Townie_ A Memoir Part 13

PART II.

RIVER, FIST, AND BONE.

10.

TWO YEARS LATER, I was back from Texas living in a third-floor walk-up in Lynn, Ma.s.sachusetts. It was a town southeast of Haverhill, a town of welfare projects and brick tenements, Cambodian and Latino street gangs, the smell of the ocean blowing in over the barrooms and alleyways and strip malls. There was a saying, "Lynn, Lynn, the city of sin, you don't come out the way you went in," but I lived contentedly alone in two rooms with no furniture and nothing on the walls, the front room echoing my footsteps each time I walked over its cracked linoleum floor to the kitchen where there was a gas stove and a small table and chair. In the back was the bedroom, and I slept there on a yoga mat my mother had made and upholstered for me years earlier. It was foam an inch thick and I laid it on the floor and put two work boots into a pillowcase for a pillow, covered up each night with a sleeping bag.

I did not own a telephone or TV, a radio or record player, and each night after working construction with my brother Jeb, I lay on my foam pad or sat at the small table in the kitchen and read Max Weber, E. F. Schumacher, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Lenin. I was twenty-two years old, and I'd become a Marxist. That's what Texas did to me, took my hatred of bullies and bullying and inst.i.tutionalized it. In Austin, I'd drifted into the social sciences where you could learn a little about a lot, but all I seemed to find was story after story of U.S. imperialism, how we had a long history of supporting dictators and Big Business at the expense of men, women, and children just trying to eat and live and be free.

I listened to lectures on Third World politics and economic policy and the fight against communism. But it looked to me like a simple fight against the poor by the rich, the strong against the weak, and I walked the campus in a constant state of outrage and grief, so much of the world's history the story of cruelty and injustice and very few people doing anything about it.

This was a campus of fifty-five thousand students, half of whom were business majors, and they went to cla.s.ses in s.p.a.cious, air-conditioned buildings, their roofs terracotta, their open foyers sporting exotic plants and stone fountains on cool Mexican or Italian tile. Palm trees offered shade wherever you needed it, and from the stone steps of the main building, you could stand and look over the terraced steps of the South Mall to the gold dome of the state capitol s.h.i.+ning so bright under the Texas sun you couldn't look directly at it.

There was the tower that'd been closed since August 1966 when Charles Whitman climbed up there and calmly aimed and shot and killed fourteen people. I could see it clearly from the steps of Arrakis House on Pearl Street, the co-op I lived in with five other men and six women. It was a small two-story in the shade of oak and pecan trees. We had a fenced-in yard and a garage that had been turned into a bedroom and bathroom, and I bunked there with Dan, a tall skinny Ph.D. candidate in political science. He had a beard and long hair and wore round rimless gla.s.ses like John Lennon, and on Friday or Sat.u.r.day nights he'd play his guitar on the front porch and sing how a working-cla.s.s hero was something to be.

But there were other songs in the air. Across the alley from our garage apartment was a sorority house that held young women who drove brightly colored coupes and put their blonde hair in curlers at night and studied at the business school. Some nights, the tower usually glowing orange a few blocks east, new pickup trucks would pull up to the sorority, their beds full of fraternity boys in jackets and ties, their boots s.h.i.+ning, and they'd hop out and line up on the lawn and sing some anthem to the girls who were now out on the second-story balcony, their smiling faces made up, their blue and white dresses billowing. The young men below would stand shoulder to shoulder singing of Texas and past glory and friendly senoritas, and the girls would toss single roses down to the fraternity boys, this ritual I a.s.sumed went back generations. The next morning I'd watch a Latina woman in a white cleaning uniform on the front lawn stooping to pick up the roses left behind, their red petals falling to the ground.

I'd walk the hot streets and its smells of barbecue smoke and baking asphalt, frying tortillas and eucalyptus leaves and the dried pecan sh.e.l.ls I crushed under my feet, but I'd become brooding and reclusive and studious. When I wasn't studying, I worked out hard at the Texas Athletic Club, riding my bicycle across town to a squat cinderblock building of mainly powerlifters, some of them pus.h.i.+ng over 400 pounds off their chests, squatting with over 600, dead-lifting even more. These were very large men, and I still strived to be one of them, but there was the growing feeling inside me that a strong body was not enough, that that kind of power was only the beginning of what you'd need to confront those who wanted to take something away from you.

ARRAKIS OWNED a rusted-out yellow Pinto wagon. It was left to us by the parents of a boy who'd killed himself the year before I arrived, and it was the model that in those days exploded into flames on rear-end collisions. We used it to go grocery shopping or take someone to the airport, or sometimes to go cool off somewhere outside of town.

It was a hot Sat.u.r.day afternoon, the air still and heavy, and I was driving the Pinto into the lot of a 7-Eleven. Kourosh was sitting beside me. He was a new resident of the house, a twenty-nine-year-old Iranian who'd just moved here from London to study computer science. When I learned he was from Iran, I said h.e.l.lo in Persian and he smiled brightly and said h.e.l.lo back and soon we were studying together in the library, drinking beer together on the weekends, and every other Friday night we would sit down somewhere, and I would teach him English and he would reciprocate the following week by teaching me Persian. Because he was good with his hands, he'd become the house mechanic and he made the Pinto run smoother, and now in the back sat Molly, a large, kind woman with wide burn scars on her arms and legs. She had a problem with her hair falling out too, from stress, she said, and trauma, so she had no eyebrows or eyelashes, and half her head was bald while the other half held thin black hair from which her ears protruded.

