Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [88]
Later, walking across the Basilere Bridge, I checked the traffic for a cruiser, then stopped and pulled the hollow-points from my pocket and threw them out over the railing, watched them briefly catch the sunlight as they fell into the dirty, swirling water.
It was early evening when I got to the bottom of Columbia Park. Across Main, two girls from Seventh Ave sat on the steps beside Pleasant Spa drinking Cokes and smoking. I was thirsty and told myself to drink some water before I changed and went down to the basement to work out. And maybe that’s what I was thinking of as I walked up my street and saw stacked on our front lawn everything Pop owned. There was his weight bench and barbell and iron plates; there were cardboard boxes that held his books and albums, his Akubra hats and pipes and clothes and running shoes. There were two or three full garbage bags there too.
HE LIVED with us for two weeks. We didn’t have a spare bedroom, and our only couch was a wicker sofa too small to sleep on, so he slept up in my room. I gave him the bed and slept on the floor, which I found I liked anyway, that cool hard surface under my back. I couldn’t remember the last time I saw Pop so happy. Maybe when we were small and lived in Iowa City, when he was finally out of the Marines and going to graduate school full-time, when he was writing and taking classes and making love with his beautiful young wife, our mother, when he’d sit down on the couch with us four kids and tell us stories of Running Blue Ice Water.
Now he was forty and free again, Lorraine and her two quiet kids and her nine thousand pounds of furniture heading back South. He laughed a lot, sometimes a little too hard and a little too long, and he was in a constant mood to celebrate. Nearly every night he and I would drive down to the bars on Washington Street. It was strange going out with him this often, like having a new buddy, one I’d always known but never really knew.
I’d try to guide us to a corner table so my back would be to a wall or window and I could see who was coming in and who was leaving. I seemed to always be looking for trouble, for a husband to slap his wife, for a boyfriend to call his girlfriend a cunt or a whore, for a bigger one to lord over one smaller.
Since fracturing that bully’s forehead, there’d been more fights: once, when Marjan had been in the wedding party of a friend, the reception later at an Am Vets down in East Boston. Two men in a Chrysler kept tapping the rear bumper of the limousine that held Marjan and the other bridesmaids. I was driving my mother’s Toyota not far behind, and the driver of the sedan was unshaven and had dark curly hair and he leaned on the horn again and again, tapping the bumper with his. “It’s party time, bitches! Come out and fuckin’ play!” The limo driver was old and small. He was parked at the entrance to the hall where he was supposed to open the back door for the girls, but he kept glancing into his side view mirror and he wasn’t getting out from behind the wheel. Now the driver of the sedan was yelling more shit out his open window and he bumped the limo again, and I pulled my mother’s Toyota into an empty space and was running between parked cars, the sedan driver looking over at me just as I threw one into his face, then another and another. A small voice inside me said, This is wrong, he can’t fight you behind the wheel like that, you have to step away, but I kept swinging at him inside his window and only stepped back when he jerked open his door and stood, staggering a second, this very big man, at least a foot taller than I was, seventy, eighty pounds heavier, and now his friend was hurrying around the trunk behind him and I couldn’t let my adrenaline back up on me and turn my legs to water because once you started you couldn’t stop or they’d get you so I reached up and grabbed the