Joe Hill - Horns

Ig went with his stolen trumpet into the yellow blaze and came at last to the tree. He did not lose a step but started straight up the burning ladder of its branches. He thought he heard voices above, irreverent, cheerful voices, and laughter-a celebration! There was music, too, kettledrums and the saucy bump-and-grind of trumpets. The trapdoor was open. Ig climbed through, into his new home, his tower of fire, which held his throne of flame. He was right; there was a celebration under way-a wedding party, his wedding party-and his bride awaited him there, with her hair aflame, naked but for a loose wrap of fire. And he took her into his arms, and her mouth found his, and together they burned.

TERRY CAME BACK HOME in the third week of October, and the first warm afternoon with nothing to do he drove out to the foundry for a look around.

The great brick building stood in a blackened field, amid the trash heaps that had gone up like bonfires and were now hills of ash, smoked glass, and burnt wire. The building itself was streaked with soot, and the whole place had a faint odor of char about it.

But around back, at the top of the Evel Knievel trail, it was nice, the light good, coming sideways through the trees in their Halloween costumes of red and gold. The trees were on fire, blazed like enormous torches. The river below made a soft rushing sound that played in gentle counterpoint to the easy soughing of the wind. Terry thought he could sit there all day.

He had been doing a lot of walking the last few weeks, a lot of sitting and watching and waiting. He had put his L.A. house on the market in late September and moved back to New York City, went to Central Park almost every day. The show was over, and without it he didn’t see any reason to hang around in a place where there weren’t seasons and where you couldn’t walk to anything.

Fox was still hoping he’d come back, had issued a statement that in the aftermath of his brother’s murder Terry had opted to take a professional sabbatical; this conveniently overlooked the fact that Terry had in fact formally resigned, weeks before the incident at the foundry. The TV people could say what they wanted to say. He wasn’t coming back. He thought maybe in another month or two he might go out, do some gigging in clubs. He wasn’t in any hurry to work again, though. He was still getting unpacked, trying not to think too much. Whatever happened next would happen on its own schedule. He’d find his way to something eventually. He hadn’t even bought himself a new horn.

No one knew what had happened that night at the foundry, and since Terry refused to provide a public comment and everyone else at the scene was dead, there were a lot of crazy ideas going around about the evening Eric and Lee died. TMZ had published the craziest account. They said Terry had gone out to the foundry looking for his brother and found Eric Hannity and Lee Tourneau there, the two of them arguing. Terry had overheard enough to understand they had murdered his brother, barbecued him alive in his car, and were out there looking for evidence they might have left behind. According to TMZ, Lee and Eric caught Terry trying to slip away and dragged him into the foundry. They had meant to kill him, but first they wanted to know if he had called anyone, if anyone knew where he was. They locked him in a chimney with a poisonous snake, trying to scare him into talking. But while he was in there, they began to argue again. Terry heard screams and gunshots. By the time he got out of the chimney, things were on fire and both men were dead, Eric Hannity by shotgun, Lee Tourneau by pitchfork. It was like the plot of a sixteenth-century revenge tragedy; all that was missing was an appearance by the devil. Terry wondered where TMZ got their information, if they had paid someone off in the police department-Detective Carter, perhaps; their outlandish report read almost exactly like Terry’s own signed testimony.

Detective Carter had come to see Terry on his second day in the hospital. Terry didn’t remember much about the first day. He recalled when he was wheeled into the emergency room, remembered someone pulling an oxygen mask over his face, and a rush of cool air that smelled faintly medicinal. He remembered that later he had hallucinated, had opened his eyes to find his dead brother sitting on the edge of his hospital cot. Ig had Terry’s trumpet and was playing a little bebop riff. Merrin was there, too, pirouetting barefoot in a short dress of crimson silk, spinning to the music so her dark red hair flew. As the sound of the trumpet resolved to the steady bleep of the EKG machine, both of them faded away. Still later, in the early hours of the morning, Terry had lifted his head from the pillow and looked around to find his mother and father sitting in chairs against the wall, both of them asleep, his father’s head resting on his mother’s shoulder. They were holding hands.

But by the afternoon of the second day, Terry merely felt as if he were recovering from a very bad flu. His joints throbbed and he could not get enough to drink, and he was aware of an all-body weakness…but otherwise he was himself. When the doctor, an attractive Asian woman in cat’s-eye glasses, came in the room to check his chart, he asked her how close he had come to dying. She said it had been one-in-three that he would pull through. Terry asked her how she came up with odds like that, and she said it was easy. There were three kinds of timber rattlers. He had run into the kind that had the weakest venom. With either of the other two, he would’ve had no chance at all. One-in-three.

Detective Carter had walked in as the doctor was walking out. Carter took Terry’s statement down impassively, asking few questions but allowing Terry to shape the narrative, almost as if he were not a police officer but a secretary taking dictation. He read it back to Terry, making occasional corrections. Then, without looking up from his lined yellow notepad, he said, “I don’t believe a word of this horseshit.” Without anger or humor or much inflection at all. “You know that, don’t you? Not one goddamn word.” Finally lifting his dull, knowing eyes to look at him.

“Really?” Terry had said, lying in his hospital bed, one floor below his grandmother with her busted face. “What do you think happened, then?”

“I’ve come up with lots of other explanations,” said the detective. “And they all make even less sense than this pile of crap you’re handing me. I’ll be damned if I have any idea what happened. I’ll just be damned.”

“Aren’t we all,” Terry said.

Carter gave him a hard and unfriendly glare.

“I wish I could tell you something different. But that’s what really happened,” Terry said. And most of the time, at least when the sun was up, Terry really believed it was what had happened. After dark, though, when he was trying to sleep…after dark sometimes he had other ideas. Bad ideas.

THE SOUND OF TIRES on gravel roused him, and he lifted his head, looked back toward the foundry. In another moment an emerald Saturn came bumping around the corner, trolling across the blasted landscape. When the driver saw him, the car whined to a stop and sat there for a moment idling. Then it came on, finally pulling in not ten feet away.

“Hey, Terry,” said Glenna Nicholson as she eased out from behind the wheel. She seemed not in the least surprised to see him-as if they had planned to meet here.

She looked good, a curvy girl in stonewashed gray jeans, a sleeveless black shirt, and a black studded belt. He could see the Playboy Bunny on her exposed hip, which was a trashy touch, but who hadn’t made mistakes, done things to themselves they wished they could take back?

“Hey, Glenna,” he said. “What brings you out here?”