Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [160]
“Do you know what they did to those people?” Pop’s voice was getting chest-deep, the Marines in it. A few people at the bar turned toward us.
“I want you to apologize to my wife and daughter.”
Aiello’s eyes were on his hand cupped loosely around his beer bottle.
My father stepped closer to him. “You hear me?”
“Hey, I’m sorry, all right? I didn’t mean nothin’ by it.”
Pop’s forefinger was close enough to Aiello’s tattoo to touch it. “Well this means something, son. This fucking means.”
The others began to look restless. One of them could be carrying, and more than one probably had a knife, but that wasn’t why I didn’t want this to go any further; we’d been having a warmhearted afternoon, a place I hoped to stay a little while longer. I stepped closer and tapped my father’s wrist. “That’s good, Pop. Our beer’s getting warm.”
Pop kept his eyes on Aiello, but he let me turn him back the way we’d come, then we were at the bar, my father quiet, his cheeks flushed, his eyes still on those men at the table. Sam bought us a fresh round. I sipped my beer and wanted to tell Pop I knew that guy, that Suzanne had been his girl for a week or so years earlier. Instead I raised my cup and said to my big friends, “Here’s to my old man kicking some Nazi ass.” Chabot laughed and Sam was smiling and squeezing my father’s shoulder, and Pop was shaking his head, “A fucking swastika.” We lifted our beers and drank. I admired him for what he’d just done, but I was surprised a tattoo like that was news to him, and I thought it was good he didn’t hang out in places like this very often.
Soon enough Aiello and his friends stood in the smoky light and made their way back outside to their bikes. Over the TVs and voices and talk and laughter came the rumble of their engines outside, then they faded to nothing, and in ten years Aiello would be strung out on heroin, HIV-positive on the streets of Haverhill, sleeping under trestles, wandering Main Street and the avenues like Crazy Jack.
ONE FALL weekend Pop and Peggy drove up to Montreal, and they asked me to stay at their campus house to look after their golden retriever Luke. Nicole lived in California now, a place she would stay for the next two decades, and that Saturday night I called Jeb and asked if he wanted to come over, cook a meal and have a few drinks. He brought his new girlfriend, Leigh, a student at Bradford, a sweet-faced rich girl from California whose hometown was the same name as her family’s
The three of us drank rum and Cokes, chatting and listening to some classical on Pop’s stereo. It’s all Jeb would ever listen to, these dead masters he was still trying to teach himself to play on the guitar. Over the years we’d both learned to cook, and that night we made garlic bread and homemade tomato sauce and meatballs over a bed of linguine. Leigh tossed a salad and we were all a little drunk when we sat down to eat.
It was at a table Pop had just inherited from his mother in Lake Charles, Louisiana, a round hardwood brought over from Ireland by her ancestors. He told me he remembered playing under it as a small boy as his mother and father listened on the radio to the war in Europe. I remembered lying on the floor in that camp in the New Hampshire woods, playing with toy cowboys while my father watched and listened to news from another war.
Over the Mozart or Bach or Beethoven, Leigh was flirting with Jeb, winking at him and telling him about the great sex they should have that night in his father’s bed. Jeb was smiling but he said, “No, we’ll sleep on the floor upstairs.” I knew why. Jeb wasn’t supposed to be here at all. Pop, for now anyway, had washed his hands of him. My father and I argued about it one night late in his kitchen. I asked him why? Why do that to Jeb and not to me?
“Because