Donny C. stood shirtless in boxer shorts crying as quietly as he could, his eyes squeezed shut, a butcher knife pressed to his throat just beneath his Adam’s Apple.
“Donny?”
He shook his head, didn’t look over at me.
“Donny, what’re you doing, man?”
I stepped closer and he glanced at me, his eyes unseeing. In the dull light that shone from under the stove’s vent I could see where a tattoo had been burned off his shoulder. His face was streaked with tears and he was shaking his head. “I’ve had it. I’ve fuckin’ had it.”
“Come talk to me, Donny.”
He shook his head, the blade still pressed to his throat. “No, I can’t do nothin’ no more.”
“Let’s sit and talk. Bring the knife with you if you want.” I backed into the front room. “C’mon, Donny.”
He stayed in the kitchen staring at me over his shoulder, his biceps tensed, ready to drive in the blade. In Colorado, the kitchen and everything in it had been locked, and why wasn’t this one? The phone was out in the hallway. I was thinking 911. If he does it, I’ll punch those numbers, then stuff a dish towel into the wound.
But now Donny was sniffling and walking toward me, the knife at his side like a tool he carried with him wherever he went. I sat on the edge of the couch, didn’t let myself sink into it. I knew nothing about staying away from a jabbing knife. I knew nothing about talking to someone who wanted to die.
“What’s got you all fucked up, Donny?”
He looked down at me. His chest was small. There was a tuft of black hair along the sternum, and his small gut protruded over his boxers. I could feel the blade there between us but tried not to look at it. Donny sat slowly, carefully, like a man with a broken leg easing into a bath of hot water. He rested the knife across his bare knee. “You just swore. If I swear like that they write me up. Two more a them and I’m back in fuckin’ jail.” He shot me a look. “You gonna write me up for that?”
“No.”
“Yeah, right.”
“I’m not worried about your swearing, Donny.”
He looked down at the blade, the floor, the wall. “I can’t breathe no more. They don’t let me do nothin’ I know how to fuckin’ do.”
“Who?”
“The counselors. They don’t like how I talk, they don’t let me get pissed off, and if I do I gotta use words without swearin’ and without fuckin’ yelling. They tell me I can’t fight anymore. You know what would’ve happened to me if I didn’t fight? Take these things away and I should just be dead ’cause I’m not fuckin’ me anymore.” His voice broke and he shook his head like what was rising up in him was a fly buzzing at his face. He wiped the back of his arm across his eyes, the knife flashing dully. He looked over at me as if he was expecting to see nothing at all.
The day counselors were doing what they could; they were trying to turn a pit bull into a collie, and they were probably doing it for him. No one in the safe, clean, and appropriate world wanted a pit bull around. But what happens to the streets that made Donny Donny? The ones that are still inside him, this young body in boxer shorts he now wanted to be free of?
“No disrespect to them, Donny, but I think they’re wrong.”
He turned his face to me. His back was slumped like an old man’s, and I wondered if he looked like his dead mother or his long-gone father.
“No, they’re right. I’m no fuckin’ good.”
“Then I’m no good either.”
I didn’t tell him any stories about myself. I didn’t swear. Part of me felt I was betraying the trained people in this house, the good lady who hired me not to counsel anyone but to keep an eye out. But images were coming to me, and I was putting them into words I began to speak, Donny with a good job making good money, all dressed up and out on a date with a beautiful woman, walking down a city street at night when a man steps from the shadows to give them shit and Donny takes care of business before the man can even get started. Donny began to nod his head at this; I was talking about punching first and punching hard, no talk, no foreplay.
“That’s right. That’s fuckin’ right.” He was tapping his foot, the flat of the blade bouncing on his knee. I began to imagine the wooden toolbox Jeb built once for his block planes and chisels, his handsaws and hammers. I told Donny he had tools he should never lose: the street talk, not taking shit from anybody, the punching and kicking and anything else that had to be done. But now it was time to learn how to use some new tools, that’s all. Not to toss out everything he knew, just add to what he knew.
