Townie by André Dubus III

avenues the snow had blanketed the streets. On Cedar, cars spun out snow as they drove from the curb or the corner store. Cleary let out a yelp and a holler and went running after a Chevy that had just pulled away, skidding slightly as it went. Cleary ran low, bent over so the driver wouldn’t see him, and when he reached the back bumper he grabbed it and squatted on his sneakers, his butt an inch or two from the road. And he skied away, just like that, the snow shooting out from under the wheels of the car, out from under his Zayre Department Store sneakers, blue exhaust coughing out its pipe beside him.
     
    IN OUR living room stood tall pine bookshelves loaded with hardcover novels and short story collections. They were the sole objects our mother and father had ever owned, and our house seemed to be the only one in the neighborhood that had them. In Cleary’s living room, there was the TV, a few glass knickknacks on the shelf beneath it. On the walls were department store prints of daisies in a vase, a kitten with sad, round eyes. Once I saw a slim hardcover lying on the coffee table, The Illustrated Bible.
    The first time Cleary was in our house, he walked up to the shelves and ran his fingers along the spines of Faulkner, Chekhov, and Balzac, books I’d never quite noticed myself.
    “Are these all real?”
    “What?”
    “I thought they were for looks, you know, like in a store.”
    “Nope.”
    “You read ’em all?”
    I shrugged. I hadn’t read any of them. “My old man has. And my mother.”
    Cleary kept running his fingers along all those books, shaking his head.
     
    ON WEEKENDS at parties down on Seventh, or out in a weed lot, or up in the woods of Round Pond, we’d try whatever drugs were going around; we’d eat tabs of brown mescaline, or a quarter of LSD 25, or half a tab of four-way purple blotter acid, chemically treated paper you dissolved under the tongue. It tasted like earwax and the rush came on in twenty or thirty minutes, the feeling the world was a strange and fascinating place really, a special place. That life was special.
    But it made your heart pound hard and fast in your rib cage and sometimes we just had to get up and run, Jeb and Cleary and I flying down the dark avenues in our sneakers or boots, which seemed to be moving us, making our legs lift and our knees bend, and we could go on forever. It was long after midnight, and one of us was screaming, the wind in our faces that smelled like green leaves and motor oil and rotting wood and tin siding cooling off. We ran past a brick church, dark and locked up, like God’s house was closed for business, had always been closed for business, and we ran past a packy and its lighted beer signs, bright blue and red neon slashing into my brain, bad to look at, and a car tore by us, some angry machine driven by no one, and we kept running and running, past the auto parts yard, all the angry machines quiet in there, a rusted hulking darkness behind a plank fence Cleary kicked himself onto sideways for a stride, the German shepherd behind there barking, straining against his chain which sounded like jangling treasure, bad men and gold and now there were golden lights ahead, Jeb already there, his hair flapping like a small child barely connected to his head, and the gold was Christmas glowing, lighted strings of bulbs hanging over used cars with hot pink price decals on their windshields, numbers I couldn’t decipher, then, without sound, the lights exploded, six or seven of them going dark, broken glass falling like snow onto the cars. Cleary was whooping and yelling, and a bottle broke against a post, brown glass spraying, and he ran up and down the gutter looking for something else to throw.
    A cruiser pulled up, its spotlight on us brighter than the sun, but it was night and now we ran blind through the used car lot and over a chain-link fence, running through yards and side streets, a door opening and slamming, a woman yelling, her voice