Joe Hill - Horns

Terry’s foot found the brake, and he brought the car to a halt.

The two brothers sat together in the front seat. Terry’s breath came fast and quick through his open mouth. For a long moment, he gaped at Ig, his face vacant and baffled. Then he laughed. It was shaky, horrified laughter, but with it came a nervous twitch of the lips that was almost a smile.

“Ig. What are you doing out here…like this?”

“That’s my question. What are you doing out here? You had a flight today.”

“How do you-”

“You need to get away from here, Terry. We don’t have a lot of time.” As he spoke, he looked into the rearview mirror, checking the road. Lee Tourneau would be coming any minute.

“Time before what? What’s going to happen?” Terry hesitated, then said, “What’s with the skirt?”

“You, of all people, ought to know a Motown reference when you see it, Terry.”

“Motown? You aren’t making sense.”

“Sure I am. I’m telling you that you need to get the fuck out of here. What could make more sense than that? You are the wrong person in the wrong place at the exact wrong time, Terry.”

“What are you talking about? You’re scaring me. What’s going to happen? Why do you keep looking in the rearview mirror?”

“I’m expecting someone.”

“Who?”

“Lee Tourneau.”

Terry blanched. “Oh,” he said. “Oh. Why?”

“You know why.”

“Oh,” Terry said again. “You know. How…how much?”

“All of it. That you were in the car. That you passed out. That he fixed it so you couldn’t tell.”

Terry’s hands were on the steering wheel, his thumbs moving up and down, his knuckles white. “All of it. How do you know he’s on his way?”

“I know.”

“You’re going to kill him,” Terry said. It wasn’t a question.

“Obviously.”

Terry considered Ig’s skirt, his grimy bare feet, his reddened skin, which might just have been a particularly bad sunburn. He said, “Let’s go home, Ig. Let’s go home and talk about this. Mom and Dad are worried about you. Let’s go home so they can see you’re all right, and then we’ll all talk. We’ll figure things out.”

“My figuring is done,” Ig said. “You should’ve left. I told you to leave.”

Terry shook his head. “What do you mean, you told me to leave? I haven’t seen you the whole time I’ve been home. We haven’t talked at all.”

Ig looked in the rearview and saw headlights. He twisted around in the seat and stared through the back window. A car was passing out on the highway, on the other side of that thin strip of forest between the foundry and the road. The headlights blinked between the trunks of the trees in a rapid staccato, a shutter being opened and closed, blink-blink-blink, sending a message: Hurry, hurry. The car went past without turning in, but it was a matter of minutes until a car came that would not pass but instead would swing up the gravel road and head their way. Ig’s gaze dropped, and he saw a suitcase on the backseat and Terry’s trumpet case beside it.

“You packed,” Ig said. “You must’ve planned to go. Why didn’t you?”

“I did,” Terry said.

Ig sat up and looked a question at him.

Terry shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. Forget it.”

“No. Tell me.”

“Later.”

“Tell me now. What do you mean? If you left town, how come you’re back?”

Terry gave him a bright and blank-eyed look. After a moment he began to speak, careful and slow. “It doesn’t make sense, okay?”

“No. It doesn’t make sense to me either. That’s why I want you to tell me.”

Terry’s tongue darted out and touched his dry lips. When he spoke, his voice was calm but a little rushed. He said, “I decided I was going back to L.A. Getting out of the mental ward. Dad was pissed at me. Vera’s in the hospital, and no one knows where you’ve been. But I just got it in my head that I wasn’t doing any good in Gideon and that I needed to go, get back to L.A., get busy with rehearsals. Dad told me he couldn’t imagine anything more selfish than me taking off with things like they are. I knew he was right, but somehow it didn’t seem to matter. It just felt good driving away.

“Except the farther I got from Gideon, the less good I felt. I’d be listening to the radio, and I’d hear a song I like, and I’d start thinking about how to arrange it with the band. Then I’d remember I don’t have a band anymore. There’s no one to rehearse with.”

“What do you mean there’s no one to rehearse with?”

“I don’t have a job,” Terry said. “I quit. Walked away from Hothouse.”

“What are you talking about?” Ig asked. He hadn’t seen anything about this on his trip into Terry’s head.

“Last week,” Terry said. “I couldn’t stand it. After what happened to Merrin, it wasn’t fun anymore. It was the opposite of fun. It was hell. Hell is being forced to smile and laugh and play party songs when you want to scream. Every time I played the horn, I was screaming. The Fox people asked me to take the weekend and think it over. They didn’t come right out and threaten to sue me for breach of contract if I don’t show up for work next week, but I know that’s in the air. I also know I don’t give a shit. There’s nothing they got that I need.”

“So when you remembered you didn’t have a show anymore-was that when you turned around and came home?”

“Not right away. It was scary. Like…like being two people at the same time. One minute I’d be thinking I needed to get off the interstate and head back to Gideon. Then I’d go back to imaginary rehearsals again. Finally, when I was almost to Logan Airport-you know that hill with the giant cross on it? The one just past the Suffolk Downs racetrack?”

Ig’s arms prickled with cold and gooseflesh. “About twenty feet tall. I know it. I used to think it was called the Don Orsillo, but that’s not right.”

“Don Orione. That’s the name of the nursing home that takes care of the cross. I pulled over there. There’s a road that leads up through the projects to the thing. I didn’t go all the way up. I just pulled over to think, parked in the shade.”

“In the shade of the cross?”

His brother nodded in a vague sort of way. “I still had the radio on. The college station, you know. The reception gets crackly that far south, but I hadn’t got around to changing it. And the kid came on for the local news, and he said the Old Fair Road Bridge in Gideon was open again, after being closed for a few hours in the middle of the day, while police salvaged a firebombed car from off the sandbar. Hearing about that car gave me a kind of sick feeling. Just because. Because we hadn’t heard from you in a couple days and the sandbar is downriver from the foundry. And this is around the same time of year when Merrin died. It all felt connected. And suddenly I didn’t know anymore why I was in such a hurry to get out of Gideon. I didn’t know why it was so important for me to go. I turned around. I came back. And as I was pulling in to town, I thought maybe I should check the foundry. In case you came out here to be close to Merrin and…and something happened to you. I felt like I had no business doing anything until I knew you were okay. And…and here I am. And you’re not okay.” He looked Ig over again, and when he spoke, his voice was halting and afraid. “How were you going to…kill Lee?”

“Quickly. Which is better than he deserves.”

“And you know what I did…and you’re letting me off? Why not kill me, too?”

“You aren’t the only person to fuck a thing up because he was scared.”

“What’s that mean?”

Ig thought for a moment before he replied, “I hated the way Merrin used to look at you, when you’d play the trumpet at your performances. I was always afraid she’d fall in love with you, instead of me, and I couldn’t stand it. Do you remember the flow charts you used to draw, making fun of Sister Bennett? I wrote the note telling on you. The one that got you an F in Ethics and tossed out of the end-of-year recital.”