Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [154]
I looked out my window and there in the middle of Main under the dim flicker of the streetlights, one man lay curled on his side and another man was on one knee punching him in the face, but the man kept covering up with his arms and hands so the other stood and began kicking him in the chest and shoulders and head.
I told you, Joey! I fuckin’ told you!
The kicker was my age. He wore jeans and work boots and a denim jacket that Big Pat Cahill grabbed and jerked backwards, the man pivoting to throw a punch till he saw it was Pat and dropped his hands. He was breathing hard. I knew him. It was Bryan F. He’d been one of the kids from the bus stop at the corner of Seventh and Main, one of the kids who’d sat on the steps beside Pleasant Spa toking on a joint from Nicky G., taking a hit off the Southern Comfort bottle from Glenn P.
Bryan’s hair was shorter now and even from my second-story window I could see his three-day beard, a blue-black shadow of whiskers covering the same square jaw he’d had as a kid twelve years earlier. Cahill was telling him to get going, somebody had called the cops. The man Bryan had beat on was rising to his feet. He was a tall bundle of rags, a stoop-shouldered long-hair who slunk back into the bar crowd in front of Ronnie D’s. Pat yelled at everyone to go the hell home, and Bryan was walking under my window now with someone I couldn’t see.
“I just had to do that, man. I’ve been in a mood to fight all fuckin’ day.”
I moved away from my window and lay back down on my mat. My heart was twitching like a dreaming dog. In the mood. Fuck him. His day or life wasn’t going well in one way or another, so now he wanted to pound on somebody. And despite what writing was doing to me, I wanted to pound him. I stared at the ceiling. Headlights swept across it in a flash, and it was like getting punched in the head. The light that shot into your brain, how it made you want to do the same to another.
PHOENIX EAST was a rambling halfway house in the lot behind the Haverhill police station and town hall, and I worked the overnight shift there two or three times a week. Afternoons I worked for a lady cleaning houses, and sometimes Sam Dolan’s father, still the health inspector, would pay me twenty-five dollars to dig perk holes for him with a pick and shovel. It was enough to pay my bills and every morning I wrote.
Most of the residents of Phoenix East were recovering alcoholics and drug addicts, and most of them were between eighteen and twenty-five. They were the kids of broken families, the kids of single mothers who did what they could and often it just wasn’t enough. Some of the residents drank too much coffee and were scrawny and smoked one cigarette after another. Others were heavy or obese and moved glumly through the day attending AA and NA meetings, working a day job in a fast food restaurant or for a cleaning company, getting rides to and from work in the house van. At the end of the week they signed their checks over to their counselor who then deposited it into the account that went to their court-ordered restitution, the payback for their crimes: shoplifting, burglary, writing bad checks, and there were always people on the other end who’d been made victims and wanted theirs.
There was one young woman in the house who kept having panic attacks and would carry a folded paper bag in her back pocket in case she hyperventilated. On the third floor, in a converted attic that smelled like horsehair plaster and old socks, lived three schizophrenics who rarely left the house. They were older, in their thirties and forties, and one of them was bald and all three had beards and wore glasses. Every few hours, the day counselors would climb the creaking stairs and hand each of them a cocktail of psychotropic drugs they washed down with a Dixie cup of water or weak Kool-Aid. There was a TV up there that never seemed to be off, and along the knee wall beneath the rafters