Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [91]
He nodded, his eyes on mine, his eyes somehow on himself.
“So, Pop, you can’t let it back up on you. You have to move as soon as it comes. No foreplay. No shoving each other. As soon as you know you’re in a fight, you punch him hard in the face and you keep punching.”
I raised my glass and sipped my beer. A woman down the bar exhaled smoke and looked over at me and my father. I felt like a liar, like I was pretending to know more than I did. And the membrane. I wanted to tell him about that membrane around someone’s eyes and nose and mouth, how you have to smash through it which means you have to smash through your own first, your own compassion for another, your own humanity.
“But where’d you learn to throw a punch?”
“Connolly’s Gym.”
Pop nodded again, his eyes scanning the crowd. “I’ve never been in a fight.”
I nodded. He’d told me this before, but I said, “Not even in the Marines?”
“No, I was an officer.”
“Well, just hit him first and hit him hard, Pop. And don’t let the rush back up on you.”
TWO OR three nights later, a woman sat alone at the bar. She was blonde and attractive, twenty years older than I was and still in her thirties. Her hair was cut straight at her shoulders and she wore a white sleeveless dress and was smoking a cigarette, a glass of white wine in front of her. She looked close to crying or walking out, and Pop and I had just come in. While we waited for our beers, he went up to her and leaned on the bar.
My father loved women. I knew that. Especially if they had pretty faces like this one. From the corner of the bar, my back to the wall, I could see him charming her, getting her to talk. Our beers came and I sipped mine and thought about bringing him his but didn’t want to interrupt him. I knew he was just flirting with her anyway. He and his new girlfriend were planning to move in together, and just that day Pop had found an apartment for them across from the campus.
It was a quiet night, the place only half full, most of the crowd in the restaurant side. Every few minutes the front door would open and someone would come in, but since going to Lynch’s home turf and seeing him on the stool next to his cane, I wasn’t worried about him or his brother or cousins anymore. That fight was done. It was time to move on, a feeling I’d been getting more and more lately, this pull to get out of this town and go far, far away. I was eighteen, and what was there to do here but go to bars like this where I stood or sat with my back to the wall, scanning the room for trouble, scanning the room for another chance to prove myself to myself. There was the Iranian girl I loved, but I could only see her at her family’s apartment, and she seemed just mildly interested in me anyway. There were more Iranian students on campus now, some of them rich and handsome. They drove sports cars and wore gold bracelets and French cologne, tennis clothes in warm weather, and I could see how comfortable she was with them all in the smoke room or walking across campus or laughing together in the student union, speaking in their mother tongue.
Pop came around the corner of the bar, his cheeks flushed. “Her fucking husband left her there.”
“Left who?”
“Her.” He pointed to the woman in the white dress. “She’s been there for an hour and he’s sitting in the restaurant with his fucking friends. An hour, son.”
“You gonna talk to him?”
“You’re damn right I am.”
I watched him only a second or two before I got up and followed. The woman’s husband sat at a large round table in the middle of the floor. Five or six men and two women sat with him. They looked up at my father, who stood a foot away pointing at the woman’s husband and already yelling in his Marine voice words that got lost in all the bar noise. But they weren’t lost on the husband, his eyes on Pop, his dark hair combed back from his face, his shoulders broad and rounded