Joe Hill

by Horns (v5. 0)

  He had left the Tree House of the Mind in flames, had burned down heaven, but the cherry still stood undamaged. A wind rose in a hot gust, and the leaves thrashed, and even from here Ig could see there was no tree house up there. It was funny, though—the way the fire seemed to be aimed at it, burning a path through the high grass to its trunk. It was the wind, funneling it straight across the field, pouring fire at the old town woods.

  Ig climbed through the foundry doorway. He stepped over his brother’s trumpet.

  Terry knelt before the open door of the furnace, head bowed. Ig saw his perfect stillness, the calm look of concentration on his face, and thought his brother looked good even in death. His shirt drawn smoothly across his broad back, cuffs folded carefully past his wrists. Ig lowered himself to his knees beside Terry. Two brothers in the pews. He took his brother’s hand in his and saw that when Terry was eleven, he had stuck gum in Ig’s hair on the school bus.

  “Shit,” Ig said. “It had to be cut out with scissors.”

  “What?” Terry asked.

  “The gum you put in my hair,” Ig said. “On Bus Nineteen.”

  Terry inhaled a small sip of air, a whistling breath.

  “Breathing,” Ig said. “How are you breathing?”

  “I’ve got,” Terry whispered, “very strong. Lungs. I do. Play the horn. Now. And then.” After a moment he said, “It’s a miracle. We both. Got out. Of this. Alive.”

  “Don’t be so sure about that,” Ig said.

  Glenna’s phone was in the furnace, had hit the wall and cracked. The battery cover had come off. Ig thought it wouldn’t work, but it beeped to life as soon as he flipped it open. Luck of the devil. He dialed emergency services and told an impersonal operator that he had been bitten by a snake, that he was at the foundry off Route 17, that people were dead and things were burning. Then he broke the connection and climbed out of the chimney to crouch beside Terry again.

  “You called,” Terry said. “For help.”

  “No,” Ig said. “You called for help. Listen closely, Terry. Let me tell you what you’re going to remember—and what you’re going to forget. You have a lot to forget. Things that happened tonight and things that happened before tonight.” And as he spoke, the horns throbbed, a hard jolt of animal pleasure. “There’s only room for one hero in this story—and everyone knows the devil doesn’t get to be the good guy.”

  Ig told him a story, in a soft and pleasing voice, a good story, and Terry nodded as he listened, as if to the beat of a song he particularly liked.

  IN A FEW MINUTES, it was done. Ig sat with him for a while longer, neither of them speaking. Ig was not sure Terry still knew he was there; he had been told to forget. He seemed to be asleep on his knees. Ig sat until he heard the distant wail of a trumpet, playing a single, razzy note of alarm, a musical sound of panicked urgency: the fire trucks. He took his brother’s head in his hands and kissed his temple. What he saw was less important than what he felt.

  “You’re a good man, Ignatius Perrish,” whispered Terry, without opening his eyes.

  “Blasphemy,” Ig said.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  HE CLIMBED DOWN from the open doorway and then, as an afterthought, reached up and took his brother’s trumpet. Then he turned and looked across the open field, along the avenue of fire, which reached in a straight line toward the cherry tree. The blaze leaped and flickered around the trunk for a moment—and then the tree itself erupted into flames, as if it were soaked in kerosene. The crown of the tree roared, a parachute of red and yellow flame, and in its branches was the Tree House of the Mind. Curtains of flame billowed in the windows. The cherry alone burned in the wood, the other trees untouched by fire.

  Ig strode along the path the fire had cut through the field, a young lord on the red carpet that led to his manor. By some trick of optics, the headlights of Lee’s Caddy fell upon him and cast a vast, looming, four-story-high shadow against the boiling smoke. The first of the fire trucks was thumping its slow way down the rutted dirt road, and the driver, a thirty-year veteran named Rick Terrapin, saw it, a horned black devil as tall as the foundry’s chimney, and he cried out and jerked at the wheel, took the fire truck right off the road and clipped a birch tree. Rick Terrapin would retire three weeks later. Between the devil in the smoke and the horrors he saw inside the foundry, he didn’t much feel like putting out fires anymore. After that he was just as happy to let shit burn.

