IG DROVE AWAY FROM HIS PARENTS’ HOUSE, from his grandmother’s smashed body and smashed wheelchair, from Terry and Terry’s awful confession, with no immediate notion of where he was going. He knew, rather, only where he wasn’t going: to Glenna’s apartment, to town. He could not bear to see another human face, hear another human voice.
He was holding a door shut in his mind, throwing all his mental weight against it, while two men pushed against the other side, trying to force their way into his thoughts: his brother and Lee Tourneau. It took all his will to keep the invaders from barging into his last refuge, to keep them out of his head. He didn’t know what would happen when they pushed through that door at last, wasn’t sure what he would do.
Ig followed the narrow state highway, across sunlit open pastures and under trees that overhung the road, into corridors of flickering darkness. He saw a shopping cart upended in a ditch at the side of the road and wondered how it was that shopping carts sometimes found their way out here, where there was nothing. It went to show that no one knew, when they abandoned a thing, what misuses it would be put to later by others. Ig had abandoned Merrin Williams one night-had walked away from his best friend in the world, in a fit of immature, self-righteous anger-and look what had happened.
He thought about riding the Evel Knievel trail on the shopping-cart express, ten years before, and his left hand rose unconsciously to touch his nose, still crooked where he’d broken it. His mind threw up an image, unbidden, of his grandmother riding her wheelchair down the long hill in front of the house, the big rubber wheels banging over the rutted grassy slope. He wondered what she had broken when she finally slammed into the fence. He hoped her neck. Vera had told him that whenever she saw him, she wanted to be dead, and Ig lived to serve. He liked to think he had always been a conscientious grandson. If he had killed her, he would look at it as a good start. But there was still plenty of work ahead.
His stomach cramped, which he wrote off as a symptom of his unhappiness until it began to gurgle as well, and he had to admit to himself he was hungry. He tried to think where he could get food with a minimum of human interaction and at that moment saw The Pit gliding by on his left.
It was the place of their last supper, where he’d spent his final evening with Merrin. He had not been in there since. He doubted he was welcome. This thought alone was an invitation. Ig turned in to the parking lot.
It was early afternoon, the indolent, timeless period that followed lunch and came before people began to show up for their after-work drink. There were only a few parked cars, belonging, Ig guessed, to the more serious sort of alcoholic. The board out front read:
10¢ Wings & 2$ Bud
Ladys Nite Thurs Come and See Us Girls
Rah Rah Gideon Saints
He stood up from the car, the sun behind him, his shadow three yards long, penciled on the dirt, a black-horned stick figure, the spurs of bone on his head pointing toward the red door of The Pit.
WHEN HE CAME THROUGH THE DOOR, Merrin was already there. Although it was crowded, the place full of college kids watching the game, he spotted her right away. She sat in their usual booth, turned to face him. The sight of her, as it always did-especially when they hadn’t been together in a while-had the curious effect of reminding him of his own body, the bare skin under his clothes. He hadn’t seen her in three weeks, and after tonight he wouldn’t see her again until Christmas, but in between they would have shrimp cocktail and some beers and some fun in the cool, freshly laundered sheets of Merrin’s bed. Merrin’s father and mother were at their camp on Winnipesaukee, and they’d have her place all to themselves. Ig went dry in the mouth at the thought of what was waiting after dinner, and a part of him was sorry they were bothering with drinks and food at all. Another part of him, though, felt it was necessary to not be in a hurry, to take their time with the evening.
It wasn’t as if they had nothing to talk about. She was worrying, and it didn’t take a lot of insight to figure out why. He was leaving at eleven forty-five tomorrow morning on British Airways to take a job with Amnesty International and would be an ocean apart from her for half a year. They had never been without each other for so long.
He could always tell when she was worrying over something, knew all the signs. She withdrew. She smoothed things with her hands-napkins, her skirt, his ties-as if by ironing out such minute items she could smooth the path to some future safe harbor for both of them. She forgot how to laugh and became almost comically earnest and mature about things. The sight of her this way struck him as funny; it made him think of a little girl dressing up in her mother’s clothes. He couldn’t take her seriousness seriously.
It didn’t make any logical sense for her to be worried, although Ig knew that worry and logic rarely traveled together. But, really: He would not even have taken the job in London if she hadn’t told him to take it, hadn’t pushed him to take it. Merrin wouldn’t let him pass on it, had relentlessly argued him out of every reservation. She told him there was no harm in trying it for six months. If he hated it, he could come home. But he wasn’t going to hate it. It was exactly the sort of thing he’d always wanted to do, the dream job, and they both knew it. And if he liked the job-and he would-and wanted to remain in England, she would come to him. Harvard offered a transfer program with the Imperial College London, and her mentor at Harvard, Shelby Clarke, selected the participants; there was no question she could get in. They could have a flat in London. She would serve him tea and crumpets in her knickers, and afterward they could have a shag. Ig was sold. He had always thought the word “knickers” was a thousand times sexier than “panties.” So he took the job and was sent off to New York City for a three-week summer training and orientation session. And now he was back, and she was smoothing things, and he was not surprised.
He made his way through the room to her, past the jostle and press of bodies. He bent across the table to kiss her before sliding into the booth opposite her. She didn’t lift her mouth to him, and he had to settle for a peck on her temple.
There was an empty martini glass in front of her, and when the waitress came, she ordered another one, told her to bring a beer for Ig. He was enjoying the look of her, the smooth line of her throat, the dark shine of her hair in the low light, and at first just went along with the conversation, murmuring in the right places, only semi-listening. He didn’t really start to focus in until Merrin told him he should look at his time in London as a vacation from their relationship, and even then he thought she was trying to be funny. He didn’t know she was serious until she got to the part about how she felt it would be good for both of them to spend time with other people.
“With our clothes off,” Ig said.
“Couldn’t hurt,” she said, and swallowed about half her martini.
It was the way she gulped at her drink, more than what she’d said, that gave him a cold shock of apprehension. That was a courage drink, and she’d already had at least one-maybe two-before he got here.
“You think I can’t wait for a few months?” he asked. He was going to make a joke about masturbation, but a strange thing happened on the way to the punch line. His breath got caught in his throat, and he couldn’t say any more.
“Well, I don’t want to worry about what’s going to happen a few months from now. We don’t know how you’re going to feel in a few months. Or how I’ll feel. I don’t want you thinking you have to come back home just so we can be together. Or assuming I’m going to transfer there. Let’s just worry about what happens now. Look at it like this. How many girls have you been with? In your whole life?”
He stared. He had seen this look of frowning, pretty concentration on her face many times, but he had never been scared of it before.
“You know the answer to that,” he said.
“Just me. And no one does that. No one lives their entire life with the first person they slept with. Not these days. There isn’t a man on the planet. There need to be other affairs. Two or three at least.”
“Is that your word for it? ‘Affairs’? That’s tasteful.”
“Fine,” she said. “You have to fuck a few other people.”
A cheer went up from the crowd, a roar of approval. Someone had slid home under the tag.
He was going to say something, but his mouth was too tacky, and he had to have a sip of beer. There was only one swallow left in the glass. He didn’t remember the beer coming, and he didn’t remember drinking it. It was lukewarm and salty, like a mouthful of the ocean. She had waited until today, twelve hours before he left to cross the ocean, to tell him this, to tell him-
“Are you breaking up with me? You want out-and you waited until now to tell me?”
The waitress stood at the side of their table with a basket of chips and a rigid smile.
“Would you like to order?” she asked. “Something else to drink?”
“Another martini and another beer, please,” Merrin said.
“I don’t want another beer,” Ig said, and didn’t recognize his own thick, sullen, almost childish voice.
“We’ll both have Key lime martinis, then,” Merrin said.
The waitress retreated.
“What the hell is this? I have a plane ticket, a rented apartment, an office. They’re expecting me to be there ready to work on Monday morning, and you lay this shit on me. What outcome are you hoping for here? Do you want me to call them up tomorrow and tell them, ‘Thanks for giving me a job that seven hundred other applicants wanted, but I have to pass’? Is this a test to see what I value more, you or the job? Because if it is, you ought to know it’s immature and insulting.”
“No, Ig. I want you to go, and I want you to-”
“Fuck someone else.”
Her shoulders jumped. He was a little surprised at himself, hadn’t expected his own voice to sound so ugly.
But she nodded, and swallowed. “Do it now or do it later, but you’re going to do it anyway.”
Ig had a nonsensical thought, in his brother’s voice: Well, it’s like this. You can live life as a cripple or a lame-ass. Ig wasn’t sure Terry had ever really said such a thing, thought the line might be completely imagined, and yet it came to him with the clarity of a line remembered from a favorite song.
The waitress gently set Ig’s martini in front of him, and he tipped it to his mouth, swallowing down a third of it in a gulp. He’d never had one before, and the sugary, harsh burn of it caught him by surprise. It sank slowly down his throat and expanded into his lungs. His chest was a furnace, and a sweat prickled on his face. His hand drifted up to his throat, found the knot of his tie. He struggled with it, pulling it loose. Why had he worn a button-down shirt? He was roasting in it. He was in hell.
“It’ll always bother you, wondering what you missed out on,” Merrin said now. “That’s how men are. I’m just being practical. I’m not waiting to get married to you so I can fight through your midlife affair with our babysitter. I’m not going to be the reason for your regrets.”
He struggled for patience, to recover a tone of calm, of good humor. The calm he could manage. The good humor he could not.
“Don’t tell me how other men think. I know what I want. I want the life we spent the last however many years daydreaming about. How many times have we talked about what to name the kids? You think that was all bullshit?”
“I think it’s part of the problem. You live like we already have kids, like we’re already married. But we don’t and we aren’t. To you the kids already exist, because you live in your head, not in the world. I’m not sure I ever even wanted kids.”
Ig yanked off his tie, flung it on the table. He couldn’t stand the feel of anything around his neck right now.
“You could’ve fooled me. It sounded like you were into the idea the last eight thousand times we talked about it.”
“I don’t know what I’m into. I haven’t had a chance to get clear of you and think about my own life since we met. I haven’t had a single day-”
“So I’m suffocating you? Is that what you’re telling me? That’s horseshit.”
She turned her face away from him, stared blankly across the room, waiting for his anger to subside. He drew a long, whistling breath, told himself not to yell, and tried again.
“Remember the day in the tree house?” he asked. “The tree house we could never find again, the place with the white curtains? You said this doesn’t happen to ordinary couples. You said we were different. You said the love we had was marked out as special, that no two people out of a million were ever given anything like we were given. You said we were meant for each other. You said there was no ignoring the signs.”
“It wasn’t a sign. It was just an afternoon lay in someone’s tree house.”
Ig shook his head slowly from side to side. Talking to her now was like flailing his hands at a storm of hornets. It did nothing, and it stung, and yet he couldn’t stop himself.
“Don’t you remember we looked for it? We looked all summer, and we could never find it again? And you said it was a tree house of the mind?”
“That’s what I said so we could stop looking for it. This is exactly what I’m talking about, Ig. You and your magical thinking. A fuck can’t just be a fuck. It always has to be a transcendent experience, life-changing. It’s depressing and weird, and I’m tired of acting like it’s normal. Will you listen to yourself? Why the fuck are we even talking about a tree house?”
“I’m getting sick of your mouth,” Ig said.
“You don’t like it? You don’t like to hear me talk about fucking? Why, Ig? Does it mess with your picture of me? You don’t want a real person. You want a holy vision you can beat off to.”
The waitress said, “I guess you still haven’t made up your minds.” Standing beside their table again.
“Two more,” Ig said, and she went away.
They stared at each other. Ig was gripping the table and felt dangerously close to turning it over.
“We were kids when we met,” she said. “We let it get a lot more serious than any high-school relationship should’ve been. If we spend some time with other people, it will put our relationship in perspective. Maybe we pick it up again later and see if we can love each other as adults the way we did as kids. I don’t know. After some time has gone by, maybe we can take another look at what we have to offer each other.”
“‘At what we have to offer each other’?” Ig said. “You sound like a loan officer.”
She was rubbing her throat with one hand, her eyes miserable now, which was when Ig noticed she wasn’t wearing her cross. He wondered if there was meaning in that. The cross had been like an engagement ring, long before either of them had ever discussed the idea of staying together their whole lives. He honestly could not remember ever seeing her without it-a thought that filled his chest with a sick, drafty sensation.
“So do you have someone picked out?” Ig asked. “Someone you want to fuck in the name of putting our relationship in perspective?”
“I’m not thinking about it that way. I’m just-”
“Yes you are. That’s what this is all about, you said so yourself. We need to fuck other people.”
She opened her mouth, then closed it, then opened it again. “Yes, I guess so, Ig. I guess that has to be part of it. I mean, I have to sleep with other people, too. Otherwise you’d probably go over there and live like a monk. It’ll be easier for you to move on if you know I have.”
“So there is someone.”
“There’s someone I’ve…I’ve been out with. Once or twice.”
“While I was in New York.” Not asking it. Saying it. “Who?”
“No one you’ve ever met. It doesn’t matter.”
“I want to know anyway.”
“It isn’t important. I’m not going to ask you any questions about what you’re doing in London.”
“About who I’m doing,” he said.
“Right. Whatever. I don’t want to know.”
“But I do. When did it happen?”
“When did what happen?”
“When did you start seeing this guy? Last week? What did you tell him? Did you say things would have to wait until I took off for London? Or did it wait?”
She parted her lips just slightly to reply, and he saw something in her eyes, something small and fearful, and in a rush of prickling heat he knew something he didn’t want to know. He knew she’d been working toward this moment the whole summer, going all the way back to when she first started pushing him to take the job.
“How far has it gone? Have you already fucked him?”
She shook her head, but he couldn’t tell if she was saying no or refusing to answer the question. She was blinking back tears. He didn’t know when that had started. It was a surprise to feel no urge to comfort her. He was in the grip of something he didn’t understand, a perverse mix of rage and excitement. Part of him was surprised to discover that it felt good to be wronged, to have a justification to hurt her. To see how much punishment he could inflict. He wanted to flay her with his questions. And at the same time, images had started to occur to him: Merrin on her knees in a tangle of sheets, lines of bright light from the half-shut venetian blinds across her body, someone else reaching for her naked hips. The thought aroused and appalled in equal measure.
“Ig,” she said softly. “Please.”
“Stop with your please. There are things you aren’t telling me. Things I need to know. I need to know if you’ve fucked him already. Tell me if you’ve fucked him already.”
“No.”
“Good. Was he ever there? In your apartment with you when I called from New York? Sitting there with his hand under your skirt?”
“No. We had lunch, Ig. That was all. We talk now and then. Mostly about school.”
“You ever think about him when I’m fucking you?”
“Jesus, no. Why would you even ask that?”
“Because I want to know everything. I want to know every shitty little thing you’re not telling me, every dirty secret.”
“Why?”
“Because it’ll make it easier for me to hate you,” Ig said.
The waitress stood rigidly at the side of their table, frozen in the act of setting down their fresh drinks.
“What the fuck are you looking at?” Ig asked her, and she took an unsteady step backward.
The waitress wasn’t the only one staring. At the other tables arranged around theirs, heads were turned. A few onlookers watched them seriously, while others, younger couples mostly, observed them with bright-eyed merriment, struggling not to laugh. Nothing was quite so entertaining as a noisy public breakup.
When Ig looked back toward Merrin, she was up on her feet, standing behind her chair. She was holding his tie in her hands. She had picked it up when he threw it aside and had been restlessly folding and smoothing it ever since.
“Where are you going?” he asked, and caught her shoulder as she tried to slip by. She lurched into the table. She was drunk. They both were.
“Ig,” she said. “My arm.”
Only then did he realize how hard he was squeezing her shoulder, digging in with his fingers with enough force to feel the bone. It took a conscious effort to open his hand.
“I’m not running away,” she said. “I want a minute to clean up.” Gesturing at her face.
“We’re not done talking about this. There’s a lot you aren’t telling me.”
“If there are things I don’t want to tell you,” she said, “it isn’t out of meanness. I just don’t want to see you hurt, Ig.”
“Too late.”
“Because I love you.”
“I don’t believe you.”
He said it to hurt her-he didn’t honestly know if he believed it or not-and felt a savage rush of excitement to see he had succeeded. Her eyes filled with bright tears, and she swayed, put a hand on the table to steady herself once more.
“If I’ve been keeping things from you, it was to protect you. I know what a good person you are. You deserve better than what you got when you threw in with me.”
“Finally,” he said. “Something we agree on. I deserve better.”
She waited for him to say more, but he couldn’t, was short of breath again. She turned and navigated her way through the crowd, toward the ladies’ room. He drank the rest of his martini, watching her go. She looked good, in her white blouse and pearl gray skirt, and Ig saw a couple college boys turn their heads to watch her, and then one of them said something, and the other laughed.
Ig’s blood felt thick and slow and he was conscious of it pumping heavily in his temples. He wasn’t aware of the man standing next to the table and didn’t hear him saying “sir,” didn’t see him until the guy bent over to look in Ig’s face. He had a bodybuilder’s physique, his sporty white tennis shirt pulled tight across his shoulders. Little blue eyes peeped out from under a bony crag of forehead.
“Sir,” he said again. “We’re going to have to ask you and your wife to leave. We can’t have you abusing the staff.”
