Townie by André Dubus III Read Free Book Online Page B

ones near the water covered with white and green barnacles. Half sunk in the mud were broken glass and a couple of tires, and we could see beyond this to the sun glinting off the river. It felt safe.
    Jeb, eleven and thin but taller than I was, started gathering up pieces of colored glass. Even then he was making things: little sculptures made from junk, pictures he drew, watercolors, and he was always taking things apart—fan engines, radios, once the back of our TV just to see how it worked. He needed to know how things worked.
    I was happy to stay down here forever. Go steal some plywood and some nails and tools and build a floor and walls under the pier, make it a place only Jeb and I would know about. It was going to be hard to get back to the house without being seen. We’d have to wait till dark.
    I heard the helicopter before I saw it, the thock-thock-thock of its massive blades, the way the water spread out smooth and rippling as it hovered over the middle of the river. Then there was an orange and white boat there too, the letters COAST GUARD painted on its bow, two men in black wet suits and scuba gear jumping into the Merrimack.
    We knew what they were looking for. People drowned in that river. It had one of the most dangerous currents in the country, especially here, at its mouth, and I wished we’d left then before the divers brought up the body. It was bloated to three times a man’s normal size, the round head matted with blond hair, the face a pale pumpkin, his mouth open, dark, and bottomless.
    We didn’t know how we’d get back home without being found, but Jeb dropped his pieces of glass and we both crawled fast out from under that pier and ran under the sun.
     
    THE HOUSE was almost always dirty. Whatever chores Mom would give us, we just did not do. But some days, cooped up in that small hot house, one or two of us would finally leave the TV, grab the broom, and start sweeping the floorboards, the narrow wooden stairs and hallway. We might wash the backed-up dishes in the kitchen, find the mop and scrub the floor. We’d go up to our rooms and make our beds, pick dirty clothes out of the corners, and stuff them into a garbage bag for when we went to the laundromat. Sometimes I’d go out to our tiny enclosed yard and sweep the concrete stoop. In the corner of the fence was a rusty rake and I’d use it on our dirt yard. I made straight even lines parallel to the fence. It was still a dirt yard, but standing on the concrete stoop after, looking down at it, our home seemed somehow more orderly, our lives within it more comprehensible.
     
    NONE OF Mom’s cars ever worked for long, but she was able to drive home the Head Start van and at least two Friday nights a month, she would load the four of us into it and take us on a Mystery Ride. If we asked where we were going, she’d say, “Who knows? It’s a mystery .”
    Suzanne, at thirteen, wearing hip-huggers and smoking Kools in her room, acted like she was too old for this game, but I think she secretly liked it as much as Jeb, Nicole, and I did, each of us sitting on our own seat, the windows open, the radio playing rock and roll, the warm air blowing in as we drove out of the South End and the abandoned buildings of downtown. Sometimes we’d get on the highway and go fast and leave it all behind. Or else Mom would stay on the back roads near the Merrimack, winding through groves of hardwood and pines where people with enough money lived in houses you could barely see from the road.
    Mom—only thirty-three years old, slender, and beautiful to men, I knew, because they were still always coming around—she nodded her head to the music and blew the smoke from her Pall Mall out the window and she sang along and tried to raise us all up out of the hole we were in. Soon we’d be hungry and somehow the mystery ended at Skippy’s, a hamburger joint built off a fast two-lane in the pine trees. The cheeseburgers were cheap and juicy, and they were