Joe Hill

by Horns (v5. 0)

  Ig had wondered why he didn’t talk about his mother.

  Lee’s hand drifted to the cross around his neck, nestled just above his clavicles. After a moment he said, “I’ve been thinking about her. Our girl from church.”

  “I bet,” Ig said, trying to make it sound funny, but it came off a little harsh and irritated, even to his own ears.

  Lee appeared not to notice. His eyes were distant, unfocused. “I bet she isn’t from around here. I’ve never seen her in church before. She was probably visiting family or something. Bet we never see her again.” He paused, then added, “The one that got away.” Not melodramatically, but with a knowing sense of humor about it.

  The truth caught in Ig’s throat, like that lump of sandwich that wouldn’t go down. It was there, waiting to be told—she’ll be back next Sunday—but he couldn’t say it. He couldn’t lie either, didn’t have the nerve. He was the worst liar he knew.

  What he said instead was, “You fixed the cross.”

  Lee didn’t look down at it but idly picked at it with one hand while staring out at the light dancing across the surface of the pool. “Yeah. I’ve been keeping it on, just in case I run into her while I’m out selling my magazines.” He paused, then continued, “You know the dirty magazines I told you about? The ones my distributor has in his storeroom? There’s one called Cherries, all these girls who are supposed to be eighteen-year-old virgins. That’s my favorite, girl-next-door types. You want a girl where you can imagine what it would be like to be the first. Of course the girls in Cherries aren’t really virgins. You can tell just by looking at them. They’ll have a tattoo on their hip or wear too much eye shadow, and they’ll have stripper names. They’re just dressing up all innocent for the photo shoot. The next photo shoot they’ll dress up as sexy cops or cheerleaders, and it’ll be just as fake. The girl in church, now, she’s the real deal.” He lifted the cross from his chest and rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger. “The thing I’m hung up on is the idea of seeing something real. I don’t think most people feel half the things they pretend to feel. I think especially girls in a relationship tend to put on attitudes like clothes, just to keep a guy interested. Like Glenna keeping me interested with the occasional hand job. It isn’t because she loves hand jobs. It’s because she doesn’t love being lonely. When a girl loses her virginity, though, it may hurt, but it’s real. It might be the realest, most private thing you could ever see in another person. You wonder who she’ll be in that moment, when you finally get past all the pretend. That’s what I think about when I think about the girl in church.”

  Ig was sorry about the half a sandwich he had eaten. The cross around Lee’s neck was flashing in the sunlight, and when Ig closed his eyes, he could still see it, a series of glowing afterimages, signaling a dreadful warning. He felt a headache coming on.

  When he opened his eyes, he said, “So politics doesn’t work out, you going to kill people for a living?”

  “I guess.”

  “How would you do it? What’s your MO?” Wondering how he would kill Lee himself, to get back the cross.

  “Who are we talking about? Some skag who owes her dealer money? Or the president?”

  Ig let out a long, slow breath. “Someone who knows the truth about you. A star witness. If he lives, you’re going to jail.”

  Lee said, “I’d burn him to death in his car. Do it with a bomb. I’m on the curb across the street from him, watching as he climbs behind the wheel. The moment he pulls out, I press the button on my remote control, so after the explosion the car keeps rolling, this big burning wreck.”

  Ig said, “Hey. Wait a minute. I got to show you something.”

  He ignored the puzzled look Lee gave him, rose, and trotted inside. He returned three minutes later, right hand closed into a fist. Lee looked up, brow furrowed, as Ig settled back into his deck chair.

  “Check it out,” Ig said, and opened his right hand to show the cherry bomb.

  Lee looked at it, his face blank as a plastic mask, but his indifference didn’t fool Ig, who was learning to read him. When Ig had opened his hand and Lee saw what he was holding, he sat up in spite of himself.

  “Eric Hannity paid up,” Ig said. “This is what I got for riding the cart down the hill. You saw the turkey, didn’t you?”

  “It rained Thanksgiving for an hour.”

  “Wouldn’t it be cool to stick it in a car? Say you found a wreck somewhere. I bet you could blow the hood off with this thing. Terry told me these are pre-CPL.”

