Townie_ A Memoir Part 16

"Andre, how ya doin', man?"

"Good, Cleary. Real good, you?"

He said he was living down in the avenues, that he was getting married soon. I said congratulations, then I was at the counter asking for a pack of Parliaments and he touched my shoulder, said to say hi to Jeb. I said I would. At the door I glanced back at him and watched him dig into his front pocket for crumpled bills. He nodded and smiled at me, winked even, and as I left the store, the cold tightening the skin on my face, I remembered the time his mother went to visit her sister in Nebraska for a whole month. I'd never understand why she went alone, why she'd leave her family like that to go off for a visit. Then someone told me it was detox she went to, some twenty-eight-day program in Boston. When I told him I knew, Cleary laughed and said, "Nah," but he swallowed twice and walked away to do nothing in particular.

In six months Cleary would send an envelope to our father's house on campus. Inside it would be two invitations to his wedding, one for me, and one for Jeb. We wouldn't go.

Four more years and Cleary would be dead.

I'd hear about it after he was buried. They said his wife stabbed him in the back. That was it; she stabbed him. But a year later, I'd be working as a bartender at McMino's Lounge on Route 110 near the Haverhill-Merrimack line and a customer from Seventh Ave would tell me what had really happened, that Cleary always thought his wife was cheating on him, that he was always beating her up. That final night he ran outside off the porch to go kill the guy he just knew she was f.u.c.king. This was down in the avenues, and he took the trail in back of his apartment house. But his wife opened his black-handled Buck knife and chased after him, screaming. She was short and small, barely five feet, and just as he reached the weeds she got to him and drove it in low, sinking the blade into his liver, snipping something called the portal artery. Cleary went down without a sound. He curled up in a heap. But his wife spent four hours at a neighbor's house crying before they called anyone, and then it was the cops, and Cleary was gone.

I sat back behind the wheel, handed Liz her cigarettes, and drove toward the highway. I didn't tell her I'd just seen an old friend, or that the farther we got from Monument Square the more I felt I was turning my back on him somehow.

IT WAS late on a Friday afternoon. Jeb and I had been painting in a closed room for hours. This was a one-day job, and Jeb hadn't wanted it. He was enjoying the one we were doing with Trevor D. and the crew in Swampscott, framing three new rooms and a roof onto a widow's house, her long snow-covered yard that sloped down to a stand of pines through which we could see barrier rocks and the ocean. I was the cut man, but under the winter sun I was also learning how to lay out the exterior walls and nail them together on the open plywood deck. Jeb was much faster than I was, especially when it came to the math; he'd pull his tape along the bottom plate of a future wall, marking off studs and the center of rough openings for windows and doorways, going back to mark off where the jack studs would go to hold the headers, then the king studs beside them. A week or so before, Trevor D. had given us each another raise, an extra dollar per hour. He said, "Andre, you focus well but you're slow. Jeb, you have much more natural talent at this than your brother, but you could use more focus."

He was right about both of us, and the only reason I may have had more focus is because I had had to just to keep up. I could feel myself gathering more skills, though, ones I wasn't sure I wanted. What did I care about condos and houses, about walls and windows and clapboards and s.h.i.+ngles and paint? These were just material objects, weren't they? What did they have to do with people in the world? Isn't that who I was more interested in? to just to keep up. I could feel myself gathering more skills, though, ones I wasn't sure I wanted. What did I care about condos and houses, about walls and windows and clapboards and s.h.i.+ngles and paint? These were just material objects, weren't they? What did they have to do with people in the world? Isn't that who I was more interested in?

I didn't know. And on that Friday afternoon on that one-day job in that empty old house in Swampscott, something strange was happening. It was a white room to be made even whiter with paint that smelled like rubbing alcohol. Jeb and I had already painted the baseboards and walls and window trim, and I felt a little drunk. It occurred to me that lately I'd been taking too many shots to the head. But when I told Jeb this, he said he felt a little drunk, too. For some reason, we left it there and kept working.

