Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [68]
You first.
No, you.
And Jeb stepped sideways through the crowd, Lynch following him past the bouncer through the door for the long stairwell down to the parking lot where my brother would have to fight in his slippers and T-shirt, his hair swinging in front of his face, and I wanted to follow, but Bobby was holding his hand up to Lynch’s boys, smiling that same smile he used to have in Connolly’s ring, both gloves at his side, daring you to swing, “You stay, we stay, right, boys?”
The tallest and biggest nodded, and the seven of us stood there in the smoke haze and the noise of the crowd that didn’t know we were waiting to see who’d come back in that door.
It was Lynch and it was way too soon. Less than a minute. He was smiling, looking down at me as he rejoined his friends. Sam said something, or Bobby, but I was moving through the crowd past the bouncer, then down the long stairwell, thinking knife. He stabbed him.
The steps were pockets of air under my feet. Then I was out in the cold, the grit of salt and sand on ice under my boots, Jeb standing there looking at me.
“You all right?”
“I had my back to him, he kicked me down the stairs, I can’t find my other slipper.”
Jeb’s left foot was bare, his toes naked on the iced-over asphalt.
“Where is it?”
“Up there somewhere.”
I was back inside, the stairs under me like an afterthought. And I was scanning them for my brother’s wool slipper, but I wasn’t looking for it. Then I was on the landing and past the bouncer inside the noise and heat and smoke, walking past Lynch and his boys to Sam and Bobby. He kicked him down the stairs. Help me find his slipper.
Sam went first and then I did too, but there was the feeling I was done with this, done with looking, done with everything, and I ran back up, stepped inside the bar, turned, and there he was, Steve Lynch on the landing, grinning down at me. My back was to the open door of the bar, and as the words came out of my mouth I could feel my weight sink back on my right foot, my arms go loose at my sides, and it was as if I were in a warm bath under a blue sky, my words coming together in a question that could only get the answer I was waiting for. “Have you seen my brother’s slipper, Steve?”
“Slipper? Your brother’s a fuckin’ faggot and so are—”
He was falling, not backwards, but straight down, as if a blade had taken off his legs at the knees, and I was swinging and swinging but the bouncer’s arm was in the air between us and I was trying to punch over it, my fist just missing Lynch’s face which was bone-white, his lower face wet and red, his mouth a dark hole though my fist felt nothing, and the bouncer pushed and I was half falling, half running down the stairs and out into the cold air where my brother waited.
“You find it?”
I was breathing hard. I shook my head. “No, but I clocked him.”
“Good.”
“Yeah.” And we began walking through the dim parking lot for Sam’s Duster, the air strangely still and calm, the streetlamps shining down in the parked cars, the ice floes in the river beyond barely moving. I felt light and pure and free of something. Sam’s car was locked.
“Your foot cold?”
“A little.”
Something was different. Everything was different. There was more quiet in the air and more noise, too. The band had stopped playing upstairs and all the voices seemed to come louder through the brick walls. The back door pushed open from the stairwell and three of Lynch’s boys came walking toward us. The bigger one, the tallest one, said, “You sucker-punched my friend,” and he tackled me into a snowbank, then was sitting on my chest punching me in the side of the head, in the ears, in the neck and shoulder. Then it was over. He’d done his duty, and he was walking back to his buddies, the three of them standing next to Jeb like they were in front of a fire watching it burn. The big one and his buddies walked back inside, and I was standing, dusting the snow off. That was it? My entire boyhood I’d been unable to talk or move or resist out of fear of that? My head