by Joe Hill
“That’s what I thought about Regan and me.” They were in Merrin’s bedroom, and her back was to Ig, her head bent. She was brushing her hair. Without looking at him, she went on, “But she said some things when she was sick—some really mean things. Things I never knew she thought about me. When she died, I felt like I hardly knew her. Course, I got off easy, compared to the things she said to my parents. I don’t think I can ever forgive her for what she said to Dad.” She spoke this last bit lightly, as if they were discussing a matter of no real importance, and then was quiet.
It was years before they talked about Regan again. But when Merrin told him, a few days later, that she was going to be a doctor, Ig didn’t need to ask what her specialty was going to be.
On the last day of August, Ig and Merrin were at the blood drive, across the street from the church, in the Sacred Heart community center, handing out paper cups of Tang and Lorna Doone sandwich cookies. A few ceiling fans pushed a sluggish current of hot air around the room, and Ig and Merrin were drinking as much juice as they were handing out. He was just working up his nerve to finally ask her over for a swim when Terry walked in.
He stood on the other side of the room, searching for Ig, and Ig lifted a hand to get his attention. Terry jerked his head: Get over here. There was something stiff and tense and worrisome in this gesture. In some ways it was worrisome enough just seeing Terry there. Terry wasn’t the sort to come anywhere near a church function on a wide-open summer afternoon if he could avoid it. Ig was only half aware of Merrin following him across the room as he threaded his way between gurneys, donors stretched upon them, tubes in their arms. The room smelled of disinfectant and blood.
When Ig got to his brother, Terry gripped his arm, squeezing it painfully. He turned him through the door and out into the foyer, where they could be alone. The doors were open to the bright, hot, stillborn day.
“Did you give it to him?” Terry asked. “Did you give him the cherry?”
Ig didn’t have to ask who he was talking about. Terry’s voice, thin and harsh, frightened him. Needles of panic prickled in Ig’s chest.
“Is Lee okay?” Ig asked. It was Sunday afternoon. Lee had gone up to Gary’s the day before. It came to Ig now that he had not seen Lee in church that morning.
“Him and some other jokers taped a cherry bomb to the windshield of a junked car and ran. But it didn’t go off right away, and Lee thought the fuse went out. They do that. He was walking back to check on it when the windshield exploded and sprayed glass everywhere. Ig. They pulled a fucking sliver out of his left eye. They’re saying he’s lucky it didn’t go into his brain.”
Ig wanted to scream, but something was happening in his chest. His lungs had gone numb, as if injected with a dose of Novocain. He couldn’t speak, couldn’t force any sound up through his throat at all.
“Ig,” said Merrin. “Where’s your inhaler?” Her voice calm and steady. She already knew all about his asthma.
He struggled to pull it out of his pocket and dropped it. She got it for him, and he put it in his mouth and took a long, damp suck.
Terry said, “Look, Ig. Ig, it’s not just about his eye. He’s in a lot of trouble. What I heard is some cops showed up with the ambulance. You know that mountain board of his? Turns out it’s stolen. They pulled a two-hundred-dollar leather jacket off his girlfriend, too. The police asked his father for permission to search his room this morning, and it was full of stolen shit. Lee worked out at the mall for a couple weeks, at the pet store, and he had a key to an access hallway that runs behind the shops. He helped himself to piles of stuff. He had all these magazines he ripped off from Mr. Paperback, and he was running a scam, selling them to people, pretending he was raising money for some made-up charity. Shit is messed up. He’ll be in juvie court if any of the stores press charges. In some ways, if he goes blind in one eye, it’ll be the best thing for him. Might win him some sympathy, maybe he won’t—”
“Oh, God,” Ig said, hearing if he goes blind in one eye, and they pulled a fucking sliver out; everything else was just noise, Terry playing an avant-garde riff on his trumpet. Ig was crying and squeezing Merrin’s hand. When had she taken his hand? He didn’t know.
