Another Broken Wizard (28 page)

“I’m going to take care of it. I just got out of
jail
, so just give me a minute. Just leave it, really,” Joe said and smiled, just to make sure they were riled.

“No. This mess is your fault and you should clean it up now,” Marissa said.

“She’s right.”

Maybe they were right. But I had the gnawing sense that I’d wind up cleaning too, unless Joe stuck to his guns. I raised my eyebrows in solidarity with him. Joe looked around, nodded and went into his room, returning with his car keys and coat.

49.

“What are you doing?” Joe’s mother asked.

“Jim and I have to go out for a minute. We’ll be right back.”

“Where are you going?” Marissa asked.

“Just out, for a second. We’ll be right back.”

Joe nodded at me and I nodded back. I had no idea what he had in mind.

“Joseph, where are you going?” Justine asked.

“Just out. Jesus. Take it easy. I’ll be back in a minute.”

“Two cars?” I asked as we crossed the deeply dug pathway across the shallow front yard.

“No, I’ll drive,” Joe said.

We hopped into his Buick Skylark and started driving. Down Main Street, past the nightclub where Joe’s old nemesis had killed three people just about a week ago, past City Hall, and into Main South. Joe stopped at a light, switched on his turn signal, paused, and then decided to keep going straight.

“Where are we heading?” I asked.

“Lincoln County Road or Armageddon,” Joe said, but didn’t laugh. He just stared through the windshield at the sparse city traffic as we neared Webster Square.

“I don’t care. You just gave me a scare with that blinker in Main South.”

“I guess I gave myself a scare too. I know where Sully lives now. I found out the other night. I keep thinking it was him who called the cops.”

“Sully?”

“Yeah. But it doesn’t seem right. It just doesn’t add up.”

After Webster Square, we hung a right onto Route 9 and went west, toward Amherst and New York State. I didn’t think we were making a run for it. If we were, we would have gotten on the Mass Pike. And anyway, we weren’t in a road movie. We weren’t in California. No matter how much we raged or how what we might try, we were in Massachusetts and Massachusetts was in us. And Massachusetts is not wide open. Trees and hills tightly circumscribe its sky. Massachusetts doesn’t say you can be new again. It’s historic like a haunted house. Even the Pilgrims just kept on with their old willful miseries, in a glacier-scraped land where farming was hard and the winters worse than home. The snow banks turn brown and the cold shuts down five out of six things you’d like to do on a given night. In Leicester, the high snow banks crowded its two westbound lanes into one.

“Up ahead is the dead man’s curve. It’s famous,” Joe said.

“Well, then be sure to speed up. I’d hate for us to be the guys famous for making it crippled man’s curve.”

And there it was—Joe’s magnificent, inappropriate, unstoppable, and for the moment, life-threatening, laugh. It took him over like a fit of glossolalia. The laugh always came with an invitation to join him in its weird ecstasy. I joined, but watched the road, for fear that he didn’t.

“If you have to do that, pull over, or at least slow down.”

That just made it worse. He could barely keep his forehead off the steering wheel, he was laughing so hard. But he did slow down. The rest of that night, we saw a hundred dead man’s curves and crippled man’s curves, and laughed at every one.

“So I have to ask. What happened to your face? Was that the cops?”

“No. The cops were pretty nice, for the most part. They were mostly just annoyed I took so long to turn myself in. This,” Joe said, gesturing to his face “was all in jail. Jail was a nightmare.”

“What happened?”

“It wasn’t anything like you’ve heard.”

“Not all rapey?”

Joe wanted to laugh at that one, but didn’t.

“Actually, it almost was a little rapey. After the judge cancelled court for the day, they shipped me and a bunch of other guys out to the county jail in West Boylston. I was in a four-man cell with two other guys. One was an older guy who kept combing his hair with his fingers, then patting it down. I saw him rub a loogie into his hair to keep it in place. He said he was in for his political beliefs. But that obviously wasn’t the case, which I’ll get to. The other guy was this black kid, who I got along with at first.”

“At least you had one friend.”

