Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [174]
Before his accident, there were moments when I came close to doing this. We’d be at Ronnie D’s drinking a beer, or running together along the streets near the campus, and he might bring up something he’d read in the paper, once about some local thug who’d just gotten out of Walpole and was already back in, and I said I knew him and he looked over at me as if I were cracking a joke, and I said, “No, I mean it. He lived a block away down on Seventh.”
He’d nod, and we’d keep running, sweating together, breathing easily though these things felt uneasy between us. One morning when I stopped by his and Peggy’s house, he had just finished the paper, and he looked up from the column he’d been reading.
“This black woman in Boston, she’s poor and has no lawn but every day she rakes the dirt in her yard. Isn’t that something? She keeps the dirt neat.” Pop’s eyes were full. This was my favorite part of him, his compassion for others, his love for humanity, his capacity to feel so deeply so quickly about things other people don’t let in or even see.
I nodded. “I used to rake our dirt yard, too.”
“No you didn’t.”
“Yeah, I did. On Lime Street.” That tiny yard of dried earth I would sometimes rake clean after sweeping the concrete stoop, the dirt rising against the plank fence I’d nailed shut.
“You’re exaggerating. You had grass.”
We were headed to a place where only hurt feelings could surface, both of us misunderstood, a universal human plight, it seemed. I changed the subject. But I told myself that he and I would have to talk openly about this one day. And what was this anyway?
On one run together, we were talking about his time in the Marines, how much he admired the D.I.’s, how they could stay up all night drinking and playing cards, then kick everyone’s asses out of bed before dawn to hump hills for fifteen miles in full gear under a cruel sun.
“I needed that. They made a man of me.” He glanced over at me. “Joining the track team was your Marines.”
I nodded, taking this in, but it felt off to me. He was talking about becoming a man, about severing that cord between the boy you were and the man you must be. I’d studied enough to know that cultures throughout history had devised rites of passage for this, elaborate rituals where the men in the community would take the sons away from the women and girls and younger children, where the boys would be put through physical pain of some sort, a praying of some sort, a joining of sons and fathers and grandfathers back through time. In modern America, there were no rites of passage like this. But there was the Marine Corps, and other arms of the military. There were the team sports I’d mostly had nothing to do with, and there was stepping into your fear instead of running from it; there was learning to break that membrane around another’s face and head. There was learning how to fight the sons and fathers and grandfathers back through time.
That scared and crying woman had been the perfect opportunity to take this out on a man, for all I knew, who had a story to tell as well; she had seemed genuinely shaken and frightened, but I never even gave those two men a chance to talk. Who’s to say she wasn’t delusional in some way? Or paranoid? Maybe it hadn’t happened the way she said it had. And even if it had happened just as she’d described, how had my putting a man in the hospital helped anything? If he truly was a woman beater, now he would fly home even angrier than he was before. For I’d learned this much about physical violence: One hurt demanded another.
I was still in the airplane’s bathroom. The faucet lever had shut off again and I pushed it one more time. I ran hot water along my forearms and hands, clean now, no sign of blood anywhere. I’d been staring at my face the way I’d done years earlier when I was fourteen, my brother bleeding in the kitchen, his teacher girlfriend and our mother tending to him after having been called a fucking whore. I’d told my face what I’d told it, and now I was telling it something else.
You should’ve just walked her to the gate,