SHE WAS SENDING HIM a message.
At first he didn’t know it was her, didn’t know who was doing it. He didn’t even know it was a message. It began about ten minutes after the start of services: a flash of golden light at the periphery of his vision, so bright it caused him to flinch. He rubbed at his eye, trying to massage away the glowing blot that now floated before him. When his sight had cleared somewhat, he glanced around, looking for the source of the light but unable to find it.
The girl sat across the aisle, one pew up from him, and she wore a white summer dress, and he had never seen her before. His gaze kept shifting to her, not because he thought she had anything to do with the light but because she was the best thing to look at on that side of the aisle. He wasn’t the only one who thought so either. A lanky boy with corn-silk hair so pale it was almost white sat directly behind her and sometimes seemed to be leaning forward to look over her shoulder and down the front of her dress. Iggy had never seen the girl before but vaguely recognized the boy from school, thought the boy might be a year older than him.
Ignatius Martin Perrish searched furtively for a wristwatch or a bracelet that might be catching light and reflecting it into his eyeball. He examined people in metal-framed eyeglasses, women with hoops dangling from their earlobes, but could not pinpoint what was causing that bothersome flash. Mostly, though, he looked at the girl, with her red hair and bare white arms. There was something about the whiteness of those arms that made them seem more naked than the bare arms of other women in church. A lot of redheads had freckles, but she looked as if she had been carved from a block of soap.
Whenever he gave up searching for the source of the light and turned his face forward, the gold flash returned, a blinding flare. It was maddening, this flash-flash in his left eye, like a moth of light circling him, fluttering in his face. Once he even batted at it, trying to swat it aside.
That was when she gave herself away, snorting helplessly, quivering with the effort it took to contain laughter. Then she gave him the look-a slow, sidelong gaze, self-satisfied and amused. She knew she had been caught and that there was no point in keeping up a pretense. Ig knew, too, that she had planned to get caught, to continue until she was found out, a thought that gave his blood a little rush. She was very pretty, about his age, her hair braided into a silky rope the color of black cherries. She was fingering a delicate gold cross around her throat, and she turned it just so, into the sunlight, and it shone, became a cruciform flame. She lingered on the gesture, making it a kind of confession, then turned the cross away.
After that Ig was no longer able to pay the slightest attention to what Father Mould was saying behind the altar. He wanted more than anything for her to glance his way again, and for a long time she didn’t do it, a kind of sweet denial. But then she took another sly, slow peek at him. Staring straight at him, she flashed the cross in his eyes, two short and one long. A moment passed, and she flashed a different sequence, three short this time. She held her gaze on his while she winked the cross at him, smiling, but in a dreamy sort of way, as if she’d forgotten what she was smiling about. The intentness of her stare suggested she was willing him to understand something, that what she was doing with the cross was important.
“I think it’s Morse code,” said Ig’s father in a low voice out of the side of his mouth: one convict talking to another in the jail yard.
Ig twitched, a nervous reflex reaction. In the last few minutes, the Sacred Heart of Mary had become a TV show playing in the background, with the volume turned down to an inaudible murmur. But when his father spoke, Ig was jolted out of the moment and back into an awareness of where he was. He also discovered, to his alarm, that his penis had stiffened slightly in his pants and was lying hot against his leg. It was important that it go back down. Any moment they would stand for the final hymn, and it would be tenting out the front of his pants.
“What?” he asked.
“She’s telling you, ‘Stop looking at my legs,’” Derrick Perrish said, side of the mouth again, movie wiseguy. “‘Or I’ll give you a black eye.’”
Ig made a funny sound trying to clear his throat.
By now Terry was trying to see. Ig sat on the inside of the aisle, with his father on his right and then his mother and then Terry, so his older brother had to crane his neck to see the girl. He considered her merits-she had turned to face forward again-then whispered loudly, “Sorry, Ig. No chance.”
Lydia thumped him in the back of his head with her hymnal. Terry said, “Damn, Mom,” and she thumped him in the head with the book again.
“You won’t use that word here,” she whispered.
“Why don’t you hit Ig?” Terry whispered. “He’s the one checking out little redheads. Thinking lustful thoughts. He’s coveting. Look at him. You can see it on his face. Look at that coveting expression.”
“Covetous,” Derrick said.
Ig’s mother looked at him, and Ig’s cheeks burned. She shifted her gaze from him to the girl, who minded them not all, pretending to be interested in Father Mould. After a moment Lydia sniffed and looked toward the front of the church.
“That’s all right,” she said. “I was starting to wonder if Ig was gay.”
And then it was time to sing, and they all stood, and Ig looked at the girl again, and as she came to her feet, she rose into a shaft of sunshine and a crown of fire settled on her brushed and shining red hair. She turned and looked at him again, opening her mouth to sing, only she gave a little cry instead, soft yet carrying. She had been about to flash him with the cross when the delicate gold chain came loose and spilled into her hand.
Ig watched her while she bowed her head and tried to fix it. Then something happened to give him an unhappy turn. The good-looking blond kid standing behind her leaned in and made a hesitant, fumbling gesture at the back of her neck. He was trying to fasten the necklace for her. She flinched and stepped away from him, gave him a startled, not particularly welcome look.
The blond did not flush or seem embarrassed. He looked less like a boy, more like classical statuary, with the stern, preternaturally calm, just slightly dour features of a young Caesar, someone who could, with a simple thumbs-down, turn a gang of bloodied Christians into lion food. Years later his hair-style, that close-cropped cap of pale white, would be popularized by Marshall Mathers, but in that year it looked sporty and unremarkable. He also had on a tie, which was class. He said something to the girl, but she shook her head. Her father leaned in and smiled at the boy and began to work on the necklace himself.
Ig relaxed. Caesar had made a tactical error, touching her when she wasn’t expecting it, had annoyed instead of charmed her. The girl’s father worked at the necklace for a while but then laughed and shook his head because it couldn’t be fixed, and she laughed, too, and took it from him. Her mother glared sharply at the both of them, and the girl and her father began to sing again.
The service ended, and conversation rose like water filling a tub, the church a container with a particular volume, its natural quiet quickly displaced by noise. Ig’s best subject had always been math, and he reflexively thought in terms of capacity, volume, invariants, and above all, absolute values. Later he turned out to be good at logical ethics, but that was perhaps only an extension of the part of him that was good at keeping equations straight and making numbers play nice.
He wanted to talk to her but didn’t know what to say, and in a moment he had lost his chance. As she stepped out from between the pews and into the aisle, she gave him a look, suddenly shy but smiling, and then the young Caesar was at her side, towering over her and telling her something. Her father intervened again, nudging her forward and somehow inserting himself between her and the junior emperor. Her dad grinned at the kid, pleasant, welcoming-but as he spoke, he was pushing his daughter ahead of him, marching her along, increasing the distance between her and the boy with the calm, reasonable, noble face. The Caesar did not seem troubled and did not try to reach her again but nodded patiently, even stepped aside, to allow the girl’s mother and some older ladies-aunts?-to slip past him.
With her father nudging her along, there was no chance to talk to her. Ig watched her go, wishing she would look back and wave to him, but she didn’t, of course she didn’t. By then the aisle was choked with people departing. Ig’s father put a hand on his shoulder to let him know they were going to wait for things to clear out. Ig watched young Caesar go by. He was there with his own father, a man with a thick blond mustache that grew right into his sideburns, giving him the look of the bad guy in a Clint Eastwood western, someone to stand to the left of Lee Van Cleef and get shot in the opening salvo of the final battle.
Finally traffic in the aisle shrank to a trickle, and Ig’s father took his hand off Ig’s shoulder to let him know they could proceed. Ig stepped out from the pew and allowed his parents past him, as was his habit, so he could walk out with Terry. He looked longingly toward the girl’s pew, as if somehow she might’ve reappeared there-and when he did, his right eyeball filled with a flash of golden light, like it was starting up all over again. He flinched, shut his eye, then walked toward her pew.
She had left her little gold cross, lying atop some puddled gold chain, in a square of light. Maybe she had put it down and then forgotten about it, with her father rushing her away from the blond boy. Ig collected it, expecting it to be cold. But it was hot, delightfully hot, a penny left all day in the sun.
“Iggy?” called his mother. “Are you coming?”
Ig closed his fist around the necklace, turned, and began quickly down the aisle. It was important to catch up to her. She had left him a chance to impress her, to be the finder of lost things, to be both observant and considerate. But when he reached the door, she was gone. He had a glimpse of her in the back of a wood-paneled station wagon, sitting with one of her aunts, her parents in the front, pulling away from the curb.
Well. That was all right. There was always next Sunday, and when Ig gave it back to her it wouldn’t be broken anymore and he would know just what to say when he introduced himself.
THREE DAYS BEFORE IG and Merrin met for the first time, a retired serviceman who lived on the north side of Pool Pond, Sean Phillips, woke at one in the morning to a steely, eardrum-stunning detonation. For a moment, muddled up with sleep, he thought he was on the USS Eisenhower again and that someone had just launched a RAM. Then he heard squealing tires and laughter. He got off the floor-he had fallen out of bed and bruised his hip-and pushed aside the window shade in time to see someone’s shitty Road Runner peeling away. His mailbox had been blown off its post and lay deformed and smoking in the gravel. It was so full of holes it looked as if it had caught a blast from a shotgun.
Late the following afternoon, there was another explosion, this time in the Dumpster behind Woolworth’s. The bomb went off with a ringing boom and spewed gouts of burning garbage thirty feet into the air. Flaming newspaper and packing material came down in a fiery hail, and several parked cars were damaged.
On the Sunday that Ig fell in love-or at least in lust-with the strange girl sitting across the aisle from him in the Sacred Heart, there was yet another explosion in Gideon. A cherry bomb with an explosive force roughly equal to a quarter stick of trinitrotoluene erupted in a toilet at the McDonald’s on Harper Street. It blew the seat off, cracked the bowl, shattered the tank, flooded the floor, and filled the men’s room with greasy black smoke. The building was evacuated until the fire marshal had determined it was safe to reenter. The incident was reported on the front page of the Monday Gideon Ledger, in an article that closed with a plea from the marshal for those responsible to quit before someone lost some fingers or an eye.
Things had been blowing up all around town for weeks. It had started a couple days before the Fourth of July and continued well after the holiday, with increasing frequency. Terence Perrish and his friend Eric Hannity weren’t the primary culprits. They had never destroyed any property except their own, and they were both too young to be out joyriding at one in the morning, blowing up mailboxes.
But.
But Eric and Terry had been at the beach in Seabrook when Eric’s cousin Jeremy Rigg walked into the fireworks warehouse there and came out with a case of forty-eight vintage cherry bombs, which he claimed had been manufactured in the good old days before the power of such explosives was limited by child-safety laws. Jeremy had passed six of them on to Eric, as a late birthday present, he said, although his real motive might’ve been pity. Eric’s father had been out of work for more than a year and was an unwell man.
It is possible that Jeremy Rigg was patient zero at the center of a plague of explosions and that all of the many bombs that went off that summer could in some way be traced back to him. Or maybe Rigg only bought them because other boys were buying them, because it was the thing to do. Maybe there were multiple points of infection. Ig never learned, and in the end it didn’t matter. It was like wondering how evil had come into the world or what happens to a person after he dies: an interesting philosophical exercise, but also curiously pointless, since evil and death happened, regardless of the why and the how and the what-it-meant. All that mattered was that by early August both Eric and Terry had the fever to blow things up, like every other teenage male in Gideon.
The bombs themselves were called Eve’s Cherries, red balls the size of crabapples with the fine-grained texture of a brick and the silhouette of an almost-naked woman stamped on the side. She was a pert-breasted honey with the unlikely proportions of a girl on a mud flap: tits like beach balls and a wasp waist thinner than her thighs. As a gesture toward modesty, she wore what looked like a maple leaf over her crotch, leading Eric Hannity to conclude she was a fan of the Toronto Maple Leafs and therefore a fuckin’ Canuck slut who was just asking to get her tits lit up.
The first time Eric and Terry used one was in Eric’s garage. They chucked a cherry into a trash can and beat feet. The explosion that followed knocked the can over, spun it across the concrete, and fired the lid up into the rafters. The lid was smoking when it came back down, bent in the middle as if someone had tried to fold it in two. Ig wasn’t there but heard all about it from Terry, who said that afterward their ears were ringing so badly neither of them could hear the other one whooping. Other items followed in a chain of demolitions: a life-size Barbie, an old tire that they sent rolling down a hill with a bomb taped inside it, and a watermelon. Ig was present for exactly none of the detonations in question, but his brother was always sure to fill him in, at great length, on what he’d missed. Ig knew, for example, that there had been nothing left of the Barbie except for one blackened foot, which fell from the sky to rattle about on the blacktop of Eric’s driveway, doing a mad disembodied tap dance, and that the stink of the burning tire had made everyone who smelled it dizzy and ill, and that Eric Hannity was standing too close to the watermelon when it exploded and needed a shower as a result. The details thrilled and tormented Ig, and by mid-August he was half desperate to see something vaporized himself.
So on the morning Ig walked into the pantry and found Terry trying to zip a twenty-eight-pound frozen Butterball turkey into his school backpack, he knew right away what it was for. Ig didn’t ask to come along, and he didn’t bargain with threats: Let me go with you or I tell Mom. Instead he watched while Terry struggled with his backpack and then, when it was clear it wasn’t going to fit, said they should make a sling. He got his windbreaker from the mudroom, and they rolled the bird up in it, and each of them took a sleeve. Hauling it between them that way, it was no trouble to carry, and just like that, Ig was going with him.
The sling got them as far as the edge of the town woods, and then, not long after they started along the trail that led to the old foundry, Ig spotted a shopping cart, half sunk in a bog to the side of the path. The front right wheel shimmied furiously, and rust flaked off the thing in a continuous flurry, but it beat lugging all that turkey a mile and a half. Terry made Ig push.
The old foundry was a sprawling medieval keep of dark brick with a great twisting chimney stack rising from one end and the walls Swiss-cheesed with holes that had once held windows. It was surrounded by a few acres of ancient parking lot, the macadam fissured almost to the point of disintegration and tummocky bunches of grass growing up through it. The place was busy that afternoon, kids skateboarding in the ruins, a fire burning in a trash can out back. A group of teenage derelicts-two boys and a skaggy girl-stood around the flames. One of them had what looked like a misshapen wiener on a stick. It was blackened and crooked, and sweet blue smoke poured off it.
“Lookit,” said the girl, a pudgy blonde with acne and low-riding jeans. Ig knew her. She was in his grade. Glenna someone. “Here comes dinner.”
“Looks like fuckin’ Thanksgiving,” said one of the boys, a kid in a HIGHWAY TO HELL T-shirt. He gestured expansively toward the fire in the trash can. “Throw that scrumptious bitch on.”
Ig, just fifteen and uncertain around strange older kids, could not speak, his windpipe shriveling as if he were already suffering an asthma attack. But Terry was smooth. Two years older and possessed of a driver’s permit, Terry already had a certain sly grace about him and the eagerness of a showman to amuse an audience. He spoke for the both of them. He always spoke for the both of them: That was his role.
“Looks like dinner’s done,” Terry said, nodding at the thing on the stick. “Your hot dog is turning black.”
