Brewster

T
HE FIRST TIME
I saw him fight was right in front of the school, winter. It was before I knew him. I noticed him walking across the parking lot—that long coat, his hair tossing around in the wind—with some guy I’d never seen before following twenty feet behind and two others fanned back like wings on a jet. It was the way the three of them were walking—tight, fast, closing quickly. That and the fact that instead of speeding up he seemed to be deliberately slowing down, one hand in his pocket, the other still bringing the cigarette to his mouth. His head at that “too late” angle I didn’t know yet. And then he turned around as if to tie his shoe, the hair blowing over his face, tossed the butt and tackled the guy with such fury—low, head down—that the two of them were actually airborne before they crashed into the icy slush. And then one of the others was being pulled off his back and he’d shaken free and was walking away, ignoring the yelling, the threats, the small crowd gathered around the figure still lying on the ground. I watched him cut between the cars, walking easy, running a lazy finger along a fin, tapping a sideview mirror. At the edge of the parking lot he stopped, though there wasn’t any traffic. Like nothing had happened, like there was nothing behind him. And I saw his shoulders hunch and his head bend forward and realized he was lighting up.

B
REWSTER.
It’s where I knew them all, Ray and Frank and Karen Dorsey and the rest. I can talk about it now. I can see the big brown hills, the reservoirs, the tracks. For some reason it’s always winter. When I try I can remember summer evenings with kids running through the tunnels of smoke from the barbeques and the parents yelling “If I catch you doin’ that one more time” like it’s a joke, but what I really see is winter: weeks-old crusts of ice covering the sidewalks and the yards, a gray, windy sky, smoke torn sideways from the brick chimneys. The houses were small and smelled like upholstered furniture and fingernail polish, and if there were old people in the house, upholstered furniture and garlic, and if there were babies, upholstered furniture and garlic and shit.

I think I always hated the place. It’s one of the things Ray and I had in common—one of the biggest, maybe—and we played it over and over like a favorite record. Hate is a big deal when you’re sixteen. Of course it wasn’t really about Brewster. Brewster just made it easy to pretend it was.

I didn’t know that then. I thought it was the place. On bad afternoons when the track was iced over or the sleet was sweeping down in sheets, Falvo would have us run intervals in the upstairs hallway of the high school, twenty-three of us in three groups of six and one of five pounding down the linoleum in waves, slowing into the curve by the science classrooms, stretching it out, then slowing again by the guidance office, then finishing up, three sets of ten with a slow jog back for recovery, and flying past the darkened classrooms I’d see the gray squares flashing by—rain, rain, rain—like empty slides in a projector, and think: Everything out there is Brewster, and turn up the pain as if I could run it all down, all of it—the town, the ice, the December dark. As if there was something to beat.

For three years I carried around a picture I’d cut out of the paper of Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the medal stand in Mexico City after the Olympic 200-meter final, heads bent, shoeless, gloved hands raised in protest. I used to take it out and look at it. I knew they were fucked. It didn’t matter. If anything, it made it better. They’d done it, they said, for all the people nobody said a prayer for.

“Yeah?” Ray said when I showed him the picture. “So what? Somebody’s gonna say a prayer now?”

I shrugged.

“Somebody’s gonna give a shit because a couple of soul brothers took off their shoes in fuckin’ Mexico?”

I put the picture away.

“Lemme see it again,” he said, and I took it out and he looked at it for a while, then handed it back to me and I put it away. I knew what he meant. We could change the world, rearrange the world, but that’s not how it felt, ever. Not in Brewster. How it felt was like somebody twice as strong as you had their hand around your throat. You could choke or fight.

W
E DIDN’T HAVE A CAR.
We walked. We walked like convicts testing an invisible fence. How far did we get those three years? If you could untie that knot, straighten it out, all the times we walked to school with the rain coming down the streets in ridges like a shell or out to Dykeman’s in the dark, slipping around on the ice pond where they actually used to get ice, grabbing on to the trunks of trees—how far would we have made it? St. Louis? Denver? Ray would just show up at my door, sometimes after school, sometimes at dusk, wearing that coat and I’d say “It’s rainin’,” and he’d say “I know it’s fuckin’ rainin’,” and I’d throw on a sweater and a sweatshirt and a jacket and close the door behind me.

It was the winter after the summer of love, and it went on for a long time. It’s hard to describe. Things were changing, but we couldn’t feel it. The children of God came through in their sandals and ponchos—we’d see them hitching backward up Route 22 with the wind whipping their hair into their faces, adjusting their packs or their guitars—but they kept going. Woodstock may have been just across the river, but Brewster was a different world. It wasn’t interested in getting back to the garden. It had to resurface the driveway, it had to mow the fuckin’ lawn, it had to right one of the angels in front of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception Church whose 20-pound test had snapped, leaving it dangling from its heel, one arm out, one knee forward as if sprinting madly for the earth. No, we felt like a cog in something turning all right—the dead, unmoving cog at the center of things, the pivot point, the pin in the tie-dye pinwheel. Watching the colors blur just made it worse.

