by Joe Hill
“No prob,” Ig said, feeling as if he’d given away something much more special than a cross on a gold necklace. It was fair—Lee deserved something good after saving Ig’s life and not getting any credit. But Ig wondered why it didn’t feel fair.
He said Lee should come over when it wasn’t raining and swim sometime, and Lee said all right. Ig felt a certain disconnect from his own voice, as if it were coming from some other source in the room—the radio, perhaps.
Lee was partway to the door with his satchel over his shoulder when Ig saw he had left his CDs. “Take your music,” he said. He was glad Lee was going. He wanted to lie on his bed for a while and rest. His stomach hurt.
Lee glanced at them and then said, “I don’t have anything to listen to them on.”
Ig wondered again how poor Lee was—if he had an apartment or a trailer, if he woke at night to screams and banging doors, the cops arresting the drunk next door for beating his girlfriend again. Another reason not to resent him for taking the cross. Ig hated that he could not be happy for Lee, that he could not take pleasure in what he was giving away, but he wasn’t happy, he was jealous.
Shame turned him around and got him rummaging in his desk. He stood up with the portable Walkman disc player he’d gotten for Christmas, and a pair of headphones.
“Thanks,” Lee said when Ig handed the disc player to him. “You don’t have to give me all this stuff. I didn’t do anything. I was just standing there and…you know.”
Ig was surprised at the intensity of his own reaction, a lightening of the heart, a rush of affection for the skinny, pale kid with the unpracticed smile. Ig remembered the moment that he’d been saved. That every minute of his life from here on out was a gift, one Lee had offered to him. The tension uncoiled from his stomach, and he was able to breathe easy once again.
Lee stuffed the CD player and headphones and discs into his satchel before hoisting his bag. Ig watched from an upstairs window as Lee rode down the hill on his mountain board, through the drizzle, the fat wheels throwing up rooster tails of water from the gleaming asphalt.
TWENTY MINUTES LATER IG HEARD the Jag pull in with that sound he liked, a smooth revving noise right out of an action movie. He returned to the upstairs window again and looked down at the black car, expecting the doors to open and spill out Terry, Eric Hannity, and some girls, in a gush of laughter and cigarette smoke. But Terry got out alone and stood by the Jaguar awhile, then walked to the door slowly, as if he had a stiff back, as if he were a much older man who’d been driving for hours instead of just across town.
Ig was halfway down the stairs when Terry let himself in, water glittering in his messy thatch of black hair. He saw Ig staring down at him and gave him a tired smile.
“Hey, bro,” Terry said. “Got something for you.” And lobbed it, a dark roundness, the size of a crabapple.
Ig clapped his hands around it, then looked at the white silhouette of the naked girl wearing the maple leaf over her crotch. The bomb was heavier than he imagined it would be, the grain rough, the surface cold.
“Your winnings,” Terry said.
“Oh,” Ig said. “Thanks. With what happened, I guess Eric forgot to pay up.” In fact, Ig had, days ago, casually come to accept that Eric Hannity was never going to pay, that he had got his nose broke for nothing.
“Yeah. Well. I reminded him.”
“Everything okay?”
“Now that he paid up it is.” Terry paused, one hand on the newel post, then said, “He didn’t want to fork it over because you wore sneakers when you went down the hill or some such shit.”
“Well. That’s weak. That’s the weakest thing I’ve ever heard,” Ig said. Terry did not reply, just stood there rubbing his thumb against the edge of the newel post. “Still. Did you guys really get into it? It’s just a firecracker.”
“No it isn’t. You see what it did to the turkey?”
This struck Ig as a funny thing to say, missing the point. Terry gave Ig a guilty-sorry smile and said, “You don’t know what he was going to do with that. There’s a kid from school Eric doesn’t like. A kid I know from band. Good kid. Ben Townsend. But, see, Ben’s mother is in the insurance business. Like, answers phones or something. So Eric has a hate on for him.”
“Just because his mom works in insurance?”
“You know Eric’s father isn’t doing too well, right? Like, he can’t lift things and he can’t work and he has trouble…he has trouble taking a dump. It’s just really sad. They were supposed to get all this insurance money, but they haven’t yet. I guess they’re never going to. And so Eric wants to get even with someone, and he sort of fixed on Ben.”
“Just because his mother works for the insurance company that’s screwing Eric’s dad?”
“No!” Terry cried. “That’s the part of this that is most fucked. She works for a completely different insurance company.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“No. It doesn’t. And don’t spend too much time trying to work it out, because you never will. Eric was gonna use this thing to blow something up that belonged to Ben Townsend, and he called me to see if I wanted in.”
“What was he going to blow up?”
“His cat.”
Ig felt a little exploded himself, blown up with a kind of horror that bordered on wonder. “No. Maybe that’s what Eric said, but he was screwing with you. I mean, c’mon…a cat?”
“He tried to pretend he was screwing with me when he saw how pissed I was. And he only gave me that cherry bomb when I threatened to tell his father about the shit we’ve been doing. Then he threw it at my head and told me to get the fuck out. I know for a fact Eric’s daddy has perpetrated several acts of police brutality on Eric’s ass.”