“She’s not my wife. She’s just someone I used to fuck.”
The big man-bartender? bouncer?-said, “I don’t need that language in my face. Take it someplace else.”
Ig got up and found his wallet and put two twenties on the table before setting out for the door. As he went, he felt a sensation of rightness settling over him. Leave her, was what he thought. Sitting across from her, he had wanted to force secrets out of her and to inflict as much unpleasantness as possible upon her in the process. But now that she was out of sight and he had breathing room, he felt it would be a mistake to give her any more time to justify what she’d decided to do to him. He didn’t want to hang around and give her a chance to dilute his hate with tears, with more talk about how she loved him. He didn’t want to understand, and he didn’t want to sympathize.
She would come back and find the table empty. His absence would say more than he could ever hope to articulate if he remained. It did not matter that he was her ride. She was a grown-up, she could get a cab. Wasn’t that her whole point in fucking someone else while he was away in England? To establish her bona fides as a grown-up?
He had never in all his life felt so sure that he was doing the proper thing, and as he got closer to the door, he heard a sound like applause rising to greet him, a low crashing of stomping feet and clapping hands that rose and rose until he opened the door at last and looked out into a thunderous downpour.
By the time he got to the car, his clothes were soaked through. He started backing up, even before he had the headlights on. He flipped the wipers on, full speed, and they lashed at the rain, but still water ran down the windshield in a flood, distorting his view of things. He heard a crunch, glanced back, and saw he had backed into a telephone pole.
He wasn’t going to get out and look at the damage. The thought didn’t even cross his mind. Before he spun onto the highway, though, he looked out the driver’s-side window, and through the water beaded on the glass, he saw her standing ten feet away, hugging herself in the rain, her hair hanging in wet strings. She stared miserably across the lot at him but did not gesture for him to stop, to wait, to come back. Ig put his foot on the gas and drove away.
The world blurred past the window, an impressionistic muddle of greens and blacks. In the late afternoon, the temperature had climbed as high as ninety-eight degrees, falling just short of triple digits. The air conditioner was set on high, where Ig had left it all day. He sat in its refrigerated blast, dimly aware that he was shivering in his wet clothes.
His emotions came in pulses, so on the exhale he hated her and wanted to tell her as much and see it sink into her face. On the inhale he felt a sick pang at the thought of driving away, leaving her in the rain, and he wanted to go back and tell her, in a quiet voice, to get into the car. In his mind she was still standing there in the rain, waiting for him. He lifted his gaze to the rearview mirror, as if he might see her back there, but of course The Pit was already half a mile away. Instead he saw a police car riding his bumper, a black cruiser with a bar across the roof.
He looked at the speedometer and discovered he was doing close to sixty in a forty. His thighs were by now trembling with an almost painful force. He eased off the gas, his pulse thudding, and when he saw the closed and boarded-up Dunkin’ Donuts on the right side of the road, he pulled off.
The Gremlin was still moving too quickly, and the tires tore at dirt, slung rocks. In the side mirror, he saw the police cruiser go by. Only it wasn’t a cruiser at all, just a black GTO with a roof rack.
He sat shuddering behind the wheel, waiting for his racing heart to slow down. After a bit he decided it might be a mistake to proceed in this weather, as drunk as he was. He would wait for the rain to stop; it was already slackening. His next thought was that Merrin might try to call him at home, make sure he got in all right, and it would be satisfying for his mother to say, “No, Merrin, he isn’t here yet. Is everything okay?”
Then he remembered his cell phone. Merrin would probably try that first. He slipped it from his pocket and shut it off and threw it on the floor of the passenger seat. He didn’t doubt she’d call, and the idea that she might imagine that something had happened to him-that he’d had an accident or, in his misery, put the car into a tree on purpose-was a good one.
The next thing to do was to stop shaking. He cranked his seat back and turned off the car, got a windbreaker from the backseat and spread it over his legs. He listened to the rain drumming slower and slower on the roof of the Gremlin, the energy of the storm already spent. He closed his eyes, relaxing to the deep, resonant beat of the downpour, and did not open them again until seven in the morning, sunlight showing through the trees.
He went home in a hurry, flung himself into the shower, dressed, collected his luggage. It was not the way he had meant to leave town. His mother and father and Vera were having breakfast together in the kitchen and his parents seemed amused to see him rushing around, flustered and disorganized. They didn’t ask where he’d been all night. They thought they knew. Ig didn’t have the heart or the time to tell them the truth of what had happened. His mother had a sly little smirk on her face, and he preferred to leave her smiling rather than looking sick for him.
Terry was home-Hothouse on summer hiatus-and he had promised he would drive Ig to Logan Airport, but he was still in bed. Vera said he’d been out with the old crowd all night and had not made it home until after sunup. Vera had heard the car pull in and looked out in time to see Terry throwing up in the yard.
“Too bad he’s home and not out there in L.A.,” his grandmother said. “The paparazzi missed out on quite a photograph. Big TV star losing his dinner in the rosebushes. That would’ve been one for People magazine. He wasn’t even dressed in the same clothes he went out in.”
Lydia Perrish looked a little less amused then and poked restlessly at her grapefruit.
Ig’s father sat back in his chair, gazing into his son’s face. “You all right, Ig? You look like you have a touch of something.”
“I’d say Terence wasn’t the only one who got his money’s worth last night,” Vera said.
“You okay to drive? I could be dressed in ten minutes,” Derrick said. “Take you myself.”
“Stay and eat your breakfast. I better get going now before it’s too late. Tell Terry I hope no one died and I’ll call him from England.”
Ig kissed them all and said he loved them and went out the door, into the cool of the morning, the dew bright in the grass. He drove the sixty miles to Logan Airport in forty-five minutes. He didn’t see any traffic until the last few miles, when he was past the Suffolk Downs racetrack and going by a high hill with a thirty-five-foot cross on the top of it. Ig got stuck behind a line of trucks for a while, in the shadow of that cross. It was summer everywhere else, but there in the deep gloom the giant cross cast across the road it was late fall, and he got briefly shivery. He had the curious, confused idea that it was called Don Orsillo’s cross, only that couldn’t be right. Don Orsillo was the play-by-play man for the Red Sox.
The roads were clear, but the British Airways terminal was packed, and Ig’s ticket was coach. He waited in line for a long time. The ticket area was full of echoing voices and the sharp clack of high heels ringing out across the marble floor and indecipherable announcements over the loudspeaker. He had checked his baggage and was waiting in yet another line, to clear security, when he felt rather than heard the disturbance behind him. He glanced around and saw people moving aside, making room for a contingent of policemen in flak vests and helmets, carrying M16s, walking in his direction. One of them was making hand gestures, pointing at the line.
When Ig turned away from them, he saw other policemen coming from the opposite direction. They were closing in from either side. Ig wondered if they were going to pull someone out of line. Someone waiting to clear security must’ve come up on Big Brother’s threat list. Ig twisted his head to look back over his shoulder at those policemen approaching from behind. They walked with the barrels of their machine guns pointed at the floor, visors of their helmets lowered across their eyes. Staring with hooded eyes at his part of the line. Those guns were scary, but not as scary as the dead, dull look in their faces.
And there was one other thing he noticed, the funniest thing of all. The officer in charge, the one using hand gestures to tell his men to spread out, to cover the exits-sometimes Ig had the crazy impression the guy was pointing at him.
IG STOOD JUST INSIDE THE DOOR of The Pit, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the cavernous gloom, a shadowy space lit only by wide-screen TVs and digital poker machines. A couple sat at the bar, figures that seemed entirely formed from darkness. A bodybuilder moved behind the bar, hanging beer glasses upside down over the back counter. Ig recognized him as the bouncer who had chased him out on the night Merrin was murdered.
Other than that, the place was empty. Ig was glad. He didn’t want to be seen. What he wanted was to get lunch without even placing an order, without speaking to anyone at all. He was trying to come up with a way to make that happen when his cell phone went off, burring softly.
It was his brother. The darkness flexed around Ig like a muscle. The thought of answering, of speaking to him, made Ig dizzy with hate and dread. He did not know what he would say, what he could say. He held the phone in his hand, watching it hum in his palm, until the ringing stopped.
No sooner had it gone silent than he began to wonder if Terry knew what he had confessed to a few minutes ago. And then there were the other things Ig could’ve found out by answering the phone. Such as: if the horns needed to be seen to pervert people’s minds. It seemed to him it might still be possible to have a normal conversation with someone over the phone. He wondered, too, if Vera was dead and Ig was now, really, the murderer everyone had always believed him to be.
No. He wasn’t ready to find that one out, not yet. He needed some time to be alone in the dark, to dwell in isolation and ignorance.
Sure, came a voice in his mind, his own voice, but sly and mocking. That’s how you spent the last twelve months. What’s one more afternoon?
When his eyes were used to the yawning shadows of The Pit, he spotted an empty corner booth where someone had eaten pizza, perhaps with kids; Ig noted plastic cups with bendy straws. A few wedges of the pizza remained. More important, the parent who had chaperoned this particular pizza party had left a half-full glass of pale beer. Ig slipped into the booth, the upholstery creaking, and helped himself. The beer was lukewarm. For all he knew, the last person to drink from the glass had had oozing cankers and a virulent case of hepatitis. After you’d grown horns from your temples, it seemed a little silly to be too fussy about possible exposure to germs.
A swinging door to the kitchen batted open, and a waitress came through, emerging from a white-tiled space, brightly lit by fluorescents, into the darkness. She had a bottle of cleaning fluid in one hand and a rag in the other and came briskly across the room, headed straight for him.
Ig knew her, of course. It was the same woman who had served him and Merrin drinks on their last night together. Her face was framed by two wings of lank black hair that curled under her long, pointed chin, so she looked like the female version of the wizard who was always giving Harry Potter such a hard time in the movies. Professor Snail or something. Ig had been waiting to read the books with the children he and Merrin planned to have together.
She wasn’t looking at the booth, and he shrank back into the red vinyl. It was already too late to slip out without being seen. He considered hiding under the table, then dismissed the idea as disturbing. In another moment she was bent over the table, collecting plates. A light hung directly above the booth, and even when he pressed himself all the way back into the seat, it still cast the shadow of his head, and the horns, upon the table. She saw the shadow first, then glanced up at him.
Her pupils shrank. Her face paled. She dropped the plates back on the table with a shocking crash, although it was perhaps more of a shock that none of them broke. She drew a sharp breath, preparing to cry out, and then her gaze found the horns. The shout seemed to die in her throat. She stood there.
“The sign said to please seat yourself,” Ig told her.
“Yes. All right. Let me clean your table off and…and I’ll bring you a menu.”
“Actually,” Ig said, “I’ve already eaten.” Gesturing at the plates before him.
Her eyes shifted from his horns to his face, back and forth, several times.
“You’re the guy,” she said. “Ig Perrish.”
Ig nodded. “You served my girlfriend and me a year ago, on our last evening together. I want to say I’m sorry for the things I said that night and the way I acted. I would tell you that you saw me at my worst, except who I was then is nothing compared to who I am now.”
“I don’t feel even a little bad about it.”
“Oh. Good. I thought I made a terrible impression.”
“No,” she said. “I mean I don’t feel even a little bad about lying to the police. I’m just sorry they didn’t believe me.”
Ig felt his insides clench. It was starting again. She was half talking to herself or, maybe more accurately, talking with her own private devil, a demon that just also happened to have Ig Perrish’s face. If he didn’t find a way to control it-to mute the effect of the horns-he would go out of his mind soon, if he wasn’t crazy already.
“What lies?”
“I told the police you threatened to strangle her. I said I watched you try to push her down.”
“Why would you tell them that?”
“So you wouldn’t get away with it. So you wouldn’t just walk away. And look at you. She’s dead, and here you are. You got away with it anyhow, just like my father got away with what he did to my mother and me. I wanted you to go to jail.” She gave her head an unconscious toss, flipping her hair out of her face. “Also, I wanted to be in the newspaper. I wanted to be a star witness. If they put you on trial, I would’ve been on TV.”
Ig stared.
“I tried my best,” she went on. “When you left that night, your girlfriend went hurrying out after you, and she forgot her coat. I carried it outside to give it back to her, and I saw you drive away without her. But that’s not what I told the police. I told them when I went outside I saw you pulling her into the car and then hauling ass out of here. That’s what screwed me up. I guess you hit a telephone pole, backing up, and one of the customers heard the crunch and looked out a window to see what happened. They told the police they saw you leave her. The detective asked me to take a polygraph to confirm my story, and I had to take back that part. Then they didn’t believe any of the other stuff I told them either. But I know what happened. I know you just turned around and came back to get her a couple minutes later.”
“You’ve got that wrong. Someone else picked her up.” When Ig thought who, he felt nauseated.
But the idea that she might’ve been wrong about him didn’t seem to interest the waitress. When she spoke again, it was as if Ig had said nothing. “I knew I’d see you again someday. Are you going to force me to go out in the parking lot with you? Are you going to take me somewhere to sodomize me?” Her tone was unmistakably hopeful.
“What? No. The fuck?”
Some of the excitement went out of her eyes. “Are you at least going to threaten me?”
“No.”
“I could say you did. I could tell Reggie you warned me to watch my back. That’d be a good story.” Her smile faded a little more, and she shot a glum look at the bodybuilder behind the bar. “He probably wouldn’t believe me, though. Reggie thinks I’m a compulsive liar. I guess I am. I like to tell my little stories. Still. I never should’ve told Reggie that my boyfriend, Gordon, died in the World Trade Tower, after I told Sarah-she’s another waitress here-that Gordy died in Iraq. I should’ve figured they’d swap notes. Still. Gordon could be dead somewhere. He’s dead to me. He broke up with me by e-mail, so fuck him. Why am I telling you all this?”
“Because you can’t help yourself.”
“That’s right. I can’t,” she said, and shivered, a response with unmistakably sexual connotations.
“What did your father do to your mother and you? Did he…did he hurt you?” Ig asked, not sure he really wanted to know.
“He told us he loved us, but he lied. He ran away to Washington with my fifth-grade teacher. They started a family, and he had another daughter, one he likes better than he ever liked me. If he really loved me, he would’ve taken me with him instead of leaving me with my mother, who is a depressing, angry old bitch. He said he would always be a part of my life, but he isn’t part of shit. I hate liars. Other liars, I mean. My own little stories don’t hurt anyone. Do you want to know the little story I tell about you and your girlfriend?”
The pizza Ig had eaten sat in his stomach in a heavy, doughy lump. “Probably not.”
Her face flushed with excitement, and her smile returned. “Sometimes people come in and ask about what you did to her. I can always tell in a glance how much they want to know, if they just want the basics or some nasty details. The college kids usually want to know something nasty. I tell them after you beat her brains in, you turned her over and sodomized the corpse.”
Ig tried to stand up, clubbed his knees against the underside of the table, and at the same time clashed his horns against the stained-glass lampshade hanging over the tabletop. The lamp started to swing, and his horned shadow plunged toward the waitress and then shrank away from her, toward and away. Ig had to sit back down, pain throbbing behind his kneecaps.
“She wasn’t-” Ig started. “That didn’t-You sick fucking bitch.”
“I am,” the waitress confessed, with a touch of pride. “I am so bad. But you should see their faces when I tell them. The girls especially love that bit. It’s always exciting to hear about someone being defiled. Everyone loves a good sex murder, and in my opinion there isn’t a story yet that can’t be improved by a little sodomy.”
“Do you understand you’re talking about someone I loved?” Ig asked. His lungs felt scraped and raw, and it was hard to catch his breath.
“Sure,” she said. “That’s why you killed her. That’s why people usually do it. It isn’t hate. It’s love. Sometimes I wish my father had loved my mother and me enough to kill us and then himself. Then it would’ve been a big awful tragedy and not just another dull, depressing breakup. If he had the stomach for double homicide, we all could’ve been on TV.”
“I didn’t kill my girlfriend,” Ig said.
At this the waitress finally showed a reaction, frowning, her lips pursing in a look of puzzled disappointment. “Well. That’s no fun. I just think you’re a whole lot more interesting if you killed someone. Course, you’ve got horns growing out of your head. That’s fun! Is it a mod?”
“Mod?”
“A body modification. Did you do it to yourself?”
Although he still could not remember the evening before-he could recall everything up until his drunken outburst in the woods by the foundry, but after that there was only a dreadful blank-he knew the answer to this one. It came to him instantly and without struggle.
“Yes,” he said. “I did.”
THE WAITRESS SAID HE’D BE more interesting if he killed someone, so he decided why not kill Lee Tourneau.
It was a joy to know where he was going, to climb back into the car with a certain destination. The tires threw dirt as he peeled out. Lee worked in the congressman’s office in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, forty minutes away, and Ig was in the mood for a drive. He could use the time on the road to figure out how he was going to do it.
First he thought he’d use his hands. Strangle him as he had strangled Merrin, Merrin who’d loved Lee, who’d been first to his house to console him the day his mother died, and Ig grabbed the steering wheel as if he were throttling Lee already and shook it back and forth hard enough to rattle the steering column. Hating Lee was the best feeling Ig had felt in years.
