Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [142]
I turned the page. My mouth had gone dry and there was a buzzing in my fingertips and here was another man at the precise moment of his death, his arms spread as he fell backwards, his rifle falling, the open sky behind him. There were the bodies of American soldiers on the beaches of Normandy. They lay facedown in the damp sand, and their rifles were half buried and the helmet of one still had a pack of cigarettes stuck in the band. There were the charred bodies of the men Jimmy Carter had sent into Iran to rescue the hostages, the melted pieces of their helicopter littered around their bodies like a broken promise. There was Mussolini hanging shot and upside down alongside his mistress. There was the photograph of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima, another of a bandaged Marine rushing through a defoliated stretch of mud to his wounded comrade. And there was one of a woman and her three young sons in El Salvador, all four of them lying dead outside the shack they’d lived in. The woman had dressed that day in a white cotton skirt and a blue sleeveless top. It looked like a man’s T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, and she’d tied the hem tightly around her waist. Her hair was wrapped up in a red kerchief, and she was barefoot and her three boys were too, none of them older-looking than nine or ten. They wore shorts and were shirtless and they must’ve been huddling close to their mother and she must’ve tried to turn them away from the shots for now two lay on their stomachs and one on his side and her bare arms lay across all three of them, dark pools of blood in the dust beneath them. On the skin of the boys were small black marks. I looked closer and saw they were flies.
I closed the book and set it down and walked out of the store and across the square, a car honking at me and others, this sea of hopeful drunk youth from the land of my birth. That family had been murdered by a death squad armed by the government armed by us, paid for with the taxes of the mothers and fathers who had sent their children to this city to learn and to grow, to work hard and become successful people who would then make money and pay their taxes that would go where and do what?
I followed the crowd and walked down concrete steps to Rathskeller’s. A live band was playing, the drums louder than the rest. A bouncer glanced at us from his stool that propped open the door, and I could see into the happy shadows of the club—a gang of boys downing shots, couples dancing jerkily under a light the color of flames, a hundred yelled conversations and crackling laughter, a crowded smoky haze the waitresses moved through. The bouncer wanted five bucks and I was glad I didn’t have it and turned and walked past a line of people my age I felt so far away from, though gone were those barely suppressed feelings of moral superiority. What I felt instead was uselessness. I had no use.
Only a year earlier it had been easy to see people as members of classes, as groups that could then be influenced, steered, and changed. But I no longer saw them that way, and why was I leaving for the Midwest to continue studying them like this? How could a man aim his M-16 at a young mother and her three boys? What part of himself did he have to kill to kill them? How was it possible for a woman and her children to be gunned down while elsewhere, at that exact moment, people laughed and drank and ate and made love?
There was a dime in my pocket under my check and bow tie. Soon I was standing in an outdoor phone booth