Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [184]
“What?”
“You’d protect those girls, too.”
“You’re bloody fuckin’ right I would. I wouldn’t let anyone fuck with them girls.”
“Then we’re on the same side, aren’t we?”
He didn’t answer. He glanced back at the car of children and old people. He looked at me.
“D’you know what I’ve fucking seen in my life?”
“No.”
It was as if he’d never asked anyone that question before, or maybe he hadn’t quite asked himself. He began to talk. He told me of getting kicked out of his house when he was thirteen. He told me of his father’s drinking, his mother’s “fucking around.” He told me of bumming all over Europe, living homeless in Madrid, Marseille, and Rome. He told me he’d done things he wasn’t proud of, bad things, only because of the bad things done to him. He told me he hated people who did bad things to little kids. “Bleedin’ fucking hate them.”
“Me too. I’m just doing what you would’ve done.” He’d been talking a long while. I was shivering.
“Fuckin’ right.” He looked tired now, the beer fading, the rage dissipated. His shoulders were slumped under his black leather, and he was smiling at me. “Where’re you from anyway, mate?”
“America.”
“You’re a fuckin’ Yank? What the Christ you doing in the U.K.?”
“Talking to you.”
He nodded slowly, like I’d said more than I just had. The train was hugging a curve and I grabbed the door handle to keep from leaning into him. He squeezed my shoulder. “Look me up in Trafalgar Square, mate. You can’t fuckin’ miss me.”
There was only one door into the car he’d come from, and he turned and pulled it open and walked down the fluorescent-lit aisle. The door didn’t close, and I watched him move down the length of the car. In that light I could see how dirty his jeans were, a rip in them beneath the hem of his leather jacket. His skin there looked pinkish and vulnerable, then he turned and walked deliberately up the aisle. I thought he might be coming back to talk some more, but he wasn’t even looking ahead and out the door he’d opened that still hadn’t shut. It was colder than before, loud with wind and spinning iron wheels, but in the font row sat two elderly ladies, one in a gray cardigan sweater, the other under a train blanket she’d pulled up to her chin. They were awake and at first looked startled to see him, but soon they were nodding and smiling.
He straightened up, blond bristles on his head glistening under the light, and he moved down the aisle, stopping every few seats to kneel and say something quietly to somebody—a middle-aged man, a woman old enough to be the mother he hadn’t seen since he was a kid, two plain young women, both of whom he’d woken to say what he had to say.
“Isn’t this remarkable?” the lady in the cardigan said. “He’s apologizing to everyone. He’s apologizing.”
I stepped over and pulled the door shut. It was two or three in the morning, and my fingers were numb as I slid open the outer door, then the inner. Fontaine smiled sleepily at me from her seat. I tiptoed around the brown-haired girl on the floor. She lay curled under covers, her cheek resting on a pillow, her eyes no longer alert but closed. Her teachers were asleep, too, slumped in their seats across from the Irish couple. The wife was snoring slightly, her head leaning against the window, her reading glasses at the tip of her nose, and her husband still had his book open. He was looking over at me. He nodded and winked. I smiled and nodded back and sat down next to my wife who apparently would not be a widow just yet.
She lay her head on my shoulder. I stared straight ahead for a long while. I couldn’t remember ever feeling this good. Not just about what I’d somehow done by not doing something else, but about people, the stories inside every one of us, the need for them to be known. And the boy in that young man’s eyes; he was all I saw after he began to talk, he was the only one I could hear.
THE DOORS were opening again and three new young men were stomping into the car. I stood and stopped