The Book of Joe (19 page)

“What's all the giggling about?” I said, indicating her friends, who were still locked in an animated huddle.

“Cheryl lost her virginity last night,” Carly said. “She was at the falls with Mike, and someone went over.”

“Cheryl Sands was a virgin?” I said skeptically.

“Strictly in a technical sense.”

“I see. So, did someone really go over the falls?”

“That's what they're saying.”

“I miss out on all the good stuff.”

“Excuse me, sir,” Carly said sternly. “If I'm not mistaken, you got about five hours' worth of the good stuff last night, and you didn't have to wait for some moron to risk life and limb for you to get it.”

“Which begs an interesting question,” I said. “Who went over?”

Carly shrugged indifferently. “I don't know.”

Nobody did. The buzz around school was simply that someone had gone over the falls the night before, and those boys that had been present were proudly embellishing tales of the sexual harvest they'd reaped in the face of this major event. Details were not yet available as to the identity of the daredevil or the outcome of his alleged plunge into the Bush River.

If news travels fast in small towns, it spreads at light speed in small-town high schools. We were all in our respective homerooms by the time Mouse arrived late to school, practically bursting with the news of Sammy's suicide, but somehow the information managed to permeate the very walls of our classrooms, carried like deer ticks through a network of hall monitors, latecomers, and students returning from bathroom breaks. “It's just a rumor,” Carly whispered to me, placing her hand on my arm as I sat trembling in my seat. But I thought of the way Sammy had stopped by to see me that night, how strangely formal his good-bye had been, and I knew better.

Lyncroft's voice came over the PA system, as usual too loud and brimming with spit, announcing an immediate assembly in the auditorium. Everyone grabbed their books and bags and filed into the rapidly filling hallway, speaking in hushed tones as they went. I felt a cold sweat break out on my forehead and I knew that Sammy was dead. I also knew that there was no way I would be able to sit in a crowded auditorium and listen to our drunk of a principal confirm it for me. Carly had gotten a few steps ahead of me down the hall, and suddenly the effort of telling her that I was cutting out seemed too much for me, so I just took a quick left turn and walked purposefully toward the exit. I'd long since learned that teachers were far less likely to question you if you moved with authority.

I sat in my father's car in the parking lot, rocking back and forth and pounding on his steering wheel, screaming out a steady string of curses until my throat was raw. After a while I started the car and drove it toward Sammy's house. It was a warm, cloudless day, and as I drove through downtown Bush Falls, the utter normalcy of the streets began to override the insanity in my head, working to convince me that I was mistaken, that someone had simply spread a nasty rumor. It could very well have been that the assembly had been called over another matter altogether. With every passing block I became increasingly confident that Sammy was just cutting and that I would find him hanging out in his bedroom, probably brooding, but certainly alive. I would tell him about the crazy rumor and he'd grin and say, “They wish,” and I'd tell him that I was taking the day off and see if he wanted to do something.

I managed to keep reality at bay in this manner for the remainder of my drive. Then I pulled onto Sammy's block and saw the cars from the Sheriff's Department parked outside his house, and the truth reasserted itself like a well-aimed kick in the crotch. I pulled over to the curb and sat there for about fifteen minutes until Sheriff Muser and a deputy emerged and climbed somberly into their car. Once they were gone, I got out of my car and quietly climbed the stairs to the Habers' porch. The front door had been inadvertently left open behind the storm door, so I could see down the long hallway and into the kitchen, where Lucy sat at the table, her head in her hands, crying loudly and steadily.

I don't know how long I stood there just watching her, rocked by the desolation of her wails and paralyzed by my own feelings of sorrow and guilt. I had just decided to leave when she happened to look up and see me through the storm door. I thought of running, even felt my feet turning in my sneakers, but her gaze froze me in my tracks. “Joe,” she said softly, with no trace of surprise in her voice at having discovered me lurking on her porch.

I walked into the kitchen and stood awkwardly against the wall as she looked up at me, her eyes swollen into slits and raw from crying. “My Sammy's gone.” Her voice was high and unsteady, like a young child speaking indignantly between sobs.

“I know,” I said.

“He was all I had,” she said, gracelessly wiping at the snot running from her nose with the back of her wrist. “And now I don't know what I'm going to do.” This last sentence segued into a long, mournful sob as she buried her face in her hands on the table. I sat down and put my arms around her and she collapsed into me as if her bones had suddenly come loose in their rigging, her body convulsing against me with each new wave of tears. “Now I have nobody.”

