Townie (9 page)

I could have told my father about her, or her father, Daryl Woods, whom our mother got to know from her work somehow. He was short and wore tight jeans and motorcycle boots, his mustache thick and blond. One night he and my mother went out for a drink at the VFW off Monument Square. They were sitting on stools at the bar when a muscular kid with a long ponytail walked in and asked Daryl for a light. Woods looked him over and told him to get lost. The kid pushed him and Daryl Woods threw a short right into his face and dropped him.

It was winter, and when I got up for school the next morning, the house still dark, the hallway lit up Daryl Woods sleeping on the wicker couch in the living room. He was snoring, his arm over his eyes, and I could see the dried blood and stitches in his forearm from his wrist to his elbow. After their drink, my mother and Daryl had gotten back into our car, a used red Toyota. Mom said she’d just started it up when that same muscled kid with the ponytail ran up to her side of the car and yelled, “Duck, lady.” Then he threw a Molotov cocktail past her face at Woods in the passenger side, the bottle smashing against his raised forearm, glass and gasoline spraying over them both. But the fuse had gone out and my mother was flooring it, downshifting and swearing, the kid in the street behind them swearing back.

The inside of the car smelled like gas for weeks.

One March afternoon, at a day party down on Seventh, Cleary and I taking the joint passed to us in the loud smoking noise, a couple of rent collectors told us to beat it and before we could stand and go, they yanked us up and pushed us down the stairs. They kicked open the door and shoved us onto the plywood porch, then off it into the mud. I remember Cleary saying, “C’mon, Ricky, we didn’t do nothin’. C’
mon.
”

And Ricky J., who months later would get stabbed in the same apartment he was kicking us out of, punched Cleary in the face, his head snapping back, a whimper coming out of him as Kenny V. shouldered me up against the porch, then, without a word, started throwing punches into my chest and ribs and arms. I covered up and he smacked me in the forehead and the temple and I raised my hands and then he went to work on my body. But he wasn’t hitting as hard as Clay Whelan had, and a voice in my head said,
This is it? This is all?
I nearly clenched my fist and started punching back. But they both carried Buck knives and the one whaling on Cleary, Ricky J., was on top of him now, punching him over and over in the head.

Then it was done. They were on the porch breathing hard, looking down at us. Cleary was just getting to his feet, blood dripping from one eye and between his teeth.

Ricky J. lit up a cigarette and flicked the match over our heads. “No more fucking moochers. Now
screw.
”

Before we were even to the street Cleary started laughing. He turned and yelled, “Fuckin’
losers
!,” and we ran up the hill and across Main Street and down the alley to his house and mother.

There were the Murphy brothers, four of them. They’d drive up to house parties where they didn’t know anyone. Walk in, drink what they wanted, smoke what they wanted, eat what they wanted, grab the butt or breasts of any girl or woman nearby, and if anybody ever said anything to them about it or even looked at them wrong, they’d jump him right there, four of them on one.

Dennis was the youngest. He was tall and had dirty blond curly hair and a cracked front tooth. It was a warm afternoon in April or May, and Jeb and Cleary and I were walking back from Round Pond, a reservoir where there were woods and you could find kids smoking dope there in the trees, or passing Tall Boys around in front of a fire till somebody called the cops or the fire department and you’d run and not look back. That afternoon Cleary taught us how to get high just by breathing deep and fast for a full minute, then have someone put you in a bear hug and squeeze till you felt your brain float up and fizz out the top of your head. I was afraid to do it, it seemed dangerous to me. Bad for your heart. But I watched Jeb squeeze Cleary and dump him in the pine needles where he lay a long time, his eyes closed, his mouth open. When he came to he was pale, but he smiled and said, “That was
boss.
That was so friggin’
boss.
”

We were on the sidewalk close to Monument Square. There was a sub shop there between a drugstore and convenience store. Sometimes the owners tossed out a pizza or a sub nobody ever picked up for takeout, and we’d find them in the dumpster out back, still warm and in the box or wrapped tightly in white deli paper.

“Hey, faggots!” It was Dennis Murphy. He ran across the street, then fell in step with us as if we knew him, as if we were friends. “How’s it hangin’? Suckin’ any hog?”

