Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [159]
A warm wind blew against the side of my face, and I could smell car exhaust, the dried mudbanks of the river. My father downshifted past the post office, then headed north. On both sides of us were closed-up mill buildings. We passed Grant Street where Connolly’s Gym used to be, its windows covered with plywood, and up ahead was the railroad trestle then Lafayette Square. It always felt strange to be on the Haverhill side with Pop, as if I were a tour guide who had to keep my mouth shut.
The Am Vets on Primrose Street wasn’t far from Eighteenth Avenue. It’s the street where Sam’s parents still lived and where I’d insulted the drunk and he’d punched me in the face and Jimmy Quinn had nearly killed him. Across the lot was the long white building that held Pilgrim Lanes, a place Pop didn’t even know about, and beyond that the strip plaza and pizza joint where Lee Paquette had the warm shotgun barrel pressed to his forehead. On the other side of the Am Vets was a lot for the city’s trucks, most of them parked now in front of a mountain of gravel, and as Pop pulled into the lot I remembered Cleary and Jeb and me hopping onto the back of one late at night during a blizzard, how we held on to the iron ledge and cruised through the soft, white avenues like heroes in a ticker-tape parade.
The Am Vets bar was crowded and there was so much cigarette smoke in the air my eyes burned. Two TVs were going in the corners, the bartenders working without a break, pouring shots and opening bottles of Bud and serving draft beer in 16-ounce plastic cups to pile drivers and truckers, to off-duty waitresses and state cops, to plumbers and carpenters and unemployed millworkers. Big Jeff Chabot was there. He’d sold his flatbed truck and was buying us a round. This was his hangout, not far from where he and his pretty wife Cheryl had bought a house right after high school. He and Sam and my father were laughing about something, their laughter lost in all the bar noise, the TVs droning in the corners, the jukebox playing “Smoke on the Water.” Pop was clearly enjoying the company of my old friends—their size, their jocular good cheer—and I was enjoying how much he was enjoying them. It was like showing him something I had made, a drawing or essay for school, those moments that had never really happened between us. But now he’d just gotten quiet and was looking past the bar to four men sitting at a table against the wall. They were in biker T-shirts, all of them long-haired and whiskered, and I knew one of them. Dom Aiello was short and heavy and wore wire-rimmed glasses too big for his face. He was one of those who’d lounge in our house on a weekday afternoon, smoking a cigarette or a joint, looking up at me whenever I walked in as if I should’ve knocked first. His sister Robyn used to come around too. She was blonde and had green eyes and high cheekbones. She looked like she’d been born into a wealthier class, but she was a speed dealer, mainly Black Beauties and dots of Orange Sunshine, and one afternoon in Cleary’s alley she walked up and French-kissed me as if she knew me. She tasted like bubblegum and nicotine, and in ten years she’d be in prison for driving up Cedar Street and pointing a pistol out her open window and firing a bullet into an old woman she’d never met. Now my father was noticing something about her brother, and he didn’t like it.
“Is that a swastika?”
I looked through the smoke haze past the men and women at the bar. On Aiello’s upper arm was the tattoo of a swastika above an iron cross. “Yep. Biker bullshit, Pop.”
“My wife is Jewish. My daughter’s Jewish.”
Then my father was moving around the bar to the tables against the wall. I stepped in between Sam and Jeff. “My old man’s getting into it.” And I hurried to where he was, my friends behind me. Pop was pointing his finger inches from Aiello’s arm. “You think six million dead is good? Is that what you’re saying with that obscenity on your arm?”
Aiello was looking steadily up at Pop, then the three of us. Big Jeff Chabot