“It’s not a hot dog!” shrieked the girl. “It’s a turd! Gary’s cookin’ a dog turd!” Doubling over and screaming with laughter. Her jeans were old and worn, and her too-small halter looked like a half-price item from Kmart, but over it she wore a handsome black leather jacket with a European cut. It didn’t go with the rest of her outfit or with the weather, and Ig’s first thought was that it was stolen.
“You want a bite?” asked the kid in the HIGHWAY TO HELL shirt. He swung the stick away from the fire and offered it in Terry’s direction. “Cooked to perfection.”
“C’mon, man,” Terry said. “I’m a high-school virgin, I play trumpet in the marching band, and I got a teeny weenie. I eat enough shit as it is.”
The derelicts erupted into laughter, maybe less because of what had been said than because of who was saying it-a slender, good-looking kid with a faded American-flag bandanna tied around his head to hold back his shaggy black hair-and the way it was said, in a tone of exuberance, as if he were joyfully putting down someone else and not himself. Terry used jokes like judo throws, as a way to deflect the energy of others from himself, and if he couldn’t find any other target for his humor, he was glad to pull the trigger on himself-an inclination that would serve him well years later, when he was doing interviews on Hothouse, begging Clint Eastwood to punch him in the face and then autograph his broken nose.
Highway to Hell looked past Terry, across the broken asphalt, to a boy standing at the top of the Evel Knievel trail. “Hey. Tourneau. Your lunch is done.”
More laughter-although the girl, Glenna, looked suddenly uneasy. The boy at the top of the trail didn’t even glance their way but stood looking down the hill and clutching a big mountain board under one arm.
“Are you going?” Highway to Hell shouted when there was no response. “Or do I need to cook you up a pair of nuts?”
“Go, Lee!” shouted the girl, and she held an encouraging fist in the air. “Let ’er rip!”
The boy at the top of the trail cast a brief, disdainful look at her, and in that moment Ig recognized him, knew him from church. It was young Caesar. He had been dressed in a tie then, and he wore one now, along with a button-up short-sleeved shirt, khaki shorts, and Converse high-tops with no socks. Just by virtue of holding a mountain board, he managed to make the costume look vaguely alternative, the act of wearing a tie an ironic affectation, the kind of thing the lead singer in a punk band might do.
“He ain’t going,” said the other boy who stood at the trash can, a long-haired kid. “Jesus, Glenna, he’s got a bigger pussy’n you.”
“Fuck you,” she said. To the bunch around the trash can, the look of hurt on her face was the funniest thing yet. Highway to Hell laughed so hard the stick shook, and his cooked turd fell into the flames.
Terry lightly slapped Ig’s arm, and they moved on. Ig wasn’t sorry to be going, found something almost unbearably sad about the crew of them. They had nothing to do. It was terrible that this was the sum total of their summer afternoon, a burned shit and hurt feelings.
They approached the willowy blond boy-Lee Tourneau, apparently-slowing again as they reached the top of the Evel Knievel trail. The hill fell steeply away here, toward the river, a dark blue gleam visible through the black trunks of the pines. It had been a dirt road once, although it was difficult to imagine anyone driving a car down it, it was so steep and eroded, a vertiginous drop ideal for producing a rollover. Two half-buried and rusting pipes showed through the ground, and between them was a worn-smooth groove of packed earth, a kind of depression that had been polished to a hard gloss by the passage of a thousand mountain bikes and ten thousand bare feet. Ig’s Grandmother Vera had told him that in the thirties and forties, when people didn’t care what they put into the river, the foundry had used those pipes to wash the dross into the water. They looked almost like rails, like tracks, lacking only a coal car or a roller-coaster car to ride them. On either side of the pipes, the trail was all crumbling sun-baked dirt and protruding stones and trash. The hard-packed path between the pipes offered the easiest way down, and Ig and Terry slowed, waiting for Lee Tourneau to go.
Only he didn’t go. He was never going to go. He put the board on the ground-it had a cobra painted on it, and big, thick, knobby tires-and pushed it back and forth with one foot, as if to see how it rolled. He squatted and picked up the board and pretended to check the spin on one wheel.
The derelicts weren’t the only ones giving him a hard time. Eric Hannity and a loose collection of other boys stood at the bottom of the hill squinting up at him and occasionally hollering taunts. Someone yelled at him to stick a manpon in his mangina and go already. From over by the trash can, Glenna screamed again: “Ride ’er, cowboy!” Beneath her rowdy cheer, though, she sounded desperate.
“Well,” Terry said to Lee Tourneau, “it’s like this. You can live life as a cripple or as a lame-ass.”
“What’s that mean?” Lee asked.
Terry sighed. “It means are you going to go?”
Ig, who had been down the trail many times on his mountain bike, said, “It’s okay. Don’t be scared. The trail between the pipes is really smooth, and-”
“I’m not scared,” said Lee, as if Ig had made an accusation.
“So go,” Terry said.
“One of the wheels is sticking,” the kid said.
Terry laughed. He laughed mean, too. “Come on, Ig.”
Ig pushed the cart past Lee Tourneau and into the trench between the pipes. Lee looked at the turkey, and his brow furrowed with a question that he didn’t speak aloud.
“We’re going to blow it up,” Ig said. “Come see.”
“There’s a baby seat in the shopping cart,” Terry said, “in case you want a ride down.”
It was a shitty thing to say, and Ig grimaced sympathetically at Lee, but Lee’s face was a Spock-on-the-bridge-of-the-Enterprise blank. He stood aside, holding his board to his chest, watching them go.
The boys at the bottom were waiting for them. There were a couple of girls, too, older girls, maybe old enough to be in college. They weren’t on the riverbank with the boys, but sunning themselves out on Coffin Rock, in bikini tops and cutoffs.
Coffin Rock was forty feet offshore, a wide white stone that blazed in the sun. Their kayaks rested on a small sandbar that tailed upriver away from it. The sight of those girls, stretched upon the rock, made Ig love the world. Two brunettes-they might’ve been sisters-with tanned, toned bodies and a lot of leg, sitting up and talking to each other in low voices and staring at the boys. Even with his back turned to Coffin Rock, Ig was aware of them, as if the girls, and not the sun, were the primary source of light cast upon the bank.
A dozen or so boys had collected for the show. They sat indifferently in tree branches hanging out over the water, or astraddle mountain bikes, or perched on boulders, all of them trying to look coolly unhappy. That was another side effect of those girls on the rock. Every boy there wanted to look older than every other boy, too old to really be there at all. If they could, with a dour look and a standoffish pose, somehow suggest they were only in the vicinity because they had to babysit a younger brother, all the better.
Possibly because he really was babysitting his younger brother, Terry was allowed to be happy. He hauled the frozen turkey out of the shopping cart and walked it toward Eric Hannity, who rose from a nearby rock, dusting off the back of his pants.
“Let’s bake that bitch,” Hannity said.
“I call a drumstick,” Terry said, and some boys laughed in spite of themselves.
Eric Hannity was Terry’s age, a rude, blunt savage with a harsh mouth and hands that knew how to catch a football, cast a rod, repair a small motor, and smack an ass. Eric Hannity was a superhero. As a bonus, his father was an ex-state trooper who had actually been shot, albeit not in a gunfight, but in an accident at the barracks; another officer, on his third day, had dropped a loaded.30-06, and the slug had caught Bret Hannity in the abdomen. Eric’s father had a business dealing baseball cards now, although Ig had hung around long enough to get a sense that his real business involved fighting his insurance company over a hundred-thousand-dollar settlement that was supposedly coming any day but that had yet to materialize.
Eric and Terry lugged the frozen turkey over to an old tree stump, rotted at the center to make a kind of damp hole. Eric put a foot on the bird and pushed it down. It was a tight fit, and fat and skin bunched up around the edges of the hole. The two legs, pink bones wrapped in uncooked flesh, were squeezed together, pursing the turkey’s stuffing cavity to a white pucker.
From his pocket Eric took his last two cherry bombs and set one aside. He ignored the boy who picked up the spare and the other boys who gathered around, staring at it and making appreciative noises. Ig had an idea Eric had set down his extra cherry just to get this precise reaction. Terry took the other bomb and jammed it into the Butterball. The fuse, almost six inches long, stuck obscenely out of that puckered hole in the turkey’s rear end.
“You all want to find cover,” Eric said, “or you’re going to be wearing turkey dinner. And give me back that other one. If someone tries to walk off with my last cherry, this bird won’t be the only one getting a piece of ordnance stuck up the ass.”
The boys scattered, crouching at the bottom of the embankment, sheltering behind tree trunks. Despite their best efforts to look disinterested, there was a helium-touched air of nervous anticipation hanging over them now. The girls on the rock were interested, too, could see something was about to happen. One of them rose to her knees and shaded her eyes with a hand, looking over at Terry and Eric. Ig wished, with a wistful pang, there was some reason for her to look at him instead.
Eric put a foot on the edge of the stump and produced a lighter, which ignited with a snap. The fuse began to spit white sparks. Eric and Terry remained for a moment, peering thoughtfully down, as if there were some doubt about whether it was going to catch. Then they began to back away, neither in any hurry. It was nicely done, a carefully managed bit of stagy cool. Eric had told the others to take cover, and they had all obliged by running for it. Which made Eric and Terry look steely and unflappable, the way they stayed behind to light the bomb and then made a slow, unhurried retreat from the blast area. They walked twenty paces but did not duck or hide behind anything, and they kept steady watch on the carcass. The fuse made a continuous sizzling sound for about three seconds, then stopped. And nothing happened.
“Shit,” Terry said. “Maybe it got wet.”
He took a step back toward the stump.
Eric grabbed his arm. “Hang on. Sometimes it-”
But Ig didn’t hear the rest of the sentence. No one did. Lydia Perrish’s twenty-eight-pound Butterball turkey exploded with a shattering crack, a sound so loud, so sudden and hard, that the girls out on the rock screamed. So did many of the boys. Ig would’ve screamed himself, but the blast seemed to force all the air out of his weak lungs, and he could only wheeze.
The turkey was torn apart in a rising gout of flame. The stump half exploded as well. Smoking chunks of wood whirled through the air. The skies opened and rained meat. Bones, still garnished with quivering lumps of raw pink flesh, drizzled down, rattling through the leaves and bouncing off the ground. Turkey parts fell pitter-plitter-plop into the river. In stories told later, many boys would claim that the girls on Coffin Rock were decorated with chunks of raw turkey, soaked in poultry blood like the chick in fuckin’ Carrie, but this was embellishment. The farthest-flung fragments of bird fell a good twenty feet short of the rock.
Ig’s ears felt as if they were stuffed with cotton batting. Someone shrieked in excitement, a long distance off from him-or at least he thought it was a long distance off. But when he looked back over his shoulder, he found the shrieking girl standing almost directly behind him. It was Glenna in her awesomely awesome leather jacket and boob-clinging tank top. She stood next to Lee Tourneau, clasping a couple of his fingers with one hand. Her other hand was raised high into the air and closed into a white-knuckled fist, a hillbilly gesture of triumph. When Lee noticed what she was doing, he wordlessly slipped his fingers out of her grip.
Other sounds rushed into the silence: yells, hoots, laughter. No sooner had the last of the turkey remains dropped from above than the boys were out of their hiding places and leaping around. Some grabbed splintered bones and threw them in the air and then pretended to duck, reenacting the moment of detonation. Other boys leaped into low tree branches, pretending they had just stepped on land mines and were being blown into the sky. They swung back and forth from the boughs, howling. One kid was dancing around, playing air guitar for some reason, apparently unaware he had a flap of raw turkey skin in his hair. It looked like footage from a nature documentary. Impressing the girls out on the rock was, for the moment, inconsequential-for most, anyway. No sooner had the turkey erupted than Ig had looked out at the river to see if they were all right. He regarded them still, watching them rise to their feet, laughing and chattering brightly to each other. One of them nodded downriver and then walked out on the sandbar to the kayaks. They would go soon.
Ig tried to think of some contrivance that would make them stay. He had the shopping cart, and he walked it up the trail a few feet and then rode it back down the hill, standing on the rear end, just something to do because he thought better when he was moving. He did this once, then again, so deep in his own head he was hardly aware he was doing it.
Eric, Terry, and other boys had loosely collected around the smoldering remains of the stump to inspect the damage. Eric rolled the last remaining cherry in one hand.
“Whatchu going to blow up now?” someone asked.
Eric frowned thoughtfully and did not reply. The boys around him began to offer suggestions, and soon they were shouting to be heard over one another. Someone said he could get a ham to explode, but Eric shook his head. “We already done meat,” he said. Someone else said they ought to put the cherry in one of his little sister’s dirty diapers. A third person said only if she was wearing it, to general laughter.
Then the question was repeated-Whatchu going to blow up now?-and this time there was a pause, while Eric made up his mind.
“Nothing,” he said, and put the cherry in his pocket.
The gathered boys made despairing sounds, but Terry, who knew his part in this scene, nodded his approval.
Then came offers and bargaining. One boy said he would trade his father’s dirty movies for it. Another kid said he would trade his father’s dirty home movies. “Seriously, my mom is a fuckin’ crazy bitch in the sack,” he said, and boys fell into one another, laughing helplessly.
“There’s about as much chance of me giving up my last cherry,” Eric said, “as there is of one of you homos climbing in that shopping cart and riding it naked down from the top of the hill.” Jerking his thumb over his shoulder at Ig and the shopping cart.
“I’ll ride it down from the top of the hill,” Ig said. “Naked.”
Heads turned. Ig stood several feet away from the knot of boys around Eric, and at first no one seemed to know who had spoken. Then there was laughter and some disbelieving hoots. Someone threw a turkey leg at Ig. He ducked, and it sailed overhead. When Ig straightened up, he saw Eric Hannity staring intently at him while passing his last cherry bomb from hand to hand. Terry stood directly behind Eric, his face stony now, and he shook his head, almost imperceptibly: No you don’t.
“Are you for real?” Eric asked.
“Will you let me have it if I ride this cart down the hill with no clothes on?”
Eric Hannity considered him through slitted eyes. “All the way down. Naked. If the cart doesn’t reach bottom, you get nothing. Doesn’t matter if you break your fucking back.”
“Dude,” Terry said, “I’m not letting you. What the fuck do you think I’m going to tell Mom when you flay all the skin off your scrawny white ass?”
Ig waited for the howls of hilarity to subside before replying, simply, “I’m not going to get hurt on the hill.”
Eric Hannity said, “You got yourself a deal. I want to see this shit.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Terry said, laughing, waving a hand in the air. He hustled across the dry ground to Ig, came around the cart, and took his arm. He was grinning when he leaned in close to speak into Ig’s ear, but his voice was low and harsh. “Will you fuck off? You are not going to ride down this hill with your cock flapping around, making the both of us look like retarded assholes.”
“Why? We’ve been skinny-dipping down here. Half these guys have already seen me with my clothes off. The other half,” Ig said, glancing toward the rest of the gathering, “don’t know what they been missing.”
“You don’t have a prayer of making it down the hill in this thing. It’s a fucking shopping cart, Ig. It has wheels like this.” He held up his thumb and index finger in the OK sign.
Ig said, “I’m going to make it.”
Terry’s lips parted to show his teeth in an angry, frustrated sneer. His eyes, though-his eyes were scared. In Terry’s mind Ig had already left most of his face on the side of the hill and was lying in a tangled, squalling mess halfway down it. Ig felt a kind of affectionate pity for Terry. Terry was cool, cooler than Ig would ever be, but he was afraid. His fear narrowed his vision so that he couldn’t see anything except what he stood to lose. Ig wasn’t built that way.
