Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [146]
“The little motherfuckers.” Dozer wiped his forehead with the back of his tattooed hand. He pulled off his leather and glanced down at me as if I should’ve done something for him by now. He wore a dark T-shirt, his arms an endless scrawl of blue and purple and green, his throat too. As he walked by I read the white lettering across his massive sagging chest: Riding a Honda’s Like Fucking a Faggot. On his back was: It Feels Good Till Somebody Sees You.
Manny was older than my father, a handsome Latino with thinning hair and a graying mustache who liked to linger in the mess hall over cooling coffee and talk about the old days. It was winter now, a Sunday afternoon, and inmates who’d been denied weekend furloughs were allowed to lounge at the dining tables, playing cards or backgammon or dominoes. One of them was my age, a baby-faced kleptomaniac named Lenny. He’d sit in a corner and strum his guitar and sing mainly old Hank Williams. His favorite was “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” and even if he was a bit off-key now and then, the other men never told him to shut up. Instead they’d ask him to sing that one over and over again.
There were fifty-seven inmates in the house, but no more than a dozen or so would get weekend furloughs. Not because of any infractions weighing against them but because they were from neighborhoods that had forged them into the criminals they’d become. It was where their families lived—their wives and mothers, sons and daughters and brothers and aunts. But it’s also where the inmates had learned the skills that had made them offenders, men and women who offend the rest of us with their stealing and dealing, their scamming and stabbing and shooting, with their rage.
That afternoon it had been snowing steadily for an hour or two, but now a wind had picked up, and we could see outside the windows of the mess hall the snow blowing sideways at the oak and hedges bordering the street, everything white, and Manny was talking in his smooth voice about Christmas. He sat across from Curtis, another inmate my age, a frizzy-haired, bucktoothed armed robber who liked to read and wanted to go back to school and be a horse doctor. Manny was telling his Christmas story to Curtis, but he kept looking over at me. I had one foot up on the dining table’s bench, my clipboard and red pen resting on my thigh. I’d just finished a head count, and Manny must have known I liked his stories because he raised his voice just enough for me to hear him.
“It was Christmas Day in Denver, brother.” And Manny told us of sitting at the bar just after noon sipping a V.O. and ginger, the only thing he ever drank. He was drinking alone, thinking about business, about people who owed him money and how hard it was to collect at Christmastime. He’d stepped into the bar because the air in the streets was so cold it “froze my face, brother. You know, it hurt your skin.”
Curtis nodded and began talking about winters he’d known. In the corner of the mess hall, the kleptomaniac was singing “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” his voice high and plaintive, and Dozer was laughing too hard as he won a hand, and Manny cut Curtis off about the ice storm that had sealed a canyon in Curtis’s youth. Manny kept talking: “It’s Christmas, but the bar is full, man, full of sad-assed players like me.” It was warm and dark as a cave, and Freddy Fender was on the jukebox, and the bartender was an