Next came the ceiling; it was ornate with a fluted cornice going around the top of each wall, and in the center of it was a flat four-foot-wide medallion of carved flowers and angels around a hook that once held the chain of a chandelier. It'd been a long time since my brother and I had been alone together, and it was good just talking while we painted. He was a father, something I kept forgetting, and he spoke of his baby son Ethan. How much he loved holding him, feeding him, even changing his diapers. "You can't believe how much you can love, Andre. You can't believe believe it." it."

It was true, I couldn't; I was many years from having a child myself, and I only saw his young fatherhood through a dark lens; he'd knocked up a girl he hadn't known and was now living with and trying to love; instead of being in some art or music school, he was working construction, the nails of his picking hand no longer long and filed but short and chipped. And his years up in his room with the teacher had done something to him. He looked like a grown man, but there was something raw and childlike about him, as if some clock had stopped for him by staying in that room, a clock that would have kept ticking if he'd left it and gone out into the streets and been with people his own age. He was twenty years old. There was the vague and nagging pull of having failed him somehow. My head began to feel like a ball of gas.

Jeb took the cornice, and I rolled the staging under the chandelier fixture and climbed up there and lay on my back, dipping my brush into the open can of paint, jabbing white into the faces of angels. This made me laugh, but then I'd been laughing for a while, both of us had, and I couldn't remember when we'd started or why. The brush was heavy in my hand, then light, then heavy again, and when had Trevor D. come into the room? Why was he looking up at us and yelling something, and why did we keep laughing anyway?

There was the slamming of the door and it seemed so long ago he'd been in the room, but was it?

I was still on my back only a foot or two from the chubby angels and their flower garlands, but my arm was too short to reach them when it hadn't been before. Had I p.i.s.sed them off?

"Do you think they're mad?"

"Who?"

"The angels. I think I p.i.s.sed them off." I was laughing and Jeb laughed back. He was bent over the top of his stepladder, his scraggly hair covering his face. "Fumes, man. It's these f.u.c.king fumes fumes."

Then the room was done and we were sitting outside on the front porch steps, waiting for Trevor D. to pick us up in the truck. We were no longer laughing, and I wasn't sure if what was happening was inside my head or out in the world, and it was like being boys again, tripping together up in my attic bedroom.

The sky was darkening. The snow on the ground was too white to look at directly, so I sat in the cold sobering air and watched my brother smoke a cigarette. I listened to him talk about his baby who I kept seeing as a pudgy angel in the ceiling I hoped I'd finished painting.

WE SHOULD'VE gone home. Jeb to his, me to mine. We should've eaten something and taken long hot showers and cleared our heads, but it was Friday, the day Trevor D. took his crew to the Hole in the Wall for pitchers of beer. We'd drink and throw darts, what he called arrows.

Trevor's pickup pulled to the curb. Tied to the rack was the British flag hanging off a broomstick that'd been there for weeks, ever since a British wars.h.i.+p took the Falkland Islands back from Argentina who'd taken it back from them. I climbed into the cab of the truck, wedged between my brother and our imperialist-capitalist boss. He pushed the s.h.i.+fter into gear and said, "That's alcohol-based paint, mates. Those windows should've been cracked all day. Where's your common sense?"

And why were we now stumbling into the small, dark Hole in the Wall to drink beer when our brains were already stewed? And was it Doug and me against the rest? Or Randy? And did Trevor D. keep winning, or was he just laughing a lot because he'd sold one of his units and that's why he was buying us round after round? There was a voice in my head: You should eat something. You should drink some water and eat something. You should eat something. You should drink some water and eat something. Then Liz's face, her brown hair and hazel eyes, how far away she'd gotten on me, how we didn't seem to be an us anymore. Then Liz's face, her brown hair and hazel eyes, how far away she'd gotten on me, how we didn't seem to be an us anymore.

