Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [95]
She left quickly, her pocketbook over her shoulder, her long hair swaying against her back.
“What took so fuckin’ long, Marie?”
I watched her climb into the backseat. Paquette’s eyes were on me. “You got a problem?”
I smiled and waved like I was in a parade. I closed the door, Marie’s boyfriend firing all six cylinders. Then came the rubber-whine of his spinning tires as he laid a patch across the lot onto Main, Big Lee beside him, Marie in the back seat.
A few years later, Lee Paquette would be in a sub shop on Primrose sitting with a teenage girl when her father would walk in with a shotgun, point it behind the counter at the man who’d been fucking his wife, and pull the trigger, the man’s body flying backwards into the smoking peppers and mushrooms and onions on the stove, a fist-sized hole in his chest.
The father would then look over at his daughter and Paquette, raise the shotgun and tell Lee to get on his knees. He’d press the hot barrel to Lee’s forehead, and Lee would begin to cry and beg for his life. Then he’d shit his pants and maybe the man didn’t shoot because of that or because his daughter was crying there beside him, too, and she’d already seen her father do enough for one afternoon. Whatever his reasons were, he lowered the shotgun and walked out the door and people still talk about Lee and how down on Primrose that day he cried and shit his pants.
THE MORNING of my train trip, Mom and Bruce drove me to South Station in Boston where Bruce insisted I borrow a navy blue sports coat for my interviews with college officials. I was nearly twenty and had hardly ever worn one before. It was tight in the upper back, but I felt like somebody in it, and I hugged Bruce and my mother goodbye, watching them pull into Boston traffic, Mom leaning out the window to wave at me, wiping under her eye and waving again. There was the feeling I was doing something more important than I’d realized.
I climbed onto the train with my duffel bag of underwear and a second pair of jeans, a sweater and socks and clothes to work out in. That’s all this trip was for me anyway. I had no intention of talking to any college officials. All I needed to see were the gyms at each school or in each town where the school was. And I had enough money on me to buy one meal a day plus a high-protein snack of some kind, nuts and seeds, maybe a hard-boiled egg, but that first night, rolling fast over the rails through New York State for the Great Lakes and Chicago, I blew fifty bucks buying beer for me and a young woman who’d been sitting beside me reading a novel. We drank too much, and she ended up crying against my chest under a train blanket over us both. In the morning I slept as we pulled into the station and she left me a note with her address in Boston for “when you ever leave that Arab girl,” and I couldn’t remember talking about Marjan at all.
Nearly two weeks later, no one place had pulled me toward it, not the mountainous ravines of Montana nor the wet, rolling green of Washington State, not the neon shine of Reno or the flat gray plains of Greeley, Colorado. But the last stop was Austin, Texas, and when I got off the train it was late afternoon and the air smelled like creosote and barbecue smoke. Rising up out of weeds beside the tracks was a billboard of a young Mexican woman, her long black hair falling over her white blouse, and she held a platter of enchiladas and a pitcher of Lone Star Beer. She was smiling, a red flower tucked behind one ear, and that was enough. I was going to school here. Surely there’d be a decent gym in the capital of Texas.
I LEFT home in September, a few days before my twentieth birthday. I’d bought a one-way Greyhound ticket South, and the bus departed from Railroad Square, not far from the Tap and the Lido and Ray and Arlene’s,