Now Eric Hannity was starting forward himself. “Let him go if he wants to. It’s no skin off your back. Off his, probably, but not yours.”
Terry went on arguing with Ig for another moment, not with words but with his stare. What finally caused Terry to look away was a sound, a soft, dismissive snort. Lee Tourneau was turning to whisper to Glenna, raising his hand to cover his mouth. But for some reason the hillside was, in that moment, unaccountably silent, and Lee’s voice carried, so everyone within ten feet of him could hear him saying, “-we don’t want to be around when the ambulance turns up to scrape dipshit off the hill-”
Terry spun on him, his face shriveling in a look of rage. “Oh, don’t go anywhere. You stand right there with that mountain board of yours you’re too chickenshit to ride and check out the show. You might want to see what a pair of balls look like. Take notes.”
The gathered boys burst into laughter. Lee Tourneau’s cheeks became inflamed, darkened to the deepest red Ig had ever seen in a human face, the color of a devil in a Disney cartoon. Glenna gave her date a look that was both pained and a little disgusted, then took a step away from him, as if his case of uncool might be catching.
In the tumult of amusement that followed, Ig slipped his arm from Terry’s grip and turned the cart up the hill. He pushed it through the weeds at the side of the trail, because he didn’t want the boys coming up the slope behind him to know what he knew, to see what he had seen. He didn’t want Eric Hannity to have a chance to back out. His audience hurried after him, shoving and shouting.
Ig had not gone far before the little wheels of the cart snagged in some brush and it started to veer violently to one side. He struggled to right it. Behind him there was a fresh outburst of hilarity. Terry was walking briskly at Ig’s side, and he grabbed the front end of the cart and pointed it straight, shaking his head. He whispered “Jesus” under his breath. Ig walked on, shoving the cart before him.
A few more steps brought him to the crest of the hill. He had settled himself to doing it, so there was no reason to hesitate or be embarrassed. He let go of the cart, grabbed the waistband of his shorts, and jerked them down, along with his underwear, showing the boys down the hill below his scrawny white ass. There were cries of shock and exaggerated disgust. When Ig straightened, he was grinning. His heartbeat had quickened, but only a little, like that of a man moving from a swift walk to a light jog-hurrying to catch his cab before someone else could get it. He kicked off his shorts without removing his sneakers and stripped off his shirt.
“Well,” Eric Hannity said, “don’t be shy, now.”
Terry laughed-a little shrilly-and looked away. Ig turned to face the crowd: fifteen and naked, balls and cock, shoulders hot in the afternoon sunshine. The air carried on it a whiff of smoke from the trash-can fire, where Highway to Hell still stood with his long-haired pal.
Highway to Hell threw up one hand, his pinkie and his index finger extended in the universal symbol of the devil’s horns, and shouted, “Fuckin’ yeah, baby! Lap dance!”
For some reason this affected the boys more than anything that had been said so far, so that several clutched at themselves and doubled over, gasping for breath, as if in reaction to some airborne toxin. For himself, however, Ig was surprised at how relaxed he felt, naked except for his loose tennis sneakers. He did not care if he was naked in front of other boys, and the girls on Coffin Rock would catch only the briefest glimpse of him before he flew into the river-a thought that did not worry him. A thought that, in fact, gave him a gleeful tickle of excitement, low down, in the pit of the stomach. Of course, there was one girl looking at him already: Glenna. She stood on tiptoes at the back of the crowd, her jaw hanging open in an expression that mingled surprise with hilarity. Her boyfriend, Lee, wasn’t with her. He had not followed them up the hill, had apparently not wanted to see what balls looked like.
Ig rolled the cart forward and maneuvered it into place, using the moment of chaos to prepare for the ride. No one gave any notice to the careful way he lined up the shopping cart with the half-buried pipes.
What Ig had discovered, riding the cart for short distances at the bottom of the hill, was that the two old and rusted pipes, sticking out of the dirt, were roughly a foot and a half apart and that the little back wheels of the shopping cart fit precisely between them. There was about a quarter inch of room on either side, and when one of the front wheels shimmied and tried to turn the cart off course, Ig had noticed it would strike a pipe and be turned back. It was very possible, on the steep pitch of the path, that the cart would hit a stone and flip over. It would not swerve off course and roll, however. Could not swerve off course. It would ride the inside of those pipes like a train on its rails.
He still had his clothes under one arm, and he turned and tossed them to Terry. “Don’t go anywhere with them. This’ll be over soon.”
“You said it,” Eric told him, which set off a fresh ripple of laughter-but which didn’t elicit quite the roar of amusement it maybe deserved.
Now that the moment had come and Ig was holding the handle of the cart, preparing to push off into space, he saw a few alarmed faces among the watching boys. Some of the older, more thoughtful-looking kids were half smiling in a quizzical way, and there was worried knowledge in their eyes, the first uneasy awareness that perhaps someone ought to put a stop to this thing before it went any further and Ig got himself seriously hurt. The thought came to Ig that if he didn’t go-now-someone might raise a sensible objection.
“See you,” Ig said before anyone could try to stop him, and he nudged the cart forward, stepping lightly onto the back.
It was a study in perspective, the two pipes leading away downhill, narrowing steadily to a final point, the bullet and the barrel. Almost from the moment he stepped onto the cart, he found himself plunging forward into a euphoric near silence, the only sounds the shrieking wheels and the rattle and bang of the steel frame. Rushing at him from below, he saw the Knowles River, its black surface diamonded with sunlight. The wheels clattered right, then left, struck the pipes, and were turned back on course, just as Ig had known they would be.
In a moment the shopping cart was going too fast for him to do anything but hold on. There was no possibility of stopping, dismounting. He had not anticipated how quickly he would accelerate. The wind sliced at his bare skin so keenly it burned, he burned as he fell, Icarus ignited. The cart struck something, a squarish rock, and the left side vaulted off the ground, and this was it, it was going to overturn at whatever magnificent, fatal speed he was doing, and his naked body would be flung over the bars, and the earth would sand the skin off him and shatter his bones as the turkey bones had shattered, in a sudden, explosive slam. Only the front left wheel scraped the upper curve of the pipe and rode it back down onto the track. The sound of those wheels, spinning faster and faster, had risen to a mad, tuneless whistle, a lunatic piping.
When he glanced up, he saw the end of the trail, the pipes narrowing to their final point just before the dirt ramp that would launch him out over the water. The girls stood on the sandbar, by their kayaks. One of them was pointing at him. He imagined himself sailing overhead, hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle, Ig jumped over the moon.
The cart came screaming from between the pipes and shot at the ramp like a rocket leaving its gantry. It hit the dirt incline, and he was flung into the air, and the sky opened to him. The sunlit day caught Ig as if he were a ball lightly tossed into a glove, held him in its gentle clasp for one moment-and then the shopping cart snapped up and back and the steel frame struck him in the face and the sky let him go, dumped him into blackness.
IG HAD A FRAGMENTARY MEMORY of the time he was underwater that he later assumed was false, because how could he remember anything about it if he’d been unconscious?
What he remembered was everything dark and roaring noise and a whirling sense of motion. He was poured forth into a thunderous torrent of souls, ejected from the earth and any sense of order and into this other, older chaos. He was in horror of it, appalled by the thought that this might be what waited after death. He felt he was being swept away, not just from his life but from God, the idea of God, or hope, or reason, the idea that things made sense, that cause followed effect, and it ought not to be like this, Ig felt, death ought not to be like this, even for sinners.
He struggled in that furious current of noise and nothing. The blackness seemed to shatter and peel away to show a muddy glimpse of sky but then closed back over him. When he felt himself weakening and sinking away, he had the sense of being grabbed and tugged along from beneath. Then, abruptly, there was something more solid under him. It felt like mud. A moment later he heard a far-off cry and was struck in the back.
The force of the impact shocked him, knocked the darkness out of him. His eyes sprang open, and he stared into a painful brightness. He retched. The river came out of his mouth, his nostrils. He was turned on his side on the mud, ear against the ground, so he could hear what was either the pounding of approaching feet or the slam of his own heart. He was downstream from the Evel Knievel trail, although in that first blurred moment of consciousness he wasn’t sure how far. A length of black rotted fire hose slithered across the liquid earth, three inches from his nose. Only after it was gone did he know that it had been a snake, sliding past him down the bank.
The leaves above began to come into focus, flitting gently against a background of bright sky. Someone was kneeling beside him, hand on his shoulder. Boys began to crash into sight, tumbling through the brush and then hitching up when they saw him.
Ig couldn’t see who was kneeling beside him but felt sure it was Terry. Terry had pulled him out of the water and gotten him breathing again. He rolled onto his back to look into his brother’s face. A skinny, sallow boy with a cap of icy blond hair stared expressionlessly back at him. Lee Tourneau was absentmindedly smoothing his tie against his chest. His khaki shorts were soaking wet. Ig didn’t need to ask why. In that moment, staring into Lee’s face, Ig decided he was going to begin wearing ties himself.
Terry came through the bushes, saw Iggy, and put on the brakes. Eric Hannity was right behind him and ran into him so hard he almost knocked him down. By now almost twenty boys were gathered around.
Ig sat up, drawing his knees close to his chest. He looked at Lee again and opened his mouth to speak, but when he tried, there was a bitter snap of pain in his nose, as if it were being broken all over again. He hunched and snorted a red splash of blood onto the dirt.
“Excuse me,” he said. “Sorry about the blood.”
“I thought you were dead. You looked a little dead. You weren’t breathing.” Lee was shivering.
“Well,” Ig said, “I’m breathing now. Thank you.”
“What’d he do?” Terry asked.
“He pulled me out,” Ig said, gesturing at Lee’s soaked shorts. “He got me breathing again.”
“You swam in for him?” Terry said.
“No,” Lee said. He blinked, seemed utterly baffled, as if Terry had asked him a much more difficult question: the capital of Iceland, the state flower. “He was already in the shallows by the time I saw him. I didn’t swim out for him or…or anything really. He was already-”
“He pulled me out,” Ig said over him, would have none of Lee’s stammering humility. He remembered quite clearly the feeling of someone in the water with him, moving close beside him. “I wasn’t breathing.”
“And you did mouth-to-mouth?” Eric Hannity asked, with unmistakable incredulity.
Lee shook his head, still confused. “No. No, it wasn’t like that. All I did was smack his back when he, you know…when he was…” He floundered there, didn’t seem to know how to go on.
Ig continued, “That’s what made me cough it up. I swallowed most of the river. My whole chest was full of it, and he pounded it out of me.” He spoke through gritted teeth. The pain in his nose was a series of sharp, bitter shocks, little electrical jolts. They even seemed to have color; when he closed his eyes, he saw neon-yellow flashes.
The gathered boys looked upon Ig and Lee Tourneau with a quiet, dumbstruck wonder. What had just transpired was a thing that happened only in daydreams and TV shows. Someone had been about to die, and someone else had rescued him, and now the saved and the savior were marked as special, stars in their own movie, which made the rest of them extras, or supporting cast at best. To have actually saved a life was to have become someone. You were no longer Joe Schmo, you were Joe Schmo who pulled Ig Perrish naked out of the Knowles River the day he almost drowned. You would be that person for the rest of your life.
For himself, looking up into Lee’s face, Ig felt the first bud of obsession beginning to open in him. He had been saved. He had been about to die, and this pale-haired boy with questioning blue eyes had brought him back. In evangelical churches you went to the river and were submerged and then lifted up into your new life, and it seemed to Ig now that Lee had saved him in this sense as well. Ig wanted to buy him something, to give him something, to find out his favorite rock band so it could be Ig’s favorite rock band, too. He wanted to do Lee’s homework for him.
There was noisy crashing in the brush, as if someone were driving a golf cart toward them. Then the girl, Glenna, appeared among them, out of breath, her face blotchy. She bent at the waist, put one hand on her round thigh, and gasped, “Jesus. Look at his face.” Her gaze shifted to Lee, and her brow furrowed. “Lee? What are you doing?”
“He pulled Ig out of the water,” Terry said.
“He got me breathing,” Ig said.
“Lee?” she asked, screwing up her face in an expression that suggested utter disbelief.
“I didn’t do anything,” Lee said, shaking his head, and Ig could not help but love him.
The pain that had been beating in the bridge of Ig’s nose had flowered, opening behind his forehead, between his eyes, penetrating deeper into the brain. He was beginning to see those neon-yellow flashes even with his eyes open. Terry sank down on one knee at his side, put a hand on his arm.
“We better get you dressed and back home,” Terry said. He sounded chastened in some way, as if he, and not Ig, were guilty of idiot recklessness. “I think your nose is broken.” He looked up then at Lee Tourneau and gave him a brief nod of acknowledgment. “Hey. Looks like maybe I was full of shit back on the hill. Sorry about what I said a couple minutes ago. Thanks for helping my brother out.”
Lee said, “Skip it. It’s not worth making a big deal.” Ig almost shivered at the calm cool of it, his unwillingness to bask in the appreciation of others.
“Will you come with us?” Ig asked Lee, gritting his teeth against the pain. He looked at Glenna. “Both of you? I want to tell my parents what Lee did.”
Terry said, “Hey, Ig. Let’s not and say we did. We don’t want Mom and Dad to know this happened. You fell out of a tree, okay? There was a slippery branch, and you face-planted. That’s just…just easier.”
“Terry. We have to tell them. I’d be drowned if he didn’t pull me out.”
Ig’s brother opened his mouth to argue, but Lee Tourneau beat him to the punch.
“No,” he said, almost sharply, and looked up at Glenna with wide eyes. She stared back at him with much the same look and grabbed strangely at her black leather jacket. Then he was on his feet. “I’m not supposed to be here. I didn’t do anything anyway.” He hurried across the little clearing to grab Glenna’s chubby hand and tug her toward the trees. With his other hand, he carried his brand-new mountain board.
“Wait,” Ig said, getting to his feet. When he stood, a bright neon flash burst behind his eyes, carrying with it a feeling like he had a nose full of packed broken glass.
“I got to go. We both got to go.”
“Well. Will you come over to the house sometime?”
“Sometime.”
“Do you know where it is? It’s on the highway, just about-”
“Everyone knows where it is,” Lee said, and then he was gone, billygoating away through the trees, pulling Glenna after him. She cast a final, distressed look back at the boys before allowing herself to be led off.
The pain in Ig’s nose was more intense now and coming in steady, rolling waves. He cupped his hands to his face for a moment, and when he took them away, his palms were painted in crimson.
“Come on, Ig,” Terry said. “We better go. You need to see a doctor about your face.”
“You and me both,” Ig said.
Terry smiled and tugged Ig’s shirt loose from the ball of laundry he was holding. Ig was startled to see it, had forgotten, until that moment, that he was standing there naked. Terry pulled it on over Ig’s head, dressing him as if he were five and not fifteen.
“Probably need a surgeon to remove Mom’s foot from my ass, too. She’ll be ready to kill me after she gets a look at you,” Terry said. As Ig’s head came through the shirt hole, he found his brother peering into his face with unmistakable anxiety. “You aren’t going to tell, are you? For real, Ig. She’d murder me for letting you ride that fucking cart down the hill. Sometimes it’s just better not to tell.”
“Oh, man, I’m no good at lying. Mom always knows. She knows the second I open my mouth.”
