The Book of Joe (17 page)

Jared and I collapse into two desk chairs on wheels and pull off our goggles, resting our Autococker air rifles on our laps. We're sweating and breathing heavily, our clothing splattered with impressionistic splotches of blue paint. Our team's ammunition cartridges are labeled Red Virus, and in the faint glow of the exit sign above us, I now see that our opponents are splattered in red. The eight of us rest in the uncomplicated camaraderie of a platoon, catching our breath before we take the next hill.

“Hey, Mr. Goffman,” Mikey says.

“Call me Joe.”

“Joe. You did much better than I thought you would. You're in pretty good shape.”

“Thanks.”

“For an old guy,” he finishes with a grin.

“Mikey,” I say.

“Yeah.”

“Suck my Autococker.”

Laughs and guffaws all around at that one, and I experience a surge of adolescent pride at my quick wit.

“What about security?” I ask. “I can't believe they leave this place unguarded.”

“Just two guards in the booth up front,” Jared says. “They sometimes drive a golf cart around the property, but they never come inside.”

“They're too busy watching TV,” Mikey adds.

“We usually pick nights when there's a good ball game on,” someone, I think Grossman, says.

“How do you know they never patrol the building?”

“It's just never happened,” Jared says.

Naturally, it's precisely at that moment that the door to the stairwell flies open with a bang and two men in security guard uniforms come charging forward, shouting and waving flashlights in our direction.

“Oh,” Jared says. “Shit.”

“Freeze,” one guard yells.

“Nobody move!” cries the other one.

Only I comply. The seven kids I'm with suddenly jump to their feet and, as one, raise their paintball guns at the two stunned men, who freeze in their tracks, mouths agape.
“You
freeze, motherfuckers!” Mikey yells gleefully. The guards stare in abject terror down the titanium barrels of seven Autocockers, and we all stay like that for a few seconds, suspended in a perfect Tarantino moment. Then a look of recognition comes over the face of one of the guards. “Wait a minute. Those are air rifles,” he complains, as if we aren't playing fair.

Mikey lets out a bloodcurdling scream, and I watch in disbelief as the boys open fire, unleashing a spray of red and blue pellets on the two guards, the air rifles hissing and clicking like a new-wave percussion instrument. The pellets explode colorfully on the guards in a symphony of light popping noises, and they fall to the floor, crying out in anguished surprise as they curl up into fetal positions, arms wrapped protectively around their heads. “Let's move!” someone says, and we all begin backing toward the stairwell, maintaining a steady barrage of intermittent fire to keep the guards on the floor until we've made it. We fly down the stairs, shouting and whooping with savage glee, and I recognize one of the voices in the mix as my own. In a few moments we burst out of the stairwell and charge through the loading bay and out of the building, into the darkness of the Porter's grounds. The cold air is invigorating against my hot, sweating face, and I feel practically euphoric as we enter the welcome cover of the woods.

If you think climbing an eight-foot chain-link fence at full speed while wearing a three-pound air rifle and carrying five pounds' worth of gear in a knapsack is easy, you're mistaken. Or you're seventeen. I launch myself thoughtlessly at the fence, confident that I will fly over it in the slipstream of my fleeing compatriots, who have already effortlessly scaled it. I make it up and over the top with no problem, but on the way down the strap from my rifle gets snagged on one of the fence posts, and I'm slammed back into the fence, the strap flying off my shoulder and hanging me by my neck. I dangle there for a precarious instant, humiliated and dangerously close to death by hanging. It isn't my life that flashes before my eyes at this point, so determined am I even now to avoid clichés at all costs, but rather a clairvoyant glimpse of the bemused half grins and rolled eyes of family and associates as they read the news accounts of my ridiculous demise. It's then that Jared and Mikey finally notice my distress and jump to my rescue, hoisting me and freeing the strap from the fence post. As they pull me off, my leg becomes ensnared by a protruding clasp in the fence. There follows a loud tearing sound as my khakis rip from mid-shin to cuff, and I feel the hot slice of cold metal shredding my ankle. I'm proud that I don't scream, although with my windpipe only recently having been freed from the crushing rifle strap, I doubt I could manage much more than a hoarse croak anyway.

I limp gingerly over to the Mercedes, which Jared already has running, and Mikey helps me in, giving me a friendly shove in the shoulder as I fall back onto the seat. “Suck my Autococker,” he says with a sardonic grin. “That was classic, man.” He disappears into the night.

