The Book of Joe

nods solemnly. “Real asshole. Not from around here. He beat her up.”
    “No way,” I say, my efforts at nonchalance falling by the wayside. Wayne’s words hit me like a battering ram to the chest. “She’d never have stood for that.”
    “Well, she did the first time. The second time, she ended up in the hospital.”
    “Oh, shit,” I say softly, feeling my eyes go wet.
    “And then some,” Wayne says.
    Something in his voice clues me in. “You guys are close.”
    “Yup.”
    “So, she knew you were coming over to see me tonight.”
    “She was supposed to meet up with us. She must have had second thoughts.” He turns to look at me. “I suppose that was for the best, seeing how the evening turned out.”
    “What ... does she think of me?” I ask him hesitantly.
    “She’s utterly indecipherable when it comes to that,” he says, closing his eyes again. “I think you’d better get me home, man. I’m starting to fade.”
    I let my glance linger for one moment longer on Carly’s house. The knowledge that she’s in there, that we are separated only by a few feet and the stucco and brick of her house, fills me with a nervous energy that makes me restless. The house is dark, but there’s a faint glow from behind the blinds in one of the upstairs bedrooms. Carly’s bedroom. She’s curled up in bed, reading a book or watching television. What might she be watching? 60 Minutes? The news? Or maybe something requiring no thought, like Dawson’s Creek or a Seinfeld rerun? I wonder what she looks like now. I pull away slowly, executing a three-point turn to head back the way we came.
    A few blocks before we get to Wayne’s house, I hear a change in his breathing and turn to find him staring out the window, weeping quietly. I look back at the road, feeling like an intruder. He opens his mouth as if to say something, but all that emerges is a series of sharp, anguished sobs that rack his frail frame, and he makes no effort to wipe away the shockingly robust tears that run in slow motion down his face. “I know,” I say impotently, reaching over to pat his bony, trembling arm. “I know, man.” An ironic choice of words for someone who doesn’t have a clue. In the intermittent glow of the passing streetlights, I see Wayne’s face, wildly contorted in grief, his eyes burning in torment behind the cascading tears, the face of a sad little boy. We drive around like that for a while, through the dark, still streets of the Falls, heedless of street signs or direction, until his cries gradually subside. “It sucks,” he says to me hoarsely, the words struggling to find a foothold in his short, heaving breaths. “It sucks like you wouldn’t believe.” I nod mutely, keeping my hand on his upper arm. After another few minutes he closes his eyes and falls into a fitful sleep. I drive around aimlessly while he sleeps, hypnotized by the rhythmic bumping of my tires against the road. After about an hour I look up, registering for the first time the alien territory stretched out before me, and realize that I’ve crossed the town line and am no longer in Bush Falls. As if I’ve been thinking, much as I did seventeen years earlier, that escape is actually a viable option.
    I let myself into Wayne’s parents’ house with keys that I find in his jacket pocket and quietly carry him upstairs to his bedroom. He feels terribly light, almost hollow, sleeping in my arms, and I have a momentary vision of the virus, a pink, hairy, corpulent thing inside of him, throbbing and dripping ectoplasm as it devours him from the inside. I lay him down on his bed and slide off his jacket, wrapping him up in the cotton comforter that lies folded across the foot of the bed.
    On a collapsible bridge table next to his bed, I see a vast collection of prescription pill bottles and a pitcher of ice water, the cubes already half melted. Under the table are an oxygen tank and a breath mask, and on the other side of the bed a large air purifier hums. Other than these sad additions, Wayne’s room appears pretty much as I remember it from high school. I locate two copies of Bush Falls in his bookcase and have just pulled one off the shelf when his mother comes to the door in a bathrobe. It is well past one in the morning, but it doesn’t appear as if she’s been sleeping. I remember Wayne once telling me that his mother reads the Bible into the wee hours every night.
    “Who’s there?” she whispers. Her gray hair is tied back in a