Joe Hill - Horns

For a brief time, when he was sixteen, she had been his by right. For a few days, he had worn Merrin’s cross around his neck, and when he sometimes pressed that cross to his lips, he could imagine he was kissing it while she wore it about her throat-the cross and nothing else. But then he let her cross and his chance at her slip through his fingers, because even more than he wanted to see her pale and naked in the dark, he wanted to see something shatter, wanted to hear an explosion loud enough to deafen him, wanted to see a car erupt into flame. His mother’s Caddy maybe, with her in it. The very thought made his pulse racy and strange in a way fantasies of Merrin couldn’t match. So he gave her up, gave her back. Made his fool’s deal with Ig-a deal with the devil, really. It had not just cost him the girl. It had cost him his eye. He felt there was meaning in this. Lee had done a miracle once, had touched the sky and caught the moon before it could fall, and ever since, God had pointed him toward other things that needed fixing: cats and crosses, political campaigns and senile old women. What he fixed was his forever, to do with as he liked, and only once had he given away what God put into his hands, and he had been blinded as a reminder not to do it again. And now the cross was his once more, proof, if he needed it, that he was being guided toward something, that he and Merrin were being brought together for a reason. He felt he was supposed to fix the cross and then fix her in some way, maybe simply by setting her free of Ig.

Lee might’ve kept his distance from Merrin all summer, but then Ig made it easy for him to go see her, sent him an e-mail from NYC:

Merrin wants her dresser but doesn’t have a car and her dad’s got work. I said ask you to bring it down and she said you aren’t her bitch, but you and I both know you are, so bring it down next time you get to Boston for the congressman. Besides, she has snared an available blonde for you. Imagine the children this woman will bear you, little Vikings with eyes like the Arctic Ocean. Go to Merrin now. You cannot resist her summons. Let her buy you a nice dinner. You’ve got to be ready to leap in to do her dirty work now that I’m heading off.

Are you hanging in there?-Ig

Lee didn’t understand the last part of Ig’s e-mail for hours-Are you hanging in there?-puzzled over it all morning, then remembered that his mother was dead, had been dead for two weeks. He was more interested in that line about leaping in to do Merrin’s dirty work, a kind of message in and of itself. That night Lee suffered overheated, sexually complicated dreams; he dreamed that Merrin was naked in his bed, and he sat on top of her arms and held her down while he forced a funnel into her mouth, a red plastic funnel, and then poured gasoline into it, and she began to buck under him as in orgasm. He lit a match, holding the matchbook in his teeth to keep the strike strip steady, and dropped it down the funnel, and there was a whoosh, and a cyclone of red flames rose from the hole, and her surprised eyes ignited. When he woke, he found the sheets soaked, had never before had a wet dream of such power, even as a teenager.

Two days later it was Friday, and he drove to Merrin’s to get the dresser. He had to move a heavy, rusting toolbox from the trunk to the backseat to make room for it, and even then he had to borrow straps from Merrin’s father to keep the lid down and the dresser in place. Halfway to Boston, Lee pulled over at a rest area and sent her a text message:

Coming down to Boston tonight, got this heavy SOB in the trunk, you better be there to take it. Is my ice queen around, maybe I can meet her.

There was a long wait before Merrin replied:

ah, sht Lee you are the best dam man for cuming to c me but shouldve told me you were on the wy no icequeen tonite shes workin guess youll have to make do with me.

MERRIN ANSWERED THE DOOR in sweatpants and a bulky hoodie, and her roommate was there, a butchy Asian girl with an annoying snicker. She was pacing around the living room, talking on a cell phone, her voice nasal and painfully cheerful.

“What do you have in this thing anyway?” Lee said. He leaned on the dresser, breathing hard and wiping sweat from his face. He had wheeled it in, strapped to a dolly that Merrin’s dad had told him to take with him, banged it up seventeen steps to get it to the landing, nearly dumping it twice. “Chain-mail underwear?”

The roomie looked over Merrin’s shoulder and said, “Try a cast-iron chastity belt.” And wandered off, trailing goose-honk laughter.

“Thought your roomie moved,” Lee said when she’d got out of earshot.

“She’s going away the same time Ig does,” Merrin told him. “San Diego. After that I’ll be all alone here for a while.”

Looking him in the eyes and smirking a little. Another message.

They wrestled the dresser in through the door, and then Merrin said just leave it and went into the kitchen to heat up some Indian food. She brought paper plates to a round, stained table under a window with a view of the street. Kids were skateboarding in the summer night, gliding out of the shadows and into the orange-tinted pools of light cast by the sodium-vapor streetlamps.

Merrin’s notebooks and papers were spread all over one side of the table, and she began putting them in a pile to get them out of the way. Lee bent over her shoulder, pretending to look at her work while he drew in a long, sweet breath of her scented hair. He saw loose sheets of ruled notebook paper with dots and dashes arranged on them in a grid.

“What’s with connect-the-dots?”

“Oh,” she said, collecting the papers and sticking them in a textbook and putting them up on the windowsill. “My roommate. We play that game, you know that game? Where you make all the dots, and then connect them into squares, and whoever has the most squares wins. Loser has to do laundry. She hasn’t had to wash her own clothes in months.”

Lee said, “You should let me have a look. I’m good at that game. I could help you with your next move.” He had only caught a brief glimpse of it, but it didn’t even look like the grid had been drawn correctly. Maybe it was a different version of the game than the one he knew.

“I think that would be cheating. You’re saying you want to make a cheater out of me?” she asked.

They held each other’s stares for a moment. Lee said, “I want what you want.”

“Well. I think I should try to win fair and square. No pun intended.”

They sat across from each other. Lee looked around, considering the place. It wasn’t much of an apartment: a living room, a kitchenette, and two bedrooms on the second floor of a rambling Cambridge house that had been divided into five units. Dance music thumped below.

“Are you going to be able to cover the rent with no roommate?”

“No. I’ll have to find someone to shack up with eventually.”

“I bet Ig would help with the rent.”

She said, “He’d pay the whole thing. I could be his kept mistress. I had an offer like that once, you know.”

“What offer?”

“One of my professors asked me out to lunch a few months ago. I thought we were going to talk about my residency. Instead he got us a two-hundred-dollar bottle of wine and told me he wanted to rent me a place in Back Bay. Sixty-year-old guy with a daughter two years older than me.”

“Married?”

“Of course.”

Lee sat back in his chair and whistled through his teeth. “Ig must’ve shit himself.”

“I didn’t tell him. And don’t you say anything about it either. I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”

“Why didn’t you tell Ig?”

“Because I’m doing coursework with the guy. I wouldn’t want Ig to report him for sexual harassment or something.”