“You’re going to have to talk to him,” Terry said. “You better have a word and make sure he’s going to keep his mouth shut. We got to do some ass covering here. If anyone finds out you gave him that cherry bomb—or that I gave it to you—oh, Jesus, Ig. They could throw me out of band.”
Ig couldn’t speak, needed another long suck on his inhaler. He was shaking.
“Will you give him a second?” Merrin snapped. “Let him get his breath back.”
Terry gave her a surprised, wondering look. For a moment his jaw hung slack. Then he closed his mouth and was silent.
“Come on, Ig,” she said. “Let’s go outside.”
Ig walked with her, down the steps, into the sunlight, his legs trembling. Terry hung back, let them go.
The air was still and weighted with moisture and a sense of building pressure. The skies had been clear earlier in the morning, but now there were heavy clouds in them, as dark and vast as a fleet of aircraft carriers. A hot gust of wind rose from nowhere and battered at them. That wind smelled like hot iron, like train tracks in the sun, like old pipes, and when Ig closed his eyes, he saw the Evel Knievel trail, the way the two half-buried pipes fell away down the slope like the rails of a roller coaster.
“It isn’t your fault,” she said. “He isn’t going to blame you. C’mon. The blood drive is almost over. Let’s get our stuff and go see him. Right now. You and me.”
Ig shrank at the thought of going with her. They had traded—the cherry bomb for her. It would be awful to bring her with him. It would be rubbing it in. Lee had only saved his life, and Ig had repaid him by taking Merrin away, and this was what happened, and Lee was blind in one eye, his eye was gone, and Ig had done that to him. Ig got the girl and his life, and Lee got a sliver of glass and ruin, and Ig took another deep suck off the inhaler, was having trouble breathing.
When he had enough air to speak, he said, “You can’t come with me.” A part of him was thinking already that the only way for him to atone was to be done with her, but another part of him, the same part that had traded for the cross in the first place, knew he wasn’t going to do that. He had decided weeks ago, had made a deal, not just with Lee but with himself, that he would do what was necessary to be the boy walking next to Merrin Williams. Giving her up wouldn’t make him the good guy in this story. It was too late to be the good guy.
“Why not? He’s my friend, too,” she said, and Ig was at first surprised at her, then at himself, for not realizing that this was true.
“I don’t know what he’ll say. He might be mad at me. He might say stuff about—about a trade.” As soon as he said it, he knew he shouldn’t have said it.
“What trade?” He shook his head, but she asked again. “What did you trade?”
“You won’t be mad?”
“I don’t know. Tell me, and then we’ll see.”
“After I found your cross, I gave it to Lee so he could fix it. But then he was going to keep it, and I had to trade him to get it back. And the cherry bomb was what I traded.”
She furrowed her brow. “So?”
He stared helplessly into her face, willing her to understand, but she didn’t understand, so he said, “He was going to keep it so he’d have a way to meet you.”
For one moment longer, her eyes were clouded, uncomprehending. Then they cleared. She did not smile.
“You think you traded—” she started, then stopped. A moment later she started again. She was staring at him with a cool, ball-shriveling calm. “You think you traded for me, Ig? Is that how you think all this worked? And do you think if he had returned the cross to me instead of you, then Lee and I would be—” But she didn’t say that either, because to go any further would be to admit that she and Ig were together now, something they both understood but had n
ot dared to say aloud. She started a third time. “Ig. I left it on the pew for you.”
“You left it—what?”
“I was bored. I was so bored. And I was sitting there imagining a hundred more mornings, roasting in the sun in that church, dying inside one Sunday at a time while Father Mould blabbed away about my sins. I needed something to look forward to. Some reason to be there. I didn’t just want to listen to some guy talk about sin. I wanted to do some myself. And then I saw you sitting there like a little priss, hanging on every word like it was all so interesting, and I knew Ig, I just knew—that fucking with your head would present me with hours of entertainment.”
