Townie Read online

  LATELY SUZANNE had been going to parties in the projects on Summer Street. It was on the other side of the cemetery, and Russ Bowman lived there. He was only fifteen or sixteen, but he had long blond hair he kept tied back in a foot-long pony tail. He had sideburns and big arm muscles he showed off in the T-shirt and biker vests he wore. I heard kids say he stabbed someone. I heard others say he raped a girl and got away with it. One night in the fall, after nine when our mother was still at work, Jeb and I went looking for Suzanne in the projects. Nicole had stayed home alone. The projects was a cluster of concrete buildings that smelled like piss and wine. There was a dark loud party, a bunch of teenagers in a hot room smoking dope while the Jackson 5 sang on the record player about ABC being as easy as 1, 2, 3. Jeb was tall for eleven, his hair long and frizzy. He put his arm around the shoulders of a cute Dominican girl, and Russ Bowman rose up out of the shadows and grabbed Jeb by the throat and backhanded his face. “She’s mine, you little shit. Beat it.”

  I stood there. I stood there with my heart fluttering, a sick hole in my gut, and I wanted to do something, anything, but it was Russ Bowman, so I did nothing. My brother stared down at the floor like he was trying to figure out what he’d done wrong. Bowman shoved him out of the room, and I followed him onto the street.

  WHENEVER THERE was a fight at school you would know it because dozens of boys and girls would be rushing to one spot like they were being pulled there by the air itself. There’d be yelling and screaming. Someone would yell “Fight!” and kids would run into the crowd. You’d see some boy getting his face punched over and over, and soon a teacher or vice principal would push his way through to break it up.

  One afternoon in late spring, the last bell rang and I was in a loud moving stream of kids pushing out the front door and into the day. The air smelled like fresh-cut grass and sewage from the river. Rain clouds were gathering over it and the boxboard factory on the other side, and parked in the fire lane was a chopper Harley-Davidson, a man standing beside it, his hands on his hips. He was tall, his hair held back with a blue bandanna, his arms tattooed and sinewy. He wore ripped jeans and black biker boots and when Russ Bowman saw him, he dropped his book and turned, his face pale, his eyes as wide as a child’s. He ran back through the crowd and into the school, this grown man chasing him. Somebody yelled “Fight!” And it was like watching the tide reverse itself, the ocean’s waves pause, then push themselves back out to sea, all of us running back inside and down the corridors, shoulder to shoulder, some tripping and falling, chasing after the man chasing Russ Bowman.

  He caught him in an empty classroom. When the rest of us spilled into it, Bowman was already flat on his back and the man was punching Russ in the face again and again.

  I liked seeing this. I liked seeing Bowman’s head bounce against the hard floor, I liked seeing the blood splattering across his nose and mouth and chin, and I especially liked how tightly his eyes were shut against the fear, and the pain.

  Then I began to not like it.

  Some kids were yelling, “Kill him! Kill him!” Others were quiet, watching like I was. Some of the girls covered their eyes or turned their heads away. Four cops plowed their way through us. The first one pulled his billy club and hooked it under the man’s chin and jerked him off Russ Bowman. The second and third cops pushed the man face-first into a desk, and a fourth cop was reaching for his cuffs and yelling at us all to beat it. “Beat it!”

  On my way out with the rest, I glanced back at Bowman. He was on his knees, his hair in his face, his nose and split lips dripping blood. He was staring down at the floor like he’d been waiting for this and now it had finally happened; he looked relieved.

  2

  MY MOTHER AND father were each the youngest children of their families, and they were both raised in southern Louisiana. Mom had one older sister. Pop had two. His father had worked for Gulf States Utilities Company, and when our father was old enough he’d sometimes drive out to a bayou and go surveying with him, his French father wearing high boots and a .22 pistol strapped to his belt for snakes. Pop’s mother was from a big Irish family in Lafayette. Her father was a state senator descended from the Irish statesman Edmund Burke. At one time my great-grandfather had been asked to run against Huey Long, but he refused because he feared Long’s political machine would try to soil his family’s name. His wife, my great-grandmother, was descended from Admiral Perry, Edwin and John Wilkes Booth, and Helene DeLauné, a lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette who, on the day of the queen’s beheading, fled with some of the silver. Over the years, it had been passed down through the male family line. When I was in my twenties, I would pull one of these spoons from my father’s garbage disposal where it had slipped from the morning’s cereal bowl and been mangled. “Pop,” I said, “isn’t this shit valuable?”

