Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [163]
16
IT WAS AN early morning in July, the phone was ringing, and it was Peggy, her voice tentative. The night before Pop had been driving back from Boston. He’d stopped on the highway to help someone who’d been in an accident, and he’d gotten run over.
“What?”
“Your father got run over by a car. He’s at Mass General.”
My blood seemed to thin out in my veins. The air itself was easy to see. Later I’d learn that Pop had driven into Boston to meet a woman he knew who worked with prostitutes. He wanted to interview one for something he was writing. This was in the Combat Zone, a dusty cluster of massage parlors and peep shows and basement barrooms near the theater district. Before going there, Pop had armed himself; under his white cotton sports jacket he wore his leather side holster and its .380 semiautomatic. Four inches beneath that, he’d clipped to his belt the .38 snub-nose he’d bought Peggy, and into his right front pocket he’d dropped a small, single-shot derringer.
He met his friend, strolled the dim neon streets of the Combat Zone, talked to a couple of prostitutes on the corner, then walked his friend back to her car and headed home. It was a dry night, the stars out, and on a straight and lighted stretch of highway a car was stopped in the fast lane. Pop slowed down. A young man and woman sat in the front seat, their faces bleeding. Then he saw the motorcycle they’d hit, most of it under their car, and he pulled ahead of them and cut left onto the median strip between the northbound and southbound lanes. He helped the young woman out of the car first. She had long dark hair and was crying, her accent Spanish. She told him how she and her younger brother were from Puerto Rico, that he spoke no English and they were passing a big truck, then saw a motorcycle lying in the passing lane and she’d hit it going so fast. Just now. She’d hit it.
It was after midnight, the highway quiet, and Pop wanted some help before he squatted and looked under the car to see the crushed motorcyclist. Later we found out there was none, that the driver of the bike was drunk and stumbling through the woods off the highway, that his wife had just left him and he’d gone to a bar and drank and drank, then raced up the highway on his motorcycle where he wiped it out, then walked away, this boy and girl plowing into it.
Now my father was helping the brother out of the car. He was lean and handsome. It looked like he’d broken his nose. Pop walked him around to where the young woman was. He stood there, one foot on the grass of the median, the woman between Pop and her brother, and Pop was trying to comfort them somehow, thinking about what he should do for them before going for help. A hundred yards north was an emergency call box he could see. That’s when he also saw a car coming and he raised his arms to wave it down.
Maybe the woman driving that car was reaching for a new cassette tape, or maybe there was a glittering piece of debris in the road, we still don’t know, but she swerved and drove straight for Pop and the brother and sister from Puerto Rico, Pop grabbing the woman’s arm and pulling her away, an act which put him where she’d been standing and so she could only watch as the car shot into her brother and my father at fifty-eight miles an hour, a speed we know because a state trooper was driving down the southbound lane at that exact moment, a moment he clocked before switching on his siren and lights and driving across the grassy median where the boy lay dead on the hood of the woman’s car and she was out and running across the highway screaming, “It’s not my fault! It’s not my fault!”
Pop lay on her trunk. His pants were around his knees. In his left front pocket a quarter was bent in half. The trooper was talking to him, words Pop barely heard because his dead mother was there, too. She was at his side, running her palm along his forehead and hair, telling him it wasn’t his time, that he was going to go through something very difficult,