I can feel my own eyes growing wet. “That was okay,” I say.
Wayne leaves some flowers at the foot of the grave and we head back to the car. We drive in silence for a while, the car filled with the weight of our thoughts. “Joe.”
“Yeah.”
“Did you and Carly have a song?”
I'm about to say no when I suddenly remember. “We did. I can't believe I forgot it.”
“What was it?”
“‘No One Is to Blame.' Howard Jones.”
Wayne looks at me and we both smile. “That's a good song,” he says softly, leaning his head back against the seat. “That's a good fucking song to have.”
thirty-one
I get home at around three to find Brad in the study, sitting back in the desk chair, smoking one of my father's pipes. “Hey, Joe,” he says, looking up embarrassedly as I enter. He puts the pipe down on the ashtray and grins at me sheepishly. “Sorry. I just wanted to smell that smell again.”
“You miss him a lot, huh?”
Brad nods. “I just can't believe he's gone, you know?”
“Yeah.”
Brad shakes his head as if to clear it. “I wanted to talk to you about something. You have a minute?”
“Sure.”
He looks across the desk at me, not sure how to begin. “Dad didn't have a will. I don't think he thought he'd ever die.”
“Okay.”
“Without a will, you and I are the legal heirs, entitled to an even split of all his assets, which are basically this house, the business, and an investment portfolio worth about two hundred thousand dollars.”
I can see where he's going with this, and I'm determined to head him off at the pass. “Brad, I don't want any of Dad's money. I don't need it, and besides, you deserve it. I'm sure he'd want you to have it.”
Brad nods and purses his lips. “It's just that we're struggling a bit, you know. The business is in the toilet, and I've got college for Jared to think about.”
“Brad, really. Don't say another word.”
But he's not done. “Cindy and me,” he says. “We're having problems.”
“Money problems?”
He shrugs. “I used to think that we were just stressed about money. But now I think it goes a lot deeper than that.”
“Are you talking about getting divorced?”
“We're not really talking at all these days.”
“I'm sorry to hear that,” I say sympathetically. I wait for him to say more, but he seems stuck, which I completely understand. Brad is confiding in me, and I am suddenly terrified at the prospect of such intimacy even though I know it's a good thing, a path to better relations. I think we both feel like impostors, posing as the kind of brothers who speak to each other about meaningful things. I wonder if he'll talk to me about Sheila, how long it's been going on and whether it's a cause or an effect of his marital problems. If the conversation is headed that way, then, familial discomfort notwithstanding, I'm in. But Brad seems to have confessed all he's about to confess to me, and just sits back in the chair and looks miserable. I could ask, I suppose, could come right out and say I saw him through the swinging doors at the Duchess, grabbing her ass like a drowning man grabs a life preserver, but I suspect I'd better not.
Brad rests his head in his hands and rubs his eyes. “I don't know how everything got so fucked up. One day it's all fine, and then, I don't know. It's like I look at her, and she's still in there somewhere, but I can't get through, you know?”
“Yeah.” I think of Carly and how I just want to freeze time, cancel all the rules and allow something else to emerge.
We look at each other for a moment. It's really beyond strange to be talking like this. We aren't suited for it. “Yeah,” Brad repeats, and stands up. Apparently, he's had all the brotherly bonding he can take for now, and I think we're both relieved. Still, it's definitely a start, something we can build on in small increments. “Anyway. I didn't mean to lay this all on you.”
“Hey, it's okay.”
“Thanks for being so good about the inheritance.”
“Forget about it.”
He stops at the door. “Dad was proud of you,” he says. “I know you probably don't think that, but he was.”
“He told you that?”
“Nah,” Brad says. “He'd never come out and say something like that. But I could tell it by the way he spoke about you. I inherited his business, but you left and made it on your own. He was proud of you for that.”
I've just ceded the family fortune to him, and he's probably just saying that to return the favor, but even knowing that, I find myself moved by his effort. “Thanks for telling me.”
