Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [49]
And I liked how much energy I had all the time, how I rarely got sick, though one weekday morning in May, I woke up with a fever and stayed in bed, and that morning Jimmy Quinn got stabbed.
Artie Doucette did it. I didn’t know him well, though I’d seen him out behind the M and L wings smoking on the grates. He wore a brown leather jacket and had long black hair and pale skin. He was stocky-looking and was always talking loud and swearing too much, and he had black sideburns he let grow below his ears. Like a lot of people, he wore a folded Buck knife in a snapped leather case at his belt.
Since the weekend, word had gotten around about what Doucette had said, that Jimmy’s girlfriend, April S., was a slut. This got back to Jimmy on Monday and for three days he’d been looking all over the school for Doucette, who’d learned of this and stayed home. By Thursday, though, he could hide no longer. He had to get back to school, and that morning he took the bus. When it pulled up behind the M and L wings just before seven-thirty, the sun rising in a blue sky, hundreds of kids standing around or starting to stream inside, Jimmy was waiting. It was Daley who told me what happened next, that Doucette stepped off the bus and scanned the crowd and saw Quinn pushing past people to get to him, that Doucette ran, begging Quinn to leave him alone.
“I didn’t mean nothin’! Jimmy, I didn’t mean—”
Quinn grabbed the back of Doucette’s leather jacket with both hands, and Doucette jerked free and spun around, the sun flashing off the five-inch blade just before he drove it into Jimmy’s hip.
“All the way in,” Daley said. “Right to the fuckin’ handle.”
Then Artie Doucette was running through the student parking lot, and Jimmy was down, his blood pulsing onto the concrete.
Daley helped Jimmy stand. His pant leg was soaked, blood running down his leg into his boot, and Quinn pressed his hand to the wound and limped through the crowded corridors all the way to the gym and Mr. Scanlon’s office, the man who coached Jimmy on the baseball team. He called an ambulance and later we learned that Doucette’s knife had just missed one of Jimmy’s kidneys, that Jimmy Quinn, tall handsome crazy Jimmy Quinn, the one who had beaten up that grown man in front of Sam’s house, had almost died.
For over a week Sam and Kevin Daley and Big Jeff Chabot and I walked the halls looking for any of Doucette’s friends. One afternoon after lunch we found one, a skinny kid with long red hair and buckteeth. Daley backhanded his face and knocked him into a wall of lockers and the kid fell to one knee and Daley leaned close and pointed his finger an inch from his face. “You tell Doucette he’s fucking dead, all right? You fuckin’ tell him.” Then he kicked him in the ribs, and we turned and went looking for more.
I don’t know if it was having the others beside me, or that we were united in our rage, but I felt little fear, only a heart-thumping, dry-mouthed desire to hurt somebody, really hurt someone.
JIMMY STAYED home the rest of the school year, and it seemed a long, long time before we saw him again.
It was June, one of those hot days when you could smell the Merrimack River all over town—the faint smell of sewage and diesel and drying mud, of dead fish and creosote, of rusty iron and the melted plastic of some chemicals we couldn’t name. It was after school, and Sam drove the two of us to Quinn’s big family house on Main Street. His mother answered the door. She looked happy to see us and led us through cool dim rooms to the backyard where Jimmy lay in a lawn chair in the sun.
His hair was longer than I’d ever seen it, and his skin was tanned a deep brown. He wore a tank top and cutoffs. When he saw us, he smiled and grabbed the walking stick at his side and stood.
“Hey, Sam. Andre.”
“Hey, Jimmy,” Sam said. “You look good.”
He did, and he didn’t. He was handsome as ever, but he’d lost muscle in his chest and shoulders and arms. We stood there awhile. I don’t remember what we talked about, just Jimmy nodding and smiling, his eyes