Joe Hill - Horns

But Lee wasn’t sure the congressman was listening anymore. He was squinting at the TV. Terry Perrish was slumped back in his chair, playing dead, his head cocked at an unnatural angle. His guest, the skinny English rock star in the black leather jacket, made the sign of the cross over his body.

“Aren’t you friends with him? Terry Perrish?”

“More his brother. Ig. They’re all wonderful people, though, the Perrish family. They were everything to me, growing up.”

“I’ve never met them. The Perrish family.”

“I think they lean Democrat.”

“People vote for friends before party,” the congressman said. “Maybe we could all be friends.” He punched Lee in the shoulder, as if at a sudden idea. He seemed to have forgotten about his migraine. “Wouldn’t it be something to announce the run for the governor’s seat on Terry Perrish’s show next year?”

“It would. It sure would,” Lee said.

“Think there’s any way to fix it?”

“Why don’t I take him out the next time he’s around,” Lee said, “and put in the good word for you. See what happens.”

“Sure,” the congressman said. “You do that. Paint the town red. Do it on my dime.” He sighed. “You cheer me up. I’m a very blessed man, and I know it. And you are one of those blessings, Lee.” He looked at Lee with eyes that twinkled in a grandfatherly sort of way. He could do it on cue, make those Santa Claus eyes. “You know, Lee, you aren’t too young to run for Congress yourself. My seat is going to be empty in a couple years, one way or another. You have very magnetic qualities. You’re good-looking and honest. You have a good personal story of redemption through Christ. You tell a mean joke.”

“I don’t think so. I’m happy with the work I’m doing now-for you. I don’t think running for office is my true calling,” Lee said, and without any embarrassment at all added, “I don’t believe that’s what the Lord wants of me.”

“That’s too bad,” said the congressman. “The party could use you, and there’s no telling how high you could climb. Heck, give yourself a chance-you could be our next Reagan.”

“Nah,” Lee said. “I’d rather be the next Karl Rove.”

HIS MOTHER DIDN’T HAVE A LOT to say at the end. Lee wasn’t sure how much she knew in the final weeks. Most days she spoke variations of only one word, her voice crazed and cracking: “Thirst! Thirst-ee!” Her eyes straining from their sockets. Lee would sit by the bed, naked in the heat, reading a magazine. By midday it was ninety-five degrees in the bedroom, maybe fifteen degrees hotter under the piled comforters. His mother didn’t always seem to know Lee was in the room with her. She stared at the ceiling, her weak arms struggling pitifully under the blankets, like a woman lost overboard, flailing to tread water. Other times her great eyes would roll in their sockets to point a pleading, terrified look in Lee’s direction. Lee would sip his iced tea and pay no mind.

Some days, after changing a diaper, Lee would forget to put on a new one, and leave his mother naked from the waist down under the covers. When she peed herself, she would begin to call “Wet! Wet! Oh, God, Lee! Wet myself!” Lee was never in a hurry to change her sheets, a laborious, tiresome process. Her pee smelled bad, like carrots, like kidney failure. When Lee did change the sheets, he would ball up the wet linens and then press them down over his mother’s face while she howled in a confused and strangled voice. Which was after all what his mother had done to him, rubbing his face in the sheets when he wet them. Her way of teaching him not to piss the bed, a problem in his youth.

His mother, however, had a single lucid moment toward the end of May, after weeks of incoherence-a dangerous moment of clarity. Lee had awoken before dawn in his bedroom on the second floor. He didn’t know what had stirred him, only that something was wrong. He sat up on his elbows, listening intently to the stillness. It was before five, and there was a faint show of false dawn graying the sky outside. The window was open a crack, and he could smell new grass, freshly budded trees. The air wafting in had a warm, humid weight to it. If it was warm already, the day was going to be a scorcher, especially in the guest room, where he was finding out if it was possible to slow-cook an old woman. Finally he heard something, a soft thud downstairs, followed by a sound like someone scraping shoes on a plastic mat.

He rose and padded quietly downstairs to check on his mother. He thought he’d find her asleep, or maybe staring blankly at the ceiling. He didn’t think he’d find her rolled on her left side, fumbling with one withered claw for the phone. She had knocked the receiver out of the cradle, and it was hanging to the floor by the coiled beige wire. She had collected a bunch of the wire in one hand, trying to pull the receiver up to where she could reach it, and it was swinging back and forth, scraping the floor, occasionally batting lightly against the night table.

His mother stopped trying to collect the wire when she saw Lee standing there. Her harrowed, sunken face was calm, almost expectant. She had once had thick, honey-colored hair, which for years she’d kept short but full, her curls feathering her shoulders. Farrah Fawcett hair. Now, though, she was balding, thin silver strands combed sideways across her liver-spotted dome.

“What are you doing, Mom?” Lee asked.

“Making a call.”

“Who were you going to call?” As he spoke, he registered the clarity in her voice and knew that she had, impossibly, surfaced from her dementia for the moment.

His mother gave him a long blank stare, then said, “What are you?” Partially surfaced anyway.

“Lee. Don’t you know me?”

“You aren’t him. Lee is out walking on the fence. I told him not to. I said he’d pay the devil for it, but he can’t help himself.”

Lee crossed the room and set the phone back in the cradle. Leaving an operating phone almost in arm’s reach had been idiotically careless, and never mind her condition.

As he bent forward to unplug the phone from the wall, though, his mother reached out and grabbed his wrist. Lee almost screamed, he was so surprised at the ferocious strength in her gaunt and gnarled fingers.

“I’m going to die anyway,” she said. “Why do you want me to suffer? Why don’t you just stand back and let it happen?”

Lee said, “Because I wouldn’t learn anything if I just let it happen.”

He expected another question, but instead his mother said, in an almost satisfied voice, “Yes. That’s right. Learn about what?”

“If there are limits.”

“To what I can survive?” his mother asked, and then went on, “No. No, that’s not it. You mean limits to what you can do.” She sank back into her pillows-and Lee was surprised to see she was smiling in a knowing sort of way. “You aren’t Lee. Lee is on the fence. If I catch him walking on that fence again, he’ll feel the back of my hand. He’s been told.”

She inhaled deeply, and her eyelids sank shut. He thought maybe she was settling down to go back to sleep-she often slipped into unconsciousness quite rapidly-but then she spoke again. There was a musing tone in her thin, old voice. “Ordered an espresso maker from a catalog one time. I think it might have been the Sharper Image. Pretty little thing, lot of copper trim. I waited a couple weeks, and it finally showed up on the doorstep. I sliced open the box, and would you believe it? There was nothing in there but packaging. Eighty-nine dollars for bubble wrap and Styrofoam. Someone must’ve gone to sleep in the espresso-machine factory.” She exhaled a long, satisfied breath.