by Joe Hill
“Looks like you’re the one who drowned,” Ig said.
Lee didn’t smile. It was as if he didn’t know how. It was as if he’d put his face on for the first time that morning and didn’t know how to use it.
“Nice tie,” Lee said.
Ig looked down at himself, had forgotten he was wearing it. Terry had rolled his eyes at Ig when Ig came downstairs Tuesday morning with his blue tie knotted around his throat. “What’s that?” Terry had asked derisively.
Their father had been wandering through the kitchen at that exact moment and looked over at Ig, then said, “Class. You ought to put some on sometime, Terry.” Ig had worn a tie every day since, but there’d been no more discussion of the matter.
“What are you selling?” Ig asked, nodding at the canvas bag.
“They’re six bucks,” Lee said. He folded back the flap and withdrew three different magazines. “Take your pick.”
The first was called, simply, The Truth! The cover showed a groom and his bride kneeling before the altar in a vast church. Their hands were clasped in prayer, their faces raised into the light slanting through stained-glass windows. Their expressions suggested that the both of them had been sucking laughing gas; they wore identical looks of maniacal joy. A gray-skinned alien stood behind them, tall and naked. He had placed a three-fingered hand on each of their heads—it looked as if he might be about to smash their skulls together and kill them both, much to their joy. The cover line read “Married by Aliens!” The other magazines were Tax Reform Now and Modern American Militia.
“All three for fifteen,” Lee said. “They’re to raise money for the Christian Patriots Food Bank. The Truth! is really good. It’s all great celebrity sci-fi stuff. There’s a story about how Steven Spielberg got to tour the real Area 51. And there’s another one about the guys from Kiss, when they were on an airplane that got hit by lightning and the engines conked out. They were all praying to Christ to save them, and then Paul Stanley saw Jesus on the wing, and a minute later the engines started up again and the pilot was able to pull out of the dive.”
“The guys in Kiss are Jewish,” Ig said.
Lee didn’t seem troubled by this news. “Yeah. I think most of what they publish is bullshit. It was still a good story.”
This struck Ig as a remarkably sophisticated observation.
“Did you say it’s fifteen for all three?” he said.
Lee nodded. “If you sell enough, you’re eligible for prizes. That’s how I wound up with the mountain board I was too chickenshit to use.”
“Hey,” Ig said, surprised at the calm, flat way Lee copped to being a coward. It was worse hearing him say it about himself than it was hearing Terry say it on the hill.
“No,” Lee said, unperturbed. “Your brother had me right. I thought I’d impress Glenna and her pals, showing the thing off, but when I was on the hill, I couldn’t make myself risk it. I just hope if I run into your brother again, he won’t hold it against me.”
Ig felt a brief but intense flash of hate for his older brother. “Like he’s got room to talk. He almost pissed himself when he thought I was going to go home and tell Mom what really happened to me. One thing about my brother, in any given situation you can always count on him to cover his ass first and worry about other people second. Come on in. I got money upstairs.”
“You want to buy one?”
“I want to buy all three.”
Lee narrowed one eye to a squint. “I can see Modern American Militia, because it’s all stuff about guns and how to tell a spy satellite from a normal satellite. But are you sure you want Tax Reform Now?”
“Why not? I’ll have to pay taxes someday.”
“Most of the people who read this magazine try not to.”
Lee followed Ig to his room but then stopped in the hall, peering cautiously within. Ig had never thought of the room as particularly impressive—it was the smallest on the second floor—but wondered now if it looked like the bedroom of a rich kid to Lee and if this would count against him. Ig had a glance around the place himself, trying to imagine how Lee saw it. The first thing he noticed was the view of the swimming pool out the window, the rain dimpling its vivid blue surface. Then there was the autographed poster of Mark Knopfler over the bed; Ig’s father had played horns on the last Dire Straits album.