The back roads were thin ribbons, and if I closed one eye it was easier to keep my balance. On either side were bare trees and black branches and white snow, sometimes the lights of a house or streetlamps, a convenience store, a gas station and sub shop, then darkness again, pierced by lights coming at me I kept my one eye away from, both hands on the steering wheel. You shouldn't be driving. You shouldn't be f.u.c.king driving. You shouldn't be driving. You shouldn't be f.u.c.king driving. But now I was halfway to Haverhill. If I turned around and drove back, it would be as much driving as continuing on. But now I was halfway to Haverhill. If I turned around and drove back, it would be as much driving as continuing on.

I rolled down the window, the air so cold it was hard, a constant slapping in my face, a constant rebuke. And I must've gone to the college first, right? Because I was in Haverhill now, walking in Lafayette Square, the flesh-and-bone memory of having walked earlier. Yes. Into Academy Hall and up to Liz's room. A kind face, a woman I didn't know telling me, "She's at the 104 Club. A bunch of 'em went."

The f.u.c.king 104 Club. A street bar in Lafayette Square across from the statue of another dead soldier, around him the incessant lights of Store 24, a car dealers.h.i.+p and liquor store, a martial arts studio, and beyond that the Little River foamy with industrial waste, black now, too polluted to freeze over. It was a bar where nothing good happened unless you were looking to cop some drugs or get into a brawl or get busted, and it's where girls from the college liked to go slumming, and how had Jeb gotten here? The two of us were walking side by side away from the car. He was talking, had been for a long time. In the car too, the whole one-eyed ride here, about music, about J. S. Bach and Rodrigo, Mozart and Beethoven and Andres Segovia, smoking cigarette after cigarette, trying to teach me something, not about the music it seemed, but him. Because how could I know him if I knew nothing of what he cared so much about?

The plowed lot beside the bar was packed with cars, so we'd parked blocks away near the railroad trestle, beyond that the abandoned brewery we used to sneak into with Cleary, steal cans of beer and drink them right there on dusty wooden steps. There was that conveyor belt Cleary would turn on and we'd ride it drunk to the upper floors, then run back down the steps and do it again and again.

Jeb and I stepped over an iced-over s...o...b..nk and walked in the street back toward the square. My brother lit up another cigarette. I hadn't been inside a Haverhill bar with him since that night at the Tap, but tonight, instead of hand-knitted slippers, he had on work boots and paint-splattered jeans, a loose sweater with a hole in the elbow. He looked like what he did all day, and I knew we were walking on asphalt gritty with sand and salt from a city truck, but my legs and feet were like cotton, my torso and face some kind of drunken steam. Then we were inside the 104 Club under flat, bright light and a haze of cigarette smoke, men and women ten or twelve deep drinking at the bar or shouting out an order, laughing and talking and smoking. There were the smells of nicotine and damp leather, of denim and perfume and sweat and beer. High in the corner hung a color TV, a Muhammad Ali fight I'd forgotten about, Ali taking a shot to the chin, his head snapping back. From below came a deep masculine roar, blood-joy in the air, a happy happy place, and my eyes burned and I wanted to turn around and leave, but my shoulder was being squeezed, my upper arm too, Liz smiling up at me, drunk. Behind her were six or seven from the college, boys and girls I didn't know, and now this too-tight hug from her, almost as if she were apologizing, and I knew she was.

She was saying something, but I wondered which of the guys behind her she'd been f.u.c.king. I leaned in close. "You want a beer?"

She smiled and kissed my lips, her tongue apologizing too. I turned and stepped sideways through people I may have known or once known, and did I even care she was moving on? What did I know about love anyway? Did I even love her? Had she loved me?

Then I was standing at the bar, my hip against someone's hip, my shoulder against another's shoulder. I could see with two eyes now, but barely, and I raised my hand to slow the movement of one of the bartenders behind this long chipped bar covered with bottles and half-full gla.s.ses and overflowing ashtrays and peanut sh.e.l.ls in spilled beer or wine. Five feet down, a woman's hand stubbed out a cigarette, a silver ring on each finger.

