Joe Hill

by Horns (v5. 0)

  Where the tom spent the balance of his day was unknown. He didn’t belong to the neighbors. He didn’t belong to anyone. Lee’s mother said he was feral. She said the word “feral” in the same spitting, ugly tone she used to refer to The Winterhaus, the bar Lee’s father stopped at every night for a drink (or two, or three) on his way home from work.

  The tomcat’s ribs were visible in his sides, and his black fur was missing in hunks, to show obscene patches of pink, scabby skin, and his furry balls were as big as shooter marbles, so big they jostled back and forth between his hind legs when he walked. One eye was green, the other white, giving him a look of partial blindness. Lee’s mother instructed her only son to stay away from the creature, not to pet him under any circumstances, and not to trust him.

  “He won’t learn to like you,” she said. “He’s past the point where he can learn to feel for people. He’s not interested in you or anyone, and never will be. He only turns up hoping we’ll put something out for him, and if we don’t feed him, he’ll stop coming around.”

  But he didn’t stop. Every night, when the sun went down but the clouds were still lit with its glow, the tomcat returned to cry in their backyard.

  Lee went looking for him sometimes, as soon as he got home from school. He wondered how the tom spent his day, where he went and where he came from. Lee would climb onto the fence and walk the ties, peering into the corn for the cat.

  He could only stay on the fence until his mother spotted him and yelled for him to get down. It was a split-tie fence, splintery wooden logs slotted into leaning posts, which enclosed the entire backyard, corn and all. The top rail was high off the ground, as high as Lee’s head, and the logs shook as he walked across them. His mother said the wood had dry rot, that one of the ties would shatter underfoot, and then it would be a trip to the hospital (his father would wave a dismissive hand in the air and say, “Whyn’t you leave him alone and let him be a kid?”). But he couldn’t stay off it; no kid could’ve. He didn’t just climb on it or walk across it as if it were a balance beam, but sometimes he even ran across it, arms stuck out to either side, as if he were some gangly crane attempting to take off. It felt good, to run the fence, posts shaking underfoot and the blood pumping in him.

  The tom went to work on Kathy Tourneau’s sanity. He would announce his arrival from the corn with a plaintive, off-key wail, a single harsh note that he sang over and over again, until Lee’s mother couldn’t stand it anymore and burst from the back door to throw something at him.

  “For God’s sake, what do you want?” she screamed at the black tomcat one night. “You aren’t getting fed, so why don’t you go away?”

  Lee didn’t say anything to his mother, but thought he knew why the cat reappeared every evening. His mother’s mistake was, she believed that the cat was crying for food. Lee, though, thought the tom was crying for the previous owners, for the people who lived in the house before them and who treated him the way he wanted to be treated. Lee imagined a freckly girl about his age, in overalls and with long, straight red hair, who would set out a bowl of cat food for the black cat and then sit at a safe distance to watch him eat without troubling him. Singing to him, maybe. His mother’s idea—that the cat had decided to torture them with incessant, shrill crying, just to see how much they could take—seemed an unlikely hypothesis to Lee.

  He decided he would learn to be the tomcat’s friend, and one night he sat out to wait for him. He told his mother he didn’t want dinner, that he was full from the big bowl of cereal he ate when he got back from school, and could he just go outside for a while? She allowed he could, at least until his father got home, and then it was right up into his pajamas and bed. He did not mention he planned to meet the cat or that he had sardines for him.

  It got dark fast in mid-October. It was not even six when he went outside, but the only light left in the sky was a line of hot pink over the fields on the far side of the road. While he waited, he sang to himself, a song that was popular on the radio that year. “Look at ’em go-o-o,” he whisper-sang, “look at ’em ki-i-ick.” A few stars were out. He tipped his head back and was surprised to see that one of these stars was moving, tracing a straight line across heaven. After a moment he realized that it had to be an airplane, or maybe a satellite. Or a UFO! What an idea. When he lowered his gaze, the tom was there.

