Townie (33 page)

I made patronizing baby sounds to make her smile, but she just kept looking into my eyes. It was as if she had me all figured out and wasn’t quite sure she wanted to be held anymore by this man twenty-three years older than she was, her brother.

I was sitting with her at the dining room table when Pop came home. She’d fallen asleep against my shoulder. The sun shone across the floor and up the stairs where her mother was writing.

I heard Pop greet Luke downstairs, then he was walking up to where we were. He smiled right away. He was wearing the same corduroy shirt from the night before, that and a pair of jeans and black leather boots he’d ordered from a boot maker in Montreal. He’d gone to church to talk to Jesus. That’s how he usually described prayer, as a personal conversation with Jesus Christ. This was something I had never done or even considered doing. Nor, as far as I knew, had my brother or sisters.

When Suzanne turned sixteen, she informed Pop she wasn’t going to church anymore and it was like a sandbag fell away, and soon Jeb and Nicole and I were caught up in this lucky current that eventually meant we got to sleep late on Sundays too. But Pop kept going to Mass six or seven days a week, and now he was smiling at his second and fifth children. His beard was newly trimmed, his cheeks and throat shaved clean. He stopped smiling and started scratching Luke behind the ears.

“That was wrong last night.”

“What was?”

“Bringing the gun. That was bad.”

I nodded, my hand pressed to the warm spine of his sleeping daughter. Peggy came downstairs for more coffee then. She held an empty mug, a big one from which she drank café au lait, a habit she’d picked up during a semester in Paris, and there was a far-off look in her eyes that reminded me of Jeb whenever he used to come downstairs after hours of practicing his guitar. Pop glanced at her as she passed. “Writing?”

“Yeah.” She filled her cup with coffee and warm milk from a pan, said to me quietly, “You can give her to your dad. He’ll lay her in her crib.”

She walked back up the stairs to her desk, and I stood and Pop came over. With my palm against the back of his baby’s head, I handed him my sleeping sister. I could smell his hair, the sweet wafer of the Eucharist on his breath, this thing he believed in so strongly and which got him to say things like he’d just did. It was good he had something like that. Maybe people needed something like that. Men in particular.

L
IZ HAD A
crush on a guy named Joe Hurka. He was in my father’s fiction writing class with her, and whenever she talked about him, which was quite a lot, her eyes had more light in them, her skin more color, her hair more shine. She talked about how sensitive he was, how beautiful his writing, and that he even wrote songs and played the guitar. One day in class Pop asked him to sing them all something, and Joe did, and now Liz’s crush looked like outright love to me. I hated Joe.

And I didn’t. All the weeks she pined for him, I never met him. Whenever she talked about something new he’d written or sung, the jealousy I felt was a hot stone in my abdomen, but it was of two parts: the obvious, and that it was possible to be a young man and know what you were supposed to do with your time on earth. This guy Joe seemed to have that, and as much as I wished for him to pack up his guitar and short stories and move away somewhere, there was also a gnawing sense that he was a better man than I was and that I should just stand aside and let what was happening happen.

One Saturday before my weight workout with Sam, I walked into Liz’s empty dorm room and saw a thin manuscript on her bed. The room smelled like shampoo, and she had probably just gotten dressed and was getting something to eat down in the dining hall. I sat on the mattress and picked up four or five stapled pages. It was a new story by Joe. My fingertips went numb. It was as if I’d found a love letter from him to her, an irrational thought, I knew. I turned the title page over and began to read.

The words were simple, clear and concrete, and soon I was no longer aware I was reading sentences written by Joe; instead, I became the story’s protagonist, a teenage boy working as a dishwasher in a diner in a small town like Haverhill. I knew these things from the details, the abandoned mill building on the other side of the alley, the flickering light of the streetlamp over the broken sidewalk, the cigarette smoke of the boy’s boss behind the counter. It’s two or three in the morning and the boy is mopping the floor when two middle-aged prostitutes walk in from the cold. They’re wearing too much makeup and not enough clothes and before they can even sit down the boy’s boss yells at them to leave, yells that they’re closed and he doesn’t serve whores anyway. The women go without much of a fight, and the story ends with the boy mopping the floor, shaking his head and thinking,
That’s not right, that’s just not right
.

I laid the story back down on the bed. I sat there awhile. I wasn’t thinking of Joe or Liz or me. I wasn’t thinking at all. I was seeing that boy in that diner and even
feeling
what it might be like to be him in that moment when the world pulled him up against his own conscience, though this word was not yet in my head. It was like hearing a good song on the radio, that place it puts you where you weren’t before. Or the movies, how they did that, too. And now Joe’s story.

I wanted to read another one. I wanted to read whatever he’d written. But I was running late for my workout with Sam, and as I left Liz’s room and walked down the worn carpet of Academy Hall, dorm room doors open and ten different albums playing on ten different record players, talk and laughter and a vacuum cleaner running somewhere, I felt more
here,
like water leaking from an ear you hadn’t known was blocked, and then something warm and wet is on your skin and now you can hear.