Jared throws the Mercedes into gear and drives us down the dirt road. Just ahead of us, the furiously spinning tires of Mikey's Jeep kick up a small pebble that hits my front windshield with the force of a bullet. There is a sharp, cracking sound and a small circular chip appears in the German glass, just under the rearview mirror, with three or four spidery tentacles ambitiously extending in disparate directions. “Oops,” Jared says.

“Just drive,” I say. And as my burgling nephew steers us at high velocity into the night, my probing hand comes away sticky with blood from my wounded ankle, and through no easily discernible connection, it reminds me that I've forgotten to call Carly as I promised.

twenty-two

I'm almost disappointed when there's no car chase. It's distinctly possible that the guards haven't phoned in the incident, swearing a solemn oath of secrecy rather than choosing to explain how a band of high school kids with paintball guns overpowered them. Whatever the case, we make good our escape and are soon parked in the woods overlooking the Bush River Falls.

I look at my nephew peering pensively at the churning waters. “Jared,” I say. “I just want to be friends.”

He laughs. “Was this the place in your time too?”

“My parents probably screwed around here too.”

Jared fumbles through the many pockets of his cargo pants and, after a moment, triumphantly fishes out a slightly bent but wholly intact joint. “Join me?” he says, punching the dashboard lighter.

“Believe it or not, that's the second joint I've seen tonight.”

“Good,” Jared says, firing it up. “Then you're already primed.” He takes two short tokes on the spliff to get it lit right, and then one long, meaningful drag, before passing it to me as he holds his breath. I am about to refuse, but the throbbing in my injured ankle is fast becoming excruciating and I think of something Wayne said earlier.

“Okay,” I say, taking the proffered joint. “But strictly for medicinal purposes.”

“Whatever floats your boat, man.” Jared leans back and closes his eyes.

I take a long drag, coughing slightly at the acrid dryness of the weed, and then take another, this time pulling the herb down deeply into my lungs. I pass it back to Jared as I exhale, my smoke all but invisible in the darkness of the car. We pass the chubby joint back and forth a few more times and then lean back in our automatically reclining seats, turning down the roof so we can stare up at the stars. “I lost my virginity here,” I say, apropos of nothing.

“No shit,” Jared says. “Me too.”

We enjoy a primitive male moment, high-fiving over our shared sexual triumph. I have a brief, vivid flash of Carly's milky white thighs as she pulled her skirt down her legs, smiling affectionately at my clumsy, sophomoric excitement. “Are you sure?” I asked as she pulled urgently at the waistband of my underwear. “I want this,” she said. “I want it with you.”

“I loved her very much,” I announce to the universe swirling above us like a studio backdrop, vast and intimate, my sudden, piercing sadness amplified by the weed.

“That's nice,” Jared says. “I just wanted to get laid already.”

         

I open my eyes a short while later to discover that during my brief nap, our location has changed. We are now parked outside a large brick colonial set back on an impressive front lawn. “Where are we?” I ask.

“I just wanted to see something,” Jared says, peering intently out his window.

I lean across the seat and look out over his shoulder. “What are we looking at?”

“Her.” Jared points to a lit window on the second floor. A girl periodically passes in and out of the window frame as she moves around her room, getting ready for bed.

“Who's that?”

“Kate Portnoy.”

“And she is . . . ?”

“Perfect,” Jared says reverently.

“What about that girl from the house? Candi?”

“Sheri. She's just a friend.”

“Some friend,” I say wistfully. “I need some friends like that.”

Jared smirks without taking his eyes off the upstairs window. “We have an understanding.”

“Ah,” I say. “And Kate doesn't know about Sheri?”

Jared sits back in his seat and looks at me, positively bereft. “Kate doesn't know about me.”

I nod sympathetically, thinking I'd give anything to have the broken heart of an eighteen-year-old. “I'm hungry,” I say.

We pull into the 7-Eleven and walk through the aisles, sipping at Big Gulps as we shop for munchies. “I never realized how many different kinds of potato chips there are,” I say, stupidly overwhelmed. “How are you supposed to make up your mind?”

“You,” Jared says with a grin, “are stoned.”

“Could be. What time is it?”

“Eleven forty-two.”