I ordered three Buds. Liz preferred Michelob, but I wasn't sure I could say that many syllables without slurring. I looked over the crowd for my brother. The hip against mine belonged to a blonde woman, a student from the college. I knew her and did not know her. A big man stood behind her talking to the back of her head, but she wasn't looking at him. Her nose was straight and perfect, her skin clear and unlined, her chin strong, her hair thick and s.h.i.+ny and with no sign of bleach or color or any of the s.h.i.+t girls from around here put in theirs. Her name was Hailey, and she must've taken off a sweater or something because she was wearing the dark blue T-s.h.i.+rt she'd had on when Liz had first introduced us on the red-carpeted stairs of Academy Hall. It was tight and showed off her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and small waist, her lean swimmer arms. And those small white letters above her left nipple: LAGNAF LAGNAF.

I drank from my beer, thought about talking to her, didn't want to talk to her. Didn't want to be here. Liz was behind me in the crowd somewhere, and she'd laughed on those stairs and told me what those letters meant: Let's All Get Naked and f.u.c.k. Let's All Get Naked and f.u.c.k. Five or six other girls wore the same T-s.h.i.+rt. I wondered if any of them were here tonight, slumming too. Five or six other girls wore the same T-s.h.i.+rt. I wondered if any of them were here tonight, slumming too.

"I'm talking talking to you." to you." The man behind Hailey put his big hand on her shoulder and she turned, her hair whipping. "I said to f.u.c.k The man behind Hailey put his big hand on her shoulder and she turned, her hair whipping. "I said to f.u.c.k off off." Just a string of words instantly swallowed up in the barroom noise. She shrugged her shoulder away from him.

I'd never seen him before. Twenty-two or -three, over six feet, maybe 230, 240. He had a handsome face, all jaw and cheekbones, but there was a dullness in his eyes, not stupid but predatory, and now maybe a little p.i.s.sed off too. He put his hand back on her shoulder. I rested my bottle on the bar next to the two I hadn't delivered yet. Why should I do something? What did Hailey and her friends with their secret T-s.h.i.+rts think they'd find down here anyway? But she was clearly done with him and that should be it. That should always be it.

"Hey, brother, she's all set."

I was shorter than he was, smaller, two things he took in as he was taking in the main thing: that I was sticking my face into his business.

"I'm not your f.u.c.kin' brother."

"Outside then." I jerked my head toward the door.

"Let's go go." These words the answer to a riddle floating down a river I was also floating down, the crowd parting and moving, the red and gold glow of a neon Miller sign above the door that opened for me on its own. But my heart hadn't even woken up for this. I could be nodding off somewhere; there was no fear, none of that marrow-electric jolt that put something I needed into my arms and legs, no pounding heart and shallow breath, no keen eye on any movement coming my way. There was just the steady forward momentum of having broken through the membrane-because the invitation to fight is a breaking too-and this was the right thing to do, wasn't it?

It was school all over again. The crowd sensed the change in the air, and now people were outside and ringed around us under the white light over the door. I had both hands up, but my back foot kept slipping on ice and I couldn't plant it but jabbed at him anyway, this pathetic move from a boxing ring n.o.body used in a real fight, and how had I forgotten that? Why all of a sudden did I think there were some rules to this?

He feinted away from it, his head ramming into my chest, and I was lifted and there was the back-slap of pavement, a weight on my sternum. The first punches were almost a surprise, hard and fast from the right and left, sparks behind my eyes. I opened them, and there he was on my chest. His face was in shadow, and it was hard to breathe and he kept punching and my hands grabbed both his wrists and wouldn't let go.

"Kill him, man. f.u.c.kin' kill kill 'em." 'em."

