Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [26]
JEB AND I had a new friend now, Cleary, whom everybody called by his last name. After the high school let out at two-thirty, I’d take the bus home and wait for my brother to walk back from the middle school, then he and I would go to Cleary’s house down the dirt alley behind our garage. It was a tiny two-story of four rooms and a bathroom, the backyard just big enough for his father’s Chevy, though we rarely saw him. We saw his mother a lot, a big-breasted woman who started her drinking every morning in tall plastic cups filled with vodka and Pepsi. Some afternoons we’d knock on Cleary’s door, hear nothing, then walk in over the yellow linoleum of the kitchen and the living room where his mother would be passed out on the couch in front of the TV, her mouth open, a cigarette still burning in the ashtray.
We’d call our friend and he’d come leaping down the stairs smiling, always smiling, his short dark hair sticking up in a cowlick, a smattering of freckles across his cheeks. In the summer he wore cutoff shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt. In the winter it’d be fake jeans from Zayre’s, a T-shirt and denim jacket covered with magic marker peace signs.
We’d walk a half mile down Main Street past houses built so close together there were no yards. Window shades were drawn and you never saw anybody sitting on a porch. Cleary walked on the balls of his feet and bounce-walked, and he was always scheming, talking about the girl he was going to screw or the Corvette he’d own one day or the real Mexican switchblades he heard you could order from a magazine. He’d shove you into a mailbox and laugh and start running, and we’d chase him, Jeb’s wild frizzy hair bouncing, my ponytail slapping my back, and we’d go through GAR Park where, when the weather was warm, Dominican and Puerto Rican families laid out blankets and ate together. In the middle of the green was a statue of Hannah Duston, this woman who long ago was kidnapped by Indians along with one of her children, and late one of those first nights, after her ten captors were asleep, she crawled out from under her blanket and took a hatchet and killed every single one of them in their sleep. Then she scalped them. The statue is of her in a long dress, a hatchet in her half-raised arm, her eyes on Main Street which sloped down past the shopping plaza to the river and the Basilere Bridge over the Merrimack. It was named for the first soldier from Haverhill to get killed in Vietnam, a war that was still going on, though we didn’t think much about that.
One February morning we skipped school and went downtown. It was ten or eleven degrees and the dirty snow piled along both sides of Washington Street had become ice; the air made my lungs hurt. Our noses, ears, and fingers felt burned. The three of us had a dollar to share so we sat in a booth at Valhally’s Diner and drank coffee with so much milk and sugar in it you couldn’t call it coffee anymore. The Greek man behind the counter hated us; he folded his black hairy forearms across his chest and watched us take our free refills until we were giddy with caffeine. Cleary went for his seventh cup and the owner yelled something at him in Greek. On the way out Cleary stole two dollars someone