Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [32]
It was a baseball that belonged to one of his roommates. For a while Pop looked in his buddy’s bedroom for a couple of gloves too, and I was relieved he didn’t find them. I was fourteen but wouldn’t know what to do with a baseball glove. What hand do you put it on? How do you catch a ball in it?
So we stood forty feet away from each other on the sidewalk and threw bare-handed. Soft arcing tosses that were fun to catch. Fun. At first, as the white ball sailed at me, I tensed up and jumped at it with both hands. But then, as I kept catching it, I began to look forward to catching it again, to see it spin in the air as it came, its dark stitching rotating. I had no idea how to throw it back. I have a vague memory of my father telling me to lift my leg, to throw over my shoulder, though he may not have. But I knew we were talking about something as we threw the ball back and forth, an occasional car passing in the street beside us, the charcoal glowing hotter for our burgers, and there was so much surprise in his face that I clearly had no experience with a baseball whatsoever, that I did not know one thing about it. I could see he didn’t want to draw too much attention to this. In my father’s eyes above his trimmed beard, I saw pity for me, and maybe I began to feel sorry for myself too, but what I remember most is being surprised that he was surprised. What did he think kids did in my neighborhood? What did he think we did? But how could I tell him anything without incriminating us all, especially my mother, whom he would blame? And when we sat down to eat at his tiny table in his tiny kitchen we were both quiet and ate too quickly, so much to say there was nothing to say.
ONE WEEKDAY morning, I woke late and was surprised to hear Mom’s voice downstairs. She and Bruce were talking in the front room. I dressed and walked to the first floor. The sun was out and shone through the window across the dusty rug. From Suzanne’s room I could hear Mick Jagger singing how beautiful Angie was. It sounded like Mom and Bruce were arguing about something, which didn’t happen too often. I climbed the stairs to my sister’s room.
Suzanne sat on her mattress, her back against the wall. She was smoking a cigarette, and when I walked in she looked up and stubbed it out as if she’d been waiting for me.
“You hear what happened?” She blew smoke out the side of her mouth.
“No, what?”
“Jeb tried to kill himself last night.”
“What?”
She told me how sometime after midnight our thirteen-year-old brother had called a rock station down in Boston, how he’d requested a drum solo, how he’d crept outside with Bruce’s car keys, a blanket, tape, and our vacuum cleaner’s hose, how he then attached it to the exhaust pipe of Bruce’s Jaguar XJ6, how he taped it airtight, then pushed the other end into the crack above the back window and stuffed the blanket around it till it, too, was airtight. How he climbed in behind the wheel, started the engine, and waited.
Maybe if Bruce hadn’t been a drinker, Jeb would have died, but Bruce woke needing to piss and that’s when he’d heard his engine idling out in the driveway. That’s when he went out there and found Jeb half-conscious behind smoky glass. That’s when he jerked open the door and pulled our brother out, switched off the Jaguar, and walked Jeb up and down the street till his head had cleared.
“Jeb wrote Mom a note. I guess Janice fucking Woods broke his heart or something.”
Mick Jagger was singing on about Angie, how he still loved her. Suzanne shook her head at me. I stared down at her floor, shaking my head too. There was a twisting in the marrow of my bones, a twisting that vibrated with sound. You should’ve done something. You knew Janice Woods was bad news. Why didn’t you do something?
“Where is he?