Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [47]
A few Saturdays later, we were back at the Lanes, shooting pool. None of us had any money for beer or even a seven-dollar bottle of Kappy’s screwdriver mix, but we had enough quarters to play Eight Ball. I was no good at it, and when it was my turn to play the winner, I handed my pool cue to Big Jeff Chabot and walked past April S. sitting on Jimmy’s lap, April C. beside them, chewing gum and watching the old people bowl down on the floor. I was thirsty. Earlier in the day I’d worked out in the basement for over two hours, hitting all my body parts at once, something Sam had told me to do to put on size, to work out less, not more. For a month or so now, I was doing only three workouts a week, but I could already feel my T-shirts getting tight in the shoulders and back. There was a porcelain water fountain bolted into the wall near the door, and I leaned over and drank gulp after gulp of tepid city water, every bit of it tasting good. When I straightened up, three men in ice hockey clothes walked in. I didn’t know anything about hockey, but I recognized the oversized nylon shirts, all of them dark purple with orange stripes and big numbers printed on the back. The man in front had long red hair, still wet from sweating under a hockey helmet, and my heart started beating faster.
Last winter Cleary and I had been waiting outside a package store a block away from Monument Square. It was a convenience store that sold beer, and we’d stood away from the fluorescent light of the windows and waited with the money he or I had stolen from our mothers. Across the street was the used car lot we’d run through tripping so long ago, it seemed, and now all the little white bulbs were fixed again and dangled over rows of repossessed Monte Carlos and Mustangs and LeSabres. A van pulled up beside us, the radio blasting “Bennie and the Jets.” The driver shut it off fast and slammed the door and stepped into the light. He had long red hair and needed a shave. He wore a dungaree jacket and didn’t look like a cop or anybody’s father, and Cleary said, “Hey, man, can you buy us some beers?”
He looked at us hard. For a second we thought a no was coming, the fourth of the night. But then he walked over with his hand out, and Cleary handed him a ten-dollar bill, “Schlitz Tall Boys, please.”
The man took the money without a word and disappeared inside the store. A cop car was cruising down the street and we stepped back around the corner and stayed there in the darkness between the cinderblock wall and the dumpster. Behind us was a three-decker house. I could see through the second-story window the pale blue flicker of a TV behind a thin curtain. Cleary was talking about where we should go to drink our Tall Boys, maybe back to the tree hut, maybe down to Railroad Square and the abandoned brewery we knew how to get into to get warm.
An engine started up and we leapt around the corner to see the van backing fast away from the curb. We ran into the lot, shouting for him, but the redheaded man gave us the finger and stepped on it and was gone.
Weeks later, Cleary and I were walking down Main Street late on a Friday night. It was after one in the morning and the town was quiet, the boxlike houses we walked beside dark and locked up, the shades drawn. We’d been at a party at the rent collectors’ on Seventh Avenue. They were fresh off a drug run down south, and the three small rooms of the apartment were wedged with people drinking and passing joints of Acapulco gold under the heart-tapping flash of a strobe light, the Stones playing “Brown Sugar.”
In the bright kitchen, a man with long blond hair and an outlaw mustache sat at a table rolling joint after joint after joint. His chest was bare behind a leather vest, his arm muscles showing, and in a metal baking dish in front of him were hundreds of pot seeds he’d fingered from the dried leaf. Beside him sat two