Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [46]
This went on until Sam came down in his corduroys and white T-shirt, his hair messed up. He said it was getting late. We’d better clean up before his parents got home.
A while later, we filed outside, one of us carrying a plastic trash bag of our empties we’d stash somewhere. It was after midnight and we were standing around in the street. The air was colder and you could smell snow coming. Far off a train whistle sounded, the Boston & Maine on its last run of the night. I was drunk and didn’t know it till I reached out for Marie’s hand and missed.
Headlights shone on us from up the hill. The car was moving slow and every few yards the driver stepped on the brakes, his taillights flashing red. We parted for him, a small sedan, two men sitting in the front, the driver looking out at us like we’d done something to him.
“That’s my neighbor,” Sam said. “Let’s get goin’.”
April S. said she’d left her pocketbook inside the house, and she and Jimmy went back inside to get it.
Two houses down, the car jerked to a stop and parked half on the sidewalk. Both doors opened quickly and now the men were coming toward us. The light from Sam’s porch glowed dimly in the street, and I could see they were forty or fifty years old, their hair thinning, one tall, the other short and wearing a parka. “Why you running? You stealing from my street? You the little shits stealing from this street? Get outta here and don’tchoofucking come back.” The man was slurring his words. The tall one behind him was weaving slightly, his eyes on Marie’s breasts beneath her leather jacket.
“Mr. T., it’s me, Sam Dolan. I live across the street from you.”
“Don’t give me that shit. It’s you. Now get the hell off my street, you fuckin’ punks.”
I was standing close to him now, Sam on my left, Greg on my right, the others behind us, and I didn’t like how this tall one kept looking at Marie. I didn’t like how the short one kept insulting us, ignoring Sam, his own neighbor, swearing at us.
I stepped closer to him. “Fuck you, you ugly motherfucker.”
A flash of yellow light snaked through my brain and there was black sky, then the streetlamp, then Sam’s porch light again and the man who’d punched me was saying one thing more, a numbing ache in my nose, and there was the sound of running, then a fist slammed into Sam’s neighbor’s face, and he dropped to the street, Jimmy Quinn straddling him, punching and punching. One of the twins was screaming, and Jeff and Kevin began walking the tall man back, and Sam was trying to grab Jimmy, who was yelling, “Motherfucker! Piece of shit motherfucker!” He stood and kicked the man in the chest and back and rolled him to a parked car where he picked him up by his parka and slammed him down, his head thudding against the bumper. He picked him up and did it again, the dull clang of skull on metal. He did it again and was lifting the man to do it once more, but now Sam grabbed Jimmy around the chest and pulled him back and away.
“That’s enough, Jimmy. Enough.”
Jimmy’s shirt was ripped at the collar. He was breathing hard. He pointed at the man lying on his side in the street. “Fuck you.”
A man’s voice called from a window. “I called the cops!”
We started running down Eighteenth Avenue, Jimmy and April ahead of me, her pocketbook jerking against her hip, her hand in his. I wished it’d been me who’d punched the man back, but as I ran drunk down the street with my friends, it felt as if something had just been revealed: Jimmy Quinn was as dangerous as everybody said he was, and even though I hadn’t hit anyone, I had talked back.
I had just started something.
FOR A week or more we waited for the cops to show up at Sam’s door, but nothing