I wanted to tell her that she had me, but I knew that wasn't true anymore, so I just held her and said nothing. We sat like that for a while, suspended in our pathetic, futile symmetry, a motherless boy and a childless mother with no place in between to meet and nothing of any real value to offer each other. I left there feeling neither grief nor sympathy but only a burgeoning fury at my abject worthlessness and a growing certainty that the time had come for me to get the hell out of the Falls.

         

They'd pulled Sammy's body out of the Bush River early that morning. His car was found in the woods near the waterfalls, and although there were never any published reports of the circumstances of his death, I could imagine in vivid detail what had happened. Just as Carly and I were finishing our marathon sex session in my bedroom, Sammy drove his car up to the falls and parked. As all around him couples in parked cars clumsily groped and petted each other, Sammy stuck some Springsteen into his tape deck, maybe even playing “Bobby Jean” at the same moment that I was listening to it in my bedroom, and drank enough beer to blind himself to the consequences of what he planned to do. Eventually, he stepped out of his car and stared down at the waterfalls, the combination of darkness and alcohol obscuring the churning waters below so that they didn't appear particularly frightening to him. Then Sammy took a last, deep breath and hurled himself determinedly off the cliff and into the falls.

And maybe in that last moment it felt good to be so bold, to have made that decision. And for that brief instant of flight, before the waters angrily swallowed him into their tumultuous darkness, maybe he finally felt free. And maybe I just told myself that because I knew that if I'd simply chosen to go for that drive with him instead of staying home to have more sex, Sammy would never have jumped.

         

The rest of the year flew by in a blur. I went to school, hung out with Carly, and graduated, but I experienced it all from behind a gauzy veil of detachment, seeing everything and feeling none of it. It was like a switch in me had been turned off that day in Lucy's kitchen, and I became one step removed from my own life.

Sean Tallon made a crack about Sammy as he passed me in the hall one day, and without hesitation I punched him square in the nose, drawing a shocking spray of blood. He was more surprised than hurt, but he got over it quickly and pounded the shit out of me, bashing my skull in with the worn plaster cast on his broken arm while Mouse looked on, cackling hysterically. I studied my bruises in the mirror with an almost clinical interest, but I didn't recall feeling any pain.

Sean's broken arm, coupled with Wayne's disappearance, effectively crippled the basketball team. They had been easily knocked out of the play-offs in the first round, and for the first time in twenty years, the Bush Falls Cougars didn't go to the state finals.

About a week after Sammy's death, someone threw a large brick through Dugan's office window and trashed his trophy case. An investigation was launched, but the guilty party was never discovered. Looking back years later, I thought it was me, could sometimes recall the heft of the stone in my hand right before I threw it, but the memory was so vague and synthetic that I couldn't be sure. Maybe I just heard about it and wished it had been me.

twenty-five

To err, as they say, is human. To forgive is divine. To err by withholding your forgiveness until it's too late is to become divinely fucked up. Only after burying my father do I realize that I always intended to forgive him. But somewhere I blinked, and seventeen years flew by, and now my forgiveness, ungiven, has become septic, an infection festering inside me.

I stay in bed for two days, sweating feverishly beneath my blankets, stomach clenched, thighs like jelly. I don't know if what I'm feeling is genuine grief or deep, paralyzing regret over not being able to grieve, but whichever it is, it isn't screwing around. I lie motionless, flitting seamlessly between sleep and wakefulness until they become all but indistinguishable. More than once, I dream I'm crying, and wake up with swollen eyes and a damp pillow.

My thoughts assemble before me in a ragged stream of semiconsciousness. I hate my life, and up until a few days ago I didn't even know it, and how can such a seemingly important fact have escaped my attention? Why has my father's death left me feeling so alone, when he hasn't been a part of my life in seventeen years? I'm an orphan. I repeat the word out loud, over and over again, listening to it bounce off the walls of my childhood bedroom until it makes no sense.

Loneliness is the theme, and I play it like a symphony, in endless variations. I've lived more than a third of my life, and am more alone now than I've ever been. You're supposed to make your way through life becoming more substantial as you go, the nucleus of your own little universe, your orbit overlapping the orbits of others. Instead, I've shed all those who cared about me like snakeskin, slithering angrily into my small solitary hole.

