Townie (28 page)

It was a cold bright day, and I headed east past Kenoza Lake where I’d run with my father, then under the highway, the same back road Mom used to drive us on in that Head Start van, those Mystery Rides when joy was something she willed herself to show us, something she raised from deep inside herself as a promise for what could be. Now her life seemed to have opened up into it as if it had been waiting for her.

What waited for me? I knew she was right to chastise me for what I’d said, but I did not yet know why she was right: How could art truly help people? Did it feed them? Clothe them? Keep them warm in the winter? Did it put a gun in their hands to fend off their oppressors?

Up ahead was a roadhouse. It wasn’t even noon yet, but in the gravel lot were parked five or six motorcycles, a neon Miller sign glowing in the sun-streaked window. I downshifted, pulled into the lot, then turned around and headed back to Haverhill and the long workout with Sam that always cleared my head, that always made me feel ready for whatever was coming next.

TREVOR D.
promoted me from laborer to carpenter’s helper and he bumped my pay to five dollars an hour. Instead of hauling debris and fresh lumber and tools all day with Randy, I got to wear a tape measure on my belt and stick a pencil behind my ear. I was made the cut man for all the partition walls they were building.

It was a cold dry week, the sun heavy and bright in a deep sky, and first thing every morning I set up my cut station in the parking lot down below. I took three eight-foot two-by-fours, set them across two saw-horses, then laid a full sheet of plywood over them and carried over the chop saw and unrolled a cord and plugged it in.

“Hey,
Ratchet.
” Doug called down from the second-story window. He stood in the naked wood frame, a big grin on his face. He always wore a dark wool sailor’s cap down around his ears, and in the early morning sun I could see the sawdust in it. “Here’s your list.” He tossed a foot-long section of two-by-six out into the air and Randy ran and caught it over his shoulder, but Doug was already inside, and I said, “Nice catch, Randy.”

“Nice list, Ratchet.”

They’d been calling me that ever since Doug and I went up to the new flat roof and started lagging the perimeter joists to four-by-four posts in the corners. We each had a ratchet wrench, something I’d never used before. Doug was on the east side of the frame, I was on the west, and I could hear him cranking the galvanized lag bolts into wood, the
clickety-clickety-click
his ratchet made, but I couldn’t figure out how he could work his hand so fast; once I pushed the lag bolt into its predrilled hole and set the ratchet head on its end, I could crank it only half a turn before the ratchet handle hit the perimeter joist, then I’d have to pull the ratchet head free and set it on the bolt for another half crank again and again.

Doug was on his third bolt while I was still on my first. He looked over at me. He stood and walked across the roof. “The fuck you doin’? That’s a
ratchet
wrench.” He squatted and cranked the ratchet back and forth, the lag bolt sinking all the way into the wood without his once having to pull it away and reset it on the head of the lag. “See, numb-nuts. It fuckin’
ratchets
.” He straightened up and laughed. “That’s it, man. When we come to one of your fights, I’m calling you ‘the Ratchet Kid.’” He laughed again and shook his head. “See what college did to you? Unfuckin’ believable, the Ratchet Kid.”

Jeb had told them I was boxing. The five of us were standing around the vending truck, sipping hot coffee, warming our hands on the Styrofoam cups. Jeb nodded in my direction and said, “Andre’s a boxer.” I could see the pride in my younger brother’s eyes, and it surprised me; what seemed to move and impress him most were artistic pursuits—a perfectly executed painting, a flawlessly played fugue, anything that came from the rosewood guitar of Andrés Segovia.

“Yeah,” Trevor said, “but can you build a
box
?”

The conversation turned to furniture-building, fine-finish work, but when coffee break was over, Doug tossed his cup into the dumpster and said, “We should all get shit-faced and go watch Andre fight.”

We went back to the job, but it was like hearing they wanted to come watch me read political theory at night, this private thing I was doing to weigh who I was and where I should be going. And my first official fight wouldn’t come until late winter anyway, the Golden Gloves down in Lowell, another milltown on the Merrimack River, the one Jack Kerouac had made famous. I’d been doing well enough in the ring that Tony Pavone handed me an application form, and a few days later I got my AAU number in the mail. At the Gloves you had to have it pinned to your shirt or trunks for each bout, and each one was single-elimination, a term I’d never heard before. Pavone was standing in the fluorescent light of his office doorway when he said it. Behind me the gym was crowded with fighters working out, the place smelling like sweat and mildew.