Beside her sat Jen. She was a year younger than I was. She skipped a lot of cla.s.ses and stayed in her room writing poetry and painting with watercolors or spray cans, anything she could find. She had blonde hair and wore faded cotton dresses from St. Vincent de Paul's and she'd been her high school valedictorian, though she had to explain to me what that was. Her room was next to mine on the second floor. Sometimes I'd crawl into her bed or she'd crawl into mine, and now she sat in her bathing suit next to Wei Ling, a bright and cheerful premedical student from China who laughed a lot and studied hard, smoking cigarettes in her bedroom till late at night.

The five of us were heading to Barton Creek, a spring-fed swimming hole on the other side of Austin. All we needed was beer and ice, and just as I pulled into the lot, two frat boys climbed out of their powder blue Monte Carlo. They were both tall and well-built, their b.u.t.ton-down s.h.i.+rts tucked snugly into their ironed jeans, and as we pulled up in our rusted Pinto wagon, the m.u.f.fler throaty, just a bit too much exhaust seeping out the back, the driver glanced over at us like we were bugs somebody should've stepped on, and that's when I noticed how he'd parked his Monte Carlo across two parking s.p.a.ces, that's when I noticed the stickers on his rear b.u.mper: Anti-Irania Mania Anti-Irania Mania, and No Camel Jockeys No Camel Jockeys.

They weren't the first I'd seen. A month before, close to midnight, I'd walked home from the campus library to see a Cadillac parked in front of our house. Like so many of the cars in that neighborhood of fraternities and sororities, it was new, its silver hubcaps catching the dim light from our front porch. I saw the No Camel Jockeys No Camel Jockeys sticker on the rear b.u.mper, and I stood there looking down at it a long while. sticker on the rear b.u.mper, and I stood there looking down at it a long while.

Because of my ties to Marjan and her family, I'd studied more about Iran and its secret police, Savak, trained and supported by the United States. There were stories of men forced to watch the repeated rape of their wives, forced to watch their own children held down while fingers were broken, a hand was sawn off, or an arm. Then, on September 8, 1978, what they call Black Friday, a protesting and unarmed crowd was gunned down in Jaleh Square, and what killed them were American bullets.

In November, students climbed over the walls of the American Emba.s.sy and took control of what they called "the nest of spies for the Great Satan." I didn't see us all as being the Great Satan, but I thought it very reasonable that they did.

Back in Austin, Texas, fraternity boys got liquored up and cruised the streets looking for anyone with dark skin and eyes and hair, anyone who looked like a "camel jockey" or "sand n.i.g.g.e.r." They found Ethiopians, Mexicans, a few Egyptians and Sudanese, and they beat them up, usually three or four on one. I'd hear of these attacks, and each day I walked to and from campus hoping to see one, hoping to do what I'd learned to do.

Now in the parking lot of the 7-Eleven, my pulse was thras.h.i.+ng between my ears and I edged the Pinto up to the rear pa.s.senger side of the powder blue Monte Carlo and stepped on the gas and sc.r.a.ped metal off metal the length of both cars, Wei Ling screaming, the Monte Carlo rocking in the rear view mirror as I pulled ahead, a strip of chrome hanging from it like a broken limb.

Molly was yelling, "You have no right! You have absolutely no right right to do that with to do that with us us in the car. Andre. Take us home right this minute!" in the car. Andre. Take us home right this minute!"

"Not till they come out." My mouth was dry. I'd slipped off my seat belt so I could jump out of the car when they came back outside, those two racist, ent.i.tled pieces of s.h.i.+t I was going to go after. But Kourosh's hand was on my arm.

"Andre-jahn, no. No."

And it was like the man next to me in that wedding reception in East Boston, a calm voice telling me this is not the way.

FOR THE most part I was able to control myself. Every night after dinner, Kourosh and I would load our backpacks with books and notebooks and walk to the main library on campus where we'd study from seven till just after midnight. I was reading a lot of labor history now, which kept me in a dark mood, especially stories like the Ludlow Ma.s.sacre in Colorado when the governor sent in the National Guard to break up a strike and they shot and burned to death twenty men, women, and children. Karl Marx said that human history is the history of cla.s.s conflict, and how, I thought, could he have been anything but right. And I was tired of walking around carrying this new knowledge that only the writers of little-read books seemed to have, that only my professors had.

It was early spring in Austin and all day it had rained. You could smell the ozone, the magnolias and eucalyptus and pine. Across the alley at suppertime, the sorority's kitchen door had been open and they'd been served brisket and beans, but now it was after midnight, a Tuesday or Wednesday, and my window was open, and I lay on my mattress in the dark listening to drops of rain ticking from leaf to leaf. The house was quiet. Down the hall behind a closed door came the tapping of keys from a manual typewriter. I'd always loved that sound, was drawn to it for reasons I couldn't explain. A block or two north a college boy let out a rebel yell, some lone drunk wandering home from an outdoor bar. But then there were more voices, two or three talking loud and laughing, another one hollering, and didn't they know the whole neighborhood was asleep? Did they even think think about that? about that?

