Free Broken Vessels by Andre Dubus Page A

can’t remember which one.”
    â€œ Walking Tall ,” I said, and put it in the trunk where for two years it stayed, losing its brightness, moistening, drying, collecting dust. I forgot it was there, save when I stacked suitcases on it, or shoved it aside to make room for an ice chest.
    I remembered it at once on that Sunday night nearly two years later. I was alone at the bar, talking to the bartender and some regulars, and I left at eleven o’clock to watch the baseball news at eleven-fifteen. In Yankee Stadium that afternoon the Red Sox had won, Boyd had pitched, Rice had homered, and I wanted to see the highlights. I was still in second gear when I saw them: a crowd on the right side of the street, beyond the sidewalk; they were in a semicircle, watching something at the drugstore wall. I turned the car toward them, drove it to the curb, and brightened the headlights. Some of the punks turned to the light. Past their faces I saw what they were watching: a tall young punk holding a sobbing and screaming girl; he was pushing her back and head against a brick wall, pulling her forward, pushing her again and again. I wanted my sons: my two big justice-seeking sons. I got out of the car, leaving the lights on, went back to the trunk, picked up the axe handle, returned to the front of the car and stood in the lights. Some of the punks shouted at me to go mind my own fucking business. That line strikes me still: my business, while Jan’s back and head were striking a brick wall. I told them I wanted the girl left alone. There was more shouting, and Nick let go of Jan, who fled down the street. He ran after her, caught her by the post office, and I heard her sobbing and yelling. Then Nick came toward me. He stood close and yelled at me and I asked him why a man his size was hitting a woman. With a querulous nuance in his rage, he shouted that she had thrown a drink on his car, even on the seat. Then I saw the cruiser stopping across the street and an officer coming out of the passenger side and walking toward us and I told Nick a police officer was coming up behind him. The officer dispersed the punks and listened to Nick and me telling our stories, while the driver of the cruiser drove diagonally across the street, into the opposite lane, his blue lights flashing, and stopped beside us. I leaned into his window. Beyond him, in the passenger seat, was Jan. She was weeping into the palms of her hands. I gave the officer my name, address, phone number, and told Jan I would be a witness in court, then drove home and saw Boyd pitching and Rice hitting a home run.
    Jan or her mother or sometimes both of them, passing the phone between them, called me during the next few weeks, to let me know what they were doing about the assault and battery charges against Nick, and the date of the pre-trial hearing before the magistrate. They did not have a telephone in their home. They had a very old car. Jan was fifteen; by the date of the trial in December she was sixteen and had left high school and enrolled in a school for beauticians. An older brother lived at home with them. The father lived in Lawrence, some fifteen or twenty minutes away, but was no longer a father; neither Jan nor her mother ever mentioned him and he was not at the trial, where I learned of his existence on earth from Jan’s maternal grandmother.
    On the Sunday night of her beating Jan had walked from her home to Bradford Square: two blocks of shops for pizza, hamburgers, roast beef, and the bar where I was a regular. She was to meet Nick at the Midway Pizza and Sub. But when she walked into that small brightly lit place where teenagers ate pizza and drank soft drinks and smoked cigarettes, Nick was with another girl; perhaps she was a young woman. At the trial she looked nineteen or twenty, but she was dressed, made-up, and bejeweled as for a Saturday night date, so I could not guess her age. Jan believed Nick was her boyfriend. When she saw him in