Terence looked relieved. “So who said open your mouth? You’re in pain. Just stand there and cry. Leave the bullshit to me. It’s what I’m good at.”
LEE TOURNEAU WAS SHIVERING and soaking wet the next time Ig saw him as well, two days later. He wore the same tie, the same shorts, had his mountain board under one arm. It was as if he’d never dried off, as if he’d only just waded out of the Knowles.
It had started to rain, and Lee had been caught out in it. His almost-white hair was soaked flat, and he had the sniffles. He carried a wet canvas satchel over his shoulder; it gave him the look of a newsboy out to hawk some papers in an old Dick Tracy strip.
Ig was alone in the house, an uncommon occurrence. His parents were in Boston to attend a cocktail party at John Williams’s town house. Williams was in his last year as the conductor of the Boston Pops, and Derrick Perrish was going to perform with the orchestra in the farewell concert. They had left Terry in charge. Terry had spent most of the morning in his pajamas in front of MTV, on the phone, carrying on a series of conversations with equally bored friends. His tone at first was cheerfully lazy, then alert and curious, then, finally, clipped and flat, the toneless tone he used to express his highest levels of disdain. Ig had gone by the living room to see him pacing, an unmistakable sign of agitation. Finally Terry had banged down the phone and launched himself up the stairs. When he came back down, he was dressed and tossing the keys to their father’s Jag in one hand. He said he was going to Eric’s. He said it with his upper lip curled, the look of someone with a dirty job to do, someone who has come home to find the trash cans knocked over and garbage spread all over the yard.
“Don’t you need someone with a license to go with you?” Ig asked. Terry had his permit.
“Only if I get pulled over,” Terry said.
Terry walked out the door, and Ig closed it behind him. Five minutes later Ig was opening it again, someone thumping on the other side. Ig assumed it was Terry, that he had forgotten something and come back to get it, but it was Lee Tourneau instead.
“How’s your nose?” Lee asked.
Ig touched the tape across the bridge of his nose, then dropped his hand. “I wasn’t that pretty to begin with. You want to come in?”
Lee took a step in through the door and stood there, a pool forming under his feet.
“Looks like you’re the one who drowned,” Ig said.
Lee didn’t smile. It was as if he didn’t know how. It was as if he’d put his face on for the first time that morning and didn’t know how to use it.
“Nice tie,” Lee said.
Ig looked down at himself, had forgotten he was wearing it. Terry had rolled his eyes at Ig when Ig came downstairs Tuesday morning with his blue tie knotted around his throat. “What’s that?” Terry had asked derisively.
Their father had been wandering through the kitchen at that exact moment and looked over at Ig, then said, “Class. You ought to put some on sometime, Terry.” Ig had worn a tie every day since, but there’d been no more discussion of the matter.
“What are you selling?” Ig asked, nodding at the canvas bag.
“They’re six bucks,” Lee said. He folded back the flap and withdrew three different magazines. “Take your pick.”
The first was called, simply, The Truth! The cover showed a groom and his bride kneeling before the altar in a vast church. Their hands were clasped in prayer, their faces raised into the light slanting through stained-glass windows. Their expressions suggested that the both of them had been sucking laughing gas; they wore identical looks of maniacal joy. A gray-skinned alien stood behind them, tall and naked. He had placed a three-fingered hand on each of their heads-it looked as if he might be about to smash their skulls together and kill them both, much to their joy. The cover line read “Married by Aliens!” The other magazines were Tax Reform Now and Modern American Militia.
“All three for fifteen,” Lee said. “They’re to raise money for the Christian Patriots Food Bank. The Truth! is really good. It’s all great celebrity sci-fi stuff. There’s a story about how Steven Spielberg got to tour the real Area 51. And there’s another one about the guys from Kiss, when they were on an airplane that got hit by lightning and the engines conked out. They were all praying to Christ to save them, and then Paul Stanley saw Jesus on the wing, and a minute later the engines started up again and the pilot was able to pull out of the dive.”
“The guys in Kiss are Jewish,” Ig said.
Lee didn’t seem troubled by this news. “Yeah. I think most of what they publish is bullshit. It was still a good story.”
This struck Ig as a remarkably sophisticated observation.
“Did you say it’s fifteen for all three?” he said.
Lee nodded. “If you sell enough, you’re eligible for prizes. That’s how I wound up with the mountain board I was too chickenshit to use.”
“Hey,” Ig said, surprised at the calm, flat way Lee copped to being a coward. It was worse hearing him say it about himself than it was hearing Terry say it on the hill.
“No,” Lee said, unperturbed. “Your brother had me right. I thought I’d impress Glenna and her pals, showing the thing off, but when I was on the hill, I couldn’t make myself risk it. I just hope if I run into your brother again, he won’t hold it against me.”
Ig felt a brief but intense flash of hate for his older brother. “Like he’s got room to talk. He almost pissed himself when he thought I was going to go home and tell Mom what really happened to me. One thing about my brother, in any given situation you can always count on him to cover his ass first and worry about other people second. Come on in. I got money upstairs.”
“You want to buy one?”
“I want to buy all three.”
Lee narrowed one eye to a squint. “I can see Modern American Militia, because it’s all stuff about guns and how to tell a spy satellite from a normal satellite. But are you sure you want Tax Reform Now?”
“Why not? I’ll have to pay taxes someday.”
“Most of the people who read this magazine try not to.”
Lee followed Ig to his room but then stopped in the hall, peering cautiously within. Ig had never thought of the room as particularly impressive-it was the smallest on the second floor-but wondered now if it looked like the bedroom of a rich kid to Lee and if this would count against him. Ig had a glance around the place himself, trying to imagine how Lee saw it. The first thing he noticed was the view of the swimming pool out the window, the rain dimpling its vivid blue surface. Then there was the autographed poster of Mark Knopfler over the bed; Ig’s father had played horns on the last Dire Straits album.
Ig’s own horn was on the bed, resting in an open case. The trumpet case contained an assortment of other treasures: a wad of money, tickets to a George Harrison show, a photo of his mother in Capri, and the redheaded girl’s cross on its broken chain. Ig had made an effort to fix it with a Swiss Army knife, which got him exactly nowhere. Finally he had put it aside and turned to a different but related task. Ig had borrowed the M volume of Terry’s Encyclopaedia Britannica and looked up the key to Morse code. He still remembered the exact sequence of short and long flashes the redheaded girl had aimed at him, but when he translated them, his first thought was that he had to be wrong. It was a simple enough message, a single short word, but so shocking it caused a cool, sensuous prickle to race up his back and over his scalp. Ig had begun to try to work out an adequate response, lightly penciling strings of dots and dashes into the endpapers of his Neil Diamond Bible, trying different replies. Because, of course, it wouldn’t do to just talk to her. She had spoken to him in flashes of daylight, and he felt he ought to reply in kind.
Lee took it all in, his gaze darting here and there, finally settling on four chrome towers filled with CDs that stood against the wall. “That’s a lot of music.”
“Come in.”
Lee shuffled in, bowed by the weight of the dripping canvas bag.
“Sit down,” Ig said.
Lee sat on the edge of Ig’s bed, soaking the duvet. He twisted his head to look over his shoulder at the towers of CDs.
“I’ve never seen so much music. Except maybe in a record store.”
“Who do you like to listen to?” Ig asked.
Lee shrugged.
This was an inexplicable reply. Everyone listened to something.
“What albums do you have?” Ig asked.
“I don’t.”
“Nothing?”
“Just never been that interested, I guess,” Lee said calmly. “CDs are expensive, aren’t they?”
It bewildered Ig, the idea that a person could not be interested in music. It was like not being interested in happiness. Then he registered Lee’s follow-up-CDs are expensive, aren’t they?-and for the first time it came to him that Lee didn’t have money to spend on music or anything else. Ig thought of Lee’s brand-new mountain board-but that had been a prize for his charity work, he’d just said. There were his ties and his button-up short-sleeved shirts-but probably his mother made him wear them when he went out peddling his magazines, expected him to look clean-cut and responsible. Poor kids often dressed up. It was rich kids who dressed down, carefully assembling a blue-collar costume: eighty-dollar designer jeans that had been professionally faded and tattered and worn-out T-shirts straight off the rack from Abercrombie & Fitch. Then there was Lee’s association with Glenna and Glenna’s friends, a crowd that gave off a trailer-park vibe; country-club kids just didn’t hang out at the foundry, burning shits on a summer afternoon.
Lee raised one eyebrow-he definitely gave off a bit of a Spock vibe-seemed to pick up on Ig’s surprise. He said, “What do you listen to?”
“I don’t know. Lots of stuff. I’ve been on a big Beatles kick lately.” By “lately” Ig meant the last seven years. “You like them?”
“Don’t really know them. What are they like?”
The notion that anyone in the world might not know the Beatles staggered Ig. He said, “You know…like, the Beatles. John Lennon and Paul McCartney.”
“Oh, them,” Lee said, but the way he said it, Ig knew he was embarrassed and only pretending to know. Not pretending too hard either.
Ig didn’t speak but went to the rack of CDs and studied his Beatles collection, trying to decide where Lee ought to start. First he thought Sgt. Pepper and pulled it out. But then he wondered if Lee would really enjoy it or if he’d find all the horns and accordions and sitars disorienting, if he’d be turned off by the lunatic mix of styles, rock jams turning into English pub sing-alongs turning into mellow jazz. He’d probably want something easier to digest, a collection of clear, catchy melodies, something recognizable as rock ’n’ roll. The White Album, then. Except coming in at The White Album was like walking into a movie in the last twenty minutes. You’d get action, but you wouldn’t know who the characters were or why you were supposed to care. Really, the Beatles were a story. Listening to them was like reading a book. You had to start with Please Please Me. Ig pulled down the whole stack and put them on the bed.
“That’s a lot of stuff to listen to. When do you want them back?”
Ig didn’t know he was giving them away until the moment Lee asked the question. Lee had pulled him out of the roaring darkness and pounded the breath back into his chest and for it had been given nothing. A hundred dollars of CDs was nothing. Nothing.
“You can have them,” Ig said.
Lee gave him a confused look. “For the magazines? You have to pay for those in cash.”
“No. Not for the magazines.”
“What then?”
“Not letting me drown.”
Lee looked at the tower of CDs, put a tentative hand on top of them.
“Thank you,” he said. “I don’t know what to say. Except maybe you’re crazy. And you don’t need to.”
Ig opened his mouth, then closed it, briefly stricken with emotion, with liking Lee Tourneau too much to manage a simple reply. Lee gave him another puzzled, curious stare, then quickly looked away.
“Do you play same as your dad?” Lee asked, pulling Ig’s trumpet out of his case.
“My brother plays. I know how, but I don’t really myself.”
“Why not?”
“I can’t breathe.”
Lee frowned.
“I mean, I have asthma. I run out of air when I try to play.”
“I guess you’ll never be famous.” He didn’t say it unkindly. It was just an observation.
“My dad isn’t famous. My dad plays jazz. You can’t get famous playing jazz.” Anymore, Ig silently added.
“I’ve never heard one of your dad’s records. I don’t know much about jazz. It’s like the stuff that’s always playing in the background in movies about old-time gangsters, right?”
“Usually.”
“I bet I’d like that. Music for a scene with gangsters and those girls in the short straight skirts. Flappers.”
“Right.”
“And then the killers walk in with machine guns,” Lee said, looking excited for the first time since Ig had met him. “Killers in fedoras. And they hose the place down. Blow away a bunch of champagne glasses and rich people and old mobsters.” Miming a tommy gun as he said it. “I think I like that kind of music. Music to kill people to.”
“I’ve got some stuff like that. Hang on.” Ig pulled out a disc by Glenn Miller and another by Louis Armstrong. He put them with the Beatles. Then, because Armstrong was filed below AC/DC, Ig asked, “Did you like Back in Black?”
“Is that an album?”
Ig grabbed Back in Black and put it on Lee’s growing pile. “Got a song on it called ‘Shoot to Thrill.’ Perfect for gunfights and breaking stuff.”
But Lee was bent over the open trumpet case, looking at Ig’s other treasures-picking at the redhead’s crucifix on the slender golden chain. It bothered Ig to see him touching it, and he was gripped by an urge to slam the trumpet case shut…on Lee’s fingers if he pulled his hand away too slowly. Ig brushed the impulse aside, as briskly as if it were a spider on the back of his hand. He was disappointed in himself for feeling such a thing, even for a moment. Lee looked like a child displaced by a flood-cold water still dripping off the tip of his nose-and Ig wished he had stopped in the kitchen to make cocoa. He wanted to give Lee a cup of hot soup and some buttered toast. There were any number of things he wanted Lee to have. Just not the cross.
He moved patiently around to the side of the bed and reached into the case to collect his stack of bills, turning his shoulder so Lee had to straighten up and take his hand away from the cross. Ig counted off a five and ten ones.
“For the magazines,” Ig said.
Lee folded the money and tucked it into his pocket. “You like pictures of snatch?”
“Snatch?”
“Pussy.” He said it without awkwardness-they might’ve still been talking music.
Ig had missed a transition somewhere. “Sure. Who doesn’t?”
“My distributor has all kinds of magazines. I’ve seen some strange stuff in his storeroom. Stuff that’ll turn your head around. There’s a whole magazine of pregnant women.”
“Ulh!” Ig cried, joyously disgusted.
“We live in troubled times,” Lee said, without any notable disapproval. “There’s one of old women, too. Still Horny is a big one. That’s chicks over sixty fingering themselves. You got any porn?”
Ig’s answer was in his face.
“Let’s see,” Lee said.
Ig got Candy Land out of his closet, one of a dozen games stuffed in the back.
“Candy Land,” Lee said. “Nice.”
Ig didn’t understand at first, then he did. He’d never thought about it, had only stuck his jack-off literature there because no one played Candy Land anymore, not because it had any symbolic meaning.
He set it on the bed and removed the lid and the board, took out the plastic tray that held the pieces. Beneath was a Victoria’s Secret catalog, and the Rolling Stone with Demi Moore naked on the cover.
“This is pretty tame material,” Lee said, not unkindly. “I’m not sure you even need to hide this stuff, Ig.”
Lee shifted aside the Rolling Stone and discovered an issue of Uncanny X-Men beneath it, the one with Jean Grey dressed in a black corset. He smiled placidly.
“This is a good one. Because Phoenix is so sweet and good and caring, and then bam! Out comes the black leather. That your thing? Cute girls with the devil inside?”
Ig said, “I don’t have a thing. I don’t know how that got in there.”
“Everyone has a thing,” Lee said, and of course he was right. Ig had been thinking almost exactly this when Lee said he didn’t know what music he liked. “Still, whacking off over comics…that’s unwell.” He said it calmly, with a certain appreciation. “You ever had anyone do it for you? Jerk you off?”
For a moment the room seemed to expand around Ig, as if it were the inside of a balloon filling with air. The thought crossed his mind that Lee might be about to offer a hand job, and if that were to happen-a terrible, diseased thing to contemplate-then Ig would tell him he had nothing against gay people, he just wasn’t one himself.
But Lee went on, “Remember the girl I was with on Monday? She’s done it to me. She gave a little scream when I finished. Funniest thing I ever heard. I wish I had it on tape.”
“Seriously?” Ig asked, both relieved and shaken. “Has she been your girlfriend for a long time?”