I closed my eyes and tried to ignore them. The voices got louder. I could hear boot steps on Pearl. A male voice was talking about a woman, how everybody knew she was a wh.o.r.e. "How come you you don't know that, J.B? She's a f.u.c.kin' don't know that, J.B? She's a f.u.c.kin' wh.o.r.e. wh.o.r.e." And J.B. let out a boozy yell right there under my window. I sat up and looked down at three of them standing in the alley, the light from the sorority's stoop s.h.i.+ning across the wet asphalt. They were tall, the way so many Texans seemed to be, and they wore pointed Tony Lamas and expensive cotton s.h.i.+rts, one of them swaying slightly as he lit a cigarette, the other two talking in loud, half-drunk voices about Dolly, the same woman they were calling a wh.o.r.e. The window screen was pressing against my nose. A whisper inside me said, Ignore them. They'll wander off. Go to sleep. Ignore them. They'll wander off. Go to sleep.

But then one of them started laughing and he let out that rebel yell again, and I said, "You want to keep it down out there, please? People are sleeping."

"Yeah? You want your a.s.s a.s.s kicked?" kicked?"

I pulled on my jeans and T-s.h.i.+rt and was soon walking barefoot over the kitchen's linoleum floor, then damp ground, then the cool wet asphalt of the alley.

LATER, BACK in my bed in the dark, the boy in me kept replaying how I'd walked up to three tall men and waited for one of them to get it started, and when the tallest one asked me if I'd come out there for an a.s.s-kicking, I dropped him with a right cross to the face, then pivoted and dropped the one next to him, then I went after the third but he was the drunkest one and he tripped and fell, then the second one was on me and we both knelt in a puddle swinging at each other till I got in more than he did and he fell back and crawled into the shadows of the dumpster.

I stood and yelled at them to get the f.u.c.k out of my alley. But the first one I'd hit wasn't moving. He lay on his back with his arms spread wide, his mouth open and bleeding, and I watched as his two friends mumbled revenge and picked him up and carried him farther down the alley to their car. They lay him in the backseat. The engine revved once, then the driver, the second one I'd punched, backed up and drove slowly away from our house.

For a while I couldn't stop replaying how well those first two punches had gone, the first a knockout, the second a knockdown. And it had happened so fast, the way it always did, so that my friends in the house I lived in didn't even know about it. That I'd protected them. For a few moments I lay in the glow of the hurt I'd caused, and I felt completely virtuous, as brave and selfless as a good father.

But then my cheeks began to burn, this voice in my head: You did that for you. You did that for you. And I saw Cody Perkins back on the streets of the South End, how he walked with his chest out and his head up, how he was always looking for a fight. At eleven and twelve years old, I could only fear and admire him; how could anyone And I saw Cody Perkins back on the streets of the South End, how he walked with his chest out and his head up, how he was always looking for a fight. At eleven and twelve years old, I could only fear and admire him; how could anyone look look for a fight? How could anyone for a fight? How could anyone want want that? But lying there on my mattress in Texas nine years later, my knuckles swelling up, the alley clear and quiet because I had cleared it, I knew why he wanted to find those fights; they were his only chance to get out what was inside him. Like pus from a wound, it was how he expressed what had to be expressed. It gave him the chance to do something for him and him only, and my shame now came from someplace I hadn't considered before, that maybe inside me there were other ways to get this pus out, other ways to express a wound. that? But lying there on my mattress in Texas nine years later, my knuckles swelling up, the alley clear and quiet because I had cleared it, I knew why he wanted to find those fights; they were his only chance to get out what was inside him. Like pus from a wound, it was how he expressed what had to be expressed. It gave him the chance to do something for him and him only, and my shame now came from someplace I hadn't considered before, that maybe inside me there were other ways to get this pus out, other ways to express a wound.

I began to meditate. I skimmed a book on it at the campus bookstore on Guadalupe, and each night after studying at the library, I'd sit cross-legged on the floor in my room with the lights off and my eyes closed. I'd concentrate on my breathing. Every few exhalations I'd think, Om, peace, peace, peace. Om, peace, peace, peace.

I liked having that word in my head. It made me feel I was heading some place higher and more evolved. I'd think of Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, even Jesus, someone I'd rarely thought of; I'd breathe and begin to imagine loving all these people I'd come to hate, these wealthy white kids I was convinced would one day hold the reins of oppressive power.

