Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [127]
At first I thought it was another brawl. There was a whooshing movement to my right and people parted and were walking away quickly. There was a lightness in my chest, then something jerked from my fingers and I was rolling onto my side as the cruiser pulled in tight to the snowbank inches from my face, the flash of blue lights in the air, my good, good friends, the Haverhill police.
I MAY have slept at Liz’s that night, or at Sam’s in his second-story bedroom on Eighteenth Avenue. I may have driven back to Salem and Lynn with Jeb. I don’t remember. But these kinds of fights happened in Haverhill all the time, and the cops helped me up and told people to move along. The big one was gone, and there was no talk of pressing charges anyway. They may have asked if I wanted medical attention, and they probably went inside the 104 Club to make their presence known, but all I remember clearly is the next night Pop found out, and now Pop wanted revenge.
It was close to ten, a Saturday night, and I was standing in the small dining room of his campus house. Theresa sat at the table nursing a beer, and Sam stood with his back to the plate-glass window, outside so dark that we were reflected back at us, a woman and three men. My father stood in the center of the room in his corduroy shirt and leather vest, a drink in his hand. Peggy had gone to bed early, as was her habit, and my baby half-sister was asleep downstairs too.
Both my cheeks were swollen. My left eyelid was puffy, my lower lip split, and if I’d ever had a worse headache I couldn’t remember it. My neck muscles were stiff and sore. Pop took a long drink off his Stolichnya. He drank it like the Russians, over ice with ground black pepper. He put it on the table and walked up to me and studied my face for the second time in five minutes. It was Vinny who’d told him what happened, Vinny who’d gotten the story from the rich girl Hailey I never saw again.
In the light from the kitchen Pop touched two fingers under my chin and tilted my face up. I could smell vodka and Old Spice. This gesture of his was new, and it made me feel like a boy, a feeling I both liked and hated.
“Who was this motherfucker? He’s gotta be pretty tough to beat you.”
I shook my head and shrugged. There was the earned sense I had reached a dry plateau on some long, steep climb up a mountain in the rain. I was more than happy to stay there now, no need to go to the top; I hadn’t changed myself from what I was to what I’d become for my father, but it was good hearing he thought this of me. I also felt vaguely like a liar and an impostor, though, and he’d shown his street-naïvité for having said it: there were thousands of men tougher than I was, tens of thousands.
Sam was talking. He knew people who were at the 104 Club the night before, and he’d made a few calls and found out who’d beaten the shit out of me. It was Devin Wallace, someone who brawled in the bars regularly. I knew his older brother Ben. He had a severe underbite and was tall and sinewy and he drank all day, cruising around town in beat-up sedans, burning rubber at traffic lights, giving the finger to anyone who said a thing about it. Years later, he went on to serve multiple sentences at the state prison in Walpole, and he’d be dead of cirrhosis of the liver before he hit forty-five. Now my father wanted something done to his bigger, stronger, handsome brother, but I was through with it. I’d fought and lost, and wouldn’t a movie be a good thing to do right now? Popcorn and cold Coke and a dark room full of strangers turning themselves over to the imaginations of others?
It was my fault I’d lost so badly anyway. Since when do you invite someone outside? I’m not your fuckin’ brother. That was his invitation, which came first and which I should have followed with a straight right to his predatory face. But since Sambo’s, something had changed in me, and now Pop’s and