Joe Hill

by Horns (v5. 0)

  “That was his car, Mary,” he said, his name for Merrin. “All burned up. I think he’s gone. I think the bad man is gone.”

  Ig put one hand on the driver’s seat and the other on the passenger seat and hoisted himself between them, sliding up front to sit next to Dale.

  “Sorry to disappoint you,” Ig said. “Only the good die young, I’m afraid.”

  As Ig climbed forward into view, Dale made a gobbling noise of fright and jerked at the wheel. They swerved hard to the right, into the gravel breakdown lane. Ig fell hard against the dash and almost crashed to the floor. He could hear rocks clanging and bashing against the undercarriage. Then the car was in park and Dale was out of it and running up the road, running and screaming.

  Ig pushed himself up. He couldn’t make sense of it. No one else screamed and ran when they saw the horns. Sometimes they wanted to kill him, but no one screamed and ran.

  Dale reeled up the center of the road, looking back over his shoulder at the station wagon and uttering vaguely birdlike cries. A woman in a Sentra blasted her horn at him as she blew by—Get the hell out of the road. Dale staggered to the edge of the highway, a thin strip of dirt crumbling off into a weedy ditch. The earth gave way under Dale’s right foot, and he went tumbling down.

  Ig got behind the wheel and rolled slowly after him.

  He pulled alongside as Dale rose unsteadily to his feet. Dale began to run once again, in the ditch now. Ig pressed the button to lower the passenger-side window and leaned across the seat to call out to him.

  “Mr. Williams,” Ig said, “get in the car.”

  Dale didn’t slow down but ran on, gasping for breath, clutching at his heart. Sweat gleamed on his jowls. There was a split in the back of his pants.

  “Get away!” Dale cried, his words blurring together. Geddway. “Gedawayalp!” He said it twice more before Ig realized that “alp” was panic-ese for “help.”

  Ig looked blankly at the picture of Christ taped to the dash, as if hoping Big J might have some advice for him, which was when he remembered the cross. He looked down at it, hanging between his clavicles, resting lightly on his bare chest. Lee had not been able to see the horns while he wore the cross; it stood to reason that if Ig was wearing the cross, no one could see them or feel their effects, an astonishing proposition, a cure for his condition. To Dale Williams, Ig was himself: the sex murderer who had bashed his daughter’s head in with a rock and who had just climbed out of the backseat in a skirt, armed with a pitchfork. The golden cross looped about Ig’s throat was his own humanity, burning brightly in the morning light.

  But his humanity was of no use to him, not in this situation or any other. It had been of no use to him since the night Merrin was taken. Was, in fact, a weakness. Now that he was used to it, he far preferred being a demon. The cross was a symbol of that most human condition: suffering. And Ig was sick of suffering. If someone had to get nailed to a tree, he wanted to be the one holding the hammer. He pulled over, unclasped the cross, and put it in the glove compartment. Then he sat up straight behind the wheel again.

  He sped up to get ahead of Dale, then stopped the car. He reached behind him and awkwardly lifted the pitchfork from the back and got out. Dale was just stumbling past, down in the ditch, up to his ankles in muddy water. Ig took two steps after him and threw the pitchfork. It hit the marshy water in front of him, and Dale shrieked. He tried to go back too quickly and sat down with a great splash. He paddled about, scrambling to find his feet. The pole of the pitchfork stood straight up from the shallow water, shivering from the force of its impact.

  Ig slid down the embankment, with all the grace of a snake greasing its way through wet leaves, and grabbed the pitchfork before Dale could stand. He jerked it free from the mud and pointed the business end at him. There was a crawfish stuck to one of the tines, writhing in its death throes.

  “Enough running. Get in the car. We have a lot to talk about.”

  Dale sat breathing strenuously in the muck. He looked up the shaft of the pitchfork and squinted into Ig’s face. He shaded his eyes with one hand. “You got rid of your hair.” Paused, then added, almost as an afterthought, “And grew horns. Jesus. What are you?”

  “What’s it look like?” Ig asked. “Devil in a blue dress.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  I KNEW IT WAS YOUR CAR right away,” Dale said, behind the wheel and driving again. He was calm now, at peace with his own private demon. “Soon as I looked at it, I knew someone had set fire to it and pushed it into the river. And I thought you were probably in it at the time, and I felt…felt so…”

  “Happy?”

