The Book of Joe (28 page)

For a kid who speaks as little as Jared, this is practically a speech, and the rest of us greet it with respectful silence. Jared walks over to Wayne and reaches out for the ball. “And that's my whole, sad story. Film at eleven.” He catches a toss from Wayne and dribbles it back and forth between his legs. “I guess I have more in common with you, Uncle Joe, than with my dad,” he says to me.

“Except that you can actually play,” Wayne points out, much to everyone's apparent amusement.

“Fuck you,” I say good-naturedly while Jared and Carly snicker. “You want to go one-on-one right now?”

Wayne smiles. “Them's fighting words.” He throws off his overcoat dramatically and pulls himself carefully to his feet, extending his arms to Jared. “Give me that ball, Junior.”

Just as Jared tosses him the basketball, there is a high-pitched whine of scraping metal and the creak of hinges. We all look toward the far wall of the gym, where one of the doors has suddenly swung open, casting a triangular shaft of light across the gym floor. Standing silhouetted in the light from his office is Coach Dugan. His features are obscured in the shadows, but there's no mistaking his chiseled profile. “Who is that?” he says, stepping out onto the floor.

“Busted,” Jared groans under his breath.

“Hey, Coach,” Wayne says sheepishly. “How's it going?”

Dugan squints across the gym in his direction. “Who's that, Hargrove?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What the hell are you doing here, son?”

“I just wanted to feel the old hardwood under my feet one more time.”

Dugan looks around at the rest of us, his expression becoming particularly grim when he gets to me. He seems about to say something, but then he turns around and disappears back into his office, the steel door slamming solidly behind him.

“Busted,” Jared says again, heading for the doors. “Big-time. He's definitely calling the cops.”

“What should we do?” Carly asks, giggling giddily in spite of herself. “Should we run?”

I think about it for a second. “Let's.”

Wayne sits back down in his wheelchair, and we begin quickly heading for the exit doors when we're stopped in our tracks by a loud clicking sound and the whir of unseen electricity. Seconds later, the gym's sodium lights begin audibly popping on, row by row, their soft electric hum filling the room. We stand in their purple glow, gazing around incredulously in the growing illumination, and I see that Wayne is smiling. “Look!” Carly says, pointing upward.

“Well, I'll be damned,” Wayne says, his voice thick with emotion. At first I don't understand what they're talking about, but then I look a little higher and see the fiberglass backboards, the ones reserved for Cougars only, sliding slowly, almost majestically down in their grooved path until finally settling simultaneously into their game positions.

Jared lets out a whoop and turns Wayne's wheelchair around, running back downcourt toward one of the newly lowered backboards, and Carly chases them, dribbling the ball much too high in the exuberant and deliberate manner of an uninitiated female. I'm touched by Dugan's gesture, and then pissed at myself for being touched, because does he really think this one kindness, this one minuscule act, can make up for everything, and then I think,
Is it really any different from what I've been trying to do since I got to the Falls,
and I answer that
Yes, it is different, because he's an asshole,
and then I remember that I am too.

I move to join them at the far end of the court but find myself suddenly frozen in place, a potent wave of largely unformed emotions overwhelming me. It feels like my blood is being heated before it's circulated, threatening to melt my veins. What paralyzes me is the sudden, certain realization that I'm standing in the exact spot where my father fell in his last conscious moments. I look at the top of the key and mentally count the paces to where I stand, confirming that I am in fact standing in the right spot. “Come on, Joe!” Carly calls to me from the other side of the gym. I use two fingers to brush away the hot wetness that has suddenly formed on my cheeks, and then I shake it off and step decisively out of Arthur Goffman's sweet spot.

         

Now that the lights are on, I can see that the ink from the ancient signatures on my father's basketball has been rubbing off onto our sweaty hands and comically splotching our faces where our ink-smudged hands made contact, making us look like quite the wild bunch. We stay for around a half hour, Carly, Jared, and I shooting around while Wayne sits in his wheelchair at the foul line, a happy smile on his face. Every so often he stands up and we toss him the ball for one or two perfect foul shots.

