Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [40]
I hadn’t seen him. But I’d heard about him. People said he was crazier than his brother Ricky who’d go after anyone for anything, that Tommy was quiet but meaner and more dangerous, that some biker down on Fourth looked too long at Tommy’s girlfriend and he jerked him off his parked hog and beat him till he was almost dead. That’s why Tommy J. had to join the army, they said. That or prison.
I knew he was nineteen or twenty years old, that he weighed close to 200 pounds and was an MP in the army. I remember hoping he’d get killed on the way home from wherever he was. Or that the army would need him and wouldn’t let him out and then months would pass, and he and his brother would forget whatever their little sister had told them.
Jeb started taking different routes to and from school. Some afternoons his teacher would drive him home. She was thirty-five years old and had wild frizzy hair just like Jeb. She was small and thin and wore big, round glasses like Janis Joplin, and she drove a bright orange Z-28, sleek-looking and low to the ground. At the middle school she’d encouraged Jeb’s natural creativity, and gave him Andrés Segovia records he would listen to on our old record player in his room. He was starting to teach himself classical guitar.
It was a weekday afternoon in April, and I was sitting on the front steps of our house waiting for him to come home. An hour earlier on the high school bus, Glenn P. tapped the back of my head, his eyes pink behind his glasses, his long greasy hair stuck behind both ears. “Guess who got in last night?”
I had said nothing, and he’d laughed his stoned, gleeful laugh, and now I was waiting for my brother to come home so I could, what? I didn’t know. Maybe I was just going to tell him to get in the house and stay there. Don’t go down to the store for a Coke or anything. Don’t get seen in the street.
It was a strange afternoon anyway because our mother was home, sick with the flu, and the house was quiet, no other kids inside smoking, drinking, cranking the stereo so loud you could always hear it out on the sidewalk. Most of the snow had melted, but there was still a patch of it in the front yard, the grass brown and damp, bare twigs and half a fallen branch lying in the wet leaves nobody had raked in the fall.
Down on Main Street cars passed. It had to be after three, but I didn’t own a watch and didn’t want to go inside and check the clock in the kitchen. On the other side of our street, on the corner of Main and Columbia Park, was a yellow brick apartment building, and I looked past the bare branches of the trees to the flat roof and tin-colored sky above it. The air had gotten cooler. It felt like it might rain. And then I saw Jeb’s teacher’s sports car as it slowed down on Main, her indicator blinking yellow like an advertisement for anybody bumming at the corner of Seventh, that Sue’s little brother had just gotten home. My heart started up and I stood and walked to the curb to tell him Tommy J. was home on leave, but in only seconds a man was striding up Columbia Park from Main followed by six or seven others, kids I’d seen from the avenues and on the bus, kids in leather jackets and T-shirts and Dingo boots, their long scraggly hair stuck behind their ears, though Tommy J.’s hair was so short he looked bald, and he had a trimmed mustache like a cop’s. He was already halfway up the street when Jeb’s teacher’s car pulled up and my thirteen-year-old brother climbed out of the passenger seat, smiling and oblivious, a book or some art supplies under his arm, his hair wild, that brown fuzz on his cheeks and chin.
Somebody said, “That’s him, Tommy.”
The teacher was opening her door. I told Jeb to run inside. “Do it. Go.”
But Tommy J. was already there in front of our house. He was wearing a sweatshirt, and he was a foot taller than both of us, sixty or seventy pounds heavier, and he punched my brother in the face, Jeb’s head snapping back, his book falling to the street.
“You like my little sister, mothafucka?”
Some kid laughed, the teacher was screaming something,