  “Sorry. I felt sorry.”

  “Really?”

  “That I wasn’t the one who did it.”

  “Ah,” Ig said, looking away.

  Ig held the pitchfork between his knees, the tines sticking into the fabric of the roof, but after they’d been driving for a bit, Dale seemed to forget about it. The horns were doing what they did, playing their secret music, and as long as Ig wasn’t wearing the cross, Dale was helpless not to dance along.

  “I was too scared to kill you. I had a gun. I bought it just to shoot you. But the closest I ever came to killing anyone with it was myself. I put it in my mouth one night to see how it tasted.” He was silent briefly, remembering, then added, “It tasted bad.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t shoot yourself, Mr. Williams.”

  “I was scared to do that, too. Not because I’m afraid I’ll go to hell for committing suicide. It’s because I’m afraid I won’t go to hell…that there isn’t a hell to go to. No heaven either. Just nothing. Mostly I think there must be nothing after we die. Sometimes that seems like it would be a relief. Other times it’s the most awful thing I can imagine. I don’t believe a merciful God would’ve taken both my little girls from me. One from the cancer and the other killed out in the woods that way. I don’t think a God worth praying to would’ve put either of them through what they went through. Heidi still prays. She prays like you wouldn’t believe. She’s been praying for you to die, Ig, for a year now. When I saw your car in the river I thought…I thought…well. God finally came through on something. But no. No, Mary is gone forever, and you’re still here. You’re still here. You’re…you’re…the fucking devil.” Panting for breath. Struggling to go on.

  “You make that sound like a bad thing,” Ig said. “Turn left. Let’s go to your house.”

  The trees growing alongside the road delineated an avenue of bright and cloudless blue sky. It was a nice day for a drive.

  “You said we have things to discuss,” Dale said. “But what could we possibly have to talk about, Ig? What did you want to tell me?”

  “I wanted to tell you that I don’t know if I loved Merrin as much as you did, but I loved her as much as I knew how. And I didn’t kill her. The story I told the police, about passing out drunk behind Dunkin’ Donuts, was true. Lee Tourneau picked Merrin up from in front of The Pit. He drove her to the foundry. He killed her there.” After a beat, Ig added, “I don’t expect you to believe me.” Except: He did. Maybe not right away, but soon enough. Ig was very persuasive these days. People would believe almost any awful thing their private devil told them. In this case it was true, but Ig suspected that if he wanted to, he could probably convince Dale that Merrin had been killed by clowns who had picked her up from The Pit in their teeny-tiny clown car. It wasn’t fair. But then, fighting fair was what the old Ig did.

  However, Dale surprised him, said, “Why should I believe you? Give me a reason.”

  Ig reached over and put his hand on Dale’s bare forearm for a moment, then took it away.

  “I know that after your father died, you visited his mistress in Lowell and paid her two thousand dollars to go away. And you warned her if she ever called your mother drunk again, you’d go looking for her, and when you found her, you’d knock her teeth in. I know you had a one-night stand with a secretary at the dealership, at the Christmas party, the year befo
re Merrin died. I know you once belted Merrin in the mouth for calling her mother a bitch. That’s probably the thing in your life you feel worst about. I know you haven’t loved your wife for going on ten years. I know about the bottle in the bottom left-hand desk drawer at work, and the skin magazines at home in the garage, and the brother you don’t talk to because you can’t stand that his children are alive and yours are dead and—”

  “Stop. Stop it.”

  “I know about Lee the same way I know about you,” Ig said. “When I touch people, I know things. Stuff I shouldn’t know. And people tell me things. Talk about the things they want to do. They can’t help themselves.”

  “The bad things,” Dale said, rubbing two fingers against his right temple, stroking it gently. “Only they don’t seem so bad when I look at you. They seem like they might be…fun. Like I’ve been thinking how when Heidi gets on her knees to pray tonight, I ought to sit on the bed in front of her and tell her to blow me while she’s down there. Or the next time she tells me God doesn’t give anyone burdens they can’t bear, I could slug her one. Hit her again and again until that bright look of faith goes out of her eyes.”

  “No. You aren’t going to do that.”