There were more words out there in the air around us, men's voices, then Jeb's, "That's my brother. brother." His hands on the shoulders of the one on me, but then other hands pulled him away and there was yelling, had been for a long time, from the one on me who had a handful of hair on both sides of my head, my fingers still locked around his wrists, and he began to lift my head and slam it back down, lift it and slam it, the concrete beneath me felt like a betrayal, and I tried to tense the muscles in my neck but that only slowed his momentum and at the corners of my eyes darkness welled and I tried to pull his hands from my hair but he was too strong. I began kneeing him in the back, but that only loosened my neck and he slammed harder, the back of my skull thinner now, more brittle, and I could only see the shadow of his face meeting more shadows, my eyes filling with them, and if I didn't keep him from this and if no one was going to pull him off, this would be it, this will be it, this is it, this can't be it, this can't be it this will be it, this is it, this can't be it, this can't be it, every muscle I'd ever worked going rigid, my neck a clamp, and maybe he was getting tired, but my fingers were now part of his wrists against the sides of my head and he could no longer move, and he was spitting, hawking and spitting into my face, this warm wet evidence of a street rage I'd either forgotten to bring along, or was too drunk to bring along, or could no longer summon, these thoughts not in my head but in my blood I could feel stiffening on my face beside his phlegm.

At first I thought it was another brawl. There was a whoos.h.i.+ng movement to my right and people parted and were walking away quickly. There was a lightness in my chest, then something jerked from my fingers and I was rolling onto my side as the cruiser pulled in tight to the s...o...b..nk inches from my face, the flash of blue lights in the air, my good, good friends, the Haverhill police.

I MAY have slept at Liz's that night, or at Sam's in his second-story bedroom on Eighteenth Avenue. I may have driven back to Salem and Lynn with Jeb. I don't remember. But these kinds of fights happened in Haverhill all the time, and the cops helped me up and told people to move along. The big one was gone, and there was no talk of pressing charges anyway. They may have asked if I wanted medical attention, and they probably went inside the 104 Club to make their presence known, but all I remember clearly is the next night Pop found out, and now Pop wanted revenge.

It was close to ten, a Sat.u.r.day night, and I was standing in the small dining room of his campus house. Theresa sat at the table nursing a beer, and Sam stood with his back to the plate-gla.s.s window, outside so dark that we were reflected back at us, a woman and three men. My father stood in the center of the room in his corduroy s.h.i.+rt and leather vest, a drink in his hand. Peggy had gone to bed early, as was her habit, and my baby half-sister was asleep downstairs too.

Both my cheeks were swollen. My left eyelid was puffy, my lower lip split, and if I'd ever had a worse headache I couldn't remember it. My neck muscles were stiff and sore. Pop took a long drink off his Stolichnya. He drank it like the Russians, over ice with ground black pepper. He put it on the table and walked up to me and studied my face for the second time in five minutes. It was Vinny who'd told him what happened, Vinny who'd gotten the story from the rich girl Hailey I never saw again.

In the light from the kitchen Pop touched two fingers under my chin and tilted my face up. I could smell vodka and Old Spice. This gesture of his was new, and it made me feel like a boy, a feeling I both liked and hated.

"Who was this motherf.u.c.ker? He's gotta be pretty tough to beat you."

I shook my head and shrugged. There was the earned sense I had reached a dry plateau on some long, steep climb up a mountain in the rain. I was more than happy to stay there now, no need to go to the top; I hadn't changed myself from what I was to what I'd become for my father, but it was good hearing he thought this of me. I also felt vaguely like a liar and an impostor, though, and he'd shown his street-naivite for having said it: there were thousands of men tougher than I was, tens of thousands.

