by Joe Hill
The shopkeeper was an old man with a scholarly look, in granny glasses and a sweater that buttoned up the front. He slumped behind the counter with his chin on his fist, leafing through the New York Review of Books. He glanced at Ig without interest and began to ring up his purchases.
As he pressed the keys of the cash register, he confessed to Ig that his wife of forty years had Alzheimer’s, and he had been thinking about luring her to the basement stairs and pushing her down them. He felt sure a broken neck would be ruled an accident. Wendy had loved him with her body, and written him letters every week while he was in the army, and given him two fine daughters, but he was tired of listening to her rave and washing her, and he wanted to go live with Sally, an old friend, in Boca Raton. When his wife died, he could collect an insurance payment of almost three-quarters of a million dollars, and then there would be golf and tennis and good meals with Sally for however many years he had left. He wanted to know what Ig thought about it. Ig said he thought he would burn in hell. The shopkeeper shrugged and said of course—that went without saying.
He spoke to Ig in Russian, and it was in this language that Ig gave his reply, although he didn’t know Russian, had never studied it. Yet he was entirely unsurprised by his sudden, undeserved fluency. After speaking to Terry in their mother’s voice, it seemed a small enough thing. Besides: The language of sin was universal, the original Esperanto.
Ig started away from the cash register, thinking how he’d fooled Terry, how something in him had been able to bring forth just exactly the voice Terry wanted to hear. He wondered at the limits of such a power, wondered how completely he could lead another mind astray. He stopped at the door and looked back, staring with interest at the shopkeeper, who sat behind the counter looking at his paper once again.
“Aren’t you going to answer your phone?” Ig asked.
The shopkeeper lifted his head to stare at him, his eyebrows bunched together in puzzlement.
“It’s ringing,” Ig said. The horns pounded with a feeling of pressure and weight, entirely pleasurable.
The shopkeeper frowned at the silent phone. He picked it up and put it to his ear. Even from across the room, Ig could hear the dial tone.
“Robert, it’s Sally,” Ig said—but the voice that came from his lips was not his own. It was hoarse, deep, but unmistakably female, and with a Bronx twang; a voice entirely unfamiliar, and yet he was sure it was the one that belonged to Sally Whoever.
The shopkeeper screwed up his face in confusion and said to the empty line, “Sally? We just talked a few hours ago. I thought you were trying to save on the long distance.”
The horns throbbed, in a state of sensual exhilaration.
“I’ll save money on long distance when I don’t have to call you every day,” Ig said in the voice of Sally in Boca Raton. “When are you coming down here? This waiting is killing me.”
The shopkeeper said, “I can’t. You know I can’t. Do you know what it would cost to put Wendy in a home? What would we live on?” Speaking to a dead line.
“Who said we need to live like Rockefellers? I don’t need oysters. Tuna salad will do. You want to wait until she dies, but what if I go first? Then where are we? I’m not a young woman, and you aren’t a young man. Put her in a place where people will care for her, and then get on a plane and come down here so someone can care for you.”
“I promised her I wouldn’t put her in a home while she was alive.”
“She isn’t the person you made that promise to anymore, and I’m scared what you might do if you stay with her. Pick a sin we can both live with, is what I ask. Give me a call when you’ve got a ticket, and I’ll come get you at the airport.”
Ig broke the connection then, let go; the painful-sweet feeling of pressure drained from the horns. The shopkeeper drew the phone away from his ear and stared at it, lips parted slightly in confusion. The dial tone droned. Ig eased himself out the door. The shopkeeper didn’t look up, had forgotten all about him.
IG BUILT A FIRE in the chimney, then opened the first bottle of wine and drank deeply, without waiting for it to breathe. The fumes filled his head, dizzying him, a sweet asphyxiation, loving hands around his throat. He felt he ought to be working on a plan, ought to have decided by now the proper way to deal with Lee Tourneau, but it was hard to think while staring into the fire. The ecstatic movement of the flames transfixed him. He marveled at the whirl of sparks and the orange tumble of falling coals, marveled at the bitter-harsh taste of the wine, which peeled away thought like paint stripper going to work on old paint. He tugged restlessly at his goatee, enjoying the feel of it, glad for it, felt that it made his thinning hair more acceptable. When Ig was a child, all his heroes had been bearded men: Jesus, Abraham Lincoln, Dan Haggerty.
