Joe Hill - Horns

“And what are you doing with the rest of your evening?” Lee had asked as Ig departed, and Terry said, “I dunno-I was going to see if Family Guy was on. What about you? Anything happening around town?” Two hours later they were at the sandbar and a friend from high school whose name Terry couldn’t exactly remember was handing him a joint.

They had gone out, ostensibly, to have some drinks and say hello to the old crowd, but there on the sandbar, standing back from the bonfire, Lee told Terry that the congressman loved the show and wanted to meet him sometime. Terry took it in stride, tipped the neck of his beer bottle to Lee, and said definitely, they ought to make it happen one of these days. He had thought it was possible Lee would work his way around to something along those lines and does not hold it against him. Lee has a job to do, same as anyone else, same as Terry. And Lee’s job involves doing a lot of good; Terry knows about his work with Habitat for Humanity, knows Lee gives time every summer to work with poor and disadvantaged urban kids at Camp Galilee, Ig right at his side. Being around Lee and Ig has, for years, made Terry feel a little guilty. He never wanted to save the world himself. The only thing Terry ever wanted was for someone to pay him for goofing off with his horn. Well, that and maybe a girl who likes to party-not an L.A. model, not someone hung up on her cell phone and her car. Just someone fun and real and a little dirty in the sack. Someone East Coast, with working-class jeans and a few CDs by Foreigner. He’s got the sweet gig, so he’s halfway to happiness anyway.

“Fuck we doing out here?” Terry asks now, staring into the rain. “Thought we were calling it a night.”

Lee says, “I thought you called it a night about five minutes ago. I’m pretty sure I heard you snoring. I can’t wait to tell people that the Terry Perrish drooled all over my front seat. That’ll impress the honeys. It’s like my own little piece of TV history.”

Terry opens his mouth for a comeback-he will clear more than two million dollars this year, partly on the strength of a sublime gift for verbally cutting other wiseasses down-and finds he has nothing to say, his a perfectly empty head. He shows Lee Tourneau his middle finger instead.

“You think Ig and Merrin are still at The Pit?” Terry asks. The place will be coming up on the right at any moment.

“We’ll see,” Lee says. “Be there in another minute.”

“Are you screwing with me? We don’t want to go see them. I know they don’t want to see us. It’s their last night.”

Lee gives Terry a surprised, curious look out of the corner of his good eye. “How do you know? Did she tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“That she’s breaking up with him. This is their last night.”

A statement that instantly jolts Terry out of his baked, thoughtless state, as startling as sitting down on a tack.

“The fuck you mean?”

“She thinks they got involved too young. She wants to see other guys.”

Terry marvels at the news, recoils from it, is baffled by it. He thoughtlessly lifts the joint cupped in his hand to his lips, then remembers it isn’t lit.

“You really didn’t know?” Lee asks.

“I just meant it’s their last night before Ig goes to England.”

“Oh.”

Terry stares blankly into the rain, which is coming down so hard the wipers can’t keep up, so it’s like being in a car wash, the way the water pours down the glass. He cannot imagine Ig without Merrin, cannot imagine who that person would be. He’s dazed by the news, so it takes an interminable time before the obvious question occurs to him.

“How do you know all this?”

“She talked to me about it,” Lee says. “She’s scared to hurt him. I’ve been in Boston a lot this summer, doing things for the congressman, and she’s there, too, so we get together and talk sometimes. I’ve probably seen her more than Ig has over the last month.”

Terry looks out at the underwater world, sees a reddish haze of light approaching on the right. They’re almost there.

“So why would you want to come by here now?”

“She said she’d call me if she needed a ride home,” Lee says. “And she hasn’t called.”

“So she doesn’t need you, then.”

“But she might not call if she’s upset. I just want to see if Ig’s car is still there or not. Parking’s up front. We don’t even need to pull in.”

Terry doesn’t follow Lee, can’t figure out why he would want to drive by and look for Ig’s car. He also can’t imagine Merrin wanting to be around either of them if things have ended badly.

But Lee is already slowing, turning his head to look past Terry at the parking lot on the right.

“I don’t…” Lee says, talking to himself now. “It’s not…I don’t think she would’ve gone home with him…” Sounding worried, almost.

Terry is the one who sees her, Merrin standing in the rain out by the side of the road, under a walnut with a great spreading crown. “There. Lee, right there.”

She seems to spot them at the same moment and steps out from beneath the tree, one arm raised. With the water coming down the passenger-side window, Terry sees her as through carnival glass, an impressionistic painting of a girl with copper-wire hair, holding aloft what at first seems to be a white votary candle. As they grind to a stop and she moves to the side of the car, Terry sees she is merely holding up a finger to get their attention as she breaks from cover and runs barefoot through the rain, holding her black heels in one hand.

The Caddy is a two-door, and even before Lee tells him to get in back, Terry is unbuckling his belt and turning to loft himself over the front seat. As he is about to pitch into the rear, Lee thuds an elbow into his ass, tipping him off balance, and instead of landing in the seat, Terry dives into the foot well. For God knows what reason, there’s a metal toolbox on the floor, and Terry catches it on the temple, flinches at a sharp stab of pain. He pulls himself up onto the seat and pushes the ball of his hand hard against his banged-up head. It was a mistake to go leaping around, has set off the strongest wave of motion sickness yet, so it feels as if the whole car has been picked up off the ground by a giant who is shaking it slowly, like a cup with dice in it. Terry shuts his eyes, fighting to suppress that sudden nauseating sensation of reckless motion.

By the time things have settled enough for him to risk looking around, Merrin is in the car and Lee Tourneau is turned sideways to face her. Terry looks at his palm and sees a bright drop of blood. He scraped himself good, although that initial sharp pain has already mostly subsided, leaving behind a dull ache. He wipes the blood on his pant leg and looks up.

It is easy to see that Merrin has only just stopped crying. She is pale and shaking, like someone either recovering from or beginning to succumb to illness, and her first attempt at a smile is a miserable thing to look at.

“Thanks for picking me up,” she says. “You just saved my life.”

“Where’s Ig?” Terry asks.

Merrin glances back at him but has trouble making eye contact, and Terry is immediately sorry he asked.

“I d-don’t know. He left.”

Lee says, “You told him?”

Merrin’s chin wrinkles, and she turns to face forward. She looks out the window at The Pit and doesn’t reply.

“How’d he take it?” Lee asks.

Terry can see her face reflected in the glass, can see her biting her lips and struggling not to cry. Her answer is “Can we just go?”

Lee nods and puts on his blinker, then pulls a U-ie in the rain.

Terry wants to touch her shoulder, wants to reassure her in some way, let her know that whatever happened in The Pit, he doesn’t hate her or hold it against her. But Terry doesn’t touch her, won’t touch her, never touches her. In a decade of knowing her, he has kept her at a friendly distance, even in his imagination, has never once considered allowing her into his sexual fantasies. There would be no harm in such a thing, yet he senses he would be placing something at risk all the same. What he would be placing at risk, he cannot say. To Terry the word “soul” first refers to a kind of music.