His second thought was that there had to be a tire iron in the trunk. He could put on his windbreaker-it was lying across the backseat-and stick the tire iron up his sleeve. When Lee was in front of him, he could let it slip down into his hand and give it to him across the head. Ig imagined the wet thok! of the tire iron connecting with Lee’s skull and shivered with excitement.
His concern was that the tire iron might be too quick, that Lee might never know what hit him. In a perfect world, Ig would force Lee into the car and take him somewhere to drown him. Hold his head under the water and watch him struggle. Ig grinned at the thought, unaware that smoke was trickling from his nostrils. In the brightly lit cockpit of the car, it was just a pale summery haze.
After Lee had lost most of the sight in his left eye, he got quiet and kept his head down. He did twenty hours of unpaid volunteer work for every store he’d stolen from, regardless of how much he’d taken, a thirty-dollar pair of sneakers or a two-hundred-dollar leather jacket. He wrote a letter to the paper detailing each of his crimes and apologizing to shopkeepers, his friends, his mother, his father, and his church. He got religion-literally-and volunteered for every program Sacred Heart offered. He worked every summer with Ig and Merrin at Camp Galilee.
And once every summer, Lee was a guest speaker at Camp Galilee’s Sunday-morning services. He always began by telling the children that he was a sinner, that he had stolen and lied, used his friends and manipulated his parents. He told the children that once he was blind but now he saw. He said it while pointing into his half-ruined left eye. He delivered the same moral pep talk every summer. Ig and Merrin listened from the rear of the chapel, and when Lee pointed to his eye and quoted “Amazing Grace,” it inevitably caused Ig’s back and arms to break out in goose bumps. Ig felt lucky knowing him, was proud to know him, to have a small piece of Lee’s story.
It was a hell of a good story. Girls liked it especially. They liked both that Lee had been bad and that he had reformed; they liked that he could talk about his own soul and that children loved him. There was something unbearably noble about the way he could calmly admit to the things he had done, without showing any shame or self-consciousness. The girls he dated liked being the one temptation he still allowed himself.
Lee had been accepted to the seminary school in Bangor, Maine, but he gave up theology when his mother got sick and he came home to take care of her. By then his parents were divorced, his father off with his second wife in South Carolina. Lee brought his mother her meds, kept her sheets clean, changed her diapers, and watched PBS with her. When he wasn’t at his mother’s bedside, he was at UNH, where he collected a major in media studies; on Saturdays he drove to Portsmouth to work in the office of New Hampshire’s newest congressman.
He started as an unpaid volunteer, but by the time his mother died, he was a full-time employee, head of the congressman’s religious-outreach program. A lot of people thought that Lee was reason number one the congressman had been reelected the last time out. His opponent, a former judge, had signed a waiver allowing a pregnant felon the right to receive a first-trimester abortion, which Lee dubbed capital punishment for the unborn. Lee went to half the churches in the state to speak about it. He looked good in the pulpit, in his tie and crisp white shirt, and he never missed a chance to call himself a sinner, and they all loved that.
Lee’s work on the campaign had also resulted in the one and only fight he ever had with Merrin, although Ig wasn’t sure it was a fight if one person wouldn’t defend himself. Merrin ripped him up one side and down the other over the abortion thing, but Lee took it calmly and said, “If you want me to quit my job, Merrin, I’ll turn in my resignation tomorrow. Don’t even need to think about it. But if I remain in the job, I have to do what I was hired to do, and I’m going to do it well.” She said Lee had no shame. Lee said sometimes he wasn’t sure he had anything else, and she said, “Oh, Christ, don’t go earnest on me,” but after that she let him be.
Lee had liked to look at her, of course. Ig had seen him sometimes, checking Merrin out when she got up from a table, her skirt swishing at her legs. He had always liked looking at her. Ig had not minded that Lee looked. Merrin was his. And anyway, after what Ig had done to Lee’s eye-over time he’d come to feel he was personally responsible for Lee’s partial blindness-he could hardly begrudge him a glance at a pretty woman. Lee often said the accident could’ve blinded him completely and that he tried to enjoy each and every good thing he saw as if it were his last taste of ice cream. Lee had a knack for making statements like that, confessing plainly to his pleasures and mistakes, unafraid of being mocked. Not that anyone mocked him. Quite the opposite: Everyone was rooting for Lee. His turnaround was in-fucking-spirational. Maybe someday soon he would run for political office himself. There had already been some talk along those lines, although Lee laughed off any suggestion that he might seek higher office, trotted out that Groucho Marx bit about how any group that would accept him as a member wasn’t worth belonging to. Caesar had refused the throne three times as well, Ig remembered.
Something was beating in Ig’s temples. It was like a hammer falling on hot metal, a steady ringing crash. He came off the interstate and followed the highway to the office park, where the congressman kept his offices in a building with a great wedge-shaped glass atrium thrusting outward from the front of the building, like the prow of some enormous glass tanker. Ig drove to the entrance around back.
The blacktop lot behind the building was two-thirds empty, baking in the afternoon heat. Ig parked and grabbed his blue nylon windbreaker from the backseat and climbed out. It was too warm for a coat, but he put it on anyway. He liked the feel of the sun on his face and head and the heat shimmering up off the asphalt beneath him. Gloried in it, really.
He opened the hatchback and raised the compartment in the floor. The tire iron was bolted to the underside of a metal panel, but the bolts were caked in rust, and trying to twist them loose hurt his hands. He quit and looked in his roadside-emergency kit. It held a magnesium flare, a tube wrapped in red paper, oily and smooth. He grinned. A flare beat the hell out of a tire iron. He could burn Lee’s pretty face with it. Blind him in the other eye, maybe-that might be as good as killing him. Besides, Ig was more suited to a flare than a tire iron. Wasn’t it well established that fire was the devil’s only friend?
Ig crossed the blacktop through the shimmering heat. It was this summer that the seventeen-year locusts came out to mate, and the trees behind the parking lot were filled with their noise, a deep, resonating thrum, like the working of a great mechanical lung. The sound of them filled Ig’s head, was the sound of his headache, of madness, of his clarifying rage. A snippet of the Revelation to John came back to him: Then from the smoke came locusts on the earth. The locusts came every seventeen years to fuck and to die. Lee Tourneau was a bug, no better than the locusts-quite a bit worse, really. He had done the fucking part, and now he could die. Ig would help him. As he crossed the lot, he jammed the flare up into the sleeve of his coat and held it there with his right hand.
He approached a pair of Plexiglas doors imprinted with the Honorable Congressman of New Hampshire’s name. They had a mirrored tint, and he saw himself reflected there: a scrawny, sweating man in a windbreaker zipped to his throat, who looked as if he’d come to commit a crime. Not to mention he had horns. The points had split through the skin of his temples, and the bone beneath was stained pink with blood. Worse even than the horns, though, was the way he was grinning. If he had been standing on the other side of those doors and saw himself coming, he would’ve turned the lock and called 911.
He pushed into air-conditioned, carpeted quiet. A fat man with a flattop haircut sat behind a desk, talking cheerfully into a headset. Just to the right of the desk was a security checkpoint where visitors were required to pass through a metal detector. A fifty-something state trooper sat behind the X-ray monitor, chewing gum. A sliding Plexiglas window behind the receptionist’s desk looked into a small bare room with a map of New Hampshire tacked to the wall and a security monitor on a table. A second state trooper, an enormous, broad-shouldered man, sat in there at a folding table, bent over paperwork. Ig could not see his face, but he had a thick neck and a great white bald head that was somehow vaguely obscene.
It unnerved Ig, those state troopers, that metal detector. The sight of them brought back bad memories of Logan Airport, and his body tingled with an ill sweat. He had not been here to see Lee in well over a year and didn’t remember ever having to clear any kind of security before.
The receptionist said “Good-bye, honey” into his headset, pressed a button on his desk, and looked at Ig. The receptionist had a big, round, moony face, and probably his name was Chet or Chip. Behind his square-framed glasses was a bright look of dismay or bafflement.
“Help you?” he asked Ig.
“Yes. Could you-”
But then something else caught Ig’s attention: the security monitor in that room on the other side of the Plexiglas window. It displayed a fish-eyed view of the reception area-the potted plants, the inoffensive plush couches, and Ig himself. Only something was wrong with the monitor. Ig kept splitting into two overlapping figures and then jumping back together; that part of the image was flickering and unstable. The primary image of Ig showed him as he was, a pale, gaunt man with tragically receding hair, a goatee, and curving horns. But then there was that secondary shadow image, dark and featureless, which kept twitching in and out of existence. This second version of himself was without horns-an image not of who he was but of who he had been. It was like watching his own soul trying to pry itself free from the demon to which it was anchored.
The state trooper who sat in that bare, brightly lit room with the monitor had noticed as well, had revolved in his office chair to study the screen. Ig could still not see the trooper’s face; he had rotated far enough around so Ig could see only his ear and his polished white dome, a cannonball of bone and skin, resting on the thick, brutal plug of his neck. After a moment the state trooper reached out and banged his fist on the monitor, trying to correct the image, and hit it so hard that for a moment the whole picture blacked out.
“Sir?” said the receptionist.
Ig pulled his stare away from the monitor. “Could…could you page Lee Tourneau? Tell him Ig Perrish is here to see him.”
“I have to see your driver’s license and print you an ID tag before I can send you through,” he said in a flat, automatic sort of way, staring at the horns with blank-eyed fascination.
Ig glanced at the security checkpoint and knew he couldn’t walk through it with a magnesium flare stuck up his sleeve.
“Tell him I’ll wait out here. Tell him he’s going to want to see me.”
“I don’t think he will,” said the receptionist. “I can’t imagine anyone would want to. You’re awful. You have horns, and you’re awful. I wish I didn’t even come into work today, just looking at you. I almost didn’t come into work. Once a month I give myself a mental-health day and stay at home and put on my mother’s underpants and get myself good and hot. For an old bird, she has some really dirty stuff. She’s got a black satin corset with a whalebone back, lotta straps, real nice.” His eyes were glazed, and there was a little white spit at the corner of his mouth.
“I especially like that you think of it as a mental-health day,” Ig said. “Get me Lee Tourneau, would you?”
The receptionist rotated ninety degrees to one side, turning his shoulder to Ig. He punched a button, then murmured into his headset. He listened for a moment, then said, “Okay.” He revolved back toward Ig. His round face gleamed with perspiration.
“He’s in meetings all morning.”
“Tell him I know what he did. Use those exact words. Tell Lee if he wants to talk about it, I’ll wait five minutes in the parking lot.”
The receptionist gave him a blank stare, then nodded and turned slightly away again. Into his headset he said, “Mr. Tourneau? He says…he says he knows what you did?” Turning it into a question at the last moment.
Ig didn’t hear what else the receptionist had to say, though, because in the next moment there was a voice in his ear, a voice he knew well but had not heard in several years.
“Iggy fucking Perrish,” said Eric Hannity.
Ig turned around and saw the bald state trooper who’d been sitting with the security monitor in the room on the other side of the Plexiglas window. At eighteen Eric had been a teenager straight out of an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog, big and sinewy, with a head of close-cropped curly brown hair. He had liked to walk around with no shoes and his shirt off and his jeans slipping down around his hips. But now that he was almost thirty, his face had lost its definition, becoming a fleshy block, and when his hair started to thin, he’d shaved it off rather than fight a battle he couldn’t win. He was magnificent now in his baldness; if he had an earring in one ear, he could’ve played Mr. Clean in a TV commerical. He had, perhaps inevitably, gone into his daddy’s line of work, a trade that offered him both authority and legal cover to occasionally hurt people. Back when Ig and Lee were still friends (if they had ever really been friends), Lee had mentioned that Eric was in charge of the congressman’s security. Lee said Eric had mellowed a lot. Lee had even been out sportfishing with him a time or two. “Course, for chum he uses the livers of disemboweled protesters,” Lee said. “Make of that what you will.”
“Eric,” Ig said, stepping back from the desk. “How are you?”
“Happy,” Eric Hannity said. “Happy to see you. What about you, Ig? How you doing? Kill anyone this week?”
Ig said, “I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine. You look like you forgot to take your pill.”
“What pill?”
“Well. You must be sick with something. It’s ninety degrees out, but you’re in a windbreaker and you’re sweating like a hog. Plus, you’ve got horns growing out of your head, and I know that’s not normal. Course, if you were a healthy person, you never would’ve beat your girlfriend’s face in and left her in the woods. The little redheaded twat,” Hannity said. He regarded Ig with pleasure. “I’ve been a fan of yours ever since, you know that, Ig? No shit. I’ve thought your rich-bitch family was due to come down a couple pegs for years. Your brother especially, all his fucking money, on TV with swimsuit models sitting in his lap every night, like he ever worked an honest day in his life. Then you go and do what you did. You shoveled shit all over your family name, and they aren’t ever going to scrape it off. I love it. I don’t know what you can do for an encore. What will you do for an encore, Ig?”
It was a struggle to keep his legs from shaking. Hannity loomed, outweighing him by a hundred pounds, towering over him by six inches. “I’m just here to pass a word with Lee.”
“I know what you do for an encore,” Eric Hannity said, as if Ig had not replied. “You show up at a congressman’s office with a head full of crazy and a weapon hidden in your windbreaker. You’ve got a weapon, don’t you? That’s why you’re wearing that jacket, to hide it. You’ve got a gun, and I’m going to shoot you and be on the front page of the Boston Herald for bagging Terry Perrish’s mentally ill brother. Wouldn’t that be something? Last time I saw your brother, he offered me free tickets to his show if I ever got out to L.A. Rubbing it in my face about what a big shit he is. What I’d like is to be the guy who heroically shoots you in the fucking face before you can kill again. Then, at the funeral, I could ask Terry if he can still help me out with tickets. Just to see his expression. Come on, Ig. Step up to the metal detector so I can have an excuse to blow your mentally deficient ass away.”
“I’m not going in to see anyone. I’m going to wait outside,” Ig said, already backing away for the door, conscious of a cool flop sweat under his arms. His palms were slippery. As he nudged the door open with one elbow, the flare slipped, and for one terrifying moment he thought it was going to slide out in front of Hannity and fall to the floor, but he was able to grab it with his thumb and hold it in place.
Eric Hannity watched with an almost-animal look of hunger on his face as Ig backed out into the sunlight.
The transition from the chill of the office to the baking heat of the afternoon made Ig briefly dizzy. The sky brightened, then dimmed, then brightened again.
He had known just what he was doing when he drove to the congressman’s office. It had seemed simple, had seemed right. He saw now, though, that it had been a mistake. He was not going to kill Lee Tourneau with a highway flare (itself a comically absurd idea). Lee wasn’t even going to come out to talk to him.
As he crossed the lot, Ig’s stride quickened, along with the beat of his heart. The thing to do was leave, take the back roads to Gideon. Find a place to be alone, to be quiet and do some thinking. Get his head right. After the day he’d been through, he desperately needed to get his head right. Coming here was an act so thoroughly reckless and impulsive that it frightened him to think he’d allowed himself to do it. There was a part of him that thought there was a good chance Eric Hannity was already rallying backup and that if Ig didn’t go soon, he wouldn’t be able to go at all. (Another part, though, cooed softly, In ten minutes Eric won’t remember you were here. He was never even talking to you. He was talking with his own devil.)
Ig tossed the flare into the back of the Gremlin, slammed the hatchback. He had made it around to the driver’s-side door before he heard Lee call to him.
“Iggy?”
Ig’s internal temperature changed at the sound of Lee’s voice, fell by several degrees, as if he had too quickly swallowed a very cold drink. Ig turned and stared. He saw Lee through the wavering heat rising off the blacktop, a rippled, distorted figure, flickering in and out of existence, a soul and not a man. His short golden hair burned hot and white, as if he were aflame. Eric Hannity stood next to him, his bald pate throwing glare, his arms crossed over his barrel chest, hands hidden beneath his armpits.
Hannity remained by the entrance to the congressman’s offices, but Lee started toward Ig, seeming to walk not on the ground but on air, to be flowing like liquid through the smothering heat of day. As he got closer, however, his form became more solid, so that he was no longer a streaming, insubstantial spirit, a thing shaped out of heat and distorted sunlight, but finally only a man, with his feet on the ground. He wore jeans and a white shirt, a blue-collar costume that had the effect of making him look more like a carpenter than a political shill. He removed a pair of mirrored sunglasses as he came close. A thin gold chain glittered at his throat.
The blue of Lee’s right eye was the exact shade of the burnt August sky above. The damage to the left eye had not resulted in the usual sort of cataract, which appeared as a creamy white film across the retina. Lee had developed a cortical cataract, which manifested itself as a sunburst of palest blue-a terrible white star opening in the black ink of his pupil. The right eye was clear and watchful, fixed upon Ig, but the other was turned slightly inward and seemed to gaze off into the distance. Lee said he could see through it, if unclearly. He said it was like looking through a soap-covered window. Lee seemed to take Ig in with his right eye. Who knew what the left eye was looking at.
“I got your message,” Lee said. “So. You know.”
Ig was taken aback, hadn’t imagined that even under the influence of the horns Lee would admit to it so bluntly. It disarmed him, too, the shy, half-smiling look of apology on Lee’s face, an expression that seemed almost embarrassed, as if raping and murdering Ig’s girlfriend had been a graceless social faux pas, like tracking mud onto a new carpet.