  The cat with the mismatched eyes poked his head from between the low stalks of corn to stare at Lee for a long, silent moment, not crying for once. Lee withdrew his hand from the pocket of his coat, moving slowly, so as not to scare it.

  “Hey, bud-dee,” he said, dragging out the last syllable in a musical sort of way. “Hey, bud-dee.”

  The sardine tin made a sharp metal cracking sound as he popped it open, and the tom flitted back into the corn, was gone.

  “Oh, no, buddy,” Lee said, jumping to his feet. It was unfair. He had planned out the whole encounter, how he would lure the cat close with a soft, friendly song and then put the tin down for him, making no move to touch him tonight, just letting him eat. And now he was gone, without giving Lee a chance.

  The wind lifted and the corn rustled uneasily, and Lee felt the cold through his coat. He was standing there, too disappointed to move, just staring blankly out at the corn, when the cat leaped into sight again, jumping onto the top rail of the fence. He turned his head to stare back at Lee with bright, fascinated eyes.

  Lee was relieved the tom hadn’t run off without a look back, was grateful to him for sticking around. Lee made no sudden moves. He crept, rather than walked, and did not speak to the cat again. He thought, when he got close, that the tom would drop back into the corn and vanish. Instead, though, when Lee had reached the fence, the cat took a few steps along the top rail, then paused to look back again, a kind of expectancy in his eyes. Waiting to see if Lee would follow, inviting him to follow. Lee took a post and climbed to the top rail. The fence shook, and he thought now, now the cat would jump and be gone. Instead the tomcat waited for the fence to stop moving and then began to stroll away, tail in the air to show his black asshole and big balls.

  Lee tightroped after the tomcat, arms held out to either side for balance. He did not dare hurry, for fear of frightening him off, but moved at a steady walk. The cat strutted lazily on his way, leading him farther and farther from the house. The corn grew right up to the fence, and dry, thick leaves swatted and brushed Lee’s arm. He had a bad moment when one of the rails shook wildly underfoot, and he had to crouch down and put a hand on a post to keep from falling. The cat waited for him to recover, crouching on the next tie. He still didn’t move when Lee stood back up and crossed the wobbling log to him. Instead he arched his back, ruffling up his fur, and began to purr his strained, rusty purr. Lee was nearly beside himself with excitement, to be so close to him at last, almost close enough to touch.

  “Hey,” he breathed, and the tom’s purring intensified, and he lifted his back to Lee, and it was impossible to believe he didn’t want to be touched.

  Lee knew he had promised himself he wouldn’t try to pet the tomcat, not tonight, not when they were just making first contact, but it would be rude to reject such an unmistakable request for affection. He reached down gently to stroke him.

  “Hey, bud-dee,” he sang softly, and the cat squeezed his eyes shut in a look of pure animal pleasure, then opened them and lashed out with one claw.

  Lee jerked upright, the claw swishing through the air not an inch from his left eyeball. The rail clattered violently underfoot, and Lee’s legs went rubbery, and he fell sideways into the corn.

  The top rung was only about four feet from the ground in most places, but along that part of the fence the earth sloped away to the left, so the fall was closer to six feet. The pitchfork that lay in the corn had been there for over a decade, had been waiting for Lee since before he was born, lying flat on the earth with the curved and rusted tines sticking straight up. Lee hit it headfirst.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  H
E SAT UP A WHILE LATER. The corn whispered frantically, spreading false rumors about him. The cat was gone from the fence. It was full night, and when he looked up, he caught the stars moving. They were all satellites now, shooting in different directions, dropping this way and that. The moon twitched, fell a few inches, twitched again. As if the curtain of heaven were in danger of falling, and revealing the empty stage behind. Lee reached up and straightened the moon and put it back where it belonged. The moon was so cold in his hand that it made his fingers numb, like handling an icicle.

