Townie (27 page)

THE LYNN
Boys Club was a mile or so from my street, a brick building that when I first entered it smelled like cotton and sweat, glove leather and canvas and hair oil. From the front desk I could hear men’s voices, the chugging slappity-slap of a speed bag, then a heavy bag jerking on its chain, the shuffle of feet, a man calling “Time!”

I walked down concrete steps into the basement training room. It was dimly lit and crowded, the walls covered with fight posters. Beneath three bare bulbs, two boxers sparred in the ring. One was black, the other white, and when the black one lashed out with a quick jab or straight right or left hook, the white one would counterpunch instantly, his eyes two shadowed slits under puffy eyebrows, his blue mouthguard visible between his lips. They wore no headgear and the gloves were fight-size and both were young and fast and small, featherweights probably. Around the ring were six or seven folding chairs, half of them taken by other fighters, their hands wrapped. Against the left wall were four speed bags. A big man in a gray sweatsuit was working one of them in a steady rhythm, the inflated rubber bag bouncing up and back in triple time. On the concrete floor two boxers skipped rope, another was doing incline sit-ups, his hands locked behind his head, and two more were doing push-ups side by side, one going down while the other came up. To the right, in the fluorescent glare of an open doorway, hung three heavy bags, each one heavier than the last. A Latino boy was working on the smallest. He’d throw a body shot, then weave away from the swaying bag and come up on it with an uppercut or left hook. His hair was wet black ringlets he kept out of his face with a red bandanna, and I was turning my attention to a man on the heaviest heavy bag. He wasn’t much taller or bigger than I was, but he was throwing one-two combinations that rocked the long Everlast, the iron beam above vibrating. A knockout punch for sure.

There was the smack of leather on flesh, the hiss of air through the nostrils of the fighters every time they threw a punch, the scuff and squeak of their rubber soles, the
tip-tip-tip
of the skip rope, men grunting and breathing hard, the muffled pops of punches connecting with the heavy bags, and behind all this the constant staccato of the speed bag in the corner. The air smelled like testosterone and damp cotton and muscle liniment. I was about to walk to the lighted doorway when someone tapped my arm.

It was a short man in his seventies. He wore a thin brown sweater and his nose was a smudge on his face, his eyes deeply lidded. But it was his ears it was hard not to stare at; sticking to each side of his head was a gnarled clump of flesh.

“Who are you?”

“Andre.”

“French?”

“Yep.”

“You wanna fight?”

“Yeah, I do.”

He offered his hand, his knuckles twice the size of mine. “Tony Pavone.” He waved his arm at the room. “I train all these kids. We got the Gloves coming up down to Lowell. What’re you, a middleweight?”

I smiled and shrugged.

“Yeah, we need a middleweight. You want to start right now?”

I was still in my construction clothes and work boots, but I told him I’d be back the next night, and I was.

TONY PAVONE
had been the New England Champion in his weight class back in the thirties, and he trained everyone the same way. The workout started with three rounds of shadowboxing in the ring. At first no one was in there but me, throwing combinations at the air under the lights, bobbing under imaginary counterpunches, weaving into some hopefully evasive footwork before going back in and throwing more punches. I’d never done it before, and I felt silly till I saw four or five others doing the same thing. One climbed into the ring and worked alongside me. The others shadowboxed in the center of the concrete floor. A few times Tony would shout from the darkness beyond the ropes, “Keep your right up. Throw more jabs.”

After only three rounds I was breathing hard and my sweatshirt was sticking to my back. Now it was time for two rounds on the small heavy bag, then two on the medium, then two more on the heaviest. Earlier I’d wrapped my hands and it felt good to have those hitting gloves back on, that leather-sewn iron bar against my palms. Pavone walked around the gym in his wool sweater and worn gray dress pants and scuffed black shoes. He studied each fighter for a half minute or so. Whether they were in the ring or shadowboxing or working one of the bags, he’d offer a tip or he’d stay quiet. With me he was quiet till I got to the heavy bag, my eyes burning from the sweat, my shoulders sore from holding up my hands. I’d been trying to remember some of the combinations I’d learned from Bill Connolly, and I threw a jab, then a double left hook, weaved away from the bag, set my feet, and threw a right cross that sent an ache up my arm into my shoulder.

“That’s good power. That’s good.”