“I know everything, you fuck,” Ig said, his voice shaking.
Lee paled; spots of color bloomed in his cheeks. He held up his left hand, palm out, in a wait-a-minute gesture. “Ig. I’m not going to make excuses. I knew it was the wrong thing to do. I had a little too much to drink, and she looked like she needed a friend, and things got out of hand.”
“That’s all you have to say for yourself? Things got out of fucking hand? You know I’m here to kill you.”
Lee stared for a moment, then glanced over his shoulder at Eric Hannity and back to Ig. “Given your history, Ig, you shouldn’t joke. After what you’ve been through over Merrin, you want to be careful what you say in the presence of a lawman. Especially a lawman like Eric. He doesn’t get irony.”
“I’m not being ironic.”
Lee picked at the golden chain around his throat and said, “For what it’s worth, I feel lousy about it. At the same time, a small part of me is glad you found out. You don’t need her in your life, Ig. You’re better off without her.”
Ig couldn’t help himself, made a low, agonized sound of rage in his throat and started toward Lee. He expected Lee to back away, but Lee held his ground, just pointed another glance back at Eric, who nodded in return. Ig shot a look at Eric himself-and went still. For the first time, he saw that Eric Hannity’s holster was empty. The reason it was empty was that he had the revolver in one hand, and he was hiding it in his armpit. Ig couldn’t actually see the gun but sensed it there, could feel the weight of it as if he held it himself. Eric would use it, too, Ig had no doubt. He wanted to shoot Terry Perrish’s brother, get in the paper-HERO COP SLAYS ALLEGED SEX KILLER-and if Ig put his hands on Lee, it would be all the excuse he needed. The horns would do the rest, compelling Hannity to fulfill his ugliest impulses. That’s how they worked.
“I didn’t know you cared so much,” Lee said finally, taking slow, steady breaths. “Jesus, Ig, she’s trash. I mean, she has a good heart, but Glenna’s always been trash. I thought the only reason you were living with her was to get out of your parents’ house.”
Ig had no idea what he was talking about. For a moment the day seemed to catch in place; even the dreadful sawing of the locusts seemed to pause. Then Ig understood, remembered what Glenna had admitted to him that morning, the first confession the horns had compelled. It seemed impossible it had been only that morning.
“I’m not talking about her,” Ig said. “How could you think I’m talking about her?”
“Who are you talking about, then?”
Ig didn’t understand. They all told. As soon as they saw Ig, saw his horns, the secrets tumbled forth. They couldn’t help themselves. The receptionist wanted to wear his mother’s underwear, and Eric Hannity wanted an excuse to shoot Ig and get in the paper, and now it was Lee’s turn, and the only thing Lee had to confess to was being on the receiving end of a drunken blow job.
“Merrin,” Ig said hoarsely. “I’m talking about what you did to Merrin.”
Lee tilted his head, just a little, so his right ear was pointed toward the sky-like a dog listening for a faraway sound. He let out a soft, sighing breath. Then he gave his head the tiniest shake.
“Lost me, Ig. What am I supposed to have done to-”
“Fucking killed her. I know it was you. You killed her and made Terry keep quiet about it.”
Lee gave Ig a long, measured look. He glanced again toward Eric Hannity-checking, Ig thought, to see if Eric was close enough to hear their conversation. He was not. Then Lee looked back, and when he did, his face was dead and blank. The change was so jarring that Ig almost shouted in fear-a comical reaction, a devil afraid of a man, when it was supposed to be the other way around.
“Terry told you this?” Lee said. “If he did, he’s a goddamn liar.”
Lee was closed off from the horns in some way Ig didn’t understand. There was a wall up, and the horns couldn’t poke through. Ig tried to will the horns to work, and for a moment they filled with a dense swell of heat and blood and pressure, but it didn’t last. It was like trying to play a trumpet with a mass of rags stuffed into it. Force as much air into it as you liked, it wasn’t going to blow.
Lee went on, “I hope he hasn’t been telling anyone else that. And I hope you haven’t either.”
“Not yet. But soon everyone will know what you did.” Could Lee even see the horns? He hadn’t mentioned them. Hadn’t even seemed to look at them.
“They’d better not,” Lee said. Then the muscles flexed at the corners of his jaw as an idea occurred to him, and he said, “Are you recording this?”
“Yes,” Ig said, but he was too slow, and anyway, that was the wrong answer; no one who was attempting entrapment would admit to recording a conversation.
“No you aren’t. You never did learn to lie, Ig,” Lee said, and smiled. His left hand was fingering the gold chain around his throat. The other was in his pocket. “Too bad for you, though. If you were recording this conversation, you might get somewhere. As it is, I don’t think you can prove anything. Maybe your brother said something to you while he was drunk, I don’t know, but whatever he told you, I’d just put it out of your mind. I definitely wouldn’t go around repeating it. Tales out of school never do anyone any good. Think about it. Can you imagine Terry going to the police with some crazy story about me killing Merrin, with nothing but his word against mine, and him silent a whole year? No evidence to back him up? ’Cause there isn’t any, Ig, it’s all gone. If he goes out with that story, best-case scenario it’s the end of his career. Worst-case scenario maybe we both wind up in jail. I promise there’s no way I’d be going without him.”
Lee slipped a hand out of his pocket long enough to rub a knuckle in his good eye, as if to clear some dust from it. For a moment the right eye was shut, and he was staring at Ig through the damaged eye, the eye shot through with those spokes of white. And for the first time, Ig understood what was so terrible about that eye, what had always been so terrible about it. It wasn’t that it was dead. It was just…occupied with other matters. As if there were two Lee Tourneaus. The first was the man who’d been Ig’s friend for more than a decade, a man who could admit to children he was a sinner and who donated blood to the Red Cross three times a year. The second Lee was a person who gazed at the world around him with all the empathy of a trout.
Lee cleared whatever was in his right eye and let the hand fall to his side. He casually replaced it in his pocket. He was coming forward again. Ig retreated, staying out of arm’s reach. He wasn’t sure why he was backing off, didn’t know why it suddenly seemed a matter of life and death to keep at least a few feet of blacktop between himself and Lee Tourneau. The locusts droned in the trees, a terrible, maddening buzz that filled Ig’s head.
“She was your friend, Lee,” Ig said as he retreated around the front end of the car. “She trusted you, and you raped her and killed her and left her in the woods. How could you do that?”
“You’ve got one thing wrong, Ig,” Lee said in a calm, steady, low voice. “It wasn’t rape. I’m sure you’d like to believe that, but honestly, she wanted me to fuck her. She was coming on to me for months. Sending me messages. Playing little word games. She had this whole cocktease business going on behind your back. She was just waiting for you to go to London so we could have our thing.”
“No,” Ig said, a sick heat rising to his face, rising behind the horns. “She might’ve slept with someone else, but she wouldn’t have slept with you, Lee.”
“She told you that she wanted to sleep with other people. Who do you think she was talking about? I mean, honestly, this seems to be a running theme with your girls, Ig. Merrin, Glenna-sooner or later they all wind up on the end of my dick.” Opening his mouth in a toothy, aggressive grin that had no humor in it.
“She fought you.”
“I know you probably won’t believe this, Ig, but she wanted that, too, wanted me to take the lead, push past her objections. Maybe she needed that. It was the only way she could get over her inhibitions. Everybody has a dark side. That was hers. You know she came when we fucked, don’t you? Out there in the woods with me? She came hard. I think it was a fantasy of hers. Being taken in the gloomy ol’ forest. A little bit of scratch and wrestle.”
“And then a rock in the head?” Ig asked. He had by now backed all the way around the front end of the Gremlin to the passenger side, and Lee had followed him step by step. “That part of the fantasy?”
Lee stopped walking and stood there. “You’ll have to ask Terry. He was the one who did that part.”
“That’s a lie,” Ig whispered.
“But there really is no truth. None that matters,” Lee said. His left hand came out of his shirt. He wore a gold cross, which flashed in the sunlight. He put it in his mouth and sucked on it for a moment, then let it fall and said, “No one knows what went down that evening. If I smashed her with the rock, or if Terry did it, or if you did it…no one is ever going to know what really happened. You don’t have a case to make, and I’m not going to cut some deal with either of you, so what do you want?”
“I want to see you die hopeless and scared in the dirt,” Ig said. “Just like she did.”
Lee smiled, as if he had been offered a compliment.
“Do it, then,” he said. “Come on and do it.” He took a quick step forward, lunging at Ig, and Ig opened the passenger-side door between them, flinging it into Lee.
It crashed into Lee’s legs with a bang, and something hit the asphalt-rattle-clatter-tchok! Ig had a glimpse of a red Swiss Army knife with a three-inch blade, spinning away across the ground. Lee staggered and made a harsh whuffing sound, exhaling sharply, and Ig used the chance to scramble into the car, across the passenger seat, and behind the wheel. He didn’t even bother to close the passenger door.
“Eric!” Lee shouted. “Eric, he’s got a knife!”
But the Gremlin came to life in a rasping, grinding burst, and Ig’s foot found the gas before he was even settled in the seat. The Gremlin lurched forward, and the passenger door thudded shut. Ig’s gaze darted to the rearview mirror, and he saw Eric Hannity trotting across the lot, pistol in his hand, barrel pointed at the ground.
Chunks of asphalt flew from the back tires and glittered in the sunlight, skeins of gold. As Ig pulled out, he shot another glance at the rearview mirror and saw Lee and Eric standing in the dust cloud. Lee’s good right eye was closed again, and he was waving a hand at the billowing grit. The half-blind left eye, though, was open and staring after Ig with an alien sort of fascination.
HE STAYED OFF THE INTERSTATE on the way back-back where? He didn’t know. Ig drove automatically, with no conscious thought to direction. He wasn’t sure what had just happened to him. Or, rather, he knew what had happened but not what it meant. It wasn’t anything Lee had said or done; it was what he hadn’t said, hadn’t done. The horns hadn’t touched him. Lee alone, of all the people Ig had dealt with today, had told Ig only what he wanted to tell; his confession had been a considered decision, not a helpless impulse.
Ig wanted off the road, as soon as possible. Would Lee call the police and tell them Ig had shown up in a deranged state and come at him with a knife? No, actually, Ig didn’t think he would. Lee wouldn’t bring the law into this if he could avoid it. Still, Ig kept to the speed limit and watched his rearview mirror for police cruisers.
He wished he could be coolly in control, could handle his getaway like Dr. Dre-be a stone-cold badass-but his nerves were jangled and his breath was short. He had finally come up against the edge of emotional exhaustion. Crucial systems were shutting down. He couldn’t keep going like this. He needed to get a handle on what was happening to him. He needed a fucking saw, a sharp-toothed saw, needed to cut the miserable things off his head.
The sun beat at the window in flashes, a soothing, hypnotic repetition. Images beat the same way in Ig’s mind. The open Swiss Army knife on the ground, Vera riding her wheelchair down the hill, Merrin flashing her cross at him that day ten years ago in church, the horned image of himself in the security monitor at the congressman’s office, the golden cross shining in the summer light at Lee’s throat-and Ig twitched in surprise, knees knocking the steering wheel. A peculiar and unpleasant idea came to him, an impossible idea, that Lee was wearing her cross, had taken it off her dead body, a trophy. Only no, she hadn’t been wearing it their last night together. Still: It was hers. It had been just a gold cross like any other, not a mark on it to show who it had belonged to, and yet he felt sure it was the same cross she’d been wearing the first day he saw her.
Ig restlessly twisted at his goatee, wondering if it might be as simple as that, if Merrin’s cross had turned off the horns (muted them) in some way. Crosses held back vampires, didn’t they? No, that was worse than garbage, that was nonsense. He had walked into the house of the Lord earlier that morning, and Father Mould and Sister Bennett had fallen all over themselves to tell him their secrets and ask his permission to sin.
But Father Mould and Sister Bennett hadn’t been in the church. They had been beneath it. That wasn’t a holy place. It was a gym. Had they worn crosses, had they dressed themselves in any sign of their faith? Ig remembered Father Mould’s cross, hanging from one end of the twenty-pound bar set across the bench press, and Sister Bennett’s bare throat. What do you say to that, Ig Perrish? Ig Perrish didn’t say anything; he drove.
A boarded-up Dunkin’ Donuts flashed by on his left, and he realized he was near the town woods, not far from the road running up to the old foundry. He was less than half a mile from where Merrin had been murdered, the very same place he’d gone last night to curse and rave and piss and pass out. It was as if the day’s whole motion had merely described a great circle that was always, inevitably, going to lead him back to where he had started.
He slowed and turned. The Gremlin thudded down the single-lane gravel road, with trees growing close on either side. Fifty feet from the highway, the lane was blocked by a chain, a BB-dented No Trespassing sign hanging from it. He drove off the road and around it and back up into the ruts.
Soon the foundry came into sight through the trees. It stood in an open field at the top of a hill and should’ve been in sunlight but instead was dark, seemed to be in shadow. Maybe a cloud was across the sun; but when Ig squinted up through the windshield, he saw an impossibly clear late-day sky.
He drove until he was at the edge of the meadow around the remains of the foundry, then stopped the car. He left the engine running and got out.
When Ig was a child, the foundry had always seemed like the ruins of a castle, straight out of the Brothers Grimm, a place in the deep, dark forest where a wicked prince might lure an innocent to the slaughter-exactly what had happened here, it turned out. It was a surprise to discover as an adult that it wasn’t so very far off in the woods after all, just maybe a hundred feet from the road. Ig started toward the place where her body had been found and where the memorial for her was kept by her friends and family. He knew the way, had been there often since her death. Snakes followed, but he pretended not to notice.
The black cherry tree was as he had left it the night before. He had yanked her pictures down out of the branches. They lay scattered among weeds and bushes. The bark, a pale, scaly crust, was peeling away to show the rotten reddish wood beneath. Ig had pulled his pecker out and pissed into the weeds, on his own feet, and into the face of the plastic Virgin Mary figurine that had been left in a natural hollow between two of the thickest roots. He had despised that Mary with her idiot smile, symbol of a story that meant nothing, servant of a God who was no good to anyone. He had no doubt that Merrin had called out to God here in this place while she was being raped and killed, in her heart if not with her voice. God’s reply had been that due to the high volume of calls she could expect to be on hold until she was dead.
Ig glanced casually at the statue of Mary now, started to look away, and then did a double take. The Holy Mother looked as if she had been held in flames. The right half of her smiling, beatific face was scabbed black, like a marshmallow left too long over a campfire. The other half of her face had run like wax. That side was frowning and deformed. The sight of her gave Ig a brief moment of light-headedness, and he swayed and put his foot on something round and smooth that rolled under his heel and-
– for a moment it was night and the stars were wheeling overhead and he was peering up into the branches and gently drifting leaves, and he said, “I see you up there.” Talking to whom-God? Rocking on his heels in the warm night before he went-
– straight back on his ass, slamming butt-first into the dirt. He looked past his feet and saw he had stepped on a bottle of wine, the same bottle he’d brought out the night before. He bent and picked it up and shook it, and wine sloshed inside.
He got up and tipped his head back for an uneasy look into the branches of the black cherry tree. Leaves fluttered gently above. He moved his tongue around the tacky, bad-tasting cavity of his mouth, then turned and started back to the car.
Ig stepped over a snake or two on the way, still ignoring them. He uncorked the wine and had a swallow. It was hot from a day spent in the sun, but he didn’t mind. It tasted like Merrin when he went down on her: a taste of oils and copper. It tasted like weeds, too, as if it had in some way absorbed the fragrance of the summer itself, after an evening spent beneath the tree.
Ig drove on to the foundry, bumping gently across the overgrown meadow. As he rolled toward the building, he scanned the old foundry for signs of life. On a summer day in his own childhood, on a hot August evening, half the kids in Gideon would’ve been out here, looking to score something: a smoke, a beer, a kiss, a grope, or a sweet taste of their own mortality on the Evel Knievel trail. But the place was empty and isolated in the last of the day’s light. Maybe since Merrin had been killed out here, kids didn’t like to come around so much anymore. Maybe they thought the place was haunted. Maybe it was.
He rolled around to the rear of the building and put his car into park to one side of the Evel Knievel trail, positioning the Gremlin in the shade of an oak. A frilly blue skirt, a long black sock, and someone’s overcoat hung from the branches, as if the tree were fruiting mildewed laundry. Beyond the front bumper were the old and rusting pipes leading down to the water. He shut off the car and got out to look around.
Ig had not been inside for years, but it was much as he remembered it. The foundry lay open to the sky, brick arches and pillars rising away into the slanting reddish light. Thirty years of overlapping graffiti covered the walls. The individual messages were mostly incoherent, but then perhaps the individual messages were of no importance. It seemed to Ig that all such messages were the same at heart: I Am; I Was; I Want to Be.
Part of one wall had fallen in, and Ig navigated his way around a mound of bricks, past a wheelbarrow piled with rusting tools. At the far side of the largest room was the chimney. The iron hatch to the blast furnace hung ajar, an opening just large enough to crawl into.
Ig approached it and peered in at a mattress and a collection of red candles, melted to fat stubs. A filthy and stained blanket that had once been blue was pushed to the side of the mattress. Farther back were the charred remnants of a campfire in a circle of coppery light, centered directly beneath the chimney. Ig picked up the blanket and sniffed it. It reeked of stale urine and smoke. He let it flop from his hands.
