Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [27]
He paid our way on the city bus that was heated and made a loop all the way through town, along the river, up to the Westgate shopping center, then back again. We stayed on it for two hours, taking the loop six times. For a while I looked out the window at all the red brick mills, the storefronts with their dusty windows, barrooms on every block. The bus was warm, too warm. In the far rear, away from the driver, Cleary took out his black-handled Buck knife and carved a peace sign into the aluminum-backed seat in front of him.
After the bus, we made our way through the narrow factory streets, most of the buildings’ windows covered with gray plywood, though Cleary’s mother still worked at Cohen’s Shoes, when she wasn’t drinking. We walked along the railroad tracks, its silver rails flushed with the packed snow, the wooden ties gone under. The summer before we’d built a barricade for the train, a wall of broken creosote ties, an upside-down shopping cart, cinderblocks, and a rusted oil drum. We covered it with brush, then Cleary siphoned gas from a station wagon behind Cohen’s and poured it on. Jeb and I lit it, air sucked by us in a whoosh, and we ran down the bank across the parking lot into the abandoned brewery to the second floor to watch our fire, to wait for the Boston & Maine, to hear the screaming brakes as it rounded the blind curve just off the trestle over the river. But a fat man in a good shirt and tie showed up at the tracks, then a cop, and we ran laughing to the first floor where we turned on the keg conveyor belt, lay on it belly-first, and rode it up through its trapdoor over and over.
As we made our way through town it began to snow. My brother and I were hungry, but Cleary was never hungry; he was hawny, he said. One morning, as we sat in the basement of his house and passed a homemade pipe between us, his mother upstairs drunk and singing to herself, Cleary said: “I’m always hawny in the mawnin’.”
Jeb and I laughed and Cleary didn’t know why, then he inhaled resin on his next hit and said, “Shit, man, the screem’s broken.”
“The what?”
“The screem. You know, the screem. Like a screem door?”
By the time we reached the avenues the snow had blanketed the streets. On Cedar, cars spun out snow as they drove from the curb or the corner store. Cleary let out a yelp and a holler and went running after a Chevy that had just pulled away, skidding slightly as it went. Cleary ran low, bent over so the driver wouldn’t see him, and when he reached the back bumper he grabbed it and squatted on his sneakers, his butt an inch or two from the road. And he skied away, just like that, the snow shooting out from under the wheels of the car, out from under his Zayre Department Store sneakers, blue exhaust coughing out its pipe beside him.
IN OUR living room stood tall pine bookshelves loaded with hardcover novels and short story collections. They were the sole objects our mother and father had ever owned, and our house seemed to be the only one in the neighborhood that had them. In Cleary’s living room, there was the TV, a few glass knickknacks on the shelf beneath it. On the walls were department store prints of daisies in a vase, a kitten with sad, round eyes. Once I saw a slim hardcover lying on the coffee table, The Illustrated Bible.
The first time Cleary was in our house, he walked up to the shelves and ran his fingers along the spines of Faulkner, Chekhov, and Balzac, books I’d never quite noticed myself.
“Are these all real?”
“What?”
“I thought they were for looks, you know, like in a store.”
“Nope.”
“You read ’em all?”
I shrugged. I hadn’t read any of them. “My old man has. And my mother.”
Cleary kept running his fingers along all those books, shaking his head.
ON WEEKENDS at parties down on Seventh, or out in a weed lot, or up in the woods of Round Pond, we’d try whatever drugs were going around; we’d eat tabs of brown mescaline, or a quarter of LSD 25, or half a tab of four-way purple blotter acid, chemically treated paper you dissolved under the tongue.