Ig’s own horn was on the bed, resting in an open case. The trumpet case contained an assortment of other treasures: a wad of money, tickets to a George Harrison show, a photo of his mother in Capri, and the redheaded girl’s cross on its broken chain. Ig had made an effort to fix it with a Swiss Army knife, which got him exactly nowhere. Finally he had put it aside and turned to a different but related task. Ig had borrowed the M volume of Terry’s Encyclopaedia Britannica and looked up the key to Morse code. He still remembered the exact sequence of short and long flashes the redheaded girl had aimed at him, but when he translated them, his first thought was that he had to be wrong. It was a simple enough message, a single short word, but so shocking it caused a cool, sensuous prickle to race up his back and over his scalp. Ig had begun to try to work out an adequate response, lightly penciling strings of dots and dashes into the endpapers of his Neil Diamond Bible, trying different replies. Because, of course, it wouldn’t do to just talk to her. She had spoken to him in flashes of daylight, and he felt he ought to reply in kind.
Lee took it all in, his gaze darting here and there, finally settling on four chrome towers filled with CDs that stood against the wall. “That’s a lot of music.”
“Come in.”
Lee shuffled in, bowed by the weight of the dripping canvas bag.
“Sit down,” Ig said.
Lee sat on the edge of Ig’s bed, soaking the duvet. He twisted his head to look over his shoulder at the towers of CDs.
“I’ve never seen so much music. Except maybe in a record store.”
“Who do you like to listen to?” Ig asked.
Lee shrugged.
This was an inexplicable reply. Everyone listened to something.
“What albums do you have?” Ig asked.
“I don’t.”
“Nothing?”
“Just never been that interested, I guess,” Lee said calmly. “CDs are expensive, aren’t they?”
It bewildered Ig, the idea that a person could not be interested in music. It was like not being interested in happiness. Then he registered Lee’s follow-up—CDs are expensive, aren’t they?—and for the first time it came to him that Lee didn’t have money to spend on music or anything else. Ig thought of Lee’s brand-new mountain board—but that had been a prize for his charity work, he’d just said. There were his ties and his button-up short-sleeved shirts—but probably his mother made him wear them when he went out peddling his magazines, expected him to look clean-cut and responsible. Poor kids often dressed up. It was rich kids who dressed down, carefully assembling a blue-collar costume: eighty-dollar designer jeans that had been professionally faded and tattered and worn-out T-shirts straight off the rack from Abercrombie & Fitch. Then there was Lee’s association with Glenna and Glenna’s friends, a crowd that gave off a trailer-park vibe; country-club kids just didn’t hang out at the foundry, burning shits on a summer afternoon.
Lee raised one eyebrow—he definitely gave off a bit of a Spock vibe—seemed to pick up on Ig’s surprise. He said, “What do you listen to?”
“I don’t know. Lots of stuff. I’ve been on a big Beatles kick lately.” By “lately” Ig meant the last seven years. “You like them?”
“Don’t really know them. What are they like?”
The notion that anyone in the world might not know the Beatles staggered Ig. He said, “You know…like, the Beatles. John Lennon and Paul McCartney.”
“Oh, them,” Lee said, but the way he said it, Ig knew he was embarrassed and only pretending to know. Not pretending too hard either.
Ig didn’t speak but went to the rack of CDs and studied his Beatles collection, trying to decide where L
ee ought to start. First he thought Sgt. Pepper and pulled it out. But then he wondered if Lee would really enjoy it or if he’d find all the horns and accordions and sitars disorienting, if he’d be turned off by the lunatic mix of styles, rock jams turning into English pub sing-alongs turning into mellow jazz. He’d probably want something easier to digest, a collection of clear, catchy melodies, something recognizable as rock ’n’ roll. The White Album, then. Except coming in at The White Album was like walking into a movie in the last twenty minutes. You’d get action, but you wouldn’t know who the characters were or why you were supposed to care. Really, the Beatles were a story. Listening to them was like reading a book. You had to start with Please Please Me. Ig pulled down the whole stack and put them on the bed.
“That’s a lot of stuff to listen to. When do you want them back?”
Ig didn’t know he was giving them away until the moment Lee asked the question. Lee had pulled him out of the roaring darkness and pounded the breath back into his chest and for it had been given nothing. A hundred dollars of CDs was nothing. Nothing.
“You can have them,” Ig said.
Lee gave him a confused look. “For the magazines? You have to pay for those in cash.”
“No. Not for the magazines.”
“What then?”
“Not letting me drown.”
Lee looked at the tower of CDs, put a tentative hand on top of them.