“We don’t have a relationship like that. Not a boyfriend-girlfriend thing. She just comes over now and then to talk about boys and the people who are mean to her at school and stuff. She knows my door is open.” Ig almost laughed at this last statement, which he assumed was ironic, but then held back. Lee seemed to mean it genuinely. He went on, “The times she’s whacked me off were kind of a favor she did. It’s a good thing, too. If not for that, I’d probably club her to death, the way she gabs on all the time.”
Lee gently put the Uncanny X-Men back into the box, and Ig reassembled Candy Land and replaced it in his closet. When he came back to the bed, Lee was holding the cross in one hand, had picked it out of the trumpet case. At the sight, Ig’s heart took the elevator to the basement.
“This is pretty,” Lee said. “Belong to you?”
“No,” Ig said.
“No. I didn’t think so. Looks like something a girl would wear. Where’d you get it?”
The easiest thing to do would’ve been to lie, to say it belonged to his mother. But lies turned Ig’s tongue to clay, and anyway, Lee had saved his life.
“In church,” Ig said, knowing that Lee would figure out the rest. He did not know why it felt so catastrophically wrong to simply tell the truth about such a little thing. It was never wrong to tell the truth.
Lee had looped both ends of the golden chain around his index finger, so the cross dangled across his palm. “It’s broken,” he said.
“That’s how I found it.”
“Was a redhead wearing it? Girl about our age?”
“She left it. I was going to fix it for her.”
“With this?” Lee asked, knuckling the Swiss Army knife that Ig had been using to bend and twist at the chain’s gold rings. “You can’t fix it with this. For something like this, you probably need a pair of needle-nose pliers. You know, my dad has some precision tools. I bet I could fix it up in five minutes. I’m good at that: fixing things.”
Lee turned his gaze to Ig at last. He didn’t need to ask outright for Ig to know what he wanted. Ig felt ill at the thought of giving it to him, and his throat was unaccountably tight, the way it sometimes got at the onset of an asthma attack. But there was really only one possible reply that would allow him to keep his own sense of himself as a decent and selfless person.
“Sure,” Ig said. “Why don’t you take it home and see if you can do something with it?”
Lee said, “Okay. I’ll fix it up, and give it back to her on Sunday.”
“Would you?” Ig asked. It felt as if there were a smooth wooden shaft going through the pit of his stomach, with a crank on one end, and someone was beginning to turn it, methodically twisting his insides around it.
Lee nodded and returned his gaze to the cross. “Thanks. I’d like that. I was asking you what your thing is. You know, what kind of girl you like. She’s my kind of thing. There’s something about her, you can just tell she’s never been naked in front of any guy, except her father. You know I saw it break? The necklace. I was standing in the pew right behind her. I tried to help her with it. She’s cute, but a little snotty. I think it’s fair to say most pretty girls are snotty until they get their cherry popped. Because, you know, it’s the most valuable thing they’re ever going to have. It’s the thing that keeps boys sniffing around them and thinking about them-the idea of getting to be the one. But after someone does it, they can relax and act like a normal girl. Anyway. I appreciate you letting me have this. It’ll give me a nice in with her.”
“No prob,” Ig said, feeling as if he’d given away something much more special than a cross on a gold necklace. It was fair-Lee deserved something good after saving Ig’s life and not getting any credit. But Ig wondered why it didn’t feel fair.
He said Lee should come over when it wasn’t raining and swim sometime, and Lee said all right. Ig felt a certain disconnect from his own voice, as if it were coming from some other source in the room-the radio, perhaps.
Lee was partway to the door with his satchel over his shoulder when Ig saw he had left his CDs. “Take your music,” he said. He was glad Lee was going. He wanted to lie on his bed for a while and rest. His stomach hurt.
Lee glanced at them and then said, “I don’t have anything to listen to them on.”
Ig wondered again how poor Lee was-if he had an apartment or a trailer, if he woke at night to screams and banging doors, the cops arresting the drunk next door for beating his girlfriend again. Another reason not to resent him for taking the cross. Ig hated that he could not be happy for Lee, that he could not take pleasure in what he was giving away, but he wasn’t happy, he was jealous.
Shame turned him around and got him rummaging in his desk. He stood up with the portable Walkman disc player he’d gotten for Christmas, and a pair of headphones.
“Thanks,” Lee said when Ig handed the disc player to him. “You don’t have to give me all this stuff. I didn’t do anything. I was just standing there and…you know.”
Ig was surprised at the intensity of his own reaction, a lightening of the heart, a rush of affection for the skinny, pale kid with the unpracticed smile. Ig remembered the moment that he’d been saved. That every minute of his life from here on out was a gift, one Lee had offered to him. The tension uncoiled from his stomach, and he was able to breathe easy once again.
Lee stuffed the CD player and headphones and discs into his satchel before hoisting his bag. Ig watched from an upstairs window as Lee rode down the hill on his mountain board, through the drizzle, the fat wheels throwing up rooster tails of water from the gleaming asphalt.
TWENTY MINUTES LATER IG HEARD the Jag pull in with that sound he liked, a smooth revving noise right out of an action movie. He returned to the upstairs window again and looked down at the black car, expecting the doors to open and spill out Terry, Eric Hannity, and some girls, in a gush of laughter and cigarette smoke. But Terry got out alone and stood by the Jaguar awhile, then walked to the door slowly, as if he had a stiff back, as if he were a much older man who’d been driving for hours instead of just across town.
Ig was halfway down the stairs when Terry let himself in, water glittering in his messy thatch of black hair. He saw Ig staring down at him and gave him a tired smile.
“Hey, bro,” Terry said. “Got something for you.” And lobbed it, a dark roundness, the size of a crabapple.
Ig clapped his hands around it, then looked at the white silhouette of the naked girl wearing the maple leaf over her crotch. The bomb was heavier than he imagined it would be, the grain rough, the surface cold.
“Your winnings,” Terry said.
“Oh,” Ig said. “Thanks. With what happened, I guess Eric forgot to pay up.” In fact, Ig had, days ago, casually come to accept that Eric Hannity was never going to pay, that he had got his nose broke for nothing.
“Yeah. Well. I reminded him.”
“Everything okay?”
“Now that he paid up it is.” Terry paused, one hand on the newel post, then said, “He didn’t want to fork it over because you wore sneakers when you went down the hill or some such shit.”
“Well. That’s weak. That’s the weakest thing I’ve ever heard,” Ig said. Terry did not reply, just stood there rubbing his thumb against the edge of the newel post. “Still. Did you guys really get into it? It’s just a firecracker.”
“No it isn’t. You see what it did to the turkey?”
This struck Ig as a funny thing to say, missing the point. Terry gave Ig a guilty-sorry smile and said, “You don’t know what he was going to do with that. There’s a kid from school Eric doesn’t like. A kid I know from band. Good kid. Ben Townsend. But, see, Ben’s mother is in the insurance business. Like, answers phones or something. So Eric has a hate on for him.”
“Just because his mom works in insurance?”
“You know Eric’s father isn’t doing too well, right? Like, he can’t lift things and he can’t work and he has trouble…he has trouble taking a dump. It’s just really sad. They were supposed to get all this insurance money, but they haven’t yet. I guess they’re never going to. And so Eric wants to get even with someone, and he sort of fixed on Ben.”
“Just because his mother works for the insurance company that’s screwing Eric’s dad?”
“No!” Terry cried. “That’s the part of this that is most fucked. She works for a completely different insurance company.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“No. It doesn’t. And don’t spend too much time trying to work it out, because you never will. Eric was gonna use this thing to blow something up that belonged to Ben Townsend, and he called me to see if I wanted in.”
“What was he going to blow up?”
“His cat.”
Ig felt a little exploded himself, blown up with a kind of horror that bordered on wonder. “No. Maybe that’s what Eric said, but he was screwing with you. I mean, c’mon…a cat?”
“He tried to pretend he was screwing with me when he saw how pissed I was. And he only gave me that cherry bomb when I threatened to tell his father about the shit we’ve been doing. Then he threw it at my head and told me to get the fuck out. I know for a fact Eric’s daddy has perpetrated several acts of police brutality on Eric’s ass.”
“Even though he can’t take a shit?”
“He can’t take a shit, but he can swing a belt. I hope to God that Eric is never a cop. Him and his dad are just alike. You’d have the right to remain silent with his boot on your throat.”
“Would you really have told his dad about-”
“What? No. No way. How could I tattle about all the stuff Eric’s blown up when I was in on it myself? That’s, like, the first rule of blackmail.” Terry was silent a moment, then said, “You think you know someone. But mostly you just know what you want to know.” He looked up at Ig with clear eyes and said, “He is a badass. Eric. And I always felt kind of like a badass when I was with him. You’re not in band, so you don’t know, Ig. It’s hard to be desired by women and feared by men when your primary skill is playing ‘America the Beautiful’ on the trumpet. I liked the way people looked at us. That’s what was in it for me. I couldn’t tell you what was in it for him. Except he liked that I’d pay for things and that we know some famous people.”
Ig rolled the bomb around and around in his hand, feeling that there was something he ought to say but not knowing how to say it. What came to him at last was hopelessly inadequate. “What do you think I should blow up with this?”
“I don’t know what. Just don’t leave me out, okay? Sit on it a few weeks. After I have my license, I’ll drive us down to Cape Cod with a bunch of the guys. We can have a bonfire on the beach and find something there.”
“Last big explosion of the summer,” Ig said.
“Yeah. Ideally I’d like to see us leave a swath of destruction that can be seen from orbit. Barring that, let’s at least try to destroy something precious and beautiful that can never be replaced,” Terry said.
THE WHOLE WAY TO CHURCH, Ig’s palms were sweating, felt tacky and strange. His stomach was upset, too. He knew why, and it was ridiculous-he didn’t even know her name and had never spoken a word to her.
Except that she had signaled him. A church full of people, many her own age, and she had looked right at him and had sent him a message with her cross of burning gold. Even now he wasn’t sure why he’d let her go, how he could’ve given her away like a baseball card or a CD. He told himself Lee was a lonely trailer-park kid who needed someone, that things had a way of working out how they were supposed to. He tried to feel good about what he had done, but there was instead, rising within him, a black wall of horror. He could not imagine what had compelled him to allow Lee to take her cross away from him. Lee would have it with him today. He would give it to her, and she would say thank you, and they would talk after church. In his mind they were already walking out together; as she went by, the redhead glanced Ig’s way, but her gaze slid over him without any recognition at all-the repaired cross glittering in the hollow of her throat.
Lee was there, in the same pew, and he was wearing her cross around his own throat. It was the first thing Ig noticed, and his reaction was simple and biochemical. It was as if he had downed a painfully hot cup of coffee, all at once. His stomach knotted and burned. His blood surged furiously, as if hopping with caffeination.
The pew in front of Lee remained empty until the last moments just before the service began, and then three stout old ladies slid in where the girl had sat the week before. Lee and Ig spent much of the first twenty minutes craning their heads, searching for her, but she wasn’t there. That hair of hers, a rope of braided copper wire, would have been impossible to miss. Finally Lee looked across the aisle at Ig and lifted his shoulders in a comical shrug, and Ig gave an exaggerated shrug back, as if he were Lee’s co-conspirator in his attempt to connect with Morse Code Girl.
Ig wasn’t, though. He bowed his head when it was time to say the Lord’s Prayer, but what Ig was praying for wasn’t a part of the standard text. He wanted the cross back. It didn’t have to be right. He wanted it more than he’d ever wanted anything, more than he’d wanted to breathe when he was lost in that fatal rush of black water and roaring souls. He didn’t know her name, but he knew they were good at having fun together, at being together; the ten minutes when she’d been flashing that light into his face were the best ten minutes he’d ever spent in church. Some things you didn’t give away, no matter how much you owed.
WHEN THE SERVICES WERE OVER, Ig stood with his father’s hand on his shoulder, watching people file past. His family was always among the last to leave any crowded place: church, a movie theater, a baseball stadium. Lee Tourneau went by and dipped his head to Ig in a dismissive sort of nod that seemed to say, Somes you win and somes you lose.
As soon as the aisle was clear, Ig crossed to the pew where the girl had sat the week before and then sank to one knee there and began to tie his shoe. His father looked back at him, but Ig nodded that they should go on and he would catch up. He watched until his family had moved out of the nave before quitting with the shoe.
The three stout old ladies who had settled in Morse Code Girl’s former pew were still there, collecting purses and arranging summer shawls over their shoulders. As he glanced up at them now, it came to Ig that he had seen them before. They had walked out with the girl’s mother last Sunday, in a chattering, social pack, and at the time Ig had wondered if they were aunts. Had one of them even been in the car with the girl after the services? Ig wasn’t sure. He wanted to think so, but suspected he was letting wishful thinking color memory.
“Excuse me,” Ig said.
“Yes?” asked the lady closest to him, a big woman, hair dyed a metallic shade of brown.
Ig wagged a finger at the pew and shook his head. “There was a girl here. Last Sunday. She left something by accident, and I was going to give it back. Red hair?”
The woman didn’t reply but remained where she was, even though the aisle was clear enough to allow her to exit. Finally Ig realized she was waiting for him to make eye contact. When he did, and saw the knowing, narrow-eyed way she was looking at him, he felt his pulse flutter.
“Merrin Williams,” said the woman, “and her parents were only in town last weekend to take possession of their new house. I know because I sold it to them and showed them this church as well. They’re back in Rhode Island now, packing their things. She’ll be here next Sunday. I’m sure I’ll be seeing them again, soon enough. If you want, I could pass along whatever it is Merrin left here.”
“No,” Ig said. “That’s okay.”
“Mm,” said the woman. “I thought you’d rather give it to her yourself. You have that look about you.”
“What…what look?” Ig asked.
“I’d say it,” said the woman, “but we’re in church.”
THE NEXT TIME LEE CAME OVER, they went into the pool and played basketball in the shallow end until Ig’s mother came out with grilled ham-and-brie sandwiches on a plate. Lydia couldn’t just make a grilled ham-and-cheese with yellow American like other moms-it had to have a pedigree, express in some way her own more sophisticated and worldly palate. Ig and Lee sat eating them on reclining patio chairs, with water puddling under their seats. For some reason one or the other of them was always dripping wet when they were together.
Lee was polite to Ig’s mother, but after she walked away, he peeled back the toast and looked at the milky melted cheese on the ham.
“Someone came all over my sandwich,” he said.
Ig choke-laughed on a bite, which turned into a coughing fit, harsh, painful in his chest. Lee automatically thumped him on the back, rescuing Ig from himself. It was getting to be a habit, an integral part of their relationship.
“For most people it’s just lunch. For you it’s another chance to get yourself killed.” Lee squinted at him in the sunlight and said, “You’re probably the most death-prone person I know.”
“I’m harder to finish off than I look,” Ig said. “Like a cockroach.”
“I liked AC/DC,” Lee said. “If you were going to shoot someone, you’d really want to do it while you were listening to them.”
“What about the Beatles? Did you feel like shooting anyone listening to them?”
Lee considered seriously for a moment, then said, “Myself.”
Ig laughed again. Lee’s secret was that he never strained for the laugh, didn’t even always seem to know that the things he said were amusing. He had a restraint, an aura of glassy and unflappable cool, that made Ig think of a secret agent in a movie, defusing a warhead-or programming one. At other times he was such a blank-he never laughed, not at his own jokes, not at Ig’s-it was as if Lee were an alien scientist, come to earth to learn about human emotions. Kind of like Mork.
