The Book of Joe

basis?”
    “What’s your point?”
    “I just wonder if your father’s right. That I’m not being a good uncle to you, you know? A proper influence.”
    “Well, if it makes you feel any better, I was doing shit like this before you ever showed up.”
    “It does, thanks.” I’m quiet for a moment. “Don’t do drugs.”
    “Thanks for the revolutionary tip.”
    “And speaking of tips, always wear a condom on yours.”
    “Condom,” Jared says. “Got it.”
    “Smoking causes cancer,” Carly chimes in.
    “Don’t drink and drive,” Wayne says.
    This goes on for a little while. “Seriously,” I say. “If we get into trouble again, your parents will have me shot.”
    “Chill. I do this all the time.”
    “You do what all the time? Hang out in the gym after hours, or breaking and entering in general?”
    “Yes.”
    We park in the lot by the gymnasium, alongside three sets
    of double exit doors. They are fire doors, the sort that can be opened only from the inside, by pushing in the waist-high access bars. “So,” I say to Jared, cutting the engine. “What now?”
    “Now we wait,” Jared says. “He’ll be here in a minute.”
    “Who?”
    “Drew.”
    “Who’s Drew?”
    “The key master.”
    A moment later Jared’s pager goes off. He pulls it expertly from where it’s clipped to his unused belt loop and looks at the screen. “Drew,” he says with a nod, pressing a button on the pager and returning it to his waist as he looks expectantly out the window. Moments later, a black Volkswagen Beetle speeds into the parking lot and comes to a screeching halt a few spots away from us. A sticker on the car’s rear bumper reads I SELL COCAINE FOR THE CIA. Jared gets out and jogs over to the car. Drew turns out to be a tall, skinny kid with sideburns of Elvis proportions. He’s dressed in baggy jeans that are kept from falling down around his ankles by some undetectable special effect and a black zip-up sweatshirt, also a few sizes too big. I recognize him as one of the boys from our recent paintball outing. He climbs out of the Beetle and he and Jared perform a complex handshake before walking over to the exit doors. On the way, Drew tugs on a thick silver chain that hangs from his belt loop and disappears into one of the gaping front pockets of his jeans, producing a comically oversized key ring. He inserts one of the keys expertly into the last fire door and pulls on the key after he turns it so that the door swings open a little, his manner indicating that it’s not the first time he’s done this. Jared leans a rock against the doorjamb and walks Drew back over to his car, where they execute another convoluted handshake before the kid gets back into his car and peels out of the parking lot. Jared saunters back over to our car and flashes us a thumbs-up.
    “We’re golden.”
    I wrestle the wheelchair out of the trunk, along with a basketball, signed by the championship Cougar team of 1958 that we’ve liberated from my father’s trophy case and pumped back up to regulation. I feel funny about borrowing the ball, but I reason that my father is gone and Wayne’s still alive, and basketballs are meant to be played with, not to sit inactively in showcases. Besides, I’m pretty sure that Arthur Goffman would have understood Wayne’s imperative to return to the scene of his past glory one last time, even if he would have frowned on my act of petty pilferage.
    The waxed wood of the gym floor glistens pristinely in the dim orange glow of the exit signs and emergency lights as we wheel Wayne in, our footsteps echoing momentously in the cavernous room. Wayne’s eyes are wide with excitement.
    “Can we get a little more light?” I ask Jared.
    “Afraid not,” he says. I now see that the two main fiberglass backboards are suspended thirty feet above us on either side of the court. “The switches for the lights and lowering the hoops are in Dugan’s office, and no one can get in there but him.”
    “It’s okay,” Wayne says. “We can use the side baskets.”
    All along the gym walls, bolted into the elevated running track, are the standard white wooden backboards with orange targets and rims. These are the baskets everyone in the school uses except for the team. As a point of pride, Dugan reserves the use of the regulation-size, retractable fiberglass backboards for Cougars only.
    Wayne pulls himself up into a standing position in front of the wheelchair and tosses off his comforter.