Joe Hill - Horns

He set it on the bed and removed the lid and the board, took out the plastic tray that held the pieces. Beneath was a Victoria’s Secret catalog, and the Rolling Stone with Demi Moore naked on the cover.

“This is pretty tame material,” Lee said, not unkindly. “I’m not sure you even need to hide this stuff, Ig.”

Lee shifted aside the Rolling Stone and discovered an issue of Uncanny X-Men beneath it, the one with Jean Grey dressed in a black corset. He smiled placidly.

“This is a good one. Because Phoenix is so sweet and good and caring, and then bam! Out comes the black leather. That your thing? Cute girls with the devil inside?”

Ig said, “I don’t have a thing. I don’t know how that got in there.”

“Everyone has a thing,” Lee said, and of course he was right. Ig had been thinking almost exactly this when Lee said he didn’t know what music he liked. “Still, whacking off over comics…that’s unwell.” He said it calmly, with a certain appreciation. “You ever had anyone do it for you? Jerk you off?”

For a moment the room seemed to expand around Ig, as if it were the inside of a balloon filling with air. The thought crossed his mind that Lee might be about to offer a hand job, and if that were to happen-a terrible, diseased thing to contemplate-then Ig would tell him he had nothing against gay people, he just wasn’t one himself.

But Lee went on, “Remember the girl I was with on Monday? She’s done it to me. She gave a little scream when I finished. Funniest thing I ever heard. I wish I had it on tape.”

“Seriously?” Ig asked, both relieved and shaken. “Has she been your girlfriend for a long time?”

“We don’t have a relationship like that. Not a boyfriend-girlfriend thing. She just comes over now and then to talk about boys and the people who are mean to her at school and stuff. She knows my door is open.” Ig almost laughed at this last statement, which he assumed was ironic, but then held back. Lee seemed to mean it genuinely. He went on, “The times she’s whacked me off were kind of a favor she did. It’s a good thing, too. If not for that, I’d probably club her to death, the way she gabs on all the time.”

Lee gently put the Uncanny X-Men back into the box, and Ig reassembled Candy Land and replaced it in his closet. When he came back to the bed, Lee was holding the cross in one hand, had picked it out of the trumpet case. At the sight, Ig’s heart took the elevator to the basement.

“This is pretty,” Lee said. “Belong to you?”

“No,” Ig said.

“No. I didn’t think so. Looks like something a girl would wear. Where’d you get it?”

The easiest thing to do would’ve been to lie, to say it belonged to his mother. But lies turned Ig’s tongue to clay, and anyway, Lee had saved his life.

“In church,” Ig said, knowing that Lee would figure out the rest. He did not know why it felt so catastrophically wrong to simply tell the truth about such a little thing. It was never wrong to tell the truth.

Lee had looped both ends of the golden chain around his index finger, so the cross dangled across his palm. “It’s broken,” he said.

“That’s how I found it.”

“Was a redhead wearing it? Girl about our age?”

“She left it. I was going to fix it for her.”

“With this?” Lee asked, knuckling the Swiss Army knife that Ig had been using to bend and twist at the chain’s gold rings. “You can’t fix it with this. For something like this, you probably need a pair of needle-nose pliers. You know, my dad has some precision tools. I bet I could fix it up in five minutes. I’m good at that: fixing things.”

Lee turned his gaze to Ig at last. He didn’t need to ask outright for Ig to know what he wanted. Ig felt ill at the thought of giving it to him, and his throat was unaccountably tight, the way it sometimes got at the onset of an asthma attack. But there was really only one possible reply that would allow him to keep his own sense of himself as a decent and selfless person.

“Sure,” Ig said. “Why don’t you take it home and see if you can do something with it?”

Lee said, “Okay. I’ll fix it up, and give it back to her on Sunday.”

“Would you?” Ig asked. It felt as if there were a smooth wooden shaft going through the pit of his stomach, with a crank on one end, and someone was beginning to turn it, methodically twisting his insides around it.

Lee nodded and returned his gaze to the cross. “Thanks. I’d like that. I was asking you what your thing is. You know, what kind of girl you like. She’s my kind of thing. There’s something about her, you can just tell she’s never been naked in front of any guy, except her father. You know I saw it break? The necklace. I was standing in the pew right behind her. I tried to help her with it. She’s cute, but a little snotty. I think it’s fair to say most pretty girls are snotty until they get their cherry popped. Because, you know, it’s the most valuable thing they’re ever going to have. It’s the thing that keeps boys sniffing around them and thinking about them-the idea of getting to be the one. But after someone does it, they can relax and act like a normal girl. Anyway. I appreciate you letting me have this. It’ll give me a nice in with her.”

“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.