THE GOLDEN
Gloves were three weeks away. It was a weeknight, probably Wednesday, and all day long Jeb and Randy and I had hung Sheetrock in the rooms we’d built in the widow’s house overlooking the water. The ceilings came first. The day before, we’d started nailing spruce strapping into the joists sixteen inches on center and while Jeb finished that, Randy and I were hauling sheets of plaster board off the truck and stacking them against a wall in each of the three rooms. By coffee break, all the Sheetrock was unloaded and Jeb had finished the strapping. He was faster with measurements and cuts and handling the screw gun, so it fell to Randy and me to do most of the grunt work. We’d squat and lift a full sheet, carry it under where it would go, then we’d count off, “One, two,
lift,
” and yank the sheet up from our sides and flat onto our heads, our fingertips on its smooth surface to keep it from buckling and cracking. We’d each step up onto a stool or lidded joint compound bucket, and together we’d press the four-foot-wide, twelve-foot-long sheet up against the ceiling strapping and there’d be the electric whine of the screw gun as Jeb went to work sinking black screws through plasterboard into spruce till we could let go and drop our arms and step down to do it again and again.

Now the day was over, and I was in my small apartment in Lynn pulling on sweats. The only light in my room was a bulb in the ceiling, stark and too bright, and outside the windows was blackness, a cold I was planning to run through on my way to the Boys’ Club and Tony Pavone’s boxing ring. My shoulders were fatigued from all the overhead work of the day, and it would be hard to keep my fists up, hard to throw punches. But I wouldn’t allow this thought to stay in my head. Whatever good had come to me had come from my complete and utter disregard for my body’s need for comfort. If I began to capitulate now, where would it end? In no time I’d be small and soft again, a boy who liked to read books and build tree forts with his brother. A boy easily stomped.

I pulled a second sweatshirt down over the first. For a moment or two I just stood there in my empty room. No posters or photographs on the walls. No desk or chair or couch or bed. Just my yoga mat on the floorboards under my sleeping bag, the two work boots stuffed into a pillowcase I called a pillow. Beside it was the stack of books I’d been laboring through all year, a composition binder I sometimes took notes in, the glossy brochure of the University of Wisconsin at Madison waiting for me in the fall. In the corner, propped up against the dusty baseboard, was the AAU number I would soon pin to my trunks in the Golden Gloves, and it was time to move, time to get moving.

But in the kitchen I stopped at the door. I watched myself let go of the knob and turn and put a pan of water on the stove. I opened the flames under it all the way, then watched myself take an empty cup and drop a tea bag into it. I walked back to where I slept for the notebook and a pencil, and why did I set them on the small kitchen table? Why was I sitting there waiting for the water to boil for the tea when I should be running along an icy sidewalk in the night to train?

I began to feel too warm in my layered sweats, but I didn’t move. I opened the notebook in front of me. The water began to bubble and I stood and poured it steaming into my cup, the tea bag jerking, then rising, and now I watched as I set the cup near the notebook and took my pencil and held it. What was I doing? And why? Why was I doing this?

For a short time or a long time, I stared at the page. I saw how consistently level the blue lines were from left to right, a quarter of an inch high, maybe five-sixteenths. I kept staring at them. Then a curtain lifted and I began to see a factory somewhere where these notebooks were made, men and women running big machines, cutting and printing and binding, and I saw a man like Randy working some press, his outlaw mustache, sweat in the corners of his eyes, then I was in the woods, woods I called Maine, the place Liz was from, and now a young woman who looked very much like her was half drunk on warm beer and was losing her virginity on the hood of a Pontiac. Then I
was
her, feeling the metal hood under my skin, the jabs into me that hurt, then didn’t but did.

The boy she’d given herself to finished quickly, and it was as if I were a mist in the trees watching them sitting now in the front seat. They smoked cigarettes and neither of them spoke. A soft rain began to fall and the boy started the engine and put his car in gear and drove down the rutted road away from what they’d just done together. Away from me.

I put down my pencil. In front of me were just handwritten words, quite a few crossed out and replaced with others. I raised the cup of tea to my lips and blew on it, but it had cooled to the temperature of the room. Hadn’t it just been steaming? How long had I been sitting here?

I blinked and looked around my tiny rented kitchen, saw things I’d never seen before: the stove leaning to the left, the handle of the fridge covered with dirty masking tape, the chipped paint of the window casing, a missing square of linoleum on the floor under the radiator.

I stood and closed the notebook. I picked up the pencil and set it on top like some kind of marker, a reminder to me of something important I shouldn’t lose.

A FEW
days later I was in the ring with someone new. He was my height with a bushy beard, a narrow chest and wide waist, his arms thin, his eyes cloudy above blotchy cheeks. He was too young to look like this, a drunk from one of the neighborhood barrooms, and as I stepped into the ring to spar him, I wondered why he was here.