At the same time he was laughing, Ig was distressed. Not liking the Beatles was almost as bad as not knowing about them at all.
Lee saw the chagrin on his face and said, “I’ll give them back. You should have them back.”
“No,” Ig said. “Keep ’em and listen to them some more. Maybe you’ll hear something you like.”
“I did like some of it,” Lee said, but Ig knew he was lying. “There was that one…” and his voice trailed off, leaving Ig to guess at which of maybe sixty songs he might be referring to.
And Ig guessed it. “‘Happiness Is a Warm Gun’?”
Lee pointed a finger at him, cocked his thumb, and blew him away.
“What about the jazz? Did you like any of that?”
“Kind of. I don’t know. I couldn’t really hear the jazz stuff.”
“What do you mean?”
“I kept forgetting it was on. It’s like the music in the supermarket.”
Ig shivered. “So are you going to be a hit man when you grow up?” he asked.
“Why?”
“’Cause you only like music you can murder people to.”
“No. Just it ought to set the scene. Isn’t that the whole point of music? It’s like the background to what you’re doing.”
He wasn’t going to argue with Lee, but ignorance like that pained him. Hopefully, over the years of being best friends, Lee would learn the truth about music: that it was the third rail of life. You grabbed it to shock yourself out of the dull drag of hours, to feel something, to burn with all the emotions you didn’t get to experience in the ordinary run of school and TV and loading the dishwasher after dinner. Ig supposed that growing up in a trailer park, Lee had missed out on a lot of the good things. It was going to take him a few years to catch up.
“So what are you going to do when you grow up?” Ig asked.
Lee tucked away the rest of his sandwich and, with his mouth stuffed full, said, “I’d like to be in Congress.”
“For real? To do what?”
“I’d like to write a law that says irresponsible bitches who do drugs have to get sterilized so they can’t have kids they aren’t going to take care of,” Lee said, without heat.
Ig had wondered why he didn’t talk about his mother.
Lee’s hand drifted to the cross around his neck, nestled just above his clavicles. After a moment he said, “I’ve been thinking about her. Our girl from church.”
“I bet,” Ig said, trying to make it sound funny, but it came off a little harsh and irritated, even to his own ears.
Lee appeared not to notice. His eyes were distant, unfocused. “I bet she isn’t from around here. I’ve never seen her in church before. She was probably visiting family or something. Bet we never see her again.” He paused, then added, “The one that got away.” Not melodramatically, but with a knowing sense of humor about it.
The truth caught in Ig’s throat, like that lump of sandwich that wouldn’t go down. It was there, waiting to be told-she’ll be back next Sunday-but he couldn’t say it. He couldn’t lie either, didn’t have the nerve. He was the worst liar he knew.
What he said instead was, “You fixed the cross.”
Lee didn’t look down at it but idly picked at it with one hand while staring out at the light dancing across the surface of the pool. “Yeah. I’ve been keeping it on, just in case I run into her while I’m out selling my magazines.” He paused, then continued, “You know the dirty magazines I told you about? The ones my distributor has in his storeroom? There’s one called Cherries, all these girls who are supposed to be eighteen-year-old virgins. That’s my favorite, girl-next-door types. You want a girl where you can imagine what it would be like to be the first. Of course the girls in Cherries aren’t really virgins. You can tell just by looking at them. They’ll have a tattoo on their hip or wear too much eye shadow, and they’ll have stripper names. They’re just dressing up all innocent for the photo shoot. The next photo shoot they’ll dress up as sexy cops or cheerleaders, and it’ll be just as fake. The girl in church, now, she’s the real deal.” He lifted the cross from his chest and rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger. “The thing I’m hung up on is the idea of seeing something real. I don’t think most people feel half the things they pretend to feel. I think especially girls in a relationship tend to put on attitudes like clothes, just to keep a guy interested. Like Glenna keeping me interested with the occasional hand job. It isn’t because she loves hand jobs. It’s because she doesn’t love being lonely. When a girl loses her virginity, though, it may hurt, but it’s real. It might be the realest, most private thing you could ever see in another person. You wonder who she’ll be in that moment, when you finally get past all the pretend. That’s what I think about when I think about the girl in church.”
Ig was sorry about the half a sandwich he had eaten. The cross around Lee’s neck was flashing in the sunlight, and when Ig closed his eyes, he could still see it, a series of glowing afterimages, signaling a dreadful warning. He felt a headache coming on.
When he opened his eyes, he said, “So politics doesn’t work out, you going to kill people for a living?”
“I guess.”
“How would you do it? What’s your MO?” Wondering how he would kill Lee himself, to get back the cross.
“Who are we talking about? Some skag who owes her dealer money? Or the president?”
Ig let out a long, slow breath. “Someone who knows the truth about you. A star witness. If he lives, you’re going to jail.”
Lee said, “I’d burn him to death in his car. Do it with a bomb. I’m on the curb across the street from him, watching as he climbs behind the wheel. The moment he pulls out, I press the button on my remote control, so after the explosion the car keeps rolling, this big burning wreck.”
Ig said, “Hey. Wait a minute. I got to show you something.”
He ignored the puzzled look Lee gave him, rose, and trotted inside. He returned three minutes later, right hand closed into a fist. Lee looked up, brow furrowed, as Ig settled back into his deck chair.
“Check it out,” Ig said, and opened his right hand to show the cherry bomb.
Lee looked at it, his face blank as a plastic mask, but his indifference didn’t fool Ig, who was learning to read him. When Ig had opened his hand and Lee saw what he was holding, he sat up in spite of himself.
“Eric Hannity paid up,” Ig said. “This is what I got for riding the cart down the hill. You saw the turkey, didn’t you?”
“It rained Thanksgiving for an hour.”
“Wouldn’t it be cool to stick it in a car? Say you found a wreck somewhere. I bet you could blow the hood off with this thing. Terry told me these are pre-CPL.”
“Pre-what?”
“Child-protection laws. The fireworks they make nowadays are like farts in a bathtub. Not these.”
“How could they sell ’em if they’re against the law?”
“It’s only against the law to manufacture new ones. These are from a box of old ones.”
“Is that what you’re going to do? Find a wreck and blow it up?”
“No. My brother’s making me wait until we go to Cape Cod, Labor Day weekend. He’s taking me after he gets his license.”
“It’s not my business, I guess,” Lee said, “but I don’t see how he has any say.”
“No. I have to wait. Eric Hannity wasn’t even going to give it to me, because I was wearing sneakers when I went down the hill. He said I wasn’t really naked. But Terry said that was bullshit and got Eric to cough up. So I owe him. And Terry wants to wait for Cape Cod.”
For the first time in their brief friendship, Lee seemed irritated by something. He grimaced, wiggled around on his deck chair, as if he had suddenly noticed something digging into his back. He said, “Kind of stupid they’re called Eve’s Cherries. Shoulda called ’em Eve’s Apples.”
“Why?”
“’Cause of the Bible.”
“The Bible only says they ate fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. It never says it’s an apple. Could’ve been a cherry.”
“I don’t believe that story.”
“No,” Ig admitted. “Neither do I. Dinosaurs.”
“You believe in Jesus?”
“Why not? As many people wrote about him as wrote about Caesar.” He looked sidelong at Lee, who himself so resembled Caesar that his profile might’ve been stamped on a silver denarius, was only missing the crown of laurel leaves.
“Do you believe he could do miracles?” Lee asked.
“Maybe. I don’t know. If the rest is true, does that part even matter?”
“I did a miracle once.”
Ig found this a not terribly remarkable thing to admit. Ig’s father said he had seen a UFO once in the Nevada desert, when he was out there drinking with the drummer from Cheap Trick. Instead of asking what miracle Lee had performed, Ig said, “Was it cool?”
Lee nodded, his very blue eyes distant, a little unfocused. “I fixed the moon. When I was a little kid. And ever since, I’ve been good at fixing other things. It’s what I’m best at.”
“How’d you fix the moon?”
Lee narrowed one eye to a squint, lifted one hand toward the sky, pinched an imaginary moon between thumb and forefinger, and gave it a half turn. He made a soft click. “All better.”
Ig didn’t want to talk religion; he wanted to talk demolition. “It’s going to be pretty miraculous when I light the fuse on this thing,” he said, and Lee’s gaze swiveled back to the cherry bomb in Ig’s hand. “I’m going to send something home to God. Any suggestions what?”
The way Lee looked at the cherry bomb, Ig thought of a man sitting at a bar drinking something boozy and watching the girl onstage tug down her panties. They had not been buddies for long, but a pattern had been established-this was the moment Ig was supposed to offer it to him, the way he had given Lee his money, his CDs, and Merrin Williams’s cross. But he didn’t offer it, and Lee couldn’t ask for it. Ig told himself he didn’t give it to Lee because he had embarrassed him last time, with his gift of CDs. The truth was something different: Ig felt a mean urge to hold something over him, to have a cross of his own to wear. Later, after Lee left, Ig would be ashamed of this impulse-a rich kid with a swimming pool, lording his treasures over a kid from a single-parent home in a trailer park.
“You could stick it in a pumpkin,” Lee said, and Ig replied, “Too much like the turkey,” and they were off and running, Lee suggesting things, Ig considering them in turn.
They discussed the merits of throwing the bomb into the river to see if they could kill fish with it, dropping it into an outhouse to see if it would make a shit geyser, using a slingshot to shoot it into the bell tower of the church to see what kind of gong it made when it went off. There was the big billboard outside of town that read WILD BASS WAREHOUSE-FISHING AND BOATING SUPPLIES; Lee said it would be hilarious to tape the bomb to the B and see if they could make it the WILD ASS WAREHOUSE. Lee had lots of ideas.
“You keep trying to figure out what kind of music I like,” Lee said. “I’ll tell you what I like. The sound of things blowing up and tinkling glass. Music to my ears.”
IG WAS WAITING FOR HIS TURN in the barber’s chair when he heard a tapping from behind him and looked over his shoulder and saw Glenna standing on the sidewalk, staring in at him from an inch away, her nose smooshed to the window. She was so close she would’ve been breathing on his neck if there weren’t a plate of glass between them. Instead she breathed on the glass, turning it white with condensation. She wrote in it with one finger: I SEEN YOUR P.P. Beneath this she drew a cartoonish dangling cock.
Ig’s heart lurched, and he quickly glanced around to see if his mother was close by, if she had noticed. But Lydia stood across the room from him, behind the barber’s chair, giving instructions to the hairdresser. Terry was up in the seat, wearing the apron, waiting patiently to be made even more beautiful. Cutting Ig’s own rat’s snarl was like clipping a deformed hedge. It couldn’t be made pretty, only manageable.
Ig looked back at Glenna, shaking his head furiously: Go away. She wiped the message off the glass with the sleeve of her awesomely awesome leather jacket.
She wasn’t alone. Highway to Hell was there, too, along with the other derelict who had been a part of their group at the foundry, a long-haired kid in his late teens. The two boys were on the other side of the parking lot, rooting in a garbage can. What was it with the two of them and garbage cans?
Glenna rattled her fingernails against the window. They were painted the color of ice, long and pointed, witch fingernails. He looked again at his mother but could see in a glance he wouldn’t be missed. Lydia was wrapped up in what she was saying, shaping something in the air, the perfect head of hair or maybe an imaginary sphere, a crystal ball, and in the ball was a future in which the nineteen-year-old hairdresser received a big tip if she could just stand there and nod her head and chew her gum and let Lydia tell her how to do her job.
When Ig came outside, Glenna had turned her back to the window and planted her firm, round bottom against the glass. She was staring at Highway to Hell and his long-haired buddy. They stood with the trash can between them and a garbage bag pulled open. The long-haired kid kept reaching up to touch Highway to Hell’s face, tenderly almost. He laughed a big, goofy guffaw every time the kid caressed him.
“Why did you give Lee that cross?” Glenna said.
It jolted Ig-of all the things she could’ve said. He had been asking himself the same question for over a week.
“He said he was going to fix it,” Ig said.
“It’s fixed. So why doesn’t he give it back?”
“It isn’t mine. It’s-This girl dropped it in church. I was going to fix it and give it back, but I couldn’t, and Lee said he could with his dad’s tools, and now he’s wearing it in case he runs into her when he’s going door-to-door for his charity.”
“His charity,” she said, and snorted. “You ought to ask for it back. You should ask for your CDs back, too.”
“He doesn’t have any music.”
“He doesn’t want any music,” Glenna said. “If he wanted some, he’d get himself some.”
“I don’t know. CDs are pretty expensive and-”
“So? He’s not poor, you know,” Glenna said. “He lives in Harmon Gates. My dad does their yard work. That’s how I know him. My dad sent me over there to plant peonies one day by myself. Lee’s parents have plenty of money. Did he tell you he can’t afford CDs?”
It disoriented Ig, the idea that Lee lived in Harmon Gates, had a man to do his yard work, a mother. A mother especially. “His parents live together?”
“It doesn’t seem like it sometimes, because his mother works at Exeter Hospital and has a really long commute and isn’t around so much. It’s probably better that way. Lee and his mom don’t get along.”
Ig shook his head. It was like Glenna was talking about a completely different person, someone Ig didn’t know. He had formed a very clear picture of Lee Tourneau’s life, the trailer he shared with his pickup-driving father, the mother who had disappeared when he was a child to smoke crack and sell herself in the Combat Zone down in Boston. Lee had never told Iggy that he lived in a trailer or that his mother was a drug-addicted hoor, but Ig felt that these things were implied by Lee’s view of the world, by the subjects he never discussed.
“Did he tell you he doesn’t have any money for things?” Glenna asked again.
Ig shook his head.
“I didn’t think,” she said. She toed a stone on the ground for a moment, then looked up and said, “Is she prettier than me?”
“Who?”
“The girl from church. The girl who used to wear that cross.”
Ig tried to think what to say, mentally flailing for some graceful and considerate lie-but he had never been any good at lying, and his silence was a kind of answer in and of itself.
“Yeah,” Glenna said, smiling ruefully. “I thought so.”
Ig looked away from her, too distressed by that unhappy smile to maintain eye contact. Glenna seemed all right, direct and no bullshit.
Highway to Hell and the long-haired kid were laughing over the trash can-the loud, sharp cries of crows. Ig had no idea why.
“Do you know a car you could set fire to,” Ig said, “and get away with it? Not like a car someone owns. Just a wreck?”
“Why?”
“Lee wants to set fire to a car.”
She frowned, trying to figure out why Ig had shifted the conversation to this. Then she looked at Highway to Hell. “Gary’s dad, my uncle, has a bunch of junkers in the woods, out behind his house in Derry. He’s got a home auto-parts business. Or at least he says he has an auto-parts business. I don’t know if he’s ever had any customers.”
“You should mention them to Lee sometime,” Ig said.
A fist rapped on the glass behind him, and both of them turned to look up at Ig’s mother. Lydia smiled down at Glenna and lifted one hand in a stiff little wave, then shifted her gaze to Ig and opened her eyes in a wide, strained look of impatience. He nodded, but when his mother turned her back to them, Ig did not immediately move to reenter the salon.
Glenna cocked her head to an inquisitive angle. “So if we get some arson going, you want in?”
“No. Not really. You kids have fun.”
“You kids,” she said, and her smile broadened. “What are you going to do with your hair?”
“I don’t know. Probably what I always do.”
