Townie_ A Memoir Part 20

I moved away from my window and lay back down on my mat. My heart was twitching like a dreaming dog. In the mood. In the mood. f.u.c.k him. His day or life wasn't going well in one way or another, so now he wanted to pound on somebody. And despite what writing was doing to me, I wanted to pound f.u.c.k him. His day or life wasn't going well in one way or another, so now he wanted to pound on somebody. And despite what writing was doing to me, I wanted to pound him him. I stared at the ceiling. Headlights swept across it in a flash, and it was like getting punched in the head. The light that shot into your brain, how it made you want to do the same to another.

PHOENIX EAST was a rambling halfway house in the lot behind the Haverhill police station and town hall, and I worked the overnight shift there two or three times a week. Afternoons I worked for a lady cleaning houses, and sometimes Sam Dolan's father, still the health inspector, would pay me twenty-five dollars to dig perk holes for him with a pick and shovel. It was enough to pay my bills and every morning I wrote.

Most of the residents of Phoenix East were recovering alcoholics and drug addicts, and most of them were between eighteen and twenty-five. They were the kids of broken families, the kids of single mothers who did what they could and often it just wasn't enough. Some of the residents drank too much coffee and were scrawny and smoked one cigarette after another. Others were heavy or obese and moved glumly through the day attending AA and NA meetings, working a day job in a fast food restaurant or for a cleaning company, getting rides to and from work in the house van. At the end of the week they signed their checks over to their counselor who then deposited it into the account that went to their court-ordered rest.i.tution, the payback for their crimes: shoplifting, burglary, writing bad checks, and there were always people on the other end who'd been made victims and wanted theirs.

There was one young woman in the house who kept having panic attacks and would carry a folded paper bag in her back pocket in case she hyperventilated. On the third floor, in a converted attic that smelled like horsehair plaster and old socks, lived three schizophrenics who rarely left the house. They were older, in their thirties and forties, and one of them was bald and all three had beards and wore gla.s.ses. Every few hours, the day counselors would climb the creaking stairs and hand each of them a c.o.c.ktail of psychotropic drugs they washed down with a Dixie cup of water or weak Kool-Aid. There was a TV up there that never seemed to be off, and along the knee wall beneath the rafters were stacked dozens of paperbacks beside magazines and newspapers and notebooks one of them wrote in every day and night. We called them "the three wise men."

One early morning after my shift I was sitting on the steps of Phoenix East when I saw Crazy Jack walking across the lot from Main Street. For years he had been roaming the streets, walking up and down the sidewalks talking to himself, yelling and swearing. He had long brown hair and a beard and wore dark T-shirts and old jeans. In the winter I'd sometimes see him in a parka, the sleeves too short, or he'd be in a camouflaged hunting jacket, the sleeves too long, and all four seasons he wore a navy wool cap on his head.

One afternoon years before, I was walking through the parking lot of DeMoulas grocery. It was a weekend and mothers and their little kids were going into the place or leaving it, pushing their loaded carts ahead of them, the kids running beside it or jumping on it, and Crazy Jack stood in an empty parking s.p.a.ce, his dark eyes on me. "How's it feel to be a chickens.h.i.t chickens.h.i.t!? Huh?! How's it f.u.c.kin' feel feel?!"

I kept walking. That was the only way to deal with Crazy Jack, to ignore him, something the town had been doing for so long.

MY NIGHT shift started at eleven when all the residents were in bed and it was lights-out. The second-shift counselor would brief me on anything I needed to know, if one of them had "acted out" that day, or if there were any new issues in the air. The counselors I relieved were college-educated, well-meaning, young and white, and whenever I took the house log and shut the front door behind them, locking it twice, I felt between two planes: theirs, which I shared, and the young men and women lying in the dark upstairs.

Donny C. was twenty-two, clean and sober, and living by court order in Phoenix East. With his olive skin and thick black hair, he would've been handsome if it weren't for his flattened nose and that he smoked cigarette after cigarette and called people stinkb.u.ms. He'd grown up in South Boston and knew his father only from sporadic visits to the state prison in Walpole. His mother didn't have a car so Donny didn't see much of him. He said to a counselor once that it was his brother who raised him, his big brother Francis whom everybody called Frankie C.