“Thank you,” he said. “I don’t know what to say. Except maybe you’re crazy. And you don’t need to.”
Ig opened his mouth, then closed it, briefly stricken with emotion, with liking Lee Tourneau too much to manage a simple reply. Lee gave him another puzzled, curious stare, then quickly looked away.
“Do you play same as your dad?” Lee asked, pulling Ig’s trumpet out of his case.
“My brother plays. I know how, but I don’t really myself.”
“Why not?”
“I can’t breathe.”
Lee frowned.
“I mean, I have asthma. I run out of air when I try to play.”
“I guess you’ll never be famous.” He didn’t say it unkindly. It was just an observation.
“My dad isn’t famous. My dad plays jazz. You can’t get famous playing jazz.” Anymore, Ig silently added.
“I’ve never heard one of your dad’s records. I don’t know much about jazz. It’s like the stuff that’s always playing in the background in movies about old-time gangsters, right?”
“Usually.”
“I bet I’d like that. Music for a scene with gangsters and those girls in the short straight skirts. Flappers.”
“Right.”
“And then the killers walk in with machine guns,” Lee said, looking excited for the first time since Ig had met him. “Killers in fedoras. And they hose the place down. Blow away a bunch of champagne glasses and rich people and old mobsters.” Miming a tommy gun as he said it. “I think I like that kind of music. Music to kill people to.”
“I’ve got some stuff like that. Hang on.” Ig pulled out a disc by Glenn Miller and another by Louis Armstrong. He put them with the Beatles. Then, because Armstrong was filed below AC/DC, Ig asked, “Did you like Back in Black?”
“Is that an album?”
Ig grabbed Back in Black and put it on Lee’s growing pile. “Got a song on it called ‘Shoot to Thrill.’ Perfect for gunfights and breaking stuff.”
But Lee was bent over the open trumpet case, looking at Ig’s other treasures—picking at the redhead’s crucifix on the slender golden chain. It bothered Ig to see him touching it, and he was gripped by an urge to slam the trumpet case shut…on Lee’s fingers if he pulled his hand away too slowly. Ig brushed the impulse aside, as briskly as if it were a spider on the back of his hand. He was disappointed in himself for feeling such a thing, even for a moment. Lee looked like a child displaced by a flood—cold water still dripping off the tip of his nose—and Ig wished he had stopped in the kitchen to make cocoa. He wanted to give Lee a cup of hot soup and some buttered toast. There were any number of things he wanted Lee to have. Just not the cross.
He moved patiently around to the side of the bed and reached into the case to collect his stack of bills, turning his shoulder so Lee had to straighten up and take his hand away from the cross. Ig counted off a five and ten ones.
“For the magazines,” Ig said.
Lee folded the money and tucked it into his pocket. “You like pictures of snatch?”
“Snatch?”
“Pussy.” He said it without awkwardness—they might’ve still been talking music.
Ig had missed a transition somewhere. “Sure. Who doesn’t?”
“My distributor has all kinds of magazines. I’ve seen some strange stuff in his storeroom. Stuff that’ll turn your head around. There’s a whole magazine of pregnant women.”
“Ulh!” Ig cried, joyously disgusted.
“We live in troubled times,” Lee said, without any notable disapproval. “There’s one of old women, too. Still Horny is a big one. That’s chicks over sixty fingering themselves. You got any porn?”
Ig’s answer was in his face.
“Let’s see,” Lee said.
Ig got Candy Land out of his closet, one of a dozen games stuffed in the back.
“Candy Land,” Lee said. “Nice.”
Ig didn’t understand at first, then he did. He’d never thought about it, had only stuck his jack-off literature there because no one played Candy Land anymore, not because it had any symbolic meaning.
He set it on the bed and removed the lid and the board, took out the plastic tray that held the pieces. Beneath was a Victoria’s Secret catalog, and the Rolling Stone with Demi Moore naked on the cover.
“This is pretty tame material,” Lee said, not unkindly. “I’m not sure you even need to hide this stuff, Ig.”
Lee shifted aside the Rolling Stone and discovered an issue of Uncanny X-Men beneath it, the one with Jean Grey dressed in a black corset. He smiled placidly.