Sam was talking. He knew people who were at the 104 Club the night before, and he'd made a few calls and found out who'd beaten the s.h.i.+t out of me. It was Devin Wallace, someone who brawled in the bars regularly. I knew his older brother Ben. He had a severe underbite and was tall and sinewy and he drank all day, cruising around town in beat-up sedans, burning rubber at traffic lights, giving the finger to anyone who said a thing about it. Years later, he went on to serve multiple sentences at the state prison in Walpole, and he'd be dead of cirrhosis of the liver before he hit forty-five. Now my father wanted something done to his bigger, stronger, handsome brother, but I was through with it. I'd fought and lost, and wouldn't a movie be a good thing to do right now? Popcorn and cold c.o.ke and a dark room full of strangers turning themselves over to the imaginations of others?

It was my fault I'd lost so badly anyway. Since when do you invite someone outside? I'm not your f.u.c.kin' brother. I'm not your f.u.c.kin' brother. That was That was his his invitation, which came first and which I should have followed with a straight right to his predatory face. But since Sambo's, something had changed in me, and now Pop's and Sam's plan was to go back to the 104 Club where the Wallaces and their crew hung out and then get him somehow, Sam and Theresa and my half-drunk and determined writer father, who, with his trimmed professor's beard, stood at the door and pulled on an insulated Red Sox jacket and one of his Akubra hats. They both reflected things he loved, finely made leather from Down Under, and a team of grown men who played a game called baseball. I'd seen him wearing them many times before, mainly walking his dog within the campus walls, but now I pictured him down at the 104 Club looking for a fight, and I felt protective of him and cowardly all at once for I was doing nothing to stop this; if I did, I would look like the weak little boy I'd been working all these years to kill. invitation, which came first and which I should have followed with a straight right to his predatory face. But since Sambo's, something had changed in me, and now Pop's and Sam's plan was to go back to the 104 Club where the Wallaces and their crew hung out and then get him somehow, Sam and Theresa and my half-drunk and determined writer father, who, with his trimmed professor's beard, stood at the door and pulled on an insulated Red Sox jacket and one of his Akubra hats. They both reflected things he loved, finely made leather from Down Under, and a team of grown men who played a game called baseball. I'd seen him wearing them many times before, mainly walking his dog within the campus walls, but now I pictured him down at the 104 Club looking for a fight, and I felt protective of him and cowardly all at once for I was doing nothing to stop this; if I did, I would look like the weak little boy I'd been working all these years to kill.

POP AND Theresa went in his car, Sam and I in the black Duster. We were going to walk in separately and in twos; if Wallace wasn't there, then we'd stand on opposite sides of the bar and wait. Then what? Jump him? All four of us? Theresa, too?

Sam drove us out of the sanctuary of campus, my father's taillights ahead of us. Through the back window of Pop's car I could see the silhouette of his Akubra, and I was eleven years old again, standing at the window of our old rented house on Lime Street, watching my father admonish and warn Clay Whelan, his father Larry holding him back, this chained dog who would've surely killed Pop if he'd gotten free. And I couldn't let Pop get to Wallace before I did. If he got to him first, my father would begin things with words, with language, the one thing he was so good at, and probably in his Marine captain's chest-voice like he'd done at the Tap with the husband of the spurned wife, but that would give Wallace too much time and motivation, and he was so much bigger than my father, so much angrier. No, I needed to get there first: no words, no foreplay, no polite invitations. I'd just have to start swinging and hope the first one was hard enough to give me time for the second and the third and the fourth. I was tapping my foot, my tongue dry as shaved bark. I wanted that cold c.o.ke.

Sam turned off Main and headed down a side street for the river. We were still in neighborhoods of large, comfortable houses, their s.h.i.+ngles or clapboards in no need of paint, their covered porches s.p.a.cious and level and free of trash and the clutter of discarded kids' toys. Christmas lights were draped along the fascia, and in the windows stood lighted trees behind wispy curtains. These were Bradford houses, n.o.body living in them on welfare or food stamps, many of them college-educated, their late-model cars parked neatly in plowed driveways.