When Donny was little, Frankie C. read him picture books at night. Walked him to and from school so n.o.body would mess with him. Taught him how to shoot a basketball and later how to smoke a cigarette and drink a few beers, though that's where he drew the line. Nothing harder was allowed. No liquor. No dope. But then Frankie C. got busted and sent to the same prison their old man had been paroled from.

Donny C. was thirteen and lived alone with his mother. She smoked too much and lived off government checks and hardly ever left their apartment she kept spotless, everything in place. Donny C. fell in with the gangs, started dealing, starting drinking liquor and snorting lines. He stopped going to school and was high all the time. Sometimes he wouldn't come home for over a week or more. After being up for days he'd crash on somebody's couch in the projects, or in a car or van parked on Mission Hill where he woke up worried about getting shot for being white. His mother never called the cops because she knew what he was doing and couldn't bear him being taken away from her, too, but when he'd finally stumble into their apartment she'd yell at him, tell him how worried she was and what if you die out there and n.o.body ever tells tells me? me?

Donny told his counselor he knew he was f.u.c.king up his life, and that he better fly right soon because Frankie was up for parole. Frankie would be coming home, and Donny didn't want to let him down. He was seventeen.

The day Frankie C. was granted parole, he called home to tell his mother and brother himself. Their mother cried and apologized to Frankie for not being at the hearing, said she couldn't find a ride out there and her breathing hadn't been too good lately. Donny got on the phone. He told his counselor how Frankie's voice was "like G.o.d" to him, the way He always knows what you're up to. He said to Donny, "I want to shoot hoops with you soon as I get home."

Donny hung up and kissed his mother and went out and partied one last time. He found his boys and drank vodka shots and cold forties. They smoked blunts and snorted lines and washed it down with more vodka and beer. They did this in an empty warehouse down by the water. They were celebrating. But that night, Donny told his counselor, he knew when to stop. That night he was going home, and then he was going to clean up. From the inside out. For Frankie C. For their mother. For himself himself.

When he stumbled home, his mother was crying on the sofa. Her hands were over her face, and the phone receiver was still in her lap. The TV was on. Donny turned it off. "What, Ma? What? What Ma? What? What happened happened?"

And it was like your whole life laughing at you, Donny said. "Like I had no right to be happy for one one f.u.c.kin' night, just one f.u.c.kin' night, just one night. night."

She told him the news and he was screaming, pulling over the bookcase of her knickknacks, kicking them across the floor and stomping on them. He kicked the TV, the stereo, ripped it off its stand and threw it across the room. Her screams were in the air with his now and so was the recliner he heaved onto its side and began kicking till its legs broke off, and he picked one up and whipped it at the gla.s.s window his brother would never stand at ever again; he wouldn't sit here with him and Ma smoking and watching a show; he wouldn't sleep in the back room; and he wouldn't be shooting hoops with his little brother for G.o.d had been shanked, and now Donny's mother was quiet, her face gray, and she was pressing her palms against her chest, and she was dead before Donny was even finished breaking all he needed to break. She was gone and he'd done it to her, and why wouldn't he live in the streets after that? Sleeping under bridges and in dumpsters. Hustling his body. Dealing in whatever could be dealt. Getting drunk or high whenever he possibly could.

The night I found Donny C., I was sitting in the front room sipping weak coffee. The overhead light was kept on twenty-four hours a day and it shone on donated furniture and a linoleum parquet floor that was dusty and needed to be swept and mopped. I'd just made a round of the rooms upstairs and everyone was asleep, the boys and men in rooms facing Main Street, the girls and women in the back. The main job of the overnight counselor seemed to be to keep residents from walking off, and to keep them from f.u.c.king. Three of the five women upstairs were gay. A week earlier, one of them, a pale, dead-eyed girl from Lawrence, told me she probably wasn't gay but after all that had happened to her, well, she was now.

