Joe Hill - Horns

It had started to rain, and Lee had been caught out in it. His almost-white hair was soaked flat, and he had the sniffles. He carried a wet canvas satchel over his shoulder; it gave him the look of a newsboy out to hawk some papers in an old Dick Tracy strip.

Ig was alone in the house, an uncommon occurrence. His parents were in Boston to attend a cocktail party at John Williams’s town house. Williams was in his last year as the conductor of the Boston Pops, and Derrick Perrish was going to perform with the orchestra in the farewell concert. They had left Terry in charge. Terry had spent most of the morning in his pajamas in front of MTV, on the phone, carrying on a series of conversations with equally bored friends. His tone at first was cheerfully lazy, then alert and curious, then, finally, clipped and flat, the toneless tone he used to express his highest levels of disdain. Ig had gone by the living room to see him pacing, an unmistakable sign of agitation. Finally Terry had banged down the phone and launched himself up the stairs. When he came back down, he was dressed and tossing the keys to their father’s Jag in one hand. He said he was going to Eric’s. He said it with his upper lip curled, the look of someone with a dirty job to do, someone who has come home to find the trash cans knocked over and garbage spread all over the yard.

“Don’t you need someone with a license to go with you?” Ig asked. Terry had his permit.

“Only if I get pulled over,” Terry said.

Terry walked out the door, and Ig closed it behind him. Five minutes later Ig was opening it again, someone thumping on the other side. Ig assumed it was Terry, that he had forgotten something and come back to get it, but it was Lee Tourneau instead.

“How’s your nose?” Lee asked.

Ig touched the tape across the bridge of his nose, then dropped his hand. “I wasn’t that pretty to begin with. You want to come in?”

Lee took a step in through the door and stood there, a pool forming under his feet.

“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.