Joe Hill - Horns

“What? No. The fuck?”

Some of the excitement went out of her eyes. “Are you at least going to threaten me?”

“No.”

“I could say you did. I could tell Reggie you warned me to watch my back. That’d be a good story.” Her smile faded a little more, and she shot a glum look at the bodybuilder behind the bar. “He probably wouldn’t believe me, though. Reggie thinks I’m a compulsive liar. I guess I am. I like to tell my little stories. Still. I never should’ve told Reggie that my boyfriend, Gordon, died in the World Trade Tower, after I told Sarah-she’s another waitress here-that Gordy died in Iraq. I should’ve figured they’d swap notes. Still. Gordon could be dead somewhere. He’s dead to me. He broke up with me by e-mail, so fuck him. Why am I telling you all this?”

“Because you can’t help yourself.”

“That’s right. I can’t,” she said, and shivered, a response with unmistakably sexual connotations.

“What did your father do to your mother and you? Did he…did he hurt you?” Ig asked, not sure he really wanted to know.

“He told us he loved us, but he lied. He ran away to Washington with my fifth-grade teacher. They started a family, and he had another daughter, one he likes better than he ever liked me. If he really loved me, he would’ve taken me with him instead of leaving me with my mother, who is a depressing, angry old bitch. He said he would always be a part of my life, but he isn’t part of shit. I hate liars. Other liars, I mean. My own little stories don’t hurt anyone. Do you want to know the little story I tell about you and your girlfriend?”

The pizza Ig had eaten sat in his stomach in a heavy, doughy lump. “Probably not.”

Her face flushed with excitement, and her smile returned. “Sometimes people come in and ask about what you did to her. I can always tell in a glance how much they want to know, if they just want the basics or some nasty details. The college kids usually want to know something nasty. I tell them after you beat her brains in, you turned her over and sodomized the corpse.”

Ig tried to stand up, clubbed his knees against the underside of the table, and at the same time clashed his horns against the stained-glass lampshade hanging over the tabletop. The lamp started to swing, and his horned shadow plunged toward the waitress and then shrank away from her, toward and away. Ig had to sit back down, pain throbbing behind his kneecaps.

“She wasn’t-” Ig started. “That didn’t-You sick fucking bitch.”

“I am,” the waitress confessed, with a touch of pride. “I am so bad. But you should see their faces when I tell them. The girls especially love that bit. It’s always exciting to hear about someone being defiled. Everyone loves a good sex murder, and in my opinion there isn’t a story yet that can’t be improved by a little sodomy.”

“Do you understand you’re talking about someone I loved?” Ig asked. His lungs felt scraped and raw, and it was hard to catch his breath.

“Sure,” she said. “That’s why you killed her. That’s why people usually do it. It isn’t hate. It’s love. Sometimes I wish my father had loved my mother and me enough to kill us and then himself. Then it would’ve been a big awful tragedy and not just another dull, depressing breakup. If he had the stomach for double homicide, we all could’ve been on TV.”

“I didn’t kill my girlfriend,” Ig said.

At this the waitress finally showed a reaction, frowning, her lips pursing in a look of puzzled disappointment. “Well. That’s no fun. I just think you’re a whole lot more interesting if you killed someone. Course, you’ve got horns growing out of your head. That’s fun! Is it a mod?”

“Mod?”

“A body modification. Did you do it to yourself?”

Although he still could not remember the evening before-he could recall everything up until his drunken outburst in the woods by the foundry, but after that there was only a dreadful blank-he knew the answer to this one. It came to him instantly and without struggle.

“Yes,” he said. “I did.”

THE WAITRESS SAID HE’D BE more interesting if he killed someone, so he decided why not kill Lee Tourneau.

It was a joy to know where he was going, to climb back into the car with a certain destination. The tires threw dirt as he peeled out. Lee worked in the congressman’s office in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, forty minutes away, and Ig was in the mood for a drive. He could use the time on the road to figure out how he was going to do it.

First he thought he’d use his hands. Strangle him as he had strangled Merrin, Merrin who’d loved Lee, who’d been first to his house to console him the day his mother died, and Ig grabbed the steering wheel as if he were throttling Lee already and shook it back and forth hard enough to rattle the steering column. Hating Lee was the best feeling Ig had felt in years.

His second thought was that there had to be a tire iron in the trunk. He could put on his windbreaker-it was lying across the backseat-and stick the tire iron up his sleeve. When Lee was in front of him, he could let it slip down into his hand and give it to him across the head. Ig imagined the wet thok! of the tire iron connecting with Lee’s skull and shivered with excitement.

His concern was that the tire iron might be too quick, that Lee might never know what hit him. In a perfect world, Ig would force Lee into the car and take him somewhere to drown him. Hold his head under the water and watch him struggle. Ig grinned at the thought, unaware that smoke was trickling from his nostrils. In the brightly lit cockpit of the car, it was just a pale summery haze.

After Lee had lost most of the sight in his left eye, he got quiet and kept his head down. He did twenty hours of unpaid volunteer work for every store he’d stolen from, regardless of how much he’d taken, a thirty-dollar pair of sneakers or a two-hundred-dollar leather jacket. He wrote a letter to the paper detailing each of his crimes and apologizing to shopkeepers, his friends, his mother, his father, and his church. He got religion-literally-and volunteered for every program Sacred Heart offered. He worked every summer with Ig and Merrin at Camp Galilee.

And once every summer, Lee was a guest speaker at Camp Galilee’s Sunday-morning services. He always began by telling the children that he was a sinner, that he had stolen and lied, used his friends and manipulated his parents. He told the children that once he was blind but now he saw. He said it while pointing into his half-ruined left eye. He delivered the same moral pep talk every summer. Ig and Merrin listened from the rear of the chapel, and when Lee pointed to his eye and quoted “Amazing Grace,” it inevitably caused Ig’s back and arms to break out in goose bumps. Ig felt lucky knowing him, was proud to know him, to have a small piece of Lee’s story.

It was a hell of a good story. Girls liked it especially. They liked both that Lee had been bad and that he had reformed; they liked that he could talk about his own soul and that children loved him. There was something unbearably noble about the way he could calmly admit to the things he had done, without showing any shame or self-consciousness. The girls he dated liked being the one temptation he still allowed himself.

Lee had been accepted to the seminary school in Bangor, Maine, but he gave up theology when his mother got sick and he came home to take care of her. By then his parents were divorced, his father off with his second wife in South Carolina. Lee brought his mother her meds, kept her sheets clean, changed her diapers, and watched PBS with her. When he wasn’t at his mother’s bedside, he was at UNH, where he collected a major in media studies; on Saturdays he drove to Portsmouth to work in the office of New Hampshire’s newest congressman.