Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [64]
Kench turned down a dead-end street. It was after two in the morning. He stopped the Toyota to turn around, and a beat-up sedan passed them slowly on the opposite side. Then it did a U-turn and pulled across the road and blocked it, their front bumper not far from the Toyota’s exhaust pipe. Two men stepped out. They were both black and one of them knocked on the window and asked Kench for help because their car had just gotten stuck on the ice behind them.
Kench got out of the car and left Suzanne there and walked around to the rear of the sedan. One of the men got behind the sedan’s wheel, the other stayed back with Kench, and they both pushed on the trunk as the big engine roared. Suzanne could hear it from inside Mom’s Toyota, but she could also see the red flash of the brake lights every time her boyfriend and the other man pushed. The sedan didn’t move and Kench climbed back into the Toyota and shut the door against the cold.
“Adam,” she said, “he was stepping on the brakes when you guys were pushing.”
“Don’t worry, I got it covered. We’re copasetic.”
“No, we need to leave.”
One of the men rapped his knuckles against the driver’s window and Kench opened the door and stepped outside again and Suzanne heard the sap thump his forehead, watched him drop to the street. The one who hit him knelt over him and went through his pockets, and Suzanne’s passenger door opened and the other one pulled her from the car and held a knife to her ribs and walked her to the sedan.
WHEN THEY were done with her, when they were done taking turns with her one at a time in the backseat while the other drove slowly past the steel-shuttered windows of shops, under overpasses, past the locked doors of apartment buildings—when they were done, they stopped at a corner and pushed her out. She wore only her shirt, nothing else, and as they drove off she stood there with her feet together, her arms crossed tightly. It was after three in the morning in February in Boston, ice on the sidewalk, the snowbanks along the curb dirty and frozen, her feet bare, her legs. Both of the men had held the same knife to her the whole time, and that was how she was going to die, wasn’t it? But no, the cold will do it now. Maybe she was thinking that when she saw the headlights coming and she waved the car down, a taxicab, the driver older and black, looking her over, letting her climb into the back of his heated cab. She told him what had just happened to her, and he shook his head, “All that free shit thrown at them and they gotta do that.”
He used his radio to call the police. She described to him the dead-end alley she’d been taken from, the streets and buildings around it. The driver took her right to it. In the glare of his headlights, Mom’s red Toyota was still there, and Kench lay on his back in the low snowbank where he’d fallen. Over the rooftops, the sky wasn’t quite as black, dawn not far off, a Monday in February, Valentine’s Day.
NOW IT was just after seven, Mom and Bruce were in his car speeding down the highway for Boston, and I was picking up the phone to call my father.
At first, because I never called it, I couldn’t remember his number. Then it came to me and I dialed, my fingers hot in the rotary holes, my body light, my tongue thick. His phone began to ring. I stood in the hallway near the back door, the one Suzanne had used the night before to leave. I heard again their voices, heard the car start up, and why didn’t I get up and run down there and stop them? I knew then, wherever they were going, she was doing it for him. I should’ve done something. Again, why didn’t I?
Outside the sky was gray. Patches of snow lay in our neighbor’s side yard. Somewhere in our house Jeb and Nicole were awake, home because of what had happened, though I did not