We’d talk, or drink beer if we had some. Sometimes we’d just throw stuff into the East Branch, which always seemed to be running high with snow melt, or go up into the woods around the reservoir. The ice shelves along the river were thin as china. By the last year, things weren’t good, but that didn’t keep us from walking—the wind marbling the empty frozen streets, the red-brick buildings shuttered on Main. It was all we had. He’d still knock on the door, then look away almost like he was embarrassed, and sometimes my mother would walk by and he’d say “Hiya doin’, Mrs. Mosher?” and she’d say “Hello, Raymond, how is your family? and he’d say, “OK if me and Jon go out?” and her mouth would tighten and she’d say “He can do what he wants,” and go up the stairs.

He met Karen, or first saw her, anyway, the fall of our sophomore year, but I can’t tell you when it was we were walking down Doanesburg Road the night Rizzolo and his partner pulled up behind us—it was later, that’s all I know. Maybe a year. More.

We were walking to Putnam Lake. He couldn’t knock on her door, Ray said; he just wanted to look at her house. I had nowhere else to go. It was dark, freezing, and we’d just passed over the little bridge down from Green Chimneys where they brought city kids to straighten them out when we heard the bleep of the siren. I’d never had a problem with the cops. With our hands in our pockets, hunched in our coats, I guess we must have looked like something. We weren’t.

“Police,” said a voice over the loudspeaker, like there was any doubt about it, and then the cruiser pulled up next to us and a flashlight beam hit us in the face.

“Where you think
you’re
goin’?” said the cop behind the flashlight. “Nothin’—Cappicciano’s kid,” he said into the car. He turned back to Ray and whistled softly. “Will you look at you. What’s a matter with you, you been leadin’ with your face again? Joe, take a look at this.” He played the flashlight under Ray’s hood. “Jesus, you look like one of them dogs with the black eyes.”

“Buster Brown,” said the other cop.

“What?”

“The dog that sells the shoes.”

The cop with the light turned to look at him. “You have to believe me when I tell you I don’t know what the fuck you’re talkin’ about.” He turned back to Ray. “So you ever think, like, to duck might be a good idea?”

“Yeah, OK,” Ray said.

“Yeah, OK. So where’d you get the shiner?”

“Danbury.”

“Danbury. What is there, like a store?”

“Yeah.”

“Let me tell you somethin’, smartass—you’re gonna get yourself killed. You got a thick head for a punk, but these little spics can fight, an’ one of these days one of ’em ’s gonna cut himself a window in your chest the size of Puerto Rico.” He turned the light on me. “Who the hell’s this?”

I told him.

“What’re you doin’ with this moron?”

The driver said something I couldn’t make out.

“Yeah? Track star, huh? You gonna try out for football?”

“No.”

“Why not, you can run, right?”

“I don’t know.”

“He doesn’t know,” said the driver.

“Another genius.”

He switched back to Ray. “Your father know about Danbury? How’s your father?”

Ray didn’t say anything.

“Well, you tell him I said hello.
We
said hello. It’s a goddamn crime what they did to him. OK.” He tapped twice on the hood. “Stay outta trouble, track star.” And the car pulled away.

L
ATE AT NIGHT
a place can look older. Walking down the hill into Putnam Lake with everything frozen and just the three streetlights, the flag hanging quiet in front of the firehouse, the war memorial on its pedestal where the road split, it felt like we’d walked back in time. Like it was the 1940s or something. Maybe that’s why I remember that night. Or maybe it’s because six miles each way was crazy even for us. Ray didn’t talk much after the cops left. I didn’t mind—I didn’t need to talk all the time.

By the time we found the house a short way up from the lake, it was just after midnight. It was a big, light-colored house with a wide porch with quiet blue Christmas lights around it like a frame. The windows were dark. We just stood across the street and looked at it.

“I always liked that house,” Ray said.

“Yeah,” I said. I did a little dance to keep my feet from going numb.

“She’s probably asleep.”

“Probably,” I said.

He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out half a Snickers bar and unwrapped the end.

“Sure?”

“Go ahead, track star.”

“Fuck you, I’m gonna try out for football.”

He was still looking at the house, hugging himself in his coat. I could see his lip, like he’d stuffed a big grape under it, lifting his mouth into a comic book sneer. “Weird how things can change,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. I wiped my nose but it didn’t do much.

“I don’t know why she’s with me, you know?”

“Me, either,” I said.

“I guess we should go. Fuck, it’s cold.”

“I think we should stay here. Stare at the house some more.”

And we started the long walk back, along Putnam Lake like a flat white field in the dark, past the war memorial and the firehouse, then Lost Lake, curved and still behind the trees, and it was almost two when I let myself in the back door. I’d go in late to school—nobody would care.