We never stopped walking and he walked with us. He had a light pine branch in his hand a foot and a half long, and he was slapping it against his palm as he walked. My heart was beating fast, and my mouth had gone gummy. We were getting close to the square, the gas stations and shops, cars driving around the statue of the Union soldier in the middle of the asphalt. An old woman was walking in our direction on the sidewalk ahead of us. She was short and small. Her hair was white. Even though the air was warm she wore a thin coat buttoned to the top, and she carried two full grocery bags, one in each arm. I started to move to the side. I remember hoping Murphy wouldn’t say anything about sucking hog as we passed her. Her eyes had been on the concrete, on where it was cracked and where it was heaved and buckled, but now she looked up at us and she seemed to pull her groceries in tighter. None of us moved to the side and she had to nearly step in the street as we passed and that’s when Murphy flicked his branch out and slapped her face, her eyes blinking and tearing up, and he kept walking. We all kept walking. Cleary laughed like he thought it was funny when I knew he didn’t. I don’t remember what Jeb said or did, but I did nothing. The old woman was yelling something at us. I could hear the shock in her voice, the outrage. She said something about the police and her dead husband. She yelled, “I hope you’re
proud
of yourselves,” her voice tremulous. And to walk beside Dennis Murphy for even another heartbeat felt like poison to my own blood, but I kept walking.

In my visits with Pop once a month, I could have told him that story, or the others, but why would I?

O
NE WEDNESDAY IN
late spring, Pop set up a hibachi grill outside on the half-wall alongside his apartment building. The air was cool and I could smell the lighter fluid he’d just lit up, the mud in the street drains. There was about an hour of daylight left and my father was throwing a ball to me on the sidewalk.

It was a baseball that belonged to one of his roommates. For a while Pop looked in his buddy’s bedroom for a couple of gloves too, and I was relieved he didn’t find them. I was fourteen but wouldn’t know what to do with a baseball glove. What hand do you put it on? How do you catch a ball in it?

So we stood forty feet away from each other on the sidewalk and threw bare-handed. Soft arcing tosses that were fun to catch.
Fun.
At first, as the white ball sailed at me, I tensed up and jumped at it with both hands. But then, as I kept catching it, I began to look forward to catching it again, to see it spin in the air as it came, its dark stitching rotating. I had no idea how to throw it back. I have a vague memory of my father telling me to lift my leg, to throw over my shoulder, though he may not have. But I knew we were talking about something as we threw the ball back and forth, an occasional car passing in the street beside us, the charcoal glowing hotter for our burgers, and there was so much surprise in his face that I clearly had no experience with a baseball whatsoever, that I did not know one thing about it. I could see he didn’t want to draw too much attention to this. In my father’s eyes above his trimmed beard, I saw pity for me, and maybe I began to feel sorry for myself too, but what I remember most is being surprised that he was surprised. What did he think kids did in my neighborhood? What did he think we
did
? But how could I tell him anything without incriminating us all, especially my mother, whom he would blame? And when we sat down to eat at his tiny table in his tiny kitchen we were both quiet and ate too quickly, so much to say there was nothing to say.

ONE WEEKDAY
morning, I woke late and was surprised to hear Mom’s voice downstairs. She and Bruce were talking in the front room. I dressed and walked to the first floor. The sun was out and shone through the window across the dusty rug. From Suzanne’s room I could hear Mick Jagger singing how beautiful Angie was. It sounded like Mom and Bruce were arguing about something, which didn’t happen too often. I climbed the stairs to my sister’s room.

Suzanne sat on her mattress, her back against the wall. She was smoking a cigarette, and when I walked in she looked up and stubbed it out as if she’d been waiting for me.

“You hear what happened?” She blew smoke out the side of her mouth.

“No, what?”

“Jeb tried to kill himself last night.”

“What?”

She told me how sometime after midnight our thirteen-year-old brother had called a rock station down in Boston, how he’d requested a drum solo, how he’d crept outside with Bruce’s car keys, a blanket, tape, and our vacuum cleaner’s hose, how he then attached it to the exhaust pipe of Bruce’s Jaguar XJ6, how he taped it airtight, then pushed the other end into the crack above the back window and stuffed the blanket around it till it, too, was airtight. How he climbed in behind the wheel, started the engine, and waited.

Maybe if Bruce hadn’t been a drinker, Jeb would have died, but Bruce woke needing to piss and that’s when he’d heard his engine idling out in the driveway. That’s when he went out there and found Jeb half-conscious behind smoky glass. That’s when he jerked open the door and pulled our brother out, switched off the Jaguar, and walked Jeb up and down the street till his head had cleared.

“Jeb wrote Mom a note. I guess Janice fucking Woods broke his heart or something.”

