Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [4]
Then he glanced up from his paper. He looked around the room. He looked at us looking at him. “This is Dr. Deakins’s office, isn’t it?”
“No,” I said. “He moved.”
The man apologized and stood and left in a hurry. I don’t know why we didn’t just put up a sign and lock the door. There was a lot I didn’t seem to know.
LATELY SUZANNE had been going to parties in the projects on Summer Street. It was on the other side of the cemetery, and Russ Bowman lived there. He was only fifteen or sixteen, but he had long blond hair he kept tied back in a foot-long pony tail. He had sideburns and big arm muscles he showed off in the T-shirt and biker vests he wore. I heard kids say he stabbed someone. I heard others say he raped a girl and got away with it. One night in the fall, after nine when our mother was still at work, Jeb and I went looking for Suzanne in the projects. Nicole had stayed home alone. The projects was a cluster of concrete buildings that smelled like piss and wine. There was a dark loud party, a bunch of teenagers in a hot room smoking dope while the Jackson 5 sang on the record player about ABC being as easy as 1, 2, 3. Jeb was tall for eleven, his hair long and frizzy. He put his arm around the shoulders of a cute Dominican girl, and Russ Bowman rose up out of the shadows and grabbed Jeb by the throat and backhanded his face. “She’s mine, you little shit. Beat it.”
I stood there. I stood there with my heart fluttering, a sick hole in my gut, and I wanted to do something, anything, but it was Russ Bowman, so I did nothing. My brother stared down at the floor like he was trying to figure out what he’d done wrong. Bowman shoved him out of the room, and I followed him onto the street.
WHENEVER THERE was a fight at school you would know it because dozens of boys and girls would be rushing to one spot like they were being pulled there by the air itself. There’d be yelling and screaming. Someone would yell “Fight!” and kids would run into the crowd. You’d see some boy getting his face punched over and over, and soon a teacher or vice principal would push his way through to break it up.
One afternoon in late spring, the last bell rang and I was in a loud moving stream of kids pushing out the front door and into the day. The air smelled like fresh-cut grass and sewage from the river. Rain clouds were gathering over it and the boxboard factory on the other side, and parked in the fire lane was a chopper Harley-Davidson, a man standing beside it, his hands on his hips. He was tall, his hair held back with a blue bandanna, his arms tattooed and sinewy. He wore ripped jeans and black biker boots and when Russ Bowman saw him, he dropped his book and turned, his face pale, his eyes as wide as a child’s. He ran back through the crowd and into the school, this grown man chasing him. Somebody yelled “Fight!” And it was like watching the tide reverse itself, the ocean’s waves pause, then push themselves back out to sea, all of us running back inside and down the corridors, shoulder to shoulder, some tripping and falling, chasing after the man chasing Russ Bowman.
He caught him in an empty classroom. When the rest of us spilled into it, Bowman was already flat on his back and the man was punching Russ in the face again and again.
I liked seeing this. I liked seeing Bowman’s head bounce against the hard floor, I liked seeing the blood splattering across his nose and mouth and chin, and I especially liked how tightly his eyes were shut against the fear, and the pain.
Then I began to