Joe Hill - Horns

She was kneeling over him, her red hair tickling his nose. She smelled of lemons and mint. The necklace hung from her throat, flashing at him again, transmitting a message of almost unbearable pleasure.

“Nothing,” he said. “I think I’m reading you loud and clear.”

FOR ALL THE REST of the summer, they had a habit of wandering into each other. When Ig went with his mother to the supermarket, Merrin was there with her mother, and they wound up walking together, drifting along a few feet behind their parents. Merrin got a bag of cherries, and they shared it while they walked.

“Isn’t this shoplifting?” Ig asked.

“We can’t get in trouble if we eat the evidence,” she said, and spit a pit into her hand and then handed it to him. She gave him all her pits, calmly expecting him to get rid of them, which he did by putting them in his pocket. When he got home, there was a sweet-smelling wet lump the size of a baby’s fist in his jeans.

And when the Jag had to go into Masters Auto for an inspection, Ig tagged along with his father, because he knew by then that Merrin’s dad worked there. Ig had no reason to believe that Merrin would be at the dealership as well, on a sunny Wednesday afternoon, but she was, sitting on her father’s desk, swinging her feet back and forth, as if waiting for him, impatient for him to arrive. They got orange sodas from the vending machine and stood talking in a back hallway, under buzzing fluorescent lights. She told him she was hiking out to Queen’s Face the next day, with her father. Ig said the path went right behind his house, and she asked if he would walk up with them. Her lips were stained orange from the soda. It was no work to be together. It was the most natural thing in the world.

It was natural to include Lee also. He kept things from getting too serious. He invited himself along for the walk up Queen’s Face, said he wanted to check it out for mountain-boarding trails. He forgot to bring the board, though.

On the climb up, Merrin grabbed the collar of her T-shirt and pulled it away from her chest, twitching it back and forth to fan herself and mock-panting from the heat. “You guys ever jump in the river?” Merrin asked, pointing at the Knowles through the trees. It wound through dense forest in the valley below, a black snake with a back of brilliantly glittering scales.

“Ig jumps in all the time,” Lee said, and Ig laughed. Merrin gave them both a puzzled, narrow-eyed look, but Ig only shook his head. Lee went on, “Tell you what, though. Ig’s pool is a lot nicer. When are you going to have her over swimming?”

Ig’s face prickled with heat at the suggestion. He had fantasized just that thing, many times-Merrin in a bikini-but whenever he came close to asking her, his breath failed him.

They talked about her sister, Regan, just once in those first weeks. Ig asked why they had moved up from Rhode Island, and Merrin said with a shrug, “My parents were really depressed after Regan died, and my mother grew up here, her whole family is here. And home didn’t feel right anymore. Without Regan in it.”

Regan had died at twenty of a rare and particularly aggressive form of breast cancer. It took just four months to kill her.

“Must’ve been awful,” Ig murmured, a moronic generality but the only thing that felt safe. “I can’t imagine how I’d feel if Terry died. He’s my best friend.”

“That’s what I thought about Regan and me.” They were in Merrin’s bedroom, and her back was to Ig, her head bent. She was brushing her hair. Without looking at him, she went on, “But she said some things when she was sick-some really mean things. Things I never knew she thought about me. When she died, I felt like I hardly knew her. Course, I got off easy, compared to the things she said to my parents. I don’t think I can ever forgive her for what she said to Dad.” She spoke this last bit lightly, as if they were discussing a matter of no real importance, and then was quiet.

It was years before they talked about Regan again. But when Merrin told him, a few days later, that she was going to be a doctor, Ig didn’t need to ask what her specialty was going to be.

On the last day of August, Ig and Merrin were at the blood drive, across the street from the church, in the Sacred Heart community center, handing out paper cups of Tang and Lorna Doone sandwich cookies. A few ceiling fans pushed a sluggish current of hot air around the room, and Ig and Merrin were drinking as much juice as they were handing out. He was just working up his nerve to finally ask her over for a swim when Terry walked in.

He stood on the other side of the room, searching for Ig, and Ig lifted a hand to get his attention. Terry jerked his head: Get over here. There was something stiff and tense and worrisome in this gesture. In some ways it was worrisome enough just seeing Terry there. Terry wasn’t the sort to come anywhere near a church function on a wide-open summer afternoon if he could avoid it. Ig was only half aware of Merrin following him across the room as he threaded his way between gurneys, donors stretched upon them, tubes in their arms. The room smelled of disinfectant and blood.

When Ig got to his brother, Terry gripped his arm, squeezing it painfully. He turned him through the door and out into the foyer, where they could be alone. The doors were open to the bright, hot, stillborn day.

“Did you give it to him?” Terry asked. “Did you give him the cherry?”

Ig didn’t have to ask who he was talking about. Terry’s voice, thin and harsh, frightened him. Needles of panic prickled in Ig’s chest.

“Is Lee okay?” Ig asked. It was Sunday afternoon. Lee had gone up to Gary’s the day before. It came to Ig now that he had not seen Lee in church that morning.

“Him and some other jokers taped a cherry bomb to the windshield of a junked car and ran. But it didn’t go off right away, and Lee thought the fuse went out. They do that. He was walking back to check on it when the windshield exploded and sprayed glass everywhere. Ig. They pulled a fucking sliver out of his left eye. They’re saying he’s lucky it didn’t go into his brain.”

Ig wanted to scream, but something was happening in his chest. His lungs had gone numb, as if injected with a dose of Novocain. He couldn’t speak, couldn’t force any sound up through his throat at all.

“Ig,” said Merrin. “Where’s your inhaler?” Her voice calm and steady. She already knew all about his asthma.

He struggled to pull it out of his pocket and dropped it. She got it for him, and he put it in his mouth and took a long, damp suck.

Terry said, “Look, Ig. Ig, it’s not just about his eye. He’s in a lot of trouble. What I heard is some cops showed up with the ambulance. You know that mountain board of his? Turns out it’s stolen. They pulled a two-hundred-dollar leather jacket off his girlfriend, too. The police asked his father for permission to search his room this morning, and it was full of stolen shit. Lee worked out at the mall for a couple weeks, at the pet store, and he had a key to an access hallway that runs behind the shops. He helped himself to piles of stuff. He had all these magazines he ripped off from Mr. Paperback, and he was running a scam, selling them to people, pretending he was raising money for some made-up charity. Shit is messed up. He’ll be in juvie court if any of the stores press charges. In some ways, if he goes blind in one eye, it’ll be the best thing for him. Might win him some sympathy, maybe he won’t-”

“Oh, God,” Ig said, hearing if he goes blind in one eye, and they pulled a fucking sliver out; everything else was just noise, Terry playing an avant-garde riff on his trumpet. Ig was crying and squeezing Merrin’s hand. When had she taken his hand? He didn’t know.