Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [155]
One early morning after my shift I was sitting on the steps of Phoenix East when I saw Crazy Jack walking across the lot from Main Street. For years he had been roaming the streets, walking up and down the sidewalks talking to himself, yelling and swearing. He had long brown hair and a beard and wore dark T-shirts and old jeans. In the winter I’d sometimes see him in a parka, the sleeves too short, or he’d be in a camouflaged hunting jacket, the sleeves too long, and all four seasons he wore a navy wool cap on his head.
One afternoon years before, I was walking through the parking lot of DeMoulas grocery. It was a weekend and mothers and their little kids were going into the place or leaving it, pushing their loaded carts ahead of them, the kids running beside it or jumping on it, and Crazy Jack stood in an empty parking space, his dark eyes on me. “How’s it feel to be a chickenshit!? Huh?! How’s it fuckin’ feel?!”
I kept walking. That was the only way to deal with Crazy Jack, to ignore him, something the town had been doing for so long.
MY NIGHT shift started at eleven when all the residents were in bed and it was lights-out. The second-shift counselor would brief me on anything I needed to know, if one of them had “acted out” that day, or if there were any new issues in the air. The counselors I relieved were college-educated, well-meaning, young and white, and whenever I took the house log and shut the front door behind them, locking it twice, I felt between two planes: theirs, which I shared, and the young men and women lying in the dark upstairs.
Donny C. was twenty-two, clean and sober, and living by court order in Phoenix East. With his olive skin and thick black hair, he would’ve been handsome if it weren’t for his flattened nose and that he smoked cigarette after cigarette and called people stinkbums. He’d grown up in South Boston and knew his father only from sporadic visits to the state prison in Walpole. His mother didn’t have a car so Donny didn’t see much of him. He said to a counselor once that it was his brother who raised him, his big brother Francis whom everybody called Frankie C.
When Donny was little, Frankie C. read him picture books at night. Walked him to and from school so nobody would mess with him. Taught him how to shoot a basketball and later how to smoke a cigarette and drink a few beers, though that’s where he drew the line. Nothing harder was allowed. No liquor. No dope. But then Frankie C. got busted and sent to the same prison their old man had been paroled from.
Donny C. was thirteen and lived alone with his mother. She smoked too much and lived off government checks and hardly ever left their apartment she kept spotless, everything in place. Donny C. fell in with the gangs, started dealing, starting drinking liquor and snorting lines. He stopped going to school and was high all the time. Sometimes he wouldn’t come home for over a week or more. After being up for days he’d crash on somebody’s couch in the projects, or in a car or van parked on Mission Hill where he woke up worried about getting shot for being white. His mother never called the cops because she knew what he was doing and couldn’t bear him being taken away from her, too, but when he’d finally stumble into their apartment she’d yell at him, tell him how worried she was and what if you die out there and nobody ever tells me?
Donny told his counselor he knew he was fucking up his life, and that he better fly right soon because Frankie was up for parole. Frankie would be coming home, and Donny didn’t want to let him down. He was seventeen.
The day Frankie C. was granted parole, he called home to tell his mother and brother himself. Their mother cried and apologized to Frankie for not being at the hearing, said she couldn’t find a ride out there and her breathing hadn’t been too good lately. Donny got on the phone. He told his counselor how Frankie’s voice was