The Book of Joe (30 page)

thirty-eight

Wayne and I used to lower the basketball hoop in my driveway to about eight feet every so often so that we could practice our alley-oops, tomahawks, and reverse dunks. Over time, this practice led to a gradual loosening of the bolts that fastened the hoop to the backboard, so that whenever the ball made contact with any part of the basket, there was a distinct rattling sound. It's been many years since I heard this sound, but sitting in the study, writing my novel, I recognize it instantly, and step outside to find Brad shooting around, still dressed in the suit pants and loafers he wore to Wayne's funeral earlier that day. “Hey,” he says when I step out onto the porch. “Want to shoot around a little?”

I step down to the driveway and catch his pass. “Sure.” The driveway is still wet from the earlier rain, and the ball is covered with a film of wet grit from the blacktop. I take a step closer and put up an easy bank shot, too close to qualify for courtesy, but Brad tosses me the ball anyway. We shoot around in silence for a few minutes in the fading daylight, the only sounds the chirping of the crickets and the hard leather slap of the ball on damp pavement.

“That was something today, at the funeral, huh?” Brad finally says. His tone is casual, but his posture is weighted with purpose.

“It sure was,” I say, and take another shot, which hits the front of the rim and lands right in Brad's hands. He tosses in an underhand layup, grabs his own rebound, and dribbles out to take an outside shot. He still handles the ball with complete authority, and when he launches his shot, there's no question that he'll sink it.

“I said some things to you the other night,” he says as I grab his rebound.

“All justified.”

“Still, I feel bad about the way we left things.”

“Don't. I have no one in my life to kick my ass when I'm out of line. I think I needed it.”

I toss him the ball, and he stares at it with a thoughtful frown, as if he's never taken the time to actually look at a basketball before. “I'm leaving tonight for a trade show in Chicago. I'll be gone for a few days, and when I get back, I'll be moving out of my house and into this one.” He walks over to the steps of the house and sits down. “I didn't know how much longer you planned on hanging around, but I wanted to say good-bye in case you were leaving, and if not, I just wanted to warn you that you'd be getting a roommate.”

“I guess I'll be heading back to the city fairly soon,” I say, sitting down beside him on the stairs.

He nods and clears his throat. “This thing with Sheila,” he says. “It only happened after Cindy and I had already fallen apart.”

“It's none of my business.”

He casts a sideways glance at me. “Let's pretend for a moment that it is.”

“Okay,” I say. “Are you getting divorced?”

“I don't know.”

“Are you in love with Sheila?”

“Hard to say.”

“Well, then.”

“What about you and Carly? How's that going?”

“Remains to be seen.”

Brad looks at me and smiles. “I guess we have more in common than we thought.”

“Who knew?” I smile back and nod. He pats my back and we sit there staring at our shoes, two brothers on our dead parents' stairs in the gathering dusk, a little lost, a little found, looking toward the future and wondering which it will ultimately be.

thirty-nine

The next day, Carly and I drive up to Noank to pick up Wayne's ashes, which are waiting for us at the receptionist's desk in a typical brass urn. We spend the drive home trying to figure out what to do with them. “We could spread them over the falls,” Carly suggests.

“Maybe,” I say. “But as someone who recently took that plunge, I don't exactly recommend it. What about the lake at the Porter's campus?”

She shakes her head. “There's been talk around town that they're going to put up a new mall. Your lake is probably the future site of an Old Navy.”

“Since when do news editors listen to rumors?”

“We're the ones who start them.”

“So much for Porter's, then. Wayne can't spend eternity in Old Navy.”

“What about the high school gym?” Carly says. “He loved playing ball so much.”

I nod, but the practicalities of spreading ashes indoors troubles me. I picture them landing in undignified piles on the wooden floor, only to end up in the murky depths of a custodian's mop bucket. Besides, I suspect there are laws about this sort of thing. “I think it needs to be outdoors. Remember in
Terms of Endearment,
how they flew out behind Jack Nicholson's convertible? It was like they were flying up to the sky and out into the ocean, being dispersed into everywhere at once. I think that's what appealed to Wayne.”