  “Not to me, son.”

  OUR MOTHER’S father was Elmer Lamar Lowe, a man who’d never gone further than the third grade. At sixteen he’d been a foreman for a gang of gandy dancers, grown men laying railroad tracks under the sun, singing cadence as they swung sledgehammers and drove spikes into ties, fastening scalding iron rails that flashed brightly as they heaved the next length ahead of them. During the Great Depression, he was making sixty-five dollars a day setting bridge piers in the swirling depths of the Mississippi. He wore a diving bell suit, a thin air hose running from his helmet to the surface. A lot of men died doing this, but he went on to build power plants for big companies, bringing electricity to people throughout the south and even to Mexico. Our mother’s mother had Welsh, Scottish, and Apache blood, a family of rice farmers and mule skinners, men who used their mules and rope to haul boats of supplies along shallow waterways.

  I knew little of any of these things until I was grown. Nor did I know that in the late fifties my father’s older sister Beth taught at St. Charles Academy, a convent school in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where she was a lay teacher. One of her English students was the freshman queen and homecoming queen, Patricia Lowe, a honey-haired beauty who was smart and polite and had so much presence that when she smiled at you it felt as if no one had ever smiled at you before: my future mother. As a junior she was already engaged to James Wayne, a piney woods boy from Rapides Parish, but James was in the army, and when he shipped off to Panama, Beth pulled my mother aside one day and said, “You can’t marry James Wayne, you have to meet my brother Andre.”

  My mother had already heard of Andre Dubus. She’d read one of his articles in the local paper where he’d argued for integration, something she believed in deeply as well. She said she would meet him and when he called that winter told him she was going squirrel hunting up in Rapides Parish but that she could see him sometime after Christmas. He seemed intrigued by that, this pageant winner off in the woods with a loaded gun.

  As a student at McNeese State College in Lake Charles, our father was small—barely 140 pounds—French-Irish handsome, but shy. On their first date, my mother told him she’d just gotten a new record player so they drove to Mueller’s Department Store and he bought her two albums, June Christy and Sammy Davis. She told him she admired his writing. He told her he wanted to see her again. That weekend, she broke her engagement with James Wayne, and the following Saturday night she was sitting with my father at a restaurant that served inexpensive oysters on the half-shell, listening to a band of black musicians—who could only enter and exit through the rear entrance, who could not use the same water fountains or bathrooms as white people, who avoided looking directly at any of the white women while they played Dixieland jazz.

  The summer of 1957 my father went off to Officer Candidate School. Like my mother, he wanted to get out of Louisiana, but that’s not why he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps. He enlisted because of two things his father had said. On their quiet street in Lafayette, my father had spent a lot of time playing imaginary games outside. This was during the war, men dying over in Europe and the South Pacific. Once his father yelled at him, “Goddamnit, all you�
��re good for is shooting Japs in the backyard.” When my father was a teenager, my grandfather looked down at him and said, “When are you going to grow hair on your arms? You look like a woman.”

  Within a few months of meeting, my mother and father had eloped; she had married a writer and a Marine second lieutenant, he had married a bright beauty from the working class. A few days after the justice of the peace had joined them for life, my mother’s father said to her, “If you get divorced, don’t bother coming home. There’s been no damn divorces in our family.”

