Joe Hill - Horns

You know how I want to die? On the Evel Knievel trail, roaring down it on a cart of my own. I could close my eyes and imagine your arms around me. Then go right into a tree. She never knew what hit her. That’s how. I would like very much to believe in a Gospel of Mick and Keith, where I can’t get what I want-which is you, Ig, and our children, and our ridiculous daydreams-but at least get what I need, which is a quick, sudden ending and the knowledge that you got away clean.

And you will have some stout and kindly mother-wife to give you children, and you will be a wonderful, happy, energetic father. You will see all of the world, every corner of it, and you will see pain, and you will ease some of it. You will have grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. You will teach. You will go for long walks in the woods. On one of these walks, when you are very old, you will find yourself at a tree with a house in its branches. I will be waiting for you there. I will be waiting by candlelight in our tree house of the mind.

This is a lot of lines and dots. Two months of work, right here. When I started writing, the cancer was a pea in one breast and less than a pea in my left armpit. Now, wrapping up, it’s…well. From small things, Mama, big things one day come.

I’m not sure I really needed to write so much. Probably could’ve saved myself a lot of effort and just copied out the first message I ever sent you, flashing you with my cross. US. That says most of it. Here’s the rest: I love you, Iggy Perrish.

Your girl, Merrin Williams

AFTER HE HAD READ MERRIN’S final message, and set it aside, and read it again, and set it aside once more, Ig climbed out of his chimney, wanted to be away from the smell of cinder and ash for a while. He stood in the room beyond, breathing deeply of the late-afternoon air, before it came to him that the snakes had not gathered. He was alone in the foundry, or almost. A single snake, the pit viper, lay coiled in the wheelbarrow, sleeping in fat loops of herself. He was tempted to go close and stroke her head, even took a single step toward her, then stopped. Better not, he thought, and looked down at the cross around his neck, then shifted his gaze to stare at his shadow climbing the wall in the last of the day’s red light. He saw the shadow of a man, long and skinny. He still felt the horns at his temples, felt the weight of them, the points slicing into the cooling air, but his shadow showed just himself. If he walked to the snake now, with Merrin’s cross around his throat, he thought there was a good chance she would bury her fangs in him.

He considered the black length of his shadow, climbing the brick wall, and understood that he could go home if he liked. With the cross about his throat, his humanity was his again, if he wanted it. He could put the last two days behind him, a nightmare time of sickness and panic, and be who he had always been. The thought brought with it an almost painful sense of relief, was an almost sensual pleasure: to be Ig Perrish and not the devil, to be a man and not a walking furnace.

He was still thinking it over when the serpent in the wheelbarrow lifted her head, white lights washing over her. Someone was coming up the road. Ig’s first thought was Lee, coming back to look for his lost cross and any other incriminating evidence he might’ve left behind.

But as the car rolled up in front of the foundry, he recognized it as Glenna’s battered emerald Saturn. He could see it through the doorway that opened on a six-foot drop. She climbed out, trailing veils of smoke behind her. She pitched her cigarette into the grass and ground it out with her toe. She had quit twice in the time Ig had been with her-once for as long as a week.

Ig watched her from the windows while she made her way around the building. She had on too much makeup. She always had on too much makeup. Black cherry lipstick and a big hair perm and eye shadow and shiny pink paste-ons. She didn’t want to go inside, Ig could tell from the look on her face. Beneath her painted mask, she looked afraid and miserable and pretty in a plain, forlorn sort of way. She wore tight, low-riding black jeans that showed the crack of her ass, and a studded belt and a white halter, which bared her soft belly and exposed the tattoo on her hip, the Playboy Bunny rabbit head. It hurt Ig, looking at her and seeing how it was all put together in a kind of desperate plea: Want me, somebody want me.

“Ig?” she called. “Iggy! Are you in there? Are you around?” She cupped a hand to her mouth to amplify her voice.

He didn’t reply, and she dropped the hand.

Ig went from window to window, watching her stride through the weeds, around to the back of the foundry. The sun was on the other side of the building, the red tip of a cigarette sizzling through the pale curtain of the sky. As she crossed to the Evel Knievel trail, Ig slipped down through an open doorway and circled behind her. He crept through the grass and the day’s dying ember light: one crimson shadow among many. Her back was to him, and she did not see him coming toward her.

Glenna slowed at the top of the trail, seeing the scorch mark on the earth, the blasted place where the soil had been cooked white. The red metal gas can was still there, lying in the undergrowth on its side. Ig crept on, continuing across the field behind her, and into the trees and brush, on the right-hand side of the trail. In the field around the foundry, it was still late afternoon, but under the trees it was already dusk. He played restlessly with the cross, rubbing it between thumb and forefinger, his mind on how to approach Glenna and what he should say to her. What she deserved of him.

She looked at the burn in the dirt and then at the red metal gas can and, finally, down the trail, toward the water. Ig could see her putting the parts together, figuring it out. She was breathing faster now. Her right hand dived into her purse.

“Oh, Ig,” she said. “Oh, goddamn it, Ig.”

The hand came out with her phone.

“Don’t,” Ig said.

She tottered in her heels. Her phone, as pink and smooth as a bar of soap, slipped from her hand, hit the ground, bounced into the grass.

“What the hell are you doing, Ig?” Glenna said, shifting from grief to anger in the time it took to get her balance back. She peered past a screen of blueberry bushes and into the shadows under the trees. “You scared the shit out of me.” She started toward him.

“Stay where you are,” he told her.

“Why don’t you want me to-” she began, then stopped. “Are you wearing a skirt?”

Some faint rose-colored light reached through the branches and fell upon the skirt and his bare stomach. From the chest up, though, he remained in shadow.

The flushed and angry look on her face gave way to a disbelieving smile that did not express amusement so much as fright. “Oh, Ig,” she breathed. “Oh, baby.” She took another step forward, and he held up a hand.

“I don’t want you to come back here.”

She came no closer.

“What brings you to the foundry?”

“You trashed our place,” she said. “Why’d you do that?”

He didn’t answer, didn’t know what to say.

She dropped her gaze and bit her lip. “I guess someone told you about me and Lee the other night.” Not recalling, of course, that she had told him herself. She forced herself to look back up. “Ig, I’m sorry. You can hate me if you want. I got that coming, I guess. I just want to be sure you’re okay.” Breathing softly and in a small voice, she said, “Please let me help you.”

Ig shivered. It was almost more than he could bear, to hear another human voice offering to help him, to hear a voice raised in affection and concern. He had been a demon for just two days, but the time when he knew what it was like to be loved seemed to exist in a hazily recalled past, to have been left behind long ago. It amazed him to be talking with Glenna in a perfectly ordinary way, was an ordinary miracle, as simple and fine as a cold glass of lemonade on a hot day. Glenna felt no impulse to blurt her worst and most shameful impulses; her guilty secrets were just that, secrets. He touched the cross about his neck again, Merrin’s cross, enclosing a small, precious circle of humanity.