Joe Hill - Horns

As soon as the aisle was clear, Ig crossed to the pew where the girl had sat the week before and then sank to one knee there and began to tie his shoe. His father looked back at him, but Ig nodded that they should go on and he would catch up. He watched until his family had moved out of the nave before quitting with the shoe.

The three stout old ladies who had settled in Morse Code Girl’s former pew were still there, collecting purses and arranging summer shawls over their shoulders. As he glanced up at them now, it came to Ig that he had seen them before. They had walked out with the girl’s mother last Sunday, in a chattering, social pack, and at the time Ig had wondered if they were aunts. Had one of them even been in the car with the girl after the services? Ig wasn’t sure. He wanted to think so, but suspected he was letting wishful thinking color memory.

“Excuse me,” Ig said.

“Yes?” asked the lady closest to him, a big woman, hair dyed a metallic shade of brown.

Ig wagged a finger at the pew and shook his head. “There was a girl here. Last Sunday. She left something by accident, and I was going to give it back. Red hair?”

The woman didn’t reply but remained where she was, even though the aisle was clear enough to allow her to exit. Finally Ig realized she was waiting for him to make eye contact. When he did, and saw the knowing, narrow-eyed way she was looking at him, he felt his pulse flutter.

“Merrin Williams,” said the woman, “and her parents were only in town last weekend to take possession of their new house. I know because I sold it to them and showed them this church as well. They’re back in Rhode Island now, packing their things. She’ll be here next Sunday. I’m sure I’ll be seeing them again, soon enough. If you want, I could pass along whatever it is Merrin left here.”

“No,” Ig said. “That’s okay.”

“Mm,” said the woman. “I thought you’d rather give it to her yourself. You have that look about you.”

“What…what look?” Ig asked.

“I’d say it,” said the woman, “but we’re in church.”

THE NEXT TIME LEE CAME OVER, they went into the pool and played basketball in the shallow end until Ig’s mother came out with grilled ham-and-brie sandwiches on a plate. Lydia couldn’t just make a grilled ham-and-cheese with yellow American like other moms-it had to have a pedigree, express in some way her own more sophisticated and worldly palate. Ig and Lee sat eating them on reclining patio chairs, with water puddling under their seats. For some reason one or the other of them was always dripping wet when they were together.

Lee was polite to Ig’s mother, but after she walked away, he peeled back the toast and looked at the milky melted cheese on the ham.

“Someone came all over my sandwich,” he said.

Ig choke-laughed on a bite, which turned into a coughing fit, harsh, painful in his chest. Lee automatically thumped him on the back, rescuing Ig from himself. It was getting to be a habit, an integral part of their relationship.

“For most people it’s just lunch. For you it’s another chance to get yourself killed.” Lee squinted at him in the sunlight and said, “You’re probably the most death-prone person I know.”

“I’m harder to finish off than I look,” Ig said. “Like a cockroach.”

“I liked AC/DC,” Lee said. “If you were going to shoot someone, you’d really want to do it while you were listening to them.”

“What about the Beatles? Did you feel like shooting anyone listening to them?”

Lee considered seriously for a moment, then said, “Myself.”

Ig laughed again. Lee’s secret was that he never strained for the laugh, didn’t even always seem to know that the things he said were amusing. He had a restraint, an aura of glassy and unflappable cool, that made Ig think of a secret agent in a movie, defusing a warhead-or programming one. At other times he was such a blank-he never laughed, not at his own jokes, not at Ig’s-it was as if Lee were an alien scientist, come to earth to learn about human emotions. Kind of like Mork.

At the same time he was laughing, Ig was distressed. Not liking the Beatles was almost as bad as not knowing about them at all.

Lee saw the chagrin on his face and said, “I’ll give them back. You should have them back.”

“No,” Ig said. “Keep ’em and listen to them some more. Maybe you’ll hear something you like.”

“I did like some of it,” Lee said, but Ig knew he was lying. “There was that one…” and his voice trailed off, leaving Ig to guess at which of maybe sixty songs he might be referring to.

And Ig guessed it. “‘Happiness Is a Warm Gun’?”

Lee pointed a finger at him, cocked his thumb, and blew him away.

“What about the jazz? Did you like any of that?”

“Kind of. I don’t know. I couldn’t really hear the jazz stuff.”

“What do you mean?”

“I kept forgetting it was on. It’s like the music in the supermarket.”

Ig shivered. “So are you going to be a hit man when you grow up?” he asked.

“Why?”

“’Cause you only like music you can murder people to.”

“No. Just it ought to set the scene. Isn’t that the whole point of music? It’s like the background to what you’re doing.”

He wasn’t going to argue with Lee, but ignorance like that pained him. Hopefully, over the years of being best friends, Lee would learn the truth about music: that it was the third rail of life. You grabbed it to shock yourself out of the dull drag of hours, to feel something, to burn with all the emotions you didn’t get to experience in the ordinary run of school and TV and loading the dishwasher after dinner. Ig supposed that growing up in a trailer park, Lee had missed out on a lot of the good things. It was going to take him a few years to catch up.

“So what are you going to do when you grow up?” Ig asked.

Lee tucked away the rest of his sandwich and, with his mouth stuffed full, said, “I’d like to be in Congress.”

“For real? To do what?”

“I’d like to write a law that says irresponsible bitches who do drugs have to get sterilized so they can’t have kids they aren’t going to take care of,” Lee said, without heat.

Ig had wondered why he didn’t talk about his mother.

Lee’s hand drifted to the cross around his neck, nestled just above his clavicles. After a moment he said, “I’ve been thinking about her. Our girl from church.”

“I bet,” Ig said, trying to make it sound funny, but it came off a little harsh and irritated, even to his own ears.

Lee appeared not to notice. His eyes were distant, unfocused. “I bet she isn’t from around here. I’ve never seen her in church before. She was probably visiting family or something. Bet we never see her again.” He paused, then added, “The one that got away.” Not melodramatically, but with a knowing sense of humor about it.

The truth caught in Ig’s throat, like that lump of sandwich that wouldn’t go down. It was there, waiting to be told-she’ll be back next Sunday-but he couldn’t say it. He couldn’t lie either, didn’t have the nerve. He was the worst liar he knew.

What he said instead was, “You fixed the cross.”

Lee didn’t look down at it but idly picked at it with one hand while staring out at the light dancing across the surface of the pool. “Yeah. I’ve been keeping it on, just in case I run into her while I’m out selling my magazines.” He paused, then continued, “You know the dirty magazines I told you about? The ones my distributor has in his storeroom? There’s one called Cherries, all these girls who are supposed to be eighteen-year-old virgins. That’s my favorite, girl-next-door types. You want a girl where you can imagine what it would be like to be the first. Of course the girls in Cherries aren’t really virgins. You can tell just by looking at them. They’ll have a tattoo on their hip or wear too much eye shadow, and they’ll have stripper names. They’re just dressing up all innocent for the photo shoot. The next photo shoot they’ll dress up as sexy cops or cheerleaders, and it’ll be just as fake. The girl in church, now, she’s the real deal.” He lifted the cross from his chest and rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger. “The thing I’m hung up on is the idea of seeing something real. I don’t think most people feel half the things they pretend to feel. I think especially girls in a relationship tend to put on attitudes like clothes, just to keep a guy interested. Like Glenna keeping me interested with the occasional hand job. It isn’t because she loves hand jobs. It’s because she doesn’t love being lonely. When a girl loses her virginity, though, it may hurt, but it’s real. It might be the realest, most private thing you could ever see in another person. You wonder who she’ll be in that moment, when you finally get past all the pretend. That’s what I think about when I think about the girl in church.”