  IT WAS the six of us: my young parents and all four of us kids born in a five year period beginning in 1958. We were each born on Marine bases, delivered by Marine doctors, Suzanne at Quantico in Virginia, me and Jeb on Camp Pendleton in California, and Nicole on Whidbey Island in Washington State. During these years, our father spent a lot of time aboard the USS Ranger off the coast of Japan. When we did see him, it was for brief stretches in cramped Marine base housing. His head was shaved, his face smooth and clean, but he was a man who didn’t smile much, a man who seemed locked into a car on a road he didn’t want to be on. But then my father’s father died in 1963, and almost immediately after that Dad retired from the Marines as a captain and was accepted into the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in Iowa City.

  Though I didn’t have words for it, I’d never seen him happier; he laughed often and loudly; he hugged and kissed our mother at every turn; he’d let his hair grow out long enough you could actually see some on his head, thick and brown. He’d grown a mustache, too. At night before bed, he’d sit me, my brother, and two sisters down at the kitchen table or on the couch in the living room and he’d tell us stories he made up himself—adventure stories where the hero and heroine were Indians defending their families and their people from the white man. One of them was Running Blue Ice Water, a kind and brave warrior who lingered in my imagination long after we’d been tucked in upstairs in a large room all four of us children shared.

  My memory of that time is the memory of parties, though we were so broke we ate canned meat and big blocks of government cheese. Once a month Pop sold blood. But the parties went on. They happened at night, the house filled with talk and laughter and cigarette smoke. There were parties during the day, too. Blankets laid out on grass under the sun. Men and women eating sandwiches and sipping wine and reading poems out loud to each other.

  Some parties were at the Vonneguts’ house next door. All the Vonnegut kids were older than we were, but the father, Kurt, would walk down to our house every afternoon and sit with us four kids in the living room and watch Batman on the small black-and-white. He smoked one cigarette after the other. He laughed a lot and made jokes, and once he squinted down at me through the smoke and said: “Who’s your favorite bad guy?”

  “Um, False Face.”

  He smiled, his face a warm mix of mustache and round eyes and curly hair. “I like the Riddler.”

  IN OUR bedroom floor was an air vent that overlooked the living room, and sometimes on party nights we kids would huddle around it and spy on our mother and father and their friends below, watch them dance and drink and argue and laugh, the men always louder than the women, their cigarette smoke curling up through the grate into our faces. I remember hearing a lot of dirty words then but also ones like story, novel, and poem. Hemingway and Chekhov.

  In the morning we’d be up long before our parents. We’d get cereal and poke around in the party ruins, the table and floors of our small house littered with empty beer bottles, crushed potato chips, overflowing ashtrays, half the butts brushed with lipstick. If there was anything left in a glass, and if there wasn’t a cigarette floating in it, Suzanne and I would take a few sips because we liked the taste of watered-down whiskey or gin. Once we found a carrot cake in the living room. Its sides were covered with white frosting, but the middle was nothing but a mashed crater. I remembered the cake from the night before, a mouthwatering three-layer with frosted writing on the top. I asked my mother who it was for and she said it was for one of their friends who’d just sold his novel to a publisher; they were going to celebrate. And now the cake was unrecognizable, and when my mother came down that morning looking young and beautiful, probably in shorts and one of my father’s shirts, smoking a cigarette, only twenty-five or -six, I asked her what had happened to the cake. She dug her finger into the frosting, then smiled at me. “Just your father and his crazy writer friends, honey.” Did that mean he was a crazy writer, too? I wasn’t sure.

  It was another party at our house that confirmed it for me, though, one that began with jazz on the record player, a platter of cucumbers and carrots and horseradish dip on the kitchen table, glasses set out on the counter, and in his front room on his black wooden desk were two lit candles on either side of something rectangular and about two or three inches high covered with a black cloth. As my father’s friends showed up one or two couples at a time, he’d walk them into his room with a drink or bottle of beer in his hand, and he’d point at what he told them was the failed novel he was holding a funeral for. He’d laugh and they’d laugh and one of his writer friends put his hand on his shoulder and squeezed, both of them looking suddenly pained and quite serious. I knew then my father was a writer too.