“I'll see you tomorrow night,” he says, extending his hand. We shake, an oddly formal gesture for so intimate a discussion. A hug would make more sense, but I doubt either of us is up to that.
Still, it's a start.
After Brad leaves, I get to work on my new novel, reveling in the ease with which the words come. The character of Matt Burns is beginning to unfold in my mind as if I'm discovering him rather than inventing him. He's an average guy, somewhat bowed under the weight of his own gradually diminishing expectations. He stuttered as a child and was ridiculed profusely for it, and even though he corrected the stutter years ago, he speaks in quick, economical bursts, as if terrified that it might start up again at any moment. Matt makes a living as a construction foreman. He's not particularly strong himself, but he's good with his hands. He's happiest when surrounded by the deafening cacophony of construction equipment. At all other times, the world feels too quiet, and now, as he begins looking into the odd circumstances surrounding his father's death, with conversation the only tool at his disposal, he feels uncomfortable and out of his element.
Matt proves to be my instrument, and I climb onto his back and ride him through the town, taking in the local flavor and meeting the secondary characters as we go. I write straight into the night, knowing that I'm going into excessive detail that I will later have to sift through and pare down, but I'm thrilled to finally be writing again, to be seeing everything with such clarity. I surge with the power of my creation, a god presiding over the formation of his universe. It's been far too long since I felt like a writer.
Sometime after two I fall asleep at my desk and dream that I'm at a party of some sort at Lucy's house. The yard is crowded with company, some dressed in formal wear and others in bathing suits. I'm in a bathing suit, so I make my way toward the pool, where Lucy sits in a lounge chair, sunning herself in a black bikini. “Hey, Joe,” she says, smiling and waving at me lazily. “Look who's come back.” I look up and see Sammy standing on the edge of the board, affecting a mock bodybuilder pose before jumping gracelessly into the water. But when he emerges, I realized that I was mistaken. It's Wayne, not Sammy, who now swims in powerful strokes across the pool. I call out to him, amazed that he seems to have regained his health, but he is too caught up in his swimming to hear me. I then step onto one of those frustrating dream treadmills where no matter how much I walk, I can't seem to get to the edge of the pool. “Wayne!” I shout. “It's me.” He pauses in his strokes, treading water as he looks through the crowd, but despite my wild gesticulations, he can't locate me. Eventually, he shrugs and climbs out of the pool. Lucy gets up from her chair and hands him a towel, and they kiss, a deep, lustful kiss, which of course makes no sense. Then he turns and walks right by me, eighteen years old again, glistening and powerful and full of life.
“Wayne,” I say. He turns and looks at me as if seeing me for the first time. There are droplets of water clinging to his earlobes and nose. “It's me—Joe.” I'm confused and disoriented, but more than anything, I'm flooded with an overwhelming sense of gratitude that he isn't sick anymore, that we can go on being friends like in the old days. He looks at me somberly and nods slowly. “Joe.”
“Yes.”
He grins his old, cocky grin. “You have a phone call.”
“What?”
I do, and sure enough I hear a phone ringing. And as soon as the realization hits that the ringing isn't part of the dream, the dream vanishes and the phone wakes me up.
I'm sprawled at my desk, my face glued to my arm with drool, my neck stiff from sleeping bent over in my chair. The room is filled with the soft hues and shadows of indirect sunlight. I'm mildly bewildered at having inadvertently slept so deeply at my desk, and still haunted by the vivid images of my dream. “It's Wayne,” Carly says when I pick up the phone, and I wonder foggily how she knows, since she wasn't in the dream at all.
“What?” I say, sitting up slowly. “Carly? What time is it?”
“It's ten-thirty,” she says, her voice frantically urging me to get with the program. “Joe, Wayne's on the roof of the high school.”
I'm trying to understand her, but it isn't computing. “Could you say that again?” I use my fingers in an attempt to manually rub the consciousness into my brain via my eyeballs.
“Wayne's on the roof of the high school,” Carly repeats impatiently. “We have to get over there.”