“Beards,” he muttered. “I am blessed in facial hair.”
He was on the second bottle of wine when he heard the fire whispering to him, suggesting plans and schemes, offering encouragement in a soft, hissing voice, putting forth theological arguments. Ig canted his head and listened to it, listened carefully, in a state of fascination. Sometimes he nodded in agreement. The voice of the fire said the most sensible things. Over the next hour, Ig learned a great deal.
AFTER IT WAS DARK, he opened the hatch and found the teeming faithful gathered in the room beyond, waiting to hear The Word. Ig emerged from the chimney, and the crawling carpet of snakes—a thousand of them at least, lying on top of one another, braided together in mad tangles—cleared a path for him to the heap of bricks in the center of the floor. He climbed to the top of the little hill and settled himself with his pitchfork and his second bottle of wine. From his perch upon the low mound, he ministered to them.
“It is a matter of faith that the soul must be guarded, lest it be ruined and consumed,” Ig told them. “Christ himself forewarned his apostles to beware him who would destroy their souls in Hell. I advise you now that such a fate is a mathematical impossibility. The soul may not be destroyed. The soul goes on forever. Like the number pi, it is without cessation or conclusion. Like pi it is a constant. Pi is an irrational number, incapable of being made into a fraction, impossible to divide from itself. So, too, the soul is an irrational, indivisible equation that perfectly expresses one thing: you. The soul would be no good to the devil if it could be destroyed. And it is not lost when placed in Satan’s care, as is so often said. He always knows exactly how to put his finger on it.”
A thick brown rope of snake dared to climb the pile of bricks. Ig felt it moving across his bare left foot but paid it no mind at first, attending instead to the spiritual needs of his flock.
“Satan has long been known as the Adversary, but God fears women even more than He fears the devil—and is right to. She, with her power to bring life into the world, was truly made in the image of the Creator, not man, and in all ways has proved Herself a more deserving object of man’s worship than Christ, that unshaven fanatic who lusted for the end of the world. God saves—but not now, and not here. His salvation is on layaway. Like all grifters, He asks you to pay now and take it on faith that you will receive later. Whereas women offer a different sort of salvation, more immediate and fulfilling. They don’t put off their love for a distant, ill-defined eternity but make a gift of it in the here and now, frequently to those who deserve it least. So it was in my case. So it is for many. The devil and woman have been allies against God from the beginning, ever since Satan came to the first man in the form of a snake and whispered to Adam that true happiness was not to be found in prayer but in Eve’s cunt.”
The snakes writhed and hissed and fought for space at his feet. They bit one another, in a state close to rapture.
The thick brown snake at Ig’s feet began to twist around one of his ankles. He bent and lifted her in one hand, peering down at her at last. She was the color of dry, dead autumn leaves, aside from a single orange stripe that ran along her back, and at the end of her tail was a short, dusty rattle. Ig had never seen a rattle on a snak
e, outside of Clint Eastwood movies. She allowed herself to be hoisted in the air, made no effort to get away. The serpent peered back at him through golden eyes, crinkled like some kind of metallic foil and with long slotted pupils. Her black tongue flicked out, tasting the air. The cool material of her skin felt as loose on the muscle beneath as an eyelid closed over an eye. Her tail (but perhaps it was wrong to speak of tails; the whole thing was a tail, with a head stuck on one end) hung down against Ig’s arm. After a moment Ig looped the viper over his shoulders, wearing her like a loose scarf or like an unknotted tie. Her rattle lay against his naked chest.
He stared out at his audience, had forgotten what he was saying. He tipped his head back and had a sip of wine. It burned going down, a sweet swallowed flame. Christ, at least, was right in his love of devil drink, which, like the fruit of the garden, brought with it freedom and knowledge and certain ruination. Ig exhaled smoke and remembered his argument.
