Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [84]
“Why don’t you hit me then? Hit me.”
He rushed at me and there was a thrust in my shoulder and he fell backwards to the asphalt and lay there and didn’t move.
The tall one straightened up and sniffled. He looked from me to his friend, then back at me. Someone else had been standing near the hood of the Monte Carlo, and now he ran around the car and squatted on the ground near Ryan. “Shit.”
Ryan mumbled something. He rolled onto his shoulder, and I turned and walked through the parking lot and out the iron gates into the street for the long walk home.
TWO DAYS later I was sitting on the granite steps of Academy Hall between classes. It was a cool, gray morning, and I had a biology exam and was trying to remember what a lysosome was when Eric, one of the skinny rockers from Connecticut, sat down next to me. He had long blond hair. His cheeks always looked wind-chapped. He lit up a cigarette.
“That guy you hit had to go to the hospital.”
I looked over at him. I hadn’t told anyone about hitting anyone, but I’d done it in the parking lot beneath the dorm windows of Academy Hall.
“You fractured his forehead.”
“How do you know that?”
“’Cause I was there. His buddy’s my friend from back home.”
I shrugged, though my heart was going a bit faster and I couldn’t deny the warmth of pride opening up in my chest.
Eric blew smoke out both his nostrils. He nodded his head as if I’d just said something. “Yep, concussion.”
“And what about his scrawny friend he was beating on? How’s his nose?” I stood and gripped my biology book. Eric nodded again and took a deep drag off his cigarette, and I walked down the steps for Haseltine Hall and my biology exam. I reminded myself how big that Ryan was, that watching him punch his skinny friend was like watching a grown man hit a woman or a child.
Not far from the door to the hall, a group of girls was sitting in a circle smoking and chatting. One of them, thin and fair-skinned from Michigan, held a dead leaf to the flame of her lighter, the leaf curling away from the heat and becoming a wisp of smoke. She looked at me as I passed. I pulled open the heavy oak door of the hall and stepped inside; it was as if I’d just been warned.
9
POP WAS SICK with the flu. It was spring now, and he called me and asked if I wanted his two tickets to the game.
“What game?”
“The Red Sox.”
“Baseball?”
“Yes, baseball.”
“I guess so.”
“They’re playing the Yankees at Fenway.”
“Where’s that?”
“Boston. Take Dolan. Tell him it’s the Yankees.”
I’d heard of them but didn’t know they were from New York or that we were supposed to hate them. My father liked Sam Dolan, admired him for his muscles and good manners, and I’d heard them talk sports before, using words and terms and names I’d never heard. It was like sitting with Marjan’s family when they spoke Persian. Sometimes I listened hard for anything I might recognize, though I didn’t do that the few times Sam and my father talked about sports; I knew there was nothing in it I would know much about, these games with balls in them that men threw at each other or bounced or hit with a bat. I understood training for a goal, and I knew these were athletes who worked hard at what they did. But why? Why were grown men playing games?
Since I was very young, I’d seen little of them and knew less. Pop had never talked to us about them; maybe if he’d stayed with us he would have. Maybe he would have had more time to, the way he did that afternoon he and I had thrown a ball to each other bare-handed on the sidewalk, the charcoals growing hotter in the hibachi on the half-wall beside us. And if he’d stayed, there may have been more money and less moving from one scrappy neighborhood to another where no one seemed to have much to do with these games either. On the TV we four kids had lived in front