Mick Jagger was singing on about Angie, how he still loved her. Suzanne shook her head at me. I stared down at her floor, shaking my head too. There was a twisting in the marrow of my bones, a twisting that vibrated with sound.
You should’ve done something. You knew Janice Woods was bad news. Why didn’t you do something?

“Where is he?”

“School. Mom’s pissed at Bruce ’cause he didn’t even wake her up last night to tell her about it.”

THAT AFTERNOON
after school I waited on the porch steps for my brother. It was a warm day in spring, and I could smell damp earth, the dry paint of the railing. Soon he was walking down Columbia Park, then he was standing on the sidewalk in front of me. He was smiling guiltily and his cheeks were pale, his T-shirt ripped under the collar. I stood. “You try something like that again,
I’ll
fucking kill you.”

“Sure, governor.” He said this in a British accent, smiling through me as he climbed the steps and brushed past me. We both knew I was full of shit. We both knew I wasn’t capable of killing anyone.

Jeb may have gone to a counselor after that, but I don’t think so. The days became again what they were, and life continued as it was.

BECAUSE THERE
was never a mother or father home in the afternoons, our big rented house on Columbia Park became another place for kids to gather and get high. There were some from the bus stop and the avenues, Nicky G. and Glenn P., Bryan, and Anne Marie and Dawn, but also many people I’d never seen before. Some were grown men, their motorcycles on the sidewalk leading to our porch. By three in the afternoon, the house would be thick with pot and cigarette smoke, the stereo Bruce bought us blaring in the front room: the Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, Ten Years After, Pink Floyd. In the living room, girls would be sitting on the laps of their boyfriends, some of them sharing a beer or cigarette or joint. In the dining room, at the table that came with the house and one we rarely used, five or six would be playing 45, using for an ashtray their beer cans or one of our cereal bowls.

I hadn’t moved up to the attic yet, and my room was still on the second floor in the back of the house across from Jeb’s. I’d go up there and shut the door behind me. I’d lie on my bed and try to ignore the weekday afternoon party voices and laughter, the yelling or loud trash-talking from Nicky G. or one of the rent collectors from Seventh who’d started coming around too. I’d lie there and imagine being a different kind of kid, one who could walk downstairs and open the front door and yell at them all to just get the fuck out. And when they wouldn’t, I’d jerk the men to their feet one at a time. They’d swing at me, and I’d duck and then start hurling punches and kicks like Billy Jack, smashing bones and severing arteries, all with my hands and feet.

Instead I stayed in my room and waited for the sun to go down and for them to drift off, two or three at a time.

Still, some would come around at night. Once, close to ten o’clock, Mom lay on the floor in front of the TV in her work clothes, a pillow under her head, her cheap coat covering her like a blanket. A knocking echoed from the front door and Nicole got up and answered it. I was sitting in a wicker chair. I was half asleep, but there was a mild electrical current telling me that
I
should have gone to the door, not my ten-year-old sister.

She walked back into the room. Her back was held erect with her scoliosis brace, her chin resting on its plastic collar. “It’s Glenn P. He wants to talk to Suzanne.”

Mom opened her eyes. “Well you tell Glenn P. to go take a flying fuck.”

Nicole turned and walked through the hall to the door. I could see her red hair pulled back over the rear collar of her brace. “Um, my mom says for you to go take a flying fuck.”

If Glenn P. said something back, Nicole didn’t repeat it. She locked the door and walked back into the living room and sat down with her homework.

ONE RAINY
afternoon in April, I came home to another full house and I went straight upstairs and there was Kip L. and Donna H. coming down the narrow hallway. He was half a foot taller than I was but lighter, his skin white, blue veins and capillaries standing out in his arms and hands. People said he shot heroin, and I was sure that’s what he and Donna H. had been doing up here, maybe in the bathroom, but her halter top was unbuttoned and beneath the flared hem of her hip-huggers were bare feet. As she passed me in the narrow hallway she smelled like sweat and Kip L.’s leather jacket.

They didn’t say anything, and I didn’t either. Then they were back downstairs and I walked into my room. Rain pattered against the window. The only light was gray and shadowed, and I flicked on the overhead bulb. Lately I’d been making my bed some mornings, pulling the top blanket or bedspread tight at the corners. I could see it was still made but rumpled, and there, in the middle of my mattress, was a spot of wetness the size of a quarter.

