Townie (26 page)

But I liked Ronnie D’s. I liked how crowded and dimly lit it always was. The only light came from amber lamps in the walls of the wooden booths and from behind the bar, and that’s where Big Pat Cahill worked slow and steady tapping off glasses of beer, pouring shots of blackberry brandy and peppermint schnapps, ringing up purchases on an old brass cash register beneath the painting of a nude woman reclining on her elbow, her belly and breasts exposed, a blanket draped over her hip. Pat had a long brown beard and hair he tucked behind his ears. His voice was low and stony, and he wore black T-shirts all year long, and at closing when the lights would come up, the bar crammed with drunk men and women in a smoky haze, another bartender would yell, “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay
here
!” This was a line people ignored, but then Pat would bellow, “Everyone the fuck out!
Now!
” And we’d drain our drinks and beers and head for the door.

By nightfall, the place would be full of people I’d known and not known for years. Faces from high school, or men and women I’d seen in the streets. They stood crowded at the bar or sat at the cocktail tables or in the booths against the wall that Sam and Theresa and I preferred. We’d drink and laugh and talk. Because he’d lived in this town his entire life, Sam knew far more people than I did. Men from his old hockey team, maybe a coworker from the paper, or a friend of his parents or one of his many aunts and uncles and cousins. Now and then, one or two would sit in the booth with us for a while as we drank beer after beer. Every half hour or so, the cocktail waitress would come by to take another order and she’d start to clear the table, but we’d ask her to leave the empty bottles where they were; for some reason we liked to see evidence of all we drank, as if we were measuring just how much fun we were having.

And it
was
fun, though back in Texas all that book-learning had seemed to open doors inside me that led to a higher part of myself, one that was more evolved and thoughtful, reasonable and idealistic; in the Northeast again, working construction in Lynn, trying to study at night but losing interest, lifting and drinking with Sam, I was at the mercy of something; every time a man laughed too loudly or yelled above the crowd, I’d sit up and look over there, expecting to see trouble and ready to jump back into the heart of it. Most of the time it was nothing, though; Ronnie D’s was a friendlier bar than those across the river in Haverhill. The customers were regulars who knew each other, and besides, there was Pat to deal with.

Sometimes I’d go home with a woman. Wake up in an apartment or house I didn’t recognize. Turn to see the sleeping face of someone I did not know, her brown curly hair on the pillow, or red, or straight and blonde, my clothes on the rug, hers too, once a leopard-skin outfit I stepped over on my way out the door.

But most nights I’d leave with Sam and Theresa, and the three of us would drive down along the river past the closing bars and men and women milling on the sidewalks, smoking cigarettes, laughing, and we’d head under the railroad bridge up River Street past pawnshops and sub shops, a machine shop, a car dealership of repossessed cars, then along the black Merrimack to the highway and Howard Johnson’s where we’d wait for a table and order eggs and home fries, toast and pancakes and coffee.

One night at Ronnie’s, the last-call lights up and shining on us like a cop’s, Sam and Theresa and I were in a crowd close to the door. Pat had switched off the jukebox and now there were only loud, drunken voices, so much cigarette smoke in the air my eyes burned. Theresa was wearing a short leather jacket and tight jeans, her back to the booth behind her. A man sat there against the wall, one leg up, his arm resting on it, and his eyes were on Theresa’s ass. There was another man sitting across from him, but I was seeing only this one. He had long black hair and wore a black sweater, his sideburns shaved off halfway across his jaw. He reminded me of Kenny V., who years ago had walked me and Cleary out of a pot party on Seventh and started whaling away on my head and rib cage. The waitress had cleared all the bottles away, so now I held a glass of beer and sipped from it. Theresa was talking to somebody, laughing, and the man in the booth said something to the other, then raised his eyebrows and nodded in the direction of Theresa’s ass, and I leaned forward and dumped my beer in his face.

It was like pushing the button to some rusty old machine whose functions were simple but automatic: the man in the booth was standing up now, yelling, his face dripping, but he was the first moving part that touched the next moving part that touched the next. I don’t remember punching him or his friend, but Sam had gotten into it with a tall man in a light windbreaker at the bar and with one hand under the man’s chin, Sam pushed him up and over it. Then Pat was moving fast and hollering and we were all outside, two cruisers pulling up to move us along, this raucous band of people I only saw when drunk.

