The Book of Joby (38 page)

Ever since Joby had awakened to his first taste of debauchery’s secondary rewards, Ben had wavered between sympathy founded in certain stark recollections of his own wilder nights, and an urge to smirk. Joby was the
last
person he had ever expected to see hungover, but when he’d shown up last
night, Ben had refrained from pressing him for explanations. That morning as they’d gotten ready for school, Joby had finally told him all about his drinking spree with Lindwald, but refused to tell him why this sudden surrender to indulgence after so many years of respectable sobriety.

As they neared school, however, Ben’s curiosity finally got the best of him. “So, how long do I have to wait to hear the rest of it, Joby?” When Joby didn’t answer, Ben shrugged and let it go again, but then he saw a weird little smile on Joby’s face, and really had to know. “Come on, dude. What drove you to drink?”

“This may seem a little sudden,” Joby said, “but I was wondering if you’d consider being best man at my wedding.”

Ben took his eyes off the road to glance at Joby.
“What?”

“I’m gonna ask Laura to marry me,” Joby said, straight-faced. “Today, I think.”

Ben’s mouth fell open. “Is that a joke?”

“Hey! It’s red!” said Joby, pointing through the windshield.

Ben slammed on his brakes, and, when the light had changed, turned the corner and parked the truck.

“It’s not a joke,” Joby said, then smiled like Ben had not seen him smile since they’d been boys. That’s when Ben knew he was for real.

To Ben’s surprise, his own first reaction was a sudden stab of loss. He’d never realized until that moment, or acknowledged anyway, how much he’d hoped that somehow, maybe, someday, he and Laura . . . But then he took a second look at his friend’s radiant face and realized that Joby was,
finally, in love
! A frantic burst of excitement and delight instantly eclipsed any other feelings.

“You son of a bitch!” Ben shouted gleefully, reaching across to grab Joby up in a bear hug. “Whoever thought you’d beat me to the altar!” He let go of Joby, and leaned back so they could beam at each other until Joby laughed out loud. Then they both were laughing themselves sick. “When you gonna ask her?” Ben said.

“Well, I’ve got some patching up to do first, I think,” said Joby. “We had a little . . .
thing
. . . after prom, but that’s what made me see how much I love her, Ben. I just hope she’ll have me now.”

“Ha!” Ben laughed. “She’s been trollin’ Joby bait for six years, and you think she’ll say no?”

To Ben’s consternation, Joby’s easy exuberance vanished as quickly as it
had appeared. “It was a pretty serious
thing,
” he said. “I blew it real bad, but I’m gonna get her out of homeroom this morning, and try to work it out.” He smiled a bit more wanly. “The valedictorian can pull some strings and get her a pass, I guess.”

“Finally! He gets it!” Ben exclaimed. “Let’s go get her, Joby.”

He pulled back into traffic, and minutes later they were walking toward the school’s main entrance. Crossing the lawn, Ben’s attention was drawn to a group of girls clustered mournfully around one of their number who was crying. Ben was curious, but felt too buoyant to linger on it. As he pulled one of the school’s big glass doors open for Joby, however, they saw another group of grieving kids at the end of the hall, and recognized Johnny Mayhew standing sullenly at the group’s fringe.

“Lotta girls must’ve got dumped after prom,” Ben said, oddly afraid to dignify his own joke with a smile.

“Hey, Johnny,” Joby called quietly. “What’s wrong?”

Mayhew turned and stared at him, then turned angrily and walked away.

“What’s
his
problem?” Ben griped.

Joby looked around, and spotted Pete Blackwell. “Hey, Pete, what’s with all the crying around here?”

Pete looked glumly past them at the group down the hall. “Nothing like
dying
to get friends you never had popping up all over, is there?” he mumbled.

“Who died?” Ben asked with a chill of alarm.

“Jamie Lindwald,” Pete said. “Crashed and burned his truck last night, outside of town. They say there were empty beer cans all over.”

Ben turned to find Joby’s face painted in stark horror.

Pete looked abashed. “Sorry, Joby. I guess you were friends, huh? I should have—”

Before he could finish, Joby whirled, and slammed back through the big glass doors, half-running toward the lawn. Ben dropped his books and ran after him.

“Joby!” Ben yelled. “Wait, damn it!”

Joby ran even faster, right toward the street.

Ben poured on all the speed he had, and managed to throw him to the grass just before he reached the sidewalk. Joby writhed beneath him, but Ben kept him pinned to the lawn. As students gathered at a distance to point and gawk, Joby began to sob.

“It’s got nothing to do with you!” Ben exclaimed. “You told him not to drive! You told me so last night. It was
his
choice!
His,
damn it!”

“I should have stopped him!”
Joby wailed.
“He was out there ’cause of me!”

“Goddamn it, Joby!
You
were out there ’cause of
him
! What the hell were you s’posed to
do
? Stand in front of the fuckin’ truck?”

Joby stopped struggling and lay facedown, crying into the grass. Ben loosened his hold, but didn’t let him up. After a moment, Joby’s crying tapered off, and he mumbled something Ben didn’t catch.

“What?” Ben asked.

Joby rolled over and stared up at him like a man already hanged. “The wages of sin is death,” he said without inflection.

