“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.
Band-Aids are best applied by somebody else. There's something about pulling off those white plastic tabs by myself that always feels pathetic, seems to emphasize the fact that there's no one in the world to do it for me. With a sigh, I lean into the mirror to plant the adhesive strip on my skull, and something reflecting behind me catches my eye. In the corner of the mirror, I can see the door to my father's bedroom, half closed, and on the back of it hangs a framed poster. I turn around and confirm, to my great surprise, that it's the poster from last year's theatrical release of Bush Falls. The artwork depicts a somewhat distant swimming pool framed in the bare spread legs and bikini-clad bottom of a woman standing with her back to the camera. Standing waist-deep in the water between those legs is Leonardo DiCaprio, who stares up at the unseen top half of the woman in goofy, exaggerated wonder. Beneath the photo, in a grand white script, are the words BUSH FALLS followed by the ridiculous tag line THE SUMMER JUST GOT A LITTLE BIT HOTTER. Owen laughed uncontrollably for a good ten minutes when he first saw the poster. “Oh, my Lord!” he exclaimed dramatically in the fake Southern accent he always trots out for just this sort of occasion. “That is just too precious!”
“It's cheesy,” I complained, irked by his condescension.
“Deliciously cheesy,” he corrected me, and then collapsed into another paroxysm of full-bellied laughter. I was less than amused, wondering what Lucy Haber would think when she saw that poster.
And now here it is, hanging inexplicably in my father's bedroom. I stare at it intently, as if I might somehow discern the meaning of its presence by forensic analysis. Why does a father hang up the poster of a movie based on his son's novel? The only answer that I can come up with, dumbfounding as it is, is pride. My father was proud of me. The town was in an uproar about the book when it first came out, the local papers filled with furious editorials and defensive denials from all involved in the events described. When the movie came out two years later, dozens of newsmagazines and entertainment tabloids reignited the hullabaloo as they came in droves to do stories on the town and track down the people behind the movie's twisted characters. I was viciously derided by every person who managed to speak to a reporter. Sheriff Muser even tried to organize a class action lawsuit against me. And in the midst of all that furor, my father, with whom I'd barely spoken in ten years, framed and hung the movie poster in his bedroom, where he could see it every night as he climbed into bed.
With mounting apprehension, I run downstairs and into my father's den. There, beside the trophy case and framed basketball awards, both his and Brad's, stands an Ikea bookcase with glass doors, in which I discover fifteen hardcover versions of Bush Falls and another twenty or so paperbacks with the movie poster pictured on the cover. Lying on top of the bookcase is a wide, flat book, which turns out to be a scrapbook, the kind they sell in stationery stores. The binding cracks loudly as I open it with shaking hands. On each page, carefully centered and glued under the protective plastic sheets, are a wide assortment of reviews of Bush Falls, everything from the New York Times to Entertainment Weekly as well as The Minuteman and some other regional papers. On the top left corner of one of the reviews, I notice a small imprint that reads “VMT Media Services.” He actually hired a clipping service to track my press. My legs become rubber, and I sit down hard on the small couch against the wall, still clutching the scrapbook in my hands. The couch smells of my father's aftershave and pipe tobacco. “What the hell?” I say out loud as a tear runs down my cheek and lands on the brown faux leather of the scrapbook. A second tear soon follows, and then a third. I stare at those three wet spots on the cover, wondering what the hell they mean. Before I've come up with anything, though, sleep is on me lik
e shrink-wrap, and the last thing I hear is the sound of the scrapbook slipping out of my fingers and landing with a gentle thud on the carpeted floor.
fifteen
I get my first flying book at around eight the next morning. One doesn't instantly identify the sound of a flying book. The light, fluttering sound of airborne pages is followed by a jarring thud as the book caroms off the living room picture window and lands in the front yard. I roll off the couch in my father's den, nauseous and without any discernible center of gravity, and peer groggily out the living room window, expecting to see another dazed or broken bird lying bewildered on the lawn. Instead, I am greeted by my own face smiling pretentiously up at me from the dust jacket of a hardcover copy of Bush Falls, which lies facedown and spread open, the upper portion of the book's spine indented from its collision with the window. The street in front of the house is completely deserted.
There is the sound of soft breathing behind me, and I turn around to find Jared sleeping on the living room couch in jeans and a black T-shirt that says “Bowling for Soup.” I don't remember seeing him there when I came in last night, although that can hardly be considered conclusive. “Hey, Jared,” I mumble. Four beds upstairs, and we both slept on couches.
“Hey,” he grunts back, not opening his eyes.
“You'll be late for school.”
He opens one eye. “Doesn't really pay to go, then, does it?” The eye closes.
He'll get no argument from me. I head upstairs for a shower, pausing only long enough to doff my shorts and perform some spastic dry heaves over the toilet. The light hits my eyes like needles, so I shower in the dark, leaning against the cold tiles in an effort to wake myself up. The hot water pummels my scalp soothingly, cascading in torrents down my face and shoulders, and my mind wanders. I think about Wayne and then my father and the scrapbook I found last night. It's unbelievable to me that before yesterday they and the Falls were such a remote part of my life, distant memories more than anything else. Now they threaten to consume me, the protective barrier of the last seventeen years dissipating like a mirage.
The Book of Joe Page 11