But then I saw the body of Jesus Christ hanging on the cross, his chest collapsed, those spikes driven through his feet and palms. I saw the bullets shot into Gandhi's torso, his outsretched hands that could do nothing for him, and I saw Martin Luther King lying dead on that concrete motel balcony in Memphis. Now my heart was beating faster, my breathing more shallow. I thought peace, peace, peace. peace, peace, peace. But I saw my brother's arms at his sides as Tommy J. punched him in the face, I saw my sister raped by two men who were never caught, and when I was nine and we still lived together in that house in the woods, I lay on the living room floor under the coffee table while my mother and father watched the black-and-white news, a close-up on the X-ray of Robert Kennedy's brain and the .22 caliber bullet shot into it. And now I knew by whom and why, a young Palestinian angry over Kennedy's support of Israel, and when would any of this ever end? Would we ever stop doing this to one another? But I saw my brother's arms at his sides as Tommy J. punched him in the face, I saw my sister raped by two men who were never caught, and when I was nine and we still lived together in that house in the woods, I lay on the living room floor under the coffee table while my mother and father watched the black-and-white news, a close-up on the X-ray of Robert Kennedy's brain and the .22 caliber bullet shot into it. And now I knew by whom and why, a young Palestinian angry over Kennedy's support of Israel, and when would any of this ever end? Would we ever stop doing this to one another?

GRADUATION DAY was hot and cloudless, the Texas sky a deep blue above the terracotta-tiled roofs of campus. The steps of the South Mall were taken up with fathers in ties and mothers in dresses, and brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and cousins watching thousands of us in our robes and ta.s.seled mortarboards as we sat in the shade of the main building listening to a speech given by a man in a linen three-piece suit. Somewhere in the crowd were my mother and her mother and sister, both of whom had driven to Austin from central Louisiana where my grandmother lived. My mother had flown in from St. Maarten, the island where she'd been living with Bruce for two years helping him to run a small airfreight company that flew in supplies for hotels and restaurants. My brother and sisters were up North: Suzanne had dropped out of Bradford and gotten a job tending bar at the beach. She'd met a roofer there named Keith, and they planned to get married late in the summer; Nicole was in her last year of high school and living with our father and his third wife, Peggy; and Jeb had gotten a girl pregnant. He was working construction and sharing a small rented house with her in Salem, Ma.s.sachusetts. She was due to have the baby soon. He was nineteen.

Some administrator was speaking now, a tall handsome man I'd never seen before. He smiled and leaned into the microphone and declared us official graduates of the university. There were whoops of joy. Mortarboards got tossed into the air, and I turned and made my way through the crowd to look for my mother, aunt, and grandmother. I felt oddly blue. I had just begun to learn all I needed to learn. There were so many more books to read, so many more lectures to attend. How would I be completely free until I'd learned all those truths? But there was my family too; I kept feeling them inside me, an itch that could only be scratched by going North for a while: And would Jeb get married? How was he going to be a cla.s.sical guitarist while working construction? Wasn't that bad for his hands? Didn't he tell me that before? That a musician has to take care of his hands?

But I wasn't just going back for my brother and two sisters. As much as I'd loved all that reading and essay-writing and test-taking, there was the instinct to walk away from it for a while, to do some kind of physical work. I could take a year before I went back to school for that Ph.D., then maybe I'd become someone with the credentials to do good, the kind of person to whom people really listened.

BY LATE fall, Jeb and I were building things together again. Our boss was Trevor D., a lanky British man who wanted to be a millionaire before he turned thirty. He had long dark hair and expected punctuality and efficiency and the consistent execution of our tasks. These were words he used regularly. He also said "excellence" a lot, and once or twice a week he had to unhitch his leather carpenter's ap.r.o.n and lie down on the ground, his eyes closed tight as one of his migraines pa.s.sed through his head like a silent storm.

There was the lead carpenter, Doug, and Jeb, the carpenter's helper, and Randy the laborer, and me, who'd been demoted from carpenter to laborer once Trevor D. saw I knew very little and could do less. I'd lied to get the job, told him I had all kinds of experience when all I'd done was build forts with Jeb when we were kids.

We were renovating a three-story house Trevor D. had bought down by the water. It was in a neighborhood of two-hundred-year-old houses, paint flaking off their clapboards, rot in their sills and doors and window frames. There was a barroom a block away called the Hole in the Wall, a few boarded-up shops, but from the roof of Trevor D.'s house you could see the ocean, a gray sliver of it beyond utility poles and s.h.i.+ngled gables. His plan was to gut the entire structure down to its frame then rebuild it as three condominiums, the top one a luxury unit because of the "water-view." He said he hoped to triple or quadruple his investment.

I saw him as a tawdry capitalist.

The five of us ripped off all the clapboards, pulled out the windows and any sheathing that may have rotted, wide pine boards nailed to studs by men decades and decades before any of us was born. A lot of the sheathing had to go, the roof too, including the rafters because Trevor D. needed a flat roof for the deck we were going to build up there. It took over a week to strip the house down to its naked frame, a week when we all worked together doing the same thing, but now the long steel dumpster we'd filled was gone and stacks of new lumber sat in the lot, lumber Randy and I constantly hauled to Trevor and Doug and Jeb, the men who knew what they were doing and spoke about it in a language I did not know.