  “Pre-what?”

  “Child-protection laws. The fireworks they make nowadays are like farts in a bathtub. Not these.”

  “How could they sell ’em if they’re against the law?”

  “It’s only against the law to manufacture new ones. These are from a box of old ones.”

  “Is that what you’re going to do? Find a wreck and blow it up?”

  “No. My brother’s making me wait until we go to Cape Cod, Labor Day weekend. He’s taking me after he gets his license.”

  “It’s not my business, I guess,” Lee said, “but I don’t see how he has any say.”

  “No. I have to wait. Eric Hannity wasn’t even going to give it to me, because I was wearing sneakers when I went down the hill. He said I wasn’t really naked. But Terry said that was bullshit and got Eric to cough up. So I owe him. And Terry wants to wait for Cape Cod.”

  For the first time in their brief friendship, Lee seemed irritated by something. He grimaced, wiggled around on his deck chair, as if he had suddenly noticed something digging into his back. He said, “Kind of stupid they’re called Eve’s Cherries. Shoulda called ’em Eve’s Apples.”

  “Why?”

  “’Cause of the Bible.”

  “The Bible only says they ate fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. It never says it’s an apple. Could’ve been a cherry.”

  “I don’t believe that story.”

  “No,” Ig admitted. “Neither do I. Dinosaurs.”

  “You believe in Jesus?”

  “Why not? As many people wrote about him as wrote about Caesar.” He looked sidelong at Lee, who himself so resembled Caesar that his profile might’ve been stamped on a silver denarius, was only missing the crown of laurel leaves.

  “Do you believe he could do miracles?” Lee asked.

  “Maybe. I don’t know. If the rest is true, does that part even matter?”

  “I did a miracle once.”

  Ig found this a not terribly remarkable thing to admit. Ig’s father said he had seen a UFO once in the Nevada desert, when he was out there drinking with the drummer from Cheap Trick. Instead of asking what miracle Lee had performed, Ig said, “Was it cool?”

  Lee nodded, his very blue eyes distant, a little unfocused. “I fixed the moon. When I was a little kid. And ever since, I’ve been good at fixing other things. It’s what I’m best at.”

  “How’d you fix the moon?”

  Lee narrowed one eye to a squint, lifted one hand toward the sky, pinched an imaginary moon between thumb and forefinger, and gave it a half turn. He made a soft click. “All better.”

  Ig didn’t want to talk religion; he wanted to talk demolition. “It’s going to be pretty miraculous when I light the fuse on this thing,” he said, and Lee’s gaze swiveled back to the cherry bomb in Ig’s hand. “I’m going to send something home to God. Any suggestions what?”

  The way Lee looked at the cherry bomb, Ig thought of a man sitting at a bar drinking something boozy and watching the girl onstage tug down her panties. They had not been buddies for long, but a pattern had been established—this was the moment Ig was supposed to offer it to him, the way he had given Lee his money, his CDs, and Merrin Williams’s cross. But he didn’t offer it, and Lee couldn’t ask for it. Ig told himself he didn’t give it to Lee because he had embarrassed him last time, with his gift of CDs. The truth was something different: Ig felt a mean urge to hold something over him, to have a cross of his own to wear. Later, after Lee l
eft, Ig would be ashamed of this impulse—a rich kid with a swimming pool, lording his treasures over a kid from a single-parent home in a trailer park.

  “You could stick it in a pumpkin,” Lee said, and Ig replied, “Too much like the turkey,” and they were off and running, Lee suggesting things, Ig considering them in turn.

  They discussed the merits of throwing the bomb into the river to see if they could kill fish with it, dropping it into an outhouse to see if it would make a shit geyser, using a slingshot to shoot it into the bell tower of the church to see what kind of gong it made when it went off. There was the big billboard outside of town that read WILD BASS WAREHOUSE—FISHING AND BOATING SUPPLIES; Lee said it would be hilarious to tape the bomb to the B and see if they could make it the WILD ASS WAREHOUSE. Lee had lots of ideas.