On his walk back to the car, to get his bottle and his cell phone, he finally had to admit that snakes were following him. He could hear them, the hiss their bodies made moving in the dry grass: almost a dozen of them in all. He grabbed a chunk of old concrete from amid the weeds and turned and threw it at them. One snake effortlessly weaved aside. None of them were struck. They went still, watching him in the last of the day’s light.
He tried not to look at them but at the car; a two-foot rat snake dropped from the oak tree above and hit the hood of the Gremlin with a tinny bang. He recoiled with a scream, then lunged at it, grabbing at it to throw it off.
Ig thought he had it by the head, but he’d gripped it too low, mid-trunk, and it twisted on itself and fastened its teeth into his hand. It was like catching an industrial staple in the meat of his thumb. He grunted and flung it into the brush. Ig stuck his thumb into his mouth and tasted blood. He wasn’t worried about poison. There were no poisonous snakes in New Hampshire. Or no, that wasn’t quite right. Dale Williams had liked to take Ig and Merrin hiking in the White Mountains and had warned them to be on the lookout for timber rattlers. But he had always done so gleefully, his chubby cheeks bright red, and Ig had never heard of rattlers in New Hampshire from anyone else.
He spun on his entourage of reptiles. There were almost twenty of them now.
“Get the fuck away from me!” he roared at them.
They froze, watching him from the high grass with avid, slitted, gold-foil eyes-then began to scatter, veering aside and slipping into the weeds. Ig thought some cast disappointed looks back at him as they departed.
He stalked toward the foundry and pulled himself up through a doorway several feet off the ground. He turned there for a last look into the deepening twilight. A single snake had not done as she was told and had trailed him all the way back to the ruin. She swished restlessly about directly below, a small, delicately marked garter, staring up with the excited, eager look of a groupie under a rock star’s balcony, desperate to be seen and acknowledged.
“Go brumate somewhere!” he shouted.
Maybe he was imagining it, but she seemed to squiggle about even faster, almost ecstatically. It reminded him of sperm swimming up the birth canal, of loosened erotic energy-a disconcerting line of thought. He whirled around and got away from there as fast as he could without running.
HE SAT IN THE FURNACE with the bottle, and with each swallow of wine the darkness surrounding him opened and expanded, becoming more lush. When the last inch of merlot was gone and there was no point sucking on the bottle anymore, he sucked on his sore, snakebit thumb instead.
He didn’t consider bedding down in the Gremlin-he had bad memories of the last time he’d dozed off there, and anyway, he did not want to wake up with a blanket of snakes covering the windshield.
Ig wished for a way to light the candles but wasn’t sure it was worth going to the car to get the cigarette lighter. He didn’t want to walk through a mess of snakes in the dark. He was sure they were still out there.
He thought there might be a lighter or a matchbook somewhere in the furnace with him, and he reached into his pocket for his cell phone, thinking he could use the light from the screen to look around. But when he put his hand in his pocket, he found something in there with his phone, a slim cardboard box that felt like, but couldn’t be…
A box of matches. He slipped them out of his pocket and stared at them, a prickle of gooseflesh spilling down his back, and not just because he didn’t smoke and didn’t know how he had come by this particular matchbox.
LUCIFER MATCHES, it said on the cover in ornate black script, and showed the silhouette of a leaping black devil, his head tossed back, goatee curling from his chin, horns thrusting at the sky.
And for a moment it was there again, tantalizingly close, what had happened the night before, what he had done, but when he grasped at it, it slipped away. It was as slippery, and as hard to get a hand on, as a snake in the weeds.
He pushed open the little drawer in the box of Lucifer Matches. A few dozen matches, with evil-looking purply black heads. Big, thick, kitchen-style matches. They had a smell on them, the odor of eggs beginning to go bad, and he thought they were old, so old it would be a miracle if he could get one to light. He dragged one across the strike strip, and it hissed to life on the first try.
Ig began lighting candles. There were six in all, arranged in a loose semicircle. In a moment they were throwing their reddish light upon the bricks, and he saw his own shadow surging and falling against the curved roof above. His horns were unmistakable, his shadow’s most striking feature. When he looked down, he saw that the match had burned itself out against his fingers. He hadn’t noticed, hadn’t felt any pain as it sizzled down to his skin. He rubbed thumb and index finger together and watched the blackened remains of the matchstick crumble away. His thumb didn’t hurt anymore where the rat snake had bitten him. In the poor light, he couldn’t even find the wound.
He wondered what time it was. He didn’t own a watch, but he had a cell phone, and he turned it back on to see that it was almost nine. He had a low battery and five messages. He put the phone to his ear and played them.
The first: “Ig, it’s Terry. Vera’s in the hospital. The brake on her wheelchair let go and she rolled down the hill and right into the fence. She’s lucky to be alive. She broke her fuckin’ face and cracked a couple ribs. They got her in intensive care, and it’s too early to get drunk. Call me.” A click and he was gone. No mention of their encounter in the kitchen that morning, but that didn’t surprise Ig. For Terry it hadn’t happened.
The second: “Ig. It’s your mother. I know that Terry told you about Vera. They’re keeping her unconscious and on a morphine drip, but at least she’s stable. I talked to Glenna. She wasn’t sure where you are. Give me a call. I know we talked earlier today, but my head is a mess, and I can’t remember when or about what. I love you.”
Ig laughed at that. The things people said. The effortless way they lied, to others, to themselves.
The third: “Hey, kid. Dad. I guess you heard your Grandma Vera went through the fence like a runaway truck. I stretched out for an afternoon nap, and when I woke up, there was an ambulance in the front yard. You ought to talk to your mom. She’s pretty upset.” After a pause his father said, “I had the funniest dream about you.”
The next was Glenna. “Your grandmother is in Emergency. Her wheelchair went out of control, and she rolled into the fence at your house. I don’t know where you are or what you’re doing. Your brother came by looking for you. If you get this message, your family needs you. You should go to the hospital.” Glenna burped softly. “Unh. Excuse me. I had one of those supermarket doughnuts this morning, and I think they were going bad. If a supermarket doughnut can go bad. My stomach has hurt all day.” She paused again and then said, “I’d go to the hospital with you, but I’ve never met your grandma, and I barely know your parents. I was thinking today how strange that is that I don’t know them. Or not strange. Maybe it’s not strange. You’re the nicest guy in the world, Ig. I’ve always thought that. But I think deep down you’ve always been sort of ashamed to be with me after all those years with her. Because she was so clean and good and never made any mistakes, and I’m all mistakes and bad habits. I don’t blame you, you know. For being ashamed. For what it’s worth, I don’t think too much of me either. I’m worrying about you, bud. Take care of your grandma. And yourself.”
This message caught him off guard, or maybe it was his own reaction to it that caught him off guard. He had been prepared to hold her in contempt, to hate her, but not to remember why he’d liked her. Glenna had been casually free with her apartment and her body, had not held his self-pity and his wretched obsession with a dead girlfriend against him. And it was true: Ig had been with her because, on some level, it was a help to be around someone as fucked up as he was, someone he could look down his nose at just a little. Glenna was a sweet, shabby mess. She had a Playboy Bunny tattoo she didn’t remember getting-had been too drunk-and stories about being pepper-sprayed by cops, fighting at concerts. She’d been in a half-dozen relationships, all of them bad: a married man, an abusive pot dealer, a guy who’d taken pictures of her and shown them to friends. And of course there had been Lee.
He thought over the thing she’d confessed about Lee Tourneau that morning, Lee who had been her first crush, who stole for her. Ig had not imagined he could be sexually possessive about Glenna-he’d never believed that their relationship was going anywhere or was exclusive in some way-they were roommates who fucked, not a couple with a future-but the thought of Glenna falling to her knees in front of Lee Tourneau and Lee pushing himself into her mouth made Ig feel weak with a disgust that bordered on moral horror. The idea of Lee Tourneau anywhere near Glenna made him ill and afraid for her, but there was no time to dwell on it. The phone was cycling on to the last message, and an instant later Terry was speaking in Ig’s ear again.
“Still at the hospital,” he said. “Honestly, I’m more worried about you than I am about Vera. No one knows where you are, and you won’t answer this fucking phone. I went by the apartment looking for you. Glenna said she hasn’t seen you since last night. Did you two fight? She didn’t look too good.” Terry paused, and when he spoke again, his words had a quality of being weighed and measured before they were spoken, selected with unnatural care. “I know I talked to you, sometime since I got in, but I can’t remember if we made plans. I don’t know. My head isn’t right. You get this message, call me. Let me know where you are.” Ig thought that was all. Ig thought now Terry would hang up. Instead there was an unsteady, indrawn breath, and then, in a rough, scared voice, his brother said, “Why can’t I remember what we talked about the last time we talked?”
EACH CANDLE CAST ITS OWN shadow against the curved brick ceiling, so that six featureless devils crowded together above Ig, mourners in black, gathered over the casket. They swayed from side to side to a dirge only they could hear.
Ig chewed his beard, worrying about Glenna, wondering if Lee Tourneau would visit her tonight, looking for him. But when he called her, it switched over to voice mail without ringing. He didn’t leave a message. He didn’t know what to say. Hey, babe, I won’t be coming home tonight… I want to stay away until I figure out what to do about the horns growing out of my head. Oh, and by the way, don’t suck Lee Tourneau’s cock tonight. He’s not a good guy. If she wasn’t answering the phone, she was already asleep. She had said she wasn’t feeling well. Enough, then. Leave it. Lee wasn’t going to batter in her door at midnight with an ax. Lee would want to remove Ig as a threat in some way that would expose himself to the bare minimum of risk.
Ig lifted the bottle to his lips, but nothing came out. He had drained it a good while ago, and it was still empty now. It pissed him off. Bad enough to be exiled from humanity, but he had to be sober, too. He turned to heave the bottle, then caught himself, staring through the open furnace door.
The snakes had found their way into the foundry, so many it caused the breath to shoot out of him. Were there a hundred? He thought there might be, a shifting tangle that faced the door to the furnace, their black eyes glittering and avid in the candlelight. After a moment of hesitation, he completed the throw, and the bottle hit the floor before them, spraying glass. Most of the serpents went gliding away, vanishing into piles of brick or out of sight through one of the many doorways. Some, however, only retreated a short distance and then stopped, eyeing him in an almost accusatory way.
He slammed the door on them and flung himself down on the filthy bed, dragging the blanket over him. Ig’s thoughts were a riot of angry noise, people shouting at him, confessing their sins, and asking for permission to commit more, and he did not imagine he would ever find his way to sleep, but sleep found him, pulled a black bag over his head, and choked the consciousness out of him. For six hours he could’ve been dead.
IGGY WOKE IN THE FURNACE, wrapped in the old, piss-stained blanket. It was refreshingly cool at the bottom of the chimney, and he felt strong and well. As his head cleared, he had a thought, the happiest thought of his life. He had dreamt it-all of it. Everything that had come to pass the day before.
He had been drunk and wretched, had pissed on the cross and the Virgin Mary, had cursed God and his own life, had been consumed by an annihilating rage, yes; that had happened. But then, in the blank time afterward, he had staggered here to the foundry and passed out. The rest had been a particularly vivid nightmare: discovering he’d grown horns; hearing one awful confession after another, leading up to the worst of all, Terry’s terrible, impossible secret; loosening the wheelchair brake and shoving Vera down the hill; his visit to the congressman’s office and his disorientating confrontation with Lee Tourneau and Eric Hannity; and then settling here at the foundry, hiding in the moribund blast furnace from a mob of love-struck serpents.
Sighing with relief, Ig lifted his hands to his temples. His horns were hard as bone and filled with an unpleasant, fevery heat. He opened his mouth to scream, but someone else beat him to it.
The iron hatch and the curved brick walls muffled sound, but as from a great distance he heard a sharp, anguished cry, followed by laughter. It was a girl. She screamed, “Please!” She screamed, “Don’t, stop!” Ig pushed open the iron door of the furnace, his pulse banging hard inside him.
He scrambled out through the hatch into the clear, clean light of the August morning. Another wavering cry of fear-or pain-came from his left, through a doorless opening that led outside. On some half-conscious level, Ig registered for the first time a throaty, hoarse quality to the shouting voice and understood that he wasn’t hearing a girl at all, but a boy, one whose voice was shrill with panic. Ig did not slow, but flew barefoot across the concrete, past the wheelbarrow full of old and rusting tools. He grabbed the first instrument that came to hand without stopping or looking at it, just wanted something to swing.
They were outside, on the asphalt: three wearing clothes and one wearing only streaks of mud and a pair of too-small white jockey shorts. The boy in his underwear, scrawny and long in the torso, was perhaps as young as thirteen. The others were older boys, juniors or seniors in high school.
One of them, a kid with a shaved head shaped like a lightbulb, sat on top of the nearly naked boy, smoking a cigarette. A few paces behind him was a fat kid in a wifebeater. His face was sweaty and gleeful and he hopped from foot to foot, his fat-boy tits jiggling. The oldest of the boys stood to the left, holding a small, writhing garter snake by the tail. Ig recognized this snake-impossible but true-as the one that had given him the longing looks the day before. She twisted, trying to lift herself high enough to bite the boy who held her, but was unable. This third boy held a pair of garden shears in his other hand. Ig stood behind them all, in the doorway, looking down at them from six feet above the ground.
“No more!” screamed the boy in his underwear. His face was grimy, but clear lines of pink skin stood out where tears had cut tracks in the dirt. “Stop, Jesse! It’s enough!”
The smoker, Jesse, sitting on top of him, flicked hot ash in the boy’s face. “Shut the fuck up, cumstain. It’s enough when I say.”
Cumstain had already been burned with the cigarette several times. Ig could see three bright, shiny, red spots of inflamed tissue on his chest. Jesse moved the tip of the cigarette from burn mark to burn mark, holding it only an inch from Cumstain’s skin. The glowing coal traced a rough triangle.
“You know why I burned a triangle?” Jesse asked. “That’s how the Nazis marked a fag. That’s your mark. I woulda given you something not so bad, but you hadda squeal like you’re taking it up the ass. Plus, your breath smells like fresh dick.”
“Ha!” shouted the fat boy. “That’s funny, Jesse!”
“I got just the thing to get rid of that dick smell,” said the boy with the snake. “Something to wash his mouth out.”
As he spoke, the third boy lifted the open blades of the shears and put them behind the head of the garter snake and, operating the handles with one hand, snapped her head off with a wet crunch. The diamond-shaped head bounced across the blacktop. It sounded hard, like a rubber ball. The trunk of the snake jerked and writhed, curling up on itself and then uncoiling in a series of mighty spasms.
“Geeeee!” screamed Fatboy, leaping up and down. “You decapernated that fucker, Rory!”
Rory crouched beside Cumstain. Blood came from the snake’s neck in quick arterial spurts.
“Suck it,” Rory said, shoving the snake in Cumstain’s face. “All you got to do is suck it and Jesse is done.”
Jesse laughed and inhaled deeply from his cigarette, so the coal at the tip brightened to an intense, poisonous red.
“Enough,” said Ig, his own voice unrecognizable to himself-a deep, resonant voice that seemed to come from the bottom of a chimney-and as he spoke, the cigarette in Jesse’s mouth erupted like a firecracker, going up in a white flash.
Jesse screamed and flipped back off Cumstain, falling into the high grass. Ig jumped from the cement landing into the weeds and stabbed the handle of the tool he was holding into the fat boy’s stomach. It was like poking a tire, a feeling of springy, hard resistance shivering up the shaft. The fat kid coughed and went back on his heels.
Ig wheeled around and pointed the business end of the tool at the boy named Rory. Rory let go of the snake. It hit the blacktop and twisted desperately about, as if still alive and trying to squirm away.
Rory rose slowly to his feet and took a step back onto a low heap of wooden planks and old cans and rusting wire. The junk shifted underfoot, and he wobbled and sat down again. He stared at what Ig was pointing at him: an ancient pitchfork with three curved and rusting tines.
There was a stitch in Ig’s lungs, a seared feeling, such as he often felt when one of his asthma attacks was coming on, and he exhaled, trying to breathe out the tightness in his chest. Smoke gushed from his nostrils. At the periphery of his vision, he saw the boy in jockey shorts rising to one knee and wiping at his face with both hands, trembling in his tightie-whities.
“I want to run,” said Jesse.
“Me, too,” the fat kid said.
“Just leave Rory here to die alone,” Jesse said. “What’d he ever do for us?”
“He got me two weeks’ detention for flooding the bathroom at school, and I didn’t even plug the toilets up,” said the fat kid. “I was just standing there. So fuck him. I want to live!”
“Then you better run,” Ig told them, and Jesse and Fatboy turned and sprinted for the woods.
Ig lowered the pitchfork and sank the points into the ground, leaned on the handle, looking over it at the teenage boy sitting on the trash heap. Rory did not attempt to rise but stared back with large, fascinated eyes.
“Tell me the worst thing you’ve ever done, Rory,” Ig asked him. “I want to know if this is a new low for you, or if you’ve done worse.”
