Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [69]
I wanted to run back up there and try again. I wanted to set my feet and throw one into the big one’s face, but now couples were leaving, a few of the women lighting up, their pocketbooks swinging. Engines started to turn over and Leslie, a woman I knew from the college, another townie, was walking fast to her car. I could see her breath. “Andre, they’re coming for you. Like fifteen of them. I like your face just the way it is, honey. Please, you gotta get outta here.”
There was yelling inside. A door slammed out front on the street. Jeb and I looked at each other, and then we were running down the back alley along the floodwall, over iced cobblestones past dumpsters and concrete loading docks and stacked oak pallets, then up under the railroad trestle past the traffic lights onto the sidewalk of Comeau Bridge. Jeb was ahead of me, his hair bouncing, his bare arms pumping. His other slipper was loose, the sole of his foot pale in the flickering fluorescent light of the streetlamps on the bridge. A car passed us, its tires humming on the iron grid, then another, and I was waiting for the screech of brakes, for a carload of men to come get us and throw us over.
Soon we were in the bright light of the gas station on the other side, a stoner I knew from somewhere just hanging up the gas pump. His Camaro door was open, and the backseat was covered with eight-tracks and empty Marlboro cartons, Aerosmith blasting from his speakers as he drove me and my brother home.
He offered us hits off a joint, but we said no thanks. He pulled up to our house on Columbia Park, his stereo too loud, and we thanked him and heard his tires squeal on the ice behind us. Jeb went ahead of me up the path in the snow to our steps, his foot probably half frozen now. Like always, nearly every light in our house seemed to be on, each window lit up and uncovered, and I walked into it behind my brother and shut the door. They’re coming for you. I believed that, and my first thought was to turn off the lights and darken the house. The living room was empty, Mom out maybe, or up in her room. Suzanne, too, up in hers, listening to music by herself. Nicole locked in hers, reading or doing homework on a Saturday night. There was the feeling I’d brought danger to them, but also, miraculously, that I would take care of it, that whatever was coming, I was going to take care of it.
Jeb had found a jacket and wrapped it around his foot, and I was walking straight back to the bathroom, smiling, shaking my head, only now aware that the knuckles of my right hand were stinging and had been for a while, that first punch connecting, a right cross that came up from my back foot and into Steve Lynch’s sneering mouth. I ran warm water over my hands and soaped up and I looked in the mirror at the boy who hadn’t backed down or run away or pleaded. I was smiling at him, and he was smiling back at me.
There were Bobby’s and Sam’s voices now, talking fast and excitedly. I turned off the water and rushed out to the living room where they stood telling Jeb their story, that after Lynch went down the bouncer started kicking everyone out, but Sam hadn’t done anything and held his ground and the bouncer wrestled with him and Sam got low and punched him in the groin and he went down and three or four others rushed in to help and Sam gripped the doorjambs and kept yelling, “You can’t push me out! You can’t push me!”
But they finally did, right onto the sidewalk on Washington Street, the door slamming behind him. Sam walked around the corner and down the sloped alleyway into the parking lot. Bobby was there squaring off with two of Lynch’s boys. His eyes caught Sam coming across the lot. “Sam?”
“Bobby?”
And Bobby punched the biggest one in the face, then yanked his jacket over his head and went to work on his body, the other backing off.
“And you.” Bobby turned to me. He was smiling wider and brighter than I’d ever seen him. Our living room looked small with him in it. “You fuckin’ nailed him.”
I nodded and smiled, then I was laughing and I couldn