“You ought to shave it off,” she said. “Go bald. You’d look cool.”
“Huh? No. No, my mom.”
“Well, you ought to at least clip it short and punk it up. Bleach the tips or something. Your hair is part of who you are. Don’t you want to be someone interesting?” She reached out and ruffed up his hair. “You could be someone interesting with a little effort.”
“I don’t think I get a say. My mom is going to want me to stick with what works.”
“Ah, that’s too bad. I like me some crazy hair myself,” Glenna said.
“Yeah?” said Gary, aka Highway to Hell. “You’re going to fucking love my ass.”
They both swiveled their heads to look at Highway to Hell and the long-haired boy, who had just wandered over from the trash can. They had collected hair clippings from the garbage and glued them to Gary’s face, making a tufty reddish brown beard of the sort van Gogh wore in his self-portraits. It didn’t match with the blue bristle of Gary’s shaved head.
Glenna’s face shriveled in a look of pain. “Oh, God. That ain’t going to fool anyone, you asshole.”
“Give me your jacket,” Gary said. “I put your jacket on, I bet I could pass for at least twenty.”
Glenna said, “You could pass for retarded. And you aren’t getting arrested in this jacket.”
Ig said, “That really is a nice jacket.”
Glenna gave him a mysteriously miserable look. “Lee gave it to me. He’s a very generous person.”
LEE OPENED HIS MOUTH to say something, then changed his mind and closed it.
“What?” Ig asked.
Lee opened his mouth again and closed it and opened it and said, “I like that rat-a-tat-tat Glenn Miller song. You could make a corpse dance to that song.”
Ig nodded and didn’t reply.
They were in the pool, because August was back. No more rain, no more unseasonable cool. It was almost a hundred degrees, not a cloud in the sky, and Lee was wearing a strip of white suntan lotion down the bridge of his nose to keep it from burning. Ig was in a life ring, and Lee hung off an inflatable pool mattress, the both of them floating in the tepid water, so heavily chlorinated that the fumes stung their eyes. It was too hot to horse around.
The cross still hung from Lee’s neck. It was spread out on the mattress, stretching away from his throat and toward Ig-as if Ig’s stare had the power of magnetism and was tugging it in his direction. The sun caught it and flashed gold in Ig’s eyes, producing a steady staccato signal. Ig didn’t need to know Morse code to know what it was signaling him now. It was Saturday, and Merrin Williams would be in church tomorrow. Last chance, the cross flashed. Last chance, last chance.
Lee’s lips parted slightly. He seemed to want to say more but not know how to proceed. Finally he said, “Glenna’s cousin Gary is having a bonfire in a couple weeks. At his place. Sort of an end-of-the-summer party. He’s got some bottle rockets and stuff. He says he might have beer, too. You think you’d want to come?”
“When?”
“It’s the last Saturday this month.”
“I can’t. My dad is playing a show with John Williams at the Boston Pops. It’s opening night. We always go to his opening-night shows.”
“Yeah, I understand that,” Lee said.
Lee put the cross in his mouth and sucked on it, thinking. Then he dropped it and finally said the thing he wanted to say. “Would you ever sell it?”
“Sell what?”
“Eve’s Cherry. The bomb. There’s a junker at Gary’s. Gary says no one will care if we trash the thing. We might put lighter fluid on it and blow it up.” He caught himself, then added, “That’s not why I asked if you could come. I asked because it’ll be more fun if you’re there.”
“No. I know,” Ig said. “Just, I wouldn’t feel right selling it to you.”
“Well. You can’t keep giving me things either. If you were going to sell it, how much would you want? I’ve got a little money saved up from tips on the magazine sales.”
Or you could borrow a twenty from your mama, Ig thought, in an almost sly, silky voice that he hardly recognized as his own.
“I don’t want your money,” Ig said. “But I’ll trade you.”
“For what?”
“For that,” Ig said, and nodded at the cross.
There. It was said. Ig’s next breath held in his lungs, a hot, chlorine-flavored capsule of oxygen, chemical and strange. Lee had saved his life, pulled him out of the river when he was unconscious and pounded the air back into him, and Ig was ready to give back, felt he owed Lee anything and everything-except for this. She had signaled him, not Lee. Ig understood there was no right in bargaining with Lee like this, no moral defense, no way to sell it to himself as the act of a decent person. No sooner had he asked for the cross back than he felt a kind of shriveling inside; he had always thought of himself as the good guy in his own story, the clear hero. But the good guy wouldn’t do this. Maybe some things were more important than being the good guy, though.
Lee stared, a slight half smile pulling at the corners of his lips. Ig felt a blaze of heat in his face and was not entirely sorry, was glad to be embarrassed for her. He said, “I know this is coming out of nowhere, but I think I have a crush on her. I would’ve said something earlier, but I didn’t want to be in your way.”
Without hesitation Lee reached behind his neck and undid the clasp. “All you ever had to do was ask. It’s yours. It was always yours. You found it, not me. All I did was fix it. And if it gets you in with her, I’m glad to fix that, too.”
“I thought she was your sort of thing, though. You aren’t-”
Lee waved a hand through the air. “Going to compete with a friend over some girl whose name I don’t know. All the stuff you’ve given me, all the CDs? Even if they mostly sucked, I appreciate it. I’m not an ungrateful person, Ig. You ever see her again, you’re all over it. I’m behind you all the way. I don’t think she’s coming back, though.”
“She is,” Ig said softly.
Lee looked at him.
The truth had come out before Ig could help himself. He had to know that Lee didn’t care, because they were friends now. Were going to be friends for the rest of their lives.
When Lee didn’t speak-just floated there with that half smile on his long, narrow face-Ig went on, “I met someone who knows her. She wasn’t there last Sunday because her family is moving up from Rhode Island and they had to go back and get the rest of their stuff.”
Lee finished removing the cross and tossed it lightly to Ig, who caught it when it hit the water.
“Go get her, tiger,” Lee said. “You’re the one who found that thing, and for whatever reason she didn’t seem to take a shine to me. Besides. I have all I can handle in the lady department these days. Glenna came over to see me yesterday, to tell me about the car at Gary’s, and while she was over, she took the whole thing in her mouth. Only for a minute. But she did it.” Lee beamed-the smile of a child with a new balloon. “What a fucking slut, huh?”
“That’s awesome,” Ig said, and smiled weakly.
IG SAW MERRIN WILLIAMS and then pretended he hadn’t: no easy task, his heart leaping inside him, throwing itself into his rib cage like an angry drunk assaulting the bars of his holding cell. He had thought of this moment not just every day but nearly every hour of every day, since he had last seen her, and it was almost too much for his nervous system, was overloading the grid. She wore cream-colored linen slacks and a white blouse with the sleeves folded back, and her hair was loose this time, and she looked right at him as he came up the aisle with his family, but he pretended not to see her.
Lee and his father came in a few minutes before the service began and settled into a pew on Ig’s side, close to the front. Lee turned his head and gave her a long look, up and down. She didn’t seem to notice, was gazing intently at Ig. After Lee had finished inspecting her, he peered back over his shoulder, to look at Ig himself from under heavy-lidded eyes. He shook his head in mock disapproval before pivoting away.
Merrin stared at Iggy for the entire first five minutes of the service, and in all that time he did not once look at her directly. He clenched his hands together, his palms slick with sweat, and kept his eyes fixed on Father Mould.
She didn’t give up staring at him until Father Mould said, “Let us pray.” She slid off the pew to kneel and put her hands together, and that was when Ig slipped the cross out of his pocket. He held it in the cup of his hand, found some sunshine, and pointed it at her. A spectral golden cross of light drifted over her cheekbone and struck the corner of her eye. She blinked the first time he flashed her with it, flinched the second time, and looked back at him the third time. He held the piece steady, so a golden cross of pure light burned in the center of his hand and its reflection shone on her cheek. She regarded him with unexpected solemnity, the radio operator in a war movie, receiving a life-or-death signal from a comrade-in-arms.
Slowly and deliberately, he tilted it this way and that, flashing the Morse-code message he had memorized over the course of the last week. It felt important to get it exactly right, and he handled the cross as if it were a thimbleful of nitroglycerin. When the message was complete, he held her gaze for a moment longer and then closed his hand around the cross and looked away again, his heart slamming so loudly he felt sure his father must be able to hear it, kneeling next to him. But his father was praying over his hands, his eyes closed.
Ig Perrish and Merrin Williams took care not to look at each other again throughout the rest of the service. Or, to be more exact, they did not look into each other’s face, although he was conscious of her watching him from the corner of her eye, as he watched her, enjoying the way she stood to sing, with her shoulders back. Her hair burned in the daylight.
Father Mould blessed them all and bade them to love one another, which was precisely Ig’s goal. As people began to file out, Ig remained where he was, his father’s hand on his shoulder, as always. Merrin Williams stepped into the aisle, her own father behind her, and Ig expected her to stop and thank him for rescuing her cross, but she did not even look at him. Instead she stared back and up at her father, chatting with him as they went out. Ig opened his mouth to speak to her-and then his gaze was drawn to her left hand, her index finger extended to point behind her, back toward her pew. It was such a casual gesture she could’ve just been swinging her arm, but Ig was sure she was telling him where to wait for her.
When the aisle was clear, Ig stepped out and aside, to let his father and mother and brother go on ahead. But instead of following them, he turned and walked toward the altar and the chancel. When his mother shot a look at him, he pointed in the direction of the back hall, where there was a restroom. You could only pretend you needed to tie your shoe so many times. She went on, her hand on Terry’s arm. Terry was looking back at Ig with narrow-eyed suspicion but allowed himself to be marched away.
Ig hung out in the shadowy back hall that led to Father Mould’s office, watching for her. She returned soon enough, and by then the church was practically empty. She looked around the nave but didn’t see him, and he remained in the darkness, watching her. She walked to the altar of repose and lit a candle and crossed herself and knelt and prayed. Her hair fell to hide her face, and so Ig did not think she saw him as he started forward. He did not feel as if he was walking toward her at all. His legs were not his own. It was more like being carried, as if he were on the shopping cart again; there was that same giddy but nauseating feeling of plunge in his stomach, of dropping off the very edge of the world, of sweet risk.
He did not interrupt her until she lifted her head and looked up.
“Hey,” he said as she rose. “I found your cross. You left it. I was worried when I didn’t see you last Sunday that I wouldn’t have a chance to give it back.” He was already holding it out to her.
She tugged the cross and its slender chain of gold from his hand and held it in hers.
“You fixed it.”
“No,” Ig said. “My friend Lee Tourneau fixed it. He’s good at fixing things.”
“Oh,” she said. “Tell him I said thanks.”
“You can tell him yourself if he’s still around. He goes to this church, too.”
“Will you put it on?” she asked. She turned her back to him and lifted her hair and bent her head forward, to show him the white nape of her neck.
Ig smoothed his palms across his chest to dry them and then opened the necklace and gently pulled it around her throat. He hoped she wouldn’t see that his hands were shaking.
“You met Lee, you know,” Ig said, so he’d have something to say. “He was sitting behind you the day it broke.”
“That kid? He tried to put it back on me after it snapped. I thought he was going to strangle me with it.”
“I’m not strangling you, am I?” Ig asked.
“No,” she said.
He was having trouble linking the clasp to the chain. It was his nervous hands. She waited patiently.
“Who were you lighting a candle for?” Ig asked.
“My sister.”
“You have a sister?” Ig asked.
“Not anymore,” she said in a clipped, emotionless sort of way, and Ig felt a sick twinge, knew he shouldn’t have asked.
“Did you figure out the message?” he blurted, feeling an urgent need to move the conversation to something else.
“What message?”
“The message I was flashing you. In Morse code. You know Morse code, don’t you?”
She laughed-an unexpectedly rowdy sound that almost caused Ig to drop the necklace. In the next moment, his fingers discovered what to do, and he fastened the chain around her throat. She turned. It was a shock how close she was standing. If he lifted his hands, they would be on her hips.
“No. I went to Girl Scouts a couple times, but I quit before we got to anything interesting. Besides, I already know everything I need to know about camping. My father was in the Forest Service. What were you signaling me?”
She flustered him. He had planned this whole conversation in advance, with great care, working out everything she’d ask and every smooth reply he’d give her, but it was all gone now.
“But weren’t you flashing something to me?” he asked. “The other day?”
She laughed again. “I was just seeing how long I could flash you in the eyes before you figured out where it was coming from. What message did you think I was sending you?”
But Ig couldn’t answer her. His windpipe was bunching up again, and there was a dreadful suffusion of heat in his face, and for the first time he realized how ridiculous it was to have imagined she had been signaling anything, let alone what he had talked himself into believing-that she was flashing the word “us.” No girl in the world would’ve signaled such thing to a boy she had never spoken to before. It was obvious, now that he looked at it straight on.
“I was saying, ‘This is yours,’” Ig told her at last, deciding that the only safe thing to do was to ignore the question she had just asked him. Furthermore, this was a lie, although it sounded true. He had been signaling her a single short word as well. The word had been “yes.”
“Thanks, Iggy,” she said.
“How do you know my name?” he asked, and was surprised at the way her face suddenly colored.
“I asked someone,” she said. “I forget why, I-”
“And you’re Merrin.”
She stared, her eyes questioning, surprised.
“I asked someone,” he said.
She looked at the doors. “My parents are probably waiting.”
“Okay,” he said.
By the time they reached the atrium, he had found out they were both in first-period English together, that her house was on Clapham Street, and that her mother had signed her up to be a volunteer at the blood drive the church was holding at the end of the month. Ig was working the blood drive, too.
“I didn’t see you on the sign-up sheet,” she said. They walked three more steps before it occurred to Ig that this meant she had looked for his name on the sheet. He glanced over and saw her smiling enigmatically to herself.
When they came through the doors, the sunshine was so bright that for a moment Ig couldn’t see anything through the harsh glare. He saw a dark blur rushing at him and lifted his hands and caught a football. As his vision cleared, he saw his brother and Lee Tourneau and some other boys-even Eric Hannity-and Father Mould fanning out across the grass, and Mould was shouting, “Ig, right here!” His parents were standing with Merrin’s parents, Derrick Perrish and Merrin’s father talking cheerfully, as if their families had been friends for years. Merrin’s mother, a thin woman with a pinched colorless mouth, was shading her eyes with one hand and smiling at her daughter in a pained sort of way. The day smelled of hot tarmac, sun-baked cars, and fresh-cut lawn. Ig, who was not at all athletically inclined, cocked back his arm and threw the football with a perfect tight spin on it, and it cut through the air and dropped right into Father Mould’s big, calloused hands. Mould lifted it over his head, running across the green lawn in his black short-sleeved shirt and white collar.
Football lasted for most of half an hour, fathers and sons and Father chasing one another across the grass. Lee was drafted as a quarterback; he wasn’t much of an athlete either, but he looked the part, falling back to go long with that look of perfect, almost icy calm on his face, his tie tossed over one shoulder. Merrin kicked off her shoes and played, the only girl among them. Her mother said, “Merrin Williams, you’ll get grass stains on your pants and we’ll never get them out,” but her father waved his hand in the air and said, “Let her have some fun.” It was supposed to be touch football, but Merrin threw Ig down on every play, diving at his feet, until it was a gag that cracked everyone up-Ig wiped out by this sixteen-year-old girl built like a blade of grass. No one thought it was funnier, or enjoyed it more, than Ig himself, who went out of his way to give her chances to cream him.