On the second afternoon of my self-pity fest, Jared comes by to see me.

“What are you doing?” he says.

Moping, sulking, crying, feeling sorry for myself. “Nothing,” I say.

“You look awful.”

“I'm having a bad life.”

He nods, undeterred by my sarcasm, and tosses my clothing off the desk chair to make himself a seat. “Whatever. My father said to invite you for dinner tomorrow night, if you'll still be around.”

“Why didn't he call me himself?”

“He did. I guess the wack job downstairs didn't give you the message.”

I look at him. “What wack job?”

“Your agent, I guess. He's acting like he owns the place.”

“Owen is downstairs?”

“I thought you knew.”

“I didn't.”

“He acts as if you know.” Jared shrugs. “So that was some show you put on at the cemetery.”

“I slipped,” I say.

He stares at me intently for a minute and then frowns. “Just tell me: did you love him or not?”

I look up at my nephew. “He was my father.”

“I wasn't questioning your genealogy.”

“Listen,” I say, but he waves me down.

“A simple yes or no will do.”

“It's not a simple question.”

He scowls at my equivocation, the uncompromising scowl of youthful conviction. “Make it simple,” he says. “Boil it down to the basics.”

I'm quiet for a long moment, but Jared seems prepared to wait indefinitely. “I can't,” I say.

“Why not?”

“I just—I don't know.”

He stands up and sighs. “How did you get so fucked up?” he asks me, not unkindly.

“It takes a high level of discipline,” I tell him as he heads for the door. “And absolute commitment. It's like my own special super power.”

He stops at the door. “So I'll see you tomorrow night?”

“What's tomorrow night?”

“Um, dinner, remember?”

“Oh, yeah. Sure.”

He shakes his head and offers a sad little grin. “That is, if you can fit us into your busy schedule here.”

A little while later I pull myself out of bed and crawl downstairs to find Owen sprawled out on the living room couch in a pair of my father's sweatpants and an undershirt, looking at Asian porno sites on his laptop. “Hey,” he says by way of greeting. He sits up a little, and his white, hairless belly fat peeks out from between his undershirt and waistband like rising dough in a bake pan. Concentric circles of soiled paper plates, soda cans, crumpled junk food packages, and Chinese take-out boxes surround him like Stonehenge. Sitting there like that, a dough ball in the midst of his own refuse, he looks somewhat pitiful, and I have a sudden intuitive flash that the real Owen, the soft, unaffected one who hides behind the sharp wit and silly suits, is really just a sad and lonely little man. The spirited verbiage and outlandishness are the threads with which he constantly, desperately spins his protective cocoon, the only thing standing between him and the abyss. Or maybe that's just me projecting. “What are you doing here?” I say.

“Just holding down the fort,” Owen says.

“You're doing a great job.” I conspicuously eye the piles of litter.

“A man's got to eat.”

I sit at the foot of the stairs, rubbing my face wearily. “Owen. Why are you still here?”

He smiles and folds his laptop. “I have a better question,” he says, and then looks at me meaningfully. “Why are you still here?”

“I have some things I still need to work out.”

“What things?”

“I'm not sure. I guess that would be the first thing on the list.”

Owen nods and stands up, brushing an assortment of crumbs off his undershirt. “Well, to answer your earlier question, I stuck around to tell you something.”

“What's that?”

“I'd like to tell you why your manuscript isn't any good.”

“So now it's no good?”

“No. It was always no good.”

“I can't stress enough how not up for this I am right now.”

“Actually, you are,” Owen says. “Your business is writing, but my business is writers, and of the two of us, I'm the one who's on top of his game right now, so it would behoove you to pay attention.” He stares at me intently, daring me to contradict him.
“Bush Falls
came from inside you, from that place where good writers store the great narrative events of their lives. The problem is that since you left the Falls, nothing of any significance has happened to you. If I had to write the jacket copy for the book of your life, I'd be hard-pressed to come up with anything. Joe lives in Manhattan. Joe has maybe a little more than his share of what is doubtless highly conventional sex. Joe gets older. Joe gets depressed. That pretty much does it. You've had no great loves and no significant experiences. It's like you've been sleepwalking through the last seventeen years.”

“Somewhere in there, I did write a critically acclaimed best-selling novel.”