ONE WEEKDAY
morning I’d somehow woken before anyone else and went down into the kitchen to see what there might be to eat. Usually the inside of the fridge was nearly empty shelves, but I was reaching for its handle anyway when I heard the hissing. I turned to see the blue flames of the front burner. It had been going all night. Inches away was a greasy Burger King bag on a stack of dirty dishes, and I rushed over and switched off the gas. The air was warm and smelled like scorched metal.

That night, long after everyone was in bed, I lay on my mattress and pictured the flames climbing the walls, thick smoke filling the hallway, snaking under our doors, blackening the glass of the windows, suffocating us before the fire even made it to where we slept. I got up and went downstairs and checked the knobs of the oven and stove. I touched each one five times, turning it to
OFF
and holding it there. But this did not seem to be enough. I moved to anything electrical and unplugged it, too. I started with the kitchen clock. I hurried to the lamps in the living room, even the stereo and TV, unplugging them all. Then I moved quickly to the front door and checked the lock, again having to touch the cool metal five times to make sure. I crept through the dark house to the back door and did the same there. Then I climbed the stairs and lay in bed and tried to sleep. I’d think of my brother wanting to die; I’d see the exhaust pipe and the vacuum cleaner hose, and I’d hear the drums on the radio, feel the carbon monoxide entering my lungs like a thief.

JEB AND
I began building again. The backyard was small and square, probably thirty feet by thirty feet, but in the far corner away from the house was that tall beech tree. Tacked into its trunk at its base was the corner post for the side and rear fences, short rotting planks on rails, the one we hopped over to get to Cleary’s house down the back alley to Main Street. It was the one we hauled our stolen lumber over, too.

Cleary helped us. At the bottom of the avenues on Primrose Street, not far from a Catholic church and cemetery, was a lumberyard. They kept most of their wood outside under tarps surrounded by a ten-foot chain-link fence, but there was no barbed wire at the top and lately they’d been tossing used pallets on the sidewalk outside.

At night, long after we’d eaten and Mom had dozed off, Jeb and Cleary and I would run down Seventh past the lighted noise of the apartments, the dogs barking, TVs blaring. We’d get down to Primrose where every other streetlamp was out, the lumberyard lit up with only one security light over the door to the office, and we’d check the street for a passing cruiser, then stack those pallets and climb up and over, the points of the fence sometimes catching on our pants or shirts, and we’d drop down onto a stack of plywood and head for the eight-foot two-by-fours and two-by-sixes. They were pale white in the shadows and smelled like dry wood and were hard and smooth under our hands, and we yanked them from their stack and leaned them against the fence, then pushed them up and over to the first of us down on the other side.

We needed nails, too. The office and warehouse were locked and there was that light over the office door, but lying in the black shadows around the corner were discarded sections of steel bands that had been cut away from what they’d held together. There was loose rope and spools of cable, more pallets, and all along the asphalt up against the warehouse were scattered loose screws and nails. We’d pick up as many as we could and load up our pockets. When I climbed back up over the fence, I thought it was the fence poking my thigh, but it was the nails, fifteen or twenty of them.

It seemed like we’d been in there a long time. We walked back up into the avenues where very few of the streetlights worked, most of our walk safely in shadow, and we passed the tin-sided houses with no front yards, the shades or curtains drawn, each of us carrying no more than three or four two-by-fours over our shoulders, but we walked along like men who worked, men who had actually earned what they carried.

WE WERE
building a tree house in that beech in the backyard. Our landlord had a shop in the basement, and we went down there and found a couple of hammers and a handsaw. In the garage, hanging on the wall, was a wooden ladder, and within a day or two we’d built a fairly level platform fifteen feet up in the branches of the tree. For the flooring, we’d stolen a sheet of plywood from one of the stacks in the lumberyard, but it took two of us to carry it back home, and when we went back for more a few nights later, there were bright floodlights shining down into the yard and the warehouse and office.

Cleary stood there in the dark, his hair over one eye. “Holy shit.” Then there was the sound of something heavy sliding over the asphalt, then a rattling, then a German shepherd charging us till the chain yanked straight. And we ran.

We needed walls and a roof. Weeknights we wandered up and down the avenues looking for scrap piles behind houses, but there seemed to be a dog chained in every third or fourth lot. Once we hopped a fence and dropped down into a packed-dirt yard. There was a motorcycle, a lawn chair, and a picnic table. In the corner a couple of bikes leaned one against the other, and Newburyport and Cody Perkins and whoever had hopped over our fence and stolen our bikes came rushing back and I began to feel like somebody I didn’t want to be, an exterior light coming on and shining on the three of us. “You motherfuckers want to get shot?”