Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [99]
And it was like the man next to me in that wedding reception in East Boston, a calm voice telling me this is not the way.
FOR THE most part I was able to control myself. Every night after dinner, Kourosh and I would load our backpacks with books and notebooks and walk to the main library on campus where we’d study from seven till just after midnight. I was reading a lot of labor history now, which kept me in a dark mood, especially stories like the Ludlow Massacre in Colorado when the governor sent in the National Guard to break up a strike and they shot and burned to death twenty men, women, and children. Karl Marx said that human history is the history of class conflict, and how, I thought, could he have been anything but right. And I was tired of walking around carrying this new knowledge that only the writers of little-read books seemed to have, that only my professors had.
It was early spring in Austin and all day it had rained. You could smell the ozone, the magnolias and eucalyptus and pine. Across the alley at suppertime, the sorority’s kitchen door had been open and they’d been served brisket and beans, but now it was after midnight, a Tuesday or Wednesday, and my window was open, and I lay on my mattress in the dark listening to drops of rain ticking from leaf to leaf. The house was quiet. Down the hall behind a closed door came the tapping of keys from a manual typewriter. I’d always loved that sound, was drawn to it for reasons I couldn’t explain. A block or two north a college boy let out a rebel yell, some lone drunk wandering home from an outdoor bar. But then there were more voices, two or three talking loud and laughing, another one hollering, and didn’t they know the whole neighborhood was asleep? Did they even think about that?
I closed my eyes and tried to ignore them. The voices got louder. I could hear boot steps on Pearl. A male voice was talking about a woman, how everybody knew she was a whore. “How come you don’t know that, J.B? She’s a fuckin’ whore.” And J.B. let out a boozy yell right there under my window. I sat up and looked down at three of them standing in the alley, the light from the sorority’s stoop shining across the wet asphalt. They were tall, the way so many Texans seemed to be, and they wore pointed Tony Lamas and expensive cotton shirts, one of them swaying slightly as he lit a cigarette, the other two talking in loud, half-drunk voices about Dolly, the same woman they were calling a whore. The window screen was pressing against my nose. A whisper inside me said, Ignore them. They’ll wander off. Go to sleep.
But then one of them started laughing and he let out that rebel yell again, and I said, “You want to keep it down out there, please? People are sleeping.”
“Yeah? You want your ass kicked?”
I pulled on my jeans and T-shirt and was soon walking barefoot over the kitchen’s linoleum floor, then damp ground, then the cool wet asphalt of the alley.
LATER, BACK in my bed in the dark, the boy in me kept replaying how I’d walked up to three tall men and waited for one of them to get it started, and when the tallest one asked me if I’d come out there for an ass-kicking, I dropped him with a right cross to the face, then pivoted and dropped the one next to him, then I went after the third but he was the drunkest one and he tripped and fell, then the second one was on me and we both knelt in a puddle swinging at each other till I got in more than he did and he fell back and crawled into the shadows of the dumpster.
I stood and yelled at them to get the fuck out of my alley. But the first one I’d hit wasn’t moving. He lay on his back with his arms spread wide, his mouth open and bleeding, and I watched as his two friends mumbled revenge and picked him up and carried him farther down the alley to their car. They lay him in the backseat. The engine revved once, then the driver, the second one I’d punched, backed up and drove slowly away from our house.
For a while I couldn’t stop replaying how well those first two punches had gone, the first a knockout, the second a knockdown.