Townie (18 page)

You first.

No, you.

And Jeb stepped sideways through the crowd, Lynch following him past the bouncer through the door for the long stairwell down to the parking lot where my brother would have to fight in his slippers and T-shirt, his hair swinging in front of his face, and I wanted to follow, but Bobby was holding his hand up to Lynch’s boys, smiling that same smile he used to have in Connolly’s ring, both gloves at his side, daring you to swing, “You stay, we stay, right, boys?”

The tallest and biggest nodded, and the seven of us stood there in the smoke haze and the noise of the crowd that didn’t know we were waiting to see who’d come back in that door.

It was Lynch and it was way too soon. Less than a minute. He was smiling, looking down at me as he rejoined his friends. Sam said something, or Bobby, but I was moving through the crowd past the bouncer, then down the long stairwell, thinking
knife.
He
stabbed
him.

The steps were pockets of air under my feet. Then I was out in the cold, the grit of salt and sand on ice under my boots, Jeb standing there looking at me.

“You all right?”

“I had my back to him, he kicked me down the stairs, I can’t find my other slipper.”

Jeb’s left foot was bare, his toes naked on the iced-over asphalt.

“Where is it?”

“Up there somewhere.”

I was back inside, the stairs under me like an afterthought. And I was scanning them for my brother’s wool slipper, but I wasn’t looking for it. Then I was on the landing and past the bouncer inside the noise and heat and smoke, walking past Lynch and his boys to Sam and Bobby.
He kicked him down the stairs. Help me find his slipper.

Sam went first and then I did too, but there was the feeling I was done with this, done with looking, done with everything, and I ran back up, stepped inside the bar, turned, and there he was, Steve Lynch on the landing, grinning down at me. My back was to the open door of the bar, and as the words came out of my mouth I could feel my weight sink back on my right foot, my arms go loose at my sides, and it was as if I were in a warm bath under a blue sky, my words coming together in a question that could only get the answer I was waiting for. “Have you seen my brother’s slipper, Steve?”

“
Slipper?
Your brother’s a fuckin’ faggot and so are—”

He was falling, not backwards, but straight down, as if a blade had taken off his legs at the knees, and I was swinging and swinging but the bouncer’s arm was in the air between us and I was trying to punch over it, my fist just missing Lynch’s face which was bone-white, his lower face wet and red, his mouth a dark hole though my fist felt nothing, and the bouncer pushed and I was half falling, half running down the stairs and out into the cold air where my brother waited.

“You find it?”

I was breathing hard. I shook my head. “No, but I clocked him.”

“Good.”

“Yeah.” And we began walking through the dim parking lot for Sam’s Duster, the air strangely still and calm, the streetlamps shining down in the parked cars, the ice floes in the river beyond barely moving. I felt light and pure and free of something. Sam’s car was locked.

“Your foot cold?”

“A little.”

Something was different. Everything was different. There was more quiet in the air and more noise, too. The band had stopped playing upstairs and all the voices seemed to come louder through the brick walls. The back door pushed open from the stairwell and three of Lynch’s boys came walking toward us. The bigger one, the tallest one, said, “You sucker-punched my friend,” and he tackled me into a snowbank, then was sitting on my chest punching me in the side of the head, in the ears, in the neck and shoulder. Then it was over. He’d done his duty, and he was walking back to his buddies, the three of them standing next to Jeb like they were in front of a fire watching it burn. The big one and his buddies walked back inside, and I was standing, dusting the snow off. That was
it
? My entire boyhood I’d been unable to talk or move or resist out of fear of
that
? My head and ears were sore, so what.

I wanted to run back up there and try again. I wanted to set my feet and throw one into the big one’s face, but now couples were leaving, a few of the women lighting up, their pocketbooks swinging. Engines started to turn over and Leslie, a woman I knew from the college, another townie, was walking fast to her car. I could see her breath. “Andre, they’re coming for you. Like fifteen of them. I like your face just the way it is, honey. Please, you gotta get outta here.”