He walked away, and that’s all I needed to hear, though it was a surprise to me that I did; I already knew I had something good with my right cross, that it might be a knockout punch in the ring too, but it was just having a man older than my father take me in and say something about what he saw that felt like cool water on a dry tongue, one I hadn’t known was so dry.

Sam often talked about his own growing up, how his father had driven him to hundreds of practices and games, the coaches or ex-teachers or uncles he would sometimes go to for advice. But I’d had no coaches and until college had done my best to be invisible in the classroom. Whatever uncles I had were in Louisiana and they were uncles by a marriage that had ended years ago anyway. Somewhere, sometime I’d stopped expecting my father to father; maybe if he’d stayed with us, it would have been different, but even then there was the feeling that writing and running and teaching is where he seemed to put the truest part of himself. After those things, there seemed to be little extra energy or time for anything else. When I saw him now, it was usually at Ronnie D’s on the weekends and when I walked in his eyes would light up and he’d call me over to the bar and buy me a beer, put his arm around me as if we both knew more about the other than we did.

I finished my rounds on the heavy bag, then followed old and slightly hunched Tony Pavone to the ring.

L
IZ WAS IN
one of my father’s fiction writing classes. She was from Maine and had brown hair and bright hazel eyes and whenever she blinked a tiny indentation appeared above her nostrils. Pop told me she was a good writer, one of his most talented, and one night at Ronnie D’s I sat across from her in one of the booths. Under the bar noise we talked and sipped beer, then went for a drive where we kept talking, and now on weekends it was in her room I slept.

It was in Academy Hall on the Bradford College campus. She had a suite and a roommate, a small living room between the two bedrooms. On Saturday nights, Sam and Theresa and Liz and I would meet there, then go down to Ronnie D’s or one of the bars on the river in Haverhill. We’d drink till last call, then end up at Howard Johnson’s.

One Friday in the loud smoky noise, we four sat in a booth when Pop walked over from the bar. He only came down to Ronnie’s after all his disciplined rituals and duties were over, when he’d felt he’d earned the drinking he did there, and he usually looked relaxed and glad to be among some of his students, a few lawyers and off-duty cops he’d gotten to know, men from the mills he never would’ve met otherwise, and now his oldest son.

But tonight he walked over looking pained about something, angry, his cheeks red above his trimmed beard. I immediately thought of Peggy. Marriage trouble.

Sam stood up in the booth and offered Pop his hand. Pop shook it, said hello to Liz and Theresa, then asked me if we could talk over at the bar for a minute. I said yeah and followed him. We stood at the corner of the bar, the entire length of it thick with men and women two or three deep, their talk and laughter a constant sound, the jukebox playing a Stones song. Most of the women were smoking, blowing it out their nostrils or the sides of their mouths as they told stories or listened to stories or laughed at stories or looked pissed off about something. The air smelled like cigarette ash and smoke, sour beer, perfume and leather and the oak bar Pop and I leaned our elbows against, our shoulders touching. Pat Cahill’s big hands rested two glasses of beer in front of us. “These are on Jimmy.” Then Pat was back at the register, and Pop raised his glass to a man at the opposite end of the bar fifty people away, a small face in the neon light of the Budweiser sign in the window. In a few years he’d be dead from cirrhosis of the liver. Pop raised his glass to him in thanks, set it back on the bar, and said, “He hit her.”

“Jimmy? Who’d he hit?”

“No, Suzanne. Her fucking husband hit her.”

There was no sound, no voices or thumping music, no laughter or rattling ice in so many glasses, no empty beer bottles tossed into a box—there was the open back porch Suzanne got married on, a small wedding to this man she’d met at Hampton Beach. He was a roofer with a red beard and shoulder-length hair, and he liked her right away and she liked him and then the two families and a few friends were on an uncut lawn on a warm September afternoon witnessing their marriage. I watched from a picnic table I sat on with a few others, and I tried to push aside my concerns but there was something wrong with what I was seeing; Suzanne, twenty-three years old, was in a denim skirt and a white blouse. She’d lost some weight and looked pretty and hopeful standing there on the porch looking up into her groom’s face, smiling as the justice of the peace spoke. She held a small bouquet of flowers.

Keith was in jeans too and a light windbreaker, and maybe he wasn’t conscious they were even on his face, a pair of mirrored aviator sunglasses so that as Suzanne looked into his eyes and recited her vow, she was seeing only herself looking back.

