Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [73]
I climbed out and got into Sam’s car. He looked at me. I looked back at him. Then he stepped on the gas and it was only a few feet till the Chevelle dipped off the road and slipped down a short embankment into the water. It sank immediately, bubbles rising up out of the town’s drinking water, only the radio antennae visible as we drove away.
Years later I would think about this, that this was the town’s drinking supply, but that morning as we sped away, my arms and legs felt light, my fingertips buzzing electric, and it was like sweeping out the corners and shaking out the rugs and mopping the floor till it shone.
NOT LONG after, a warm day in late spring. Grass was poking up green in our small front yard and in all the other yards and the median of Columbia Park. The maple and oak trees were nearly leafed out and the air smelled like damp earth, the wooden planks of porch steps, budding flowers I couldn’t name, then the exhaust of Kench’s brother’s motorcycle as he pulled up onto our sidewalk and blocked anyone’s path to or from our porch and front door. He switched off the engine. He was smaller than Kench but had the same high forehead and long thinning hair. Sam and I were inside the house getting ready to go somewhere, and Kench’s brother was standing now, pulling off his bike helmet and smiling at me as I walked down the porch steps, smiling like he was a friend here to show us his new bike, and I was yelling, swearing at him, a jolt running up my right leg, his motorcycle falling over onto the grass. I began stomping it, felt small metal pieces break under my boot, I kicked in the headlight, boot-heeled the kickstand till it was bent, squatted and grabbed the chassis and heaved and rolled it onto the front sidewalk, then kicked it again, yelling at Kench’s little brother the entire time to get the fuck away from my house. You hear me?! Fuck off!
I was sweating and breathing hard, the air quiet now. Sam stood beside me as we watched Kench’s brother struggle to lift his bike, his hair in his face as he fiddled with instruments I’d broken, as he bent back the kick-starter and got his motorcycle running and drove off slowly without even putting on his helmet.
“Jesus,” Sam said, “you were pissed, huh?”
“Fuck him, Sam. Fuck him.” I was looking out at the empty street. Bits of reflector glass shone on my sidewalk, and there was Kench’s brother’s face, the smile that had turned to surprise turned to hurt turned to fear. He’d never done anything to my sister, but that seemed to be beside the point; in the basement I was getting stronger and stronger. I could bench-press 100 pounds over my body weight. I could do ten wide-grip chin-ups with a 50-pound dumbbell hanging from my belt. I was throwing combinations at the heavy bag that rocked the joists of the house I began to feel I was defending for the first time.
7
IN THE SUMMER, Salisbury Beach was where you went if you had wheels, especially on Friday or Saturday night. It was a sandy strip of barrooms and open arcades, pool halls and dance clubs and carnival rides. There was a roller-coaster built entirely out of wood, bleached four-by-fours that one day would rot and they’d tear it down, but in the late seventies you could hear the rattle of the cars all night long, the cries of riders as they plummeted down one steep slope and got jerked up another. There was the bass thump of DJ music through the thin walls of the Frolics, the boxed roll and ping of steel balls in the pinball machine, the hard-cornered slap of plastic air hockey pucks, talk and yelling, little kids laughing or pleading, the creaking of gears beneath the huge lighted Ferris wheel. There were the revving motorcycle engines, their diesel-fed clacking of steel on steel. There