Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [124]
There was the slamming of the door and it seemed so long ago he’d been in the room, but was it?
I was still on my back only a foot or two from the chubby angels and their flower garlands, but my arm was too short to reach them when it hadn’t been before. Had I pissed them off?
“Do you think they’re mad?”
“Who?”
“The angels. I think I pissed them off.” I was laughing and Jeb laughed back. He was bent over the top of his stepladder, his scraggly hair covering his face. “Fumes, man. It’s these fucking fumes.”
Then the room was done and we were sitting outside on the front porch steps, waiting for Trevor D. to pick us up in the truck. We were no longer laughing, and I wasn’t sure if what was happening was inside my head or out in the world, and it was like being boys again, tripping together up in my attic bedroom.
The sky was darkening. The snow on the ground was too white to look at directly, so I sat in the cold sobering air and watched my brother smoke a cigarette. I listened to him talk about his baby who I kept seeing as a pudgy angel in the ceiling I hoped I’d finished painting.
WE SHOULD’VE gone home. Jeb to his, me to mine. We should’ve eaten something and taken long hot showers and cleared our heads, but it was Friday, the day Trevor D. took his crew to the Hole in the Wall for pitchers of beer. We’d drink and throw darts, what he called arrows.
Trevor’s pickup pulled to the curb. Tied to the rack was the British flag hanging off a broomstick that’d been there for weeks, ever since a British warship took the Falkland Islands back from Argentina who’d taken it back from them. I climbed into the cab of the truck, wedged between my brother and our imperialist-capitalist boss. He pushed the shifter into gear and said, “That’s alcohol-based paint, mates. Those windows should’ve been cracked all day. Where’s your common sense?”
And why were we now stumbling into the small, dark Hole in the Wall to drink beer when our brains were already stewed? And was it Doug and me against the rest? Or Randy? And did Trevor D. keep winning, or was he just laughing a lot because he’d sold one of his units and that’s why he was buying us round after round? There was a voice in my head: You should eat something. You should drink some water and eat something. Then Liz’s face, her brown hair and hazel eyes, how far away she’d gotten on me, how we didn’t seem to be an us anymore.
The back roads were thin ribbons, and if I closed one eye it was easier to keep my balance. On either side were bare trees and black branches and white snow, sometimes the lights of a house or streetlamps, a convenience store, a gas station and sub shop, then darkness again, pierced by lights coming at me I kept my one eye away from, both hands on the steering wheel. You shouldn’t be driving. You shouldn’t be fucking driving. But now I was halfway to Haverhill. If I turned around and drove back, it would be as much driving as continuing on.
I rolled down the window, the air so cold it was hard, a constant slapping in my face, a constant rebuke. And I must’ve gone to the college first, right? Because I was in Haverhill now, walking in Lafayette Square, the flesh-and-bone memory of having walked earlier. Yes. Into Academy Hall and up to Liz’s room. A kind face, a woman I didn’t know telling me, “She’s at the 104 Club. A bunch of ’em went.”
The fucking 104 Club. A street bar in Lafayette Square across from the statue of another dead soldier, around him the incessant lights of Store 24, a car dealership and liquor store, a martial arts studio, and beyond that the Little River foamy with industrial waste, black now, too polluted to freeze over. It was a bar where nothing good happened unless you were looking to cop some drugs or get into a brawl or get busted, and it’s where girls from the college liked to go slumming, and how had Jeb gotten here?