There were no shades or curtains over the windows in the front room. Across the empty asphalt lot was the back of the police station, a security lamp shining down on three cruisers. I'd brought a book with me and was looking for a place to sit when I heard out in the kitchen the tink of metal on metal. I put down my book and coffee and listened. There was the sound of a stifled giggle, like a man laughing with two hands pressed over his mouth. Somebody must've crept down the rear staircase and was stealing food from the fridge or cabinet, maybe one of the three wise men, and that's what I expected to see when I stepped into the kitchen.

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 f.u.c.kin' 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 911 911. 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 f.u.c.ked 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 f.u.c.kin' 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 f.u.c.kin' do."

"Who?"

"The counselors. counselors. They don't like how I talk, they don't let me get p.i.s.sed off, and if I do I gotta use words without swearin' and without f.u.c.kin' yelling. They tell me I can't fight anymore. You know what would've happened to me if I didn't They don't like how I talk, they don't let me get p.i.s.sed off, and if I do I gotta use words without swearin' and without f.u.c.kin' yelling. They tell me I can't fight anymore. You know what would've happened to me if I didn't fight fight? Take these things away and I should just be dead 'cause I'm not f.u.c.kin' 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 f.u.c.kin' 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 s.h.i.t 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 f.u.c.kin' right. 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 s.h.i.t 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 add to what he knew. 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 f.u.c.kin' come from?"

"Beats the s.h.i.t 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 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. 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 pa.s.sed 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 me behind. It required me to suffer with someone else, an act that made trying to hurt him impossible. 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 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 bar 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 Sat.u.r.days 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 ca.s.sette player. The windows were down as we drove along Water Street past the boarded-up Woolworth's building, past Mitch.e.l.l'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 pa.s.sed 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 gla.s.ses 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 cla.s.s, 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 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 bulls.h.i.t, Pop."

"My wife is Jewish. My daughter's daughter's Jewish." 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 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 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. 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 means something, son. This f.u.c.king something, son. This f.u.c.king means 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 n.a.z.i a.s.s." Chabot laughed and Sam was smiling and squeezing my father's shoulder, and Pop was shaking his head, "A f.u.c.king swastika. 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 c.o.kes, chatting and listening to some cla.s.sical 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 meatb.a.l.l.s 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 lying 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 s.e.x 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 school. Because you don't walk away from responsibility 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, lives, Andre. He needs to become a Andre. He needs to become a man 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 him?

I was tired and half drunk. Leigh and Jeb and I cleared the table and washed the dishes and got rid of the evidence of our time here together. They poured themselves some more rum and were soon kissing up against the table, and I said good night and went down the stairs to the spare room I had been given readily over the years but not Jeb.

A WHIMPER, a moan, a woman's voice calling my name, my arm and shoulder jostled and squeezed. "Andre, you have to come-" Razor panic in it, my eyes open to Leigh crying on her knees beside my bed. "He has a gun. Please, you have to you have to come-" Razor panic in it, my eyes open to Leigh crying on her knees beside my bed. "He has a gun. Please, you have to stop stop him, he has a him, he has a gun gun."

I was up and following her into the dark hallway, a light on in Pop's bathroom, the house too quiet. I rushed past her. The bathroom was bright and empty, and its fluorescent light spilled over the floor of our father's den, the room where he wrote and lifted weights, where he kept all his handguns on a shelf in the closet and now it was open and my brother stood there facing it; he was naked, crying, Pop's .22 Colt in his right hand, its barrel in the palm of his left. Jeb's shoulders were jerking up and down, and he was studying the gun as if it were a problem he was not even close to solving. Words were coming out of me, my hand was on his back, his skin warm, the muscles bunching under it. I reached for the pistol, and he let me take it. He turned to me and dropped his head on my shoulder and I was hugging my naked crying brother, one arm around his back, the other heavy at my side with this pistol we'd both given our father.

LEIGH WRAPPED Jeb in a sheet and the three of us sat on the front stairs. Jeb kept crying. He'd shake his head and take a breath, then tell me how for years he'd taken refuge in thoughts of dying, ever since that first time when he was thirteen years old in the driveway at Columbia Park. When things got really bad, he said, that's where he went inside his head, to a dark door that immediately opened into a light, airy s.p.a.ce, everything over, everything finished with.

"Have you tried it since then?"