There was yelling inside. A door slammed out front on the street. Jeb and I looked at each other, and then we were running down the back alley along the floodwall, over iced cobblestones past dumpsters and concrete loading docks and stacked oak pallets, then up under the railroad trestle past the traffic lights onto the sidewalk of Comeau Bridge. Jeb was ahead of me, his hair bouncing, his bare arms pumping. His other slipper was loose, the sole of his foot pale in the flickering fluorescent light of the streetlamps on the bridge. A car passed us, its tires humming on the iron grid, then another, and I was waiting for the screech of brakes, for a carload of men to come get us and throw us over.

Soon we were in the bright light of the gas station on the other side, a stoner I knew from somewhere just hanging up the gas pump. His Camaro door was open, and the backseat was covered with eight-tracks and empty Marlboro cartons, Aerosmith blasting from his speakers as he drove me and my brother home.

He offered us hits off a joint, but we said no thanks. He pulled up to our house on Columbia Park, his stereo too loud, and we thanked him and heard his tires squeal on the ice behind us. Jeb went ahead of me up the path in the snow to our steps, his foot probably half frozen now. Like always, nearly every light in our house seemed to be on, each window lit up and uncovered, and I walked into it behind my brother and shut the door.
They’re coming for you.
I believed that, and my first thought was to turn off the lights and darken the house. The living room was empty, Mom out maybe, or up in her room. Suzanne, too, up in hers, listening to music by herself. Nicole locked in hers, reading or doing homework on a Saturday night. There was the feeling I’d brought danger to them, but also, miraculously, that I would take care of it, that whatever was coming, I was going to take care of it.

Jeb had found a jacket and wrapped it around his foot, and I was walking straight back to the bathroom, smiling, shaking my head, only now aware that the knuckles of my right hand were stinging and had been for a while, that first punch connecting, a right cross that came up from my back foot and into Steve Lynch’s sneering mouth. I ran warm water over my hands and soaped up and I looked in the mirror at the boy who hadn’t backed down or run away or pleaded. I was smiling at him, and he was smiling back at me.

There were Bobby’s and Sam’s voices now, talking fast and excitedly. I turned off the water and rushed out to the living room where they stood telling Jeb their story, that after Lynch went down the bouncer started kicking everyone out, but Sam hadn’t done anything and held his ground and the bouncer wrestled with him and Sam got low and punched him in the groin and he went down and three or four others rushed in to help and Sam gripped the doorjambs and kept yelling, “You can’t push me out! You can’t push
me
!”

But they finally did, right onto the sidewalk on Washington Street, the door slamming behind him. Sam walked around the corner and down the sloped alleyway into the parking lot. Bobby was there squaring off with two of Lynch’s boys. His eyes caught Sam coming across the lot.
“Sam?”

“Bobby?”

And Bobby punched the biggest one in the face, then yanked his jacket over his head and went to work on his body, the other backing off.

“And
you.
” Bobby turned to me. He was smiling wider and brighter than I’d ever seen him. Our living room looked small with him in it. “You fuckin’
nailed
him.”

I nodded and smiled, then I was laughing and I couldn’t remember feeling this good about anything in my life ever before.

“Hey, Jeb,” Sam said, “we found your slipper. It’s in the car.”

Jeb went outside for it. Bobby wanted to hear Sam’s story again about taking on the big bouncer, and Sam was telling it when Jeb’s voice came yelling from outside. “They’ve got sticks! You guys, they’ve got
sticks
!”

The three of us were pushing through the foyer and out the front door. A sedan had pulled up ahead of Sam’s Duster, the back door of his car open, its interior light shining on ice patches on the asphalt and the four men closing in on Jeb in the street. Each of them carried what looked like wooden clubs or broken chair legs, the three of us already there, four against four, Dana Lynch swinging his stick and yelling, “You’re dead, motherfucker!”

“I don’t think so.” The words came out of me, but my eyes were on the big one I’d already been in the snowbank with, the road slick under my feet, and Dana was slipping his way toward me. I could see his limp and remembered hearing months before about him getting his legs crushed between two cars at some party. Sam moved toward him, but the big one stepped in and pushed him back a step, and Bobby was calling to the others to make a move. Jeb stood in the middle holding his slipper, his foot still bare.

