Joe Hill - Horns

Ig was halfway down the stairs when Terry let himself in, water glittering in his messy thatch of black hair. He saw Ig staring down at him and gave him a tired smile.

“Hey, bro,” Terry said. “Got something for you.” And lobbed it, a dark roundness, the size of a crabapple.

Ig clapped his hands around it, then looked at the white silhouette of the naked girl wearing the maple leaf over her crotch. The bomb was heavier than he imagined it would be, the grain rough, the surface cold.

“Your winnings,” Terry said.

“Oh,” Ig said. “Thanks. With what happened, I guess Eric forgot to pay up.” In fact, Ig had, days ago, casually come to accept that Eric Hannity was never going to pay, that he had got his nose broke for nothing.

“Yeah. Well. I reminded him.”

“Everything okay?”

“Now that he paid up it is.” Terry paused, one hand on the newel post, then said, “He didn’t want to fork it over because you wore sneakers when you went down the hill or some such shit.”

“Well. That’s weak. That’s the weakest thing I’ve ever heard,” Ig said. Terry did not reply, just stood there rubbing his thumb against the edge of the newel post. “Still. Did you guys really get into it? It’s just a firecracker.”

“No it isn’t. You see what it did to the turkey?”

This struck Ig as a funny thing to say, missing the point. Terry gave Ig a guilty-sorry smile and said, “You don’t know what he was going to do with that. There’s a kid from school Eric doesn’t like. A kid I know from band. Good kid. Ben Townsend. But, see, Ben’s mother is in the insurance business. Like, answers phones or something. So Eric has a hate on for him.”

“Just because his mom works in insurance?”

“You know Eric’s father isn’t doing too well, right? Like, he can’t lift things and he can’t work and he has trouble…he has trouble taking a dump. It’s just really sad. They were supposed to get all this insurance money, but they haven’t yet. I guess they’re never going to. And so Eric wants to get even with someone, and he sort of fixed on Ben.”

“Just because his mother works for the insurance company that’s screwing Eric’s dad?”

“No!” Terry cried. “That’s the part of this that is most fucked. She works for a completely different insurance company.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“No. It doesn’t. And don’t spend too much time trying to work it out, because you never will. Eric was gonna use this thing to blow something up that belonged to Ben Townsend, and he called me to see if I wanted in.”

“What was he going to blow up?”

“His cat.”

Ig felt a little exploded himself, blown up with a kind of horror that bordered on wonder. “No. Maybe that’s what Eric said, but he was screwing with you. I mean, c’mon…a cat?”

“He tried to pretend he was screwing with me when he saw how pissed I was. And he only gave me that cherry bomb when I threatened to tell his father about the shit we’ve been doing. Then he threw it at my head and told me to get the fuck out. I know for a fact Eric’s daddy has perpetrated several acts of police brutality on Eric’s ass.”

“Even though he can’t take a shit?”

“He can’t take a shit, but he can swing a belt. I hope to God that Eric is never a cop. Him and his dad are just alike. You’d have the right to remain silent with his boot on your throat.”

“Would you really have told his dad about-”

“What? No. No way. How could I tattle about all the stuff Eric’s blown up when I was in on it myself? That’s, like, the first rule of blackmail.” Terry was silent a moment, then said, “You think you know someone. But mostly you just know what you want to know.” He looked up at Ig with clear eyes and said, “He is a badass. Eric. And I always felt kind of like a badass when I was with him. You’re not in band, so you don’t know, Ig. It’s hard to be desired by women and feared by men when your primary skill is playing ‘America the Beautiful’ on the trumpet. I liked the way people looked at us. That’s what was in it for me. I couldn’t tell you what was in it for him. Except he liked that I’d pay for things and that we know some famous people.”

Ig rolled the bomb around and around in his hand, feeling that there was something he ought to say but not knowing how to say it. What came to him at last was hopelessly inadequate. “What do you think I should blow up with this?”

“I don’t know what. Just don’t leave me out, okay? Sit on it a few weeks. After I have my license, I’ll drive us down to Cape Cod with a bunch of the guys. We can have a bonfire on the beach and find something there.”

“Last big explosion of the summer,” Ig said.

“Yeah. Ideally I’d like to see us leave a swath of destruction that can be seen from orbit. Barring that, let’s at least try to destroy something precious and beautiful that can never be replaced,” Terry said.

THE WHOLE WAY TO CHURCH, Ig’s palms were sweating, felt tacky and strange. His stomach was upset, too. He knew why, and it was ridiculous-he didn’t even know her name and had never spoken a word to her.

Except that she had signaled him. A church full of people, many her own age, and she had looked right at him and had sent him a message with her cross of burning gold. Even now he wasn’t sure why he’d let her go, how he could’ve given her away like a baseball card or a CD. He told himself Lee was a lonely trailer-park kid who needed someone, that things had a way of working out how they were supposed to. He tried to feel good about what he had done, but there was instead, rising within him, a black wall of horror. He could not imagine what had compelled him to allow Lee to take her cross away from him. Lee would have it with him today. He would give it to her, and she would say thank you, and they would talk after church. In his mind they were already walking out together; as she went by, the redhead glanced Ig’s way, but her gaze slid over him without any recognition at all-the repaired cross glittering in the hollow of her throat.

Lee was there, in the same pew, and he was wearing her cross around his own throat. It was the first thing Ig noticed, and his reaction was simple and biochemical. It was as if he had downed a painfully hot cup of coffee, all at once. His stomach knotted and burned. His blood surged furiously, as if hopping with caffeination.

The pew in front of Lee remained empty until the last moments just before the service began, and then three stout old ladies slid in where the girl had sat the week before. Lee and Ig spent much of the first twenty minutes craning their heads, searching for her, but she wasn’t there. That hair of hers, a rope of braided copper wire, would have been impossible to miss. Finally Lee looked across the aisle at Ig and lifted his shoulders in a comical shrug, and Ig gave an exaggerated shrug back, as if he were Lee’s co-conspirator in his attempt to connect with Morse Code Girl.

Ig wasn’t, though. He bowed his head when it was time to say the Lord’s Prayer, but what Ig was praying for wasn’t a part of the standard text. He wanted the cross back. It didn’t have to be right. He wanted it more than he’d ever wanted anything, more than he’d wanted to breathe when he was lost in that fatal rush of black water and roaring souls. He didn’t know her name, but he knew they were good at having fun together, at being together; the ten minutes when she’d been flashing that light into his face were the best ten minutes he’d ever spent in church. Some things you didn’t give away, no matter how much you owed.

WHEN THE SERVICES WERE OVER, Ig stood with his father’s hand on his shoulder, watching people file past. His family was always among the last to leave any crowded place: church, a movie theater, a baseball stadium. Lee Tourneau went by and dipped his head to Ig in a dismissive sort of nod that seemed to say, Somes you win and somes you lose.