Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [45]
Sometimes I forgot how far I had to go. I’d turned my body into something hard, but I still only weighed 147 pounds. I wasn’t even close to being able to scare somebody away just by how I looked.
Once hockey season began, Sam and I stopped running together, but every Friday and Saturday night we’d walk from his small house on Eighteenth Avenue down Primrose Street past the Am Vets hall, its parking lot half full, music from a jukebox thumping behind the cinderblock walls. In front of the side door, four or five Harleys would be leaning on their kickstands, a black helmet hanging off a sissy bar, the red light from a neon Miller sign glinting off its surface. Beyond the Am Vets was a strip of weeds, then the parking lot for Pilgrim Lanes, a long white clapboard building where inside men and women bowled down on the floor. There’d be laughter and cigarette smoke and the clatter of candle pins, and we’d be over by the bathrooms where the pool tables were, taking turns playing eight ball with four or five others: there was Jimmy Quinn, who was six feet and could bench-press over 200 pounds for reps. One of his front eyeteeth was chipped, but he was handsome and already had a name. There were stories about him decking grown men who’d crashed house parties or some patch of woods where kids from the high school were drinking and getting high. They said he had the killer instinct, that even after a guy was down and hurt, Jimmy would keep whaling on his face and head till somebody pulled him off or the cops came and everybody started running.
There was fast-talking Kevin Daley, who played hockey with Sam and bragged often about their practice drills. “Man, we sweated bullets, didn’t we, Sam? We sweated fucking bullets.” There was gentle Jeff Chabot, who was tall and weighed over 250 pounds and was always smiling and cracking a joke; Greg Kelly whose cousin was the one they named the bridge after, the first kid from our town to get killed in Vietnam; and there were girls: the two April’s—slim, blonde, hip-swaying April S., who was Jimmy’s steady all through high school, and April C., Sam’s girl, short and blonde with thick muscular legs and a cute face, and if she didn’t like something you’d just said she’d smile and say, “Fuck you, you little faggot.” And somehow you didn’t feel less because of it. There were the twins Gina and Marie, pretty Greek girls who didn’t come from down in the avenues and never seemed happy standing in the lot of brush and high weeds across from the lanes, drinking a beer and passing around a bottle of Kappy’s screwdriver mix.
It’s where the night always went, into the high brush across the street where we’d drink and maybe pass a joint around. Sometimes, when the weather was bad and if no one else was home, we’d end up at somebody’s house, usually Sam’s. His parents adopted him when they were older, and they were already in their late fifties. His father, a short, small-boned Irishman with a gravelly voice and a face like John Wayne, was the town’s health inspector. Sam’s mother was from a big Irish family up the river in Lowell. She was a waitress, and if she had a Saturday night off, Mr. and Mrs. Dolan usually went out with friends and didn’t get home till late. We had their small two-story house to ourselves.
It was on a hill street with other small houses. The man next door drove a truck for the city. Another across the street was some kind of businessman. One July day he paid Sam and me to ride downtown in a pickup to an abandoned mill where we loaded two cigarette vending machines into the back of the truck, then rode to the man’s house on Eighteenth. We carried them into his garage, and when he handed us each a twenty-dollar bill, he told us, “Don’t say nothin’ to nobody, all right?”
IT WAS late October, and the night was cold and wet. Sam’s mother and father were out, and seven or eight of us were drinking beer inside his house. Sam had his record player going in his room, “Locomotive Breath” playing