“Even though he can’t take a shit?”
“He can’t take a shit, but he can swing a belt. I hope to God that Eric is never a cop. Him and his dad are just alike. You’d have the right to remain silent with his boot on your throat.”
“Would you really have told his dad about—”
“What? No. No way. How could I tattle about all the stuff Eric’s blown up when I was in on it myself? That’s, like, the first rule of blackmail.” Terry was silent a moment, then said, “You think you know someone. But mostly you just know what you want to know.” He looked up at Ig with clear eyes and said, “He is a badass. Eric. And I always felt kind of like a badass when I was with him. You’re not in band, so you don’t know, Ig. It’s hard to be desired by women and feared by men when your primary skill is playing ‘America the Beautiful’ on the trumpet. I liked the way people looked at us. That’s what was in it for me. I couldn’t tell you what was in it for him. Except he liked that I’d pay for things and that we know some famous people.”
Ig rolled the bomb around and around in his hand, feeling that there was something he ought to say but not knowing how to say it. What came to him at last was hopelessly inadequate. “What do you think I should blow up with this?”
“I don’t know what. Just don’t leave me out, okay? Sit on it a few weeks. After I have my license, I’ll drive us down to Cape Cod with a bunch of the guys. We can have a bonfire on the beach and find something there.”
“Last big explosion of the summer,” Ig said.
“Yeah. Ideally I’d like to see us leave a swath of destruction that can be seen from orbit. Barring that, let’s at least try to destroy something precious and beautiful that can never be replaced,” Terry said.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE WHOLE WAY TO CHURCH, Ig’s palms were sweating, felt tacky and strange. His stomach was upset, too. He knew why, and it was ridiculous—he didn’t even know her name and had never spoken a word to her.
Except that she had signaled him. A church full of people, many her own age, and she had looked right at him and had sent him a message with her cross of burning gold. Even now he wasn’t sure why he’d let her go, how he could’ve given her away like a baseball card or a CD. He told himself
Lee was a lonely trailer-park kid who needed someone, that things had a way of working out how they were supposed to. He tried to feel good about what he had done, but there was instead, rising within him, a black wall of horror. He could not imagine what had compelled him to allow Lee to take her cross away from him. Lee would have it with him today. He would give it to her, and she would say thank you, and they would talk after church. In his mind they were already walking out together; as she went by, the redhead glanced Ig’s way, but her gaze slid over him without any recognition at all—the repaired cross glittering in the hollow of her throat.
Lee was there, in the same pew, and he was wearing her cross around his own throat. It was the first thing Ig noticed, and his reaction was simple and biochemical. It was as if he had downed a painfully hot cup of coffee, all at once. His stomach knotted and burned. His blood surged furiously, as if hopping with caffeination.
The pew in front of Lee remained empty until the last moments just before the service began, and then three stout old ladies slid in where the girl had sat the week before. Lee and Ig spent much of the first twenty minutes craning their heads, searching for her, but she wasn’t there. That hair of hers, a rope of braided copper wire, would have been impossible to miss. Finally Lee looked across the aisle at Ig and lifted his shoulders in a comical shrug, and Ig gave an exaggerated shrug back, as if he were Lee’s co-conspirator in his attempt to connect with Morse Code Girl.
Ig wasn’t, though. He bowed his head when it was time to say the Lord’s Prayer, but what Ig was praying for wasn’t a part of the standard text. He wanted the cross back. It didn’t have to be right. He wanted it more than he’d ever wanted anything, more than he’d wanted to breathe when he was lost in that fatal rush of black water and roaring souls. He didn’t know her name, but he knew they were good at having fun together, at being together; the ten minutes when she’d been flashing that light into his face were the best ten minutes he’d ever spent in church. Some things you didn’t give away, no matter how much you owed.
WHEN THE SERVICES WERE OVER, Ig stood with his father’s hand on his shoulder, watching people file past. His family was always among the last to leave any crowded place: church, a movie theater, a baseball stadium. Lee Tourneau went by and dipped his head to Ig in a dismissive sort of nod that seemed to say, Somes you win and somes you lose.
As soon as the aisle was clear, Ig crossed to the pew where the girl had sat the week before and then sank to one knee there and began to tie his shoe. His father looked back at him, but Ig nodded that they should go on and he would catch up. He watched until his family had moved out of the nave before quitting with the shoe.
The three stout old ladies who had settled in Morse Code Girl’s former pew were still there, collecting purses and arranging summer shawls over their shoulders. As he glanced up at them now, it came to Ig that he had seen them before. They had walked out with the girl’s mother last Sunday, in a chattering, social pack, and at the time Ig had wondered if they were aunts. Had one of them even been in the car with the girl after the services? Ig wasn’t sure. He wanted to think so, but suspected he was letting wishful thinking color memory.
“Excuse me,” Ig said.
“Yes?” asked the lady closest to him, a big woman, hair dyed a metallic shade of brown.
Ig wagged a finger at the pew and shook his head. “There was a girl here. Last Sunday. She left something by accident, and I was going to give it back. Red hair?”