  “You keep trying to figure out what kind of music I like,” Lee said. “I’ll tell you what I like. The sound of things blowing up and tinkling glass. Music to my ears.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  IG WAS WAITING FOR HIS TURN in the barber’s chair when he heard a tapping from behind him and looked over his shoulder and saw Glenna standing on the sidewalk, staring in at him from an inch away, her nose smooshed to the window. She was so close she would’ve been breathing on his neck if there weren’t a plate of glass between them. Instead she breathed on the glass, turning it white with condensation. She wrote in it with one finger: I SEEN YOUR P.P. Beneath this she drew a cartoonish dangling cock.

  Ig’s heart lurched, and he quickly glanced around to see if his mother was close by, if she had noticed. But Lydia stood across the room from him, behind the barber’s chair, giving instructions to the hairdresser. Terry was up in the seat, wearing the apron, waiting patiently to be made even more beautiful. Cutting Ig’s own rat’s snarl was like clipping a deformed hedge. It couldn’t be made pretty, only manageable.

  Ig looked back at Glenna, shaking his head furiously: Go away. She wiped the message off the glass with the sleeve of her awesomely awesome leather jacket.

  She wasn’t alone. Highway to Hell was there, too, along with the other derelict who had been a part of their group at the foundry, a long-haired kid in his late teens. The two boys were on the other side of the parking lot, rooting in a garbage can. What was it with the two of them and garbage cans?

  Glenna rattled her fingernails against the window. They were painted the color of ice, long and pointed, witch fingernails. He looked again at his mother but could see in a glance he wouldn’t be missed. Lydia was wrapped up in what she was saying, shaping something in the air, the perfect head of hair or maybe an imaginary sphere, a crystal ball, and in the ball was a future in which the nineteen-year-old hairdresser received a big tip if she could just stand there and nod her head and chew her gum and let Lydia tell her how to do her job.

  When Ig came outside, Glenna had turned her back to the window and planted her firm, round bottom against the glass. She was staring at Highway to Hell and his long-haired buddy. They stood with the trash can between them and a garbage bag pulled open. The long-haired kid kept reaching up to touch Highway to Hell’s face, tenderly almost. He laughed a big, goofy guffaw every time the kid caressed him.

  “Why did you give Lee that cross?” Glenna said.

  It jolted Ig—of all the things she could’ve said. He had been asking himself the same question for over a week.

  “He said he was going to fix it,” Ig said.

  “It’s fixed. So why doesn’t he give it back?”

  “It isn’t mine. It’s—This girl dropped it in church. I was going to fix it and give it back, but I couldn’t, and Lee said he could with his dad’s tools, and now he’s wearing it in case he runs into her when he’s going door-to-door for his charity.”

  “His charity,” she said, and snorted. “You ought to ask for it back. You should ask for your CDs back, too.”

  “He doesn’t have any music.”

  “He doesn’t want any music,” Glenna said. “If he wanted some, he’d get himself some.”

  “I don’t know. CDs are pretty expensive and—”

  “So? He’s not poor, you know,” Glenna said. “He lives in Harmon Gates. My dad does their yard work. That’s how I know him. My dad sent me over there to plant peonies one day by myself. Lee’s parents have plenty of money. Did he tell you he can’t afford CDs?”

  It disoriented Ig, the idea that Lee lived in Harmon Gates, had a man to do his yard work, a mother. A mother especially. “His parents live together?”

  “It doesn’t seem like it sometimes, because his mother works at Exeter Hospital and has a really long commute and isn’t around so much. It’s probably better that way. Lee and his mom don’t get along.”

  Ig shook his head. It was like Glenna was talking about a completely different person, someone Ig didn’t know. He had formed a very clear picture of Lee Tourneau’s life, the trailer he shared with his pickup-driving father, the mother who had disappeared when he was a child to smoke crack and sell herself in the Combat Zone down in Boston. Lee had never told Iggy that he lived in a trailer or that his mother was a drug-addicted hoor, but Ig felt that these things were implied by Lee’s view of the world, by the subjects he never discussed.

  “Did he tell you he doesn’t have any money for things?” Glenna asked again.

  Ig shook his head.

  “I didn’t think,” she said. She toed a stone on the ground for a moment, then looked up and said, “Is she prettier than me?”

  “Who?”

  “The girl from church. The girl who used to wear that cross.”