“It's okay. We always used to climb up there. He won't fall.”
There is a pause. “I'm not worried about him falling, Joe.”
I stand up in my father's den, now fully awake. “I'm on my way.”
“I'm already in my car,” she says. “I'll pick you up in five minutes.”
“You don't think he would really jump, do you?”
“No, I don't. But it would be just like him to want to surprise us.”
The high school is already a mob scene when we pull up in Carly's Honda, the students milling about in an energized frenzy as the faculty make vain, halfhearted efforts at crowd control. In the meantime, sheriff's deputies are attempting to erect wooden sawhorses to cordon off the area directly below the building's cupola. A fire truck and a number of emergency vehicles are parked at random angles at the curb, and two local news vans with roof-mounted satellite uplink equipment have pulled onto the sidewalk, their crews hustling around the periphery of the school's front promenade as they try to capture the chaos for the evening news. Up on top of the building, lying back against the cupola and smoking a cigarette, is Wayne. He's too high up for me to make out the expression on his face, but he doesn't appear poised to jump.
The students are all staring upward in unmasked morbid fascination, talking and joking among themselves, thrilled by the unexpected drama and the resulting free period or two. Carly and I push and shove our way through the throngs of onlookers and then past the barricades, where Mouse stands in a huddle of emergency services workers, bullhorn in hand, looking tense and uncertain. “Dave!” Carly calls out to him. “Have you spoken to him at all yet?”
He looks up at her with a frown. “No press past the barricades,” he says.
“That's Wayne Hargrove up there,” she says. “Let us talk to him.”
Mouse considers us dourly. “I know who it is. He doesn't want to talk. Now, get back there.”
“Come on, Mouse, you know he'll talk to me,” I say, which turns out to be a mistake, not only because I've accidentally called him by his old nickname but because he apparently hasn't noticed me up until this point. “You!” he barks, his eyes widening. “If you don't get your ass behind those barricades right now, I'll book you for obstruction.”
I start to argue, but Carly pulls me back behind the barricades. I try calling up to Wayne, to let him know I'm there, but he's as oblivious to me now as he was in my dream earlier.
“What now?” Carly says, shielding her eyes from the sun as she looks up at the roof. She's wearing jeans and an avocado-colored blouse, her hair pinned loosely above her forehead by a brown leather barrette. This is no time to be realizing how lovely she looks, but as bad as the situation is, part of me is thrilled to be standing next to her like this, to be in it with her.
“This way,” I say, grabbing her hand and steering her through the crowd. We work our way around to the side of the school, where we find another deputy guarding the path leading to the rear of the building and the fire staircase. “If we can get that guy to move, I can get up to the roof,” I say. “Do you think you can create a diversion?”
“No problem,” Carly says sardonically, ducking under the barricade without hesitation. Before I know what she's doing, she's taken off at a run across the side lawn toward the front corner of the school building. “Hey!” the deputy calls to her. “Stop!” Carly keeps running, and within seconds the guard has taken off after her. I hear her stop to inform him that she's a member of the press, but by then I've already crossed the lawn and made it into the stairwell. I take the metal stairs two and three at a time, feeling all James Bond as I make my way up to the roof.
I've just emerged onto the roof when I hear footsteps pounding up the stairs behind me, and I'm bracing myself for a confrontation with the deputy when Jared appears running up the last flight of stairs and joins me on the roof.
“Hey, Uncle Joe,” he says, flipping his wild hair out of his face as we stand together, catching our breath.
“What are you doing here?” I say.
“I go to school here. Sometimes.”
“You picked a hell of a day to stop cutting.”
Jared shrugs. “Who knew?” He walks over to the edge of the roof and looks down at the crowd below with mild curiosity. “Be one hell of a swan dive.”
“Why don't you go back downstairs.”
“The view's much better from up here.”
“Fine.” I give up and turn to look up toward the cupola. “I'm going to talk to Wayne for a few minutes. You wait here.”
“You bet,” Jared says. “Good luck.”