I kept thinking Jeb shouldn't know it either. He'd spent his teenage years in his room, practicing guitar and f.u.c.king a grown woman and making art; then he found himself at Bradford College, drunk at a party with a cute girl and now he was a father, and the teacher was finally gone and how did he understand what these men were talking about? What did he know about building walls and floors and stairs to rooms with windows that worked? But somehow he did. And if he wasn't sure, he'd pretend he knew, then go learn on his own what seemed to be already there inside him, an innate knowledge of how things worked.

So many times during the day, Trevor D. and Doug and Jeb would pause to work out a problem: a support wall is needed here, but that makes the hallway on the other side too narrow; the stairs end here, but now the header's too low above the last step; if the kitchen window is framed here, there's no room for a fridge there; and on and on. I'd hear pieces of their conversation while Randy and I hauled new two-by-fours for the walls, sheets of plywood for sheathing, fifty-pound boxes of nails. Randy and I spent days pulling old ones from every stud in the house so that each one was clean and ready for twentieth-century insulation, strapping, and Sheetrock. While new construction started on the first floor, he and I continued demo work on the second and third. We knocked down part.i.tion walls. We ripped up old flooring from joists we'd then have to balance ourselves on to keep from falling through. We filled barrels with chunks of plaster and broken lathe, each one weighing well over a hundred pounds, and we'd heave them down steps and outside to the new dumpster where we'd squat on either side of the barrel, then lift it over our heads and dump it in, the plaster dust clouding back into our faces, our hair white, our eyes red-rimmed.

Randy didn't talk much, but I knew he'd dropped out of high school, that he was married and had a two-year-old son. I knew his wife had a drinking problem and was in rehab, and that Randy's mother took care of his son all day while he worked. I knew he liked cars and took pride in the black SS Chevelle he drove to the job site every morning. He kept it clean inside and out and parked it on the far side of the parking lot. Any tools he owned-a framing hammer, a sledge, a few pry bars, and a reciprocating saw-he'd lay on a blanket in the trunk. At coffee break, he and I would sit against the foundation apart from Trevor D., Doug, and Jeb, who usually stood in the middle of the lot looking up at the house, pointing things out to each other. Trevor and Doug were dressed for the weather, heavy jeans and work boots, a fleece vest and wool sweater over more wool over long underwear, the white cotton sleeves you could see at the wrists. But Jeb, his hair shorter now, his stubble catching the morning light, he stood there in jeans with a hole in one knee, his bare leg showing. He wore a T-s.h.i.+rt under a b.u.t.ton-down cotton s.h.i.+rt that may have belonged to Bruce once. The s.h.i.+rttails hung out. But he didn't look cold or unhappy as he stood there and tapped a Marlboro from his pack and lit up, nodding his head at whatever Trevor D. was saying, learning his trade.

At night, alone in my apartment, I'd heat a can of soup and read Marx or Engels or Weber. The radiator hissed, and I'd read the same sentence over and over, wouldn't even see it. Later, lying on my mat in the back room, I'd thumb through catalogues for graduate schools, think about all the knowledge that would come with earning a Ph.D. in political thought, how much I would know then.

But the world didn't seem so big now, and where were the people who wanted to change it anyway? Somehow in Texas, studying all I'd studied, I'd felt like more than just one. My reading had joined my mind to the thinkers before me, to the millions of people whose lives they indirectly wrote about, these scholars who sat in a tower so high they could see everyone and I could too. But after eight to ten hours of working with my body, I was too tired to look, a capitalist plot, I thought, to keep the prole in his place. But this a.s.sumption floated away like steam; if I was a proletarian, who was Trevor D.? He had plans to be a rich bourgeois, but I saw how hard he worked every day, how two or three times a s.h.i.+ft, he'd sit somewhere with his calculator and paper and pencil to figure out how much all this was costing, how much was left in the budget, how much would his return be? And what did I care if he made a hundred thousand dollars on this job? As long as what he built was solid and its price was fair, what was wrong with that? Did that make him an oppressor?

I didn't know. So I'd brew tea and open one of my books and keep reading, hoping one of these dead intellectuals could tell me.

FOR THE first time since I was fifteen and began to change my body with weights, I had no place to train. If there was a barbell gym in Lynn I couldn't find it, and even though I was working with my body all day long all week long, sweating and breathing hard for so much of each s.h.i.+ft, it wasn't enough. My chest muscles felt smaller, my shoulders and arms too, and when I flexed my upper back, it didn't flare as much as it used to. Despite all my training, I had never become big, just hard and fit, but now whatever muscle I'd built was atrophying. I felt vulnerable, like a knight who has slipped off his steel-plated armor and gone back into the world without it. I was no longer the small, soft boy Clay Whelan and the others had beat up, but a cool irrational fear welled in my gut that if I didn't find a gym, I would slide back into being that boy all over again, and as soon as I did, that's when they'd come for me.

EVERY SAt.u.r.dAY I'd drive forty minutes northeast to Haverhill. I'd meet Sam Dolan at the Y and he and I would work out together with rusting black iron in a dank concrete room. He was still so much stronger than I was, bench-pressing well over 300 pounds now, but I'd missed my friend, and it was good to be with him again, and for over two hours we'd push and pull and press and curl.