“Well.” Carly lifts the urn and sets it carefully on her lap, her fingers tracing the bends in the brass as she speaks. “You've got the convertible, so we're halfway there.”

“I guess so. We're an act in search of a venue.”

We drive in silence for a few minutes, and Carly leans her head against my shoulder and lets her hand fall lazily into my lap, softly stroking my thigh. “I'm tired,” she says softly, her lips just inches from my ear. Despite the sadness of the day and the morbid nature of our current expedition, the combination of her breath in my ear and her hand on my thigh doesn't take very long to stir my anatomy.

“You keep doing that, and sleep won't be an option.”

She smiles and slides her hand slowly upward, pressing down as she brings her lips to my ear. “Home, Jeeves,” she whispers.

We leave the urn in the car and hurry inside, groping each other like a couple of teenagers.

         

We have sex repeatedly, loud, reckless, passionate, dirty sex, with a violent urgency that was absent in our earlier reunion. Wayne is gone and, with him, my last excuse for staying in the Falls, and it's as if we're trying to push past all of the questions and doubts that have been attending us up until now and somehow fuck our way into a new understanding of our situation. It doesn't work, sex being more of a question than an answer to people in our position, but we go at it with great industry nonetheless. If we're going to remain clueless, I can't think of a better way to do it.

After our third go-round, Carly collapses into a deep sleep, and I throw on some jeans and a T-shirt and go downstairs to watch the rain, my body still delightfully sore from our prior exertions. I'm exhausted but at the same time strangely invigorated. The thing in me that had been cracking ever since I got to the Falls finally shattered when Wayne died, and now I can feel the first, vague stirrings of something new being configured in its place, equally breakable but as yet untouched. I pull a folding chair out onto the front porch and watch as the rain finally tapers off into a thick wet mist that hangs in thick curtains around the porch lights. The obscured moon lends the night a spooky timbre, and I imagine Wayne's ghost hovering somewhere in the mist in front of me, invisible and light as air. “Hey, man,” I say, “how are things on the other side?” The lone cry of a neighboring dog is the only reply I get, but it feels good to be speaking to Wayne anyway.

A short while later the front door swings open and Carly emerges, dressed in some old sweats she must have found by rummaging through my drawers. She has pillow hair and sleepy eyes, but she still looks radiant in the soft glow of the porch light. “Hey,” she says.

“Hey.”

She grabs another folding chair off the wall and sits down beside me, pulling her knees up to her chest and looking out into the rain, her expression inscrutable. I reach for her hand and cradle it in both of mine. We sit in silence for a little while, listening to the sounds of each other's breathing. “Joe,” she says, “this is insane. I mean, are we really going to try to do this?”

“I want to,” I say, realizing as I do how true that is. “I'm still in love with you.”

She gives me a sharp look. “I'm not ready to hear that from you right now. I don't know that I'll ever be.”

“It's the truth.”

“That doesn't matter. I'm not the same person I was. I'm fucked up.” I give her a sideways glance. “I am,” she says. “You haven't even scratched the surface.”

“I find that most people worth knowing are fucked up in some way or another. Take me, for example.”

She smiles sadly and touches my face tenderly. “It's never going to work.”

“Come on,” I say. “What's the worst that could happen?”

At the curb directly in front of the house, my Mercedes bursts loudly into flames.

         

The concussive force of the blast knocks us both backward, flipping us onto our backs as the chairs collapse. Upstairs, my bedroom window shatters, never again to knock unsuspecting pigeons out of the sky. We crawl onto our knees to see that the car has been transformed into a bright fireball, the flames reaching a good twenty feet into the sky. Car alarms go off and lights go on up and down the block. The heat from the fire licks savagely at our faces, and our arms go up in matching defensive postures as we watch in stunned silence while the car burns. On the lawn, a number of copies of
Bush Falls
have been ignited and burn in isolated little fires all their own.

