Free Townie by André Dubus III Page A

to fight for just glancing at them a second too long. After a while it worked; because I looked like them, they didn’t see me anymore. But the cops did. Especially those late weekday mornings walking through town when I should’ve been in algebra class, world history, gym; I’d pass more barrooms, a lock shop, St. Joe’s Catholic Church, a cruiser pulling up and a cop yelling out at me, “Why ain’t you in school?”
    “I had a doctor’s appointment.”
    “Where’s your parents?”
    “Working.”
    “How’d you get to the doctor?”
    “Walked.”
    “Well, keep walkin’.” And he’d drive off in his police car, his antennas swaying back and forth like a scolding finger.
    It seemed that each day I got up just wanting to get through it. I didn’t know if my brother and sisters felt the same way, but my mother seemed to; most weeknights, Bruce quietly drunk, sipping a bourbon and reading in the front room, she’d be stretched out on the floor in front of the TV asleep in her work clothes by eight o’clock, my brother and sisters and me free to do whatever we wanted, do homework or not do homework, fight or ignore each other, ignore the five days of dishes stacked in the kitchen sink and on the counters; ignore the overflowing garbage in the trash bucket or the mountain of bags in the garage because none of us carried any out to the curb on garbage night; ignore the dirty clothes hanging out of the full hampers in both bathrooms; ignore the fact that we each did our own laundry when we needed to, one at a time, going down into the basement and putting into the machine one pair of underwear, a pair of jeans, a pair of socks, a T-shirt and sweater, using an entire load, then drying the same outfit for an hour in the dryer, each of us doing it this way; ignore the dust everywhere, the loose hairs, the grit tracked over the linoleum floors and throw rugs; ignore that our dog, Dirt, shat regularly up on the second-floor hallway in the dark corner near the stairs up to my attic bedroom; ignore that we could walk out of that house and not come home till midnight or later; ignore that most nights Suzanne would go up to her room with a boyfriend and smoke dope and listen to her albums; ignore that twelve-year-old Nicole had installed by herself a padlock on her bedroom door, one she locked with a key she kept with her at all times; ignore that our father never called us and we never called him.
     
    JEB AND I had a new friend now, Cleary, whom everybody called by his last name. After the high school let out at two-thirty, I’d take the bus home and wait for my brother to walk back from the middle school, then he and I would go to Cleary’s house down the dirt alley behind our garage. It was a tiny two-story of four rooms and a bathroom, the backyard just big enough for his father’s Chevy, though we rarely saw him. We saw his mother a lot, a big-breasted woman who started her drinking every morning in tall plastic cups filled with vodka and Pepsi. Some afternoons we’d knock on Cleary’s door, hear nothing, then walk in over the yellow linoleum of the kitchen and the living room where his mother would be passed out on the couch in front of the TV, her mouth open, a cigarette still burning in the ashtray.
    We’d call our friend and he’d come leaping down the stairs smiling, always smiling, his short dark hair sticking up in a cowlick, a smattering of freckles across his cheeks. In the summer he wore cutoff shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt. In the winter it’d be fake jeans from Zayre’s, a T-shirt and denim jacket covered with magic marker peace signs.
    We’d walk a half mile down Main Street past houses built so close together there were no yards. Window shades were drawn and you never saw anybody sitting on a porch. Cleary walked on the balls of his feet and bounce-walked, and he was always scheming, talking about the girl he was going to screw or the Corvette he’d own one day or the real Mexican