Sam followed Pop's car over the river. There was the hum of tires on the steel grates, and the black water beneath us flowed east and I could see the dim white of snow on the mudbanks. Then we were on River Street pa.s.sing lighted sub shops and package stores, a diner in Railroad Square. Soon we were in the dark gauntlet of the closed shoe factories where we pa.s.sed the brewery and drove under the tracks again. In an abandoned weed lot a shopping cart lay on its side, rags spilling from it, and up ahead was the light of Lafayette Square, the exterior lamp over the door to the 104 Club a white star pulsing in my head.

The lot was only half full. While Pop parked, Sam did two loops around the statue of the dead hero.

"We'll give them time to get in first."

"Good."

"You all right?"

"Yep."

"Don't worry, we'll get him."

On the second loop I could see Pop and Theresa walking into the bar, Pop holding the door open for her. Theresa was only a year or two younger than his third wife, and they looked like a mismatched couple out on a date. Again there came the feeling this was not my father's world, that he was having too much fun right now, and that very soon the fun would stop.

Sam parked the Duster in the lot close to the street. I started to get out fast, but Pop and Theresa didn't know what Wallace looked like and they'd have to wait for us anyway. I glanced over the car at Sam. "Buddy, if he's there, he's gonna know why we are, too. I'll have to go right at him."

"We'll have to go right at him." have to go right at him."

I didn't say anything. I wanted Sam's help and I did not want his help, but more than this, I didn't want to be here at all. In the cold air, my cheeks stung, my split lip too. It was going to hurt to get punched there again.

The 104 Club was as empty as it had been crowded the night before. Only one bartender was working, a thin man with a gray ponytail who stood at the far end watching the TV in the corner. Beneath it was a shuffleboard I hadn't seen the night before, and two couples sat beside it in wooden chairs drinking and smoking and talking. Four or five others stood at the bar, men and women, Pop and Theresa among them. But no Devin Wallace. The air smelled like cigarette smoke and disinfectant and popcorn from the machine.

Sam called the bartender over and ordered two Buds. Sat.u.r.day nights always seemed to start slow. It was date night, people going out to dinner or the movies, maybe a dance club somewhere. Around ten they'd come in for a drink that would turn into two, then three, then by last call business would be as good as the night before. But now it was after ten and still this place was quiet. Maybe all the regulars were as hungover as I was and had stayed home. I didn't know, but I was relieved and took a sip of the Budweiser that tonight was like drinking lighter fluid or chicken grease. I put my bottle down. The door opened and four or five men walked in with the icy air, Ben Wallace one of them. A dark wool cap was pulled down around his ears and his whiskered chin jutted out, and as he walked by me and Sam, he took us in and his eyes changed from expectant of a good time to something darker. I looked down the bar at Pop and Theresa. Both of them were smoking a cigarette, but Pop's eyes were on mine. I shook my head once, then tapped Sam on the hand. "If Devin shows, we're way f.u.c.king outnumbered. This was a bad idea."

"See that tall one with Ben? I played hockey with him. What's he doing with Wallace?"

Theresa stood in front of us. Somebody had put a quarter in the jukebox, and Huey Lewis & the News was singing about believing in love. She leaned in close. "Is he one of them?"

Sam shook his head and drained his beer. "This isn't going anywhere. Let's shoot up to Ronnie D's."

Theresa went back for Pop, and maybe that's what she'd told him, that this wasn't going anywhere, which really meant it was was going somewhere but not where we'd pictured it back in my father's small campus house full of books, some precise act of revenge on one man, a big man at that, one I was happy to concede to now. going somewhere but not where we'd pictured it back in my father's small campus house full of books, some precise act of revenge on one man, a big man at that, one I was happy to concede to now.

Pop stood on the sidewalk under the light. His face was shadowed by the brim of his Akubra. "Why're we leaving?"

"It's dead, Pop. n.o.body's in there tonight. We're heading up to Ronnie D's. Maybe he's there."

