Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [162]
I squeezed my brother’s knee. I stood and stepped past him and his girlfriend to the phone on the wall. I called information. I called Christof in the canyons north of Boulder.
IT’D BEEN less than twenty-four hours, and Jeb and I were greeting him at the airport in Boston. Christof had gained some weight and had a slight limp I’d forgotten about. The circles beneath his eyes seemed darker too, his mustache thick as ever. We hugged, and when I introduced him to my brother, Christof took his hand in both of his, looked down into his face and eyes the same way he always had with the inmates, as if he was seeing all that needed to be seen and now was the time for Jeb to see it, too.
It was near midnight. While I drove north up the highway, they talked, Christof turned sideways in the passenger seat, Jeb in the shadows in the back. Christof was asking my brother questions, and I felt like a voyeur listening to the answers. But already Christof’s voice became deeper, more serious, and I could hear him work his way into the darkness my brother lived in.
Soon enough we were at the Haverhill line, and I was driving over the Merrimack River, the guardrail zipping by in our headlights. Up ahead was the exit for River Street and the Howard Johnson’s where so many late nights Sam and Theresa and I would go for breakfast after last call. Christof had said earlier he needed to eat, so I slowed for the ramp, Jeb talking now, his voice small and high and anguished.
Down to the right a culvert was overgrown with weeds and beyond it was a new car lot, its sign lighted over what years ago had been a drive-in theater, one of those our mother would take the four of us to on a Friday night Mystery Ride. It’s where I’d first seen Billy Jack, a misty rain spotting the van windows as he punched and kicked and broke bones.
I pulled into Howard Johnson’s and parked in front of its windows. Most of the tables and booths were empty, a waitress leaning against the counter and talking to a cook in white. I cut off the engine. Christof was turned completely in his seat, one hand holding my brother’s. In less than forty minutes he seemed to have taken Jeb back twenty years. In the rearview mirror I could see his contorted face, and it was as if I were spying on someone’s birth or death.
I left the car and walked into the bright fluorescence of Howard Johnson’s. The air smelled like hot grease and cigarette smoke and disinfectant, and the waitress glanced over at me. She had short bleached hair and bad skin. I’d seen her around for years but didn’t know her. She walked up to me, and I told her there would be three of us. She grabbed some menus and I followed her to one of the empty booths along the window. It was hard not to think of Sambo’s then, of smashing ceramic cups into human faces, of kicking a boy in the head again and again. I sat in the booth but did not look outside. In the car, Christof was coaxing my brother to name all that had hurt him, a darkness he’d swallowed till it made him want to die. Sitting there waiting for them, I knew it was the same darkness I’d been pushing into the faces of boys and men for years.
CHRISTOF STAYED with Jeb a few days. Then my friend was back in the canyons two thousand miles west, and already my brother looked different. He walked straighter, his eyes were brighter, and a gray veil seemed to have lifted from him. Twenty-five years later, he’s still free of it.
I never told my father about that night with Jeb and the .22 Colt. I never told him about that afternoon with the other guns, either. When trouble came, our father just was not the man we’d ever turned