“So you did,” Owen concedes. “The single remarkable event in your post–Bush Falls life was writing a book about the Falls. Do you see what I'm getting at here?”

“That I'm a big fucking loser?”

“Besides that. Listen. You've been gone from here for seventeen years, but really you never left. The things that happened here—with your friends, and Carly, and your father—they damaged you, and from that damage came your book, but you're not going to get another one out of it.”

“Well, if you're right, what the hell am I supposed to do about it?”

“You're already doing it. You've been doing it since you got here.”

“What exactly is it that you think I've been doing?”

Owen smiles. “Gathering new material.”

“You're insane,” I say. “This has been a nightmare for me.”

“I know.” He sits down next to me on the stairs. “You're in pain, and frankly I'm relieved to see it.”

“And why is that?”

“Because, to paraphrase the late Bruce Lee, pain is good. It means that you're alive. And dead people, for the most part, don't write books.”

“Fuck writing,” I say angrily. “I have nothing. There's no one in my life.” My voice trembles tellingly, and I take it down a notch for maintenance. “No one cares about me.”

“That's not true.”

“But it is,” I say sadly. “And I never even realized it until now. What kind of colossal asshole must that make me, to have gone this far through life without having made a positive difference to one fucking soul?”

“I care.”

“You get paid.”

“That just makes me care more.”

I sigh. “Whatever.”

“Wayne cares about you.”

“Wayne's dying,” I say, and immediately feel like a schmuck.

Owen looks at me severely. “We're all dying. Just at different rates.”

“Is this the first time you've tried to cheer someone up? Because, I have to tell you, you really suck at it.”

“It's not in my job description.” Owen slaps my knee as he gets up from the stairs. “Cheer yourself up. I'm going home.”

I watch him gather up his laptop and a leather overnight bag, and then follow him to the front door. Unbelievably, the white stretch is still parked outside. “You kept the limo all this time?” I say. “That's going to cost you a fortune.”

“Actually, it's going to cost
you
a fortune,” he says with a smirk, heading out the door and down the steps before I can thank him for sticking around. I watch from behind the storm door as the absurd limo pulls away from the curb and meanders down the block. The sunroof opens and Owen's hand pops up, comically brandishing a half-filled wineglass. He'll be good and wasted by the time he gets home. For the first time I smile, feeling vaguely cinematic as I watch until the white of the limo is absorbed into the dusky Connecticut twilight. In the kitchen, my cell phone rings. I consider ignoring it, but then think the better of it. Like Owen said, it's time to start living again, to throw myself into the mix and begin sorting things out. Feeling suddenly and irrationally renewed, I pull the phone off its charger and flip it open.

“You're a fucking asshole,” Nat says.

         

Owen has left a huge box in the kitchen. I open it to find a brand-new Dell Inspiron laptop, a handful of discs, and a hastily scribbled note from Owen.
Don't think about it. Just turn it on and get to work.
Fifteen minutes later I have the machine up and running on the desk in my bedroom, and I'm sitting pensively in front of it, its blank screen taunting me, daring me to try to fill it with something worthwhile. The idea of starting over from scratch is daunting, but not without appeal. I remind myself that I've done this before—to critical acclaim, no less—and allow my fingers to gently brush the smooth plastic keys of the laptop.

Over the last few days an idea has been forming, the bare skeleton of a story, and now I turn it around in my head, searching for the entry point that will get me started.
No one was more surprised when Matt Burns came home for his father's funeral than Matt himself,
I type, then pause for a moment before continuing. The sentence appears small and insignificant against the white expanse of empty screen, an unlikely springboard from which to launch an entire novel, but something in its conversational simplicity reassures me, and I begin to type some more, at first tentatively and then with greater confidence. Within two hours, I have three chapters done. It's a lyrical mystery I have in mind, about a son who returns home to investigate the suspicious circumstances surrounding his estranged father's death, excavating clues and his own troubled past as he goes. That's the basic idea, and even as I write the initial pages, I know that I'm onto something, that this is a book I can write from beginning to end. It's after nine o'clock when I finally stop typing and save my work, resisting the impulse to reread everything I've just written. It occurs to me that it's been over two days since I last showered, and I stink. I strip out of my sweats and head into the bathroom. For the first time since I returned to the Falls, things are starting to feel attainable again. I know this feeling is nothing more than the illusion of control brought on by my newly galvanized writing effort, but for now, all things being equal, I figure I'll take it.