I've forgotten that the only access onto the cupola is from the front of the building, which means grabbing the concrete ledge at the base of the cupola and swinging my legs out into the open air before pulling myself up. If this somewhat risky move bothered me when I was a kid, I don't remember, but it certainly gives me pause now. One slip, and it's a good five-story fall onto the front promenade. Still, Wayne has managed it in his frail condition, so who the hell am I to back down? Before my hesitation can morph into paralysis, I reach for the ledge, the gritty edge of the concrete tattooing my fingertips, and swing my legs up onto the base of the cupola. The crowd below lets out a gratifying collective gasp.
Wayne sits leaning against the cupola, a cigarette in his mouth and another, just lit, between his slender fingers, dangled in my direction. “Hey, Joe,” he says, nodding a casual greeting.
“Hey.” I pull myself up and then squirm forward on my belly until I'm safely on the ledge. “How's it going?”
“Swell.”
I take the cigarette and roll into a sitting position next to him, our feet dangling precariously over the side of the building. “Why don't I remember this being so dangerous back in the day?”
“Because we used to be immortal,” Wayne says, still staring through his feet at the action below.
“That must have been it.” I take a perfunctory drag on the cigarette. The smoke tastes stale and stings the back of my throat. “So,” I say. “What's going on?”
Wayne nods as if he's been waiting for the question. “I woke up feeling especially strong today,” he says. “And something told me that this very well might be my last day of being independently mobile. You can't begin to imagine what that feels like, knowing that this is my last day to simply climb out of bed and see the world, the sky, feel the ground beneath my feet, the wind against my face.” He pauses to take a small, almost childish puff on his cigarette. “So, to make a short story even shorter, I took a walk, and here I am.”
“I can't believe you managed to climb all the way up here,” I say.
“I know, right? I wasn't sure I would make it.”
“And how were you planning on getting down?”
Wayne leans forward and looks between his toes at the crowd below and then turns back to me, smiling ruefull
y. “Shortcut.”
“Wayne, man.” I'm at a loss. A couple of gray pigeons land to our right on the ledge, the jade green flecks in their plumage glinting like sequins in the sun. I've never thought of pigeons as colorful before, and I watch, fascinated, as they putter around for a few seconds in a quick, jittery ballet before flying off in a noisy burst of flapping wings.
“I'm tired, man,” Wayne says. “I'm so fucking tired of getting up every day and putting on a brave face, trying to make it okay for everyone else that I'm dying.” He grinds out his cigarette violently, his eyes welling up with angry tears, his dry lips trembling as he struggles to swallow the rage and terror frothing inside him like a witches' brew. It seems somehow incongruous that someone so near death, so desiccated, should still produce so many tears. “I'm fucking dying, man, and you know what? It is not okay. It's a fucking tragedy. I'm way too young to die. And I just can't keep cracking wise and acting like I've made my peace with the whole damn thing.”
“Who says you have to?” I say just to say something.
Wayne fixes me with a droll look. “Come on, Joe. It's in the manual. Young people with terminal illnesses develop a whimsical, slightly sarcastic sense of humor about it to put everyone else at ease and to serve as shining examples of grace in the face of colossally fucked-up events. Don't you ever watch Lifetime, man?”
“Not really.” I point to myself. “Not gay, remember?”
Wayne laughs. “Sorry. I forgot.” He flicks his butt between his feet and over the ledge and we watch it fall. “I guess you could say I'm having a mid-death crisis. I mean, what the hell will my death actually mean? I was born, I got older, and now I'm going to die, and what the hell do I have to show for it? No kids, no significant other, no people I've enriched, no accomplishments. What am I leaving behind? I'm scared of dying, I won't bullshit you about that, but more than that, I'm immensely pissed at the realization that my entire existence has actually had no real purpose except maybe to serve as some sort of cautionary tale to others.”
“Well, there are two possibilities,” I say thoughtfully. “Either there is an afterlife, or there isn't.”
The Book of Joe Page 23