  “Or it might be good to skip work this afternoon. Lie down for an hour or two in the dark.”

  “That’s better.”

  “Have a nap and then put the gun in my mouth and be done with this hurt.”

  “No. You aren’t going to do that either.”

  Dale sighed tremulously and turned in to his driveway. The Williamses owned a ranch on a street of identically dismal ranches, one-story boxes with a square of yard in back and a smaller square in front. Theirs was the pale, pasty green of some hospital rooms, and it looked worse than Ig remembered it. The vinyl siding was mottled with brown splotches of mildew where it met the concrete foundation, and the windows were dusty, and the lawn was a week overdue for a mow. The street baked in the summery heat, and nothing moved on it, and the sound of a dog barking down the road was the sound of heatstroke, of migraines, of the indolent, overheated summer staggering to its end. Ig had hoped, perversely, to see Merrin’s mother, to find out what secrets she hid, but Heidi wasn’t home. No one on the whole street seemed to be home.

  “What about if I blow off work and see if I can get shitfaced by noon? See if I can’t get myself fired. I haven’t sold a car in six weeks—they’re just looking for a reason. They only keep me on out of pity as it is.”

  “There,” Ig said. “Now, that’s what I call a plan.”

  Dale led him inside. Ig didn’t bring the pitchfork, didn’t think he needed it now.

  “Iggy, would you pour me a drink out of the liquor cabinet? I know you know where it is. You and Mary used to sneak drinks out of it. I want to sit in the dark and rest my head. My head is all woffly inside.”

  The master bedroom was at the end of a short hall done in chocolate shag carpeting. There had been pictures of Merrin along the whole corridor, but they were gone now. There were pictures of Jesus there instead. Ig was angry for the first time all day.

  “Why did you take her down and put Him up?”

  “Those were Heidi’s idea. She took Mary’s photos away.” Dale kicked off his black loafers as he wandered down the hall. “Three months ago she packed up all of Mary’s books, her clothes, her letters from you, and shoved them in the attic. Merrin’s bedroom is her home office now. She works in there stuffing envelopes for Christian causes. She spends more time with Father Mould than she does with me, goes to the church every morning and all day Sunday. She’s got a picture of Jesus on her desk. She doesn’t have a picture of me or either of her dead daughters, but she has a picture of Jesus. I want to chase her out of the house, shouting her daughters’ names at her. You know what? You should go up in the attic and get down the box. I’d like to dig out all Mary’s and Regan’s photos. I could throw them at Heidi until she starts to cry. I could tell her if she wants to get rid of our daughters’ pictures, she’s going to have to eat them. One at a time.”

  “Sounds like a lot of work for a hot afternoon.”

  “It would be fun. Be a hell of a good time.”

  “But not as refreshing as a gin and tonic.”

  “No,” Dale said, standing now at the threshold of his bedroom. “You get it for me, Ig. Make it stiff.”

  Ig returned to the den, a room that had once been a gallery on the subject of Merrin Williams’s childhood, filled with photographs of her: Merrin in war paints and skins, Merrin riding her bike and grinning to show a mouthful of chrome wire, Merrin in a one-piece swimsuit and sitting on Ig’s shoulders, Ig up to his waist in the Knowles River. They were all gone now, and it looked as if the room had been furnished by a real-estate agent in the most banal fashion possible, for a Sunday-morning open house. As if no one lived here anymore.

  No one lived here anymore. No one had lived here in months. It was just a place Dale and Heidi Williams stored their things, as detached from their interior lives as a hotel room.

  The liquor was where it had always been, though, in the cabinets above the TV set. Ig mixed Dale a gin and tonic, using tonic water from the fridge in the kitchen, throwing in a sprig of mint, cutting a section of orange, too, and pushing it down into the ice. On the way back to the bedroom, though, a rope hanging from the ceiling brushed against Ig’s right horn, threatened to snag there. Ig looked up and—

  —there it was, in the branches of the tree above him, the bottom of the tree house, words painted on the trap, the whitewash faintly visible in the night: BLESSED SHALL YOU BE WHEN YOU GO IN. Ig swayed, then—

  —shook off an unexpected wave of dizziness. He used his free hand to massage his brow, waiting for his head to clear, for the sick feeling to abate. For a moment it was there, what had happened in the woods when he went drunk to the foundry to rave and wreck shit, but it was gone now. Ig put the glass down on the carpet and pulled the string, lowering a trapdoor to the attic with a loud shriek of springs.