Sam had graduated from Merrimack College and was working as a reporter for the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune, Eagle-Tribune, something he saw himself doing for years. He'd always liked reading and writing, and now he got paid to do both. He still had his old room at his parents' house on Eighteenth Avenue, but he was engaged to marry Theresa the following August, and sometimes he'd stay over at her apartment just off Lafayette Square. Theresa worked at AT&T, which used to be Western Electric. She was kind and quiet, and she had long brown hair and a lovely face and when Sam met her at a house party, he was drawn to her right away and knew early on where they were headed together. They already had plans to one day own a house and have kids. something he saw himself doing for years. He'd always liked reading and writing, and now he got paid to do both. He still had his old room at his parents' house on Eighteenth Avenue, but he was engaged to marry Theresa the following August, and sometimes he'd stay over at her apartment just off Lafayette Square. Theresa worked at AT&T, which used to be Western Electric. She was kind and quiet, and she had long brown hair and a lovely face and when Sam met her at a house party, he was drawn to her right away and knew early on where they were headed together. They already had plans to one day own a house and have kids.

After our workouts and a shower, Sam and I would drive across the river on the Basilere Bridge to Ronnie D's. The winter sun would be down, the sky casting a purple light over the brick mill buildings up the Merrimack, broken ice floes wedged hard against the granite piers beneath us. Upriver was the iron trestle the Boston & Maine would take into Railroad Square, and beyond that the bridge Jeb and I had run across three years ago. My muscles had that pleasantly flushed and tired feeling, and I was looking forward to some cold beer and two or three bar hot dogs, but as we drove into Bradford past its neon-lit fast food shops-Mister Donut, then McDonald's, the car dealers.h.i.+p across the street-there was an emptiness somewhere behind my ribs and sternum, an airless quiet that told me I was standing still when before, in Texas, I'd been running forward.

But I liked Ronnie D's. I liked how crowded and dimly lit it always was. The only light came from amber lamps in the walls of the wooden booths and from behind the bar, and that's where Big Pat Cahill worked slow and steady tapping off gla.s.ses of beer, pouring shots of blackberry brandy and peppermint schnapps, ringing up purchases on an old bra.s.s cash register beneath the painting of a nude woman reclining on her elbow, her belly and b.r.e.a.s.t.s exposed, a blanket draped over her hip. Pat had a long brown beard and hair he tucked behind his ears. His voice was low and stony, and he wore black T-s.h.i.+rts all year long, and at closing when the lights would come up, the bar crammed with drunk men and women in a smoky haze, another bartender would yell, "You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here here!" This was a line people ignored, but then Pat would bellow, "Everyone the f.u.c.k out! Now! Now!" And we'd drain our drinks and beers and head for the door.

By nightfall, the place would be full of people I'd known and not known for years. Faces from high school, or men and women I'd seen in the streets. They stood crowded at the bar or sat at the c.o.c.ktail tables or in the booths against the wall that Sam and Theresa and I preferred. We'd drink and laugh and talk. Because he'd lived in this town his entire life, Sam knew far more people than I did. Men from his old hockey team, maybe a coworker from the paper, or a friend of his parents or one of his many aunts and uncles and cousins. Now and then, one or two would sit in the booth with us for a while as we drank beer after beer. Every half hour or so, the c.o.c.ktail waitress would come by to take another order and she'd start to clear the table, but we'd ask her to leave the empty bottles where they were; for some reason we liked to see evidence of all we drank, as if we were measuring just how much fun we were having.

And it was was fun, though back in Texas all that book-learning had seemed to open doors inside me that led to a higher part of myself, one that was more evolved and thoughtful, reasonable and idealistic; in the Northeast again, working construction in Lynn, trying to study at night but losing interest, lifting and drinking with Sam, I was at the mercy of something; every time a man laughed too loudly or yelled above the crowd, I'd sit up and look over there, expecting to see trouble and ready to jump back into the heart of it. Most of the time it was nothing, though; Ronnie D's was a friendlier bar than those across the river in Haverhill. The customers were regulars who knew each other, and besides, there was Pat to deal with. fun, though back in Texas all that book-learning had seemed to open doors inside me that led to a higher part of myself, one that was more evolved and thoughtful, reasonable and idealistic; in the Northeast again, working construction in Lynn, trying to study at night but losing interest, lifting and drinking with Sam, I was at the mercy of something; every time a man laughed too loudly or yelled above the crowd, I'd sit up and look over there, expecting to see trouble and ready to jump back into the heart of it. Most of the time it was nothing, though; Ronnie D's was a friendlier bar than those across the river in Haverhill. The customers were regulars who knew each other, and besides, there was Pat to deal with.

Sometimes I'd go home with a woman. Wake up in an apartment or house I didn't recognize. Turn to see the sleeping face of someone I did not know, her brown curly hair on the pillow, or red, or straight and blonde, my clothes on the rug, hers too, once a leopard-skin outfit I stepped over on my way out the door.

But most nights I'd leave with Sam and Theresa, and the three of us would drive down along the river past the closing bars and men and women milling on the sidewalks, smoking cigarettes, laughing, and we'd head under the railroad bridge up River Street past p.a.w.nshops and sub shops, a machine shop, a car dealers.h.i.+p of repossessed cars, then along the black Merrimack to the highway and Howard Johnson's where we'd wait for a table and order eggs and home fries, toast and pancakes and coffee.

