Townie by André Dubus III Read Free Book Online Page A

shirt and yanked me to my feet. He had the beginnings of a mustache and he smelled like B.O. and Pepsi, and I was holding on to his fists as he started dragging me to the front door, making grunting sounds, his body so much larger than mine. I had never spoken to him and knew him only by name and I knew he was going to kill me once he got me onto Lime.
    Labelle’s face jerked forward. His eyes began to water. He let go of me and covered his head, and that’s when I saw Suzanne and the broom she held, its stiff bristles she kept jabbing at his skull. “Get out! Get the fuck out !”
    Labelle turned and she poked him in the face. He blinked and jumped back. “ Shit! He paid me! Clay fuckin’ paid me!”
    “I said get out !” Suzanne jabbed him in the ear, the neck, the back of his head. Then he was fumbling with the doorknob and running across Lime Street to Clay waiting there on the sidewalk, his face a mixture of disappointment and amusement, his hit man kicked out of the house by my sister, my big sister Suzanne.
     
    SOMETIMES I’D have trouble breathing. I’d be standing in our small kitchen, my hands on the sink, and a big, invisible hand would squeeze my chest and rib cage. The room would start to tilt, and I’d sit on the floor awhile and stare straight ahead at the shifting wall. I’d stare at any blemish on my skin. I didn’t have many, but whenever I did I was convinced I’d been bitten by something poisonous—a spider or small snake that had slithered up from the river and into our house. I’d wake in the middle of the night and walk down the creaking stairwell to the bathroom and turn on the buzzing fluorescent light; I’d stare at a small red spot on my arm, convinced since I’d gone to bed that it had moved farther up toward my shoulder where it would soon disappear into my chest and heart and kill me. Sweat would break out on my forehead and the back of my neck. My mouth would be as dry as when Whelan chased me down the street. I didn’t want to give my mother something else to worry about, nor did I want her to see such fear and weakness in me, so I’d wake Suzanne in the tiny room she shared with Nicole. My older sister would climb out of bed and turn on the overhead bulb. She’d rub her eyes and squint down at the spot on my arm. “Andre, that’s a fucking zit. Go to sleep.”
     
    SUMMER CAME and now windows were open and there was Larry’s yelling, there was a woman yelling back at him or somebody else in another house, there was the canned laughter and commercial jingles of six or seven TVs, there was a bottle breaking, a drunk singing, a motorcycle or lowrider revving its engine, then peeling away from the curb, there were the smells of hot asphalt, the dusty concrete of broken sidewalks, cat shit and dog shit and gasoline, there was the wood baking in the lumberyard near the Merrimack, again the faint smell of sewage and motor oil and mud, and when the wind blew in from the east you could smell the ocean, dead seaweed and open seashell and wet sand, and it was a Saturday and Jeb and I were running from Clay and Labelle and two others I didn’t even know; they’d come walking down the middle of Lime Street under the sun and seen us sitting on our stoop doing nothing.
    “Get ’em!”
    And we were up and running down Lime and across Water Street. We climbed a rusted chain-link fence and came down on a pallet of plywood and jumped off it to the ground. We ran past a forklift, its driver watching us under his cap, a cigarette between his lips, and my chest hurt and the air was too hot but we couldn’t stop and we ran past stacks of naked two-by-fours and two-by-sixes and two-by-eights, and we climbed onto this last stack and leapt over the fence into high weeds and chunks of broken cinderblock, and we kept running.
    We ended up under a pier on the river. It was cool and shaded under there. We crouched beneath heavy planks and cross timbers, their posts black with creosote, the lower