The woman didn’t reply but remained where she was, even though the aisle was clear enough to allow her to exit. Finally Ig realized she was waiting for him to make eye contact. When he did, and saw the knowing, narrow-eyed way she was looking at him, he felt his pulse flutter.
“Merrin Williams,” said the woman, “and her parents were only in town last weekend to take possession of their new house. I know because I sold it to them and showed them this church as well. They’re back in Rhode Island now, packing their things. She’ll be here next Sunday. I’m sure I’ll be seeing them again, soon enough. If you want, I could pass along whatever it is Merrin left here.”
“No,” Ig said. “That’s okay.”
“Mm,” said the woman. “I thought you’d rather give it to her yourself. You have that look about you.”
“What…what look?” Ig asked.
“I’d say it,” said the woman, “but we’re in church.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE NEXT TIME LEE CAME OVER, they went into the pool and played basketball in the shallow end until Ig’s mother came out with grilled ham-and-brie sandwiches on a plate. Lydia couldn’t just make a grilled ham-and-cheese with yellow American like other moms—it had to have a pedigree, express in some way her own more sophisticated and worldly palate. Ig and Lee sat eating them on reclining patio chairs, with water puddling under their seats. For some reason one or the other of them was always dripping wet when they were together.
Lee was polite to Ig’s mother, but after she walked away, he peeled back the toast and looked at the milky melted cheese on the ham.
“Someone came all over my sandwich,” he said.
Ig choke-laughed on a bite, which turned into a coughing fit, harsh, painful in his chest. Lee automatically thumped him on the back, rescuing Ig from himself. It was getting to be a habit, an integral part of their relationship.
“For most people it’s just lunch. For you it’s another chance to get yourself killed.” Lee squinted at him in the sunlight and said, “You’re probably the most death-prone person I know.”
“I’m harder to finish off than I look,” Ig said. “Like a cockroach.”
“I liked AC/DC,” Lee said. “If you were going to shoot someone, you’d really want to do it while you were listening to them.”
“What about the Beatles? Did you feel like shooting anyone listening to them?”
Lee considered seriously for a moment, then said, “Myself.”
Ig laughed again. Lee’s secret was that he never strained for the laugh, didn’t even always seem to know that the things he said were amusing. He had a restraint, an aura of glassy and unflappable cool, that made Ig think of a secret agent in a movie, defusing a warhead—or programming one. At other times he was such a blank—he never laughed, not at his own jokes, not at Ig’s—it was as if Lee were an alien scientist, come to earth to learn about human emotions. Kind of like Mork.
At the same time he was laughing, Ig was distressed. Not liking the Beatles was almost as bad as not knowing about them at all.
Lee saw the chagrin on his face and said, “I’ll give them back. You should have them back.”
“No,” Ig said. “Keep ’em and listen to them some more. Maybe you’ll hear something you like.”
“I did like some of it,” Lee said, but Ig knew he was lying. “There was that one…” and his voice trailed off, leaving Ig to guess at which of maybe sixty songs he might be referring to.
And Ig guessed it. “‘Happiness Is a Warm Gun’?”
Lee pointed a finger at him, cocked his thumb, and blew him away.
“What about the jazz? Did you like any of that?”
“Kind of. I don’t know. I couldn’t really hear the jazz stuff.”
“What do you mean?”
“I kept forgetting it was on. It’s like the music in the supermarket.”
Ig shivered. “So are you going to be a hit man when you grow up?” he asked.
“Why?”
“’Cause you only like music you can murder people to.”
“No. Just it ought to set the scene. Isn’t that the whole point of music? It’s like the background to what you’re doing.”
He wasn’t going to argue with Lee, but ignorance like that pained him. Hopefully, over the years of being best friends, Lee would learn the truth about music: that it was the third rail of life. You grabbed it to shock yourself out of the dull drag of hours, to feel something, to burn with all the emotions you didn’t get to experience in the ordinary run of
school and TV and loading the dishwasher after dinner. Ig supposed that growing up in a trailer park, Lee had missed out on a lot of the good things. It was going to take him a few years to catch up.
“So what are you going to do when you grow up?” Ig asked.
Lee tucked away the rest of his sandwich and, with his mouth stuffed full, said, “I’d like to be in Congress.”
“For real? To do what?”
“I’d like to write a law that says irresponsible bitches who do drugs have to get sterilized so they can’t have kids they aren’t going to take care of,” Lee said, without heat.
Ig had wondered why he didn’t talk about his mother.
Lee’s hand drifted to the cross around his neck, nestled just above his clavicles. After a moment he said, “I’ve been thinking about her. Our girl from church.”
“I bet,” Ig said, trying to make it sound funny, but it came off a little harsh and irritated, even to his own ears.
Lee appeared not to notice. His eyes were distant, unfocused. “I bet she isn’t from around here. I’ve never seen her in church before. She was probably visiting family or something. Bet we never see her again.” He paused, then added, “The one that got away.” Not melodramatically, but with a knowing sense of humor about it.
The truth caught in Ig’s throat, like that lump of sandwich that wouldn’t go down. It was there, waiting to be told—she’ll be back next Sunday—but he couldn’t say it. He couldn’t lie either, didn’t have the nerve. He was the worst liar he knew.