And then at the reception, a fish fry at Pop and Peggy’s house on campus, the place overflowing with people, at the end of the night Sam and Theresa and I had decorated my Subaru for them, covered it with shaving cream and flowers, tied a dozen empty cans to the bumper, wrote with soap on the rear window
Just Married
. I met Keith in the downstairs bathroom to give him the keys. He stood at the sink trimming his beard. Maybe for the fancy hotel they were going to for the night, I didn’t know. But as he looked into the mirror at his own face, he appeared to me unburdened of something, a man just given a second chance.

“Your sister and me are gonna have such a good life together. Our kids’ll have everything they ever wanted. My son’s gonna get a fucking Maserati on his sixteenth birthday.”

How?
I wondered.
And why?

Last I’d heard they’d moved from Florida to California, that they’d rented a cabin up in the mountains and she was working in a fast food restaurant while he was roofing houses along the Pacific.

Now he hit her.

“She tell you this?”

“Wrote me a letter.” Pop’s eyes were on me, and it was then I could tell why he was telling me; he wanted to know what we were going to do about it.

My mouth was air, the rest of me too, my heart humming sickly. “In the
face
?”

Pop nodded. “She thinks he broke her eardrum.”

Now I was moving, my body solid again, stepping sideways between men and women in the loud happy haze to the bathroom, the stall door behind me, its wooden surface covered with inked initials and
fuck
s and
shit
s and
dick
s and phone numbers and crossed-out hearts. There were the smells of piss and deodorizer, of wet filter tips and varnished wood, and I saw Suzanne standing on the porch smiling up into Keith’s mirrored sunglasses, her bouquet, her clasped hands; then I saw her jabbing the broom straw into George Labelle’s face, kicking my attacker out of our house, and there was a pinch in my vocal cords, my yelling lost in all the barroom noise, my palms pushing against the stall till it pulled from its fasteners, the door wobbling as I hurried back to the bar and my father and the retribution that must now be delivered.

POP AND
I stood in his tiny kitchen lit only by the fanlight above the stove. Peggy and Nicole were downstairs asleep. He picked up the phone and called his old friend in San Francisco, a writer and bar owner, and told him the story and asked if he knew anyone there he could hire to break Keith’s legs. His friend said he’d make a few calls and get right back to him. I was pacing back and forth. “Let’s just fly out there and do it ourselves, Pop. Let’s just fuckin’ go out there tonight.”

Pop shook his head. “A pro will get there faster.”

The phone rang, and he picked it up. It was as if his friend had hung up and found someone standing right there at his bar.

“I’ll call you back.” Pop set the phone in its cradle, looked at me. “Five hundred.”

“For what?”

“To have his kneecaps broken.”

“Good,
fuck
him, I’ll pay for half.”

Pop still had his hand on the phone. He looked as if he were considering something.

“Call him back.”

He was looking at the window. Maybe he saw our reflections in it, or maybe he was thinking of Keith. I knew he liked him. In the months leading up to the wedding, he had spent a lot of time with him, drinking and shooting the shit. Many nights he’d invited him and Suzanne over to share a meal. When I’d called from Austin earlier that spring, he said, “Suzanne’s fallen in love with a red-bearded carpenter. He’s a good man, and he treats her well.”

And he’d seemed to, calling her honey and listening to her whenever she spoke, his eyes lit with a seeming gratitude at the world for bringing her to him.

Pop said: “We call him and give him one warning. Just one.”

“No, no fucking warnings.”

Pop was dialing their number. My fingertips and toes were buzzing, my mouth dry as paper; this was the time to set my feet and throw a right cross, no talk, no warning, just physical action, the only thing I’d ever found to work.

I did not want to hear this warning. I opened the kitchen’s back door and stepped out onto the porch. It was small and uncovered and I pissed over the side. There was a thin stand of trees, then the street and houses. Through the branches I could see lighted windows, the numbing flicker of a TV.

I finished and grasped the doorknob, but it was self-locking, and I had to take the steps and run around to the front. Luke barked once, then I was climbing the stairs back to the kitchen. Pop held the receiver to his ear, his eyes on the floor but not on the floor. His cheeks above his beard were a deep red. I was holding out my hand.

“You don’t sound like you’re listening, Keith. You’d better be fucking
listening
.” He pushed the phone at me. The receiver had no weight of any kind and my first words were just sounds coming out of my throat, but I knew what I’d promised him. “You under
stand,
Keith? Six feet under the leaves in some fucking woods somewhere, motherfucker.”

“That’s cool.” His voice was relaxed, like he was lying in a warm bath with a cold beer talking to good, good friends.