  Ig went with his stolen trumpet into the yellow blaze and came at last to the tree. He did not lose a step but started straight up the burning ladder of its branches. He thought he heard voices above, irreverent, cheerful voices, and laughter—a celebration! There was music, too, kettledrums and the saucy bump-and-grind of trumpets. The trapdoor was open. Ig climbed through, into his new home, his tower of fire, which held his throne of flame. He was right; there was a celebration under way—a wedding party, his wedding party—and his bride awaited him there, with her hair aflame, naked but for a loose wrap of fire. And he took her into his arms, and her mouth found his, and together they burned.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  TERRY CAME BACK HOME in the third week of October, and the first warm afternoon with nothing to do he drove out to the foundry for a look around.

  The great brick building stood in a blackened field, amid the trash heaps that had gone up like bonfires and were now hills of ash, smoked glass, and burnt wire. The building itself was streaked with soot, and the whole place had a faint odor of char about it.

  But around back, at the top of the Evel Knievel trail, it was nice, the light good, coming sideways through the trees in their Halloween costumes of red and gold. The trees were on fire, blazed like enormous torches. The river below made a soft rushing sound that played in gentle counterpoint to the easy soughing of the wind. Terry thought he could sit there all day.

  He had been doing a lot of walking the last few weeks, a lot of sitting and watching and waiting. He had put his L.A. house on the market in late September and moved back to New York City, went to Central Park almost every day. The show was over, and without it he didn’t see any reason to hang around in a place where there weren’t seasons and where you couldn’t walk to anything.

  Fox was still hoping he’d come back, had issued a statement that in the aftermath of his brother’s murder Terry had opted to take a professional sabbatical; this conveniently overlooked the fact that Terry had in fact formally resigned, weeks before the incident at the foundry. The TV people could say what they wanted to say. He wasn’t coming back. He thought maybe in another month or two he might go out, do some gigging in clubs. He wasn’t in any hurry to work again, though. He was still getting unpacked, trying not to think too much. Whatever happened next would happen on its own schedule. He’d find his way to something eventually. He hadn’t even bought himself a new horn.

  No one knew what had happened that night at the foundry, and since Terry refused to provide a public comment and everyone else at the scene was dead, there were a lot of crazy ideas going around about the evening Eric and Lee died. TMZ had published the craziest account. They said Terry had gone out to the foundry looking for his brother and found Eric Hannity and Lee Tourneau there, the two of them arguing. Terry had overheard enough to understand they had murdered his brother, barbecued him alive in his car, and were out there looking for evidence they might have left behind. According to TMZ, Lee and Eric caught Terry trying to slip away and dragged him into the foundry. They had meant to kill him, but first they wanted to know if he had called anyone, if anyone knew where he was. They locked him in a chimney with a poisonous snake, trying to scare him into talking. But while he was in there, they began to argue again. Terry heard screams and gunshots. By the time he got out of the chimney, things were on fire and both men were dead, Eric Hannity by shotgun, Lee Tourneau by pitchfork. It was like the plot of a sixteenth-century revenge tragedy; all that was missing was an appearance by the devil. Terry wondered where TMZ got their information, if they
had paid someone off in the police department—Detective Carter, perhaps; their outlandish report read almost exactly like Terry’s own signed testimony.

  Detective Carter had come to see Terry on his second day in the hospital. Terry didn’t remember much about the first day. He recalled when he was wheeled into the emergency room, remembered someone pulling an oxygen mask over his face, and a rush of cool air that smelled faintly medicinal. He remembered that later he had hallucinated, had opened his eyes to find his dead brother sitting on the edge of his hospital cot. Ig had Terry’s trumpet and was playing a little bebop riff. Merrin was there, too, pirouetting barefoot in a short dress of crimson silk, spinning to the music so her dark red hair flew. As the sound of the trumpet resolved to the steady bleep of the EKG machine, both of them faded away. Still later, in the early hours of the morning, Terry had lifted his head from the pillow and looked around to find his mother and father sitting in chairs against the wall, both of them asleep, his father’s head resting on his mother’s shoulder. They were holding hands.