Ben could make no sense of it at first. Then he understood, and his anger flared white hot.
“That’s fuckin’ bullshit!”
he yelled. “
Fuck Father Richter, Joby!
I wish I’d never
mentioned
church to you! I wish I’d never gone
myself
!”

“No!”
Joby moaned. “He was
right,
and I
ignored
him! He
told me
what would happen if I—”

“
I’ve
been drunk
lots
of times!” Ben shouted him down. “I got drunk in
junior high
sometimes! Nobody died!
Everybody
does it, Joby, and
nobody dies
!” He grabbed Joby’s arms again, as if he might somehow force him to listen.

“Someone did die,” Joby whispered. His eyes glazed even further. “It’s different for you, Ben. . . . It always has been.”

Ben was relieved to see Mr. Thompson, one of the school counselors, hurrying across the lawn, but when he got there, Joby wouldn’t speak, so Ben explained as best he could.

“Joby,” Mr. Thompson said calmly, “Ben is right. This wasn’t your fault. In fact, your good sense in refusing to ride with him has saved us all from twice the grief. I can’t tell you how grateful I am—how grateful we
all
are.”

Joby remained silent, looking at the sky as if none of them were there. Ben felt his own eyes burning, wondering whether it would be good or bad for Joby to see him cry.

“Joby, let’s go somewhere and talk, okay?” Mr. Thompson said.

Joby looked at him for the first time, then nodded slightly, as if movement itself were painful for him.

“Ben, thank you,” Mr. Thompson said. “You can let him up now.”

Ben got up, and reached down to give Joby a hand.

But as Joby reached his feet, he tore from Ben’s grasp and bolted down the sidewalk away from school. Ben and Mr. Thompson were after him instantly, but Joby’s speed seemed almost supernatural. Thompson soon fell away and ran back toward school. After three blocks, Ben started losing ground. Half a
block later he gave up and turned back toward school himself. He’d get Laura, and they’d go find Joby together. He had a few ideas where Joby might go, and Joby wouldn’t run from Laura . . . he hoped.

“Absolutely
not,
” Lucifer barked. “I don’t care how you do it, just get him
down
from there. I win
nothing
if he dies now.”

Lucifer had canceled all appointments to stand over the viewing bowl and direct his team via the office obelisk. The moment Joby had stopped to loiter on the overpass, he’d gone to the obsidian pillar and contacted Malcephalon.

“No! Suicide will not
begin
to satisfy the wager’s terms. . . .

“Yes, that’s fine. . . .

“No. Eventually, he’s got to be working for us, and he might be of no use whatsoever mad. I want him down,
and
sane, and I want it
now
! Must I be clearer? . . .

“Good. Now take care of it.”

Joby didn’t know how long he’d watched the freeway traffic rush below him. For some time, only one thought had occupied his mind:
The wages of sin is death.

But why Lindwald’s? he thought at last.
Joby
was the sinner. Fornication, drunkenness, murder, all in one weekend. Why should Jamie have been the one to pay?

He remembered Lindwald flinching from his touch after Lucy Beeker’s birthday mission . . . recalled the scars exposed on Lindwald’s back after he and Ben had beaten him for being a “demon.” Lindwald had paid over and over for Joby’s mistakes. “Let’s go celebrate
life,
” he heard Jamie laugh again. “
Your
life!”

“My life,” Joby whispered dolefully. Just a quick climb over the railing, a single mindless jump. . . . People might grieve, but they’d get over it and go on with their lives.

Only . . . even now, in the middle of this desolation, he knew they wouldn’t.

Every time he’d set his hand to the railing, his mind had filled with vivid, awful images of what his death would do to everyone he had cared for: Laura, Ben, his mom and dad. Though he’d lost any fear of hurting himself, he could find no way to live
or
die without hurting all those others so terribly . . . so permanently. There seemed no way to make anything better,
but it seemed he would be forced to live anyway, just to keep from making things worse.

Drained of feeling altogether, he wandered off the overpass at last, and, like a wounded animal driven by instinct toward its den, finally found himself at home. Relieved to find his mother’s car gone, he unlocked the door and went inside, fearing he had little time before she’d return.

In his room, he pulled some clothes into a bag, then, hardly able to think, scrabbled through his shelves and desk drawers for anything else he might need until, buried in the very back of his bottom drawer, he came across a thin book bound in royal blue, its cover decorated with a golden sunburst in a field of stars. Beneath that was his
Treasury of Arthurian Tales,
stored there, out of sight and out of mind, since childhood. He sat numbly on his bed, and began to flip vacantly backward through the small blue book.

It was filled with large, childish writing, smudged in pencil. “Taubolt.” “Taubolt.” “Taubolt.” The name appeared again and again across the last few pages. Then, “A knight must practice.” He felt blood rush to his face, and flipped quickly to the front of the book. “Drink a lot of beauty, Sir Joby. Feed your—” He flipped that page so hard, it tore, wanting to close it altogether, but he couldn’t seem to stop flipping through its pages, as if the answer to all this might still be hidden somewhere between all the things he was trying not to read . . . until his eyes caught a single heading, and his fingers froze.