“This is a good one. Because Phoenix is so sweet and good and caring, and then bam! Out comes the black leather. That your thing? Cute girls with the devil inside?”
Ig said, “I don’t have a thing. I don’t know how that got in there.”
“Everyone has a thing,” Lee said, and of course he was right. Ig had been thinking almost exactly this when Lee said he didn’t know what music he liked. “Still, whacking off over comics…that’s unwell.” He said it calmly, with a certain appreciation. “You ever had anyone do it for you? Jerk you off?”
For a moment the room seemed to expand around Ig, as if it were the inside of a balloon filling with air. The thought crossed his mind that Lee might be about to offer a hand job, and if that were to happen—a terrible, diseased thing to contemplate—then Ig would tell him he had nothing against gay people, he just wasn’t one himself.
But Lee went on, “Remember the girl I was with on Monday? She’s done it to me. She gave a little scream when I finished. Funniest thing I ever heard. I wish I had it on tape.”
“Seriously?” Ig asked, both relieved and shaken. “Has she been your girlfriend for a long time?”
“We don’t have a relationship like that. Not a boyfriend-girlfriend thing. She just comes over now and then to talk about boys and the people who are mean to her at school and stuff. She knows my door is open.” Ig almost laughed at this last statement, which he assumed was ironic, but then held back. Lee seemed to mean it genuinely. He went on, “The times she’s whacked me off were kind of a favor she did. It’s a good thing, too. If not for that, I’d probably club her to death, the way she gabs on all the time.”
Lee gently put the Uncanny X-Men back into the box, and Ig reassembled Candy Land and replaced it in his closet. When he came back to the bed, Lee was holding the cross in one hand, had picked it out of the trumpet case. At the sight, Ig’s heart took the elevator to the basement.
“This is pretty,” Lee said. “Belong to you?”
<
br /> “No,” Ig said.
“No. I didn’t think so. Looks like something a girl would wear. Where’d you get it?”
The easiest thing to do would’ve been to lie, to say it belonged to his mother. But lies turned Ig’s tongue to clay, and anyway, Lee had saved his life.
“In church,” Ig said, knowing that Lee would figure out the rest. He did not know why it felt so catastrophically wrong to simply tell the truth about such a little thing. It was never wrong to tell the truth.
Lee had looped both ends of the golden chain around his index finger, so the cross dangled across his palm. “It’s broken,” he said.
“That’s how I found it.”
“Was a redhead wearing it? Girl about our age?”
“She left it. I was going to fix it for her.”
“With this?” Lee asked, knuckling the Swiss Army knife that Ig had been using to bend and twist at the chain’s gold rings. “You can’t fix it with this. For something like this, you probably need a pair of needle-nose pliers. You know, my dad has some precision tools. I bet I could fix it up in five minutes. I’m good at that: fixing things.”
Lee turned his gaze to Ig at last. He didn’t need to ask outright for Ig to know what he wanted. Ig felt ill at the thought of giving it to him, and his throat was unaccountably tight, the way it sometimes got at the onset of an asthma attack. But there was really only one possible reply that would allow him to keep his own sense of himself as a decent and selfless person.
“Sure,” Ig said. “Why don’t you take it home and see if you can do something with it?”
Lee said, “Okay. I’ll fix it up, and give it back to her on Sunday.”
“Would you?” Ig asked. It felt as if there were a smooth wooden shaft going through the pit of his stomach, with a crank on one end, and someone was beginning to turn it, methodically twisting his insides around it.
Lee nodded and returned his gaze to the cross. “Thanks. I’d like that. I was asking you what your thing is. You know, what kind of girl you like. She’s my kind of thing. There’s something about her, you can just tell she’s never been naked in front of any guy, except her father. You know I saw it break? The necklace. I was standing in the pew right behind her. I tried to help her with it. She’s cute, but a little snotty. I think it’s fair to say most pretty girls are snotty until they get their cherry popped. Because, you know, it’s the most valuable thing they’re ever going to have. It’s the thing that keeps boys sniffing around them and thinking about them—the idea of getting to be the one. But after someone does it, they can relax and act like a normal girl. Anyway. I appreciate you letting me have this. It’ll give me a nice in with her.”