  When our father’s first book was published in 1967, he got a job teaching at a small college in Massachusetts. We loaded up our rusted Chevrolet and drove east. For a year we lived in the woods of southern New Hampshire in a rented clapboard house on acres of pine and pasture. We had a swimming pool and a herd of sheep. There were fallen pine needles and a brook along whose banks Jeb and I found arrowheads, smooth pebbles, the bleached bones of rabbits or squirrels. We felt rich; we had all that land to play on, we had that big old house—its dark inviting rooms, its fireplaces, its fading wallpaper and floorboards fastened with square-cut nails from before the Civil War; we had that pool.

  In 1968 we moved again, this time to a cottage on a pond on the Massachusetts-New Hampshire border. I was nine, and so it seemed like a house, but it was really a summer camp. Downstairs was the kitchen and its worn linoleum floor, the small living room with the black-and-white TV where we heard of the killing of Martin Luther King Jr.; it’s where we saw X-ray photos of Robert Kennedy’s brain and the .22 caliber bullet shot into it; it’s where the following summer we watched a man walk on the moon, my mother sitting on the arm of the couch in shorts and one of Pop’s button-down shirts, saying, “We’re on the moon, you guys. We’re on the fucking moon.”

  My father, thirty-two years old then, was earning seven thousand dollars a year teaching. He had a brown beard he kept trimmed, and he ran five miles a day, a ritual he had begun in the Marine Corps a few years earlier. My mother and father rarely had money to go out to a restaurant, but they still hosted a lot of parties at our house, usually on Friday or Saturday nights, sometimes both; my mother would set out saltine crackers and dip, sliced cheese and cucumbers and carrots; they’d open a jug of wine and a bucket of ice and wait for their friends to bring the rest: more wine, beer, bottles of gin and bourbon. Most of their friends came from the college where Pop taught: there was an art professor, a big man who wore black and had a clean-shaven handsome face and laughed loudly and looked to me like a movie actor; there were bearded poets and bald painters and women who taught pottery or literature or dance. There were students, too, mainly women, all of them beautiful, as I recall, with long shiny hair and straight white teeth, and they dressed in sleeveless sweaters or turtlenecks and didn’t wear bras, their bell-bottoms hugging their thighs and flaring out widely over their suede boots.

  The house would be filled with talk and laughter, jazz playing on the record player—a lot of Brubeck, Gerry Mulligan, and Buddy Rich. From my bed upstairs I could smell pot and cigarette smoke. I could hear music and the animated voices of my mother and father and their loud, intriguing friends. Sometimes there’d be yelling, and there’d be words like Saigon, Viet Cong, and motherfucking Nixon.

  One weeknight on th
e news, there was a story about Marines killed in battle. I was lying on the floor under the coffee table as the camera panned over the bodies of soldiers lying on the ground, most of them on their stomachs, their arms splayed out beside them. Pop sat straight on the couch. His hands were on his knees, and his eyes were shining. “Pat, those are boys. Oh, goddamnit, those are eighteen-year-old boys.”

  Later, sleeping in the bed beside my brother’s, there was a weight on my chest and I woke to my father holding me, crying into the pillow beside my ear. “My son, my son, oh, my son.” He smelled like bourbon and sweat. It was hard to breathe. I couldn’t pull my arms free of the blankets to hug Pop back. Then he was off me, crying over Jeb on his bed, and there was my mother’s whisper from the doorway, her shadowed silhouette. Her arm reached for our father, and he stood and looked down at us both a long while, then he was gone. The house was quiet, my room dark and still. I lay awake and thought of all the good men on TV who’d been shot in the head. I saw again the dead soldiers lying on the ground, and until Pop had cried over us, I hadn’t thought much about Jeb and me having to go and fight, too. But in only nine years I’d be as old as the dead, and it’d be my turn, wouldn’t it?

  BUT SOLDIERS have to be brave, and I was not; I was a new kid in school again, something I would be over and over for many years, trying to find a solitary desk away from the others, dreading recess because everybody knew everyone else and threw balls back and forth and chased after each other grabbing and laughing, and I just didn’t have the courage to jump in. Then some kid would see me looking and yell, “What’re you lookin’ at? You got a problem?”