Most likely Pop knew I was lying; bars had their regulars and Ronnie D's across the river had never had a Wallace as one, but maybe Pop, too, had come to feel this was all a bad idea.

He smiled at Theresa and held out his arm. "Let's go, darlin'."

Theresa laughed and hooked her arm in his, and Sam and I were heading for the Duster, a strip of ice cracking under my boots, when behind us the door to the bar swung back on its hinges and Ben Wallace and his crew came walking fast into the lot. "f.u.c.k you, Dubis. You're down here waiting for my brother, you and your f.u.c.kin' friends." Spit arced out of his mouth, and he was already a few feet away from me, and I never realized how tall he was, taller than his handsome, stronger brother. On both sides of him stood men I did not know, but Sam moved toward them and was calling out the name of his hockey mate, calling it in the warm tone of an old friend glad to see another.

I said, "I'm just here for a beer, Ben."

"f.u.c.k you, you are. My brother kicked the s.h.i.+t out of you last night, that's why you're here." He was closer to me now, a step away from punching range, but my body wasn't having anything to do with this. My weight was even on both feet, and there was no lightness in my hands, no flames running through my blood. I heard myself talking about Christmas.

"What?"

"It's Christmastime, Ben. Peace on earth, right?"

"f.u.c.k you, you, my brother kicked your a.s.s, and I'll f.u.c.kin' do it again right now." my brother kicked your a.s.s, and I'll f.u.c.kin' do it again right now."

But he wasn't moving any closer, and now Pop and Theresa were walking across the lot toward us. Pop had both hands in the pockets of his Red Sox jacket, and even with his thick beard and the twenty years he had on us all, there was something boyish about him.

"You're backing down 'cause you know I'll f.u.c.kin' kill you, Dubis."

"You're right, Ben. Merry Christmas."

Ben kept swearing at me, and now Sam turned to his hockey friend, a square-faced kid with an Irish name and shoulder-length hair. "Tell your buddy to calm down, Tim."

But Ben wasn't calming down. Our lack of reaction seemed to make him angrier, his chin jutting out, spit flying, and his friends seemed no more interested in a brawl than we did. They stood quietly behind him, looking from me to Sam, then at Pop, who stood a few feet back, his hands still in his pockets. He looked happy and relaxed and so awfully out of place. Wallace was threatening to kill me again and how new it was that I didn't care what he said, that he could go on and on, and it just did not matter. Because I noticed he still wasn't stepping any closer, and only when he glanced over at Pop and Theresa did my blood thin out a bit; I'd have to do something if he went after them in any way, especially my father who, it was clear now, had come downtown to see more of this part of my life. I opened the pa.s.senger door and waited for Sam whose hockey friend was speaking quietly into Ben's ear.

Ben threatened to kill me once more, but in minutes Sam and I were driving over the Merrimack River, Pop and Theresa ahead of us. My face ached, my neck too. I was looking forward to a bed somewhere, a long night's sleep. I thought we were heading for Ronnie D's but Pop steered for the campus. Then we were inside his house again, Pop creeping into his downstairs bedroom to hang his Akubra on its hook, Sam and Theresa and I sitting around the small dining room table. Theresa shook her head and laughed. "Your dad had a gun, you know."

"What?"

"When those guys ran into the parking lot, he reached right over me and took it out of the glove compartment. He had it in his pocket the whole time."

Sam looked at me and shook his head. Now I knew why Pop had really gone into his bedroom. It's where he kept his guns, on his closet shelf, and I pictured him swinging open the six-round chamber of the snub-nose and emptying the bullets into his cupped hand. Or he might be releasing the loaded clip of the semiautomatic, pulling back the slide and eyeing the bore for a straggler round. And I had a flash of him standing in the lot of the 104 Club with his hands in his jacket pockets, his relaxed smile, his right fingers cupped around something so lethal. My chest felt squeezed. "s.h.i.+t." "s.h.i.+t."