The Book of Joe

writing sarcastic letters to each other, documenting our latest, separate failures. At some point during my senior year at NYU, a routine HIV test Wayne took came back positive and his letters stopped coming. Only recently, in a rare conversation with Brad, had I learned that Wayne had moved back to the Falls, and more than once I’d resolved to give him a call, but predictably never did.
    I look into Wayne’s creased face and ravaged eyes, my throat constricting in an involuntary spasm of acute sadness, and I think that he’s very much like those pigeons I buried in my youth, flying along minding his own business when the air suddenly turned solid on him. “How long have you been symptomatic?”
    “I think I just crossed the line between long enough and too long,” he says with a rueful smile.
    “You’re living at home?”
    “Yeah. Apparently, the AIDS alone wasn’t enough to satisfy my masochistic nature.”
    “And how are the Hargrove seniors?”
    “Vindicated,” he says with a sour grin. “My mother warned me there’d be hell to pay for my abominations.”
    Wayne’s mother is a ball buster of a woman who embroiders obscure biblical verses on pillows and keeps an extensive collection of Reader’s Digest magazines, which she weeps through every Sunday after church. Beside her, his father is practically invisible, a slight balding man who speaks in muted whispers, as if he’s constantly afraid of waking someone up.
    “Can I get you anything?” I say, although not having been to the kitchen yet, I have no idea what there might be to be gotten. Beer and Gatorade have always been my father’s beverages of choice, but I suspect he still does his shopping one day at a time.
    “No, thanks,” Wayne says. “I actually came here to get you.”
    “Really? What for?”
    “To go drinking,” he says as if it should have been obvious.
    “As unfortunate as the circumstances might be, this is still a homecoming, a reunion of sorts. We owe it to ourselves to get hammered.”
    I look at his fragile form skeptically. “You’re going to get hammered?” I say. “That can’t be good for you.”
    “Oh, come on,” he says with a frown. “Look at me, will you? It’s a bit late to be implementing a policy of abstinence, don’t you think?” There’s a new quality to Wayne’s speech, something I don’t remember from our youth, a sharp thread of resigned bitterness woven into his wit.
    “Is it really that bad?” I ask, and then quickly correct myself. “I mean, is the disease really that advanced?”
    “The final countdown.” The remark and its accompanying expression reveal the first crack in his veneer of jocularity. We share a sad, comfortable silence, feeling the textured close-
    ness of old friends soberly acknowledging tragedy together. I let out an audible sigh, wishing that I were by nature a more expressive person, and Wayne sighs as well, probably wishing he didn’t have AIDS at all.
    “I’m really sorry, man,” I say. “I don’t know what to say.”
    He nods and pulls open the front door. “You can think of something en route.”
    We step outside into the muted pastels of suburban twilight. The cicadas have gone to sleep, the crickets have yet to strike up the band, and I pause on the porch for a moment, breathing in deeply the scents of freshly mowed lawns and cooling blacktop and the faintest trace of honeysuckle. I am suddenly awash in a confounding wave of nostalgia for my youth and the house in which I’d grown up.
    “You forget something?” Wayne says from the stairs.
    “A lot,” I say, perturbed.
    His smile conveys telepathic understanding. “Welcome home, my friend.” He points to the Mercedes. “I take it this obscene status symbol is yours?”
    “Afraid so.”
    “Excellent,” he says, pulling open the passenger door.
    “Let’s see what she can do.”
    At Wayne’s behest, I drive out to Pinfield Avenue, a desolate stretch of back road that winds its way quietly around Bush Falls, and floor it. The Mercedes growls with mythic energy as I push the needle up past ninety. In the passenger seat, Wayne opens his window completely to let in the angry, whipping wind, closing his eyes with a smile as it buffets his head, blowing the clinging remnants of his hair behind him comically. “Oh, come on!” he shouts above the combined din of the engine and the wind. “You can do better than that.”
    I shake my head at him and step down harder on the accelerator. The