Joe Hill - Horns

Ig was sorry about the half a sandwich he had eaten. The cross around Lee’s neck was flashing in the sunlight, and when Ig closed his eyes, he could still see it, a series of glowing afterimages, signaling a dreadful warning. He felt a headache coming on.

When he opened his eyes, he said, “So politics doesn’t work out, you going to kill people for a living?”

“I guess.”

“How would you do it? What’s your MO?” Wondering how he would kill Lee himself, to get back the cross.

“Who are we talking about? Some skag who owes her dealer money? Or the president?”

Ig let out a long, slow breath. “Someone who knows the truth about you. A star witness. If he lives, you’re going to jail.”

Lee said, “I’d burn him to death in his car. Do it with a bomb. I’m on the curb across the street from him, watching as he climbs behind the wheel. The moment he pulls out, I press the button on my remote control, so after the explosion the car keeps rolling, this big burning wreck.”

Ig said, “Hey. Wait a minute. I got to show you something.”

He ignored the puzzled look Lee gave him, rose, and trotted inside. He returned three minutes later, right hand closed into a fist. Lee looked up, brow furrowed, as Ig settled back into his deck chair.

“Check it out,” Ig said, and opened his right hand to show the cherry bomb.

Lee looked at it, his face blank as a plastic mask, but his indifference didn’t fool Ig, who was learning to read him. When Ig had opened his hand and Lee saw what he was holding, he sat up in spite of himself.

“Eric Hannity paid up,” Ig said. “This is what I got for riding the cart down the hill. You saw the turkey, didn’t you?”

“It rained Thanksgiving for an hour.”

“Wouldn’t it be cool to stick it in a car? Say you found a wreck somewhere. I bet you could blow the hood off with this thing. Terry told me these are pre-CPL.”

“Pre-what?”

“Child-protection laws. The fireworks they make nowadays are like farts in a bathtub. Not these.”

“How could they sell ’em if they’re against the law?”

“It’s only against the law to manufacture new ones. These are from a box of old ones.”

“Is that what you’re going to do? Find a wreck and blow it up?”

“No. My brother’s making me wait until we go to Cape Cod, Labor Day weekend. He’s taking me after he gets his license.”

“It’s not my business, I guess,” Lee said, “but I don’t see how he has any say.”

“No. I have to wait. Eric Hannity wasn’t even going to give it to me, because I was wearing sneakers when I went down the hill. He said I wasn’t really naked. But Terry said that was bullshit and got Eric to cough up. So I owe him. And Terry wants to wait for Cape Cod.”

For the first time in their brief friendship, Lee seemed irritated by something. He grimaced, wiggled around on his deck chair, as if he had suddenly noticed something digging into his back. He said, “Kind of stupid they’re called Eve’s Cherries. Shoulda called ’em Eve’s Apples.”

“Why?”

“’Cause of the Bible.”

“The Bible only says they ate fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. It never says it’s an apple. Could’ve been a cherry.”

“I don’t believe that story.”

“No,” Ig admitted. “Neither do I. Dinosaurs.”

“You believe in Jesus?”

“Why not? As many people wrote about him as wrote about Caesar.” He looked sidelong at Lee, who himself so resembled Caesar that his profile might’ve been stamped on a silver denarius, was only missing the crown of laurel leaves.

“Do you believe he could do miracles?” Lee asked.

“Maybe. I don’t know. If the rest is true, does that part even matter?”

“I did a miracle once.”

Ig found this a not terribly remarkable thing to admit. Ig’s father said he had seen a UFO once in the Nevada desert, when he was out there drinking with the drummer from Cheap Trick. Instead of asking what miracle Lee had performed, Ig said, “Was it cool?”

Lee nodded, his very blue eyes distant, a little unfocused. “I fixed the moon. When I was a little kid. And ever since, I’ve been good at fixing other things. It’s what I’m best at.”

“How’d you fix the moon?”

Lee narrowed one eye to a squint, lifted one hand toward the sky, pinched an imaginary moon between thumb and forefinger, and gave it a half turn. He made a soft click. “All better.”

Ig didn’t want to talk religion; he wanted to talk demolition. “It’s going to be pretty miraculous when I light the fuse on this thing,” he said, and Lee’s gaze swiveled back to the cherry bomb in Ig’s hand. “I’m going to send something home to God. Any suggestions what?”

The way Lee looked at the cherry bomb, Ig thought of a man sitting at a bar drinking something boozy and watching the girl onstage tug down her panties. They had not been buddies for long, but a pattern had been established-this was the moment Ig was supposed to offer it to him, the way he had given Lee his money, his CDs, and Merrin Williams’s cross. But he didn’t offer it, and Lee couldn’t ask for it. Ig told himself he didn’t give it to Lee because he had embarrassed him last time, with his gift of CDs. The truth was something different: Ig felt a mean urge to hold something over him, to have a cross of his own to wear. Later, after Lee left, Ig would be ashamed of this impulse-a rich kid with a swimming pool, lording his treasures over a kid from a single-parent home in a trailer park.

“You could stick it in a pumpkin,” Lee said, and Ig replied, “Too much like the turkey,” and they were off and running, Lee suggesting things, Ig considering them in turn.

They discussed the merits of throwing the bomb into the river to see if they could kill fish with it, dropping it into an outhouse to see if it would make a shit geyser, using a slingshot to shoot it into the bell tower of the church to see what kind of gong it made when it went off. There was the big billboard outside of town that read WILD BASS WAREHOUSE-FISHING AND BOATING SUPPLIES; Lee said it would be hilarious to tape the bomb to the B and see if they could make it the WILD ASS WAREHOUSE. Lee had lots of ideas.

“You keep trying to figure out what kind of music I like,” Lee said. “I’ll tell you what I like. The sound of things blowing up and tinkling glass. Music to my ears.”

IG WAS WAITING FOR HIS TURN in the barber’s chair when he heard a tapping from behind him and looked over his shoulder and saw Glenna standing on the sidewalk, staring in at him from an inch away, her nose smooshed to the window. She was so close she would’ve been breathing on his neck if there weren’t a plate of glass between them. Instead she breathed on the glass, turning it white with condensation. She wrote in it with one finger: I SEEN YOUR P.P. Beneath this she drew a cartoonish dangling cock.

Ig’s heart lurched, and he quickly glanced around to see if his mother was close by, if she had noticed. But Lydia stood across the room from him, behind the barber’s chair, giving instructions to the hairdresser. Terry was up in the seat, wearing the apron, waiting patiently to be made even more beautiful. Cutting Ig’s own rat’s snarl was like clipping a deformed hedge. It couldn’t be made pretty, only manageable.

Ig looked back at Glenna, shaking his head furiously: Go away. She wiped the message off the glass with the sleeve of her awesomely awesome leather jacket.

She wasn’t alone. Highway to Hell was there, too, along with the other derelict who had been a part of their group at the foundry, a long-haired kid in his late teens. The two boys were on the other side of the parking lot, rooting in a garbage can. What was it with the two of them and garbage cans?