Joe Hill

by Horns (v5. 0)

  They had gone out, ostensibly, to have some drinks and say hello to the old crowd, but there on the sandbar, standing back from the bonfire, Lee told Terry that the congressman loved the show and wanted to meet him sometime. Terry took it in stride, tipped the neck of his beer bottle to Lee, and said definitely, they ought to make it happen one of these days. He had thought it was possible Lee would work his way around to something along those lines and does not hold it against him. Lee has a job to do, same as anyone else, same as Terry. And Lee’s job involves doing a lot of good; Terry knows about his work with Habitat for Humanity, knows Lee gives time every summer to work with poor and disadvantaged urban kids at Camp Galilee, Ig right at his side. Being around Lee and Ig has, for years, made Terry feel a little guilty. He never wanted to save the world himself. The only thing Terry ever wanted was for someone to pay him for goofing off with his horn. Well, that and maybe a girl who likes to party—not an L.A. model, not someone hung up on her cell phone and her car. Just someone fun and real and a little dirty in the sack. Someone East Coast, with working-class jeans and a few CDs by Foreigner. He’s got the sweet gig, so he’s halfway to happiness anyway.

  “Fuck we doing out here?” Terry asks now, staring into the rain. “Thought we were calling it a night.”

  Lee says, “I thought you called it a night about five minutes ago. I’m pretty sure I heard you snoring. I can’t wait to tell people that the Terry Perrish drooled all over my front seat. That’ll impress the honeys. It’s like my own little piece of TV history.”

  Terry opens his mouth for a comeback—he will clear more than two million dollars this year, partly on the strength of a sublime gift for verbally cutting other wiseasses down—and finds he has nothing to say, his a perfectly empty head. He shows Lee Tourneau his middle finger instead.

  “You think Ig and Merrin are still at The Pit?” Terry asks. The place will be coming up on the right at any moment.

  “We’ll see,” Lee says. “Be there in another minute.”

  “Are you screwing with me? We don’t want to go see them. I know they don’t want to see us. It’s their last night.”

  Lee gives Terry a surprised, curious look out of the corner of his good eye. “How do you know? Did she tell you?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “That she’s breaking up with him. This is their last night.”

  A statement that instantly jolts Terry out of his baked, thoughtless state, as startling as sitting down on a tack.

  “The fuck you mean?”

  “She thinks they got involved too young. She wants to see other guys.”

  Terry marvels at the news, recoils from it, is baffled by it. He thoughtlessly lifts the joint cupped in his hand to his lips, then remembers it isn’t lit.

  “You really didn’t know?” Lee asks.

  “I just meant it’s their last night before Ig goes to England.”

  “Oh.”

  Terry stares blankly into the rain, which is coming down so hard the wipers can’t keep up, so it’s like being in a car wash, the way the water pours down the glass. He cannot imagine Ig without Merrin, cannot imagine who that person would be. He’s dazed by the news, so it takes an interminable time before the obvious question occurs to him.

  “How do you know all this?”

  “She talked to me about it,” Lee says. “She’s scared to hurt him. I’ve been in Boston a lot this summer, doing things for the congressman, and she’s there, too, so we get together and talk sometimes. I’ve probably seen her more than Ig has over the last month.”

  Terry looks out at the underwater world, sees a reddish haze of light approaching on the right. They’re almost there.

  “So why would you want to come by here now?”

  “She said she’d call me if she needed a ride home,” Lee says. “And she hasn’t called.”

  “So she doesn’t need you, then.”

  “But she might not call if she’s upset. I just want to see if Ig’s car is still there or not. Parking’s up front. We don’t even need to pull in.”

  Terry doesn’t follow Lee, can’t figure out why he would want to drive by and look for Ig’s car. He also can’t imagine Merrin wanting to be around either of them if things have ended badly.

  But Lee is already slowing, turning his head to look past Terry at the parking lot on the right.

  “I don’t…” Lee says, talking to himself now. “It’s not…I don’t think she would’ve gone home with him….” Sounding worried, almost.

  Terry is the one who sees her, Merrin standing in the rain out by the side of the road, under a walnut with a great spreading crown. “There. Lee, right there.”

