Townie (32 page)

Sam was talking. He knew people who were at the 104 Club the night before, and he’d made a few calls and found out who’d beaten the shit out of me. It was Devin Wallace, someone who brawled in the bars regularly. I knew his older brother Ben. He had a severe underbite and was tall and sinewy and he drank all day, cruising around town in beat-up sedans, burning rubber at traffic lights, giving the finger to anyone who said a thing about it. Years later, he went on to serve multiple sentences at the state prison in Walpole, and he’d be dead of cirrhosis of the liver before he hit forty-five. Now my father wanted something done to his bigger, stronger, handsome brother, but I was through with it. I’d fought and lost, and wouldn’t a movie be a good thing to do right now? Popcorn and cold Coke and a dark room full of strangers turning themselves over to the imaginations of others?

It was my fault I’d lost so badly anyway. Since when do you invite someone outside?
I’m not your fuckin’ brother.
That was
his
invitation, which came first and which I should have followed with a straight right to his predatory face. But since Sambo’s, something had changed in me, and now Pop’s and Sam’s plan was to go back to the 104 Club where the Wallaces and their crew hung out and then get him somehow, Sam and Theresa and my half-drunk and determined writer father, who, with his trimmed professor’s beard, stood at the door and pulled on an insulated Red Sox jacket and one of his Akubra hats. They both reflected things he loved, finely made leather from Down Under, and a team of grown men who played a game called baseball. I’d seen him wearing them many times before, mainly walking his dog within the campus walls, but now I pictured him down at the 104 Club looking for a fight, and I felt protective of him and cowardly all at once for I was doing nothing to stop this; if I did, I would look like the weak little boy I’d been working all these years to kill.

POP AND
Theresa went in his car, Sam and I in the black Duster. We were going to walk in separately and in twos; if Wallace wasn’t there, then we’d stand on opposite sides of the bar and wait. Then what? Jump him? All four of us? Theresa, too?

Sam drove us out of the sanctuary of campus, my father’s taillights ahead of us. Through the back window of Pop’s car I could see the silhouette of his Akubra, and I was eleven years old again, standing at the window of our old rented house on Lime Street, watching my father admonish and warn Clay Whelan, his father Larry holding him back, this chained dog who would’ve surely killed Pop if he’d gotten free. And I couldn’t let Pop get to Wallace before I did. If he got to him first, my father would begin things with words, with language, the one thing he was so good at, and probably in his Marine captain’s chest-voice like he’d done at the Tap with the husband of the spurned wife, but that would give Wallace too much time and motivation, and he was so much bigger than my father, so much angrier. No, I needed to get there first: no words, no foreplay, no polite invitations. I’d just have to start swinging and hope the first one was hard enough to give me time for the second and the third and the fourth. I was tapping my foot, my tongue dry as shaved bark. I wanted that cold Coke.

Sam turned off Main and headed down a side street for the river. We were still in neighborhoods of large, comfortable houses, their shingles or clapboards in no need of paint, their covered porches spacious and level and free of trash and the clutter of discarded kids’ toys. Christmas lights were draped along the fascia, and in the windows stood lighted trees behind wispy curtains. These were Bradford houses, nobody living in them on welfare or food stamps, many of them college-educated, their late-model cars parked neatly in plowed driveways.

Sam followed Pop’s car over the river. There was the hum of tires on the steel grates, and the black water beneath us flowed east and I could see the dim white of snow on the mudbanks. Then we were on River Street passing lighted sub shops and package stores, a diner in Railroad Square. Soon we were in the dark gauntlet of the closed shoe factories where we passed the brewery and drove under the tracks again. In an abandoned weed lot a shopping cart lay on its side, rags spilling from it, and up ahead was the light of Lafayette Square, the exterior lamp over the door to the 104 Club a white star pulsing in my head.

The lot was only half full. While Pop parked, Sam did two loops around the statue of the dead hero.

“We’ll give them time to get in first.”

“Good.”

“You all right?”

“Yep.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll get him.”

On the second loop I could see Pop and Theresa walking into the bar, Pop holding the door open for her. Theresa was only a year or two younger than his third wife, and they looked like a mismatched couple out on a date. Again there came the feeling this was not my father’s world, that he was having too much fun right now, and that very soon the fun would stop.

