Joe Hill - Horns

“If taking off is so great,” she said, “if getting even with you is so wonderful, why do I feel so shitty?”

“Because you aren’t there yet. You’re still here. And by the time you drive away, all you’re going to remember is you saw me dressed up for the dance in my best blue skirt. Everything else-you’re going to forget.” Putting the weight and force of the horns behind this instruction, pushing the thought deep into her head, a more intimate penetration than anything they had ever done in bed.

She nodded, staring at him with bloodshot, fascinated eyes. “Forget. Okay.” She started to get into the car, then hesitated, looking at him over the door. “First time I ever talked to you was out here. You remember? Bunch of us were cooking a turd. What a thing, huh?”

“Funny,” Ig said. “That’s kind of what I’m planning on this evening. Go on now, Glenna. Rearview mirror.”

She nodded and began to lower herself into the car, then straightened and bent over the door and kissed him on the forehead. He saw some bad things about her he hadn’t known; she had sinned often, always against herself. He was startled and stepped back, the cool touch of her lips still on his brow and the cigarette and peppermint smell of her breath in his nostrils.

“Hey,” he said.

She smiled. “Don’t get hurt out here, Ig. Seems like you can’t spend an afternoon at the foundry without nearly getting yourself killed.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Now that you mention it, it is getting to be something of a habit.”

IG WALKED BACK to the Evel Knievel trail to watch the smoldering coal of the sun sink into the Knowles River and gutter out. Standing there in the tall grass, he heard a curious musical chirrup, insectlike, but no insect he knew. He heard it quite distinctly-the locusts had gone quiet in the dusk. They were dying anyway, the droning machinery of their lust winding down with the end of the summer. The sound came again, to the left, in the weeds.

He crouched to investigate and saw Glenna’s phone in its pink semitransparent shell, lying in the straw-colored grass where she had dropped it. He tugged it from the weeds and flipped it open. There was a text from Lee Tourneau on the Home screen:

WHAT R U WEARING?

Ig twisted his goatee, nervously considering. He still didn’t know if he could do it over a phone, if the influence of the horns could be shot from a radio transmitter and bounced off a satellite. On the other hand, it was a well-known fact that cell phones were tools of the devil.

He selected Lee’s message and pressed CALL.

Lee answered on the second ring. “Just tell me you’ve got on something hot. You don’t even have to be wearing it. I’m great at pretend.”

Ig opened his mouth but spoke in Glenna’s soft, breathless, buttery voice. “I’m wearing a bunch of mud and dirt, is what I’m wearing. I’m in trouble, Lee. I need someone to help me. I got my goddamn car stuck.”

Lee hesitated, and when he spoke again, his voice was low and measured. “Where did you get yourself stuck, lady?”

“Out at the goddamn fuckin’ foundry,” Ig said in Glenna’s voice.

“The foundry? Why are you out there?”

“I came looking for Iggy.”

“Why would you want to do that? Glenna, that wasn’t thinking. You know how unstable he is.”

“I know it, but I can’t help it, I’m worried about him. His family is worried, too. There isn’t anyone knows where he’s at, and he missed his grandma’s birthday, and he won’t answer his phone. He could be dead for all anyone knows. I can’t stand it, and I hate thinking he’s messed up and it’s my fault. It’s part your fault, too, you shithead.”

He laughed. “Well. Probably. But I still don’t know why you’d be out at the foundry.”

“He likes to go out here this time of year, ’cause of this is where she died. So I thought I’d poke around, and I drove up, and got the car stuck, and of course Iggy isn’t anywhere around. You were nice enough to give me a ride home the other night. Treat a lady twice?”

He paused for a moment. Then he said, “Have you called anyone else?”

“You were the first person I thought of,” Ig said in Glenna’s voice. “Come on. Don’t make me beg. My clothes are all muddy, and I need to get out of them and wash off.”

“Sure,” he said. “All right. As long as I can watch you. Wash off, I mean.”

“That depends how fast you get here. I’m sittin’ inside the foundry waitin’ on you. You’ll make fun of me when you see where I got my car stuck. When you get out here, you’re going to absolutely die.”

“I can’t wait,” he said.

“Hurry up. It’s kind of creepy out here by myself.”

“I bet. No one out there but the ghosts. You hold on. I’m coming for you.”

Ig hung up without saying good-bye. Then he crouched for a while, over the scorch mark on the top of the Evel Knievel trail. The sun had gone down while he wasn’t paying attention. The sky was a deep, plummy shade of purple, the first stars lighting it in pinpricks. He rose at last to walk back to the foundry and get ready for Lee. He stopped and collected Merrin’s cross from where he’d hung it in the branches of the oak. He grabbed the red metal gas tank, too. It was still about a quarter full.

HE FIGURED LEE WOULD NEED at least half an hour to get there, more if he was coming all the way from Portsmouth. It didn’t feel like a lot of time. Ig was just as glad. The longer he had to think about what he needed to do, the less likely he was to do it.

Ig had come around to the front of the foundry and was about to hoist himself up through the open door into the great room when he heard a car thudding in the rutted road behind him. Adrenaline came up in an icy rush, filling him with its chill. Things were moving fast, but they couldn’t be going that fast, not unless Lee had already been in his car when Ig called, and driving out this way for some reason. Only it wasn’t Lee’s big red Caddy, it was a black Mercedes, and for some reason Terry Perrish was behind the wheel.

Ig sank into the grass, set the quarter-full gas can down against the wall. He was so unprepared for the sight of his brother-here, now-that it was hard to accept what he was seeing. His brother couldn’t be here because by now Terry’s plane was on the ground in California, and Terry was out in the semitropical heat and Pacific sunlight of L.A. Ig had told him to go, to give in to what he wanted to do most anyway-which was cut and run-and that should’ve been enough.

The car turned and slowed as it approached the building, creeping along through the high, wiry grass. The sight of Terry infuriated and alarmed Ig. His brother didn’t belong here, and there was hardly any time to get rid of him.

Ig scampered along the concrete foundation, staying low. He reached the corner of the foundry as the Mercedes crunched by, quickened his pace, and grabbed the passenger-side door. He popped it open and leaped in.

Terry looked at him and screamed and fell back against the driver’s-side door, hand fumbling for the latch. Then he recognized Ig and stopped himself.

“Ig,” he panted. “What are you-” His gaze dropped to the filthy skirt, then rose to his face. “What the fuck did you do to yourself?”

Ig didn’t understand at first, couldn’t make sense of Terry’s shock. Then he felt the cross, still clasped in his right hand, the chain wound around his fingers. He was holding the cross, and it was muting the horns. Terry was seeing Ig for himself, for the first time since he’d come home. The Mercedes jostled along through the high summer weeds.

“Want to stop the car, Terry?” Ig said. “Before we go down Evel Knievel trail and into the river?”