One night at Ronnie's, the last-call lights up and s.h.i.+ning on us like a cop's, Sam and Theresa and I were in a crowd close to the door. Pat had switched off the jukebox and now there were only loud, drunken voices, so much cigarette smoke in the air my eyes burned. Theresa was wearing a short leather jacket and tight jeans, her back to the booth behind her. A man sat there against the wall, one leg up, his arm resting on it, and his eyes were on Theresa's a.s.s. There was another man sitting across from him, but I was seeing only this one. He had long black hair and wore a black sweater, his sideburns shaved off halfway across his jaw. He reminded me of Kenny V., who years ago had walked me and Cleary out of a pot party on Seventh and started whaling away on my head and rib cage. The waitress had cleared all the bottles away, so now I held a gla.s.s of beer and sipped from it. Theresa was talking to somebody, laughing, and the man in the booth said something to the other, then raised his eyebrows and nodded in the direction of Theresa's a.s.s, and I leaned forward and dumped my beer in his face.

It was like pus.h.i.+ng the b.u.t.ton to some rusty old machine whose functions were simple but automatic: the man in the booth was standing up now, yelling, his face dripping, but he was the first moving part that touched the next moving part that touched the next. I don't remember punching him or his friend, but Sam had gotten into it with a tall man in a light windbreaker at the bar and with one hand under the man's chin, Sam pushed him up and over it. Then Pat was moving fast and hollering and we were all outside, two cruisers pulling up to move us along, this raucous band of people I only saw when drunk.

The next morning I lay in bed thinking about it. The shock in the man's face, then the outrage. And why shouldn't he feel that? What was so wrong about just looking at Theresa's a.s.s? As long as he was quiet about it, and she didn't see him do it and so didn't feel objectified and violated, what was wrong with that? Didn't I look at women like that all the d.a.m.n time? So who was I to do what I did? Again, there was this almost electric hum in my bones that I had somehow gotten myself wired wrong, that now I was stuck with impulses I could not control, ones that could lead to nothing but deeper and deeper trouble.

SOMETIMES I'D sleep in Pop's spare bedroom. When I was in Texas, he and Peggy had gotten married, and they moved back into the same campus house Pop had shared with Lorraine. Since marrying Peggy he seemed happier now. He said it was because they lived the same way; they were both writers and readers and runners. Each morning after he attended the 7 a.m. Ma.s.s down at the Sacred Hearts church, he would write at the desk in their bedroom, and she would work in the study upstairs. Then they'd each go for a run or fast walk, sometimes alone, sometimes together with their dog, a big golden retriever named Luke. The rest of the day, she worked on her graduate degree in writing and Pop taught his cla.s.ses. It was like seeing him live with one of his buddies, the ones like Metrakos who wrote or studied, then worked out, but now he had this in his wife, and I was happy for him. It looked like this time he'd be able to stay married.

Since Suzanne's rape, my father had begun to acquire an a.r.s.enal of handguns. Besides the .38 snub-nose, he now owned a .380 semiautomatic, a .45, a 9-millimeter, and a .22 caliber derringer that easily fit into the front pocket of his jeans. He even bought Peggy a lady's-size nickel-plated Sat.u.r.day Night Special, a revolver he insisted she keep with her whenever she drove up to the University of New Hamps.h.i.+re for her cla.s.ses. On his birthday the August before, Jeb and I pitched in and bought him a replica of a .22 Colt six-gun. It was silver and had smooth maple handgrips, and he kept it in a leather holster on a closet shelf with the others.

One weekend that fall, Pop and Peggy were invited by the novelist Thomas Williams and his wife to spend the night at their cabin up in the White Mountains. Pop asked me if I wanted to come along, and I said yes. Maybe that weekend I wanted to get away from the pull of the barrooms and their warm, smoky noise, the beer-by-beer sinking into mindlessness, the naked body I'd sometimes wake up to; maybe I wanted to get away from the possibility of another fight, or perhaps it was just clarity I was looking for, a little distance from the hard physical labor of the week, my distracted efforts at reading abstract political theory at night, my low-down yearnings come Friday and Sat.u.r.day.

On the two-hour drive north, I sat in the back of Peggy's Subaru while Pop drove and she sat beside him, and they talked. I learned more about Thomas Williams, that he won something called a National Book Award for his novel The Hair of Harold Roux, The Hair of Harold Roux, that with his own hands he had built this cabin one summer with his wife of many years. that with his own hands he had built this cabin one summer with his wife of many years.

After a while we left the highway and drove miles down a rutted dirt road, thick stands of pine and hardwood on either side of it. At the end was the Williamses' place, a shaved-timber cabin with a steeply pitched gable roofed with cedar s.h.i.+ngles, and beyond it a sloping field of wild gra.s.s, then deep woods that rose into a mountain ridge. In the last light of the afternoon, it was purple and blue on the horizon, and Thomas and Elizabeth Williams stepped off the porch to greet us. They were warm and welcoming and right away I liked them both. Tom Williams wore a faded work s.h.i.+rt and jeans and work boots. His face was clean-shaven, deeply lined and handsome, and when he shook my hand it was like shaking the hand of Trevor D. or Doug or Jeb, the thick pad of calluses just beneath the base of the fingers, the kind you get from swinging a hammer.

