Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [66]
IT WAS a Saturday night in winter, and we were heading downtown in Sam’s black Duster, me and Sam and my brother Jeb. For the past three years, he’d barely left his room. He was tall and lean, and his hair was so wild he had to stick strands of it behind his ears so he could see. He’d go five or six days without shaving, his cheeks and chin covered with soft brown whiskers.
He was seventeen now and a junior at the high school. When he actually went there, he wore a denim vest and spent most of the day in the art department, drawing and painting and sculpting. One afternoon he found a dead cat in the snow off Columbia Park, and he carried it into the house and cut off its tail with a kitchen knife. The next day he wore the cat tail as a tie, the bottom half of it tucked neatly into his vest.
He practiced classical guitar hours and hours every day up in his closed bedroom. His former teacher from the middle school would be in there with him, and soon my brother’s guitar would go silent and she’d start moaning. After a while, Jeb’s guitar would start up again. I would hear this sometimes and think only good things, that my brother was getting regularly what most boys could only dream of, that she was keeping him so busy with sex and art that he couldn’t possibly want to die anymore. She still bought him guitar strings, music books, paints, canvases, but he never went out with me on the weekends, never roamed the streets anymore like we used to. On Saturday nights, she’d come for him in her Z-28, and he’d walk out of the house for trips to restaurants down in Cambridge and Boston.
It was a cold night in February, two feet of snow on the ground, a thin layer of cracked ice on the sidewalks. Somehow I’d talked Jeb into going out with us, and it was strange having him in the backseat behind me, but it felt good. Like it used to. Just the two of us, before there were any friends like Cleary who was at the trade school now and had stopped coming around. We didn’t see much of him at all, though we started to hear about his little brother Mike, who was making a name for himself as a martial artist, a polite and gentlemanly killer.
That night Sam and I were wearing sweaters and leather jackets, jeans and boots, but Jeb never seemed to get cold. He wore a T-shirt and loose corduroys. On his feet weren’t shoes but wool slippers his teacher had knitted for him. He needed a shave.
Sam had the radio on, Rod Stewart singing about Maggie kicking him in the head. We were heading down to the Tap on Washington Street. On Saturday nights they had live music, and the place would be full of men and women, some of them from Bradford College across the river. Sam drove under the railroad bridge into Lafayette Square. We passed the bright lighted windows of Store 24 and cut around the rotary into the dark streets of downtown, tall abandoned mill buildings on both sides of us as present yet gone as dead ancestors. Every block and a half there’d be a blue or red neon glow coming from the first-floor window, another bar this town was full of, and I was looking forward to the Tap, but not to drink. Sam and I were eighteen now and legally old enough to be in these barrooms, but for months now he and I hadn’t had even one sip of beer, and we weren’t eating anything with sugar in it either. We were trying to get as defined as possible, to get cut.
Sam drove the Duster down the alleyway and into the asphalt lot below. It was crowded with cars and pickups. There were streetlamps along the floodwall shining down on the plowed banks, the lot salted and sanded, and out on the river was the slow dim movement of white floes on black water. Even before I stepped out of Sam’s car I could hear the thumping bass of the band up in the