“You’re learning how to be around other kinds of people, Donny. To be in other kinds of places. But don’t ever lose the old Donny. He got you this far, didn’t he? You can’t leave him behind now.”
Donny’s eyes were on mine and not on mine. He was nodding his head. Then he shook it once. “How come they never said that?”
“Different people carry different toolboxes, I guess.”
He looked at me and laughed. “Where’d you fuckin’ come from?”
“Beats the shit outta me. Put the knife back and go to bed, all right?”
He stood. “You gonna write me up for this?”
“No.”
He looked like he didn’t believe me but wanted to, needed to. He turned and walked back into the kitchen with the knife. There was the light clatter of metal on metal, the slide of the drawer, then the creak of one stair tread after another as Donny C. climbed back up to his bed in the men’s wing of Phoenix East.
The next morning, the day staff showed up with their Dunkin’ Donut coffees and called all the residents into the front room for the morning meeting. I pulled one of the counselors aside and told him about Donny. On the short ride back over the river, the sun glinting off its brown swirling surface and littered mudbanks, there was the feeling that maybe I’d gone too deep with him, that I had no business counseling someone, but I couldn’t deny that some kind of truth had passed between us. I thought of Donny C.’s new toolbox, something I never could have told him about if I hadn’t built one, too; since I’d begun to write a few years earlier, the hurt and rage that forever seemed to lie just beneath the surface of my skin was not gone but had been consistently directed to my notebooks. Jabs had become single words, a combination of punches had become sentences, and rounds had become paragraphs. When I was done, whether I had written well or not, something seemed to have left me, those same pent-up forces that would have gone into my fists and feet. But it was more than this; I was finding again and again in my daily writing that I had to become these other people, a practice that also seemed to put me more readily in another’s shoes even when I wasn’t writing. The way it had with Donny. Before this, a guy like him would have simply been an angry face I’d force myself to confront in the one way I’d learned how, my weight on my right foot, my hands in loose fists at my side. To see him as anything other than bad would have deterred me when I did not want to be deterred. But writing was teaching me to leave me behind. It required me to suffer with someone else, an act that made trying to hurt him impossible.
BECAUSE I lived in his neighborhood now, I saw a lot of Pop. By late afternoon his writing and running would be finished, and he’d stand on the sidewalk one story below my open window and yell up something like, “Hey, Andre, Random House called. They want your book.” He was joking, of course, but he knew I was up there writing, and I could hear the pride in his voice, just as I had when he’d answered the phone months earlier, when he’d whooped like some Southern cowboy about my story being published in Playboy. I’d stick my head out the window. “Tell them I’m not done yet.”
“Got time for a beer?” He’d be smiling up at me in his Red Sox jacket or his faded denim, an Akubra on his head, his beard thick and graying, and even if I was in the middle of a sentence it was hard to say no, and I’d meet him on the sidewalk and we’d go into the dim, smoky light of Ronnie D’s for a beer.
Sometimes on the weekends, he’d roam from bar to b
ar with me and Sam and Theresa. It’s what we all still did, though it was beginning to feel old to me, and some Fridays or Saturdays I’d drive into Boston instead, see a play if I had the money, or go to a museum or some film from another country.
One Saturday afternoon in late May, Pop and I were driving to the Am Vets on Primrose Street to meet Sam for a beer. Pop was driving, and he had Waylon Jennings playing on his cassette player. The windows were down as we drove along Water Street past the boarded-up Woolworth’s building, past Mitchell’s Clothes and Valhally’s Diner where Jeb and Cleary and I would sit in a booth for hours drinking too much coffee with stolen money.
Pop had just sold a short story to a literary quarterly and he was in a good mood, tapping the steering wheel and singing along with Waylon Jennings about how being crazy had always kept him from going insane.
A warm wind blew against the side of my face, and I could smell car exhaust, the dried mudbanks of the river. My father downshifted past the post office, then headed north. On both sides of us were closed-up mill buildings. We passed Grant Street where Connolly’s Gym used to be, its windows covered with plywood, and up ahead was the railroad trestle then Lafayette Square. It always felt strange to be on the Haverhill side with Pop, as if I were a tour guide who had to keep my mouth shut.
