Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [143]
Why not?
I don’t know, I’m just—I’m fucked up.
You been drinking?
No. The world’s fucked up, Pop. It’s just so fucked up.
Come home.
It was his home, his and his third family’s, but hearing him say that was like feeling his arm reach out and pull me in for a hug.
No.
Don’t miss your train, son. Come home.
No, I can’t. I just—I’ll see you tomorrow.
Andre?
Yeah?
Meet me at Fenway Park. It’s where the Red Sox play. There’s an afternoon game and I’ve got tickets. I’ll give one to you.
A game. How could people play games?
Maybe.
I hung up and began walking away from the noise and bright lights and music and laughter. The night was cooling. Three blocks north was a concrete overpass. It had two levels of traffic coming and going, and on the other side were the brownstone apartments and mansions of the rich. I could see the glow of their windows, the nearly translucent curtains separating the city from their cooled rooms. Then I was standing on the sidewalk under the bridge. It was dark here, the only light coming from passing cars. Across the street a hooded homeless man sat on a guardrail beside a shopping cart. It was stuffed with bundles wrapped tightly in trash-bag plastic, and hanging from the front was a clear sack of empty bottles and cans. Taped to the cart’s handle was a small flag jutting out at an angle, a rally flag of some kind, the soiled logo of a sports team or car racing team or college crew. Behind him and up a dirt embankment just under the overpass, four or five men were passing around a bottle. One of them was yelling about something, his words so slurred they sounded like a foreign tongue.
I turned and left the sidewalk and walked over matted grass. I climbed a rise to the concrete pad that held the footings that held the steel girders on this end of the bridge. There was broken glass here and old rags, a white sweater balled up beside a square of warped plywood, but no men or women. Down to my right a culvert of water flowed west under Storrow Drive and the jogging park beyond into the Charles River, MIT on the other side, Harvard, the best schools for the finest minds, and I stepped over broken glass and up the concrete incline till I could touch the steel of the girders. I smelled mud and dried urine and the sticky sweetness of cheap wine. In the shadows I could see how the steel plates were bolted into the concrete and between each beam was a six-foot gap. The footing they rested on was chest-high, and I reached out and brushed away a few pebbles, an empty beer can, a rotted sock. The underside of the overpass was sixteen or eighteen inches above where I’d just cleaned and as each car or truck rolled over me, I could feel a slight compression in the air, the tires a muted rumble.
I pulled myself up and kept my head low and lay down on my back. To the left was a concrete wall, at my feet and head was steel; the only way at me was from where I’d just come, and I turned on my side in that direction and curled my legs up and rested my head against my arm and pushed my fingers between my knees. The drunks sounded closer than before, but I could see them fifty or a hundred yards away huddled in the darkness on the other underside of this bridge. I could still hear the Saturday night noise of Kenmore Square, but it was muted now, and I closed my eyes, and there were the three dead boys, their mother’s body doing all it could not do.
Then I was a boy again, curled in my bed across from Jeb’s while downstairs Mom and Pop and their friends laughed and drank and argued, and all across the earth wars raged like fires, and not one of us seemed to know how to put them out.
I WOKE just an hour or two after dawn. Sometime in the night I must’ve rolled to my left because I opened my eyes to concrete, the embedded grain of the plywood forms it had been poured in. I started to roll away, but then remembered the five-foot drop. The traffic above my face was constant now, the roll and bump over the expansion joints of one car