“Did you hear me, you piece of shit?”

“Yep, you too. Give our love to everybody. Bye now.”

In the hum of the dial tone Pop stood in the shadows of their small dining room looking at me. I hung up the phone, felt that old feeling again, that I was small and weak and invisible. His reaction the kind of non-reaction given to a nobody who can and will do nothing.

Many years later, Suzanne told me she was there with him when we called, that he spoke to us like we were phoning him just to shoot the shit. But for weeks afterward, I imagined shooting
him,
then digging a deep hole and rolling his body into it, filling it back up with dirt and broken rock and the roots I’d had to sever from any tree close to me.

THE FOLLOWING
morning Pop pushed aside his writing and wrote a short story in one sitting. It was called “Leslie in California.” When he handed it to me and I read the first line, I remembered again how good at this Pop was, that he wrote beautifully every time he tried. I was standing in his kitchen holding the typed manuscript in my hands. He stood there in his tank top and shorts and running shoes, a bandanna tied around his head. Luke was beside him, his tail wagging. But Pop’s face was like I’d rarely seen it, his eyes expectant and hopeful yet mournful, too. As if he were both proud and ashamed. It was a feeling I knew well, and he nodded and left the house for his workout. I sat at his and Peggy’s table and read this story of a young wife the morning after her drunk husband hits her, his remorse, her dawning awareness that she is in a permanently dangerous place.

I finished reading the last line, and I too felt proud and ashamed. Proud because my father was an artist at this, a man who had just written deeply and poetically from a woman’s point of view. But ashamed because he had done that. It felt like thievery to me. Like he had just stolen Suzanne’s experience and made it his own, and meanwhile Keith was still walking the earth untouched, unpunished, his in-laws’ warnings some distant echo in his head. And now this story for strangers to read.

How did this help my sister? What
good
did this do?

After his run, Pop asked me what I’d thought of the story. His bandanna was drenched. He pulled it off and ran his forearm along his hairline.

“It’s a good story.”

“I’m going to send it to her.”

“Good.” I nodded. It was a Sunday, and it was time to drive back to my apartment in Lynn. I gave Pop a half hug, tapped his sweaty back, and stepped out into the cold. I felt like a liar and a chickenshit.

MY MOTHER
sat across from me at Village Square, a breakfast place in Bradford set into a row of shops between Ronnie D’s and the Sacred Hearts church. It was midwinter on Saturday morning, and in front of us were plates of eggs and bacon, hot weak coffee, and she looked better than she had in years. Gone was the look of constant financial worry. Gone was the look that she was under a great weight she just could not hold much longer. Gone was the look, blue and still surprised, that she’d been left behind.

Instead, she was tanned, and her hair was nearly blonde again. She’d lost weight and her eyes were bright and if I’d ever seen her happier, I couldn’t remember when. She was talking of their life down in St. Maarten, Bruce’s work for his brother-in-law’s airfreight business, how much she enjoyed helping deliver food to restaurants, the white sand and green sea, the ice-cold Heinekens in the salt breeze.

I was glad for her. She seemed free of something, and she kept smiling at me. “Are you excited about graduate school?”

I sipped my coffee, shook my head.

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.” The place was crowded, people eating and talking and laughing, the waitresses delivering plates of waffles and sausage, the smell of hot coffee and syrup in the air. “It seemed like a plan for a while, but—I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you write?”

“Write?”

“Yes, honey. Go
write
.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because you were good at it in school.”

“What good does writing do, Mom? Who cares about making up stories? I want to do something important for people.”

It was as if I’d reached over and slapped her face with a damp rag. “I can’t believe you just said that, Andre. I won’t tell anyone you just said that.”

I didn’t say anything. She said more, but I was thinking of my father, of the story he wrote about Suzanne when he should have done something for her in
this
world, not the one in his head.

I changed the subject. We talked about Suzanne and her marriage to this man I still wanted to kill. We talked about Jeb and his baby son, Nicole and her last year of high school, the schools out West she was looking into. Our breakfast ended soon after that. I hugged my mother on the sidewalk, thanked her for the eggs. Sam and I were to meet at the Y in an hour, and I climbed into my Subaru and went driving. I drove over the Basilere Bridge and the Merrimack, up the hill of Main Street past the shopping plaza and library, GAR Park and the statue of Hannah Duston and her raised hatchet. I drove through Monument Square past the Exxon station and insurance company and the VFW hall.