Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [172]
Just before they got to us, the woman looked up at me. In her eyes I could see guilt and a kind of dark pleasure, too.
“Thank you,” she said.
“You’re welcome.” But as the cops finally reached us, all of them breathing hard, one of them already on a radio calling for an ambulance, I stood there feeling depleted and ugly and wrong.
THE POLICE interviewed us separately, the tall friend near the glass wall, and the woman and me close to the entrance of the wide shining corridor. They wore green uniforms and 9-millimeters, and an older one with three yellow stripes stenciled onto his short sleeve was getting the woman’s story, telling her to slow down. The sergeant had a deeply lined face, his skin dry and brown, his voice a chain dragging across gravel. On the other side of the woman, a policeman with no stripes on his sleeve was taking notes.
The sergeant kept nodding his head. Every few seconds he’d glance down at me. Fifty feet away, the tall friend was gesticulating to another cop taking notes, and then he was pointing at me, and two EMTs had loaded the other man onto a white gurney and were pushing him on wheels past the crowd who’d gone quiet, the four black girls in pink dresses huddled around a woman who could be their grandmother. Moments earlier, they’d looked jubilant; now they looked scared.
“’Scuse me,” the younger policemen said. He nodded at me. “So that’s when this one started the fight? After he walked you over to your gate?”
“Well, that’s when the fighting started, yes. But he was helping me.”
“But ma’am, you’re saying this man was the perpetrator—”
“He’s no perp,” the sergeant said. “This man’s a witness.”
“But she just said—”
“Put him down as a witness. The man’s got a plane to catch.”
The younger cop looked like he wanted to say more, but he shook his head and crossed something out and kept writing. The sergeant turned to me. He wasn’t smiling, but his eyes were warm and approving. He rested his hand on my shoulder. “Just give us all your information, and you’re on your way.”
He squeezed hard, then let go, and the woman thanked me again. The younger cop said nothing. He took my driver’s license and wrote down information, then flipped his notebook shut and followed the sergeant to the others who stood in the center of the corridor waiting for an arrest that wouldn’t come.
At the chrome trash bin I picked up my book bag and hooked it over my shoulder. Many people were watching me. My plane was boarding, and now a man in line was letting me go before him, another winked and said, “That’s the way to do it.”
I could see the respect in their faces, though others took me in dubiously. It was the same contradictory look Billy Jack had gotten from some of the townspeople in that film so long ago. It was the look Buford Pusser had gotten in Walking Tall. It was the look Clint Eastwood got aimed at him in the Dirty Harry movies. It was a mix of admiration and fear, revulsion and titillation, and as I sat on the plane next to the pretty student from Boston College, it’s what I’d felt too. That boy who Clay Whelan had chased through the streets of the South End felt proud and vindicated and accomplished and brave. But the young man I was, the one who wrote daily and tried to capture the many conflicting layers of living a life, knew better; when my mother and sister had dropped me off, we’d been talking about Pop, and whatever was being said had opened up old hurts and the bitterness