The Book of Joe

bone-jarring collisions jolting me out of my sleep in the early-morning hours. I would creep hesitantly to the window and look down to see the bird on our front stairs, dazed and shivering from the sudden, inexplicable crash.
    Usually they recovered after a few minutes and took to the air again on an erratic flight path, shaken and none the wiser for their bruising experience, left only with the vague and uncomfortable notion that the air will occasionally coagulate without warning and knock them out of the sky. Every so often the crash was fatal, and I was forced to remove the dead pigeon with one of the red snow shovels from the garage and inter the bird in a shallow, unmarked grave behind the hedges. The second time I buried a pigeon with a crushed skull, I vomited profusely and was sick for hours afterward, prompting my father to grudgingly install the grille, muttering under his breath about my fragile constitution.
    The doorbell rings, and eager as I might be to continue my fond reverie of bad hair bands, pulverized birds, and my in-sensitive father, I clear my head and run downstairs to open the door.
    The pale, lingering shipwreck of a man standing on my father’s front porch, in baggy jeans and an old Cougars jacket, turns out to be Wayne Hargrove, but it takes a few beats before I recognize him. His once-thick blond hair has thinned to a few colorless wisps that float disconnectedly around his scalp, and there are dark shadows under his eyes, which are gravely sunken in their sockets. He is terribly thin in an angular way, with the stooped shoulders and protruding elbows and overall sense of diminishment that belong to a much older man. Implanted on the pasty diaphanous flesh of his forehead and neck are the small merlot-colored clusters characteristic of Kaposi’s sarcoma, as if further proof of his terrible condition were needed.
    “So the rumors were true,” my old friend says, leaning against the door frame with familiar ease, as if it were yesterday and not seventeen years ago that he used to pop over whenever he felt the urge. “The prodigal son has returned.”
    “Good news travels fast,” I say with a grin, shaking his hand. I can feel his bones, brittle and loose, shifting under his clammy, paper-thin skin as they yield to the pressure of my grip.
    “News of any kind travels fast in this town,” Wayne says.
    “No one knows that better than the town faggot.”
    We study each other for a moment or two.
    “It’s good to see you,” I say.
    He smirks, and a hint of the old Wayne, young, cocky, perennially amused, briefly flashes across his drawn face.
    “Aren’t you going to tell me how great I look? How kind the years have been?”
    “I was just going to say, you must give me the name of your dietitian.”
    Wayne’s laugh is a strong and unfettered thing, and I congratulate myself on my direct approach. “Can I come in?” he asks hesitantly, and I see a subtle change in his expression, a quick flicker of doubt, as if he thinks he might very well be rebuffed. In that instant I catch the faintest whiff of the isolation and bigotry he’s no doubt suffered as Bush Falls’s only confirmed homosexual.
    “That depends,” I say. “Are you mad at me?”
    “I promise not to spill any drinks on you, if that’s what you mean.”
    “You heard about that.”
    “Tongues are wagging,” he says, raising his eyebrows dramatically as he steps into the entry hall and looks around.
    “Wow. Time warp.”
    “Tell me about it,” I say. “My bedroom is like a shrine to the eighties.”
    “I’ll bet.”
    He asks after my father, and I give a summary of his condition and the generally pessimistic prognosis. He listens attentively, fiddling in his shirt pocket for a cigarette and a matchbook. He lights the match in the book one-handed, a trick he perfected back in high school, and takes a long, greedy drag on the cigarette. “Cigarette?”
    “Yes, I know,” I say, and we smile at the old shared joke.
    “Should you be smoking in your condition?”
    “Most definitely.” He arches his eyebrow cynically in what strikes me as a particularly gay manner: stately, self-deprecating, and slightly feminine. I wonder if he had these mannerisms back in high school and I was just oblivious, or if he’d cultivated this demeanor in the years after he left the Falls, living out in Los Angeles, working odd jobs, and auditioning for an endless stream of sitcom pilots. We’d stayed in touch sporadically,