Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [74]
It was a Sunday night, and Jeb and I were there with Sam and his girlfriend, April C. The strip was crowded with sunburned families in shorts and T-shirts, their flip-flops slapping their feet. There were tanned, bare-chested boys. Their shirts hung from their shorts pockets as they lounged around a bench or stood in a circle watching girls go by in halter tops and hip-huggers or bikini bottoms that barely covered their asses. Fifteen or twenty bikers leaned against their Harleys or Indians or Nortons, smoking cigarettes, their faces lined and whiskered and windburned. Most of them had long hair held back with a bandanna, and they wore black T-shirts with a neon wolf engraved across the chest, or Old Glory, or a bald eagle flying into a sunset, or no T-shirt at all, just a leather vest, some of the men muscular and tattooed, others scrawny as bar rats. Fifty yards away, a Salisbury police cruiser was parked up against the sidewalk in front of the shops selling beach towels and bathing suits and shot glasses with the wooden roller-coaster painted around it, but the cruiser was always empty, the cops walking around three or four at a time, their blue uniform shirts unbuttoned, rings of sweat under their arms.
Beyond the bikers was a gap in the pool halls and dance clubs you had to pay to get into. All these clapboard buildings along the water were built on piers, their bases covered with white barnacles, and through the gap I could see the black ocean, the dim white tops of waves curling into the sand. The Frolics was to the left. Even above all the noise I could hear the band from inside, the muffled but amplified cry of the lead singing “American Woman.”
The beach sand here was cool and coarse and littered with empty cigarette packs and ketchup-streaked cardboard containers and dried seaweed. Still, I wanted to see the ocean at night, and I stepped past the bikers onto the sand. I didn’t know where Sam and April had gone, but Jeb was wandering somewhere behind me and up ahead were two girls and a guy. He wore a tight white T-shirt, his arms lean and marked with home-made tattoos. He had a crew cut, which no one but soldiers had then, and the girls with him wore tube tops and too much makeup. They looked young, fourteen or fifteen. He was talking fast, inhaling deeply on a cigarette, pointing his finger at one, then the other, “So fuck you and fuck you ’cause I’m not takin’ any more a your fuckin’ shit, all right?”
I should’ve kept walking. I should’ve minded my own business, but I didn’t like how he was talking to them, and there was the headlong pull I’d been feeling since Steve Lynch that every moment like this was a test and the more tests I passed the further I permanently moved myself from the boy I’d been. “Hey, watch your mouth.”
“Yeah? Let’s take a fuckin’ walk.” He flicked his cigarette and scanned the strip for cops and now his hand was squeezing the back of my neck and I let him keep it there, let him think I’d be easy for him as we both walked over the sand into the shadows under the Frolics where I twisted away and threw one at his face, but he ducked and my fist skimmed the top of his skull and he got low and drove me down, the sand slamming my shoulder blades, then he was on me, swinging at my head and face, and I arched my back and started punching him in the shoulder, the ear, my wrist suddenly squeezed by iron, a bright light in my face, this kid pulled off me by more bright light, my wrist being slowly vised by the steel claw the first cop had put on me, a device that closes around bone as tightly as it’s pulled, and the big gray-headed cop was yanking me out from under the Frolics, my