“Well, that’s what I thought. So me and this black kid, whose name is Kane, we get to talking. We’re getting along really well, talking about the places we hung out and stuff like that. But then we start talking about people we both know and I figure out that he’s Ki’s older brother and he figures out that I’m
that
Joe, Joe Rousseau. For a minute, I thought we were going to get in a fight. But we agreed to leave our differences outside the cell for the night. Jail was bad enough. They gave us baloney sandwiches for dinner and I tried to get some sleep.”

“So far so good.”

“Yeah, good, right until I wake up with the hair-comber guy’s hands rubbing on my package.”

“Oh shit.”

“That’s right, it got rapey. And this was just jail. They say that jail is nothing compared to prison.”

“It’s not a great introduction to penalized life.”

“Well, I hope it’s the entirety of my penalized life, except for those other times. Anyway, I feel his hands, so I wake up in a flash and punch the hair-comber on the side of the head. He runs off to his bunk and starts howling like a monkey. Then Kane is awake and he’s pissed and asks why I beat up the hair-comber. I try to tell him what happened and he’s not buying it. Now, Kane isn’t a big guy, but he surprises me by punching me in the stomach, so I’m already sucking wind. I grab his neck and he starts hitting me in the face. Then I get him on the ground and I’m banging his head into the concrete floor and the hair-comber is going absolutely berserk. He’s making sounds that aren’t even human. So there I am, throttling Kane to death and looking over my shoulder like ‘
what is that sound
?’ Then the guards come and ask me nicely to stop attempting to murder Kane, and I do. He didn’t have to go to the hospital, so they didn’t have to fill out any forms, so I just got put in a cell by myself.”

“Sounds like a posh arrangement.”

“Compared to being locked in with a weird pervy dude and my worst enemy’s friend’s older brother, it was the fucking Holiday Inn. But even in the new cell, there were guys across from me, snoring and talking and moving around, so I couldn’t take a shit there. You hungry?”

“Yeah, let’s stop at the next place.”

There were a lot of trees, stone walls, town squares, cemeteries and a lot of silent, snow-crammed lanes branching off into the darkness, but not a lot of places to eat. Occasionally the road would open up straight for a moment and we’d be surprised by a windshield full of stars. The shadow and the orange glow of the streetlights played off Joe’s face. I think it was in the middle of Spencer, some town that’s ninety-nine percent darkness and snow, that we passed a big, granite World War One memorial obelisk by a stop sign.

“Look at that,” I said.

“What?”

“The World War One memorial there—just imagine all those goobers from Spencer who signed up, who left the trees and wood-frame houses of their safe irrelevancy to be slaughtered in Flanders.”

“I can relate. I’d risk a lot to get the fuck out of Spencer,” Joe said.

“I think about war sometimes, how it makes sense for the kids who fight it. It’s just being pissed off and wanting a place in the world. The army gives you something to tide over both of those impulses.”

“After nine-eleven, my friend Paul Girardi joined up. He was a pissed-off guy before that. He also said that it was like he wanted to either exist or not exist. But he didn’t want it to be up to him. I guess he thought that war would decide it for him in a way that regular life couldn’t.”

“Never heard that one before. So war lets you know whether or not you’re supposed to exist.”

“Like I said, Paul was an intense kid,” Joe said, watching the road. “But the last laugh was on him. The army has him counting boxes down in Mississippi, last I heard.”

In one of the Brookfields, we stopped at a pub by a graveyard. The old regulars at the bar seemed at odds with the management’s efforts to give it a Berkshires-rustic feel. As a result, the place wavered between being twig-and-wreath illusion and video-keno reality. The grizzled locals eyed us with suspicion. We ignored them and ordered dinner and beers.

“So where are we going?” I asked after the beers arrived.

“Just down the road. I don’t feel like being around right now. I just want some freedom, just a long drive to nowhere.”

“Well, whatever, I’m down. It’s nice, just hanging out, with no drama.”

“Yeah. I miss you, man. Do you ever think you’d move back to Worcester?”

“I don’t know, probably not. My life is down in New York. And I was never really all that at home in Worcester.”

