Townie (5 page)

Sully lay curled on the floor. He was bleeding and crying and still trying to breathe. He left school and I never saw him again and though I never spoke to Cody Perkins or he to me, I saw him all the time; I liked how loud he was. I liked how he walked around the Jackman or down the street with his chest out. A decade later he would become a prizefighter whose picture I would see tacked to telephone poles and the doors of barrooms. Sullivan had seemed nice enough, but I liked how Cody Perkins had destroyed him all by himself. Not like me, who hid daily from Clay and was too ashamed to tell my mother about getting chased and beat up three or four days a week, how I’d trip and fall and he would catch up to me, his eyes dark and intent, like this was something he just had to do, and the first punch was a green flash behind my eyes, the second a white shard, the third a dark mist, the fourth a muffled thud. By then I’d have curled up on the sidewalk or whatever backyard he’d found me in and he’d kick my back and head and legs, screaming or silent, breathing hard, walking away only when he was finished.

ONE NIGHT
a drunk walked off Lime Street into our house. It was after ten and we were watching TV, Mom upstairs and asleep for hours already, Nicole too. In the flickering blue light, I heard the man pissing, pissing on the floorboards of our hallway. Suzanne and Jeb and I looked at each other, then we watched him zip up and step back out onto Lime, a shadow stumbling under the streetlights.

I don’t remember who cleaned it up, but the next night we sat in front of the TV eating food Mom had brought us from Burger King, and Suzanne said, “That kid across the street beats the shit out of Andre every day, you know.”

“What?
Who?
”

“That kid Clay. That fuckin’ moron Clay.”

IT’D BEEN
years since we’d seen Pop on a weeknight. It was a Tuesday or Wednesday in the spring. It was cool and the sun was going down and the last of its light made Larry’s cars look etched in the air, made him look more real standing there in his dirty white T-shirt and his no front teeth talking to my father. Pop looked so out of place. He wore corduroys and a sweater and loafers. Larry hadn’t shaved in two or three days, but Pop’s beard was meticulously trimmed, his cheeks and throat shaved smooth. I watched all this from one of our windows facing the street, my heart pulsing dully in my neck, a sickening sweat breaking out on my chest; part of me was relieved my father was here, but the rest of me hated myself for needing his help, and now I was scared because Clay ran out of his house, his shouting mother behind him, and he went after my father the same way he went after me, his right fist up, ready to throw it, and Larry stiff-armed him in the chest and was yelling so loud I could hear it through the glass, fuckin’ this and fuckin’ that, Larry’s face a dark hole.

Pop hadn’t taken a step back, but he was pointing his finger at Clay like he was scolding him, trying to reason with him. He was talking to him like he might be a student in that place of rich kids where he taught in that green world that wasn’t ours, and I just knew Clay Whelan was about to beat up my father and any hope I may have felt would be stomped and I’d be forever running and looking over my shoulder and hiding wherever there was a door and a lock and no key.

But Larry somehow sent Clay back inside. The screen door slammed behind him and his mother stood there in her sweats, her arms crossed under her heavy breasts. She eyed Pop like he was a foreigner.

Afterward, sitting in our small dusty living room, Pop told me the father had banned his son from ever going near me again.

“
Banned
him?”

“I don’t think he used that word.”

I knew my dad used words like that. I knew he wrote books and taught English to college kids, and it was strange having him be in our world for even this long and I was ashamed and wanted him to leave. But I was grateful to him for coming, and as he drove down Lime Street in his underpaid professor’s car, Larry back at work on the engine of a Buick, Clay’s house quiet in the lengthening shadows, I knew things had just gotten a lot worse.

FOR A
week I saw him at the Jackman, in the halls, in the asphalt yard, in the street out front, but he stayed away from me. He was like a wolf who’d been caught and defanged and sent back out into the wild a different wolf. But on the afternoon of the fifth day, the sun high over the clustered houses of the South End, George Labelle walked into our house and the living room where I sat with my brother and sisters in front of the TV. He was as big as Sullivan but fat, as mean as Clay but subservient, and he grabbed me by the shirt and yanked me to my feet. He had the beginnings of a mustache and he smelled like B.O. and Pepsi, and I was holding on to his fists as he started dragging me to the front door, making grunting sounds, his body so much larger than mine. I had never spoken to him and knew him only by name and I knew he was going to kill me once he got me onto Lime.