Pop had brought up a few handguns, and soon he and Thomas Williams and I were taking turns shooting at a playing card Williams had clamped to some brush with a clothespin. We were using the .380, a semiautomatic with a hair trigger that allowed you to empty the clip in seconds, your hand kicking back, the smell of cordite in the air. But when it was my turn I didn't want to look young and impulsive, so I shot it slowly and deliberately. I aimed it with one arm and sighted down its short barrel, the playing card a white rectangle in green, and I held my breath, then squeezed the trigger, the card fluttering.

"He could've been a Marine, too," Williams said. He and Pop were behind me, Williams sitting on a homemade picnic table smoking a pipe. The sun on the trees had darkened, and I felt pride from what Williams had said. I took my time with my next five shots, hitting the card with three of them.

I lowered the .380, released the magazine, then pulled back on the slide and checked the chamber to make sure it was empty. I handed it to Pop handle-first, the safe way he'd taught me when I was a boy, and I could see the pride in his eyes too, but it was as if there was a fishhook lodged in my skin somewhere: Williams's words, could've been a Marine could've been a Marine. They echoed up against something inside me I hadn't been aware of, that even though I had plans for graduate school in less than a year, there was the feeling I had done very little with my life so far and still wasn't doing much. Could've been. Could've been. Like it was too late. Like I'd been letting chances to do things slip by. Like it was too late. Like I'd been letting chances to do things slip by.

My father reloaded the .380, stepped past me, and said, "Rape who, motherf.u.c.ker?" Then he raised the weapon and fired six rounds in seconds, the reports echoing out over the field of wild gra.s.s into the trees.

"h.e.l.lo? h.e.l.lo? h.e.l.lo?" A man in hiking boots and shorts was waving at us thirty feet to the right, our target just on the other side of what was a trail. Pop lowered the pistol and Williams apologized to the man and we gathered up our guns and ammo and went inside.

We ate at a weathered oak table on a small deck overlooking the field and mountain ridge, black now against a red sky. Dinner was grilled steaks and French bread and tossed green salad. I sat beside Pop and Peggy, who sat across from the Williamses. The conversation was warm and relaxed, though a lot of it was between Peggy and Elizabeth, and Williams and Pop, and there were gla.s.ses of red wine, and we pa.s.sed around the bread and broke it off with our hands. I kept looking at Elizabeth and Tom Williams. They were a good-looking couple, their kids grown already, and I thought about them building this cabin together one summer, the sharing of all that work, the joy in it. I ate the tender meat and sipped my wine; so many of the writers from my parents' early days in Iowa City had gone on to sleep with other people, their marriages cooling piles of ash they left behind. It was something my father had been writing about for years. But the Williamses were obviously different, and I did not know till that moment that I had a.s.sumed writers just could not stay married, that something inside them-maybe the dark side of their creativity-simply made them unstable.

Before dessert I thanked Thomas and Elizabeth Williams for dinner and excused myself to go sleep outside somewhere. Elizabeth insisted I take their guest room and Tom said something about bears, but I said good night, borrowed one of their flashlights, and carried my rolled sleeping bag down the path into the trees.

The trail descended alongside the field for a while, then cut south and rose steeply into the pines. The beam from the flashlight bounced ahead of me, and I was breathing hard and had no idea why I was doing this. The trail began to level off onto a small clearing of flat rocks. Between two of them was a patch of dirt. A young pine sprouted there, and it looked as good a place as I would find in the dark, and I set my flashlight on one of the rocks, unrolled my sleeping bag, untied my work boots, and climbed in. I lay back, but when the moist earth touched my head, I grabbed one of my work boots and set it on its side, then rested back against it. I reached up and switched off the flashlight.

The air was cool. It smelled like moss and pine needles and through the trees I could hear my father laugh, then Peggy or Elizabeth. They had to be at least a half mile away, but they sounded much closer than that. I closed my eyes and listened to the voices in the trees. Only the men's now. Pop and Thomas Williams, two people who, when they were young, had both found something they were good at and then just kept doing it. They seemed more whole to me because of that. But what was I I good at? Why was I even here? Not in the White Mountains but here, on good at? Why was I even here? Not in the White Mountains but here, on earth earth?

Then I saw Steve Lynch go down with one punch, the two frat boys in the alley. There was Bill Connolly's nephew I seemed to hit at will in the ring, Sam Dolan too, his eyes tearing up each time I jabbed.

Maybe I was meant to be a boxer. The signs were there, weren't they? What was stopping me? I'd learned that to hesitate was to freeze and to freeze was not to fight, and so now I never hesitated; my body responded the way I had somehow taught it to, but lying there in my sleeping bag between two stretches of rock, it was clear it was time my head got involved in all this again, that there had to be a fine balance between pa.s.sivity and reckless action, and maybe the place to find it was back in the ring.