Sam parked the Duster in the lot close to the street. I started to get out fast, but Pop and Theresa didn’t know what Wallace looked like and they’d have to wait for us anyway. I glanced over the car at Sam. “Buddy, if he’s there, he’s gonna know why we are, too. I’ll have to go right at him.”

“
We’ll
have to go right at him.”

I didn’t say anything. I wanted Sam’s help and I did not want his help, but more than this, I didn’t want to be here at all. In the cold air, my cheeks stung, my split lip too. It was going to hurt to get punched there again.

The 104 Club was as empty as it had been crowded the night before. Only one bartender was working, a thin man with a gray ponytail who stood at the far end watching the TV in the corner. Beneath it was a shuffleboard I hadn’t seen the night before, and two couples sat beside it in wooden chairs drinking and smoking and talking. Four or five others stood at the bar, men and women, Pop and Theresa among them. But no Devin Wallace. The air smelled like cigarette smoke and disinfectant and popcorn from the machine.

Sam called the bartender over and ordered two Buds. Saturday nights always seemed to start slow. It was date night, people going out to dinner or the movies, maybe a dance club somewhere. Around ten they’d come in for a drink that would turn into two, then three, then by last call business would be as good as the night before. But now it was after ten and still this place was quiet. Maybe all the regulars were as hungover as I was and had stayed home. I didn’t know, but I was relieved and took a sip of the Budweiser that tonight was like drinking lighter fluid or chicken grease. I put my bottle down. The door opened and four or five men walked in with the icy air, Ben Wallace one of them. A dark wool cap was pulled down around his ears and his whiskered chin jutted out, and as he walked by me and Sam, he took us in and his eyes changed from expectant of a good time to something darker. I looked down the bar at Pop and Theresa. Both of them were smoking a cigarette, but Pop’s eyes were on mine. I shook my head once, then tapped Sam on the hand. “If Devin shows, we’re way fucking outnumbered. This was a bad idea.”

“See that tall one with Ben? I played hockey with him. What’s he doing with Wallace?”

Theresa stood in front of us. Somebody had put a quarter in the jukebox, and Huey Lewis & the News was singing about believing in love. She leaned in close. “Is he one of them?”

Sam shook his head and drained his beer. “This isn’t going anywhere. Let’s shoot up to Ronnie D’s.”

Theresa went back for Pop, and maybe that’s what she’d told him, that this wasn’t going anywhere, which really meant it
was
going somewhere but not where we’d pictured it back in my father’s small campus house full of books, some precise act of revenge on one man, a big man at that, one I was happy to concede to now.

Pop stood on the sidewalk under the light. His face was shadowed by the brim of his Akubra. “Why’re we leaving?”

“It’s dead, Pop. Nobody’s in there tonight. We’re heading up to Ronnie D’s. Maybe he’s there.”

Most likely Pop knew I was lying; bars had their regulars and Ronnie D’s across the river had never had a Wallace as one, but maybe Pop, too, had come to feel this was all a bad idea.

He smiled at Theresa and held out his arm. “Let’s go, darlin’.”

Theresa laughed and hooked her arm in his, and Sam and I were heading for the Duster, a strip of ice cracking under my boots, when behind us the door to the bar swung back on its hinges and Ben Wallace and his crew came walking fast into the lot. “Fuck you, Dubis. You’re down here waiting for my brother, you and your fuckin’ friends.” Spit arced out of his mouth, and he was already a few feet away from me, and I never realized how tall he was, taller than his handsome, stronger brother. On both sides of him stood men I did not know, but Sam moved toward them and was calling out the name of his hockey mate, calling it in the warm tone of an old friend glad to see another.

I said, “I’m just here for a beer, Ben.”

“Fuck you, you are. My brother kicked the shit out of you last night, that’s why you’re here.” He was closer to me now, a step away from punching range, but my body wasn’t having anything to do with this. My weight was even on both feet, and there was no lightness in my hands, no flames running through my blood. I heard myself talking about Christmas.

“What?”

“It’s Christmastime, Ben. Peace on earth, right?”

