Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [186]
He stepped in front of me, but he stood in his own fight stance, his hands low and empty, and I began to talk; it was like getting in the first punch without the punch, and I talked more than I wanted to. I told him I hadn’t asked to be put in this train car. I told him I’d rather be sleeping than doing this. I told him I was tired and if there were no children trying to sleep in the aisles, I wouldn’t give a shit who was walking up and down this train. And it wasn’t just so the girls could sleep, it was so they would stop being scared.
“Because some of your friends are scary-looking to kids.”
While I talked he’d crossed his arms over his chest. He leaned against the wall and scrutinized me. In the pale fluorescence from the cars, with his long hair and sideburns, the narrow face and deep eyes, he was every street-tough I’d ever known: he was Cody Perkins about to knock out Sully; he was Clay Whelan just before he chased me down; he was Kenny V. punching me while Ricky J. beat on Cleary; he was Dennis Murphy slapping the old lady with the thin branch; he was Tommy J. walking away from my bleeding brother, and he was Steve Lynch the second before I threw my first punch. Except now I wasn’t going to throw a punch, even if the dealer was to step away from the wall and square off to shut me up; I wasn’t going to fight him either, and it was as if, in my explanation to him, I had stood between those trains and taken off all my clothes, then began to pull away every muscle I’d ever built: I ripped off the plate of my pectorals, dropping them at my feet. I reached up to each shoulder and unhooked both deltoids and let them fall, too; then I reached around for the muscles of my upper back, the first to show up years earlier, and dropped them at the feet of the dark dealer, speaking to him all along as if I’d never learned to do anything but talk, as if this armor I’d forged had never been needed because I could trust the humanity of the other to show itself. Trust. I was going to trust this stranger, this man who had entered my train car and not to talk. I was going to trust him to see and to listen and to do the right thing.
A part of me was watching myself do this, the same part that watched my fictional characters say and do things. And when they did that apart from me and my authorial wishes for them, they were more truly themselves. As I was now, standing before the dealer in the whisking cold, more truly myself. No armor, no sword.
He lit a cigarette, the lighter’s flame extinguishing in the wind. He took a deep drag and said, “You’re just protecting the girls then.” The words came sideways out his mouth, slipping through a stream of smoke.
“That’s all.”
His eyes were two slits of shadow. He held the cigarette to his lips. He nodded. It was as if he were seeing all the unfolding years that had brought me here with him between these two train cars and it was a story he knew well, one he’d already written and discarded and wasn’t up to being reminded about.
He blew smoke through both nostrils. “Fuck it, the night’s done anyway, right, mate?” He flicked the smoking butt over my shoulder into the black wind. I knew what this action meant, I knew what he was saying he had chosen not to do to me, but I didn’t care one way or another. A part of me seemed to have died anyway, and what remained watched myself walk behind the dealer through both doors, through the outer and then the inner, into the warm and quiet car of safe and sleeping girls.
20
THE LAST TIME I saw my father alive, we were both watching two men fight each other in the ring. It was February, near midnight, and I sat in damp work clothes on his couch in his house on the hill. In the past twelve years, Pop had learned how to live in a wheelchair, and there were signs of him and it all over the house: just weeks after