“You should drop your butt on the ground as soon as they snap the ball,” she said, the fifth or sixth time she wiped him out. “’Cause I can do this all day. You know that? What’s funny?” Because he was laughing.
She was kneeling over him, her red hair tickling his nose. She smelled of lemons and mint. The necklace hung from her throat, flashing at him again, transmitting a message of almost unbearable pleasure.
“Nothing,” he said. “I think I’m reading you loud and clear.”
FOR ALL THE REST of the summer, they had a habit of wandering into each other. When Ig went with his mother to the supermarket, Merrin was there with her mother, and they wound up walking together, drifting along a few feet behind their parents. Merrin got a bag of cherries, and they shared it while they walked.
“Isn’t this shoplifting?” Ig asked.
“We can’t get in trouble if we eat the evidence,” she said, and spit a pit into her hand and then handed it to him. She gave him all her pits, calmly expecting him to get rid of them, which he did by putting them in his pocket. When he got home, there was a sweet-smelling wet lump the size of a baby’s fist in his jeans.
And when the Jag had to go into Masters Auto for an inspection, Ig tagged along with his father, because he knew by then that Merrin’s dad worked there. Ig had no reason to believe that Merrin would be at the dealership as well, on a sunny Wednesday afternoon, but she was, sitting on her father’s desk, swinging her feet back and forth, as if waiting for him, impatient for him to arrive. They got orange sodas from the vending machine and stood talking in a back hallway, under buzzing fluorescent lights. She told him she was hiking out to Queen’s Face the next day, with her father. Ig said the path went right behind his house, and she asked if he would walk up with them. Her lips were stained orange from the soda. It was no work to be together. It was the most natural thing in the world.
It was natural to include Lee also. He kept things from getting too serious. He invited himself along for the walk up Queen’s Face, said he wanted to check it out for mountain-boarding trails. He forgot to bring the board, though.
On the climb up, Merrin grabbed the collar of her T-shirt and pulled it away from her chest, twitching it back and forth to fan herself and mock-panting from the heat. “You guys ever jump in the river?” Merrin asked, pointing at the Knowles through the trees. It wound through dense forest in the valley below, a black snake with a back of brilliantly glittering scales.
“Ig jumps in all the time,” Lee said, and Ig laughed. Merrin gave them both a puzzled, narrow-eyed look, but Ig only shook his head. Lee went on, “Tell you what, though. Ig’s pool is a lot nicer. When are you going to have her over swimming?”
Ig’s face prickled with heat at the suggestion. He had fantasized just that thing, many times-Merrin in a bikini-but whenever he came close to asking her, his breath failed him.
They talked about her sister, Regan, just once in those first weeks. Ig asked why they had moved up from Rhode Island, and Merrin said with a shrug, “My parents were really depressed after Regan died, and my mother grew up here, her whole family is here. And home didn’t feel right anymore. Without Regan in it.”
Regan had died at twenty of a rare and particularly aggressive form of breast cancer. It took just four months to kill her.
“Must’ve been awful,” Ig murmured, a moronic generality but the only thing that felt safe. “I can’t imagine how I’d feel if Terry died. He’s my best friend.”
“That’s what I thought about Regan and me.” They were in Merrin’s bedroom, and her back was to Ig, her head bent. She was brushing her hair. Without looking at him, she went on, “But she said some things when she was sick-some really mean things. Things I never knew she thought about me. When she died, I felt like I hardly knew her. Course, I got off easy, compared to the things she said to my parents. I don’t think I can ever forgive her for what she said to Dad.” She spoke this last bit lightly, as if they were discussing a matter of no real importance, and then was quiet.
It was years before they talked about Regan again. But when Merrin told him, a few days later, that she was going to be a doctor, Ig didn’t need to ask what her specialty was going to be.
On the last day of August, Ig and Merrin were at the blood drive, across the street from the church, in the Sacred Heart community center, handing out paper cups of Tang and Lorna Doone sandwich cookies. A few ceiling fans pushed a sluggish current of hot air around the room, and Ig and Merrin were drinking as much juice as they were handing out. He was just working up his nerve to finally ask her over for a swim when Terry walked in.
He stood on the other side of the room, searching for Ig, and Ig lifted a hand to get his attention. Terry jerked his head: Get over here. There was something stiff and tense and worrisome in this gesture. In some ways it was worrisome enough just seeing Terry there. Terry wasn’t the sort to come anywhere near a church function on a wide-open summer afternoon if he could avoid it. Ig was only half aware of Merrin following him across the room as he threaded his way between gurneys, donors stretched upon them, tubes in their arms. The room smelled of disinfectant and blood.
When Ig got to his brother, Terry gripped his arm, squeezing it painfully. He turned him through the door and out into the foyer, where they could be alone. The doors were open to the bright, hot, stillborn day.
“Did you give it to him?” Terry asked. “Did you give him the cherry?”
Ig didn’t have to ask who he was talking about. Terry’s voice, thin and harsh, frightened him. Needles of panic prickled in Ig’s chest.
“Is Lee okay?” Ig asked. It was Sunday afternoon. Lee had gone up to Gary’s the day before. It came to Ig now that he had not seen Lee in church that morning.
“Him and some other jokers taped a cherry bomb to the windshield of a junked car and ran. But it didn’t go off right away, and Lee thought the fuse went out. They do that. He was walking back to check on it when the windshield exploded and sprayed glass everywhere. Ig. They pulled a fucking sliver out of his left eye. They’re saying he’s lucky it didn’t go into his brain.”
Ig wanted to scream, but something was happening in his chest. His lungs had gone numb, as if injected with a dose of Novocain. He couldn’t speak, couldn’t force any sound up through his throat at all.
“Ig,” said Merrin. “Where’s your inhaler?” Her voice calm and steady. She already knew all about his asthma.
He struggled to pull it out of his pocket and dropped it. She got it for him, and he put it in his mouth and took a long, damp suck.
Terry said, “Look, Ig. Ig, it’s not just about his eye. He’s in a lot of trouble. What I heard is some cops showed up with the ambulance. You know that mountain board of his? Turns out it’s stolen. They pulled a two-hundred-dollar leather jacket off his girlfriend, too. The police asked his father for permission to search his room this morning, and it was full of stolen shit. Lee worked out at the mall for a couple weeks, at the pet store, and he had a key to an access hallway that runs behind the shops. He helped himself to piles of stuff. He had all these magazines he ripped off from Mr. Paperback, and he was running a scam, selling them to people, pretending he was raising money for some made-up charity. Shit is messed up. He’ll be in juvie court if any of the stores press charges. In some ways, if he goes blind in one eye, it’ll be the best thing for him. Might win him some sympathy, maybe he won’t-”
“Oh, God,” Ig said, hearing if he goes blind in one eye, and they pulled a fucking sliver out; everything else was just noise, Terry playing an avant-garde riff on his trumpet. Ig was crying and squeezing Merrin’s hand. When had she taken his hand? He didn’t know.
“You’re going to have to talk to him,” Terry said. “You better have a word and make sure he’s going to keep his mouth shut. We got to do some ass covering here. If anyone finds out you gave him that cherry bomb-or that I gave it to you-oh, Jesus, Ig. They could throw me out of band.”
Ig couldn’t speak, needed another long suck on his inhaler. He was shaking.
“Will you give him a second?” Merrin snapped. “Let him get his breath back.”
Terry gave her a surprised, wondering look. For a moment his jaw hung slack. Then he closed his mouth and was silent.
“Come on, Ig,” she said. “Let’s go outside.”
Ig walked with her, down the steps, into the sunlight, his legs trembling. Terry hung back, let them go.
The air was still and weighted with moisture and a sense of building pressure. The skies had been clear earlier in the morning, but now there were heavy clouds in them, as dark and vast as a fleet of aircraft carriers. A hot gust of wind rose from nowhere and battered at them. That wind smelled like hot iron, like train tracks in the sun, like old pipes, and when Ig closed his eyes, he saw the Evel Knievel trail, the way the two half-buried pipes fell away down the slope like the rails of a roller coaster.
“It isn’t your fault,” she said. “He isn’t going to blame you. C’mon. The blood drive is almost over. Let’s get our stuff and go see him. Right now. You and me.”
Ig shrank at the thought of going with her. They had traded-the cherry bomb for her. It would be awful to bring her with him. It would be rubbing it in. Lee had only saved his life, and Ig had repaid him by taking Merrin away, and this was what happened, and Lee was blind in one eye, his eye was gone, and Ig had done that to him. Ig got the girl and his life, and Lee got a sliver of glass and ruin, and Ig took another deep suck off the inhaler, was having trouble breathing.
When he had enough air to speak, he said, “You can’t come with me.” A part of him was thinking already that the only way for him to atone was to be done with her, but another part of him, the same part that had traded for the cross in the first place, knew he wasn’t going to do that. He had decided weeks ago, had made a deal, not just with Lee but with himself, that he would do what was necessary to be the boy walking next to Merrin Williams. Giving her up wouldn’t make him the good guy in this story. It was too late to be the good guy.
“Why not? He’s my friend, too,” she said, and Ig was at first surprised at her, then at himself, for not realizing that this was true.
“I don’t know what he’ll say. He might be mad at me. He might say stuff about-about a trade.” As soon as he said it, he knew he shouldn’t have said it.
“What trade?” He shook his head, but she asked again. “What did you trade?”
“You won’t be mad?”
“I don’t know. Tell me, and then we’ll see.”
“After I found your cross, I gave it to Lee so he could fix it. But then he was going to keep it, and I had to trade him to get it back. And the cherry bomb was what I traded.”
She furrowed her brow. “So?”
He stared helplessly into her face, willing her to understand, but she didn’t understand, so he said, “He was going to keep it so he’d have a way to meet you.”
For one moment longer, her eyes were clouded, uncomprehending. Then they cleared. She did not smile.
“You think you traded-” she started, then stopped. A moment later she started again. She was staring at him with a cool, ball-shriveling calm. “You think you traded for me, Ig? Is that how you think all this worked? And do you think if he had returned the cross to me instead of you, then Lee and I would be-” But she didn’t say that either, because to go any further would be to admit that she and Ig were together now, something they both understood but had not dared to say aloud. She started a third time. “Ig. I left it on the pew for you.”
“You left it-what?”
“I was bored. I was so bored. And I was sitting there imagining a hundred more mornings, roasting in the sun in that church, dying inside one Sunday at a time while Father Mould blabbed away about my sins. I needed something to look forward to. Some reason to be there. I didn’t just want to listen to some guy talk about sin. I wanted to do some myself. And then I saw you sitting there like a little priss, hanging on every word like it was all so interesting, and I knew Ig, I just knew-that fucking with your head would present me with hours of entertainment.”
AS IT HAPPENED, IN THE END Ig did go and see Lee Tourneau alone. When Merrin and Ig started back to the community center, to clean up the pizza boxes and the empty juice bottles, there came a peal of thunder that lasted for at least ten seconds, a low, steady rumble that was not so much heard as felt. It caused the bones in Ig’s body to shiver like tuning forks. Five minutes later the rain was clattering on the roof, so loudly he had to shout at Merrin to be heard over it, even when she was standing right next to him. It was so dark, the water coming down with such force, that it was difficult to see to the curb from the open doors. They had thought they might be able to bike to Lee’s, but Merrin’s father turned up to bring her home in his station wagon, and there was no opportunity to go anywhere together.
Terry had gotten his license two days before, passing the test on his first try, and the next day he drove Ig over to Lee Tourneau’s. The storm had split trees and unscrewed telephone poles from the soil, and Terry had to steer the Jaguar around torn branches and overturned mailboxes. It was as if some great subterranean explosion, some final, powerful detonation, had rattled the whole town and left Gideon in a state of ruin.
Harmon Gates was a tangle of suburban streets, houses painted citrus colors, attached two-car garages, the occasional backyard swimming pool. Lee’s mother, the nurse, a woman in her fifties, was outside the Tourneaus’ Queen Anne, pulling branches off her parked Cadillac, her mouth puckered in a look of irritation. Terry let Ig out, said to call home when he wanted a ride back.
Lee had a large bedroom in their finished basement. Lee’s mother walked Ig down and opened the door onto a cavernous gloom, in which the only light was the blue glow of a television. “You’ve got a visitor,” she said rather tonelessly.
She let Ig past her and closed the door behind him, so they could be alone.
Lee’s shirt was off, and he sat on the edge of his bed, clutching the frame. A Benson rerun was on the tube, although Lee had the volume turned all the way down, so it was just a source of light and moving figures. A bandage covered his left eye and was wrapped around and around his skull, swaddling much of his head. The shades were pulled down. He did not look directly at Ig or at the TV; his gaze pointed downward.
“Dark in here,” Ig said.
“The sunlight hurts my head,” Lee said.
“How’s your eye?”
“They don’t know.”
“Is there any chance-”
“They think I won’t lose all the vision in it.”
“That’s good.”
Lee sat there. Ig waited.
“You know everything?”
“I don’t care,” Ig said. “You pulled me out of the river. That’s all I need to know.”
Ig was not aware that Lee was weeping until he made a snuffling sound of pain. He cried like someone enduring a small act of sadism-a cigarette ground out on the back of the hand. Ig took a step closer and kicked over a stack of CDs, discs he had given him.
“You want those back?” Lee asked.
“No.”
“What then? You want your money? I don’t have it.”
“What money?”
“For the magazines I sold you. The ones I stole.” He said the last word with an almost luxuriant bitterness.
“No.”
“Why are you here, then?”
“Because we’re friends.” Ig took another step closer and then cried out softly. Lee was weeping blood. It stained the bandage and dribbled down the side of his left cheek. Lee touched two fingers absentmindedly to his face. They came away red.
“Are you all right?” Ig asked.
“It hurts when I cry. I’ll have to learn how to stop feeling bad about things.” He breathed harshly, his shoulders rising and falling. “I should’ve told you. About everything. It was shitty, selling you those magazines. Lying to you about what they were for. After I got to know you better, I wanted to take it back, but it was too late. That’s not how friends treat friends.”
“We don’t want to start with that. I wish like hell I never gave you the cherry bomb.”
“Forget it,” Lee said. “I wanted it. I decided. You don’t got to worry about that. Just don’t make up your mind to hate me. I really need someone to still like me.”
He didn’t need to ask. The sight of the blood staining through the bandage made Ig’s knees weak. It took a great effort of will not to think how he had teased Lee with the cherry, talking about all the things they could blow up together with it. How he had worked to take Merrin away from Lee, who had walked into the water and pulled him out when he was drowning, a betrayal for which there could be no expiation.
He sat down beside Lee.
“She’ll tell you not to hang around me anymore,” Lee said.
“My mom? No. No, she’s glad I came to see you.”
“Not your mom. Merrin.”
“What are you talking about? She wanted to come with me. She’s worried about you.”
“Oh?” Lee quivered strangely, as if gripped by a chill. Then he said, “I know why this happened.”
“It was a shitty accident. That’s all.”
Lee shook his head. “It was to remind me.”
Ig was quiet, waiting, but Lee didn’t speak again.
“Remind you of what?” Ig asked.
Lee was struggling against tears. He wiped at the blood on his cheek with the back of one hand and left a long dark streak.
“Remind you of what?” Ig asked again, but Lee was shivering with the effort it took to keep from sobbing and never got around to telling him.