The Book of Joe (11 page)

“What,” Louis says nervously. “You want I should kick him out?”

The coach holds up his hands in a placating gesture. “It's your place, Louis, not mine. You run your business at your own discretion, and no man has any right to tell you how to do that.”

Louis looks at Dugan for a minute and then turns to me. “I think you'd better go,” he says quickly. “It'd be best for all concerned, you know.” Dugan nods at him, beaming like a proud grandfather.

“Fuck you, Louis,” Wayne says disgustedly. “Grow some balls, would you?”

“Why, so you can lick them?” someone in the crowd shouts, and the place erupts into malicious laughter.

“Who said that?” Dugan roars, and the crowd falls instantly silent again. “Who the hell said that?”

Brad turns to me and says, “Time to go.”

I nod, and we head for the door, with Wayne trailing behind, cursing and spitting at everyone he passes.

“You had to go out and get wrecked, didn't you?” Brad practically shouts at me when we get outside. “You had to go and stir things up.”

“Hey, he attacked me,” I say weakly.

“He would have finished you off too,” Brad says angrily, and then snorts incredulously. “You don't get it, do you? You can't go running around the Falls like you never wrote that goddamn book. You pissed off too many people.”

“So nobody likes me,” I say with a defensive shrug. “That isn't exactly breaking news. I don't see what you're so angry about.”

Brad turns on me, seething. “I live here, you asshole. This”—he gestures around at the buildings—“is my home. I realize it's just literary fodder for you, but I have to face these people every day.”

“No one asked you to butt in,” I say. “If I want to go out and get my ass kicked, it's not your problem.”

He looks hard at me, his face a twisted mask of complex emotions that will never be articulated. At least, I hope they won't be, because I don't know if I could stand hearing what Brad really thinks of me right now. At this moment I become aware of two things: that my older brother really doesn't like me very much and that I want him to. Brad exhales slowly, audibly, shutting his eyes and shaking his head from side to side. “I'm going home,” he says tiredly. He turns and walks away, and I watch him go, disliking myself intensely and thinking that maybe an asshole does realize he's an asshole at some point after all. There just might not be anything to do about it.

I turn to Wayne, who's leaning against the window of the bar, looking terribly skinny and ragged. “You ready to go home?” I say.

“Nah. It's just getting good,” he says with a grin, then steps into the street and vomits onto the curb.

fourteen

Sobriety is best approached slowly, like a scuba diver emerging from watery depths, stopping to decompress every so often. Having the shit kicked out of you denies you that luxury, slamming you into the brick wall of sobriety all at once, which hurts like hell, placing into excruciatingly sharp focus your newly acquired bruises and lacerations. On the plus side, I feel perfectly capable of driving Wayne and myself home, which I do with exaggerated care, already picturing the gleeful, rat-faced smile on Mouse's face as he books me for driving under the influence, his mind already sprinting forward to how he'll tell the story in mock heroic tones over beers the next night.

There is a tightness in my throat, a warm blockage at the junction of my esophagus and chest, and I realize that I'm holding back tears. I wonder if I'm still in shock from the raw violence of Sean's unexpected attack or if there's something deeper going on.

In the passenger seat, Wayne lies back, a tired, satisfied grin plastered across his gaunt face. “That was fun, wasn't it?”

“I'm so glad that my public beating made for good entertainment.”

“No blood, no foul,” Wayne says.

“Excuse me—have you seen my face?” I pull the rearview mirror down and examine myself. I have a gash on my left temple where Sean's punch cut me, and the skin around it is swollen and turning purple. Somewhere in the melee, my nose started to bleed, and my upper lip is now caked with dried blood and feels as if it's been cemented to my nostrils. There is another bruise still forming on the back of my right jaw, an inch or so below the ear, and a disturbing clicking sound every time I open and shut my mouth.

“You got off easy,” Wayne says, waving dismissively. “If Brad hadn't stepped in, they'd be pulling your vital organs out from under tables.”

“Jesus,” I say. “I don't know if you could have stood so much fun in one night.”

Wayne laughs and leans against the window, his eyes closed. “Still, it was something, him standing up for you like that.”

“That it was,” I say quietly, the hot balloon in my throat threatening to burst. “So what's the deal with Sean, anyway?”

The deal, according to Wayne, is this: Sean spent the summer after graduating high school like many of his jock peers, playing playground ball all day and getting drunk and engaging in a variety of wanton destruction at night. At the time, he was dating Suzie Carmichael, a Cougars groupie whose famously endowed body had achieved a certain measure of underground fame and scrupulous documentation, both written and illustrated, on the boys' bathroom walls. One night, after countless beers, Sean was driving Suzie up to the Bush River Falls to screw in his car when he missed a turn and crashed head-on into a large ash tree at the side of the road. With the booze in his belly and sex on his mind, he was presumably driving at a fairly high speed. High enough, anyway, for the impact to uniformly crush Suzie Carmichael's legendary body and kill her instantly. She bore the brunt of the crash, as Sean had been instinctively turning away from the tree just before impact.

