Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [176]
Don’t hurt anyone. Don’t hurt anyone.
Fifty feet down the sidewalk the woman sat crying on the concrete, her long hair gripped in the yelling man’s fist. He wore frayed cutoff jeans and was shirtless, his arms shadowed with tattoos, and I was still running, calling to him to back off, “Back off!”
He punched her in the face, her eyes a squint, a whimper coming out of her. Still, there was this voice: Just get him off her. He punched her again, this barefoot woman in a blue T-shirt and white shorts and long, white legs. Her eyes were squeezed shut and blood sprang from her nose and when I finally reached him and grabbed his shoulders and yanked him back, even then came the voice, Just hold him so she can get away. But touching him did something to me, his body healthy and unhurt while hers was not, and so when he swung around to see who had interrupted him, I planted my feet and tore through that membrane that separated us, and he soon became far bloodier than she was and he stumbled away, then ran, his long stringy hair swaying dully under the sun.
I moved to the woman and helped her up. She was crying softly, blood and snot across her lips. She wiped them with the back of her arm. She tucked her hair behind her ears and started walking in the direction she’d come from. I tried to keep up beside her. I told her to call the cops, to get some help. She screamed, “Get the fuck away from me!” And she ran across Federal Street and past the antiques shop and kept going. In front of the store, the owner was smiling widely. He called out, “Hey, Rocky. Good job. Good job.”
But I was already walking fast up the sidewalk under the sun. The concrete was an iron under my feet. My shoulder ached. Did it bother the shopkeeper that he had done nothing but watch? Or did he simply tell himself it was none of his business and he could get hurt? Maybe he’d called the cops and was waiting for them. What was wrong with that?
But no, somebody should have at least kept that man from punching that woman in the face. And why not me? Because you hit him and hit him because you could and because it felt good to let go of all the bad feeling that came from seeing a woman punched in the face, but admit it, your novel is dead and somebody must pay and how sweet to have had a wife beater in the neighborhood today. How fortuitous really.
From Suzanne’s window drifted a slow-building duet, a conversation between a man and a woman, each of them, it seemed, looking down on me like two disappointed gods wondering where and how this would ever end.
I WAS back on Columbia Park again. The house had never had more strangers in it. Each room was an ear-ringing, eye-stinging party, drunk men in black leather, brown leather, sleeveless T-shirts that showed puffy muscles. Their loud talk and laughter was a freight train speeding over a trestle over the river and somewhere lost in all this were my sisters and brother and mother. I was yelling harder than I ever had. I was grabbing jacket collars and the fronts of T-shirts. I was yanking men into the front hallway and trying to kick them out the door. But every single one of them was so much bigger than I was, so much older and tougher, so I began punching faces as hard as I could, and this helped a little; they seemed to leave more quickly then, very few of them fighting back, but they didn’t take me seriously either. They left with smirks and a shrug of the shoulders. They left because they were ready to go anyway. I was grown but not grown. They peered down at me over their drinks and bottles of beer like I was an oddity of some kind, a kid who should be