  She seems to spot them at the same moment and steps out from beneath the tree, one arm raised. With the water coming down the passenger-side window, Terry sees her as through carnival glass, an impressionistic painting of a girl with copper-wire hair, holding aloft what at first seems to be a white votary candle. As they grind to a stop and she moves to the side of the car, Terry sees she is merely holding up a finger to get their attention as she breaks from cover and runs barefoot through the rain, holding her black heels in one hand.

  The Caddy is a two-door, and even before Lee tells him to get in back, Terry is unbuckling his belt and turning to loft himself over the front seat. As he is about to pitch into the rear, Lee thuds an elbow into his ass, tipping him off balance, and instead of landing in the seat, Terry dives into the foot well. For God knows what reason, there’s a metal toolbox on the floor, and Terry catches it on the temple, flinches at a sharp stab of pain. He pulls himself up onto the seat and pushes the ball of his hand hard against his banged-up head. It was a mistake to go leaping around, has set off the strongest wave of motion sickness yet, so it feels as if the whole car has been picked up off the ground by a giant who is shaking it slowly, like a cup with dice in it. Terry shuts his eyes, fighting to suppress that sudden nauseating sensation of reckless motion.

  By the time things have settled enough for him to risk looking around, Merrin is in the car and Lee Tourneau is turned sideways to face her. Terry looks at his palm and sees a bright drop of blood. He scraped himself good, although that initial sharp pain has already mostly subsided, leaving behind a dull ache. He wipes the blood on his pant leg and looks up.

  It is easy to see that Merrin has only just stopped crying. She is pale and shaking, like someone either recovering from or beginning to succumb to illness, and her first attempt at a smile is a miserable thing to look at.

  “Thanks for picking me up,” she says. “You just saved my life.”

  “Where’s Ig?” Terry asks.

  Merrin glances back at him but has trouble making eye contact, and Terry is immediately sorry he asked.

  “I d-don’t know. He left.”

  Lee says, “You told him?”

  Merrin’s chin wrinkles, and she turns to face forward. She looks out the window at The Pit and doesn’t reply.

  “How’d he take it?” Lee asks.

  Terry can see her face reflected in the glass, can see her biting her lips and struggling not to cry. Her answer is “Can we just go?”

  Lee nods and puts on his blinker, then pulls a U-ie in the rain.

  Terry wants to touch her shoulder, wants to reassure her in some way, let her know that whatever happened in The Pit, he doesn’t hate her or hold it against her. But Terry doesn’t touch her, won’t touch her, never touches her. In a decade of knowing her, he has kept her at a friendly distance, even in his imagination, has never once considered allowing her into his sexual fantasies. There would be no harm in such a thing, yet he senses he would be placing something at risk all the same. What he would be placing at risk, he cannot say. To Terry the word “soul” first refers to a kind of music.

  Instead he says, “Hey, girl, you want my jacket?” Because she is shivering helplessly and steadily in her wet clothes.

  For the first time, Lee seems to notice the way she’s trembling as well—which is f
unny, since he keeps shooting her glances, looking at her as much as he’s looking at the road—and turns down the air conditioner.

  “’S all right,” she says, but Terry already has his coat off and is handing it forward. She spreads it across her legs. “Thank you, Terry,” she says in a small voice, and then, “You m-must think—”

  “I don’t think anything,” Terry says. “So relax.”

  “Ig—”

  “I’m sure Ig is fine. Don’t you worry yourself.”

  She gives him a pained, grateful smile and then leans back toward him and says, “Are you all right?” She reaches out to lightly touch his brow, where he went face-first into Lee’s toolbox. He flinches almost instinctively from her touch. She draws her fingers back, blood on the tips of them, looks at her hand, then back at him. “You ought to have some g-gauze for that.”

  “It’s fine. No worries,” Terry says.

  She nods and turns away, and immediately the smile is gone and her eyes come unfocused, staring at nothing anyone else can see. She is folding something in her hands, over and over, and unfolding it, and then starting up again. A tie, Ig’s tie. This is somehow worse than seeing her in tears, and Terry has to look away. Being stoned no longer feels good in the slightest. He would like to lie motionless somewhere and close his eyes for a few minutes. Nap some and wake up fresh and himself again. The night has turned rancid on him, very quickly, and he wants someone to blame, someone to be irritated with. He settles on Ig.