“Look at the girl I loved and who loved me and how she ended. She wore the cross of Jesus about her neck and was faithful to the church, which never did anything for her except take her money from the collection plate and call her a sinner to her face. She kept Jesus in her heart every day and prayed to Him every night, and you see the good it did her. Jesus on His cross. So many have wept for Jesus on His cross. As if no one else has ever suffered as He suffered. As if millions have not shuffled to worse deaths, and died unremembered. Would I had lived in the time of Pilate, it would have pleased me to twist the spear in His side myself, so proud of His own pain.
“Merrin and I were to each other like man and wife. But she wanted more than me, wanted freedom, a life, a chance to discover herself. She wanted other lovers and wanted me to take other lovers as well. I hated her for this. So did God. For simply imagining she might open her legs to another man, He turned His face from her, and when she called to Him, as she was raped and murdered, He pretended He did not hear. He felt, no doubt, that she received her due. I see God now as an unimaginative writer of popular fictions, someone who builds stories around sadistic and graceless plots, narratives that exist only to express His terror of a woman’s power to choose who and how to love, to redefine love as she sees fit, not as God thinks it ought to be. The author is unworthy of His own characters. The devil is first a literary critic, who delivers this untalented scribbler the public flaying He deserves.”
The serpent around his neck let her head fall to lovingly graze against Ig’s thigh. He stroked her gently as he came to the point, the crux of his fire sermon. “Only the devil loves humans for what they are and rejoices in their cunning schemes against themselves, their shameless curiosity, their lack of self-control, their impulse to break a rule as soon as they hear tell of it, their willingness to forsake their immortal soul for nookie. The devil knows that only those with the courage to risk their soul for love are entitled to have a soul, even if God does not.
“And where does this leave God? God loves man, we are told, but love must be proved by facts, not reasons. If you were in a boat and did not save a drowning man, you would burn in Hell for certain; yet God, in His wisdom, feels no need to use His power to save anyone from a single moment of suffering, and in spite of his inaction He is celebrated and revered. Show me the moral logic in it. You can’t. There is none. Only the devil operates with any reason, promising to punish those who would make earth itself Hell for those who dare to love and feel.
“I do not claim that God is dead. I tell you He is alive and well but in no position to offer salvation, being damned Himself for His criminal indifference. He was lost the moment He demanded fealty and worship before He would offer His protection. The unmistakable bargain of a gangster. Whereas the devil is anything but indifferent. The devil is always there to help those who are ready to sin, which is another word for ‘live.’ His phone lines are open. Operators are standing by.”
The viper around Iggy’s shoulders gave her rattle a dry little shake of approval, like castanets. He lifted her in one hand and kissed her cold head, then set her down. He returned to the chimney, the snakes boiling away from his feet to allow him to pass. He left his pitchfork leaning against the wall, just outside the hatch, and climbed inside but did not rest. For a time he read his Neil Diamond Bible by the firelight. He paused, twisting nervously at his goatee, considering the law in Deuteronomy that forbade clothes with mixed fibers. A problematic bit of Scripture. A matter that required thought.
“Only the devil wants man to have a wide range of lightweight and comfortable styles to choose from,” he murmured at last, trying out a new proverb. “Although there may be no forgiveness for polyester. On this one matter, Satan and the Lord are in agreement.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
IG WOKE, STIRRED BY A CLANG and a steely shriek. He sat up in the soot-smelling darkness, rubbing his eyes, the fire long out. He squinted to see who had opened the hatch, and caught an iron wrench in the mouth, hard enough to snap his head to the side. Ig rolled onto his elbows and knees, his mouth already full of blood. He felt solid lumps rolling against his tongue. He spit a slimy string of blood; teeth came with it, three of them.
A hand in a black leather glove reached into the chimney and got Ig by the hair and dragged him out of the furnace, bouncing his head off the iron hatch on the way out. It made a brassy ringing sound, like someone striking a gong. Ig was dumped onto the concrete floor. He tried to pick himself up, doing a rough push-up, and caught a steel-tipped black boot in the side. His arms gave out, and he went straight down, struck the concrete with his chin. His teeth banged together like a clapboard: Scene 666, take one, action!