“Unless I move to D.R. or maybe South America—someplace with lots of hot Latin women—I don’t think I’ll ever leave. I mean, as long as I can be with hot women and good friends whenever I want, why go anywhere else?”

Though nearly every adult choice I’d made argued against him, I said nothing and ate. We finished drinking when we finished eating and hit the road. Route 9 out west was just another rural highway, broken by the occasional blinking traffic light and dotted with occasional wooden houses built too close to the road.

“So what is going to happen with you and this case?”

“I’m going to talk to my lawyer on Friday and see what the deal is. I can always sell out Walshie if I have to. I mean, Walshie’s a good guy, but that and three bucks will buy you a latte. After that night in jail, I think I care more about my freedom than I do about my good name among Worcester’s criminal community. I mean, like you said, this isn’t
Godfather Two
.”

We only had about three beers apiece, and caution wasn’t comfortable on him. But Joe drove slower after dinner. Northampton was closed down, though brightly lit, in the freezing quiet of winter break. Past town, the darkness was more absolute, the cold more extreme, the snows deeper and more exotic.

“We’re getting into King Philip country,” Joe said.

“I was just reading about him.”

The dark hills suddenly seemed alive with the violent obstinacy that’s born into all men. The snow seemed opportune for stringing out a foreign enemy, and the hills ideal for ambush. But the well-plowed streets, new street signs and modern houses revealed by the streetlights all indicated vacation houses.

“No shit? Is the book any good?”

“It’s alright.”

“Can I borrow it when you’re done? I’ve been looking for a good book about that war.”

“Sure. It’s funny that they never taught us about it in school, even with it happening all around where we grew up.”

“After like two hundred field trips to Sturbridge Village, maybe they could have brought it up.”

“Every year, Sturbridge fucking Village.”

“That fucking place. It’s like, great, they made everything by hand and wore uncomfortable clothes. Yeah, I get it, the past sucked,” Joe said, getting excited.

“Meanwhile, we were going to school near half a dozen battlefields.”

“To be fair, I don’t know if King Philip’s War was the most teachable moment. I’m not sure how far you are in the book. But I don’t know how they would explain it to kids. I mean, it was more of an outburst by a dying people than a war. King Philip even knew he didn’t have a chance. He had a famous quote about it. The quote doesn’t exactly make sense …”

“It was ‘
I am determined not to live until I have no country.
’ I re-read it a few times in the hospital the other day. It makes less sense the more you read it. But you do get his point.”

“Okay, so we have a ballooning horde of Colonists, the despair on the part of a dwindling native population, then add in that it was a gruesome war of attrition.”

“The bloodiest, per-capita, in US history.”

“And in the end, the Pilgrims, whose grandchildren would sign the Declaration of Independence, killed off thousands of Indians and sent the remainder into slavery. I guess I could see why they skipped it in the textbook.”

“It’s definitely harder to explain than the sawmill and the chicken coop at Sturbridge Village. But it’s a hell of a story.”

“Fucking Philip, he was doomed, just flat-out fucked. But he gave it a shot. And he was even winning for a few months.”

Joe made a left onto a farm road that twisted between rough snow banks up a hill. From there, we made lefts and rights at random, climbing hills in the Buick, just following what looked interesting in the mostly empty land. Here and there, the stars would taunt us, or the half moon would escape the tree branches. The night was hilarious. Dead man’s curves, my continued unemployment, Joe’s future in prison, the farms under three feet of snow, my Gothic mistress, the old Colonial barns with Saabs inside, and the fact that Joe had told his boss he’d be at work the next day. We just laughed and laughed. Lost in Western Mass, the sun began lighting up the sky unignorably behind us.

“Well, it looks like we broke the night,” Joe said.

“That’s no mean feat for the middle of January.”

“I should start heading back if I’m going to get to work by nine.”

Atop the hill we’d been climbing was a long, straight road lined with trees in perfect rows, planted at regular intervals. Joe slowed the car as we approached it. The trees’ million black, arthritic fingers reached over the Buick. We said nothing as we contemplated the gentle and patient mind that must have planted them, trusting in the soil, the road and a future populated by people upon whom his care would not be wasted. It was a long silence, one so pungent you could breathe it in.