Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [158]
“Different people carry different toolboxes, I guess.”
He looked at me and laughed. “Where’d you fuckin’ come from?”
“Beats the shit outta me. Put the knife back and go to bed, all right?”
He stood. “You gonna write me up for this?”
“No.”
He looked like he didn’t believe me but wanted to, needed to. He turned and walked back into the kitchen with the knife. There was the light clatter of metal on metal, the slide of the drawer, then the creak of one stair tread after another as Donny C. climbed back up to his bed in the men’s wing of Phoenix East.
The next morning, the day staff showed up with their Dunkin’ Donut coffees and called all the residents into the front room for the morning meeting. I pulled one of the counselors aside and told him about Donny. On the short ride back over the river, the sun glinting off its brown swirling surface and littered mudbanks, there was the feeling that maybe I’d gone too deep with him, that I had no business counseling someone, but I couldn’t deny that some kind of truth had passed between us. I thought of Donny C.’s new toolbox, something I never could have told him about if I hadn’t built one, too; since I’d begun to write a few years earlier, the hurt and rage that forever seemed to lie just beneath the surface of my skin was not gone but had been consistently directed to my notebooks. Jabs had become single words, a combination of punches had become sentences, and rounds had become paragraphs. When I was done, whether I had written well or not, something seemed to have left me, those same pent-up forces that would have gone into my fists and feet. But it was more than this; I was finding again and again in my daily writing that I had to become these other people, a practice that also seemed to put me more readily in another’s shoes even when I wasn’t writing. The way it had with Donny. Before this, a guy like him would have simply been an angry face I’d force myself to confront in the one way I’d learned how, my weight on my right foot, my hands in loose fists at my side. To see him as anything other than bad would have deterred me when I did not want to be deterred. But writing was teaching me to leave me behind. It required me to suffer with someone else, an act that made trying to hurt him impossible.
BECAUSE I lived in his neighborhood now, I saw a lot of Pop. By late afternoon his writing and running would be finished, and he’d stand on the sidewalk one story below my open window and yell up something like, “Hey, Andre, Random House called. They want your book.” He was joking, of course, but he knew I was up there writing, and I could hear the pride in his voice, just as I had when he’d answered the phone months earlier, when he’d whooped like some Southern cowboy about my story being published in Playboy. I’d stick my head out the window. “Tell them I’m not done yet.”
“Got time for a beer?” He’d be smiling up at me in his Red Sox jacket or his faded denim, an Akubra on his head, his beard thick and graying, and even if I was in the middle of a sentence it was hard to say no, and I’d meet him on the sidewalk and we’d go into the dim, smoky light of Ronnie D’s for a beer.
Sometimes on the weekends, he’d roam from bar to bar with me and Sam and Theresa. It’s what we all still did, though it was beginning to feel old to me, and some Fridays or Saturdays I’d drive into Boston instead, see a play if I had the money, or go to a museum or some film from another country.
One Saturday afternoon in late May, Pop and I were driving to the Am Vets on Primrose Street to meet Sam for a beer. Pop was driving, and he had Waylon Jennings playing on his cassette player. The windows were down as we drove along Water Street past the boarded-up Woolworth’s building, past Mitchell’s Clothes and Valhally’s Diner where Jeb and Cleary and I would sit in a booth for hours drinking too much coffee with stolen money.
Pop had just sold a short story to a literary quarterly and he was in a good mood, tapping the steering wheel and singing along with Waylon Jennings about