The next morning I lay in bed thinking about it. The shock in the man’s face, then the outrage. And why shouldn’t he feel that? What was so wrong about just looking at Theresa’s ass? As long as he was quiet about it, and she didn’t see him do it and so didn’t feel objectified and violated, what was wrong with that? Didn’t I look at women like that all the damn time? So who was I to do what I did? Again, there was this almost electric hum in my bones that I had somehow gotten myself wired wrong, that now I was stuck with impulses I could not control, ones that could lead to nothing but deeper and deeper trouble.

SOMETIMES I’D
sleep in Pop’s spare bedroom. When I was in Texas, he and Peggy had gotten married, and they moved back into the same campus house Pop had shared with Lorraine. Since marrying Peggy he seemed happier now. He said it was because they lived the same way; they were both writers and readers and runners. Each morning after he attended the 7 a.m. Mass down at the Sacred Hearts church, he would write at the desk in their bedroom, and she would work in the study upstairs. Then they’d each go for a run or fast walk, sometimes alone, sometimes together with their dog, a big golden retriever named Luke. The rest of the day, she worked on her graduate degree in writing and Pop taught his classes. It was like seeing him live with one of his buddies, the ones like Metrakos who wrote or studied, then worked out, but now he had this in his wife, and I was happy for him. It looked like this time he’d be able to stay married.

Since Suzanne’s rape, my father had begun to acquire an arsenal of handguns. Besides the .38 snub-nose, he now owned a .380 semiautomatic, a .45, a 9-millimeter, and a .22 caliber derringer that easily fit into the front pocket of his jeans. He even bought Peggy a lady’s-size nickel-plated Saturday Night Special, a revolver he insisted she keep with her whenever she drove up to the University of New Hampshire for her classes. On his birthday the August before, Jeb and I pitched in and bought him a replica of a .22 Colt six-gun. It was silver and had smooth maple handgrips, and he kept it in a leather holster on a closet shelf with the others.

One weekend that fall, Pop and Peggy were invited by the novelist Thomas Williams and his wife to spend the night at their cabin up in the White Mountains. Pop asked me if I wanted to come along, and I said yes. Maybe that weekend I wanted to get away from the pull of the barrooms and their warm, smoky noise, the beer-by-beer sinking into mindlessness, the naked body I’d sometimes wake up to; maybe I wanted to get away from the possibility of another fight, or perhaps it was just clarity I was looking for, a little distance from the hard physical labor of the week, my distracted efforts at reading abstract political theory at night, my low-down yearnings come Friday and Saturday.

On the two-hour drive north, I sat in the back of Peggy’s Subaru while Pop drove and she sat beside him, and they talked. I learned more about Thomas Williams, that he won something called a National Book Award for his novel
The Hair of Harold Roux,
that with his own hands he had built this cabin one summer with his wife of many years.

After a while we left the highway and drove miles down a rutted dirt road, thick stands of pine and hardwood on either side of it. At the end was the Williamses’ place, a shaved-timber cabin with a steeply pitched gable roofed with cedar shingles, and beyond it a sloping field of wild grass, then deep woods that rose into a mountain ridge. In the last light of the afternoon, it was purple and blue on the horizon, and Thomas and Elizabeth Williams stepped off the porch to greet us. They were warm and welcoming and right away I liked them both. Tom Williams wore a faded work shirt and jeans and work boots. His face was clean-shaven, deeply lined and handsome, and when he shook my hand it was like shaking the hand of Trevor D. or Doug or Jeb, the thick pad of calluses just beneath the base of the fingers, the kind you get from swinging a hammer.

Pop had brought up a few handguns, and soon he and Thomas Williams and I were taking turns shooting at a playing card Williams had clamped to some brush with a clothespin. We were using the .380, a semiautomatic with a hair trigger that allowed you to empty the clip in seconds, your hand kicking back, the smell of cordite in the air. But when it was my turn I didn’t want to look young and impulsive, so I shot it slowly and deliberately. I aimed it with one arm and sighted down its short barrel, the playing card a white rectangle in green, and I held my breath, then squeezed the trigger, the card fluttering.