Later Jared is handily defeating Carly and me in a loose two-on-one when I happen to glance at Wayne in his wheelchair. He's sitting upright and absolutely still, his eyes wide and unblinking. “Wayne?” I say, stopping in mid-dribble. He doesn't reply; gives no indication that he even hears me. “Wayne!” I call again, this time a little louder. “Oh, my god,” Carly whispers, and I feel her nails dig painfully into my forearm, denting it like clay. “Is he . . . ?” The two of us approach him apprehensively as if in slow motion, the basketball slipping out of my grasp and bouncing noisily off to the side. “Wayne?” I say again, this time softly, the sound of my own voice ringing hollow in my ears. I feel Carly's arm trembling against my own. We're a step away from him when he blinks and grins. “Just a little gallows humor,” he says.

Carly collapses into me with a gasp, and behind us, Jared hoots hysterically and claps his hands.

         

On the short drive home, Wayne announces that he wants to be cremated so that we can do something meaningful and dramatic with his ashes, like they did with Debra Winger's in
Terms of Endearment.
“You remember that?” he says. “Shirley MacLaine is just sitting there, carrying that urn around, trying to figure out what the hell to do with those ashes. That's what I want. For the two of you to come up with something meaningful and dramatic for my mortal remains.”

“You want to at least point us in the right direction?” I say.

“I've already offered to be incinerated,” Wayne says. “Jesus, do I have to do everything?”

         

Once home, after depositing Wayne safely with Fabia, I'm headed for the shower when I see Carly through the open doorway of Brad's room, sitting on the bed, still dressed in the jeans and sweatshirt she wore for our earlier excursion, looking thoughtfully at her ink-smudged hands. “What's up?” I say.

She lowers her hands and looks up at me. “More than forty years ago those boys signed that basketball, trying to preserve something that was meaningful to them. They knew even then, from the second they won that championship, that time was making it less and less relevant with every passing minute. Their names stayed on that ball for over forty years, and then, in a matter of an hour or so, it was all over my hands, and yours, just another brick in the crumbling wall of their posterity.”

I step into the room and lean against Brad's old desk, with its Led Zeppelin and Rush stickers frozen in time under the glass blotter, along with pictures of Brad and Cindy in their prime, clutching and groping at each other with what then must have been simple young lust but what now seems like something infinitely more desperate. “I'm not sure what you're getting at.”

“Did you really forget that night in the field, when the sprinklers went on?” she asks me, her expression frank and unyielding.

“I don't know. I'm not sure if I'd forgotten it, or just hadn't thought about it in so long that it felt that way.”

She nods. “Either way, I guess it amounts to the same thing. We all try to hold on to the good things from our past. Especially when the here and now doesn't measure up. These jocks . . .” She holds up her hands again. “It's almost like they knew it would never get any better for them than it was right there. And for me, it was the time I spent with you. And for the last seventeen years, that time was the ball in my trophy case that I could look at every day and find some measure of comfort, of happiness remembered.”

“For me too.”

“I know,” she says. “But memory is imperfect at best. And if that's all you've got, then what do you have when it's gone?”

I walk over and sit down beside her on the bed, holding up my own hands demonstratively. “Just some dirty hands.”

She presses her palms against mine and we slowly fold our fingers into each other's. Small, charged things fly back and forth between us at harrowing speeds. “I was just on my way to take a shower,” I say.

Carly nods. “You want company?”

         

In the shower, we scrub each other softly with washcloths, the water coming off us dark with the ink of the 1958 Championship Cougars team. We watch the stained water swirl around the drain at our feet until the color gradually fades and the water regains its normal clarity. Satisfied that we've washed off the last traces of the past, we drop the washcloths ceremoniously to the floor, our hands and mouths being more suitable instruments to the business of becoming reacquainted in the here and now.

