Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [171]
Cutting through the din of all this were the jolting electric guitars of ZZ Top. The woman said, “There they are, right there.” She kept her voice low, and she sounded scared, and I looked over and saw where the music was coming from. At the base of the glass wall two men sat against it drinking Heineken from cans. Between them was a blocky silver boom box, their music too loud, an audio fuck you to the rest of us. One was white, the other Latino. The white one wore jeans and a turquoise T-shirt with a blue marlin across the front. His legs were crossed at the ankles, and he wore black cowboy boots, and he was tanned and looked gymhard, and he was nodding his head in time to the beat. He took a long pull off his beer and glanced up at me and the woman. I put my hand on her shoulder and took in his friend and kept walking.
The woman’s gate was fifty yards beyond the glass wall. There was no seat for her, so she stood by one of the tinted windows near the Jetway, both hands on her suitcase handle. She smiled up at me. I told her to have a safe flight, but I was already walking away, this movement necessary, my body having slipped into a gear it had not been in in a long time. My gate was on the other side of the glass wall. The waiting area, like all the rest, was crowded with people heading north. The digital screen above the gate’s desk said my flight had been delayed fifteen minutes. I took this as a sign, some cosmic green light that I had permission to do what I was now doing.
I reached up to my bolo tie, loosened it, pulled it over my head, and pushed it into the front pocket of my jeans. Everything that happens began to happen: a light sheen of sweat broke out on my palms and the back of my neck. My breath was shallow and even, my heart a pulsing stone, and I was on the other side of the glass, but the music was loud even here. I walked fast. My arms and legs became the air around me. Just ahead was the long wide corridor where I’d first seen the woman, no sign of security officers or police, and I took this as another sign. There was just no one here to do what had to be done.
I slipped my backpack off my shoulder and rested it against a chrome trash bin, then I was walking down the other side of the glass wall to the heart of the thumping music. It was a song I happened to like, but not here and not this loud, all these kids, all these old women dressed for the weather they’d be flying to, sweaters around their shoulders or folded in their laps. And did I hate anyone more than a man who would punch or kick a woman?
I was standing directly in front of the boom box, talking.
“What?” The white one squinted up at me. He reached over and turned down the music, not all the way, but enough. His friend was long and thin, his hair as dark and curly as the woman they’d assaulted. I said, “Do you like kicking women?”
Somewhere in the shadows of myself, a small quiet voice said, That’s enough. Just leave it here. Don’t do anything unless they do. Wait for the cops. But the man was sneering up at me, or maybe he wasn’t, maybe it was fear I saw, or appeasement, but I’d forgotten how hard it is to stop the movement once it has started, and I didn’t want to stop anyway, and so let it begin with this searing in my shin, the air finally quiet as the boom box rose up in two pieces, the man jumping to his feet. He swung and I ducked under the wind of it and shot a right into his face, his arms dropping as I hooked him in the cheek, his head snapping sideways into another right, then another, and now he fell to the floor and I was charging his friend, screaming, “Let’s go, motherfucker!” He was taller than I was by a foot, and he had both hands up, saying, “Take it easy, take it easy, take it easy,” and I could see he was afraid of me, this stranger who had just hurt his friend, who was yelling such terrible language in front of all these old women and mothers and fathers and little kids.
There was the sound of leather soles slapping the polished granite