Labelle’s face jerked forward. His eyes began to water. He let go of me and covered his head, and that’s when I saw Suzanne and the broom she held, its stiff bristles she kept jabbing at his skull. “Get out! Get the fuck
out
!”

Labelle turned and she poked him in the face. He blinked and jumped back. “
Shit!
He paid me! Clay fuckin’
paid
me!”

“I said get
out
!” Suzanne jabbed him in the ear, the neck, the back of his head. Then he was fumbling with the doorknob and running across Lime Street to Clay waiting there on the sidewalk, his face a mixture of disappointment and amusement, his hit man kicked out of the house by my sister, my big sister Suzanne.

SOMETIMES I’D
have trouble breathing. I’d be standing in our small kitchen, my hands on the sink, and a big, invisible hand would squeeze my chest and rib cage. The room would start to tilt, and I’d sit on the floor awhile and stare straight ahead at the shifting wall. I’d stare at any blemish on my skin. I didn’t have many, but whenever I did I was convinced I’d been bitten by something poisonous—a spider or small snake that had slithered up from the river and into our house. I’d wake in the middle of the night and walk down the creaking stairwell to the bathroom and turn on the buzzing fluorescent light; I’d stare at a small red spot on my arm, convinced since I’d gone to bed that it had moved farther up toward my shoulder where it would soon disappear into my chest and heart and kill me. Sweat would break out on my forehead and the back of my neck. My mouth would be as dry as when Whelan chased me down the street. I didn’t want to give my mother something else to worry about, nor did I want her to see such fear and weakness in me, so I’d wake Suzanne in the tiny room she shared with Nicole. My older sister would climb out of bed and turn on the overhead bulb. She’d rub her eyes and squint down at the spot on my arm. “Andre, that’s a fucking
zit.
Go to sleep.”

SUMMER CAME
and now windows were open and there was Larry’s yelling, there was a woman yelling back at him or somebody else in another house, there was the canned laughter and commercial jingles of six or seven TVs, there was a bottle breaking, a drunk singing, a motorcycle or lowrider revving its engine, then peeling away from the curb, there were the smells of hot asphalt, the dusty concrete of broken sidewalks, cat shit and dog shit and gasoline, there was the wood baking in the lumberyard near the Merrimack, again the faint smell of sewage and motor oil and mud, and when the wind blew in from the east you could smell the ocean, dead seaweed and open seashell and wet sand, and it was a Saturday and Jeb and I were running from Clay and Labelle and two others I didn’t even know; they’d come walking down the middle of Lime Street under the sun and seen us sitting on our stoop doing nothing.

“Get ’em!”

And we were up and running down Lime and across Water Street. We climbed a rusted chain-link fence and came down on a pallet of plywood and jumped off it to the ground. We ran past a forklift, its driver watching us under his cap, a cigarette between his lips, and my chest hurt and the air was too hot but we couldn’t stop and we ran past stacks of naked two-by-fours and two-by-sixes and two-by-eights, and we climbed onto this last stack and leapt over the fence into high weeds and chunks of broken cinderblock, and we kept running.

We ended up under a pier on the river. It was cool and shaded under there. We crouched beneath heavy planks and cross timbers, their posts black with creosote, the lower ones near the water covered with white and green barnacles. Half sunk in the mud were broken glass and a couple of tires, and we could see beyond this to the sun glinting off the river. It felt safe.

Jeb, eleven and thin but taller than I was, started gathering up pieces of colored glass. Even then he was making things: little sculptures made from junk, pictures he drew, watercolors, and he was always taking things apart—fan engines, radios, once the back of our TV just to see how it worked. He needed to know how things
worked.

I was happy to stay down here forever. Go steal some plywood and some nails and tools and build a floor and walls under the pier, make it a place only Jeb and I would know about. It was going to be hard to get back to the house without being seen. We’d have to wait till dark.

