The Book of Joe

soothingly. “I know how upsetting it must be. But my dad’s in the hospital; I don’t know if you heard.”
    “I hadn’t,” she says, turning to face him. “What’s wrong?”
    Brad tells her, his voice remaining steady and conciliatory as he gradually steers her away from me and toward the door.
    They speak for a moment or two, and she leans forward and gives him a quick hug. Then, with one last, baleful glare back at me, she exits the Duchess. Brad comes back, shaking his head from side to side, and suddenly notices the seven or eight diners sitting stock-still, staring at us with their mouths agape. “Show’s over, folks,” he announces testily, meeting each gaze one by one until they look away. “At least for the time being,” he mutters to me under his breath as we sit back down in the booth. I feel my shirt sticking to me as I lean against the back of my seat. The milk shake seems to have dripped all the way down to my waist and is making inroads further south.
    “Who the hell was that?” I say.
    “You don’t know?”
    “I thought I covered that with ‘who the hell was that.’ ”
    “That was Francine Dugan. Coach’s wife.”
    “Oh,” I say, nodding stupidly. “I didn’t recognize her.”
    “Does it make a little more sense now?”
    “It does,” I say. “Except for the part where you call her Franny and she hugs you. When did you get so tight with Dugan’s wife?”
    Brad looks at me. “I’m the assistant coach for the Cougars.
    I thought you knew.”
    “Since when do high school basketball teams need assistant coaches?”
    Brad sighs. “They don’t, really. But Dugan’s getting up there, you know? He’s almost seventy already. It’s supposed to be a transitional thing. I assist him for a year or two, run the weekly practices, and do all the yelling and floor drills.
    Then he retires and I take over.”
    “You want to be the coach?” It’s never occurred to me that Brad might be interested in coaching.
    “It’s a good job,” he says defensively. “Decent pay and a great pension. That’s a lot more than I could say for the display business these days.”
    Now that he says it, it makes perfect sense. High school stars are forever living in the past, as if no other part of their life before or after were as real as the four years they spent playing the game. The rest of their life is just the time after basketball, soldiers missing the war. I recall the tensions I intuited between Cindy and Brad back at the hospital. It isn’t difficult to surmise that Brad yearns for those days, when he was the town hero worshipped by all, including his wife.
    “So how long have you been the assistant coach?”
    “Five years.”
    “That’s a pretty long transition, isn’t it?”
    He sighs. “No shit.”
    “Dugan doesn’t want to quit,” I say.
    “Bingo.”
    That makes sense too. If the Bush Falls basketball players are the town’s shining knights, then Dugan is their king, universally revered. He is greeted everywhere he goes with “Hey, Coach,” “Great game, Coach!” “Give ’em hell, Coach,” or some variation on that theme. His special table is always waiting for him at Halftime, where he traditionally goes with his wife after every home game. The restaurant is typically packed with former Cougars, and he invariably receives a round of applause when he enters, no doubt waving it down with feigned embarrassment well after it peaks.
    This kind of blind reverence affords him no small amount of power in Bush Falls, especially as his former players grow into positions of affluence in the community. Ex-athletes rarely leave their hometowns. Anywhere else, they would be just anyone else, an unthinkable fate after four glorious years playing for the most dominant high school basketball team in the region. The graduates from Dugan’s basketball program are a fraternity unto th emselves, and he is their sover eign leader, the nucleus serving as the single link to their glorious past. If an ex-Cougar needs a job, Dugan makes sure he gets one. If an ex-Cougar runs for local office, Dugan makes sure he gets the necessary votes. Because of his relationships throughout the Falls, Dugan is also a highly effective fund-raiser for Bush Falls High, which lends him significant leverage with the administration and the school board.
    Not surprisingly, Dugan is an arrogant, manipulative son of a bitch. And in my novel, he is also a chronic masturbator, a habit I rather artlessly