  But by the afternoon of the second day, Terry merely felt as if he were recovering from a very bad flu. His joints throbbed and he could not get enough to drink, and he was aware of an all-body weakness…but otherwise he was himself. When the doctor, an attractive Asian woman in cat’s-eye glasses, came in the room to check his chart, he asked her how close he had come to dying. She said it had been one-in-three that he would pull through. Terry asked her how she came up with odds like that, and she said it was easy. There were three kinds of timber rattlers. He had run into the kind that had the weakest venom. With either of the other two, he would’ve had no chance at all. One-in-three.

  Detective Carter had walked in as the doctor was walking out. Carter took Terry’s statement down impassively, asking few questions but allowing Terry to shape the narrative, almost as if he were not a police officer but a secretary taking dictation. He read it back to Terry, making occasional corrections. Then, without looking up from his lined yellow notepad, he said, “I don’t believe a word of this horseshit.” Without anger or humor or much inflection at all. “You know that, don’t you? Not one goddamn word.” Finally lifting his dull, knowing eyes to look at him.

  “Really?” Terry had said, lying in his hospital bed, one floor below his grandmother with her busted face. “What do you think happened, then?”

  “I’ve come up with lots of other explanations,” said the detective. “And they all make even less sense than this pile of crap you’re handing me. I’ll be damned if I have any idea what happened. I’ll just be damned.”

  “Aren’t we all,” Terry said.

  Carter gave him a hard and unfriendly glare.

  “I wish I could tell you something different. But that’s what really happened,” Terry said. And most of the time, at least when the sun was up, Terry really believed it was what had happened. After dark, though, when he was trying to sleep…after dark sometimes he had other ideas. Bad ideas.

  THE SOUND OF TIRES on gravel roused him, and he lifted his head, looked back toward the foundry. In another moment an emerald Saturn came bumping around the corner, trolling across the blasted landscape. When the driver saw him, the car whined to a stop and sat there for a moment idling. Then it came on, finally pulling in not ten feet away.

  “Hey, Terry,” said Glenna Nicholson as she eased out from behind the wheel. She seemed not in the least surprised to see him—as if they had planned to meet here.

  She looked good, a curvy girl in stonewashed gray jeans, a sleeveless black shirt, and a black studded belt. He could see the Playboy Bunny on her exposed hip, which was a trashy touch, but who hadn’t made mistakes, done things to themselves they wished they could take back?

  “Hey, Glenna,” he said. “What brings you out here?”

  “Sometimes I come here for lunch,” she said, and held up a sub in one hand, wrapped in white waxed paper. “It’s quiet. Good place to think. About Ig and…stuff.”

  He nodded. “What’ve you got?”

  “Eggplant parm. Got a Dr Pepper, too. You want half? I always get a large, and I don’t know why. I can’t eat a large. Or I shouldn’t. I guess sometimes I do.” She wrinkled her nose. “I’m really trying to take off ten pounds.”

  “Why?” Terry asked, looking her over again.

  She laughed. “Stop it.”

  He shrugged. “I’ll eat half your sandwich, if it helps with the diet. But you don’t have anything to worry about. You’re all right.”

  They sat on a fallen log along the side of the Evel Knievel trail. The water was spangled gold in the late-afternoon light. Terry didn’t know he was hungry until she gave him half her sandwich and he started to eat. Soon it was gone, and he was licking his fingers, and they were sharing out the last of the Dr Pepper. They didn’t talk. Terry was fine with that. He didn’t want to make small talk, and she seemed to know it. The silence didn’t make her nervous. It was funny, in L.A. no one ever shut up; everyone there seemed terrified by a moment of silence.

  “Thanks,” he said finally.

  “Don’t mention it,” she said.

  He pushed a hand back through his hair. At some point in the last few weeks, he had discovered a thinness at the crown, and he had responded by letting it grow out until it was almost shaggy. He said, “I should’ve come by the salon, had you give me a cut. My shit is getting out of control.”

