Joe Hill - Horns

“No.”

“Why are you here, then?”

“Because we’re friends.” Ig took another step closer and then cried out softly. Lee was weeping blood. It stained the bandage and dribbled down the side of his left cheek. Lee touched two fingers absentmindedly to his face. They came away red.

“Are you all right?” Ig asked.

“It hurts when I cry. I’ll have to learn how to stop feeling bad about things.” He breathed harshly, his shoulders rising and falling. “I should’ve told you. About everything. It was shitty, selling you those magazines. Lying to you about what they were for. After I got to know you better, I wanted to take it back, but it was too late. That’s not how friends treat friends.”

“We don’t want to start with that. I wish like hell I never gave you the cherry bomb.”

“Forget it,” Lee said. “I wanted it. I decided. You don’t got to worry about that. Just don’t make up your mind to hate me. I really need someone to still like me.”

He didn’t need to ask. The sight of the blood staining through the bandage made Ig’s knees weak. It took a great effort of will not to think how he had teased Lee with the cherry, talking about all the things they could blow up together with it. How he had worked to take Merrin away from Lee, who had walked into the water and pulled him out when he was drowning, a betrayal for which there could be no expiation.

He sat down beside Lee.

“She’ll tell you not to hang around me anymore,” Lee said.

“My mom? No. No, she’s glad I came to see you.”

“Not your mom. Merrin.”

“What are you talking about? She wanted to come with me. She’s worried about you.”

“Oh?” Lee quivered strangely, as if gripped by a chill. Then he said, “I know why this happened.”

“It was a shitty accident. That’s all.”

Lee shook his head. “It was to remind me.”

Ig was quiet, waiting, but Lee didn’t speak again.

“Remind you of what?” Ig asked.

Lee was struggling against tears. He wiped at the blood on his cheek with the back of one hand and left a long dark streak.

“Remind you of what?” Ig asked again, but Lee was shivering with the effort it took to keep from sobbing and never got around to telling him.

IG DROVE AWAY FROM HIS PARENTS’ HOUSE, from his grandmother’s smashed body and smashed wheelchair, from Terry and Terry’s awful confession, with no immediate notion of where he was going. He knew, rather, only where he wasn’t going: to Glenna’s apartment, to town. He could not bear to see another human face, hear another human voice.

He was holding a door shut in his mind, throwing all his mental weight against it, while two men pushed against the other side, trying to force their way into his thoughts: his brother and Lee Tourneau. It took all his will to keep the invaders from barging into his last refuge, to keep them out of his head. He didn’t know what would happen when they pushed through that door at last, wasn’t sure what he would do.

Ig followed the narrow state highway, across sunlit open pastures and under trees that overhung the road, into corridors of flickering darkness. He saw a shopping cart upended in a ditch at the side of the road and wondered how it was that shopping carts sometimes found their way out here, where there was nothing. It went to show that no one knew, when they abandoned a thing, what misuses it would be put to later by others. Ig had abandoned Merrin Williams one night-had walked away from his best friend in the world, in a fit of immature, self-righteous anger-and look what had happened.

He thought about riding the Evel Knievel trail on the shopping-cart express, ten years before, and his left hand rose unconsciously to touch his nose, still crooked where he’d broken it. His mind threw up an image, unbidden, of his grandmother riding her wheelchair down the long hill in front of the house, the big rubber wheels banging over the rutted grassy slope. He wondered what she had broken when she finally slammed into the fence. He hoped her neck. Vera had told him that whenever she saw him, she wanted to be dead, and Ig lived to serve. He liked to think he had always been a conscientious grandson. If he had killed her, he would look at it as a good start. But there was still plenty of work ahead.

His stomach cramped, which he wrote off as a symptom of his unhappiness until it began to gurgle as well, and he had to admit to himself he was hungry. He tried to think where he could get food with a minimum of human interaction and at that moment saw The Pit gliding by on his left.

It was the place of their last supper, where he’d spent his final evening with Merrin. He had not been in there since. He doubted he was welcome. This thought alone was an invitation. Ig turned in to the parking lot.

It was early afternoon, the indolent, timeless period that followed lunch and came before people began to show up for their after-work drink. There were only a few parked cars, belonging, Ig guessed, to the more serious sort of alcoholic. The board out front read:

10¢ Wings & 2$ Bud

Ladys Nite Thurs Come and See Us Girls

Rah Rah Gideon Saints

He stood up from the car, the sun behind him, his shadow three yards long, penciled on the dirt, a black-horned stick figure, the spurs of bone on his head pointing toward the red door of The Pit.

WHEN HE CAME THROUGH THE DOOR, Merrin was already there. Although it was crowded, the place full of college kids watching the game, he spotted her right away. She sat in their usual booth, turned to face him. The sight of her, as it always did-especially when they hadn’t been together in a while-had the curious effect of reminding him of his own body, the bare skin under his clothes. He hadn’t seen her in three weeks, and after tonight he wouldn’t see her again until Christmas, but in between they would have shrimp cocktail and some beers and some fun in the cool, freshly laundered sheets of Merrin’s bed. Merrin’s father and mother were at their camp on Winnipesaukee, and they’d have her place all to themselves. Ig went dry in the mouth at the thought of what was waiting after dinner, and a part of him was sorry they were bothering with drinks and food at all. Another part of him, though, felt it was necessary to not be in a hurry, to take their time with the evening.

It wasn’t as if they had nothing to talk about. She was worrying, and it didn’t take a lot of insight to figure out why. He was leaving at eleven forty-five tomorrow morning on British Airways to take a job with Amnesty International and would be an ocean apart from her for half a year. They had never been without each other for so long.

He could always tell when she was worrying over something, knew all the signs. She withdrew. She smoothed things with her hands-napkins, her skirt, his ties-as if by ironing out such minute items she could smooth the path to some future safe harbor for both of them. She forgot how to laugh and became almost comically earnest and mature about things. The sight of her this way struck him as funny; it made him think of a little girl dressing up in her mother’s clothes. He couldn’t take her seriousness seriously.

It didn’t make any logical sense for her to be worried, although Ig knew that worry and logic rarely traveled together. But, really: He would not even have taken the job in London if she hadn’t told him to take it, hadn’t pushed him to take it. Merrin wouldn’t let him pass on it, had relentlessly argued him out of every reservation. She told him there was no harm in trying it for six months. If he hated it, he could come home. But he wasn’t going to hate it. It was exactly the sort of thing he’d always wanted to do, the dream job, and they both knew it. And if he liked the job-and he would-and wanted to remain in England, she would come to him. Harvard offered a transfer program with the Imperial College London, and her mentor at Harvard, Shelby Clarke, selected the participants; there was no question she could get in. They could have a flat in London. She would serve him tea and crumpets in her knickers, and afterward they could have a shag. Ig was sold. He had always thought the word “knickers” was a thousand times sexier than “panties.” So he took the job and was sent off to New York City for a three-week summer training and orientation session. And now he was back, and she was smoothing things, and he was not surprised.