I heard the helicopter before I saw it, the
thock-thock-thock
of its massive blades, the way the water spread out smooth and rippling as it hovered over the middle of the river. Then there was an orange and white boat there too, the letters
COAST GUARD
painted on its bow, two men in black wet suits and scuba gear jumping into the Merrimack.

We knew what they were looking for. People drowned in that river. It had one of the most dangerous currents in the country, especially here, at its mouth, and I wished we’d left then before the divers brought up the body. It was bloated to three times a man’s normal size, the round head matted with blond hair, the face a pale pumpkin, his mouth open, dark, and bottomless.

We didn’t know how we’d get back home without being found, but Jeb dropped his pieces of glass and we both crawled fast out from under that pier and ran under the sun.

THE HOUSE
was almost always dirty. Whatever chores Mom would give us, we just did not do. But some days, cooped up in that small hot house, one or two of us would finally leave the TV, grab the broom, and start sweeping the floorboards, the narrow wooden stairs and hallway. We might wash the backed-up dishes in the kitchen, find the mop and scrub the floor. We’d go up to our rooms and make our beds, pick dirty clothes out of the corners, and stuff them into a garbage bag for when we went to the laundromat. Sometimes I’d go out to our tiny enclosed yard and sweep the concrete stoop. In the corner of the fence was a rusty rake and I’d use it on our dirt yard. I made straight even lines parallel to the fence. It was still a dirt yard, but standing on the concrete stoop after, looking down at it, our home seemed somehow more orderly, our lives within it more comprehensible.

NONE OF
Mom’s cars ever worked for long, but she was able to drive home the Head Start van and at least two Friday nights a month, she would load the four of us into it and take us on a Mystery Ride. If we asked where we were going, she’d say, “Who knows? It’s a
mystery
.”

Suzanne, at thirteen, wearing hip-huggers and smoking Kools in her room, acted like she was too old for this game, but I think she secretly liked it as much as Jeb, Nicole, and I did, each of us sitting on our own seat, the windows open, the radio playing rock and roll, the warm air blowing in as we drove out of the South End and the abandoned buildings of downtown. Sometimes we’d get on the highway and go fast and leave it all behind. Or else Mom would stay on the back roads near the Merrimack, winding through groves of hardwood and pines where people with enough money lived in houses you could barely see from the road.

Mom—only thirty-three years old, slender, and beautiful to men, I knew, because they were still always coming around—she nodded her head to the music and blew the smoke from her Pall Mall out the window and she sang along and tried to raise us all up out of the hole we were in. Soon we’d be hungry and somehow the mystery ended at Skippy’s, a hamburger joint built off a fast two-lane in the pine trees. The cheeseburgers were cheap and juicy, and they were served in red-and-white-checkered baskets heaped with curlicue fries. We’d sit at a picnic table spotted with squirrel and pigeon shit, and we’d eat this hot and perfect food and wash it down with cold Cokes.

Afterward, if she had the money, we’d continue our Mystery and find ourselves at the drive-in, the sun setting over a massive movie screen rising up out of scrub and weeds. Because of the van, she had to park in the far back and she’d pull it sideways so we could hook three or four speakers onto our open windows, each of us with our own bench seat to stretch out on.

Most of the movies were rated R and most were bad; I remember fast cars and naked breasts and pistol barrels flashing in the sun. Some disturbed me, like
Joe
where a father hates hippies and gets another father to go shoot up a commune where the first father accidentally kills his own daughter, her dead body lying bloody in the snow. There was
Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?,
Dustin Hoffman playing a hit music composer who has a split personality and ends up committing suicide in his private plane. There was Woody Allen, who talked fast and said funny things about sex I was embarrassed to hear in the van with my mother. But it was the Clint Eastwood westerns I really liked; he could shoot and kill and did it all night long to bad men who’d done bad things to him and his family. He didn’t run from them. He didn’t hide. He faced them, usually three or four at once, and in just a few words he told them what he thought of them, then drew his Colt and gunned them down like the pigs they were.