Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [164]
Then she was gone, and Pop was lying there, not feeling anything, telling the trooper about his guns. He assured him that he was licensed to carry them, and he reached into his side holster and pulled out the semiautomatic. He ejected the magazine and handed it and the pistol to the trooper who rested the gun on the roof of the car and began to cover Pop with a light blanket, but my father was pulling free the .38 snub-nose now. He tried to unload it and the trooper gently took it from him, thanking him. He’d already called an ambulance. In the air were the cries of women, the sister of the dead boy and the woman who’d driven into them. Two or three cars had stopped and pulled over and their drivers were climbing out to investigate. Pop said, “There’s one more in my pocket. I can’t reach it. It’s a derringer.”
The trooper told Pop to stay still. He reached into my father’s pants pocket for the third gun. Pop wanted him to pull his pants up, but the pain was beginning now, a black tidal wave of it sweeping through the village that once had been my father’s body and his life in it. We learned later that he’d broken thirty-four bones, that both his legs were crushed, his right one so badly it would undergo ten operations before being amputated just below the knee, his left so pulverized he would never use it again.
When Peggy called me early the next morning and told me what had happened, she said his legs were broken pretty badly. I pictured my father in two casts, lying in bed a few weeks, then walking on crutches, then the casts coming off and having to walk with a cane. Then walking with no cane. Then being his old self again. He was only fifty. He was in good shape. He’d be fine.
But he wasn’t. He’d broken so many bones that his bloodstream had filled with marrow and entered his lungs. Those first days there was the fear he would drown or that the marrow would drift to his brain and kill him as surely as a bullet. The doctors told us to call his sisters down in Louisiana, to call a priest too.
But overnight his lungs cleared. One of his doctors said she’d never seen anything like it. She shrugged and called it a miracle.
They put his shattered left leg in a cast and went to work trying to save his right. After two months of operations, though, it was no use. The day before the amputation I was in his hospital room at Mass General. The writer John Smolens was there. He was an old friend of Pop’s, one of the men he’d shared an apartment with after the divorce. Pop had lost weight, and there seemed to be more gray in his beard, his hair thinner, but that afternoon there was color in his face, and he was cheerful and laughed easily and looked like a man who was just about to leave something terrible behind him.
It was early September. He was talking about hunting squirrels, how by November he’d be doing that with his new leg. I looked down at his right foot. It was bare, pink and healthy-looking, the toenails clipped, but his shin was pinned and wrapped, still an open wound since the summer, and I joked about all the times that foot had kicked me in the ass, which it never had, and I bent down and kissed his foot goodbye, Pop laughing, his buddy too. But I was thinking of us running together, my father waiting for me at the top of the hill, the mottled light across his smiling and sweaty face.
17
I WAS RENTING A trailer on Plum Island. It was a beach town three miles east of Newburyport where I worked as a bartender in an Irish pub, saving each morning, the strongest time of the day, for writing. Five blocks east of the restaurant was Lime Street. Sometimes I’d drive up it and look at the tiny house we four kids had shared with our mother in 1970 and ’71.
It was even smaller than I remembered it, but the front door still opened right onto the narrow sidewalk and street, the tiny yard in back surrounded by a tall plank fence. This one, though, was straight and plumb and had been treated for the weather, the house too, its old clapboards newly painted