“Wow.” It seems like it should be much later than that. I grab some Sour Cream & Onion Pringles, and Jared selects Funyuns. The cashier, a goth girl wearing pale makeup and too much black lipstick, rings us up indifferently. “Thanks, Delia,” I say, reading her name tag. She has to call us back from the door to give us our change. “Sorry,” I say. “We're a little stoned.”

“How very clever of you,” she says, munching on a Kit Kat. She seems so wise and sad to me at that moment that I want to sit down and ask her questions, learn her entire story.

We sit in the parking lot on the hood of the Mercedes, our backs against the windshield, washing down our chips with long, thirsty sips from our Big Gulps. When we're done, I hop off the car and let out a wail of pain when my right foot hits the ground. I pull up my torn pants and gingerly pull at the bloodstained remnants of my sock. My ankle is swollen and caked with too much dried blood to afford me a good look at the laceration. Jared lets out a low, sympathetic whistle. “You think we should go to the emergency room?”

“Nah, we'll sit there all night,” I say. “It seems to have stopped bleeding. I'll just go home and clean it up.”

On the way, though, I change my mind and instruct Jared to drive me to Overlook Road. “What for?” he says.

“You showed me yours; now I'll show you mine.”

Carly's house is dark, which in my drug-addled condition seems to incriminate me. “I was supposed to call her tonight.”

“It's past midnight,” Jared says. “Call her tomorrow.”

Some part of me knows this would be the wiser course of action, but another part, admittedly the stoned part, thinks that showing up in the dead of night is decidedly more romantic. And tonight I'm eighteen again. It's Jared and me, two young, throbbing hearts; stoned, lonely, and romantic to the end. Our yearning knows no bounds, our faith is endless, our testosterone coming out of our ears. Give us a chance and we'll love you fiercely with every cell in our bodies; give us the signal and we'll fuck you all night. Break our hearts, we'll weep and mourn and we'll be in love again inside of a month.

I climb out of the car and limp slowly up the front walk. “Not a good idea,” Jared calls to me from the car.

“I know what I'm doing.”

“All evidence to the contrary.”

I ignore him and ring the bell. After a few seconds, I ring it again. Just as it's dawning on me what a terribly stupid idea this is, I hear the light tread of bare feet on carpeted stairs, and then Carly's at the door. She's dressed in blue boxers and a gray UConn T-shirt; her hair pulled back in a loose ponytail, her eyes squinting and bleary as sleep and consciousness jockey for position. She looks, I think, quite beautiful.

“Joe,” she says, not so much a greeting as a confirmation, in the same way the villain in a James Bond flick will note the sudden explosion in his underground nuclear facility and immediately say, in a carefully restrained European accent, “Bond.” Because, really, who the hell else could it be?

“Hi,” I say.

“What's going on?” she says, rubbing her eyes.

“I was supposed to call. I didn't want you to think I didn't.”

“You didn't,” she points out, momentarily confusing me.

“True.” There follows a leaden silence as the handle on this particular conversation floats tantalizingly above me, just out of reach. “This isn't going very well, is it?” I say.

“I'm not sure what ‘this' is, but I suspect you're right.”

I'm suddenly exhausted. I turn away from Carly and sit down on her front step. I hear her hesitate behind me and then step outside, letting the screen door close with a hydraulic hiss behind her. Score one for the home team. All things are possible. She sits down next to me, pulling her knees up to her chest.

“What do you want, Joe?” she says softly.

“I just—I don't know. I want to connect with you.”

“And you thought showing up here after midnight would do the trick?”

“It seemed like the thing to do at the time.” I find myself admiring her toes, which are short and thin and then open into little round bulbs at the end, like grapes, their nails painted a glossy crimson. “You have very pretty toes.”

“Are you drunk?”

“No,” I say. “Maybe a little high, though.”

Carly nods. “Perfect.”

Above us, the moon hangs like a fat blister on the heel of the sky, ready to burst in a spray of viscous white pus. I look at Carly and think I might cry. “I just wish I could get past all of this and just talk to you,” I tell her. “You're the only person I want to really talk to, and I just can't seem to do it.”

She nods again and leans forward and for one exhilarating instant I think she's going to hug me, but she only hovers in front of me, craning her neck as she looks down, and says, “Is that blood on your leg?”

