Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [70]
“Hey, Jeb,” Sam said, “we found your slipper. It’s in the car.”
Jeb went outside for it. Bobby wanted to hear Sam’s story again about taking on the big bouncer, and Sam was telling it when Jeb’s voice came yelling from outside. “They’ve got sticks! You guys, they’ve got sticks!”
The three of us were pushing through the foyer and out the front door. A sedan had pulled up ahead of Sam’s Duster, the back door of his car open, its interior light shining on ice patches on the asphalt and the four men closing in on Jeb in the street. Each of them carried what looked like wooden clubs or broken chair legs, the three of us already there, four against four, Dana Lynch swinging his stick and yelling, “You’re dead, motherfucker!”
“I don’t think so.” The words came out of me, but my eyes were on the big one I’d already been in the snowbank with, the road slick under my feet, and Dana was slipping his way toward me. I could see his limp and remembered hearing months before about him getting his legs crushed between two cars at some party. Sam moved toward him, but the big one stepped in and pushed him back a step, and Bobby was calling to the others to make a move. Jeb stood in the middle holding his slipper, his foot still bare.
Sam, so used to ice under his feet, stepped around the big one and put one hand on Dana’s chest and began talking him down.
“Sam, I respect you, but my brother’s in the fuckin’ hospital, man! He swallowed his two front teeth.”
Dana swung his club at his side, and now my mother was yelling from the porch that she’d called the cops and in seconds a cruiser’s spotlight was on us. The cop’s window rolled down. “Break it up or every single one of you are going to jail! You hear me? Now screw!”
Then Lynch and his boys were gone and we were back in the house, laughing again, though not quite as hard, Jeb pulling that slipper onto his damp, pink foot.
THAT NIGHT I lay in the dark a long time and couldn’t sleep. Steve Lynch would have false teeth for the rest of his life and never be quite as handsome again, and it was because of me. I knew I should probably feel bad about this, but I didn’t. Not even a little. I kept seeing the pride and respect in Bobby’s and Sam’s eyes in the living room, the way they looked at me not only like I was one of them, but maybe even a special one of them, a guy with a gift; I only hit him once, and he was in the hospital?
I kept seeing his face as I punched it. I still couldn’t remember feeling the impact of the right cross, just the sight of him dropping like a switch had been turned off in his brain, the blood gushing from his mouth, the shock in his eyes and how white his cheeks and forehead looked, how I kept swinging and would have hit him every time if the bouncer hadn’t stopped me. How I wished he hadn’t. How I wished I’d hurt Lynch even more than I did.
BECAUSE STEVE Lynch was seventeen, the town closed the Tap’s doors and they stayed closed the rest of the winter. Word was out, too, that I would soon be in the hospital myself. Not just from the Lynches and their friends but their cousins, the Murphy brothers. I didn’t know about this family connection till I saw them cruising by my gas station in a dented olive Chrysler, Dennis looking out the passenger window at me, his older brother Frank driving, two or three more in the backseat. My mouth dried up and I could feel my heart beating in my palms. I reached for the club and held it in my lap till the car disappeared under the railroad bridge for Lafayette Square. I stood and pulled open the slider to get some air.
Twice a day, while doing errands for his father, Bobby would pull up to the pumps in his pickup truck to check on me. Sam, too. He was a student at Merrimack College down in North Andover and at least once a day between classes he’d swing by in his Duster. I’d tell them both I was fine, that they were wasting their time. This was partly true because Dunkin’ Donuts was right up the hill, and there always seemed to be at least one cruiser