  If it was hot in the streets, it was suffocating in the low, unfinished attic. Some plywood had been laid across the beams to make a rudimentary floor. There was not enough headroom to stand under the steep pitch of the roof, and Ig didn’t need to. Three big cardboard boxes with the word MERRIN written on their sides in red Sharpie had been pushed just to the left of the open trap.

  He carried them down one at a time, set them on the coffee table in the living room, and went through them. He drank Dale Williams’s gin and tonic while he explored what Merrin had left behind when she died.

  Ig smelled her Harvard hoodie and the ass of her favorite jeans. He went through her books, her piles of used paperbacks. Ig rarely read novels, had always liked nonfiction about fasting, irrigation, travel, camping, and building structures out of recycled materials. But Merrin preferred fiction, high-end book-club stuff. She liked things that had been written by people who had lived short, ugly, and tragic lives, or who at least were English. She wanted a novel to be an emotional and philosophical journey and also to teach her some new vocabulary words.

  She read Gabriel García Márquez and Michael Chabon and John Fowles and Ian McEwan. One book fell open in Ig’s hands to an underlined passage: “How guilt refined the methods of self-torture, threading the beads of detail into an eternal loop, a rosary to be fingered for a lifetime.” And then another, a different book: “It goes against the American storytelling grain to have someone in a situation he can’t get out of, but I think this is very usual in life.” Ig stopped flipping through her paperbacks. They were making him uneasy.

  Some of his books were mixed in with hers, books he had not seen in years. A guide to statistics. The Camper’s Cookbook. Reptiles of New England. He drank the rest of his gin and thumbed through Reptiles. About a hundred pages in, he found a picture of the brown snake with the rattle and the orange stripe down the back. She was Crotalus horridus, a pit viper, and although her range was largely south of the New Hampshire border—she was common to
Pennsylvania—she could be found as far north as the White Mountains. They rarely attacked humans, were shy by nature. More people had been killed in the last year by lightning than had died in the whole last century from run-ins with horridus; yet for all that, its venom was accounted the most dangerous of any American snake, neurotoxic, known to paralyze lungs and heart. He put the book back.

  Merrin’s medical texts and ring-binder notebooks were piled in the bottom of the box. Ig opened one, then another, grazing. She kept notes in pencil, and her careful, not-particularly-girlish cursive was smeared and fading. Definitions of chemical compounds. A hand-drawn cross section of a breast. A list of apartments in London—flats—that she had found online for Ig. At the very bottom of the box was a large manila envelope. Ig almost didn’t bother with it, then hesitated, squinting at some pencil marks in the upper left-hand corner of the envelope. Some dots. Some dashes.

  He opened the envelope and slid out a mammogram, a blue-and-white teardrop of tissue. The date was sometime in June last year. There were papers, too, ruled notebook papers. Ig saw his name on them. They were penciled all over in dots and dashes. He slid the papers and the mammogram back into the envelope.

  He made a second gin and tonic and walked it down the hall. When he let himself into the bedroom, Dale was passed out on the covers, in black socks pulled almost to his knees and white jockey shorts with pee stains on the front. The rest of him was a stark white expanse of male flesh, his belly and chest matted in dark fur. Ig crept to the side of the bed to set down the drink. Dale stirred at the clink of the ice cubes.

  “Oh. Ig,” Dale said. “Hello. Would you believe I forgot you were here for a minute?”

  Ig didn’t reply. He stood by the bed with the manila envelope. He said, “She had cancer?”

  Dale turned his face away. “I don’t want to talk about Mary,” Dale said. “I love her, but I can’t stand to think about her and…and any of it. My brother, you know, we haven’t spoken in years. But he owns a bike and Jet Ski dealership in Sarasota. Sometimes I think I could go down there and sell his bikes for him and look at girls on the beach. He still sends me Christmas cards asking me to visit. I think sometimes I’d like to get away from Heidi, and this town, and this awful house, and how bad I feel about my shitty, fucked-up life, and start all over again. If there’s no God and no reason for all this pain, then maybe I should start again before it’s too late.”