Joe Hill - Horns

“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 Lee 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.