Joe Hill: Horns

The good: making love to Merrin Williams in it, banging his head on the roof and his knee on the gearshift. The rear shocks were stiff and screeched when the car jolted up and down, a sound that would cause Merrin to bite her lip to keep from laughing, even as Ig moved between her legs. The bad: the night Merrin was raped and killed, out by the old foundry, while he’d been sleeping off a drunk in this car, hating her in his dreams.

The AMC had been a place to hang out when there was nowhere else to go, when there was nothing to do except drive around Gideon, wishing something would happen. Nights when Merrin worked or had to study, Ig would cruise around with his best friend, tall, lean, half-blind Lee Tourneau. They’d drive down to the sandbar, where sometimes there would be a campfire and people they knew, a couple trucks parked on the embankment, a cooler full of Coronas. They would sit on the hood of the car and watch the sparks from the fire sail up into the night to vanish, the flames reflected in the black, swiftly moving water. They would talk about bad ways to die-a natural subject for them, parked so close to the Knowles River. Ig said drowning would be worst, and he had personal experience to back it up. The river had swallowed him once, held him under, forced itself down his throat, and it had been Lee Tourneau who swam in to pull him out. Lee said there was lots worse than drowning and that Ig had no imagination. Lee said burning had drowning beat any day of the week, but then he would say that, he’d had an unfortunate run-in with a burning car. Both of them knew what they knew.

Best of all were nights in the Gremlin with Lee and Merrin both. Lee would accordion himself in the rear-he was courtly by nature and always let Merrin sit up front with Ig-and then lie stretched out, with the back of his hand draped over his brow, Oscar Wilde lounging in despair on his davenport. They’d go to the Paradise Drive-In, drink beer while madmen in hockey masks chased half-naked teenagers, who would fall under the chain saw to cheers and honking horns. Merrin called these “double dates” Ig was there with her, and Lee was there with his right hand. For Merrin, half the fun of going out with Ig and Lee was ragging on Lee’s ass, but the morning Lee’s mother died, Merrin was the first to his house, to hold him while he wept.

For half an instant, Ig thought of paying a visit to Lee now; he had pulled Ig out of the deep water once, maybe he could again. But then he remembered what Glenna had told him an hour ago, the terrible bad-dream thing she had confessed over doughnuts: I got carried away and went down on him, right there with a couple guys watching and everything. Ig tried to feel the things he was supposed to feel, tried to hate them both, but couldn’t even manage low-grade loathing. He had other concerns at the moment. They were growing out of his fucking head.

And anyway: It wasn’t as if Lee were stabbing him in the back, swiping his beloved out from under him. Ig wasn’t in love with Glenna and didn’t think she was or ever had been in love with him-whereas Lee and Glenna had history, had been sweethearts once upon a very long time ago.

It was still maybe not the sort of thing one friend would do to another, but then Lee and Ig weren’t friends anymore. After Merrin had been killed, Lee Tourneau had casually, without overt cruelty, cut Ig out of his life. There had been some expressions of quiet, sincere sympathy in the days right after Merrin’s body was found, but no promises that Lee would be there for him, no offers to meet. Then, in the weeks and months that followed, Ig noticed he only ever called Lee, not the other way around, and that Lee did not work too hard to hold up his end of a conversation. Lee had always affected a certain emotional disengagement, and so it was possible Ig did not immediately register how fully and completely he’d been dropped. After a while, though, Lee’s routine excuses for not coming over, for not meeting, added up. Ig was maybe not smart about other people, but he’d always been good at math. Lee was the aide to a New Hampshire congressman and couldn’t have a relationship with the lead suspect in a sex-murder case. There were no fights, no ugly moments between them. Ig understood, let it be over without begrudging him. Lee-poor, wounded, studious, lonely Lee-had a future. Ig didn’t.

Maybe because he’d been thinking of the sandbar, he wound up parked off Knowles Road, at the base of the Old Fair Road Bridge. If he was looking for a place to drown himself, he couldn’t have hunted down a better spot. The sandbar reached a hundred feet into the current before dropping off into deep, fast, blue water. He could fill his pockets with stones and wade right in. He could also climb onto the bridge and jump; it was high enough. Aim for the rocks instead of the river if he wanted to do the job right. Just the thought of the impact made him wince. He got out and sat against the hood and listened to the hum of trucks high above him, rushing south.

He had been here lots of other times. Like the old foundry on Route 17, the sandbar was a destination for people too young to have a destination. He remembered another time down here, with Merrin, and how they had gotten caught out in the rain and sheltered under the bridge. They were in high school then. Neither of them could drive, and they had no car to run to. They shared a soggy basket of fried clams, sitting up on the weedy cobblestone incline under the bridge. It was so cold they could see their breath, and he held her wet, frozen hands in his.

Ig found a stained two-day-old newspaper, and when they got bored of not really reading it, Merrin said they should do something inspiring with it. Something that would lift the spirits of everyone everywhere who looked out on the river in the rain. They sprinted up the hill, through the drizzle, to buy birthday candles at the 7-Eleven, and then they ran back. Merrin showed him how to make boats out of the pages of the newspaper, and they lit the candles and put them in and set them off, one by one, into the rain and gathering twilight-a long chain of little flames, gliding serenely through the waterlogged darkness.

“Together we are inspiring,” she said to him, her cold lips so close to his earlobe that it made him shiver, her breath all clams. She trembled continuously, struggling with a laughing fit. “Merrin Williams and Iggy Perrish, making the world a better, more wonderful place, one paper ship at a time.”

She either didn’t notice or pretended not to see the boats filling with rain and sinking less than a hundred yards offshore, the candles in them winking out.

Remembering how it had been, and who he had been when they were together, stopped the frantic, out-of-control whirl of thoughts in his head. Perhaps for the first time all day, it was possible for Ig to take stock, to consider without panic what was happening to him.

He considered again the possibility that he had suffered a break with what was real, that everything he’d experienced over the course of the day had only been imagined. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d confused fantasy with reality, and he knew from experience that he was especially prone to unlikely religious delusions. He had not forgotten the afternoon he spent in the Tree House of the Mind. Hardly a day had passed in eight years that he hadn’t thought about it. Of course, if the tree house had been a fantasy-and that was the only explanation that ever made sense-it had been a shared one. He and Merrin had discovered the place together, and what had happened there was one of the secret silken knots that bound them to each other, a thing to puzzle over when a drive got dull or in the middle of the night, after being woken by a thunderstorm, when neither of them could get back to sleep. “I know it’s possible for people to have the same hallucination,” Merrin said once. “I just never saw myself as the type.”