Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [161]
“But he doesn’t love her, Pop. He never did.”
After two years of trying to make himself love the mother of his son, Jeb had moved out of their small house in Salem. This happened when I was in Colorado, and he’d asked Pop if he could stay with him for a while but Pop had refused, told Jeb he was a grown man and was on his own. For weeks, until he had first and last month’s rent, Jeb lived in the woods behind Bradford College. During the day he did carpentry work. At night he slept under a lean-to he’d made out of pine boughs.
Pop stared at me, his voice sinking into the Marines. “I don’t like the way he lives, Andre. He needs to become a man.”
These may not have been his exact words, but they’re close, and what I knew was this: In my father’s eyes I had somehow found my way to being a man; was it because I’d finished school and had drifted into the writing life? Or was it because of what I’d learned to do with my fists, or both? I didn’t know, but I stood there with the unspoken belief that wherever I was, I’d gotten here without much guidance from him, and if Jeb was having a hard time, why was his father blaming him?
I was tired and half drunk. Leigh and Jeb and I cleared the table and washed the dishes and got rid of the evidence of our time here together. They poured themselves some more rum and were soon kissing up against the table, and I said good night and went down the stairs to the spare room I had been given readily over the years but not Jeb.
A WHIMPER, a moan, a woman’s voice calling my name, my arm and shoulder jostled and squeezed. “Andre, you have to come—” Razor panic in it, my eyes open to Leigh crying on her knees beside my bed. “He has a gun. Please, you have to stop him, he has a gun.”
I was up and following her into the dark hallway, a light on in Pop’s bathroom, the house too quiet. I rushed past her. The bathroom was bright and empty, and its fluorescent light spilled over the floor of our father’s den, the room where he wrote and lifted weights, where he kept all his handguns on a shelf in the closet and now it was open and my brother stood there facing it; he was naked, crying, Pop’s .22 Colt in his right hand, its barrel in the palm of his left. Jeb’s shoulders were jerking up and down, and he was studying the gun as if it were a problem he was not even close to solving. Words were coming out of me, my hand was on his back, his skin warm, the muscles bunching under it. I reached for the pistol, and he let me take it. He turned to me and dropped his head on my shoulder and I was hugging my naked crying brother, one arm around his back, the other heavy at my side with this pistol we’d both given our father.
LEIGH WRAPPED Jeb in a sheet and the three of us sat on the front stairs. Jeb kept crying. He’d shake his head and take a breath, then tell me how for years he’d taken refuge in thoughts of dying, ever since that first time when he was thirteen years old in the driveway at Columbia Park. When things got really bad, he said, that’s where he went inside his head, to a dark door that immediately opened into a light, airy space, everything over, everything finished with.
“Have you tried it since then?”
He wiped his eyes, looked at me as if I’d never known him at all.
“A bunch of times.” The last just a few months earlier. Pop hadn’t washed his hands of him yet, and Jeb had stayed the night and woke up to find the house empty. For weeks he’d been standing at that door in his head, and now he hurried into Pop’s writing room, took down from his shelf the .38 snub-nose and .380 semiautomatic, loaded both, then climbed the front stairs to the kitchen and walked out onto the small side deck. He pressed one gun up under his chin, the other to the side of his head. He was going to count to three and pull both triggers at once. One, two—
Sitting two steps below my brother, I could feel the ends of the barrels up under my jaw and against my temple. I held my breath, saw the scalding lead rip through my brother’s passionate,