Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [90]
I waited till I couldn’t any longer and I used one of the urinals, my eye on the door. I rinsed my hands and splashed my face, then stepped back into the aquamarine darkness of where I was sure I’d be fighting more than one.
The bar was more crowded than just a few minutes earlier. More women now, most of them in ladies’ leather jackets, their hair clean and feathered away from their faces like disco dancers. The air was smokier, and I walked through it past Dana Lynch and his friends. At the front door I glanced back at him. The men standing around him were not his normal crew, and he was sitting on a stool, looking at me, a still expression on his face. At his knee was a long wooden cane.
As I climbed back into Fred’s car, I felt vaguely sorry for Dana Lynch. It was clear he was in no shape to fight anyone, and that he was afraid to fight me. Somebody was afraid of me.
It’s what I’d wanted, wasn’t it?
NOW POP and I were at the Tap on Washington Street raising shot glasses of Sauza tequila, toasting his new divorce and his new joy. This place had only been open a few months since Steve Lynch, and I never told my father why it had closed. I was listening to him now as he described his new woman to me, Suzanne’s age exactly, an intern named Peggy he’d met at his publisher’s office, the dinner they had afterward, how she was a writer and a runner.
Pop was smiling at me over his beer glass. In the smoky dim of the bar, his beard thicker and darker than it was, there was a light in his eyes that looked like pride.
“Ted told me about the Merrimack boys.”
I nodded, sipped my beer, tried to hide how happy I felt about where this conversation was going. Only a week before, that fight with the boys from Merrimack College, ten or twelve of them being escorted off campus by just one security guard, Ted, a young married guy I liked because he did a good imitation of John Wayne and always had a joke. He was walking behind the last of them, and he was only armed with a flashlight.
I had just pulled up to them in Marjan’s mother’s car, sent there by Marjan to pick up her younger sister from a study group at the school. A couple of the men were yelling at Ted, swearing. One, bowlegged as a wrestler, yelled, “This school’s full of bitches and faggots!” I pushed the gear into park, Marjan’s sister saying, “No, Andre, don’t, don’t.”
My headlights lit up the road, and I stepped into its light, Ted’s voice in the air, telling me to get back in my “vehicle,” then Gene, a slim, muscular swimmer from Indiana was standing beside me, and we were stepping into the darkness of the grass.
Pop said: “You took on eleven guys?”
“Gene Brock was there too.”
“How do you fight eleven guys?”
“I only fought three. Gene fought the biggest one. The rest took off.”
The first one ran at me and I let him bury his head in my waist and I ran backwards and dropped and let his own momentum hurl him over me onto his back and I started punching him in the face, then ran after another and got in two shots, then ran after a third and caught him in the side of the head.
Pop was squeezing my upper arm. “How’d you learn that?”
I shrugged, began to sip my beer, but I was tiring of my cowboy act and wanted to tell him everything, was aching to tell him. I looked at my father. “I figured some things out.”
“Like what?” Pop raised two fingers to the bartender. It was a weeknight so there was no band, but the place was loud with human voices, my eyes burning from the cigarette smoke.
“I used to think butterflies in my stomach meant I was