Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [39]
MOST FIGHTS broke out when you didn’t see it coming. I’d be walking down the crowded corridors of the school, too hot because like most of the kids from the avenues I wore my leather jacket all day long, my ponytail halfway down my back, my eyes on the backs of kids ahead of me as I moved from one class where I said nothing to the next where I said less.
“Fuckin’ asshole!” The slam of a locker, the slap of feet over the hard floor, the soft thudding of a fist thrown again and again into someone’s face, like waxed wings flapping, then a joyous shriek of someone yelling “Fight!,” and we’d all be running to them, crowding around the two or three bodies flailing away at each other in the center. In a school of over two thousand students, this happened once or twice a week.
It was a cool morning in October, the sky was gray and looked heavy with snow. The second bell had rung and Suzanne and I and all the dealers and smokers and loud trash-talkers from out back stepped off the grates and headed for the glass doors of the high school.
And again, it was like stepping into still water that suddenly has a current and it was pulling me forward, a bunch of us rushing for something happening on the concrete stoop in front of the doors, a big-breasted girl in a short green jacket straddling the chest of another girl, punching her in the forehead, her eyes, her nose, her teeth, yelling, “You cunt! You fucking cunt!”
Other kids were laughing, cheering, urging the one on top to kill her, urging the one on the bottom to fight back, her nose splattering blood on the concrete beside her ear.
Then Perez the narc pushed through us and grabbed the top girl under the arms and pulled her off and she kicked the other girl in the crotch and a knee and the girl jumped up, her eyeliner streaked, her nose and mouth bloody, hair in her face, and she charged after the girl who’d just done this to her, just like Cody Perkins had gone after Big Sully, this much smaller girl going after the bigger one Perez held, and again I felt small and weak because I knew I’d be running; if I were that girl, now was the time to run.
BUT SOME fights came with a warning. Word would get out that somebody was going to kill somebody else, beat his head in, demi him out, kick his ass for some slight; owing money he was never paying back; screwing another’s girlfriend and bragging about it; telling another, “He’s a pussy. My mother can take him.” And then the other comes around with maybe a bat or a knife or just fists and feet to prove otherwise.
GLENN P. had just flicked his smoking roach into the gutter of Main Street. “I wouldn’t want to be your brother right now.”
“Why?”
“’Cause he’s fucking dead, that’s why.”
Glenn P. hooked a strand of hair behind his ear and smiled at me like he was witnessing something that satisfied him more than he thought it would. “It was gonna be Ricky, but he got shanked in the leg so guess who’s coming home on leave?” Glenn P. turned and walked into Pleasant Spa for chips and Pepsi, his usual stoned breakfast. I’d just been in there with change I’d stolen from my mother’s purse, and I’d bought a Coke and a Willy Wonka bar. Now my heart was thudding in my chest, my mouth dry as the bus pulled up to the curb from Seventh. I thought of the J. brothers’ little sister, her heavy black eyeliner, her skinny little body, the way she’d probably talked too much about fooling around up in the tree hut with my brother, who right now was either sleeping late or just leaving the house to walk to the middle school.
FOR A week or more, this was one of the subjects at the back of the bus, on the grates out behind the M and L wings, in day parties down on Seventh. “You hear about Tommy J.? He’s coming home on leave to kill Sue’s little brother. Man, you seen Tommy lately? He’s fuckin’