“What’s that mean, Tony?”

“You know, like in playoffs. It means you can’t lose. You do, and you’re out.”

Playoffs
. Another word I barely knew. But I learned a Golden Gloves champion sometimes fought as many as ten fights in two days. And he had to win them all.

In the ring, even after an hour of shadowboxing and working on the heavy bags and now the speed bag I’d finally learned how to control, I kept coming out ahead. Not in a big way; I never knocked anyone down or out, and I was often too afraid of dropping my guard to plant my feet and throw combinations, so I jabbed and jabbed and jabbed. I never stopped jabbing. These years of consistent workouts hadn’t put much muscle on me, but I had stamina. It’s what seemed to come more naturally to me than power, and I felt as if I could throw jabs for hours, my opponent’s eyes tearing up as I popped him in the forehead, the upper cheek, his nose and mouth.

Every few jabs I’d let go with a straight right or a cross, and I’d feel the itch to weave and step in close with an uppercut I could follow with a left hook to the ribs or ear, but I was worried about the rain of counterpunches from these fighters, some black, some white or Latino. Most of them were only eighteen or nineteen but had over a hundred fights behind them already. One black kid, an eighteen-year-old welterweight I’d sparred for three rounds, told me he’d been training with Tony Pavone since he was six.

Tony had big plans for him, said openly, “This kid’s gonna be the welterweight champ at the Gloves. You watch.”

Tony would sometimes match up fighters from different weight classes. Bigger boxers could learn speed from the smaller ones. Small boxers learned how to evade. The night Tony put me in the ring with the welterweight, I felt sure it was to warm the kid up for a better, more experienced fighter after he was done with me.

The welterweight had a lean, muscled torso, his skin a burnished brown, and when Tony called “Time!,” the kid and I tapped gloves in the center of the ring, and I chomped down on my mouthpiece and wished for headgear.

But I never let him get close to me. I jabbed him in the face for most of the three rounds. A few times he weaved away and got off a hook or a right, but his feet weren’t set and his range was off so the punches only glanced my gloves. After three rounds, the kid ducked fast through the ropes and looked frustrated and I felt mildly proud of myself. Tony talked to him awhile in the light of his office. Two heavyweights stepped into the ring, and I ducked between the ropes and unlaced my gloves and started doing incline sit-ups, my feet hooked beneath an iron bar. After a while, Tony came over. “You’re good with that jab but you gotta throw more combinations. You don’t want to win on points, you want to
fight.
”

I nodded and thanked him. I knew he was right. I
was
too careful in the ring, and I wasn’t sure why, but his last word hung between my ears—
fight
. Is that what I was supposed to be doing? Because a boxing match just did not feel like a real fight to me; something was missing from it, the way maybe love is missing from an act that then becomes fucking. Something was missing, but I wouldn’t know what it was till later that winter close to dawn in a diner in Monument Square.

WE WERE
all in a celebratory mood. Sam and Theresa were now officially engaged. They asked me to be best man, and the wedding was set for late August, just a few days before I’d be driving west to the University of Wisconsin at Madison and their Ph.D. program in Marxist social science. The letter had come in the mail just a few days before. That night Liz was happy too. She’d just written something she was proud of, and now she and Sam and Theresa and I were in her room, listening to music and telling stories and drinking beer and playing cards. After his shift, Vinny T. came up and joined us, too. Vinny T. was the head of security at Bradford College. He was a short, small-boned ex-Marine with olive skin and a mat of curly black hair, his cheeks and jaw forever darkened by whiskers he kept shaved as close to the skin as possible. Vinny always had a good joke and liked to go drinking after his shift. Partly because he’d been in the Marines, he and Pop hit it off and Vinny spent a lot of time at Pop’s campus house, the two of them drinking till very late. Soon he was sitting on the couch very close to one of Liz’s girlfriends who’d wandered in, his hand on her knee, his handsome Italian face just inches from hers as he told her a dirty joke and she laughed too hard and spilled her drink. There was the feeling that good things were happening, that life wasn’t so directionless anymore and that hard work and focus could bring about something like Sam and Theresa getting married. I still wasn’t sure why I was going back to school, but just knowing I was really going had lifted something off me.