AS IT HAPPENED, IN THE END Ig did go and see Lee Tourneau alone. When Merrin and Ig started back to the community center, to clean up the pizza boxes and the empty juice bottles, there came a peal of thunder that lasted for at least ten seconds, a low, steady rumble that was not so much heard as felt. It caused the bones in Ig’s body to shiver like tuning forks. Five minutes later the rain was clattering on the roof, so loudly he had to shout at Merrin to be heard over it, even when she was standing right next to him. It was so dark, the water coming down with such force, that it was difficult to see to the curb from the open doors. They had thought they might be able to bike to Lee’s, but Merrin’s father turned up to bring her home in his station wagon, and there was no opportunity to go anywhere together.
Terry had gotten his license two days before, passing the test on his first try, and the next day he drove Ig over to Lee Tourneau’s. The storm had split trees and unscrewed telephone poles from the soil, and Terry had to steer the Jaguar around torn branches and overturned mailboxes. It was as if some great subterranean explosion, some final, powerful detonation, had rattled the whole town and left Gideon in a state of ruin.
Harmon Gates was a tangle of suburban streets, houses painted citrus colors, attached two-car garages, the occasional backyard swimming pool. Lee’s mother, the nurse, a woman in her fifties, was outside the Tourneaus’ Queen Anne, pulling branches off her parked Cadillac, her mouth puckered in a look of irritation. Terry let Ig out, said to call home when he wanted a ride back.
Lee had a large bedroom in their finished basement. Lee’s mother walked Ig down and opened the door onto a cavernous gloom, in which the only light was the blue glow of a television. “You’ve got a visitor,” she said rather tonelessly.
She let Ig past her and closed the door behind him, so they could be alone.
Lee’s shirt was off, and he sat on the edge of his bed, clutching the frame. A Benson rerun was on the tube, although Lee had the volume turned all the way down, so it was just a source of light and moving figures. A bandage covered his left eye and was wrapped around and around his skull, swaddling much of his head. The shades were pulled down. He did not look directly at Ig or at the TV; his gaze pointed downward.
“Dark in here,” Ig said.
“The sunlight hurts my head,” Lee said.
“How’s your eye?”
“They don’t know.”
“Is there any chance—”
“They think I won’t lose all the vision in it.”
“That’s good.”
Lee sat there. Ig waited.
“You know everything?”
“I don’t care,” Ig said. “You pulled me out of the river. That’s all I need to know.”
Ig was not aware that Lee was weeping until he made a snuffling sound of pain. He cried like someone enduring a small act of sadism—a cigarette ground out on the back of the hand. Ig took a step closer and kicked over a stack of CDs, discs he had given him.
“You want those back?” Lee asked.
“No.”
“What then? You want your money? I don’t have it.”
“What money?”
“For the magazines I sold you. The ones I stole.” He said the last word with an almost luxuriant bitterness.
“No.”
“Why are you here, then?”
“Because we’re friends.” Ig took another step closer and then cried out softly. Lee was weeping blood. It stained the bandage and dribbled down the side of his left cheek. Lee touched two fingers absentmindedly to his face. They came away red.
“Are you all right?” Ig asked.
“It hurts when I cry. I’ll have to learn how to stop feeling bad about things.” He breathed harshly, his shoulders rising and falling. “I should’ve told you. About everything. It was shitty, selling you those magazines. Lying to you about what they were for. After I got to know you better, I wanted to take it back, but it was too late. That’s not how friends treat friends.”
“We don’t want to start with that. I wish like hell I never gave you the cherry bomb.”
“Forget it,” Lee said. “I wanted it. I decided. You don’t got to worry about that. Just don’t make up your mind to hate me. I really need someone to still like me.”
He didn’t need to ask. The sight of the blood staining through the bandage made Ig’s knees weak. It took a great effort of will not to think how he had teased Lee with the cherry, talking about all the things they could blow up together with it. How he had worked to take Merrin away from Lee, who had walked into the water and pulled him out when he was drowning, a betrayal for which there could be no expiation.
He sat down beside Lee.
“She’ll tell you not to hang around me anymore,” Lee said.
“My mom? No. No, she’s glad I came to see you.”
“Not your mom. Merrin.”
“What are you talking about? She wanted to come with me. She’s worried about you.”