  He had to get very tall to fix the moon, and while he was up there, he looked down on his little corner of West Bucksport. He saw things he could not possibly have seen in the corn, saw things the way God saw them. He saw his father’s car coming down Pickpocket Lane and turning up the gravel road to their house. He was driving with a six-pack on the passenger seat and a cold one between his thighs. If Lee wanted to, he could’ve flicked his finger against the car and spun it off the road, tumbling it into the evergreens that screened their house from the highway. He imagined it, the car on its side, flames licking up from under the hood. People would say he was driving blind drunk.

  He felt as detached from the world below as he would’ve been from a model railroad. West Bucksport was just as delightful and precious, with its little trees, and little toy houses, and little toy people. If he wanted to, he could’ve picked up his own house and moved it across the street. He could’ve put his heel on it and flattened it underfoot. He could wipe the whole mess off the table with one stroke of his arm.

  He saw movement in the corn, an animate shadow sidling among other shadows, and recognized the cat, and knew he had not been raised to this great height just to fix the moon. He had offered food and kindness to the stray, and it had led him on with a show of affection and then lashed out at him and knocked him off the fence and might’ve killed him, not for any reason but because that was what it was built to do, and now it was walking away as if nothing had happened, and maybe to the cat nothing had happened, maybe it had already forgotten Lee, and that would not do. Lee reached down with his great arm—it was like being on the top floor of the John Hancock Tower and looking down the length of the glass building at the ground—and pushed his finger into the cat, mashing it into the dirt. For a single frantic instant, less than a second, he felt a spasm of quivering life under his fingertip, felt the cat trying to leap away, but it was too late, and he crushed it, felt it shatter like a dried seed pod. He ground his finger back and forth, the way he had seen his father grind out cigarettes in an ashtray. He killed it with a kind of quiet, subdued satisfaction, feeling a little distant from himself, the way he sometimes got when he was coloring.

  After a while he lifted his hand and looked at it, at a streak of blood across his palm and a fluff of black fur stuck to it. He smelled his hand, which had on it a fragrance of musty basements mingled with summer grass. The smell interested him, told a story of hunting mice in subterranean places and hunting for a mate to screw in the high weeds.

  Lee lowered his hand to his lap and stared blankly at the cat. He was sitting in the corn again, although he didn’t remember sitting down, and he was the same size he’d always been, although he didn’t remember getting any smaller. The tomcat was a twisted wreck. Its head was turned around backward, as if someone had tried to unscrew it like a lightbulb. The tom stared up into the night with wide-eyed surprise. Its skull was battered and misshapen, and brains were coming out one ear. The unlucky black cat lay next to a flat piece of slate, wet with blood. Lee was remotely aware of a stinging in his right arm and looked at it and saw that his wrist and forearm were scratched up, scratches grouped together in three parallel lines, as if he had taken a fork to himself, gouging at his flesh with the tines. He couldn’t figure out how the cat had managed to scratch him when he had been so much bigger, but he was tired now and his head hurt, and after a while he gave up trying to figure it out. It was exhausting, being like God, being big enough to fix the things that needed fixing. He pushed himself to his feet, his legs weak beneath him, and started back toward the house.

  His mother and father were in the front room, fighting with each other again. Or, really, his father was sitting with a beer and Sports Illustrated and not replying while Kathy stood over him, yattering at him in a low, strangled voice. Lee had a little flash of the perfect understanding that had come over him when he was big enough to fix the moon, and he knew that his father went to The Winterhaus every night, not to drink, but to see a waitress, and that they were special friends. Not that either of his parents said anything about the waitress; his mother was furious about a mess in the garage, about him wearing his boots into the living room, about her work. Somehow, though, the waitress was what they were really arguing about. Lee knew, too, that in time—a few years, maybe—his father would leave, and he would not take Lee with him.

  It didn’t bother him, the way they were fighting. What bothered him was the radio, on in the background, making a clashing, dissonant sound: like pots thrown down a staircase, while someone hissed and sputtered, like a teakettle coming to the boil. The sound of it grated on him, and he swerved toward the radio to turn it down, and it was only as he was reaching for the volume that he recognized it was that song “The Devil Inside.” He had no idea why he’d ever liked it. In the weeks to follow, Lee would discover he could not bear almost any music running in the background, that songs no longer made sense to him, were just a mess of aggravating sounds. When a radio was on, he’d leave the room, preferred the quiet that went with his own thoughts.