His pitchfork. He had leaned it against the wall, just outside the furnace. He rolled and flung himself at it. His fingers swatted the handle, and it fell over with a clang. When he grabbed for the shaft, Lee Tourneau brought the heel of his boot down on Ig’s hand, and Ig heard the bones snap with a brittle crunch. It sounded like someone breaking a fistful of dry twigs. He turned his head to look up at Lee as Lee came down with the wrench again, and he was clubbed right between the horns. A white flash bomb went off in Ig’s head, brilliant burning phosphorus, and the world disappeared.
HE OPENED HIS EYES and saw the floor of the foundry sliding by beneath him. Lee had him by the collar of the shirt and was dragging him, his knees sliding across concrete. His hands were in front of his body, held together at the wrists by something. Loops of duct tape, it felt like. He tried to leap up and only managed to weakly kick his feet. The world was filled with the infernal drone of the locusts, and it took him a moment before he understood that the sound was only inside his head, because locusts were silent at night.
It was wrong, when considering the old foundry, to think about an outside and an inside. There was no roof; the inside was the outside. But Ig was hauled through a doorway and sensed that somehow they had come out into the night, although there was still dusty concrete under his knees. He couldn’t lift his head but had an impression of openness, of having left all walls behind. He heard Lee’s Caddy idling somewhere nearby. They were behind the building, he thought, not far from the Evel Knievel trail. His tongue moved sluggishly around in his mouth, an eel swimming in blood. The tip touched an empty socket where a tooth had been.
If he was going to try to use the horns on Lee, he was going to have to do it now, before Lee did what he had come here to do. But when he opened his mouth to speak, there came a black grinding shock of pain, and it was all he could do not to scream. His jaw was broken—shattered, maybe. Blood bubbled and ran from his lips, and he made a muzzy, damaged sound of pain.
They were at the top of a flight of concrete stairs, Lee breathing hard. He paused there. “Christ, Ig,” Lee said. “You don’t look like you’re that heavy. I’m not cut out for this kind of thing.”
He dropped Ig down the steps. Ig hit the first on his shoulder and the second on his face, and it felt like his jaw was breaking all over again, and he couldn’t help it, he did scream this time, a grav
elly, strangled sound. He rolled the rest of the way to the bottom and sprawled across the dirt, nose in the earth.
After he came to rest, he held himself perfectly still—it seemed important to be still, the most important thing in the world—waiting for the black throb of pain in his smashed face to relent, at least a little. Distantly he heard boots scuff on the concrete stairs and crunch away across the earth. A car door opened. A car door slammed. The boot heels came crunching back. Ig heard a tinny clang and a hollow sloshing sound, neither of which he could identify.
“I knew I’d find you out here, Ig,” Lee said. “Couldn’t stay away, could you?”
Ig fought to lift his head and look up. Lee squatted beside him. He wore dark jeans and a white button-down shirt, sleeves rolled back to show his lean, strong forearms. His face was calm, almost good-humored. With one hand he absently picked at the cross nestled in the curls of golden hair on his chest.
“I’ve known I’d find you out here ever since Glenna called me a couple hours ago.” A smile flickered at the corners of his mouth for a moment. “She came home to find her apartment trashed. TV kicked in. Shit tossed everywhere. She called me right up. She was crying, Ig. She feels terrible. She thinks somehow you found out about our—what’s the right language for this?—our parking-lot tryst and that you hate her now. She’s scared you might hurt yourself. I told her I was more scared about you hurting her and that I thought she ought to spend the night with me. Would you believe she turned me down? She said she wasn’t afraid of you and needed to talk to you, before things went any further between me and her. Good ol’ Glenna. She’s sweet, you know. A little too desperate to please. A lot insecure. Pretty slutty. The second-closest thing to a disposable human being I’ve ever met. You’d be the first.”
