Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [67]
Jeb climbed out of the back. His hair was in his face. There were brown whiskers across his cheeks and chin and throat, and as we crossed the lot for the rear door of the bar, Jeb just a few steps behind us in his T-shirt and hand-knit woolen slippers, I felt I’d done him some kind of wrong by bringing him, that I was using him somehow, my little brother who’d become a kept boy, a musical recluse.
The stairwell up to the street level was dimly lit, the wooden treads wet and gritty. The music was louder here, and I heard a woman laugh over the noise. At the landing, Sam pushed open the door, the long oak bar two and three people deep, the bartenders working fast and never stopping, the band too loud, the air stuffy and smelling like damp wool and cigarette smoke, perfume and spilled beer and sweat. The bouncer sat on a stool collecting a two-dollar cover charge. Even on the stool he was taller than we were. He had curly black hair and a wool sweater and looked thirty years old.
We paid our money and made our way through the crowd. The floor was wide hardwood planks worn smooth, and the band was in the next room where the lights were dimmed and men and women sat at cocktail tables drinking and talking and laughing. A lot of them looked older than we were, married couples out for their Saturday night. The band was on a small stage, a cigarette smoke haze under the lights where the lead guitarist was singing about Amy and how he’d like to spend the night with her.
Usually Sam and I would head to the bar and order a milk, wait for the bartender to say something before he poured us the watered-down liquid they used for White Russians, but the bar was just too hard to get to, and as we stood there in the squeeze of bodies I began to recognize a face here and there, some of them girls from the high school, young women now. A lot of them worked shifts at Western Electric or in one of the mills or restaurants downtown, or maybe they were training as a nurse’s aide in an old folks’ home or had tried a little college like me before dropping out.
I could see a few of them drinking at the bar, talking to each other over the music. They took deep drags off their cigarettes and turned their heads to exhale, their made-up eyes glittering darkly.
Everybody was talking and nobody was even pretending to listen to the band. I was already tired of standing in the middle of it all and hoped Sam felt the same way and would want to leave soon. But he was talking to Bobby Schwartz, who I hadn’t seen come in. Bobby looked big and handsome in his dress leather jacket and somehow he’d made it to the bar and had a drink in his hand. He was smiling at Sam, nodding at whatever he was saying, and something was happening up against the brick wall, Jeb slapping away the hand of Steve Lynch.
Lynch was over six feet and had curly blond hair and a deep voice and the girls liked him though he was known for being a badass, for walking the halls like some charismatic king, always three or four others trailing behind him. More than once I’d seen him push a smaller kid out of the way, or knock another’s books out of his hands as he passed, and he’d laugh and call them faggots. I’d been in the same class with his older brother Dana, who wasn’t much different, just a little bigger and not quite as handsome.
Lynch was here with three or four of his buddies. Now they were standing there waiting for him to do something to this little shit with the untamed hair and slippers on his feet who’d just slapped Lynch’s hand aside after Steve’d scratched Jeb’s chin and said, “You need a fuckin’ shave.”
Bobby and Sam saw what was happening, too; the three of us stepped closer as if we’d been pulled there, the four with Lynch looking us over, us doing the same to them. I was vaguely aware of a steady electric current rising up my legs and into my chest, and I wasn’t afraid, just so aware, Lynch’s voice somehow the only one I heard above the dozens of others, nobody looking over at us, the crowd still drinking and talking