Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [128]
POP AND Theresa went in his car, Sam and I in the black Duster. We were going to walk in separately and in twos; if Wallace wasn’t there, then we’d stand on opposite sides of the bar and wait. Then what? Jump him? All four of us? Theresa, too?
Sam drove us out of the sanctuary of campus, my father’s taillights ahead of us. Through the back window of Pop’s car I could see the silhouette of his Akubra, and I was eleven years old again, standing at the window of our old rented house on Lime Street, watching my father admonish and warn Clay Whelan, his father Larry holding him back, this chained dog who would’ve surely killed Pop if he’d gotten free. And I couldn’t let Pop get to Wallace before I did. If he got to him first, my father would begin things with words, with language, the one thing he was so good at, and probably in his Marine captain’s chest-voice like he’d done at the Tap with the husband of the spurned wife, but that would give Wallace too much time and motivation, and he was so much bigger than my father, so much angrier. No, I needed to get there first: no words, no foreplay, no polite invitations. I’d just have to start swinging and hope the first one was hard enough to give me time for the second and the third and the fourth. I was tapping my foot, my tongue dry as shaved bark. I wanted that cold Coke.
Sam turned off Main and headed down a side street for the river. We were still in neighborhoods of large, comfortable houses, their shingles or clapboards in no need of paint, their covered porches spacious and level and free of trash and the clutter of discarded kids’ toys. Christmas lights were draped along the fascia, and in the windows stood lighted trees behind wispy curtains. These were Bradford houses, nobody living in them on welfare or food stamps, many of them college-educated, their late-model cars parked neatly in plowed driveways.
Sam followed Pop’s car over the river. There was the hum of tires on the steel grates, and the black water beneath us flowed east and I could see the dim white of snow on the mudbanks. Then we were on River Street passing lighted sub shops and package stores, a diner in Railroad Square. Soon we were in the dark gauntlet of the closed shoe factories where we passed the brewery and drove under the tracks again. In an abandoned weed lot a shopping cart lay on its side, rags spilling from it, and up ahead was the light of Lafayette Square, the exterior lamp over the door to the 104 Club a white star pulsing in my head.
The lot was only half full. While Pop parked, Sam did two loops around the statue of the dead hero.
“We’ll give them time to get in first.”
“Good.”
“You all right?”
“Yep.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll get him.”
On the second loop I could see Pop and Theresa walking into the bar, Pop holding the door open for her. Theresa was only a year or two younger than his third wife, and they looked like a mismatched couple out on a date. Again there came the feeling this was not my father’s world, that he was having too much fun right now, and that very soon the fun would stop.
Sam parked the Duster in the lot close to the street. I started to get out fast, but Pop and Theresa didn’t know what Wallace looked like and they’d have to wait for us anyway. I glanced over the car at Sam. “Buddy, if he’s there,