Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [169]
I reached for both ends of my seat belt. I clicked them together and now saw what she had seen. They were the same size as the fine droplets of paint that come off a roller when working on a ceiling, that winter day Jeb and I painted that closed room, our accidental high, the drinking and driving and more drinking, Devin Wallace knocking my head against the concrete again and again. Covering the backs of both my hands and forearms were hundreds of dots of blood. It was as if I were exposing some shameful part of myself, and I stood and stepped sideways past other passengers and rushed up the aisle and locked myself in the bathroom.
I pulled the faucet lever. The water was warm and I tried to make it hotter than that, as hot as it could possibly get. I began to wash off the man’s blood. When it swirled down the drain I looked into the mirror so close to my face. At first I didn’t see me, only what I’d done, the men’s boom box breaking into pieces, the big one rising up from the floor and swinging at me, a wild hook I’d ducked.
It was the Sunday after Thanksgiving in Miami International Airport, its wide corridors filled with people walking in all directions, every seat in the waiting areas taken, whole families sitting together. Some were tanned or sunburned and heading back north or east. Others were already brown and sat on the floor sharing sandwiches and salads from one of the food stands. Spanish hung in the air, and Southern accents, New York and New England, too. Every few minutes, neutral voices shot out of an invisible sound system calling out departing flights. It was late afternoon, and on the other side of the tinted windows the tarmac and flashing planes were still too bright to look out at.
In Key West I’d bought myself a bolo tie, its center a small TV screen that kept scrolling black-and-white geometric shapes. I didn’t watch TV anymore, hadn’t for years, but I liked the digital patterns that seemed to rise up inside that screen like some positive and innovative future I was part of. I’d just sold my first book, a collection of short stories I’d been working on since Colorado. I’d gotten paid four thousand dollars for it, and now I could afford to go visit my mother where she and Bruce lived in Miami. She’d gone back to school and was studying for her master’s in social work. She and Bruce lived in a carpeted two-story condo in a gated compound of palm trees and aloe vera, live oaks and Spanish moss.
There’d been a plan for all four of us grown kids to go down for the weekend, but only Nicole and I were able to get there, Nicole from California where she, too, was earning a master’s in social work, and me from Boston. Bruce’s drinking years were behind him now, and he was visiting his seven kids and ex-wife up north, his grandkids too. It was the Friday after Thanksgiving and outside my mother’s condominium the Florida sun shone on the live oaks and sable palms of her gated apartment complex, a lime green lizard skittering across the concrete patio. Nicole and Mom and I were sitting around the air-conditioned living room talking about getting out and doing something.
Mom wore shorts and a blouse. She looked tanned and pretty and younger than her forty-nine years. Nicole’s red hair was cut short, and she’d spent the morning studying, her focus still on what she’d been reading though this talk of doing something seemed to jolt her into the present, and she said she’d never been to Key West.
“Let’s go there. We’ll stay in some cheap motel.”
“Oh, I can’t afford that, honey.” Mom’s tone was sweetly matter-of-fact, like she was stating the time of day or what she planned to cook for supper. Not being able to afford things was a condition she and we had always known, and I thought of her Mystery Rides when we were kids, her ability to take nothing and make something fun out of it.
I thought, too, of the book money I still had in the bank, enough to stay in a good hotel and eat well and drink well, which we did for the next