Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [201]
East Broadway lay thirty yards behind us on the other side of a chain-link fence. The priest was just finishing up, and I could hear it back through the trees behind me, a car coming fast down the asphalt, its engine upshifting and getting the gas. The priest was asking us to say the Lord’s Prayer, and I didn’t want to give this car any of my attention, but now it came into view as it sped west, a blue lowrider, the center of its spinning wheels a flash of chrome. A kid leaned out the passenger window and yelled at us: “Fuckin’ faggots!”
Then they were gone, the driver downshifting for the drop of the hill through the trees. The priest smiled and shook his head: “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name.” I began reciting the words with everyone else, but my tongue had become my beating heart and my hands had turned oily and light, and that old rage sat up inside me as if it had just lain down for a short nap. “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done.” I didn’t move but saw myself running in my overcoat and suit to my car, starting it up and tearing down East Broadway through the pines. “On earth as it is in heaven.” They’d be a half mile ahead of me by now, maybe more. “Give us this day our daily bread.” These little punks with no respect for anyone, my eyes scanning for any flash of blue. “And forgive us our trespasses.” At the stop sign at the end of East Broadway, Charlie’s Variety Store across the street, I’d cut right and accelerate for downtown. Soon I’d be on River Street, on my left the rusted guardrail and bare trees, the Merrimack River flowing east, the boxboard factory on the other side, gray smoke unfurling from its stacks. I’d pass the hill street where the hospital used to be, the emergency room where they’d stitched up Sam’s chin and Vinny smoked under the awning, his eyes on me. Farther up the street, the base of Nettle Hill, Russ Bowman on his back in the classroom, his face getting punched over and over. Then I’d be on Water Street, Captain Chris’s Restaurant a gay bar now, that back kitchen where Charlie Pierce had sprayed me with scalding water and I’d gone after him, this killer of kids like me. “As we forgive those who trespass against us.” No blue car yet, to my right the concrete retaining wall for the parking lot of the shopping plaza where Crazy Jack had yelled on a warm, crowded Sunday afternoon, How’s it feel to be a chickenshit?! Then the traffic lights at the intersection where ten years after that night at the 104 Club, a loaded .38 in my father’s Red Sox jacket pocket, Ben Wallace, drunk behind the wheel of a dented sedan, had seen me walking along the sidewalk and he revved his engine till the chassis vibrated and yelled, You still want to go at it, Dubis?! And I’d drive straight through the intersection, the Basilere Bridge to my right, Bradford shimmering on the other side, and if there was still no blue ahead of me, I’d head deep into downtown, on the river side the old Woolworth’s building, Valhally’s Diner, Mitchell’s Clothing Store where our mother had put clothes for us on layaway she still could not afford, past Casey’s Office Supplies and the post office in Washington Square, then the bars of Washington Street—the Lido, the Chit Chat Lounge, the Tap and Steve Lynch swallowing his front teeth. “As we forgive those who trespass against us.” At the black trestle of Railroad Square, I’d turn right and upshift past the old leather tanneries, the berm of the Boston and Maine rail line to my left, the abandoned brewery coming up, the turn under the iron trestle for Lafayette Square, Devin Wallace straddling my chest, knocking my head against concrete again and again, the martial arts studio and Haffereffer Gas, the brown rush of the Little River flowing through drainage pipes beneath cracked asphalt, no blue yet, no blue, the shadow of another trestle above me as I downshifted up Winter Street, the booth where I pumped gas and waited for the Lynches and the Murphys to come get me, gone now, an empty concrete lot, a chain-link fence halfway around it, and before the Greek church