  It irritates him that Ig would peel off, leave her standing in the rain, an act so immature it’s laughable. Laughable but not surprising. Merrin has been a lover, a comfort blanket, a guidance counselor, a defensive barrier against the world, and a best friend to Ig. Sometimes it seems they have been married since Ig was fifteen. But for all that, it began as and always was a high-school relationship. Terry is sure Ig has never even kissed another girl, let alone fucked one, and he has wished for a while now that his brother had more experience. Not because Terry doesn’t want him to be with Merrin but because…well, because. Because love requires context. Because first relationships are by their very nature immature. So Merrin wanted them both to have a chance to grow up. So what?

  Tomorrow morning, on the drive to Logan Airport, Terry will have Ig alone and a chance to set him straight about a couple of things. He will tell Ig that his ideas about Merrin, about their relationship—that it was meant to be, that she was more perfect than other girls, that their love was more perfect than other loves, that together they dealt in small miracles—was a suffocating trap. If Ig hated Merrin now, it was only because he had discovered she was a real person, with failings and needs and a desire to live in the world, not in Ig’s daydreams. That she loved him enough to let him go, and he had to be willing to do the same, that if you loved someone, you could set them free, and—fuck, that was a Sting song.

  “Merrin, are you all right?” Lee asks. She is still shivering almost convulsively.

  “No. Y-yes. I—Lee, please pull over. Pull over here.” These last three words said with an urgent clarity.

  The road to the old foundry is coming up on the right, quickly, too quickly to turn in, really, but Lee turns in anyway. Terry plants one hand on the back of Merrin’s seat and bites down on a cry. The passenger-side tires catch soft gravel and fling it into the trees, leave a deep four-foot-long gouge.

  Brush scrapes at the bumper. The Cadillac thumps and bangs in the ruts, still going too fast, the highway disappearing behind them. Up ahead is a chain stretched across the road. Lee brakes hard, the steering wheel shimmying in his hands, back end slewing. The car stops with the headlights touching the chain, actually stretching it across the grille. Merrin opens her door, sticks her head out, and retches. Once. Again. Fucking Ig; right now Terry hates him.

  He’s not feeling too high on Lee either, flinging the car around like that. They’ve definitely come to a stop, and yet a part of Terry feels as if they’re still moving, still sliding to the side. If he had his joint on hand, he’d hurl it out the window—the thought of putting the thing in his mouth repulses him, would be like swallowing a live cockroach—only he doesn’t know what he did with it, doesn’t seem to be holding it anymore. He touches his scraped and tender temple again and winces.

  Rain taps slowly on the windshield. Except it isn’t rain, not anymore. Just water drops blowing from the branches above. Not five minutes before, the torrent was coming down so hard that the rain bounced when it hit the road, but in the usual way of summer thundershowers it has blown away as quickly as it blew in.

  Lee gets out and goes around the side of the car and crouches beside her. He murmurs something to her, his voice calm, reasonable. However she answers him, he doesn’t like it. He repeats his offer, and this time her reply is audible, her tone unfriendly. “No, Lee. I just want to go home and get into some dry things and be by myself.”

  Lee stands up, walks around to the trunk, pops it, fishes something out of it. A gym bag.

  “Got gym clothes. Shirt. Pants. They’re dry and warm. Plus, there’s no sick on them.”

  She thanks Lee and climbs out into the humid, buggy, wet, blowing night, hangs Terry’s sport coat over her shoulders. Merrin reaches for the bag, but for a moment Lee doesn’t release it.

  “You had to do it, you know. It was crazy, thinking that you could—that either of you could—”

  “I just want to change, okay?”

  Pulling the gym bag away from him and starting down the road, Merrin crosses through the headlights, her skirt swishing around her legs and her blouse rendered briefly transparent by the intense glare. Terry catches himself staring, forces himself to look away, and so sees Lee staring as well. He wonders, for the first time, if maybe good old Lee Tourneau is carrying a little bit of a torch for Merrin Williams—or at least a hard-on. Merrin continues down the road, walking at first in the tunnel of brightness carved out by the headlights, then stepping off the gravel and into darkness. It is the last time Terry will ever see her alive.