Sean emerged with bruises, lacerations, some cracked ribs, and two broken legs, effectively ending his college basketball career before it ever got started. Sheriff Muser called in some favors to quash the drunk driving charges, and Sean's father's shadier connections were called in to silence Suzie's grief-stricken parents when they objected. For a while, it was all anyone in the town could talk about, but like all small-town scandals, it ran its course and then faded into the multicolored backdrop of town lore. Without basketball, Sean could find no compelling reason to go to college, opting instead to stay in the Falls and further develop his burgeoning reputation as a mean drunk. He went into his father's demolition business, and there, at least, he seemed to find some measure of satisfaction, having always harbored a particular affinity for destruction. One night while getting sloshed at the Halftime Pub, an ex-Cougar named Bill Tuttle, who'd played a few years before Sean's time, in a cataclysmic lapse in judgment pointed out that Sean's team in its senior year had been responsible for ending the Cougars' unparalleled championship streak. It took four guys to pull Sean off of him, and by then he'd already cracked Tuttle's skull. The sheriff had no strings left to pull where Sean was concerned, and he ended up serving seven months of a three-year sentence for assault and battery.

“He said he found Jesus in prison,” Wayne says with a smirk. “And apparently Jesus was advocating body art and weight lifting, because Sean just came back bigger and meaner than before. That was about five years ago. Since then he's had some other scrapes with the law, but he's still a Cougar, so he's gotten away with murder.”

“I hope you're speaking figuratively,” I say, raising my eyebrows. “About the murder part, I mean.”

“I am, but just barely.”

“Swell.”

“You're fucked,” Wayne says, nodding agreeably. “But this is boring. Have you seen Carly yet?”

I look over at him, but his eyes are still closed. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“We've changed subjects.”

“Oh.”

“Why not give her a call?” Wayne says. “She's definitely heard you're here by now.”

“Since all of my other reunions seem to be going so smoothly,” I say.

“I haven't hit you yet.” He opens his eyes. “Turn right here, on Overlook.”

“Why?”

“I'll show you.”

I make the turn and drive about halfway down the block before Wayne orders me to stop. “This is where she lives now,” he says in a hushed voice, pointing out his window at the small Tudor we're idling in front of.

“Is that right,” I say neutrally.

“She runs the newspaper.”

“I know.”

“She's divorced.”

That throws me. “I didn't know she'd gotten married.”

Wayne nods solemnly. “Real asshole. Not from around here. He beat her up.”

“No way,” I say, my efforts at nonchalance falling by the wayside. Wayne's words hit me like a battering ram to the chest. “She'd never have stood for that.”

“Well, she did the first time. The second time, she ended up in the hospital.”

“Oh, shit,” I say softly, feeling my eyes go wet.

“And then some,” Wayne says.

Something in his voice clues me in. “You guys are close.”

“Yup.”

“So, she knew you were coming over to see me tonight.”

“She was supposed to meet up with us. She must have had second thoughts.” He turns to look at me. “I suppose that was for the best, seeing how the evening turned out.”

“What . . . does she think of me?” I ask him hesitantly.

“She's utterly indecipherable when it comes to that,” he says, closing his eyes again. “I think you'd better get me home, man. I'm starting to fade.”

I let my glance linger for one moment longer on Carly's house. The knowledge that she's in there, that we are separated only by a few feet and the stucco and brick of her house, fills me with a nervous energy that makes me restless. The house is dark, but there's a faint glow from behind the blinds in one of the upstairs bedrooms. Carly's bedroom. She's curled up in bed, reading a book or watching television. What might she be watching?
60 Minutes
? The news? Or maybe something requiring no thought, like
Dawson's Creek
or a
Seinfeld
rerun? I wonder what she looks like now. I pull away slowly, executing a three-point turn to head back the way we came.

A few blocks before we get to Wayne's house, I hear a change in his breathing and turn to find him staring out the window, weeping quietly. I look back at the road, feeling like an intruder. He opens his mouth as if to say something, but all that emerges is a series of sharp, anguished sobs that rack his frail frame, and he makes no effort to wipe away the shockingly robust tears that run in slow motion down his face. “I know,” I say impotently, reaching over to pat his bony, trembling arm. “I know, man.” An ironic choice of words for someone who doesn't have a clue. In the intermittent glow of the passing streetlights, I see Wayne's face, wildly contorted in grief, his eyes burning in torment behind the cascading tears, the face of a sad little boy. We drive around like that for a while, through the dark, still streets of the Falls, heedless of street signs or direction, until his cries gradually subside. “It sucks,” he says to me hoarsely, the words struggling to find a foothold in his short, heaving breaths. “It sucks like you wouldn't believe.” I nod mutely, keeping my hand on his upper arm. After another few minutes he closes his eyes and falls into a fitful sleep. I drive around aimlessly while he sleeps, hypnotized by the rhythmic bumping of my tires against the road. After about an hour I look up, registering for the first time the alien territory stretched out before me, and realize that I've crossed the town line and am no longer in Bush Falls. As if I've been thinking, much as I did seventeen years earlier, that escape is actually a viable option.