“Fuck
you,
my brother kicked your ass, and I’ll fuckin’ do it again right now.”

But he wasn’t moving any closer, and now Pop and Theresa were walking across the lot toward us. Pop had both hands in the pockets of his Red Sox jacket, and even with his thick beard and the twenty years he had on us all, there was something boyish about him.

“You’re backing down ’cause you know I’ll fuckin’ kill you, Dubis.”

“You’re right, Ben. Merry Christmas.”

Ben kept swearing at me, and now Sam turned to his hockey friend, a square-faced kid with an Irish name and shoulder-length hair. “Tell your buddy to calm down, Tim.”

But Ben wasn’t calming down. Our lack of reaction seemed to make him angrier, his chin jutting out, spit flying, and his friends seemed no more interested in a brawl than we did. They stood quietly behind him, looking from me to Sam, then at Pop, who stood a few feet back, his hands still in his pockets. He looked happy and relaxed and so awfully out of place. Wallace was threatening to kill me again and how new it was that I didn’t care what he said, that he could go on and on, and it just did not matter. Because I noticed he still wasn’t stepping any closer, and only when he glanced over at Pop and Theresa did my blood thin out a bit; I’d have to do something if he went after them in any way, especially my father who, it was clear now, had come downtown to see more of this part of my life. I opened the passenger door and waited for Sam whose hockey friend was speaking quietly into Ben’s ear.

Ben threatened to kill me once more, but in minutes Sam and I were driving over the Merrimack River, Pop and Theresa ahead of us. My face ached, my neck too. I was looking forward to a bed somewhere, a long night’s sleep. I thought we were heading for Ronnie D’s but Pop steered for the campus. Then we were inside his house again, Pop creeping into his downstairs bedroom to hang his Akubra on its hook, Sam and Theresa and I sitting around the small dining room table. Theresa shook her head and laughed. “Your dad had a gun, you know.”

“What?”

“When those guys ran into the parking lot, he reached right over me and took it out of the glove compartment. He had it in his pocket the whole time.”

Sam looked at me and shook his head. Now I knew why Pop had really gone into his bedroom. It’s where he kept his guns, on his closet shelf, and I pictured him swinging open the six-round chamber of the snub-nose and emptying the bullets into his cupped hand. Or he might be releasing the loaded clip of the semiautomatic, pulling back the slide and eyeing the bore for a straggler round. And I had a flash of him standing in the lot of the 104 Club with his hands in his jacket pockets, his relaxed smile, his right fingers cupped around something so lethal. My chest felt squeezed.
“Shit.”

“I asked him if he would’ve really used that. He said he’d just shoot in the air.”

Like that would’ve stopped anyone. Like there was reason involved here. Like we would’ve all paused at the loud noise and cooled down right away and walked off in opposite directions because this had all gotten so obviously out of hand.

Pop was walking up the stairs. “Who wants a nightcap?” He was smiling widely, his cheeks flushed above his beard. His dog Luke followed him up to the lighted kitchen, and Pop opened the fridge and pulled out four bottles of beer. He twisted the cap off Theresa’s first and walked over and handed it to her. She smiled up at him. “Put your gun away?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

We all laughed, even me, and it occurred to me I’d gotten so brave in one way but had stayed so cowardly in another. When Pop handed me the bottle, I took it from him and then we four lifted our drinks to that dish best served cold, a revenge I knew I would never seek.

THE NEXT
morning my father drove to Mass, and I had coffee with Peggy while she fed my baby sister. She was six months old and her name was Cadence and she had a shock of red hair that reminded me of the little bird Woodstock from Charlie Brown cartoons. After Peggy had burped and changed her, she asked if I wouldn’t mind holding her so her mother could squeeze in some writing upstairs. “And your father should be back soon.”

Cadence was lighter than a book of political theory, her entire bottom resting in my palm. She held her hands out from her sides but had a hard time holding her head up, so I fanned my fingers against the back of her tiny skull, smelled mashed pear and clean cotton and something I couldn’t name. She was looking directly into my eyes, hers the color of a blue planet, her mouth open slightly, and how was it possible to be so young and small and utterly dependent on the love of the people you were born into, their constant care, their good judgment, for years and years?