  “I don’t work there anymore,” she said. “Gave my last cut yesterday.”

  “Get out.”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “Well. Here’s to going on to other things, then.”

  “Here’s to going on to other things.”

  They each had a sip of Dr Pepper.

  “Was it a good cut to end on?” Terry asked. “Did you give someone a completely awesome trim to finish up?”

  “I shaved a guy bald. An older guy, actually. You don’t usually get older guys asking for a buzz job. That tends to be more of a younger-dude thing. You know him—Merrin Williams’s dad. Dale?”

  “Yeah. I kind of know him,” Terry said, and grimaced, fought back an almost tidal surge of sadness that didn’t entirely make sense.

  Of course Ig had been killed over Merrin; Lee and Eric had burned him to death because of what they thought he had done to her. Ig’s last year had been so bad, so unhappy, Terry almost couldn’t bear to think about it. He was sure Ig hadn’t done it, could never have killed Merrin. He supposed that now no one would ever know who had really killed her. He shuddered, remembering the night Merrin had died. He had been with fucking Lee Tourneau then—the revolting little sociopath—had even enjoyed his company. A couple of drinks, some cheap ganja out on the sandbar—and then Terry had dozed off in Lee’s car and not woken again until dawn. It sometimes seemed like that had been the last night he was really happy, playing cards with Ig and then aimlessly driving around and around Gideon through an August evening that smelled of the river and firecrackers. Terry wondered if there was any smell in all the world so sweet.

  “Why’d he do it?” Terry asked.

  “Mr. Williams said he’s moving down to Sarasota, and when he gets there, he wants to feel the sun on his bare head. Also, because his wife hates men with shaved heads. Or maybe she’s his ex-wife now. I think he’s going to Sarasota without her.” She smoothed a leaf out on her knee, then picked it up by the stem, lifted it into the breeze, and let go, watched it sail away. “I’m moving, too. ’S why I quit.”

  “Where to?”

  “New York,” she said.

  “City?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Hell. Look me up when you get there, why don’t you? I’ll show you some good clubs,” Terry said. He was already writing the number to his cell on an old receipt in his pocket.

  “What do you mean? Aren’t you in L.A.?”

  “Naw. No reason to hang around without Hothouse, and I’d take New York over L.A. anytime. You know? It’s just a lot more…real.” He handed her his number.


  She sat on the ground, holding the scrap of paper and smiling up at him, her elbows back on the log and the light dappling her face. She looked good.

  “Well,” she said, “I think we’ll be living in different neighborhoods.”

  “That’s why God invented cabs,” he said.

  “He invented them?”

  “No. Men invented them so they could get home safely after a night of drunken carousing.”

  “When you think about it,” she said, “most of the good ideas came along to make sin a whole lot easier.”

  “True that,” he said.

  They got up to walk off their sandwiches, went for a meandering stroll around the foundry. As they came to the front, Terry paused again, looking at that wide swath of burned earth. It was funny the way the wind had channeled the fire straight to the town woods and then set just a single tree aflame. That tree. It still stood, a rack of great blackened antlers, terrible horns clawing at the sky. The sight of it gave him pause, held him briefly transfixed. He shivered; the air suddenly felt cooler, more like late October in New England.

  “Lookat,” Glenna said, bending and picking something out of the burnt undergrowth.

  It was a gold cross, threaded on a delicate chain. She held it up, and it swung back and forth, flashing a golden light into her smooth, pretty face.

  “Nice,” she said.

  “You want it?”

  “I’d probably catch fire if I put this thing on,” she said. “Go for it.”

  “Nah,” Terry said. “This is for a girl.” He carried it over to a sapling growing up against the foundry, hung it on one of the branches. “Maybe whoever left it will come back for it.”

  They went on their way, not talking much, just enjoying the light and the day, around the foundry and back to her car. He wasn’t sure when they took each other’s hands, but by the time they reached the Saturn, they had. Her fingers slid from his with unmistakable reluctance.