Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [185]
Right, mate.
Right.
Cheers.
They turned and were gone, and I was halfway back to my seat when the outer door rattled again and now came two in rugby shirts, later one in a long brown coat, after that three more, drunker than the rest, the tallest one slurring “Ficku, ficku,” trying to slide past me, his breath bile and whiskey, and I was somehow able to talk him and all the rest back to where they’d come from. How was I doing this?
With the first one, as I’d stood normally between the train cars, there was the vague sense I was being guided by something greater than me and my own fears, a presence that began to flicker inside the man who’d promised to cut off my head and stick it down my throat. It flickered inside him and it flickered inside me, then it was a steadily burning flame, a found warmth I’d been inviting intruder after intruder into, but now, three or four in the morning, my limbs were heavy and my eyes were burning and it began to feel like some cosmic run of good luck was about to go dry: I knew this was still an unreasonable world; I knew I could not keep this train car clear all night long with words alone.
I sat heavily in my seat. Fontaine lay asleep against the window. I heard the doors slide open once more, and I looked up to where I’d been rising since after midnight, but the rattle and swoosh had come from behind and I turned and he was already at my side.
“Someone in this car’s not letting me friends through. Now who would do that?”
He spoke in a full voice, his accent working-class British. He stood in a crouch, must’ve leapt over each girl to get to my seat.
The girl with the brown hair opened her eyes and looked up at him. He squinted down at her as if she were misbehaving and would now have to be punished.
The girl pushed her face back into her pillow.
He was deep into his forties, his dark hair slick and long, his sideburns shaved into a point halfway down his cheek. He wore a tight black shirt open at the chest, the skin there pale and nearly hairless. If his buyers weren’t getting through, how did he know why?
“That was me.” I tried to state this as evenly as I could. I tried to state this from the larger warmth of the world I’d somehow stumbled into tonight, but my voice sounded defiant to me, and scared, for smiling sideways at me, his teeth gray and yellow, was the death I’d been waiting for.
“Who are you to keep my friends from visiting me? What gives you the fucking right, mate?” The dealer’s voice was lower now, his face too close to mine, and I could feel him taking me in: I felt young and weak and exposed: Who was I to keep anyone from moving freely up and down this train? What did give me the right? My hatred of cruelty? My nearly pathological need to protect others, one I could follow all the way back to my youth? How was my problem all of a sudden everyone else’s?
I stood and said, “People are sleeping. Let’s talk somewhere else.”
“I’m not talking, mate. I’m not here to fucking talk.”
He said it calmly. He stepped back between the girls so I could walk ahead of him and out the doors.
He was not large or well-built, but he moved with the cocky ease of the truly dangerous. So it would be a knife then, wouldn’t it? I’d die the way Cleary had six years earlier, his wife stabbing him in the lower back, my friend collapsing into the weeds and slowly bleeding to death.
I kept my back to the windows. I stepped sideways through both doors out into the perpetual noise between both trains. The air was colder, and in the zipping darkness on the other side of the steel rail a porch light came and went. The dealer had taken a moment longer to follow me through the doors,