Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [191]
Suzanne’s house was unheated. In the halogen light I worked under I could see my breath, but now the night had gotten so cold the mortar was setting up too fast so I’d turned on the oven in the kitchen and opened its door and rested the bucket of mortar on the floor in front of it. Beside my wet saw the growing stack of tile scraps were framed with slivers of ice.
The night before I hadn’t slept much. This was something I’d grown used to since we’d started having kids six years earlier. It wasn’t simply the duties that came with caring for babies and young children—getting up to carry my infant son or daughter to Fontaine’s breast for a feeding, burping them after, maybe changing a diaper; it wasn’t only that one of them was older now and had had a bad dream or needed to be carried to the bathroom through our dark bedroom; it was that since becoming a father, I now slept like a soldier on watch in enemy territory. It had been ten years since that hot afternoon and Mozart’s Requiem and the screaming woman on the sidewalk, but the world had never seemed so dangerous. Anybody or anything could hurt my kids at any time, a gut-sick feeling every mother and father knew. It was the shadow side of a love so large my body could not hold it all, and I was beginning to believe in the soul.
The phone rang as I knelt at the wet saw and fed a full tile through the spinning blade. Icy water sprayed my fingers, hands, and wrists. I usually wore a mask for this, but I was beyond tired and wanted to get home, my lungs sore now from a fine mist of porcelain dust. I coughed and flicked off the saw, wiped my cut tile dry, and answered the phone.
“Hey. You coming over?”
“Pop?”
“Yeah, it’s on soon. You almost done?”
“What’s on soon?”
“The fight, man. De La Hoya.”
Five or six times a year Pop would host a poker night, or if there was a major fight on pay-per-view, we’d do that. Jeb and I would come over, his son-in-law Tom, Sam Dolan, the Haley brothers, Jack Herlihy and others from over the years, mainly friends of his sons who’d become his friends too. We’d drink beer and whiskey, smoke cigars and tell bad dirty jokes, Pop sitting happily at the head of the table in his wheelchair, everybody at the same height.
On fight nights we’d crowd into his narrow living room, some of us standing on the wheelchair ramp and leaning on the railing, others sprawled on the couch or standing near the dark windows with a beer. Pop would always be in his chair close to the TV, and I found myself explaining the smaller things to him, how the corner man rubs Vaseline on the fighter’s face to help prevent cutting, how each fighter will try to combat that by throwing punches with a twisting motion to more easily tear open the greased skin of his opponent, how hard it is to find your punching range when the other has good feet and can bob and weave, how truly hard it is to take a punch or a flurry of them, not only to keep your cool, but to keep your fear locked in some tiny room deep down inside.
“I forgot that was tonight, Pop. Who else is there?”
“Nobody.” He told me a few had called and said they couldn’t make it. The others just hadn’t shown up this time. “You coming?”
I pictured him sitting alone in his small house on the hill, an expensive pay-per-view fight on to watch by himself. “I can’t, Pop. I’ve got to get this floor done. I’m leaving tomorrow.”
“I think you’ll regret it. It looks like it’s going to be a good one.”
“I’ll try, but I don’t think I can, Pop.”
He told me he thought I should come over anyway, and we hung up.
I was in Suzanne’s bathroom, pushing my cut pieces into mortar when the phone rang again. I took my time answering it. I had to first clear the mortar from between the tiles so it wouldn’t harden there and make