My fingers encounter a small, knob-shaped dent in Carly's chest, just above her left breast, and they stay there, rubbing it questioningly, until she looks up at me, water dripping down her face and over her lips in thin rivulets from the overhead spray of the shower. “He hit me with a toaster oven,” she says neutrally. A tiny puddle of water is collecting in this unplanned crevice, and I lean forward and suck it out, my tongue exploring the smoothness of the small site where her bone has been permanently compromised. Then I pull her tightly against me and we cling to each other directly beneath the showerhead, its unrelenting spray enveloping us in a soft hissing curtain. “When I hold you like this, I can't feel it,” I say into her wet ear.

“Me neither,” she says, opening her mouth against my shoulder and biting down.

         

I carry her, wrapped in a towel, back to my room, where I spread her out on the bed and unwrap her carefully, like packaged pottery. I lie on top of her and we spend a long while stroking and kissing each other, but Carly holds off on taking me inside her. She wants it to last like this for a while, like it did when we were kids, when heavy petting was an end unto itself and not simply the means by which the sexual wheel was greased. Then, sex had been a far-off and mythical prize, but now it's just the last part of the whole act, and she doesn't want to get there so fast. Eventually, though, the mounting heat from our friction will not be denied, and we're faced with the pragmatic choice of acting our age or making an unseemly mess. Afterward, I turn on my old stereo, and we listen to Peter Gabriel sing about getting so lost sometimes, the sound of the phonograph needle on dusty vinyl hissing like rain through the speakers. Carly lies with her head on my stomach and we listen to the music until we fall asleep. We're still lying in that position at around three in the morning when Fabia raps loudly on our door and tells us that we had better come downstairs right away.

         

Wayne lies propped up in his bed, eyes closed, thin beads of perspiration coating his forehead and upper lip. “What's up, Wayne?” I say, sitting down on the edge of the bed. Carly moves around the bed to sit on his other side. Fabia stands at the foot of the bed, looking highly agitated. Wayne's eyelids flutter open, but he can't quite get them to stay that way, and they flicker erratically, as if some internal motor is shutting down, which of course it is. With considerable effort, he manages to achieve eye contact with me for a few seconds before his lids collapse again. “Joe,” he whispers, and his voice sounds distant and muted, as if I'm hearing it straight from his throat without its passing through his mouth.

“Wayne,” I say. “We're here.”

He nods, and I think I can see his blood through his skin, slowing to a crawl in the veins of his forehead, barely propelled by the waning pump of his heart. “I think it's time,” he says after a minute. Something thick and wet has entered his voice, drowning out the very end of each syllable. “It's so strange. I thought I'd be more afraid.”

We have entered a movie, the death scene. He will reveal a secret, a long-kept indiscretion, a buried treasure, a child given up for adoption at birth, the name of the murderer, a clue to be followed up on. Carly reaches forward and runs her fingers lightly over his brow, wiping away the droplets of sweat that have begun to trickle down his face. He opens his eyes again and focuses briefly on her. “Tell the truth,” he whispers. “You guys got it on tonight, didn't you?”

Carly smiles, even as her eyes begin to fill with tears, and nods. “We did,” she says softly.

Wayne smiles. “Thank god.” Reaching out with a shaky arm, he gently brushes his fingers against the dampness of her face, then brings them to his parched tongue, closing his eyes as he tastes her tears. For a few minutes he just lies there, his chest moving in small increments as the frequency of his shallow breaths increases. I can tell that the simple act of breathing is becoming difficult for him. He opens his mouth to say something else, but this time all that comes out is an unintelligible wet noise, and the effort seems to further weaken him. “It's okay,” I say, my voice high and wavering. “Just try to relax.” I feel my own chest heave in a short series of autonomic convulsions, then feel Carly's steadying hand on my shoulder. “It's okay, Wayne,” I say again.

After another minute or so, he opens his eyes again. “You'll dedicate your book to me.” It's a question, but he lacks the vocal power to raise it at the end.

“Of course.”

“Make me sound noble.”

“I will.”

“But not uncool.”

“Noble and cool. You got it.”

Carly leans forward and kisses his forehead. A moment later I do the same, his skin hot and salty against my lips. By the time I sit back up, his eyes are closed again, but his lips have formed a weak smile. His mouth moves once or twice after that, but no sounds come out.