“What the hell?” Carly says, raising her voice significantly to be heard above the roaring flames.

“Sean,” I say incredulously. “He actually went and blew up my car.”

“I don't believe it.”

“Well, this isn't the book club's style.”

A moment later the door opens behind us and Jared emerges, much to our surprise, pulling up his jeans as he goes, his hair in a tangled mess over his face. “What the fuck?” he asks.

“What the hell are you doing here?” I say. I had no idea he was in the house.

“I'm always here. What happened to your car?”

“What does it look like?”

“Looks like it blew up.”

“Then you know as much as I do.”

The door swings open again, and a cute blond girl steps out wearing Jared's T-shirt and, as far as I can see, nothing else. “This is Kate,” Jared says. I recognize her from the night Jared pointed her out through the window. “No way,” I say. Jared just smiles and shrugs at me.

The flames have subsided somewhat by then, and the four of us sit down on the stairs to watch the car disintegrate. “You know what?” I say. “I really hated that car.”

“It didn't suit you,” Carly agrees, leaning against me.

“It would have suited me just fine,” Jared says morosely.

Carly suddenly jumps to her feet so fast that I worry a stray ember has burned her. “Look!” She extends her hands, and we now see that the air all around us is saturated with a million small particles drifting down from the sky like a dusting of snow. “It's Wayne,” she says.

“What?”

“Wayne's ashes. They were in the car.”

We step down into the front yard, arms extended, palms upward, to allow as much surface area as possible for Wayne's ashes to land. A moment later Jared joins us, looking up to the sky in wonder. Kate remains on the porch, watching us with only partially concealed disgust. The three of us stand, spinning slowly with our arms outstretched as all around us Wayne descends in slow motion, coloring the air white. Awakened neighbors stand on their porches, watching us with varying degrees of alarm. Carly sticks out her tongue and catches an ash on it, then smiles at me. “He's everywhere.” She waves her arms up at the sky. “He's the air itself.”

Some ash lands on my own outstretched tongue and I swallow it, then turn to face Carly, whose hair is now white with the falling ashes. “You look like an angel,” I say.

“I feel like one.”

“Listen. It looks like I'm going to need a lift back to Manhattan.”

She stops spinning. “Yes, you are.”

“Come spend some time in New York with me.”

Carly looks at me for a long while. “Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“Maybe is the best I can do right now.”

Off in the distance, the first shrill wails of the approaching fire trucks can be heard piercing the night, and I know chaos is only minutes away. I walk over to Carly and wrap my arms around her, and we spin slowly in the firelight, dancing under the serendipitous canopy of Wayne's remains. “I can live with maybe,” I say.

About the Author

Jonathan Tropper lives in Westchester County, New York, with his wife and two children. He is also the author of
Plan B,
and is at work on another novel for Bantam Dell.
The Book of Joe
is currently in development at Warner Bros. Studios.

Jonathan Tropper can be contacted through his website at
www.jonathantropper.com
.

THE BOOK OF JOE
A Delacorte Book / April 2004

Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved
Copyright © 2004 by Jonathan Tropper

“Better Days” by Bruce Springsteen. Copyright © 1992 Bruce Springsteen. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

“Thunder Road” by Bruce Springsteen. Copyright © 1975 Bruce Springsteen. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

“I'm on Fire” by Bruce Springsteen. Copyright © 1984 Bruce Springsteen. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

“Glory Days” by Bruce Springsteen. Copyright © 1984 Bruce Springsteen. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

“Backstreets” by Bruce Springsteen. Copyright © 1975 Bruce Springsteen. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

Delacorte Press is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Visit our website at
www.bantamdell.com

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Tropper, Jonathan.
                  The book of Joe / Jonathan Tropper.
                                    p. cm.
                  I. Title.

PS3570.R5885B66 2004
813'.54—dc21

Published simultaneously in Canada

eISBN: 978-0-440-33476-7

v3.0_r1