Joe Hill - Horns

“Sounds like a lot of work for a hot afternoon.”

“It would be fun. Be a hell of a good time.”

“But not as refreshing as a gin and tonic.”

“No,” Dale said, standing now at the threshold of his bedroom. “You get it for me, Ig. Make it stiff.”

Ig returned to the den, a room that had once been a gallery on the subject of Merrin Williams’s childhood, filled with photographs of her: Merrin in war paints and skins, Merrin riding her bike and grinning to show a mouthful of chrome wire, Merrin in a one-piece swimsuit and sitting on Ig’s shoulders, Ig up to his waist in the Knowles River. They were all gone now, and it looked as if the room had been furnished by a real-estate agent in the most banal fashion possible, for a Sunday-morning open house. As if no one lived here anymore.

No one lived here anymore. No one had lived here in months. It was just a place Dale and Heidi Williams stored their things, as detached from their interior lives as a hotel room.

The liquor was where it had always been, though, in the cabinets above the TV set. Ig mixed Dale a gin and tonic, using tonic water from the fridge in the kitchen, throwing in a sprig of mint, cutting a section of orange, too, and pushing it down into the ice. On the way back to the bedroom, though, a rope hanging from the ceiling brushed against Ig’s right horn, threatened to snag there. Ig looked up and-

– there it was, in the branches of the tree above him, the bottom of the tree house, words painted on the trap, the whitewash faintly visible in the night: BLESSED SHALL YOU BE WHEN YOU GO IN. Ig swayed, then-

– shook off an unexpected wave of dizziness. He used his free hand to massage his brow, waiting for his head to clear, for the sick feeling to abate. For a moment it was there, what had happened in the woods when he went drunk to the foundry to rave and wreck shit, but it was gone now. Ig put the glass down on the carpet and pulled the string, lowering a trapdoor to the attic with a loud shriek of springs.

If it was hot in the streets, it was suffocating in the low, unfinished attic. Some plywood had been laid across the beams to make a rudimentary floor. There was not enough headroom to stand under the steep pitch of the roof, and Ig didn’t need to. Three big cardboard boxes with the word MERRIN written on their sides in red Sharpie had been pushed just to the left of the open trap.

He carried them down one at a time, set them on the coffee table in the living room, and went through them. He drank Dale Williams’s gin and tonic while he explored what Merrin had left behind when she died.

Ig smelled her Harvard hoodie and the ass of her favorite jeans. He went through her books, her piles of used paperbacks. Ig rarely read novels, had always liked nonfiction about fasting, irrigation, travel, camping, and building structures out of recycled materials. But Merrin preferred fiction, high-end book-club stuff. She liked things that had been written by people who had lived short, ugly, and tragic lives, or who at least were English. She wanted a novel to be an emotional and philosophical journey and also to teach her some new vocabulary words.

She read Gabriel García Márquez and Michael Chabon and John Fowles and Ian McEwan. One book fell open in Ig’s hands to an underlined passage: “How guilt refined the methods of self-torture, threading the beads of detail into an eternal loop, a rosary to be fingered for a lifetime.” And then another, a different book: “It goes against the American storytelling grain to have someone in a situation he can’t get out of, but I think this is very usual in life.” Ig stopped flipping through her paperbacks. They were making him uneasy.

Some of his books were mixed in with hers, books he had not seen in years. A guide to statistics. The Camper’s Cookbook. Reptiles of New England. He drank the rest of his gin and thumbed through Reptiles. About a hundred pages in, he found a picture of the brown snake with the rattle and the orange stripe down the back. She was Crotalus horridus, a pit viper, and although her range was largely south of the New Hampshire border-she was common to Pennsylvania-she could be found as far north as the White Mountains. They rarely attacked humans, were shy by nature. More people had been killed in the last year by lightning than had died in the whole last century from run-ins with horridus; yet for all that, its venom was accounted the most dangerous of any American snake, neurotoxic, known to paralyze lungs and heart. He put the book back.

Merrin’s medical texts and ring-binder notebooks were piled in the bottom of the box. Ig opened one, then another, grazing. She kept notes in pencil, and her careful, not-particularly-girlish cursive was smeared and fading. Definitions of chemical compounds. A hand-drawn cross section of a breast. A list of apartments in London-flats-that she had found online for Ig. At the very bottom of the box was a large manila envelope. Ig almost didn’t bother with it, then hesitated, squinting at some pencil marks in the upper left-hand corner of the envelope. Some dots. Some dashes.

He opened the envelope and slid out a mammogram, a blue-and-white teardrop of tissue. The date was sometime in June last year. There were papers, too, ruled notebook papers. Ig saw his name on them. They were penciled all over in dots and dashes. He slid the papers and the mammogram back into the envelope.

He made a second gin and tonic and walked it down the hall. When he let himself into the bedroom, Dale was passed out on the covers, in black socks pulled almost to his knees and white jockey shorts with pee stains on the front. The rest of him was a stark white expanse of male flesh, his belly and chest matted in dark fur. Ig crept to the side of the bed to set down the drink. Dale stirred at the clink of the ice cubes.

“Oh. Ig,” Dale said. “Hello. Would you believe I forgot you were here for a minute?”

Ig didn’t reply. He stood by the bed with the manila envelope. He said, “She had cancer?”

Dale turned his face away. “I don’t want to talk about Mary,” Dale said. “I love her, but I can’t stand to think about her and…and any of it. My brother, you know, we haven’t spoken in years. But he owns a bike and Jet Ski dealership in Sarasota. Sometimes I think I could go down there and sell his bikes for him and look at girls on the beach. He still sends me Christmas cards asking me to visit. I think sometimes I’d like to get away from Heidi, and this town, and this awful house, and how bad I feel about my shitty, fucked-up life, and start all over again. If there’s no God and no reason for all this pain, then maybe I should start again before it’s too late.”

“Dale,” Ig said softly. “Did she tell you she had cancer?”

He shook his head, without lifting it from the pillow. “It’s one of these genetic things, you know. Runs in families. And we didn’t learn about it from her. We didn’t know about it at all until after she was dead. The medical examiner told us.”

“There was nothing in the paper about her having cancer,” Ig said.

“Heidi wanted them to put it in the paper. She thought it would create sympathy and make people hate you more. But I said Mary didn’t want anyone to know and we should respect that. She didn’t tell us. Did she tell you?”

“No,” Ig said. What she told him instead was that they should see other people. Ig had not read the two-page note in the envelope but thought he already understood. He said, “Your older daughter. Regan. I’ve never talked to you about her. I didn’t think it was my business. But I know it was hard losing her.”

“She was in so much pain,” Dale said. His next breath shuddered strangely. “It made her say awful things. I know she didn’t mean a lot of it. She was such a good person. Such a beautiful girl. I try to remember that, but mostly…mostly I remember how she was at the end. She was barely eighty pounds, and seventy pounds of that was hate. She said unforgivable things to Mary, you know. I think she was mad because Mary was so pretty, and-Regan lost her hair, and there was, you know, a mastectomy and a surgery to remove a block on her intestines, and she felt…she felt like Frankenstein, like something from a horror movie. She told us if we loved her, we’d put a pillow over her face and get it done. She told me I was probably glad it was her dying and not Merrin, because I always liked Merrin better. I try to put it all out of my mind, but I wake up some nights thinking about it. Or thinking about how Mary died. You want to remember how they lived, but the bad stuff kind of crowds out the rest. There’s probably some sound psychological reason for that. Mary took courses in psychology, she would’ve known why the bad stuff leaves a deeper mark than the good stuff. Hey, Ig. You believe my little girl got into Harvard?”