Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [78]
Later that week after my shift at the gas station, I walked over to his house and guided him through a full-body workout. He’d just finished his run and was sweating in a tank top and shorts, his bandanna damp around his head, his beard damp too. I showed him the correct form in all the movements, when to inhale and when to exhale. He lay on the bench and I put on a weight I now considered light; I was surprised to see him struggle with it; I hadn’t expected that, I hadn’t expected to be physically stronger than my own father.
I pulled one of his writing notebooks from his desk, ripped out a piece of paper, and recorded his workout program. He thanked me. He smiled widely and gave me a sweaty hug. “Hey, man, when you coming back to school?”
I shrugged. I was surprised to hear him ask the question. He hadn’t said much at all about my having dropped out. A few weeks earlier at Ronnie D’s bar, Pop turned to me and said, “I don’t worry about what you’re doing right now because you’ve already got discipline.” He took in my chest and shoulders and sipped his beer.
Now I stepped away from my father and handed him his workout program. “Start light, Pop, and work your way up slowly, all right?”
ON A Friday in late August, Mike W. pulled up to the pumps in a small Japanese car. He was one of those who used to hang around our house weekday afternoons, smoking dope in our living room or kitchen. This was something people had stopped doing, not because I’d kicked them out, but because Suzanne no longer sold anything and spent most of her time across the river as a student at Bradford.
Mike W. had shoulder-length hair but was always clean-shaven and looked healthy, and he’d never been disrespectful to my sister or the rest of us. I didn’t know him well, but I liked him. He stepped out of his car as I filled his tank.
He nodded at me. “Working out?”
“Yep.”
“I was down in Riverside the other night. The Lynches are still talking about getting you, you know.”
I glanced over at him.
“Dana’s got some legal shit hanging over his head, but he says he’s coming for you soon.”
“Let him come.” I was talking tough, but my heart was beating faster.
“I told him I heard you’re a pretty good boxer, but he still thinks you sucker-punched Steve.”
“Let him think that then.” I topped off his tank and hung up the gas nozzle and clicked it down into place.
Mike paid me, told me he was moving down to New Jersey for college, was studying history but planned to go to Law School. I wished him luck and waved as he drove off. I watched his small car accelerate under the railroad trestle for Lafayette Square. When he drove out from under the shadows, the sun glinted off his back bumper, and I stood there in the smell of fresh gasoline feeling left behind.
8
IN THE FALL I went back to school. Back to Bradford College where my father lived and worked and where I’d fallen in love with a girl from Iran. Her name was Marjan, and as far as I knew, she did not even know I existed. She had long black hair and dark eyes and a kind smile. She wore clean, pressed clothes and had a languid, graceful walk, and I spent months trying to put myself near her just to watch her laugh or brush her hair back from her face or hear her talk, her accent sweet and exotic and from a country I’d never heard of. She smoked cigarettes and even though I did not, I would go into the smoke room if she was there and I’d listen to her chat with the others, listen to that accent, watch her puff elegantly on a Marlboro Light.
She lived in Tupelo East, one of the dorms deep in the campus away from the street and not far from where my father lived with his second family. On weekend nights, instead of cruising around with Sam and Bobby, going to bars or some house party where I kept