Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [125]
The plowed lot beside the bar was packed with cars, so we’d parked blocks away near the railroad trestle, beyond that the abandoned brewery we used to sneak into with Cleary, steal cans of beer and drink them right there on dusty wooden steps. There was that conveyor belt Cleary would turn on and we’d ride it drunk to the upper floors, then run back down the steps and do it again and again.
Jeb and I stepped over an iced-over snowbank and walked in the street back toward the square. My brother lit up another cigarette. I hadn’t been inside a Haverhill bar with him since that night at the Tap, but tonight, instead of hand-knitted slippers, he had on work boots and paint-splattered jeans, a loose sweater with a hole in the elbow. He looked like what he did all day, and I knew we were walking on asphalt gritty with sand and salt from a city truck, but my legs and feet were like cotton, my torso and face some kind of drunken steam. Then we were inside the 104 Club under flat, bright light and a haze of cigarette smoke, men and women ten or twelve deep drinking at the bar or shouting out an order, laughing and talking and smoking. There were the smells of nicotine and damp leather, of denim and perfume and sweat and beer. High in the corner hung a color TV, a Muhammad Ali fight I’d forgotten about, Ali taking a shot to the chin, his head snapping back. From below came a deep masculine roar, blood-joy in the air, a happy happy place, and my eyes burned and I wanted to turn around and leave, but my shoulder was being squeezed, my upper arm too, Liz smiling up at me, drunk. Behind her were six or seven from the college, boys and girls I didn’t know, and now this too-tight hug from her, almost as if she were apologizing, and I knew she was.
She was saying something, but I wondered which of the guys behind her she’d been fucking. I leaned in close. “You want a beer?”
She smiled and kissed my lips, her tongue apologizing too. I turned and stepped sideways through people I may have known or once known, and did I even care she was moving on? What did I know about love anyway? Did I even love her? Had she loved me?
Then I was standing at the bar, my hip against someone’s hip, my shoulder against another’s shoulder. I could see with two eyes now, but barely, and I raised my hand to slow the movement of one of the bartenders behind this long chipped bar covered with bottles and half-full glasses and overflowing ashtrays and peanut shells in spilled beer or wine. Five feet down, a woman’s hand stubbed out a cigarette, a silver ring on each finger.
I ordered three Buds. Liz preferred Michelob, but I wasn’t sure I could say that many syllables without slurring. I looked over the crowd for my brother. The hip against mine belonged to a blonde woman, a student from the college. I knew her and did not know her. A big man stood behind her talking to the back of her head, but she wasn’t looking at him. Her nose was straight and perfect, her skin clear and unlined, her chin strong, her hair thick and shiny and with no sign of bleach or color or any of the shit girls from around here put in theirs. Her name was Hailey, and she must’ve taken off a sweater or something because she was wearing the dark blue T-shirt she’d had on when Liz had first introduced us on the red-carpeted stairs of Academy Hall. It was tight and showed off her breasts and small waist, her lean swimmer arms. And those small white letters above her left nipple: LAGNAF.
I drank from my beer, thought about talking to her, didn’t want to talk to her. Didn’t want to be here. Liz was behind me in the crowd somewhere, and she’d laughed on those stairs and told me what