Joe Hill - Horns

He watched Terry another minute, but when he didn’t stir, Lee flipped his cigarette butt into the wet grass and started up the road after her. He followed the gravel ruts around a slight curve and up a hill, and there was the foundry, framed against a sky of boiling black clouds. With its towering smokestack, it looked like a factory built to produce nightmares in mass quantities. The wet grass glistened and shook in the wind. He thought perhaps she had walked up to the crumbling keep of black brick and shadows, was changing there, but then he heard her hiss at him from the dark, to the left.

“Lee,” she said, and he saw her, twenty feet off the path.

She stood below an old tree, the bark peeling away to show the dead, white, leprously spotted wood beneath. She had pulled on his gray sweatpants but was clutching Terry’s sport jacket to her thin, bare chest. The sight was an erotic shock, like something from a lazy afternoon masturbation fantasy: Merrin with her pale shoulders and slim arms and haunted eyes, half naked and shivering in the woods, waiting for him alone.

The gym bag was at her feet, and her wet clothes were folded and set to one side, her heels placed neatly on top of them. Something was tucked into one shoe-a man’s tie, it looked like, folded many times over. How she did like to fold things. Lee sometimes felt she had been folding him into smaller and smaller slices for years.

“There’s no shirt in your bag,” she said. “Just sweats.”

Lee said, “That’s right. I forgot.” Walking toward her.

“Well, shit,” she said. “Give me your shirt.”

“You want me to take off my clothes?” he said.

She tried to smile but let out a short impatient breath. “Lee-I’m sorry, I’m just…I’m not in the mood.”

“No. Of course you aren’t. You need a drink and someone to talk to. Hey, I’ve got weed if you really need something to relax.” He held up the joint and smiled, because he felt she needed a smile right then. “Let’s go to my house. If you’re not in the mood tonight, another time.”

“What are you talking about?” she asked, frowning, eyebrows knitting together. “I mean I’m not in the mood for comedy. What kind of mood are you talking about?”

He leaned forward and kissed her. Her lips were wet and cold.

She flinched, took a startled step back. The jacket slipped, and she caught it to hold it in place, keep it between them. “What are you doing?”

“I just want you to feel better. If you’re miserable, that’s at least partly my fault.”

“Nothing’s your fault,” she said. She was watching him with wide, wondering eyes, a terrible kind of understanding dawning in her face. So like a little girl’s face. It was easy to look at her and imagine she was not twenty-four but still sixteen, still cherry. “I didn’t break up with Ig because of you. It has nothing to do with you.”

“Except that now we can be together. Wasn’t that the reason for this whole exercise?”

She took another unsteady step back, her face becoming incredulous, her mouth widening as if to cry out. The thought that she might be about to yell alarmed him, and he felt an impulse to step forward and get a hand over her mouth. But she didn’t yell. She laughed-strained, disbelieving laughter. Lee grimaced; for a moment it was like his senile mother laughing at him: You ought to ask for your money back.

“Oh, fuck,” she said. “Oh, Jesus fuck. Aw, Lee, this is a really bad time for some kind of shitty joke.”

“I agree,” Lee said.

She stared. The sick, confused smile faded from her face, and her upper lip lifted in a sneer. An ugly sneer of disgust.

“That’s what you think? That I broke up with him…so I could fuck you? You’re his friend. My friend. Don’t you understand anything?”

He took a step toward her, reaching for her shoulder, and she shoved him. He wasn’t expecting it, and his heels struck a root, and he went straight down onto his ass in the wet, hard earth.

Lee stared up at her and felt something rising in him, a kind of thunderous roar, a subway coming through the tunnel. He didn’t hate her for the things she was saying, although that was bad enough, leading him on for months-years, really-then ridiculing him for wanting her. What he hated mostly was the look on her face. That look of disgust, the sharp little teeth showing under her raised upper lip.

“What were we talking about, then?” Lee asked patiently, ludicrously, from his spot on the damp earth. “What have we spent the whole last month discussing? I thought you wanted to fuck other people. I thought there were things you knew about yourself, about how you feel, that you had to deal with. Things about me.”

“Oh, God,” she said. “Oh, Jesus, Lee.”

“Telling me to meet you for dinners. Writing me dirty messages about some mythical blonde who doesn’t even exist. Calling me up at all hours to find out what I’m doing, how I am.” He reached out with one hand and put it on that neat pile of her clothes. He was getting ready to stand up.

“I was worried about you, you dick,” she said. “Your mother just died.”

“You think I’m stupid? You were climbing all over me the morning she passed away, dry humping my leg with her dead in the next room.”

“I what?” Her voice rose, shrill and piping. She was making too much noise, Terry might hear, Terry might wonder why they were arguing. Lee’s hand closed around the tie tucked into her shoe, and he clenched it in his fist as he started to push himself to his feet. Merrin went on, “Are you talking about when you were drunk and I gave you a hug and you started fondling me? I let it go because you were fucked up, Lee, and that’s all that happened. That’s all.” She was beginning to cry again. She put one hand over her eyes, her chin trembling. She still held the sport coat to her chest with the other hand. “This is so fucked. How could you think I’d break up with Ig so I could screw you? I’d rather be dead, Lee. Dead. Don’t you know that?”

“I do now, bitch,” he said, and jerked the jacket out of her hands, threw it on the ground, and put the loop of the tie around her throat.

AFTER HE HIT HER with the stone, Merrin stopped trying to throw him off, and he could do what he wanted, and he loosened his grip on the tie around her throat. She turned her face to the side, her eyes rolled back in their sockets, her eyelids fluttering strangely. A trickle of blood ran from under her hairline and down her dirty, smudged face.

He thought she was completely out of it, too dazed to do anything except take it while he fucked her, but then she spoke, in a strange, distant voice.

“It’s okay,” she said.

“Yeah?” he asked her, pushing with more force, because it was the only way to stay hard. It wasn’t as good as he thought it’d be. She was dry. “Yeah, you like that?”

But he had misunderstood her again. She wasn’t talking about how it felt.

“I escaped,” she said.

Lee ignored her, kept working between her legs.

Her head turned slightly, and she stared up into the great spreading crown of the tree above them.

“I climbed the tree and got away,” she said. “I finally found my way back, Ig. I’m okay. I’m where it’s safe.”

Lee glanced up into the branches and waving leaves, but there was nothing up there. He couldn’t imagine what she was staring at or talking about, and he didn’t feel like asking. When he looked back into her face, something had fled from her eyes, and she didn’t say another word, which was good, because he was sick and tired of all her fucking talk.