  Lee stands in the open passenger-side door, staring after her, like he doesn’t know whether to get back in the car or not. Terry wants to tell him to sit down but can’t summon up the will or the energy. Terry stares after her himself for a short time, and then he can’t hack it. He doesn’t like the way the night seems to be breathing, swelling and contracting. The headlights are catching one corner of the open field below the foundry, and he doesn’t like the way the wet grass lashes at the darkness, in constant uneasy motion. He can hear it through the open door. It hisses, like the snake exhibit at the zoo. Also: He still has a faint but stomach-turning sensation of sideways motion, of sliding helplessly away toward someplace he doesn’t want to go. The ache in his right temple isn’t helping either. He picks up his feet and lies down on the backseat.

  That’s better. The mottled brown upholstery is moving, too, like billows of slow-moving cream in a lightly stirred cup of coffee, but that’s okay, a good thing to see when you’re stoned, a safe thing. Not like wet grass swaying ecstatically in the night.

  He needs something to think about, something soothing, needs a daydream to ease his queasy mind. Production is lining up guests for next season, the usual mix of what’s happening and what happened, black and white, Mos Def and Def Leppard, the Eels and the Crowes and every other animal in the pop-culture bestiary, but what Terry is really excited about is Keith Richards, who was in the Viper Room with Johnny Depp a few months ago and told Terry he thought the show was fuckin’ darlin’ and said he’d be de-fuckin’-lighted to be on, anytime, all roit, just fuckin’ ask already, and wot took you so fuckin’ long? That’d be a hell of a thing, get Richards on, give him the whole last half hour. The execs at Fox hate when Terry dumps the usual format and turns the show into a concert—he has been told it sends half a million viewers right over to Letterman—but as far as Terry is concerned, the execs can suck Keith Richards’s stringy, overworked cock.

  In a while he begins to drift. Perris
h the Thought is performing with Keith Richards in front of a festival crowd, maybe eighty thousand people, who have, for some reason, gathered at the old foundry. They’re playing “Sympathy for the Devil,” and Terry has agreed to do the lead vocal, because Mick is in London. Terry glides toward the mike and tells the leaping, ecstatic crowd that he is a man of wealth and taste, which is a line from the song but which is also true. Then Keith Richards lifts his Telecaster and plays the old devil blues. His ragged-ass, broken-bottle guitar solo is an unlikely lullaby, but good enough to ease Terry Perrish down into fitful sleep.

  He wakes once, briefly, when they’re back on the road, the Caddy rushing along a smooth ribbon of night, Lee behind the wheel and the passenger seat empty. Terry has his sport coat back, spread carefully across his legs and lap, something Merrin must’ve done when she returned to the car, a typically thoughtful gesture. Although, the coat is soaking wet and dirty and there’s something heavy holding it in his lap, lying on top of it. Terry gropes for it, picks up a wet stone the size and shape of an ostrich egg, wiry strands of grass and muck on it. That stone means something—Merrin stuck it there for a reason—but Terry is too dazed and muzzy-headed to get the joke. He puts the rock on the floor. It’s got sticky stuff on it, like snail guts, and Terry wipes his fingers on his shirt, straightens his sport coat across his thighs, and settles back down.

  His left temple is still throbbing where he banged it diving in back—feels sore and raw—and when he presses the back of his left hand to it, he sees he is bleeding again.

  “Did Merrin get off okay?” Terry asks.

  “What?” Lee says.

  “Merrin? Did we take care of her?”

  Lee drives for a while without reply. Then he says, “Yes. Yes, we did.”

  Terry nods, satisfied, and says, “She’s a good kid. I hope her and Ig work it out.”

  Lee just drives.

  Terry feels himself sliding back into his dreams of being onstage with Keith Richards, before an ecstatic crowd that is performing for him as much as he is performing for them. But then, tottering on the very edge of consciousness, he hears himself ask a question he didn’t know was even on his mind.