The Am Vets on Primrose Street wasn’t far from Eighteenth Avenue. It’s the street where Sam’s parents still lived and where I’d insulted the drunk and he’d punched me in the face and Jimmy Quinn had nearly killed him. Across the lot was the long white building that held Pilgrim Lanes, a place Pop didn’t even know about, and beyond that the strip plaza and pizza joint where Lee Paquette had the warm shotgun barrel pressed to his forehead. On the other side of the Am Vets was a lot for the city’s trucks, most of them parked now in front of a mountain of gravel, and as Pop pulled into the lot I remembered Cleary and Jeb and me hopping onto the back of one late at night during a blizzard, how we held on to the iron ledge and cruised through the soft, white avenues like heroes in a ticker-tape parade.
The Am Vets bar was crowded and there was so much cigarette smoke in the air my eyes burned. Two TVs were going in the corners, the bartenders working without a break, pouring shots and opening bottles of Bud and serving draft beer in 16-ounce plastic cups to pile drivers and truckers, to off-duty waitresses and state cops, to plumbers and carpenters and unemployed millworkers. Big Jeff Chabot was there. He’d sold his flatbed truck and was buying us a round. This was his hangout, not far from where he and his pretty wife Cheryl had bought a house right after high school. He and Sam and my father were laughing about something, their laughter lost in all the bar noise, the TVs droning in the corners, the jukebox playing “Smoke on the Water.” Pop was clearly enjoying the company of my old friends—their size, their jocular good cheer—and I was enjoying how much he was enjoying them. It was like showing him something I had made, a drawing or essay for school, those moments that had never really happened between us. But now he’d just gotten quiet and was looking past the bar to four men sitting at a table against the wall. They were in biker T-shirts, all of them long-haired and whiskered, and I knew one of them. Dom Aiello was short and heavy and wore wire-rimmed glasses too big for his face. He was one of those who’d lounge in our house on a weekday afternoon, smoking a cigarette or a joint, looking up at me whenever I walked in as if I should’ve knocked first. His sister Robyn used to come around too. She was blonde and had green eyes and high cheekbones. She looked like she’d been born into a wealthier class, but she was a speed dealer, mainly Black Beauties and dots of Orange Sunshine, and one afternoon in Cleary’s alley she walked up and French-kissed me as if she knew me. She tasted like bubblegum and nicotine, and in ten years she’d be in prison for driving up Cedar Street and pointing a pistol out her open window and firing a bullet into an old woman she’d never met. Now my father was noticing something about her brother, and he didn’t like it.
“Is that a swastika?”
I looked through the smoke haze past the men and women at the bar. On Aiello’s upper arm was the tattoo of a swastika above an iron cross. “Yep. Biker bullshit, Pop.”
“My wife is Jewish. My daughter’s Jewish.”
Then my father was moving around the bar to the tables against the wall. I stepped in between Sam and Jeff. “My old man’s getting into it.” And I hurried to where he was, my friends behind me. Pop was pointing his finger inches from Aiello’s arm. “You think six million dead is good? Is that what you’re saying with that obscenity on your arm?”
Aiello was looking steadily up at Pop, then the three of us. Big Jeff Chabot was smiling like this was the best time he’d had in a long while, and Sam stood there in a tank top, his shoulders and arms thick as hams, and Aiello’s friends—one of them with a beard he’d braided into a fine point—were staring hard at Aiello; it was his move and he wasn’t doing anything.
“Do you know what they did to those people?” Pop’s voice was getting chest-deep, the Marines in it. A few people at the bar turned toward us.
“I want you to apologize to my wife and daughter.”
Aiello’s eyes were on his hand cupped loosely around his beer bottle.
My father stepped closer to him. “You hear me?”
“Hey, I’m sorry, all right? I didn’t mean nothin’ by it.”