“He could’ve been a Marine, too,” Williams said. He and Pop were behind me, Williams sitting on a homemade picnic table smoking a pipe. The sun on the trees had darkened, and I felt pride from what Williams had said. I took my time with my next five shots, hitting the card with three of them.

I lowered the .380, released the magazine, then pulled back on the slide and checked the chamber to make sure it was empty. I handed it to Pop handle-first, the safe way he’d taught me when I was a boy, and I could see the pride in his eyes too, but it was as if there was a fishhook lodged in my skin somewhere: Williams’s words,
could’ve been a Marine
. They echoed up against something inside me I hadn’t been aware of, that even though I had plans for graduate school in less than a year, there was the feeling I had done very little with my life so far and still wasn’t doing much.
Could’ve been.
Like it was too late. Like I’d been letting chances to do things slip by.

My father reloaded the .380, stepped past me, and said, “Rape who, motherfucker?” Then he raised the weapon and fired six rounds in seconds, the reports echoing out over the field of wild grass into the trees.

“Hello?
Hello?
” A man in hiking boots and shorts was waving at us thirty feet to the right, our target just on the other side of what was a trail. Pop lowered the pistol and Williams apologized to the man and we gathered up our guns and ammo and went inside.

We ate at a weathered oak table on a small deck overlooking the field and mountain ridge, black now against a red sky. Dinner was grilled steaks and French bread and tossed green salad. I sat beside Pop and Peggy, who sat across from the Williamses. The conversation was warm and relaxed, though a lot of it was between Peggy and Elizabeth, and Williams and Pop, and there were glasses of red wine, and we passed around the bread and broke it off with our hands. I kept looking at Elizabeth and Tom Williams. They were a good-looking couple, their kids grown already, and I thought about them building this cabin together one summer, the sharing of all that work, the joy in it. I ate the tender meat and sipped my wine; so many of the writers from my parents’ early days in Iowa City had gone on to sleep with other people, their marriages cooling piles of ash they left behind. It was something my father had been writing about for years. But the Williamses were obviously different, and I did not know till that moment that I had assumed writers just could not stay married, that something inside them—maybe the dark side of their creativity—simply made them unstable.

Before dessert I thanked Thomas and Elizabeth Williams for dinner and excused myself to go sleep outside somewhere. Elizabeth insisted I take their guest room and Tom said something about bears, but I said good night, borrowed one of their flashlights, and carried my rolled sleeping bag down the path into the trees.

The trail descended alongside the field for a while, then cut south and rose steeply into the pines. The beam from the flashlight bounced ahead of me, and I was breathing hard and had no idea why I was doing this. The trail began to level off onto a small clearing of flat rocks. Between two of them was a patch of dirt. A young pine sprouted there, and it looked as good a place as I would find in the dark, and I set my flashlight on one of the rocks, unrolled my sleeping bag, untied my work boots, and climbed in. I lay back, but when the moist earth touched my head, I grabbed one of my work boots and set it on its side, then rested back against it. I reached up and switched off the flashlight.

The air was cool. It smelled like moss and pine needles and through the trees I could hear my father laugh, then Peggy or Elizabeth. They had to be at least a half mile away, but they sounded much closer than that. I closed my eyes and listened to the voices in the trees. Only the men’s now. Pop and Thomas Williams, two people who, when they were young, had both found something they were good at and then just kept doing it. They seemed more whole to me because of that. But what was
I
good at? Why was I even here? Not in the White Mountains but here, on
earth
?

Then I saw Steve Lynch go down with one punch, the two frat boys in the alley. There was Bill Connolly’s nephew I seemed to hit at will in the ring, Sam Dolan too, his eyes tearing up each time I jabbed.

Maybe I was meant to be a boxer. The signs were there, weren’t they? What was stopping me? I’d learned that to hesitate was to freeze and to freeze was not to fight, and so now I never hesitated; my body responded the way I had somehow taught it to, but lying there in my sleeping bag between two stretches of rock, it was clear it was time my head got involved in all this again, that there had to be a fine balance between passivity and reckless action, and maybe the place to find it was back in the ring.