The Book of Joe

still forming on the back of my right jaw, an inch or so below the ear, and a disturbing clicking sound every time I open and shut my mouth.
    “You got off easy,” Wayne says, waving dismissively. “If Brad hadn’t stepped in, they’d be pulling your vital organs out from under tables.”
    “Jesus,” I say. “I don’t know if you could have stood so much fun in one night.”
    Wayne laughs and leans against the window, his eyes closed.
    “Still, it was something, him standing up for you like that.”
    “That it was,” I say quietly, the hot balloon in my throat threatening to burst. “So what’s the deal with Sean, anyway?”
    The deal, according to Wayne, is this: Sean spent the summer after graduating high school like many of his jock peers, playing playground ball all day and getting drunk and engaging in a variety of wanton destruction at night. At the time, he was dating Suzie Carmichael, a Cougars groupie whose famously endowed body had achieved a certain measure of underground fame and scrupulous documentation, both written and illustrated, on the boys’ bathroom walls. One night, after countless beers, Sean was driving Suzie up to the Bush River Falls to screw in his car when he missed a turn and crashed head-on into a large ash tree at the side of the road. With the booze in his belly and sex on his mind, he was presumably driving at a fairly high speed. High enough, anyway, for the impact to uniformly crush Suzie Carmichael’s legendary body and kill her instantly. She bore the brunt of the crash, as Sean had been instinctively turning away from the tree just before impact.
    Sean emerged with bruises, lacerations, some cracked ribs, and two broken legs, effectively ending his college basketball career before it ever got started. Sheriff Muser called in some favors to quash the drunk driving charges, and Sean’s father’s shadier connections were called in to silence Suzie’s grief-stricken parents when they objected. For a while, it was all anyone in the town could talk about, but like all small-town scandals, it ran its course and then faded into the multicolored backdrop of town lore. Without basketball, Sean could find no compelling reason to go to college, opting instead to stay in the Falls and further develop his burgeoning reputation as a mean drunk. He went into his father’s demolition business, and there, at least, he seemed to find some measure of satisfaction, having always harbored a particular affinity for destruction.
    One night while getting sloshed at the Halftime Pub, an ex-Cougar named Bill Tuttle, who’d played a few years before Sean’s time, in a cataclysmic lapse in judgment pointed out that Sean’s team in its senior year had been responsible for ending the Cougars’ unparalleled championship streak. It took four guys to pull Sean off of him, and by then he’d already cracked Tuttle’s skull. The sheriff had no strings left to pull where Sean was concerned, and he ended up serving seven months of a three-year sentence for assault and battery.
    “He said he found Jesus in prison,” Wayne says with a smirk. “And apparently Jesus was advocating body art and weight lifting, because Sean just came back bigger and meaner than before. That was about five years ago. Since then he’s had some other scrapes with the law, but he’s still a Cougar, so he’s gotten away with murder.”
    “I hope you’re speaking figuratively,” I say, raising my eyebrows. “About the murder part, I mean.”
    “I am, but just barely.”
    “Swell.”
    “You’re fucked,” Wayne says, nodding agreeably. “But this is boring. Have you seen Carly yet?”
    I look over at him, but his eyes are still closed. “What does that have to do with anything?”
    “We’ve changed subjects.”
    “Oh.”
    “Why not give her a call?” Wayne says. “She’s definitely heard you’re here by now.”
    “Since all of my other reunions seem to be going so smoothly,” I say.
    “I haven’t hit you yet.” He opens his eyes. “Turn right here, on Overlook.”
    “Why?”
    “I’ll show you.”
    I make the turn and drive about halfway down the block before Wayne orders me to stop. “This is where she lives now,” he says in a hushed voice, pointing out his window at the small Tudor we’re idling in front of.
    “Is that right,” I say neutrally.
    “She runs the newspaper.”
    “I know.”
    “She’s divorced.”
    That throws me. “I didn’t know she’d gotten married.”
    Wayne