Speaking automatically, Rory said, “I stole forty bucks from my mother to buy beer, and my older brother, John, beat her up when she said she didn’t know what happened to the money. Johnnie thought she blew it on scratch tickets and was lyin’, and I didn’t say anything because I was afraid he’d beat me up, too. The way he hit her was like hearing someone kick a watermelon. Her face still isn’t right, and I feel sick whenever I kiss her good night.” As he spoke, a dark stain began to spread across the crotch of Rory’s denim shorts. “Are you going to kill me?”
“Not today,” Ig said. “Go. I release you.” The smell of Rory’s urine appalled him, but he kept it from showing in his face.
Rory pushed himself back to his feet. His legs were shaking visibly. He slid sideways and began to retreat toward the tree line, walking backward, keeping his gaze on Ig and Ig’s pitchfork. He wasn’t watching where he was going and almost stumbled over Cumstain, who still sat on the ground in his underwear and a pair of unlaced tennis sneakers. Cumstain held an armful of laundry to his chest and was staring at Ig with the same look he might’ve given some dead and diseased thing, a carcass withered by infection.
“Do you want a hand up?” Ig asked him, stepping toward him.
At that, Cumstain leaped to his feet and backed a few steps off. “Keep away from me.”
“Don’t let him touch you,” Rory said.
Ig met Cumstain’s gaze and said, in the most patient voice he could muster, “I was just trying to help.”
Cumstain’s upper lip was drawn back in a disgusted sneer, but his eyes had in them the dazed and distant look with which Ig was becoming familiar-the look that said the horns were taking hold and casting their influence.
“You didn’t help,” Cumstain said. “You fucked everything up.”
“They were burning you,” Ig said.
“So what? All the freshmen who make swim team get a mark. All I had to do was suck a little snake to show I enjoy the taste of blood, and then I was going to be solid with them. And you went and ruined it.”
“Get the hell out of here. Both of you.”
Rory and Cumstain ran. The other two were waiting at the tree line for them, and when Rory and Cumstain reached them, they all held up for a moment, in the fir-scented gloom under the trees.
“What is he?” Jesse asked.
“Scary,” said Rory. “He’s scary.”
“I just want to go,” said the fat boy. “And forget about this.”
Ig had an idea then, and he stepped forward and called to them. “No. Don’t forget. Remember that there’s something scary out here. Let everyone know. Tell them to stay away from the old foundry. This place is mine now.” He wondered if it was within the scope of his new powers to persuade them not to forget, as everyone else seemed to forget him. He could be very persuasive on other matters, so maybe he could have his way on this, too.
The boys stared at him rapt for a moment longer, and then Fatboy broke and ran, and the others went after him. Ig watched until they were gone. Then he picked up the decapernated snake with the end of the fork-blood dripped steadily from the open hose of her neck-and carried her into the foundry, where he buried her under a cairn of bricks.
MIDMORNING HE WALKED INTO THE WOODS to take a shit, hanging his can over the side of a stump, his shorts pushed down to his ankles. When he pulled them up, there was a foot-long garter curled in his boxers. He screamed and grabbed it and whipped it into the leaves.
He wiped with some old newspaper but still felt unclean and walked down the Evel Knievel trail to wade naked into the water. The river was deliciously cool against his bare skin, and he shut his eyes and pushed out from the bank, gliding into the current. The locusts thrummed, their timbales producing a harmonic that swelled and faded, swelled and faded, like breath. He was breathing easy, but when he opened his eyes, he saw water snakes zooming like torpedoes beneath him, and he screamed again and scrambled back to shore. He stepped carefully over what he thought was a long, river-softened log, then jumped and shivered when it slid away through the wet grass, a rat snake the length of his own body.
He retreated into the foundry to escape them, but there was no escape. He watched, squatting in the furnace, as they gathered on the floor beyond the hatch, slipping through holes in the mortar between bricks, falling in through open windows. It was as if the room beyond the blast furnace was a tub and someone had turned the faucets on the cold and hot running snakes. They piddled in, spilling across the floor, a rippling liquid mass of them.
Ig regarded them unhappily, his head a nervous hum of thought that corresponded in pitch, and urgency, to the throb of the locusts. The forest was filled with locust song, the males calling the females to them with that single maddening transmission that went on and on without cessation.
The horns. The horns were transmitting a signal, just like the fuck-melody of the locusts. They were broadcasting a continuous call on WSNK, Radio Snake: This next tune is for all you skin-shedding lovers out there. Cue “Tube Snake Boogie.” The horns called snakes and sins alike from the shadows, beckoning them out of hiding to show themselves.
He considered, not for the first time, sawing the horns right off his head. There was a long, rusted, hook-toothed saw in the wheelbarrow. But they were a part of his body, fused to his skull, joined to the rest of his skeleton. He pressed his thumb into the point of the left-hand horn until he felt a sharp prick, pulled his hand back, and saw a ruby-red drop of blood. His horns were the realest and most solid thing in his world now, and he tried to imagine dragging a saw back and forth across one. He flinched from the thought, envisioned spurting blood, tearing pain. It would be like dragging the saw across his ankle. The removal of the horns would require heavy-duty drugs and a surgeon.
Except any surgeon exposed to them would use the heavy-duty drugs on the nurse and then fuck her on the operating table after she passed out. Ig needed a way to cut off the signal without cutting off parts of his body, needed a way to take Radio Snake off the air, put it to sleep somehow.
Lacking that, his second-best plan was to go where the snakes weren’t. He hadn’t eaten in twelve hours, and Glenna worked at the salon Saturday mornings, styling hair and waxing eyebrows. She’d be gone, and he’d have the apartment and her fridge to himself. Besides, he had left cash there, and most of his clothes. Maybe he could leave her a note about Lee (“Dear Glenna-stopped by for a sandwich, got some things, going to be gone a while. Avoid Lee Tourneau, he murdered my last girlfriend, Love, Ig”).
HE CLIMBED INTO THE GREMLIN and stepped out fifteen minutes later on the corner in front of Glenna’s building. The heat walloped into him; it was like throwing open the door to an oven set to broil. Ig didn’t mind it, though.
He wondered if he should’ve circled the block a couple times, to make sure there weren’t cops watching the place for him, ready to pick him up for pulling a knife on Lee Tourneau the day before. Then he thought he’d rather just walk in and take his chances. If Sturtz and Posada were waiting for him, Ig would give them a blast with the horns, have ’em sixty-nine each other. The thought made him grin.
But Ig had no company in the echoing stairwell except his shadow, twelve feet tall and horned, leading the way to the top floor. Glenna had left the door unlocked when she went out, which was unlike her. He wondered if her mind had been on other things when she left the building, if she was worrying about him, wondering where he was. Or maybe she had simply overslept and gone out in a hurry. More likely that was it. Ig was her alarm clock, the one who shook her awake and made the coffee. Glenna wasn’t a morning person.
Ig eased the door inward. He had walked out of the place just yesterday morning, and yet looking at it now, he felt as if he’d never lived here and was seeing Glenna’s rooms for the first time. The furniture was cheap yard-sale stuff: a stained secondhand corduroy couch, a split beanbag with synthetic fluff hanging out. There was hardly anything of himself in this place, no photos or personal items, just some paperbacks on the shelf, a few CDs, and a varnished oar with names written on it. The oar was from his last summer at Camp Galilee-he had taught javelin-when he was voted Counselor of the Year. All the other counselors had signed it, as had the kids in his cabin. Ig couldn’t remember how it had wound up here or what he’d meant to do with it.
He looked into the kitchen by way of the pass-through window. An empty pizza box sat on a crumb-littered counter. The sink was piled with chipped dishes. Flies hummed over them.
She had mentioned to him now and then that they needed new dishes, but Ig hadn’t taken the hint. He tried to remember if he had ever bought Glenna anything nice. The only thing that came to mind was beer. When she was in high school, Lee Tourneau had at least been kind enough to steal her a leather jacket. The idea sickened him: that Lee could’ve been a better man than he was in any way.
He didn’t want Lee in his head right now, making him feel unclean. Ig meant to cook himself a light breakfast, pack his things, clean up the kitchen, write a note, and depart-in that order. He didn’t want to be here if someone came looking for him: his parents, his brother, the police, Lee Tourneau. It was safer back at the foundry, where the likelihood of encountering anyone else was low. And anyway, the dim and still atmosphere of the apartment, the humid, weighted air, disagreed with him. He had never realized it was such a dank little place. But then, the shades were pulled down over the windows, Ig didn’t know why. They hadn’t been pulled down in months.
He found a pot, filled it with water, put it on the stovetop, turned the heat to HI. There were just two eggs left. He settled them into the water and left them to boil. Ig made his way down the short corridor to the bedroom, stepping around a skirt and a pair of panties that Glenna had taken off and left in the hall. The shades were down in the bedroom, too, although that was normal. He didn’t bother with the lights, didn’t need to see. He knew where everything was.
He turned to the dresser, then paused, frowning. The drawers were all hanging out, hers and his both. He didn’t understand, never left his drawers that way. He wondered if someone had been through his things-Terry maybe, his brother trying to figure out what had happened to him. But no, Terry wouldn’t play private detective like that. Ig felt little details connecting to make a larger picture: the front door unlocked, the shades pulled down so no one could see into the apartment, the dresser rifled. These things all went together in some way, but before he could figure out how, he heard the toilet splutter and flush in the bathroom.
He was startled, hadn’t seen Glenna’s car in the side parking lot, couldn’t imagine why she might be home. He was opening his mouth to call to her, let her know he was here, when the door opened and Eric Hannity stepped out of the crapper.
He was holding up his pants with one hand and had a magazine in the other, a Rolling Stone. He lifted his gaze and stared at Ig. Ig stared back. Eric let the Rolling Stone slide out of his hand and fall on the floor. He lifted his pants and buckled his belt. For some reason he was wearing blue latex gloves.
“What are you doing here?” Ig asked.
Eric slid a wooden billy club, cherry-stained, out of a loop on his belt. “Well,” Eric said. “Lee wants to talk to you. You had your say the other day, but he hasn’t had his. And you know Lee Tourneau. He likes to get in the last word.”
“He sent you?”
“Just to watch the apartment. See if you came by.” Eric frowned to himself. “It’s the damndest thing about you showing up at the congressman’s. I think those horns of yours fiddle-fucked with my mind. I forgot right until this minute you even had them. Lee says you and me talked yesterday, but I have no idea what we talked about.” He swung the club slowly back and forth in his right hand. “Not that it really matters. Most talk is bullshit. Lee is a talker. I’m more of a doer.”
“What were you going to do?” Ig asked.
“You.”
Ig’s kidneys felt as if they were floating in very cold water. “I’ll scream.”
“Yeah,” said Eric. “I’m kind of looking forward to it.”
Ig sprang for the door. The exit, though, was in the same wall as the door into the bathroom, and Eric lunged to his right to cut him off. Ig put on a burst of speed, shrinking away from Eric and trying to get out the door ahead of him, and at the same time a shrill, terrible thought flashed through his mind: Not going to make it. Eric had his cherry club back over one arm, as if it were a football and he was about to go long.
Ig’s feet snarled in something, and when he tried to step forward, he couldn’t. His ankles caught, and he plunged off balance. Eric came around with the club, and Ig heard the low whistle of it passing behind his head, then a loud, brittle crunch as it caught the door frame and tore away a chunk of wood the size of a baby’s fist.
He got his forearms up just before he crashed to the floor, which probably saved him from breaking his nose for the second time in his life. He looked down between his elbows and saw that his feet had caught in a pair of Glenna’s discarded panties, black silk with little red devils printed on them. He was already kicking them away. He felt Eric stepping up behind him and knew if he tried to stand, he was going to catch that ironwood club in the back of the head. He didn’t try to stand. He grabbed the floor and pitched himself forward in a kind of mad scramble. The officer of the law put his size-thirteen Timberland in Ig’s ass and shoved, and Ig went down on his chin. He slid on his face across the varnished pine floor. His shoulder batted the oar that was leaned against the wall, and it fell over on top of him.
Ig rolled, grabbing blindly at the oar, trying to get it off him so he could stand up. Eric Hannity came at him, raising the club again. His eyes were blind, and his face was blank, the way a face looked when someone was under the influence of the horns. The horns were good at making people do terrible things, and Ig already understood they were an invitation now to Eric to do his worst.
He moved without thinking, holding the oar up in both hands, almost like an offering. His eyes focused on something written across the handle: “To Ig, from your best pal, Lee Tourneau-here’s something for the next time you’re up the creek.”
Eric came down with the club. It snapped the oar in two, at the narrowest point on the handle, and the paddle flipped into the air and swatted him across the face. He grunted and took an off-balance step back. Ig threw the knotty handle at his head. It struck him above the right eye and bounced off, bought enough time for Ig to push himself up off his elbows and onto his feet.
Ig wasn’t ready for Eric to recover as quickly as he did, but Hannity was at him again, as soon as he was up, coming around with the club. Ig jumped back. The head of the club brushed so close it caused the fabric of his T-shirt to snap. It kept going around and hit the screen of the television. The glass spiderwebbed, and there was a loud crack and a white snap of light somewhere inside the monitor.
Ig had backed right up into the coffee table and for an instant he was dangerously close to toppling over it. But he steadied himself while Hannity twisted the club free from the caved-in television screen. Ig turned, stepped onto the coffee table, across to the couch, and over the back, putting it between himself and Eric. In two more steps, Ig was in the kitchenette.
He turned. Eric Hannity stared in at him by way of the pass-through window. Ig crouched, breathing hard, a stitch in one lung. There were two ways out of the kitchen-he could go left or he could go right-but either way would dump him back into the living room with Eric, and he’d have to get by him to reach the stairwell.
“I didn’t come here to kill you, Ig,” Eric Hannity said. “I really just wanted to knock some sense into you. Make an impression on you, learn you to stay the fuck away from Lee Tourneau. But it’s a goddamn thing. I can’t stop thinking that I ought to smash your lunatic skull in like you did to Merrin Williams. I don’t think someone with horns coming out of their head ought to be allowed to live. I think it’d be a fucking service to the state of New Hampshire to kill you.”
The horns. It was the horns working on him.
“I forbid you to hurt me,” Ig said, trying to bend Eric Hannity to his will, putting all the concentration and force behind his horns that he could muster. They throbbed, but painfully, without any of the usual thrill. They didn’t work that way. They wouldn’t play that song, wouldn’t discourage sin, no matter how much Ig’s life depended on it.
“You forbid shit,” Hannity said.
Ig stared at him through the pass-through window, the blood rushing in him, making a dull roar in his ears like water coming to the boil. Water coming to the boil. Ig looked back over his shoulder at the pot on the stovetop. The eggs floated, while bubbles raced up and around them.
“I want to kill you and cut those fucking things off,” Eric said. “Or maybe cut them off and then kill you. I bet you have a kitchen knife that’s big enough. No one will know I did it. After what you did to Merrin Williams, there’s probably a hundred people in this town who want to see you dead. I’d be a hero, even if no one knows it but me. I’d be someone my dad was proud of.”
“Yes,” Ig said, pushing his will behind the horns again. “Come and get me. You know you want to do it. Don’t wait, do it, do it now.”
It was music to Hannity’s ears, and he lunged, not going around the island but coming straight at the pass-through window, his upper lip drawing back to show his teeth, bared in what was either a grimace of fury or a terrible grin. He put a hand on the counter and went up and headfirst through the window, and Ig took the pot by the handle and flung it.
Hannity was fast, got his free hand up to protect his face as half a gallon of scalding water hit him, dousing his arm, spraying past to spatter his big bald head. He screamed and pitched to the kitchen floor, and Ig was already moving, rushing for the door. Hannity still had time to get up and throw the club at him. It hit a lamp on an end table, and the lamp exploded. By then Ig was in the stairwell, flying down the steps, taking them five at a time, as if he had grown not horns but wings.
SOMEWHERE SOUTH OF TOWN, he pulled over to the side of the road and got out to stand on the embankment, holding himself and waiting for the shakes to pass.
The tremors came in furious bursts, racking his limbs, but the longer he stood there, the longer between fits. After a while they had passed completely, leaving him weak and dizzy. He felt as light as a maple wing-and as likely to be sent spinning by the next stiff breeze. The locusts droned, a sci-fi sound: alien death ray.
So he was right, had read the situation correctly. Lee was in some way beyond the reach of the horns. Lee had not forgotten seeing Ig yesterday, as others had forgotten; he knew that Ig was a threat to him. He would be looking to get at Ig before Ig found a way to get at him. Ig needed a plan, which was bad news; so far he hadn’t even come up with a workable plan for breakfast, was light-headed with hunger.
He got back into the car and sat with his hands on the steering wheel, trying to decide where to go now. It came to him, almost randomly, that today was his grandmother’s eightieth birthday and that she was lucky to see it. His next thought was that it was already midday, and his entire family would be at the hospital to sing “Happy Birthday” and eat cake at her bedside, which meant that Mama’s fridge would be undefended. Home was the one place you could always count on for a meal when there was nowhere else to go-wasn’t that some kind of saying?
Of course, visiting hours might be later in the day, he thought, already turning the car back onto the road. There was no guarantee the house would be empty. But would it matter if his family was home? He could walk right past them and they would forget seeing him the moment he left the room. Which raised a good question: Would Eric Hannity forget what had just happened in Glenna’s apartment? After Ig had boiled his head? Ig didn’t know.