Sam, so used to ice under his feet, stepped around the big one and put one hand on Dana’s chest and began talking him down.

“Sam, I respect you, but my brother’s in the fuckin’
hospital,
man! He swallowed his two front
teeth.
”

Dana swung his club at his side, and now my mother was yelling from the porch that she’d called the cops and in seconds a cruiser’s spotlight was on us. The cop’s window rolled down. “Break it up or every single one of you are going to jail! You hear me? Now
screw
!”

Then Lynch and his boys were gone and we were back in the house, laughing again, though not quite as hard, Jeb pulling that slipper onto his damp, pink foot.

THAT NIGHT
I lay in the dark a long time and couldn’t sleep. Steve Lynch would have false teeth for the rest of his life and never be quite as handsome again, and it was because of me. I knew I should probably feel bad about this, but I didn’t. Not even a little. I kept seeing the pride and respect in Bobby’s and Sam’s eyes in the living room, the way they looked at me not only like I was one of them, but maybe even a special one of them, a guy with a gift; I only hit him once, and he was in the
hospital
?

I kept seeing his face as I punched it. I still couldn’t remember feeling the impact of the right cross, just the sight of him dropping like a switch had been turned off in his brain, the blood gushing from his mouth, the shock in his eyes and how white his cheeks and forehead looked, how I kept swinging and would have hit him every time if the bouncer hadn’t stopped me. How I wished he hadn’t. How I wished I’d hurt Lynch even more than I did.

BECAUSE STEVE
Lynch was seventeen, the town closed the Tap’s doors and they stayed closed the rest of the winter. Word was out, too, that I would soon be in the hospital myself. Not just from the Lynches and their friends but their cousins, the Murphy brothers. I didn’t know about this family connection till I saw them cruising by my gas station in a dented olive Chrysler, Dennis looking out the passenger window at me, his older brother Frank driving, two or three more in the backseat. My mouth dried up and I could feel my heart beating in my palms. I reached for the club and held it in my lap till the car disappeared under the railroad bridge for Lafayette Square. I stood and pulled open the slider to get some air.

Twice a day, while doing errands for his father, Bobby would pull up to the pumps in his pickup truck to check on me. Sam, too. He was a student at Merrimack College down in North Andover and at least once a day between classes he’d swing by in his Duster. I’d tell them both I was fine, that they were wasting their time. This was partly true because Dunkin’ Donuts was right up the hill, and there always seemed to be at least one cruiser parked there most of the morning or afternoon. Also, I worked the day shift on a busy street, what were they going to do? But really, I was more angry than scared. I didn’t like how some were still saying I’d sucker-punched Steve. A sucker punch was walking up to someone with a smile, then surprising him. Or tapping someone on the shoulder only to pop him once he turns around. Lynch had pushed my brother down the stairs and was calling me on and I gave him what he’d never expected. And since that one punch, it was as if I’d knocked a sandbag loose inside me and now a torrent of bad feeling had pushed aside all the other sandbags and I needed another place for it all to go. Another face.

SAM AND
I were doing weighted dips in the basement when Suzanne came downstairs crying. She wore a dark sweater and hip-hugger jeans and her eyeliner was smeared. After her rape, no one in the family talked about it much, and neither did she. She may have gone to a counselor once or twice, but I don’t think so, and now she knew for sure something she’d suspected for a long time: that Kench was cheating on her. He was living with a nurse named Denise over the state line in New Hampshire, and Suzanne wanted her things back, her record player, a turquoise ring of hers he’d liked and stuck on his finger. “Please, you guys, I don’t want them in
her house
.” She covered her face and Sam put his massive, sweating arm around her. In minutes we were driving north up the highway in our sweats, our muscles still pumped with blood.

The nurse lived in a trailer park in the pines. It was after ten on a weeknight and we were driving down a dirt road over exposed tree roots, a bed of pine needles running down the center. Most of the trailers were set back into the trees, their window curtains drawn, many of them dim or dark. Some of the mobile homes had small porches or decks built onto them, and there were grills and lawn chairs and a few flower boxes nailed to the rails.