Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [179]
I’d partly brought it on myself anyway. Earlier that night, Fontaine’s cousin Helena had taken us to a pub. It was small and dark and working-class, and it brought me back to the bars along the Merrimack River three thousand miles east. I sipped my Guinness and told Fontaine’s cousin this. She was older than we were and had grown up south of Boston in a mansion, her father a wealthy businessman, one of the few in Fontaine’s family. She was loving and intelligent and close to getting a graduate degree in Jungian analysis, and maybe that’s why I began to tell her about fighting in places like this. I told her about knocking teeth out, about the time I almost kicked someone to death and the time I nearly had my skull caved in. I told her about these things and more, and a part of me could hear the lie in everything I was saying: I was making it sound too romantic and heroic, the kind of thing some neighborhood boys just learned to do and I was one of them. I left out how small and afraid and passive I’d been for years. I left out my constant fear that I’d become some kind of runaway train, that I was incapable of resolving conflict with another man except through throwing that first clean punch. I left out that I often walked around with the feeling I’d gotten away with something for a long time but that one day I was going to get caught. I left out that all these stories made me big to the boy but small to the man.
Before dozing off, Fontaine already asleep beside me, I lay there thinking of fight after fight: a man on a beach in Texas at sundown, how he was chasing his screaming wife and I set my feet and punched him through his beard, his arms at his sides like my little brother years before, blood dripping from his chin into the sand. There was a gray-haired bar customer who drank four hot toddies in one hour and when I shut him off he reached across the bar and yanked my tie till I couldn’t breathe and I hit him with a straight right, this man thirty years older than I who fell to the floor. I dragged him up, hauled him outside, and when he came after me I punched him again. There was a night party in a marshy field in old Newburyport, a gauntlet of cars facing each other, their headlights on, four or five radios going at once, dozens of football players and their girlfriends drinking and laughing and talking loud, and I was drunk with Sam and a few others from Haverhill, walking down the center of that headlit lane, yelling, “I want to fight! Who wants to fuckin’ fight!?” And then I was being tackled and rolled into the weeds, Sam Dolan on top of me throwing punches into the ground near my face. “I’ll fight you!” Then his cheek close to mine, his voice low. “Keep your mouth shut. You want to die here?”
Now the dream preacher was my black crow on a limb. My time was up, and why shouldn’t it be after all these years of raging and then the glorification I’d practiced the night before? Still, I was terrified of what was coming and how it would come and there was no one to call and nothing to do but wait for it.
I needed something right then. Anything. A book to read. Other lives to fall into away from my own that would soon end. But the reading light was on Fontaine’s side of the bed, and the only book was a pocket-size New Testament she read briefly most every night. It was another thing about her I admired, her private and necessary faith in something ineffable, though I’d never felt any pull toward it myself. It all seemed man-made and preposterous to me, but now it was the only book in the room, one that had always given my wife solace, and I reached over her shoulder and grabbed it and sat up straight in the darkness and opened it to the middle of the book. I narrowed my eyes at two dim pages, the words on them indecipherable lines of shadow. I flipped the pages over two at a time, stopping every other heartbeat and squinting down at sentences I could not make out as words. I turned over more pages, then started back again