         

Carly's guest bathroom is done in light pastels, pinks and blues, with impressionistic watercolor orchids on the wallpaper. Above the sink is a frosted Lucite shelf with scented soaps in the shapes of seashells and starfish. I know instinctively that she didn't decorate this room, that it was like this when she bought the house. It is far too delicate and refined a room to suit the base processes for which it is intended, and I'm sure that defecating in it would feel like swearing in a temple. I sit on the peach marble sink, and Carly sits on the furry toilet seat with my wounded leg planted between her smooth, hairless thighs as she dabs it gently with alcohol. I realize that this was my immediate motivation for having woken her up. I couldn't bear the thought of tending to my own wounds two nights in a row. “This is pretty deep,” Carly says, grunting mildly as she works around the cut. “How'd it happen?”

“Climbing a fence.”

“And what's that all over your clothing?”

“Paint.”

She gives me an inquisitive look. “I was playing paintball,” I explain.

“Oh.” In the dissipating haze of the marijuana, her face appears bathed in a soft golden light. “So,” she says. “Tonight you played paintball, smoked pot, and hurt yourself climbing a fence.”

“It sounds stupid when you put it like that,” I say. “Out of context.”

“Why don't you put it into context for me?”

I think about it for a moment and then shrug. “The context has temporarily eluded me. I guess I was trying to relive my youth a little.”

“Like you were such a pothead in your youth.”

“Well, maybe I should have been.” This is of course the exact wrong thing to say, because it makes me sound like a bitter fuck. The correct response would be “I didn't need the weed because I had you,” or something along those lines. It would be corny, overtly flirtatious, and would have earned me at best a sarcastic frown, but underneath it all it might have reminded her that she'd once loved me.

Carly tears open another alcohol swab with her teeth and continues scrubbing my bloodied ankle. “Can I be honest with you?” she says.

“As long as you're going to say something nice.”

“Since you got to the Falls, you seem determined to make a complete ass out of yourself and absorb a good deal of bodily harm along the way.”

“Could you explain to me how that was nice?”

“Some might say,” she continues, easily ignoring me, “that you're doing it deliberately.”

“And why would I do that?”

“I don't know,” she says, turning back to my cut. She pulls out some gauze and tape from a drawer under me and begins carefully wrapping the cut. “Some misguided form of penance, maybe.”

“That's a neat theory,” I say. “But what's my sin?”

“Everyone's got something.”

“What have you got?”

She considers the question. “I'm not sure,” she confesses, biting on her lip thoughtfully. “But I know I've already done all the penance I'm going to do.”

“I heard about that—your marriage, I mean. I'm sorry. I just—I don't know what to say.”

“That's actually perfect,” Carly says, standing up brusquely and lowering my now-bandaged foot. “Because we are so not going to discuss it.”

“I'm sorry,” I say again.

“Don't be.”

“What should I be?”

Carly fixes me with a look in which bitterness and resigned warmth mingle awkwardly, like guests early to a cocktail party. “You should be going,” she says.

         

Jared and I sit in a subdued silence on the short drive home, the last remnants of the weed diffusing from our bloodstream like bubbles from champagne going flat. I replay my conversation with Carly, trying to recall its exact tone, but it's already fading to fuzzy unreality. I still have no clue as to what she feels toward me, but I'm developing the strong suspicion that her ambivalence is probably not cause for uncontained optimism. We pull up to the house and Jared cuts the engine, leaning back as he hands me my keys. “So, how'd that work out for you back there?” he asks.

“Okay,” I say. “Not too good. I don't know. Lousy.”

“As long as you're clear on it.”

“What about the window girl?”

“Kate.”

“Kate. You think you'll talk to her anytime soon?”

“I don't know,” Jared says. “As frustrating as it is, there's something nice about this stage.”

“She doesn't know you exist. I don't think you can legally call that a stage.”

“I know. But I haven't fucked anything up yet.”

“Point taken.”

We step out of the car and trudge across the lawn toward the front porch, two battle-weary soldiers back from the trenches, when Jared suddenly tenses up. “Busted,” he whispers to me through his teeth. I looked up and follow his gaze to find Cindy standing on the porch, looking tired and mightily pissed. She takes in our ragged, limping, paint-spattered appearance with angry, disapproving eyes that burn with unbridled hostility when they come to rest on me. Her face contracts briefly as she sniffs, and I have no doubt that she can smell the weed on us. I steel myself for the inevitable tongue-lashing, but the night has one more surprise in store for me. Cindy comes down the stairs, nodding slowly as if I've done nothing more than fulfill her worst expectations.