Townie by André Dubus III Read Free Book Online

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