Read Townie for Free Online Page A

We’d sit in the cool dark of the theater eating hot buttery popcorn, sipping a cold sweet Coke, the movie stars so handsome and beautiful, and it was like being on furlough from a penal colony, the hug from Pop as he dropped us back off, the smell of Old Spice on his cheek above his beard, his hand patting my back.
     
    AFTER A few months, we moved to Arlington Street on the North End. It was a street with trees on it and houses that seemed looked after, and there were no more roaming kids or fighting sounds, and we settled in for a year in a whole house with a fenced backyard and grass. Across the street was the hospital, and we could hear the ambulances come and go, their sirens starting up or winding down. Sometimes they’d come back quiet, and I was sure whoever they’d picked up was dead inside.
    The North End was districted to a different school where I was new and the first morning a tall kid asked me what I was looking at and I said nothing and he and his two friends pushed me down and kicked me once or twice and after that I stayed in the dark corners and kept my head down and my mouth shut.
    Maybe we’d moved so much we didn’t know how to make friends, maybe we’d just gotten too used to keeping to ourselves, but on Arlington Street the four of us, no matter the weather, still spent afternoons in front of the TV. Mom would get home after dark and more and more now, her boyfriends were coming over too. One looked like an outlaw; he had long blond hair and a handlebar mustache, and he wore tight jeans and pretended he was interested in us. There was Maurice, a big and kind black man who, when they broke up, gave Mom a 45 record of Charley Pride’s rendition of “For the Good Times.” He asked her to please play it again and again. There was Dick from the South End whom she never liked but who came around all the time anyway. He was tall and had big arm muscles and short hair. Once we all had the flu and he showed up at the door with a bottle of penicillin.
    “ Penicillin?” my mother said. “Are you crazy ? You don’t just give kids penicillin. ”
    He insisted she take it from him, this nearly quart-size brown bottle of antibiotic. It looked stolen from some warehouse.
    He went away, but I think he sat in his car outside a lot, waiting, hoping she’d change her mind and love him. He must’ve been there on a Sunday when Pop came by to get us; for a month we didn’t see Dick. Then late on a weeknight, all five of us in front of the TV, a bearded man knocked on the door. He was tall with Dick’s arm muscles. My mother opened the door partway.
    “It’s me, Patty. It’s Dickie, ” and he laughed and ran his fingers through his whiskers. “See? I got a beard, hippie style! Just like your ex. I seen you like that so I grew it. See? Hippie style.”
    I don’t know what she said to that, but she went out to the porch and stood under the light talking to him for a long time and we didn’t see him anymore after that.
     
    THE FOLLOWING summer the landlord raised the rent and we had to move back to the South End, to Lime Street, a place many people from town called “Slime Street.” It was where Suzanne and I would go to school at the Jackman, three stories of crumbling brick I would learn years later had been condemned by the city but still stayed open for the kids of the South End. We now lived in an old clapboard house so close to the street you had to be careful not to step out too quickly onto the sidewalk or you’d fall into traffic. There was a small dirt yard in back I liked because it had a solid plank fence around it and nobody could see me there. I could be outside but invisible. I was hiding all the time.
    Across the street lived the Whelans. There were always three or four cars and trucks in their side yard, some on blocks, the hoods open or gone, and the father, Larry, worked on the engines every afternoon. He was short and had no front teeth and he drank from cans of Pabst he’d rest