Someone hit the bell and we tapped gloves. He kept his hands low like Bobby Schwartz, and I thought I’d just throw some jabs, that’s all, and I threw one, a white canyon opening up in my head. My eyes cleared and there were the ropes wrapped in duct tape, the darkness on the other side where Tony Pavone said, “Good hook. But both a you, keep your hands
up
.”

I must’ve dropped my right. I must’ve dropped it when I threw the jab and opened myself up. It was the hardest I’d ever been hit in the ring, and I didn’t want to get hit again. A thousand bees were hovering now, their wings beating dully, and we were moving clockwise, our eyes locked. His still looked cloudy to me, the whites not white, his gaze unfocused. What he’d just thrown was luck, right? Tony yelled at him to hold his hands
up
, but he wasn’t, so I stepped in and threw a right and a flower flamed up behind my eyes, the bees’ wings hot and buzzing under my skin, and through a maroon haze, he was there again. I wished for headgear. I wanted to stop and ask him how he was getting to me so easily, what was I doing wrong? But a three-minute round was a three-minute round, and you didn’t stop in the middle. You just didn’t.

I tried to evade him with some footwork, something I was never too swift at. I planted my feet, jabbed, then began to move counterclockwise, a direction from which it was harder for me to throw a strong right. His eyes blinked and his right hand dropped and I shot a hook for his cheek, but a hammer smashed the bees into my skull where they kept drilling on their own and my eyes burned and I could hear a voice, one of the bees talking, its wings explaining something,
Finish him off. Throw a combination
. These words meant not for me, but for this man who looked like he was just getting started, this drunk who punched hard enough to kill somebody. And he was holding back, too. Each of his hooks had hurt me, and he had to have seen that, but he wasn’t stepping in to end things. He wasn’t doing what I’d learned to do, to hurt even more the one you’ve already hurt.

In the next two minutes he hit me six or seven more times. When the round ended, I thanked him for the session and ducked between the ropes and untied my gloves and unwrapped my hands. My fingers were clumsy and looked far away. Tony Pavone was saying something to me, his voice close, words of advice, it sounded like. Words I couldn’t quite decipher.

The headache lasted ten days, a huge hand squeezing my temples between thumb and forefinger. At the edge of my vision was a green world that sometimes turned purple or brown, and whenever I read my tape measure I had to squint, the hand squeezing harder.

I WAS
riding in the back of Peggy’s Subaru. Pop was driving. We were pulling away from Kappy’s liquor store with one of his buddies I didn’t know well. He sat in the passenger side and had a beard as wild-looking as Fidel Castro’s, and he kept talking about Romania and collective farming. It was a warm, gray afternoon. On both sides of Main Street the dirty snowbanks had melted into slush, its runoff sluicing into the drains, some of them clogged with damp leaves, empty cans or cigarette packs, damp sections of newspaper.

Pop elbowed his friend. “My boy’s a Golden Glove boxer.”

“What’re you, a middleweight?”

“Yeah, no.”

“No? You’re not a middleweight?”

“I am, but not what he said.”

Pop’s eyes caught mine in the rearview. He was waiting for me to continue, and I could see that whatever I’d say next would be all right, that he was just curious, that’s all; this was the collateral gift of him having been a father who’d always lived somewhere else, one who had never been part of any decisions we made or did not make about our lives; he’d always been absent, and it made the next thing easy to say. “The Gloves were last week. I didn’t go.”

“How come?”

“I don’t know…”

“What?”

I could’ve told him about the beating I’d taken in the ring. I could’ve told him about the headache that wouldn’t go away, or how I’d begun to see my skull as a container for my brains, one that had been designed to protect them so why was I encouraging people to punch it as hard as they could? Weren’t there other things I could learn to do?

“I think I should be doing something more creative.”

I did not say artistic, though I was thinking that. I did not say I’d started to write a short story for the first time and that each night after work I looked forward to that tea and to that table, to my pencil I would sharpen with the U-knife from my carpentry apron, the lined notebook I was slowly filling with words and sentences and paragraphs. I did not tell him that just doing this left me feeling pleasantly empty of something after, something I normally would have brought into the ring or the weight room.

Pop said, “Interesting.” And he downshifted and drove the three of us along Main Street. We were heading off to a Bradford College faculty party somewhere, a dinner with grown men and women like the man beside Pop, people who had Ph.D.’s and taught and wrote, people who danced and painted and sculpted. Pop’s friend was talking about Romania again, and I was looking out the window at this place that had become my hometown, the street Rosie P. had lived on, her sweet smile and naked brown legs. Columbia Park and the house my mother had worked so hard to keep us in, the longest we’d ever been anywhere, the tree house in the back made from stolen lumber, the attic turret I’d exiled myself to, the sidewalk in front where Tommy J. had punched my brother in the face and called my mother a whore. There were the worn apartment stairs beside Pleasant Spa where early in the morning kids from the avenues still waited for the bus and passed joints and drank Pepsis or Cokes. And Cleary’s side street, his loving drunk mother.