Townie by André Dubus III Page A

hoarse so maybe it was another dog yelling at us, and the cop was too slow, his cruiser shooting up all the wrong side streets, its engine angry like the others.
    It was better not to go anywhere.
    Sometime that year, I’d moved my room up into the attic. Our rented house had that three-story turret, and the third story was part of the attic, but it had a finished floor and light blue wallpaper and trim around the windows. It was unheated, but there were electrical outlets that worked, and there was even an old bed with a headboard. I moved my things up there, hung my blacklight posters of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. Tacked to the wall my blacklight, a birthday or Christmas present, and I got hold of some glow-in-the dark paints and painted a space galaxy on the ceiling. At night, when only the blacklight was on, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix pulsing light from the walls like insistent spirits, I lay on the bed and stared at the moon and stars and distant worlds.
    It was a better place to trip. No cops or dogs or angry machines. Just Bob Dylan on my record player, the expanding cosmos over our heads. But one night in winter we ate a batch of blotter cut with strychnine. Every ninety seconds or so a hot knife seemed to push through my heart, and I had to stand and hold my breath as it passed, my shoulders rounded, my chest sunken, this feeling I’d been yanked through all the decades of my life and now I was old and dying and it was my fault.
     
    ON THE other side of the river was Bradford. It’s where a lot of Jocks at the high school lived, the kids who wore corduroys and sweaters and looked clean. It’s where houses had big green lawns. It’s where the college was where Pop taught. It’s where he lived in an apartment building with Theo Metrakos and his friend Dave Supple, a writer too.
    Since leaving our mother, Pop had lived in a few places, but we rarely saw them and never slept there. Years later I would hear my father say the divorce had left him dating his children. That still meant picking us up every Sunday for a matinee and, if he had the money, an early dinner somewhere. For a few years now he was taking us to church too. He’d pull up in his rusted-out Lancer and drive us to Mass at Sacred Hearts in Bradford Square. The five of us would walk down the aisle between the crowded pews, Jeb and I with our long hair, Suzanne in her tight hip-huggers, Nicole in her brace she now wore for scoliosis, Pop one of the only men in church not wearing a jacket or tie. He refused to put money in the collection basket, too. Many times I’d hear him say, “You think Jesus ever wore a fucking tie? Did Jesus spend money on buildings ?”
    One night, when we were still living at the doctor’s house, I heard Mom on the phone trying to convince Pop that he should start taking out each of us one at a time, that he was never going to know us as individual people if he didn’t.
    I don’t know if I cared then about that or not, but a cool sweat broke out on my forehead just thinking about being alone with Pop. I’d never been alone with him. What would I say? What would we talk about? What would we do?
    When Mom got off the phone, she said, “I can’t believe it. Your father says he’ll be too shy with each of you. He’s scared of his own kids!”
    This made me feel better and worse, but every Wednesday night he’d drive up to the house and take one of us back to his apartment across the river. It was on the third floor of an old brick building covered with ivy. Across the street was the Bradford Green, a lawn and trees and a gazebo, and you could see it from his bedroom where his bed was always made and there were shelves of books and his black wooden desk I remembered from when he used to live with us, its surface clean and organized, notebooks stacked neatly beside his typewriter beside his humidor and pipe stand, six or eight of them each with a white pipe cleaner sticking out of the mouthpiece.
    In his small