“Oh?” Lee quivered strangely, as if gripped by a chill. Then he said, “I know why this happened.”
“It was a shitty accident. That’s all.”
Lee shook his head. “It was to remind me.”
Ig was quiet, waiting, but Lee didn’t speak again.
“Remind you of what?” Ig asked.
Lee was struggling against tears. He wiped at the blood on his cheek with the back of one hand and left a long dark streak.
“Remind you of what?” Ig asked again, but Lee was shivering with the effort it took to keep from sobbing and never got around to telling him.
THE FIRE SERMON
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
IG DROVE AWAY FROM HIS PARENTS’ HOUSE, from his grandmother’s smashed body and smashed wheelchair, from Terry and Terry’s awful confession, with no immediate notion of where he was going. He knew, rather, only where he wasn’t going: to Glenna’s apartment, to town. He could not bear to see another human face, hear another human voice.
He was holding a door shut in his mind, throwing all his mental weight against it, while two men pushed against the other side, trying to force their way into his thoughts: his brother and Lee Tourneau. It took all his will to keep the invaders from barging into his last refuge, to keep them out of his head. He didn’t know what would happen when they pushed through that door at last, wasn’t sure what he would do.
Ig followed the narrow state highway, across sunlit open pastures and under trees that overhung the road, into corridors of flickering darkness. He saw a shopping cart upended in a ditch at the side of the road and wondered how it was that shopping carts sometimes found their way out here, where there was nothing. It went to show that no one knew, when they abandoned a thing, what misuses it would be put to later by others. Ig had abandoned Merrin Williams one night—had walked away from his best friend in the world, in a fit of immature, self-righteous anger—and look what had happened.
He thought about riding the Evel Knievel trail on the shopping-cart express, ten years before, and his left hand rose unconsciously to touch his nose, still crooked where he’d broken it. His mind threw up an image, unbidden, of his grandmother riding her wheelchair down the long hill in front of the house, the big rubber wheels banging over the rutted grassy slope. He wondered what she had broken when she finally slammed into the fence. He hoped her neck. Vera had told him that
whenever she saw him, she wanted to be dead, and Ig lived to serve. He liked to think he had always been a conscientious grandson. If he had killed her, he would look at it as a good start. But there was still plenty of work ahead.
His stomach cramped, which he wrote off as a symptom of his unhappiness until it began to gurgle as well, and he had to admit to himself he was hungry. He tried to think where he could get food with a minimum of human interaction and at that moment saw The Pit gliding by on his left.
It was the place of their last supper, where he’d spent his final evening with Merrin. He had not been in there since. He doubted he was welcome. This thought alone was an invitation. Ig turned in to the parking lot.
It was early afternoon, the indolent, timeless period that followed lunch and came before people began to show up for their after-work drink. There were only a few parked cars, belonging, Ig guessed, to the more serious sort of alcoholic. The board out front read:
10¢ Wings & 2$ Bud
Ladys Nite Thurs Come and See Us Girls
Rah Rah Gideon Saints
He stood up from the car, the sun behind him, his shadow three yards long, penciled on the dirt, a black-horned stick figure, the spurs of bone on his head pointing toward the red door of The Pit.
WHEN HE CAME THROUGH THE DOOR, Merrin was already there. Although it was crowded, the place full of college kids watching the game, he spotted her right away. She sat in their usual booth, turned to face him. The sight of her, as it always did—especially when they hadn’t been together in a while—had the curious effect of reminding him of his own body, the bare skin under his clothes. He hadn’t seen her in three weeks, and after tonight he wouldn’t see her again until Christmas, but in between they would have shrimp cocktail and some beers and some fun in the cool, freshly laundered sheets of Merrin’s bed. Merrin’s father and mother were at their camp on Winnipesaukee, and they’d have her place all to themselves. Ig went dry in the mouth at the thought of what was waiting after dinner, and a part of him was sorry they were bothering with drinks and food at all. Another part of him, though, felt it was necessary to not be in a hurry, to take their time with the evening.