Pop’s forefinger was close enough to Aiello’s tattoo to touch it. “Well this means something, son. This fucking means.”
The others began to look restless. One of them could be carrying, and more than one probably had a knife, but that wasn’t why I didn’t want this to go any further; we’d been having a warmhearted afternoon, a place I hoped to stay a little while longer. I stepped closer and tapped my father’s wrist. “That’s good, Pop. Our beer’s getting warm.”
Pop kept his eyes on Aiello, but he let me turn him back the way we’d come, then we were at the bar, my father quiet, his cheeks flushed, his eyes still on those men at the table. Sam bought us a fresh round. I sipped my beer and wanted to tell Pop I knew that guy, that Suzanne had been his girl for a week or so years earlier. Instead I raised my cup and said to my big friends, “Here’s to my old man kicking some Nazi ass.” Chabot laughed and Sam was smiling and squeezing my father’s shoulder, and Pop was shaking his head, “A fucking swastika.” We lifted our beers and drank. I admired him for what he’d just done, but I was surprised a tattoo like that was news to him, and I thought it was good he didn’t hang out in places like this very often.
Soon enough Aiello and his friends stood in the smoky light and made their way back outside to their bikes. Over the TVs and voices and talk and laughter came the rumble of their engines outside, then they faded to nothing, and in ten years Aiello would be strung out on heroin, HIV-positive on the streets of Haverhill, sleeping under trestles, wandering Main Street and the avenues like Crazy Jack.
ONE FALL weekend Pop and Peggy drove up to Montreal, and they asked me to stay at their campus house to look after their golden retriever Luke. Nicole lived in California now, a place she would stay for the next two decades, and that Saturday night I called Jeb and asked if he wanted to come over, cook a meal and have a few drinks. He brought his new girlfriend, Leigh, a student at Bradford, a sweet-faced rich girl from California whose hometown was the same name as her family’s
The three of us drank rum and Cokes, chatting and listening to some classical on Pop’s stereo. It’s all Jeb would ever listen to, these dead masters he was still trying to teach himself to play on the guitar. Over the years we’d both learned to cook, and that night we made garlic bread and homemade tomato sauce and meatballs over a bed of linguine. Leigh tossed a salad and we were all a little drunk when we sat down to eat.
It was at a table Pop had just inherited from his mother in Lake Charles, Louisiana, a round hardwood brought over from Ireland by her ancestors. He told me he remembered playing under it as a small boy as his mother and father listened on the radio to the war in Europe. I remembered lyin
g on the floor in that camp in the New Hampshire woods, playing with toy cowboys while my father watched and listened to news from another war.
Over the Mozart or Bach or Beethoven, Leigh was flirting with Jeb, winking at him and telling him about the great sex they should have that night in his father’s bed. Jeb was smiling but he said, “No, we’ll sleep on the floor upstairs.” I knew why. Jeb wasn’t supposed to be here at all. Pop, for now anyway, had washed his hands of him. My father and I argued about it one night late in his kitchen. I asked him why? Why do that to Jeb and not to me?
“Because you finished school. Because you don’t walk away from responsibility.”
“But he doesn’t love her, Pop. He never did.”
After two years of trying to make himself love the mother of his son, Jeb had moved out of their small house in Salem. This happened when I was in Colorado, and he’d asked Pop if he could stay with him for a while but Pop had refused, told Jeb he was a grown man and was on his own. For weeks, until he had first and last month’s rent, Jeb lived in the woods behind Bradford College. During the day he did carpentry work. At night he slept under a lean-to he’d made out of pine boughs.
Pop stared at me, his voice sinking into the Marines. “I don’t like the way he lives, Andre. He needs to become a man.”
These may not have been his exact words, but they’re close, and what I knew was this: In my father’s eyes I had somehow found my way to being a man; was it because I’d finished school and had drifted into the writing life? Or was it because of what I’d learned to do with my fists, or both? I didn’t know, but I stood there with the unspoken belief that wherever I was, I’d gotten here without much guidance from him, and if Jeb was having a hard time, why was his father blaming him?