         

I let myself into Wayne's parents' house with keys that I find in his jacket pocket and quietly carry him upstairs to his bedroom. He feels terribly light, almost hollow, sleeping in my arms, and I have a momentary vision of the virus, a pink, hairy, corpulent thing inside of him, throbbing and dripping ectoplasm as it devours him from the inside. I lay him down on his bed and slide off his jacket, wrapping him up in the cotton comforter that lies folded across the foot of the bed. On a collapsible bridge table next to his bed, I see a vast collection of prescription pill bottles and a pitcher of ice water, the cubes already half melted. Under the table are an oxygen tank and a breath mask, and on the other side of the bed a large air purifier hums. Other than these sad additions, Wayne's room appears pretty much as I remember it from high school. I locate two copies of
Bush Falls
in his bookcase and have just pulled one off the shelf when his mother comes to the door in a bathrobe. It is well past one in the morning, but it doesn't appear as if she's been sleeping. I remember Wayne once telling me that his mother reads the Bible into the wee hours every night.

“Who's there?” she whispers. Her gray hair is tied back in a tight bun, and her thin, colorless lips crinkle and purse as she squints into the darkness.

“It's just me, Mrs. Hargrove. Joe.”

“Joseph Goffman?” she says, walking into the room. “What on earth?”

“I'm just bringing Wayne home,” I say. “He needed a little help.”

She looks down at Wayne, who hasn't budged since I lay him down, and seems about to move forward with the intention of straightening his blankets and then, as if she's thought the better of it, stops and remains standing where she is, her hands folded rigidly against her chest. “He has no business being out and about like that,” she says with a frown.

“He just wanted some fresh air.”

“Fresh air,” she repeats, raising her eyebrows scornfully. Then she notices the book I'm holding. “So, you're a famous author now,” she says in the same tone she might have used to say “So, you're a convicted pedophile.”

“I guess so,” I say.

“Well,” she says disdainfully. “You won't find me reading that trash.”

“If you haven't read it, how do you know it's trash?”

“I heard about it,” she declares gravely. “And believe me, hearing was plenty.”

“Well,” I say, placing the book back on the shelf and heading for the door, “I guess that's my cue.”

I head down the stairs, now noticing the crucifix and assorted Jesus artwork that occupies every available bit of wall space. Wayne's mother follows behind me, muttering something quietly to herself. As I reach the front door, she calls my name softly. I turn to face her. “Yes?” I say.

“I'm praying for your father,” she says.

“And what about your son?”

She frowns and looks heavenward. “I pray for his soul.”

“He's not dead yet,” I say. “I think he could use a little less praying and a little more compassion.”

“He has sinned against the Lord. He's paying the price.”

“And I'm sure the Bible has nothing but praise for the woman who denies her suffering child a mother's love in his final days.”

She flashes me a dark look, her eyes filled with the defiant righteousness of the dogmatically pious. “When was the last time you read the Bible, Joe?”

“You won't catch me reading that trash,” I say. “I've heard about it, and believe me, hearing was plenty.”

         

I need a Band-Aid. It's just past two-thirty in the morning when I finally stagger into my father's house, reeling and bone-weary from what feels like the longest day of my life. I locate some Neosporin and gauze wipes in the medicine chest in the downstairs bathroom, but there are no Band-Aids to be found, and the cut on my left temple is stinging and wet in the open air. Then I remember that Band-Aids were always kept in the medicine cabinet above the hamper in my parents' bathroom, and this simple recollection unleashes a flood of half-formed images from my youth that leave me disoriented and short of breath. I pause for a few seconds, waiting for the chaos in my belly to abate, and then head upstairs.

My father's bedroom hasn't changed very much, with its oak bedroom set and dirt-colored carpet, the faded velvet reading chair buried under stacks of old magazines and newspapers. My mother's dressing table sits in its place, her assorted moisturizers and perfume bottles still standing on the small oriental tray against the mirror, untouched for over twenty years. If I were to open the drawers of her dresser, I know I would find her blouses, scarves, and undergarments neatly folded and waiting for her. I know that because in the first few years after her death, I visited those drawers frequently, occasionally taking out one of her scarves to smell the lingering traces of her perfume. There is no reason to think my father has emptied her dresser in the intervening years. His house has become a tomb in which the solitary remains of what was once a family are preserved, untouched by time and the various other elements that ripped us to shreds.