  He felt light-headed climbing the stairs. The walls sometimes seemed to be pulsing, and he was afraid if he looked outside, he might see the moon twitching in the sky again, and this time he might not be able to fix it. He thought it might be best if he lay down before it fell. He said good night from the stairs. His mother didn’t notice. His father didn’t care.

  When Lee woke the next morning, the pillowcase was soaked with dry bloodstains. He studied it without alarm or fear. The smell, an old copper-penny odor, was especially interesting.

  A few minutes later, he was in the shower and happened to look down between his feet. A thin thread of reddish brown was racing in the current and whirling down the drain, as if there were rust in the water. Only it wasn’t rust. He lifted a hand absently to his head, wondering if he had cut himself when he fell from the fence the night before. His fingers prodded a tender spot on the right side of his skull. He touched what felt like a small depression, and for a moment it was as if someone had dropped a hair dryer into the shower with him, a hard jolt of electricity that made the world flash, turn into a photographic negative for an instant. When the sickening shocked feeling passed, he looked at his hand and found blood on his fingers.

  He did not tell his mother he had hurt his head—it didn’t seem important—or explain the blood on his pillow, although she was horrified when she saw the mess.

  “Look at this,” she said. “This is ruined! Completely ruined!” Standing in the middle of the kitchen with the blood-soaked pillowcase in one hand.

  “Lay off,” said Lee’s father, sitting at the kitchen table holding his head between his hands as he read the sports. He was pale and bristly and sick-looking but still had a smile ready for his boy. “Kid gets a nosebleed, you act like he killed someone. He ain’t murdered anyone.” His father winked at Lee. “Not yet anyhow.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  LEE HAD A SMILE READY for Merrin when she opened the door, but she didn’t appreciate it, hardly looked at him.

  He said, “I told Ig I had to be in Boston today for the congressman, and he told me if I don’t take you out someplace for a nice dinner, he won’t be my friend anymore.”

  Two girls sat on the couch watching TV, the volume turned up on a rerun of Growing Pains. Piled between them and at their feet were stacks of cardboard boxes. Slants, like Merrin’s roommate. The roomie sat on the arm of a chair, hollering cheerfully into he
r cell. Lee didn’t think much of Asians in general, hive creatures fixated on phones and cameras, although he did like the Asian-schoolgirl look, black buckled shoes and high socks and pleated skirts. The door to the roomie’s bedroom was open, and there were more boxes piled on a bare mattress.

  Merrin surveyed this scene with a kind of wondering hopelessness, then turned back to Lee. If he had known she was going to be as gray as dishwater, no makeup, hair unwashed, in her baggy old sweats, he would’ve skipped a visit. Total turnoff. He was already sorry he’d come. He realized he was still smiling and made himself stop, felt for the right thing to say.

  “God, are you still sick?” he asked.

  She nodded absently and then said, “Want to go on the roof? Less noisy.”

  He followed her up the stairs. They didn’t appear to be going out to dinner, but she brought a pair of Heinekens from the fridge, which was better than nothing.

  It was going on eight o’clock, but still not dark. The skateboarders were down in the road again, their boards clattering and banging on the asphalt. Lee walked across the roof deck to look over the edge at them. A couple had fauxhawks and wore ties and button-down shirts that were buttoned only at the collar. Lee had never been interested in skateboarding as anything more than a look, because you came off as alternative with a board under your arm, a little dangerous, but also athletic. He didn’t like falling, though; just the idea of falling made one whole side of his head go cold and numb.

  Merrin touched the small of his back, and for just a moment he thought she was going to push him over the side of the roof, and he was going to twist and grab her by her pale throat and pull her with him. She must’ve seen the shock on his face, because she smiled for the first time and offered him one of the Heinekens. He nodded thanks and took it and held it in one hand while he lit up with the other.