He didn’t know if he really could walk right past his family either. He knew he couldn’t walk right past Terry. He needed to deal with Lee Tourneau, yes, but he needed to see to Terry as well. It would be a mistake to leave him out of it, let him slide away back to his life in L.A. The notion of Terry returning to L.A. to play his razzy little show tunes on Hothouse and wink at movie stars appalled Ig and filled him with an inspiring hate. Fucking Terry had a few things to answer for. Wouldn’t it be something to find him home alone? That would be too much to hope for. That would be the luck of the devil.
Ig considered parking on the fire road a quarter of a mile away and hiking around to the back of the house, scaling the wall, sneaking in, but then said fuck it and steered the Gremlin right up the drive. It was too hot for stealth, and he was too hungry.
Terry’s rent-a-Mercedes was the only car in the driveway.
Ig pulled up alongside it and sat with the engine off, listening. A cloud of glittering dust had chased him up the hill and roiled around the Gremlin. He considered the house and the hot, drowsing stillness of the early afternoon. Perhaps Terry had left his car and gone to the hospital with his parents. That was the most likely thing, only Ig didn’t believe it, knew he was in there.
Ig made no effort to be quiet. In fact, when he got out of the car, he slammed the door of the Gremlin and then hesitated, watching the house. He thought he would see movement on the second floor, Terry twitching aside a curtain to look out, see who was there. But he observed no sign of anyone alive inside.
He let himself in. The TV was off in the media room, the computer shut down in his mother’s office. In the kitchen, stainless-steel appliances hushed efficiently. Ig pulled a stool up, opened the door, and ate straight from the refrigerator. He drank half a carton of cold milk in eight hard swallows and then waited out the inevitable dairy headache, a sharp rush of pain behind the horns and a momentary darkening of his vision. When the headache subsided and he could see clearly again, he discovered a platter of deviled eggs under Saran Wrap. His mother had probably made them up for Vera’s birthday, but she wasn’t going to need them. Ig assumed that Vera was having something nutritious through a tube this afternoon. He ate them all, stuffing them into his mouth with his fingers, one after the other. He was sure they were 666 times better than the boiled eggs he’d been making for himself at Glenna’s.
He was turning the plate in his hands like a steering wheel and running his tongue over it when he thought he heard a muttering male voice somewhere above. He froze, listening intently. After a bit he heard the voice again. He set the plate in the sink and took a kitchen knife from the magnetic strip on the wall, the biggest he could find. It came loose with a soft musical chime of steel against steel. He wasn’t sure what he planned to do with it, only that he felt better holding it. After what had happened in his apartment, he thought it was a mistake to go anywhere unarmed. He climbed the stairs. His brother’s old room was at the far end of the long second-floor gallery.
Ig held up in the partly open door with the knife. It had been made over into a guest room a few years earlier and was as coolly impersonal as a room at the Ramada. His brother slept on his back, a hand flung over his eyes. He made a muttering sound of disgust, and smacked his lips. Ig’s gaze swept the night table, and he saw a box of Benadryl. Ig had gotten the asthma, while his brother was allergic to everything: bees, peanuts, pollen, cat hair, New Hampshire, anonymity. The muttering and the mumbling-that was the allergy medication, which always put Terry into a heavy but curiously restless sleep. He made thoughtful humming sounds, as if coming to grave but important conclusions.
Ig crept to the bedside and sat on the night table, holding the knife. Without any heat or rage in him at all, he considered sinking it into Terry’s chest. He could conceptualize the act quite clearly, how he would put a knee on him first to pin him to the bed, find a space between two ribs, and push the knife in with both hands while Terry struggled up toward consciousness.
He wasn’t going to kill Terry. Couldn’t. Ig doubted he could even stab Lee Tourneau to death while he slept.
“Keith Richards,” Terry said quite clearly, and Ig was so surprised he jumped lightly to his feet. “Love the fuckin’ show.”
Ig studied him, waited for him to lift his arm away from his eyes and sit up, blinking blearily, but he wasn’t awake, just talking in his sleep. Talking about Hollywood, about his fucking job, rubbing elbows with famous rock stars, getting big ratings, nailing models. Vera was in the hospital, Ig had gone missing, and Terry was dreaming about the good times in the land of Hothouse. For a moment Ig was breathless with hate, his lungs struggling to fill with oxygen. Terry undoubtedly had a flight back to the West Coast tomorrow; he hated Bumpkinville, never stayed a minute longer than necessary even before Merrin died. Ig saw no reason to let him go back with all his fingers. Terry was so out of it that Ig could take his right hand, the trumpet hand, put it on the night table, and remove the fingers with one whack, all before he woke. If Ig had lost his great love, Terry could get by without his. Maybe he could learn to play the fucking kazoo.
“I hate you, you selfish motherfucker,” Ig whispered, and took his brother’s wrist to draw it away from his eyes, and in that moment-
Terry twitches awake and glances blearily around and doesn’t know where he is. An unfamiliar car, on a road he doesn’t recognize, rain coming down so hard the wipers can’t keep up, the nightworld beyond a blur of storm-lashed trees and boiling black sky. He scrubs his face with one hand, trying to clear his head, and looks over and up, for some reason expecting to see his little brother sitting beside him, but instead there’s Lee Tourneau, steering them into darkness.
The rest of the night begins to come back to him, facts falling into place, in no particular order, like chips dropping through the pins in a game of Plinko. He has something in his left hand-a pinched-out joint, and not some little twist of grass either, but a thick blunt of Tennessee Valley weed, the size of his thumb. Tonight he has been to two bars and a bonfire on the sandbar under the Old Fair Road Bridge, making the rounds with Lee. He has smoked too much and drunk too much and knows he will repent of it in the morning. In the morning he has to drive Ig to the airport, because little brother has a flight to catch for Merrie Olde England, God save the queen. The morning is already only a few hours away. Terry is currently in no shape to drive anyone, and when he closes his eyes, it feels as if Lee’s Cadillac is sliding to the left, like a pat of butter greasing its way across a pan tipped on its side. It is this motion-sick sensation that woke him from his doze.
He sits up, forcing himself to concentrate on their surroundings. It looks as if they are on the meandering country highway that circumscribes the town, making a three-quarter crescent along Gideon’s outer limits, but that doesn’t make any sense-there’s nothing out here except the old foundry and The Pit, and they wouldn’t have a reason to go to either place. After they left the sandbar, Terry had assumed that Lee was taking him home, and was glad of it. At the thought of his own bed, of crisp white sheets and his puffy down comforter, he had gone almost shivery with pleasure. The best thing about being home is waking up in his old room, in his old bed, with the smell of coffee brewing downstairs and sunlight showing around the shades, the whole bright day waiting for him to step into it. The rest of Gideon, though, Terry is just as glad to have left behind.
Tonight is a case in point, a perfect illustration of what he hasn’t been missing. Terry spent an hour at the bonfire without feeling in any way a part of it, might as well have been watching from behind glass-the pickup trucks parked on the embankment, the drunken friends wrestling in the shallows while their girls whooped it up, fucking Judas Coyne on the boom box, a guy whose idea of musical complexity is a song with four power chords instead of three. Life among the rednecks. When the thunder began to roll overhead and the first hot, fat drops of rain began to fall, Terry counted it a lucky break. Terry doesn’t know how his father has lived here for twenty years. Terry can barely get through seventy-two hours of the place.
His primary coping mechanism is currently cupped in his left hand, and even knowing he’s already past his limit, a part of him itches to light up and have another toke. He would, too, if it were anyone but Lee Tourneau sitting next to him. Not that Lee would complain or give him so much as a dirty look, but Lee is an aide to a War on Drugs congressman, a Super-Christian Family Values man, and it would be his ass if he got pulled over in a car filled with ganja smoke.
Lee had come by the house around six-thirty to say good-bye to Ig. He stuck around to play Texas Hold ’ Em with Lee and Ig and Terry and Derrick Perrish, and Ig won every hand, took them all for three hundred bucks. “There,” Terry said, throwing a fistful of twenties at his younger brother. “When you and Merrin are having your postcoital bottle of champagne, think fondly of us. We paid for it.” Ig had laughed and looked delighted with himself and embarrassed and gotten up. He had kissed his father and then he had kissed Terry, too, on the side of the head, an unexpected gesture that caused Terry to twitch in surprise. “Keep your tongue out of my ear,” Terry said, and Ig laughed again and was gone.
“And what are you doing with the rest of your evening?” Lee had asked as Ig departed, and Terry said, “I dunno-I was going to see if Family Guy was on. What about you? Anything happening around town?” Two hours later they were at the sandbar and a friend from high school whose name Terry couldn’t exactly remember was handing him a joint.
They had gone out, ostensibly, to have some drinks and say hello to the old crowd, but there on the sandbar, standing back from the bonfire, Lee told Terry that the congressman loved the show and wanted to meet him sometime. Terry took it in stride, tipped the neck of his beer bottle to Lee, and said definitely, they ought to make it happen one of these days. He had thought it was possible Lee would work his way around to something along those lines and does not hold it against him. Lee has a job to do, same as anyone else, same as Terry. And Lee’s job involves doing a lot of good; Terry knows about his work with Habitat for Humanity, knows Lee gives time every summer to work with poor and disadvantaged urban kids at Camp Galilee, Ig right at his side. Being around Lee and Ig has, for years, made Terry feel a little guilty. He never wanted to save the world himself. The only thing Terry ever wanted was for someone to pay him for goofing off with his horn. Well, that and maybe a girl who likes to party-not an L.A. model, not someone hung up on her cell phone and her car. Just someone fun and real and a little dirty in the sack. Someone East Coast, with working-class jeans and a few CDs by Foreigner. He’s got the sweet gig, so he’s halfway to happiness anyway.
“Fuck we doing out here?” Terry asks now, staring into the rain. “Thought we were calling it a night.”
Lee says, “I thought you called it a night about five minutes ago. I’m pretty sure I heard you snoring. I can’t wait to tell people that the Terry Perrish drooled all over my front seat. That’ll impress the honeys. It’s like my own little piece of TV history.”
Terry opens his mouth for a comeback-he will clear more than two million dollars this year, partly on the strength of a sublime gift for verbally cutting other wiseasses down-and finds he has nothing to say, his a perfectly empty head. He shows Lee Tourneau his middle finger instead.
“You think Ig and Merrin are still at The Pit?” Terry asks. The place will be coming up on the right at any moment.
“We’ll see,” Lee says. “Be there in another minute.”
“Are you screwing with me? We don’t want to go see them. I know they don’t want to see us. It’s their last night.”
Lee gives Terry a surprised, curious look out of the corner of his good eye. “How do you know? Did she tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
“That she’s breaking up with him. This is their last night.”
A statement that instantly jolts Terry out of his baked, thoughtless state, as startling as sitting down on a tack.
“The fuck you mean?”
“She thinks they got involved too young. She wants to see other guys.”
Terry marvels at the news, recoils from it, is baffled by it. He thoughtlessly lifts the joint cupped in his hand to his lips, then remembers it isn’t lit.
“You really didn’t know?” Lee asks.
“I just meant it’s their last night before Ig goes to England.”
“Oh.”
Terry stares blankly into the rain, which is coming down so hard the wipers can’t keep up, so it’s like being in a car wash, the way the water pours down the glass. He cannot imagine Ig without Merrin, cannot imagine who that person would be. He’s dazed by the news, so it takes an interminable time before the obvious question occurs to him.
“How do you know all this?”
“She talked to me about it,” Lee says. “She’s scared to hurt him. I’ve been in Boston a lot this summer, doing things for the congressman, and she’s there, too, so we get together and talk sometimes. I’ve probably seen her more than Ig has over the last month.”
Terry looks out at the underwater world, sees a reddish haze of light approaching on the right. They’re almost there.
“So why would you want to come by here now?”
“She said she’d call me if she needed a ride home,” Lee says. “And she hasn’t called.”
“So she doesn’t need you, then.”
“But she might not call if she’s upset. I just want to see if Ig’s car is still there or not. Parking’s up front. We don’t even need to pull in.”
Terry doesn’t follow Lee, can’t figure out why he would want to drive by and look for Ig’s car. He also can’t imagine Merrin wanting to be around either of them if things have ended badly.
But Lee is already slowing, turning his head to look past Terry at the parking lot on the right.
“I don’t…” Lee says, talking to himself now. “It’s not…I don’t think she would’ve gone home with him…” Sounding worried, almost.
Terry is the one who sees her, Merrin standing in the rain out by the side of the road, under a walnut with a great spreading crown. “There. Lee, right there.”
She seems to spot them at the same moment and steps out from beneath the tree, one arm raised. With the water coming down the passenger-side window, Terry sees her as through carnival glass, an impressionistic painting of a girl with copper-wire hair, holding aloft what at first seems to be a white votary candle. As they grind to a stop and she moves to the side of the car, Terry sees she is merely holding up a finger to get their attention as she breaks from cover and runs barefoot through the rain, holding her black heels in one hand.
The Caddy is a two-door, and even before Lee tells him to get in back, Terry is unbuckling his belt and turning to loft himself over the front seat. As he is about to pitch into the rear, Lee thuds an elbow into his ass, tipping him off balance, and instead of landing in the seat, Terry dives into the foot well. For God knows what reason, there’s a metal toolbox on the floor, and Terry catches it on the temple, flinches at a sharp stab of pain. He pulls himself up onto the seat and pushes the ball of his hand hard against his banged-up head. It was a mistake to go leaping around, has set off the strongest wave of motion sickness yet, so it feels as if the whole car has been picked up off the ground by a giant who is shaking it slowly, like a cup with dice in it. Terry shuts his eyes, fighting to suppress that sudden nauseating sensation of reckless motion.
By the time things have settled enough for him to risk looking around, Merrin is in the car and Lee Tourneau is turned sideways to face her. Terry looks at his palm and sees a bright drop of blood. He scraped himself good, although that initial sharp pain has already mostly subsided, leaving behind a dull ache. He wipes the blood on his pant leg and looks up.
It is easy to see that Merrin has only just stopped crying. She is pale and shaking, like someone either recovering from or beginning to succumb to illness, and her first attempt at a smile is a miserable thing to look at.
“Thanks for picking me up,” she says. “You just saved my life.”
“Where’s Ig?” Terry asks.
Merrin glances back at him but has trouble making eye contact, and Terry is immediately sorry he asked.
“I d-don’t know. He left.”
Lee says, “You told him?”
Merrin’s chin wrinkles, and she turns to face forward. She looks out the window at The Pit and doesn’t reply.
“How’d he take it?” Lee asks.
Terry can see her face reflected in the glass, can see her biting her lips and struggling not to cry. Her answer is “Can we just go?”
Lee nods and puts on his blinker, then pulls a U-ie in the rain.
Terry wants to touch her shoulder, wants to reassure her in some way, let her know that whatever happened in The Pit, he doesn’t hate her or hold it against her. But Terry doesn’t touch her, won’t touch her, never touches her. In a decade of knowing her, he has kept her at a friendly distance, even in his imagination, has never once considered allowing her into his sexual fantasies. There would be no harm in such a thing, yet he senses he would be placing something at risk all the same. What he would be placing at risk, he cannot say. To Terry the word “soul” first refers to a kind of music.
Instead he says, “Hey, girl, you want my jacket?” Because she is shivering helplessly and steadily in her wet clothes.
For the first time, Lee seems to notice the way she’s trembling as well-which is funny, since he keeps shooting her glances, looking at her as much as he’s looking at the road-and turns down the air conditioner.
“’S all right,” she says, but Terry already has his coat off and is handing it forward. She spreads it across her legs. “Thank you, Terry,” she says in a small voice, and then, “You m-must think-”
“I don’t think anything,” Terry says. “So relax.”
“Ig-”
“I’m sure Ig is fine. Don’t you worry yourself.”
She gives him a pained, grateful smile and then leans back toward him and says, “Are you all right?” She reaches out to lightly touch his brow, where he went face-first into Lee’s toolbox. He flinches almost instinctively from her touch. She draws her fingers back, blood on the tips of them, looks at her hand, then back at him. “You ought to have some g-gauze for that.”
“It’s fine. No worries,” Terry says.
She nods and turns away, and immediately the smile is gone and her eyes come unfocused, staring at nothing anyone else can see. She is folding something in her hands, over and over, and unfolding it, and then starting up again. A tie, Ig’s tie. This is somehow worse than seeing her in tears, and Terry has to look away. Being stoned no longer feels good in the slightest. He would like to lie motionless somewhere and close his eyes for a few minutes. Nap some and wake up fresh and himself again. The night has turned rancid on him, very quickly, and he wants someone to blame, someone to be irritated with. He settles on Ig.
It irritates him that Ig would peel off, leave her standing in the rain, an act so immature it’s laughable. Laughable but not surprising. Merrin has been a lover, a comfort blanket, a guidance counselor, a defensive barrier against the world, and a best friend to Ig. Sometimes it seems they have been married since Ig was fifteen. But for all that, it began as and always was a high-school relationship. Terry is sure Ig has never even kissed another girl, let alone fucked one, and he has wished for a while now that his brother had more experience. Not because Terry doesn’t want him to be with Merrin but because…well, because. Because love requires context. Because first relationships are by their very nature immature. So Merrin wanted them both to have a chance to grow up. So what?