Liz sat close to Theresa on the couch, the two of them laughing and looking like sisters with their brown hair and wool sweaters and tight jeans. Then it was after three in the morning and Liz’s friend had wandered off and there was a plan to go to Vinny’s house out on Lake Attitash. He was going to cook the five of us omelets. Sam and Theresa wanted to get home, though, and I hugged them at the back door of Academy Hall, quiet now, the red-carpeted floor soft and gritty under our feet. I watched the two of them walk out to the parking lot holding hands, the light from a security lamp shining dully on Sam’s black Duster as they pulled away.

Vinny had some last-minute paperwork to get done so Liz and I and sat on the couch in Vinny’s office. The only light came from a fluorescent desk lamp, and Vinny sat in it entering something into the shift log, his eyes squinting, the slight static of the dispatch radio in the air. Liz was smoking a cigarette. The couch was wobbly but deep and maybe I dozed a few minutes. Maybe I didn’t. But it was as if Sam and Theresa had never driven off because now they were hurrying through the back door, Theresa looking pale as she held the door for her fiancé, his beard dripping blood.

DRIVING THERESA
home to where she lived with her mother down in the avenues, Sam had slowed for the right he’d have to take at the corner of Fifth and Cedar, but there was a massive oak tree at the corner, its roots having buckled the sidewalk long ago, and he had to edge up almost into Cedar Street and that’s when a car shot in front of his hood, nearly clipping it. The car slowed immediately and Sam saw the flashing blue light on the dashboard, an unmarked police car. It pulled over, and the cop was sitting there, Sam thought, studying him, the black Duster that almost hit him.

Instead of turning right for Sixth Avenue, Sam turned left and eased up behind the unmarked car. He was ready to explain himself, to explain the big oak he couldn’t see around. Inside the car, the blue light was still flashing, and Sam waited for the cop to step out first, but when he didn’t, Sam did, and now the cop stepped out too, a young guy in a leather jacket and dark pants and motorcycle boots standing in the path of Sam’s headlights. He had stringy black hair and he just stood there looking at Sam, then past him to the Duster. Maybe he could see Theresa, maybe he couldn’t. Then the front and back passenger doors opened and three more guys climbed out, all of them in denim or leather jackets, and a white light rocked through Sam’s head, his chin a numbing burn, the kid who’d just punched him standing there like it was Sam’s move now.

“Yeah?” Sam jerked down the zipper of his jacket and yanked it off his shoulders and dropped it to the ground. “I’ll fight all you pieces of shit, let’s
go
.”

Sam was wearing a short-sleeve polo shirt, and maybe if he hadn’t worn that one, maybe if he’d worn a loose sweater or work shirt, the kid who’d punched him wouldn’t have seen so clearly Sam’s deeply muscled chest, his impossibly thick shoulders and upper arms, and he wouldn’t have pulled the knife he now waved in front of him, the base of the blade between his thumb and forefinger, the handle in his palm. Like this was something he did all the time, pulled knives on people in fights, people he’d just pulled over in his phony unmarked cruiser.

“Fine,” Sam said, “fine. We’re going to call this one over, all right?” He could feel his chin bleeding, the liquid itch of it, and he walked backwards to his Duster, the four of them standing there in his headlights. One of them laughed and another stepped closer. The kid’s knife blade glinted dully in his hand, and the blue light still flashed, and Sam climbed in behind his wheel and pulled the door shut after him, and Theresa said, “I got their plate number, Sam.”

Sam put the Duster in reverse. He rolled his window down and yelled out into the cold air.
“Remember this face. You hear me? Remember this
face
.”

THE KID
with the knife must’ve had a big ring on his hand; behind the black whiskers of Sam’s beard a chunk of flesh was missing from his chin, and somebody—Theresa or Liz—had gotten him a damp paper towel from a bathroom and he was pressing it to the wound. He’d told us their story that way, his hand pressed to his chin in the dim fluorescent light of Vinny’s small office. There were droplets of blood on Sam’s shirt, and I kept thinking of that kid and his sucker punch and his knife. I pictured my best friend stabbed and bleeding to death down in the avenues, his fiancée no longer his fiancée, and then what would they have done to her? What were they hoping to do with their phony police flasher and their knives?