  Ig tried to think what to say, mentally flailing for some graceful and considerate lie—but he had never been any good at lying, and his silence was a kind of answer in and of itself.

  “Yeah,” Glenna said, smiling ruefully. “I thought so.”

  Ig looked away from her, too distressed by that unhappy smile to maintain eye contact. Glenna seemed all right, direct and no bullshit.

  Highway to Hell and the long-haired kid were laughing over the trash can—the loud, sharp cries of crows. Ig had no idea why.

  “Do you know a car you could set fire to,” Ig said, “and get away with it? Not like a car someone owns. Just a wreck?”

  “Why?”

  “Lee wants to set fire to a car.”

  She frowned, trying to figure out why Ig had shifted the conversation to this. Then she looked at Highway to Hell. “Gary’s dad, my uncle, has a bunch of junkers in the woods, out behind his house in Derry. He’s got a home auto-parts business. Or at least he says he has an auto-parts business. I don’t know if he’s ever had any customers.”

  “You should mention them to Lee sometime,” Ig said.

  A fist rapped on the glass behind him, and both of them turned to look up at Ig’s mother. Lydia smiled down at Glenna and lifted one hand in a stiff little wave, then shifted her gaze to Ig and opened her eyes in a wide, strained look of impatience. He nodded, but when his mother turned her back to them, Ig did not immediately move to reenter the salon.

  Glenna cocked her head to an inquisitive angle. “So if we get some arson going, you want in?”

  “No. Not really. You kids have fun.”

  “You kids,” she said, and her smile broadened. “What are you going to do with your hair?”

  “I don’t know. Probably what I always do.”

  “You ought to shave it off,” she said. “Go bald. You’d look cool.”

  “Huh? No. No, my mom.”

  “Well, you ought to at least clip it short and punk it up. Bleach the tips or something. Your hair is part of who you are. Don’t you want to be someone interesting?” She reached out and ruffed up his hair. “You could be someone interesting with a little effort.”

  “I don’t think I get a say. My mom is going to want me to stick with what works.”

  “Ah, that’s too bad. I like me some crazy hair myself,” Glenna said.

  “Yeah?” said Gary, aka Highway to Hell. “You’r
e going to fucking love my ass.”

  They both swiveled their heads to look at Highway to Hell and the long-haired boy, who had just wandered over from the trash can. They had collected hair clippings from the garbage and glued them to Gary’s face, making a tufty reddish brown beard of the sort van Gogh wore in his self-portraits. It didn’t match with the blue bristle of Gary’s shaved head.

  Glenna’s face shriveled in a look of pain. “Oh, God. That ain’t going to fool anyone, you asshole.”

  “Give me your jacket,” Gary said. “I put your jacket on, I bet I could pass for at least twenty.”

  Glenna said, “You could pass for retarded. And you aren’t getting arrested in this jacket.”

  Ig said, “That really is a nice jacket.”

  Glenna gave him a mysteriously miserable look. “Lee gave it to me. He’s a very generous person.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  LEE OPENED HIS MOUTH to say something, then changed his mind and closed it.

  “What?” Ig asked.

  Lee opened his mouth again and closed it and opened it and said, “I like that rat-a-tat-tat Glenn Miller song. You could make a corpse dance to that song.”

  Ig nodded and didn’t reply.

  They were in the pool, because August was back. No more rain, no more unseasonable cool. It was almost a hundred degrees, not a cloud in the sky, and Lee was wearing a strip of white suntan lotion down the bridge of his nose to keep it from burning. Ig was in a life ring, and Lee hung off an inflatable pool mattress, the both of them floating in the tepid water, so heavily chlorinated that the fumes stung their eyes. It was too hot to horse around.

  The cross still hung from Lee’s neck. It was spread out on the mattress, stretching away from his throat and toward Ig—as if Ig’s stare had the power of magnetism and was tugging it in his direction. The sun caught it and flashed gold in Ig’s eyes, producing a steady staccato signal. Ig didn’t need to know Morse code to know what it was signaling him now. It was Saturday, and Merrin Williams would be in church tomorrow. Last chance, the cross flashed. Last chance, last chance.