Joe Hill - Horns

He started as an unpaid volunteer, but by the time his mother died, he was a full-time employee, head of the congressman’s religious-outreach program. A lot of people thought that Lee was reason number one the congressman had been reelected the last time out. His opponent, a former judge, had signed a waiver allowing a pregnant felon the right to receive a first-trimester abortion, which Lee dubbed capital punishment for the unborn. Lee went to half the churches in the state to speak about it. He looked good in the pulpit, in his tie and crisp white shirt, and he never missed a chance to call himself a sinner, and they all loved that.

Lee’s work on the campaign had also resulted in the one and only fight he ever had with Merrin, although Ig wasn’t sure it was a fight if one person wouldn’t defend himself. Merrin ripped him up one side and down the other over the abortion thing, but Lee took it calmly and said, “If you want me to quit my job, Merrin, I’ll turn in my resignation tomorrow. Don’t even need to think about it. But if I remain in the job, I have to do what I was hired to do, and I’m going to do it well.” She said Lee had no shame. Lee said sometimes he wasn’t sure he had anything else, and she said, “Oh, Christ, don’t go earnest on me,” but after that she let him be.

Lee had liked to look at her, of course. Ig had seen him sometimes, checking Merrin out when she got up from a table, her skirt swishing at her legs. He had always liked looking at her. Ig had not minded that Lee looked. Merrin was his. And anyway, after what Ig had done to Lee’s eye-over time he’d come to feel he was personally responsible for Lee’s partial blindness-he could hardly begrudge him a glance at a pretty woman. Lee often said the accident could’ve blinded him completely and that he tried to enjoy each and every good thing he saw as if it were his last taste of ice cream. Lee had a knack for making statements like that, confessing plainly to his pleasures and mistakes, unafraid of being mocked. Not that anyone mocked him. Quite the opposite: Everyone was rooting for Lee. His turnaround was in-fucking-spirational. Maybe someday soon he would run for political office himself. There had already been some talk along those lines, although Lee laughed off any suggestion that he might seek higher office, trotted out that Groucho Marx bit about how any group that would accept him as a member wasn’t worth belonging to. Caesar had refused the throne three times as well, Ig remembered.

Something was beating in Ig’s temples. It was like a hammer falling on hot metal, a steady ringing crash. He came off the interstate and followed the highway to the office park, where the congressman kept his offices in a building with a great wedge-shaped glass atrium thrusting outward from the front of the building, like the prow of some enormous glass tanker. Ig drove to the entrance around back.

The blacktop lot behind the building was two-thirds empty, baking in the afternoon heat. Ig parked and grabbed his blue nylon windbreaker from the backseat and climbed out. It was too warm for a coat, but he put it on anyway. He liked the feel of the sun on his face and head and the heat shimmering up off the asphalt beneath him. Gloried in it, really.

He opened the hatchback and raised the compartment in the floor. The tire iron was bolted to the underside of a metal panel, but the bolts were caked in rust, and trying to twist them loose hurt his hands. He quit and looked in his roadside-emergency kit. It held a magnesium flare, a tube wrapped in red paper, oily and smooth. He grinned. A flare beat the hell out of a tire iron. He could burn Lee’s pretty face with it. Blind him in the other eye, maybe-that might be as good as killing him. Besides, Ig was more suited to a flare than a tire iron. Wasn’t it well established that fire was the devil’s only friend?

Ig crossed the blacktop through the shimmering heat. It was this summer that the seventeen-year locusts came out to mate, and the trees behind the parking lot were filled with their noise, a deep, resonating thrum, like the working of a great mechanical lung. The sound of them filled Ig’s head, was the sound of his headache, of madness, of his clarifying rage. A snippet of the Revelation to John came back to him: Then from the smoke came locusts on the earth. The locusts came every seventeen years to fuck and to die. Lee Tourneau was a bug, no better than the locusts-quite a bit worse, really. He had done the fucking part, and now he could die. Ig would help him. As he crossed the lot, he jammed the flare up into the sleeve of his coat and held it there with his right hand.

He approached a pair of Plexiglas doors imprinted with the Honorable Congressman of New Hampshire’s name. They had a mirrored tint, and he saw himself reflected there: a scrawny, sweating man in a windbreaker zipped to his throat, who looked as if he’d come to commit a crime. Not to mention he had horns. The points had split through the skin of his temples, and the bone beneath was stained pink with blood. Worse even than the horns, though, was the way he was grinning. If he had been standing on the other side of those doors and saw himself coming, he would’ve turned the lock and called 911.

He pushed into air-conditioned, carpeted quiet. A fat man with a flattop haircut sat behind a desk, talking cheerfully into a headset. Just to the right of the desk was a security checkpoint where visitors were required to pass through a metal detector. A fifty-something state trooper sat behind the X-ray monitor, chewing gum. A sliding Plexiglas window behind the receptionist’s desk looked into a small bare room with a map of New Hampshire tacked to the wall and a security monitor on a table. A second state trooper, an enormous, broad-shouldered man, sat in there at a folding table, bent over paperwork. Ig could not see his face, but he had a thick neck and a great white bald head that was somehow vaguely obscene.

It unnerved Ig, those state troopers, that metal detector. The sight of them brought back bad memories of Logan Airport, and his body tingled with an ill sweat. He had not been here to see Lee in well over a year and didn’t remember ever having to clear any kind of security before.

The receptionist said “Good-bye, honey” into his headset, pressed a button on his desk, and looked at Ig. The receptionist had a big, round, moony face, and probably his name was Chet or Chip. Behind his square-framed glasses was a bright look of dismay or bafflement.

“Help you?” he asked Ig.

“Yes. Could you-”

But then something else caught Ig’s attention: the security monitor in that room on the other side of the Plexiglas window. It displayed a fish-eyed view of the reception area-the potted plants, the inoffensive plush couches, and Ig himself. Only something was wrong with the monitor. Ig kept splitting into two overlapping figures and then jumping back together; that part of the image was flickering and unstable. The primary image of Ig showed him as he was, a pale, gaunt man with tragically receding hair, a goatee, and curving horns. But then there was that secondary shadow image, dark and featureless, which kept twitching in and out of existence. This second version of himself was without horns-an image not of who he was but of who he had been. It was like watching his own soul trying to pry itself free from the demon to which it was anchored.

The state trooper who sat in that bare, brightly lit room with the monitor had noticed as well, had revolved in his office chair to study the screen. Ig could still not see the trooper’s face; he had rotated far enough around so Ig could see only his ear and his polished white dome, a cannonball of bone and skin, resting on the thick, brutal plug of his neck. After a moment the state trooper reached out and banged his fist on the monitor, trying to correct the image, and hit it so hard that for a moment the whole picture blacked out.