Joe Hill - Horns

The cat with the mismatched eyes poked his head from between the low stalks of corn to stare at Lee for a long, silent moment, not crying for once. Lee withdrew his hand from the pocket of his coat, moving slowly, so as not to scare it.

“Hey, bud-dee,” he said, dragging out the last syllable in a musical sort of way. “Hey, bud-dee.”

The sardine tin made a sharp metal cracking sound as he popped it open, and the tom flitted back into the corn, was gone.

“Oh, no, buddy,” Lee said, jumping to his feet. It was unfair. He had planned out the whole encounter, how he would lure the cat close with a soft, friendly song and then put the tin down for him, making no move to touch him tonight, just letting him eat. And now he was gone, without giving Lee a chance.

The wind lifted and the corn rustled uneasily, and Lee felt the cold through his coat. He was standing there, too disappointed to move, just staring blankly out at the corn, when the cat leaped into sight again, jumping onto the top rail of the fence. He turned his head to stare back at Lee with bright, fascinated eyes.

Lee was relieved the tom hadn’t run off without a look back, was grateful to him for sticking around. Lee made no sudden moves. He crept, rather than walked, and did not speak to the cat again. He thought, when he got close, that the tom would drop back into the corn and vanish. Instead, though, when Lee had reached the fence, the cat took a few steps along the top rail, then paused to look back again, a kind of expectancy in his eyes. Waiting to see if Lee would follow, inviting him to follow. Lee took a post and climbed to the top rail. The fence shook, and he thought now, now the cat would jump and be gone. Instead the tomcat waited for the fence to stop moving and then began to stroll away, tail in the air to show his black asshole and big balls.

Lee tightroped after the tomcat, arms held out to either side for balance. He did not dare hurry, for fear of frightening him off, but moved at a steady walk. The cat strutted lazily on his way, leading him farther and farther from the house. The corn grew right up to the fence, and dry, thick leaves swatted and brushed Lee’s arm. He had a bad moment when one of the rails shook wildly underfoot, and he had to crouch down and put a hand on a post to keep from falling. The cat waited for him to recover, crouching on the next tie. He still didn’t move when Lee stood back up and crossed the wobbling log to him. Instead he arched his back, ruffling up his fur, and began to purr his strained, rusty purr. Lee was nearly beside himself with excitement, to be so close to him at last, almost close enough to touch.

“Hey,” he breathed, and the tom’s purring intensified, and he lifted his back to Lee, and it was impossible to believe he didn’t want to be touched.

Lee knew he had promised himself he wouldn’t try to pet the tomcat, not tonight, not when they were just making first contact, but it would be rude to reject such an unmistakable request for affection. He reached down gently to stroke him.

“Hey, bud-dee,” he sang softly, and the cat squeezed his eyes shut in a look of pure animal pleasure, then opened them and lashed out with one claw.

Lee jerked upright, the claw swishing through the air not an inch from his left eyeball. The rail clattered violently underfoot, and Lee’s legs went rubbery, and he fell sideways into the corn.

The top rung was only about four feet from the ground in most places, but along that part of the fence the earth sloped away to the left, so the fall was closer to six feet. The pitchfork that lay in the corn had been there for over a decade, had been waiting for Lee since before he was born, lying flat on the earth with the curved and rusted tines sticking straight up. Lee hit it headfirst.

HE SAT UP A WHILE LATER. The corn whispered frantically, spreading false rumors about him. The cat was gone from the fence. It was full night, and when he looked up, he caught the stars moving. They were all satellites now, shooting in different directions, dropping this way and that. The moon twitched, fell a few inches, twitched again. As if the curtain of heaven were in danger of falling, and revealing the empty stage behind. Lee reached up and straightened the moon and put it back where it belonged. The moon was so cold in his hand that it made his fingers numb, like handling an icicle.

He had to get very tall to fix the moon, and while he was up there, he looked down on his little corner of West Bucksport. He saw things he could not possibly have seen in the corn, saw things the way God saw them. He saw his father’s car coming down Pickpocket Lane and turning up the gravel road to their house. He was driving with a six-pack on the passenger seat and a cold one between his thighs. If Lee wanted to, he could’ve flicked his finger against the car and spun it off the road, tumbling it into the evergreens that screened their house from the highway. He imagined it, the car on its side, flames licking up from under the hood. People would say he was driving blind drunk.

He felt as detached from the world below as he would’ve been from a model railroad. West Bucksport was just as delightful and precious, with its little trees, and little toy houses, and little toy people. If he wanted to, he could’ve picked up his own house and moved it across the street. He could’ve put his heel on it and flattened it underfoot. He could wipe the whole mess off the table with one stroke of his arm.

He saw movement in the corn, an animate shadow sidling among other shadows, and recognized the cat, and knew he had not been raised to this great height just to fix the moon. He had offered food and kindness to the stray, and it had led him on with a show of affection and then lashed out at him and knocked him off the fence and might’ve killed him, not for any reason but because that was what it was built to do, and now it was walking away as if nothing had happened, and maybe to the cat nothing had happened, maybe it had already forgotten Lee, and that would not do. Lee reached down with his great arm-it was like being on the top floor of the John Hancock Tower and looking down the length of the glass building at the ground-and pushed his finger into the cat, mashing it into the dirt. For a single frantic instant, less than a second, he felt a spasm of quivering life under his fingertip, felt the cat trying to leap away, but it was too late, and he crushed it, felt it shatter like a dried seed pod. He ground his finger back and forth, the way he had seen his father grind out cigarettes in an ashtray. He killed it with a kind of quiet, subdued satisfaction, feeling a little distant from himself, the way he sometimes got when he was coloring.

After a while he lifted his hand and looked at it, at a streak of blood across his palm and a fluff of black fur stuck to it. He smelled his hand, which had on it a fragrance of musty basements mingled with summer grass. The smell interested him, told a story of hunting mice in subterranean places and hunting for a mate to screw in the high weeds.

Lee lowered his hand to his lap and stared blankly at the cat. He was sitting in the corn again, although he didn’t remember sitting down, and he was the same size he’d always been, although he didn’t remember getting any smaller. The tomcat was a twisted wreck. Its head was turned around backward, as if someone had tried to unscrew it like a lightbulb. The tom stared up into the night with wide-eyed surprise. Its skull was battered and misshapen, and brains were coming out one ear. The unlucky black cat lay next to a flat piece of slate, wet with blood. Lee was remotely aware of a stinging in his right arm and looked at it and saw that his wrist and forearm were scratched up, scratches grouped together in three parallel lines, as if he had taken a fork to himself, gouging at his flesh with the tines. He couldn’t figure out how the cat had managed to scratch him when he had been so much bigger, but he was tired now and his head hurt, and after a while he gave up trying to figure it out. It was exhausting, being like God, being big enough to fix the things that needed fixing. He pushed himself to his feet, his legs weak beneath him, and started back toward the house.