Tomorrow morning, on the drive to Logan Airport, Terry will have Ig alone and a chance to set him straight about a couple of things. He will tell Ig that his ideas about Merrin, about their relationship-that it was meant to be, that she was more perfect than other girls, that their love was more perfect than other loves, that together they dealt in small miracles-was a suffocating trap. If Ig hated Merrin now, it was only because he had discovered she was a real person, with failings and needs and a desire to live in the world, not in Ig’s daydreams. That she loved him enough to let him go, and he had to be willing to do the same, that if you loved someone, you could set them free, and-fuck, that was a Sting song.
“Merrin, are you all right?” Lee asks. She is still shivering almost convulsively.
“No. Y-yes. I-Lee, please pull over. Pull over here.” These last three words said with an urgent clarity.
The road to the old foundry is coming up on the right, quickly, too quickly to turn in, really, but Lee turns in anyway. Terry plants one hand on the back of Merrin’s seat and bites down on a cry. The passenger-side tires catch soft gravel and fling it into the trees, leave a deep four-foot-long gouge.
Brush scrapes at the bumper. The Cadillac thumps and bangs in the ruts, still going too fast, the highway disappearing behind them. Up ahead is a chain stretched across the road. Lee brakes hard, the steering wheel shimmying in his hands, back end slewing. The car stops with the headlights touching the chain, actually stretching it across the grille. Merrin opens her door, sticks her head out, and retches. Once. Again. Fucking Ig; right now Terry hates him.
He’s not feeling too high on Lee either, flinging the car around like that. They’ve definitely come to a stop, and yet a part of Terry feels as if they’re still moving, still sliding to the side. If he had his joint on hand, he’d hurl it out the window-the thought of putting the thing in his mouth repulses him, would be like swallowing a live cockroach-only he doesn’t know what he did with it, doesn’t seem to be holding it anymore. He touches his scraped and tender temple again and winces.
Rain taps slowly on the windshield. Except it isn’t rain, not anymore. Just water drops blowing from the branches above. Not five minutes before, the torrent was coming down so hard that the rain bounced when it hit the road, but in the usual way of summer thundershowers it has blown away as quickly as it blew in.
Lee gets out and goes around the side of the car and crouches beside her. He murmurs something to her, his voice calm, reasonable. However she answers him, he doesn’t like it. He repeats his offer, and this time her reply is audible, her tone unfriendly. “No, Lee. I just want to go home and get into some dry things and be by myself.”
Lee stands up, walks around to the trunk, pops it, fishes something out of it. A gym bag.
“Got gym clothes. Shirt. Pants. They’re dry and warm. Plus, there’s no sick on them.”
She thanks Lee and climbs out into the humid, buggy, wet, blowing night, hangs Terry’s sport coat over her shoulders. Merrin reaches for the bag, but for a moment Lee doesn’t release it.
“You had to do it, you know. It was crazy, thinking that you could-that either of you could-”
“I just want to change, okay?”
Pulling the gym bag away from him and starting down the road, Merrin crosses through the headlights, her skirt swishing around her legs and her blouse rendered briefly transparent by the intense glare. Terry catches himself staring, forces himself to look away, and so sees Lee staring as well. He wonders, for the first time, if maybe good old Lee Tourneau is carrying a little bit of a torch for Merrin Williams-or at least a hard-on. Merrin continues down the road, walking at first in the tunnel of brightness carved out by the headlights, then stepping off the gravel and into darkness. It is the last time Terry will ever see her alive.
Lee stands in the open passenger-side door, staring after her, like he doesn’t know whether to get back in the car or not. Terry wants to tell him to sit down but can’t summon up the will or the energy. Terry stares after her himself for a short time, and then he can’t hack it. He doesn’t like the way the night seems to be breathing, swelling and contracting. The headlights are catching one corner of the open field below the foundry, and he doesn’t like the way the wet grass lashes at the darkness, in constant uneasy motion. He can hear it through the open door. It hisses, like the snake exhibit at the zoo. Also: He still has a faint but stomach-turning sensation of sideways motion, of sliding helplessly away toward someplace he doesn’t want to go. The ache in his right temple isn’t helping either. He picks up his feet and lies down on the backseat.
That’s better. The mottled brown upholstery is moving, too, like billows of slow-moving cream in a lightly stirred cup of coffee, but that’s okay, a good thing to see when you’re stoned, a safe thing. Not like wet grass swaying ecstatically in the night.
He needs something to think about, something soothing, needs a daydream to ease his queasy mind. Production is lining up guests for next season, the usual mix of what’s happening and what happened, black and white, Mos Def and Def Leppard, the Eels and the Crowes and every other animal in the pop-culture bestiary, but what Terry is really excited about is Keith Richards, who was in the Viper Room with Johnny Depp a few months ago and told Terry he thought the show was fuckin’ darlin’ and said he’d be de-fuckin’-lighted to be on, anytime, all roit, just fuckin’ ask already, and wot took you so fuckin’ long? That’d be a hell of a thing, get Richards on, give him the whole last half hour. The execs at Fox hate when Terry dumps the usual format and turns the show into a concert-he has been told it sends half a million viewers right over to Letterman-but as far as Terry is concerned, the execs can suck Keith Richards’s stringy, overworked cock.
In a while he begins to drift. Perrish the Thought is performing with Keith Richards in front of a festival crowd, maybe eighty thousand people, who have, for some reason, gathered at the old foundry. They’re playing “Sympathy for the Devil,” and Terry has agreed to do the lead vocal, because Mick is in London. Terry glides toward the mike and tells the leaping, ecstatic crowd that he is a man of wealth and taste, which is a line from the song but which is also true. Then Keith Richards lifts his Telecaster and plays the old devil blues. His ragged-ass, broken-bottle guitar solo is an unlikely lullaby, but good enough to ease Terry Perrish down into fitful sleep.
He wakes once, briefly, when they’re back on the road, the Caddy rushing along a smooth ribbon of night, Lee behind the wheel and the passenger seat empty. Terry has his sport coat back, spread carefully across his legs and lap, something Merrin must’ve done when she returned to the car, a typically thoughtful gesture. Although, the coat is soaking wet and dirty and there’s something heavy holding it in his lap, lying on top of it. Terry gropes for it, picks up a wet stone the size and shape of an ostrich egg, wiry strands of grass and muck on it. That stone means something-Merrin stuck it there for a reason-but Terry is too dazed and muzzy-headed to get the joke. He puts the rock on the floor. It’s got sticky stuff on it, like snail guts, and Terry wipes his fingers on his shirt, straightens his sport coat across his thighs, and settles back down.
His left temple is still throbbing where he banged it diving in back-feels sore and raw-and when he presses the back of his left hand to it, he sees he is bleeding again.
“Did Merrin get off okay?” Terry asks.
“What?” Lee says.
“Merrin? Did we take care of her?”
Lee drives for a while without reply. Then he says, “Yes. Yes, we did.”
Terry nods, satisfied, and says, “She’s a good kid. I hope her and Ig work it out.”
Lee just drives.
Terry feels himself sliding back into his dreams of being onstage with Keith Richards, before an ecstatic crowd that is performing for him as much as he is performing for them. But then, tottering on the very edge of consciousness, he hears himself ask a question he didn’t know was even on his mind.
“What’s with the rock?”
Lee says, “Evidence.”
Terry nods to himself-this seems a reasonable answer-and says, “Good. Let’s stay out of jail if we can.”
Lee laughs, a harsh, wet, coughlike sound-cat with a hairball in its throat-and it comes to Terry that he has never heard the guy laugh before and doesn’t much like it. Then Terry is gone, settling himself back into unconsciousness. This time, though, there are no dreams waiting for him, and he frowns in his sleep, wearing the look of a man trying to work out a nagging clue in a crossword puzzle, something he should know the answer to.
Sometime later he opens his eyes and realizes the car isn’t moving. The Caddy has, in fact, been parked for a while. He has no idea how he can know this, only that he does.
The light is different. It isn’t morning yet, but the night is in retreat, has already scooped up most of its stars and put them away. Fat, pale, mountainous clouds, the shreds of last night’s thunderstorm, drift vividly against a backdrop of darkness. Terry has a good view of the sky, staring up through one of the side windows. He can smell dawn, a fragrance of rain-saturated grass and warming earth. When he sits up, he sees that Lee has left the driver’s-side door ajar.
He reaches on the floor for his sport coat. It must be down there somewhere; he assumes it slipped off his lap while he was asleep. There’s the toolbox, but no coat. The driver’s-side seat is folded forward, and Terry climbs out.
His spine cracks as he puts his arms out to his sides and stretches his back, and then he goes still-arms reaching out into the night like a man nailed to an invisible cross.
Lee sits smoking on the steps of his mother’s house. His house now, Terry remembers, Lee’s mother six weeks in the ground. Terry can’t see Lee’s face, only the orange coal of his Winston. For no reason Terry can put his finger on, the sight of Lee waiting for him there on the porch steps unsettles him.
“Some night,” Terry says.
“It isn’t over yet.” Lee inhales, and the coal brightens, and for a moment Terry can see part of Lee’s face, the bad part, the part with the dead eye in it. In the morning gloom, that eye is white and blind, a glass sphere filled with smoke. “How’s your head?”
Terry reaches up to touch the scrape on his temple, then drops his hand. “Fine. No big deal.”
“I had an accident, too.”
“What accident? You okay?”
“I am. But Merrin isn’t.”
“What do you mean?” Abruptly, Terry is aware of the clammy-sick hangover sweat on his body, a kind of unpleasant dewy sensation. He looks down at himself and sees black finger smears on his shirt, mud or something, has only a vague memory of wiping his hand on himself. When he looks back at Lee, he is suddenly afraid to hear what he has to say.
“It really was an accident,” Lee said. “I didn’t know how serious it was until it was too late to help her.”
Terry stares, waiting on the punch line. “You’re moving too fast, buddy. What happened?”
“That’s what we have to figure out. You and me. That’s what I want to talk about. We need to have our story straight, before they find her.”
Terry does the reasonable thing and laughs. Lee has a famously dry, flat sense of humor, and if the sun was up and Terry wasn’t so dreadfully sick, he might appreciate it. Terry’s right hand, however, doesn’t think Lee is funny. Terry’s right hand has, all on its own, begun to pat Terry’s pockets, feeling for his cell phone.
Lee says softly, “Terry. I know this is terrible. But I’m not kidding. We’re in a real mess here. Neither of us is to blame-this is no one’s fault-but we’re in about the most awful trouble two people can be in. It was an accident, but they’ll say we killed her.”
Terry wants to laugh again. Instead he says, “Stop it.”
“I can’t. You need to hear this.”
“She is not dead.”
Lee sucks at his cigarette, and the coal brightens, and the eye of pale smoke stares at Terry. “She was drunk, and she came on to me. I guess it was her way of getting even with Ig. She had her clothes off, and she was all over me, and when I pushed her away-I didn’t mean to. She fell over a root or something and landed on a rock. I walked away from her, and when I came back-just awful. I don’t know if you’ll believe this, but I’d rather take out my other eye than have ever caused her pain.”
Terry’s next breath is a lungful not of oxygen but of terror; he inhales a chestful of it, as if it were a gas, an airborne toxin. There is a churning feeling in both stomach and head. There is a feeling of the ground tilting underfoot. He has to call someone. He has to find his phone. He has to get help; this is a situation that calls for calm authorities with experience handling emergencies. He turns to the car, leans into the backseat looking for his sport coat. His cell phone must be in his coat. But the coat isn’t on the floor where he thought it would be. It isn’t in the front seat either.
Lee’s hand on the nape of his neck causes Terry to jump upright, crying out, a soft sobbing shout, and to pull away from him.
“Terry,” Lee says. “We need to figure out what we’re going to say.”
“There’s nothing to figure out. I need my phone.”
“You can use the one in the house if you want.”
Terry stiff-arms Lee, pushing him aside, and marches toward the porch. Lee pitches his cigarette and follows, in no particular hurry.
“You want to call the cops, I won’t stop you. I’ll go with you to meet them at the foundry,” Lee says, “show them where to find her. But you better know what I’m going to tell them before you pick up the phone, Terry.”
Terry takes the steps in two bounding leaps, crosses the porch, jerks open the screen door, and pushes the front door in. He takes a stumbling step into a dark front hall. If there’s a phone here, he can’t see it in all the shadows. The kitchen is through to the left.
“We were all so drunk,” Lee says. “We were drunk, and you were high. She was the worst, though. That’s what I’ll tell them first. She was coming on to the both of us from the moment she got in the car. Ig called her a whore, and she was determined to prove him right.”
Terry is only half listening. He moves swiftly through a small formal dining room, barking his knee on a straight-backed chair, stumbling, then going on, into the kitchen. Lee comes after him, his voice unbearably calm.
“She told us to pull over so she could change out of her wet clothes, and then she put on a show, standing in the headlights. The whole time you didn’t say anything, just watching her, listening to her talk about how Iggy had a few things coming to him for the way he treated her. She made out with me a while, and then she went to work on you. She was so drunk she couldn’t see how angry you were. In the middle of giving you her little lap dance, she started talking about all the money she could get, selling the story of Terry Perrish’s private gang bang to the tabloids. That it would be worth doing to get even with Ig, just to see his face. That was when you hit her. You hit her before I knew what was happening.”
Terry is in the kitchen, at the counter, his hand on the beige phone, but he doesn’t pick it up. For the first time, he turns his head and looks back at tall, wiry Lee with his crown of golden-white hair, and his terrible, mysterious white eye. Terry puts a hand in the center of Lee’s chest and shoves him hard enough to slam him back into the wall. The windows rattle. Lee doesn’t look too upset.
“No one’s going to believe that horseshit.”
“Who knows what they’ll believe?” Lee Tourneau says. “It’s your fingerprints on the rock.”
Terry pulls Lee by the shirt, away from the wall, and smashes him into it again, pins him there with his right hand. A spoon falls from the counter, strikes the floor, rings like a chime. Lee regards him, unperturbed.
“You dropped that big fat joint you were smoking right next to the body. And she’s the one gave you that scrape,” Lee says. “Fighting you. After she was dead, you cleaned yourself off with her underwear. It’s your blood all over her panties.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Terry asks. The word “panties” also seems to ring in the air, just like the spoon.
“The scrape on your temple. I cleaned it with her underwear, while you were passed out. I need you to understand the situation, Terry. You’re in this thing as much as me. Maybe more.”
Terry brings the left hand back, squeezing his fingers into a fist, then catches himself. There is a kind of eagerness in Lee’s face, a bright-eyed anticipation, his breathing shallow and fast. Terry doesn’t hit him.
“What are you waiting for?” Lee asks. “Do it.”
Terry has never hit another man in anger in his life; he is almost thirty years old and has never thrown a punch. He has never even been in a school-yard brawl. Everyone in school liked him.
“If you hurt me in any way at all, I’ll call the police myself. That’ll make things look even better for me. I can say I tried to defend her.”
Terry takes an unsteady step back from him and lowers his hand. “I’m going. You ought to get yourself a lawyer. I know I’m going to be talking to mine inside of twenty minutes. Where’s my coat?”
“With the stone. And her panties. In a safe place. Not here. I stopped somewhere on the way home. You told me to collect the evidence and get rid of it, but I didn’t get rid of it-”
“Shut the fuck up-”
“-because I thought you might try to put it all on me. Go ahead, Terry. Call them. But I promise if you lay this shit on me, I’ll drag you down with me. Up to you. You just got Hothouse. You’re going back to L.A. in two days to hang with movie stars and underwear models. But go ahead and do the right thing. Satisfy your conscience. Just remember, no one will believe you, not even your own brother, who will hate you forever for killing his best girl when you were drunk and stoned. He might not believe it at first, but give him time. You’ll have twenty years in jail to pat yourself on the back for your upstanding morals. For the love of God, Terry. She’s been dead for four hours already. If you wanted to look clean, you should’ve reported it while the body was still warm. Now it’s bound to look like you at least thought about hiding it.”
“I’ll kill you,” Terry whispered.
“Sure,” Lee said. “Okay. Then you’ve got two bodies to explain. Knock yourself out.”
Terry turns away, stares desperately at the phone on the counter, feeling like if he doesn’t pick it up and call someone in the next few moments, every good thing in his life will be taken away from him. And yet he can’t seem to lift his arm. He is like a castaway on a desert island, watching an airplane glitter in the sky forty thousand feet overhead, with no way to signal it and his last chance at rescue sailing away.
“Or,” Lee says, “the other way it could’ve happened, if it wasn’t you and it wasn’t me, is she was killed by a random stranger. It happens all the time. It’s like every Dateline ever. No one saw us pick her up. No one saw us turn in to the foundry. As far as the world knows, you and I drove back to my place after the bonfire and played cards and passed out in front of the two A.M. SportsCenter. My house is on the exact opposite side of town from The Pit. There’s no reason we would’ve gone out there.”
Terry’s chest is tight, and his breath is short, and he thinks, randomly, that this must be how Ig feels when he’s in the grip of one of his asthma attacks. Funny how he can’t get his arm up to reach for the phone.
“There. I’ve said my piece. Basically, it comes down to this: You can live life as a cripple or a coward. What happens now is up to you. Trust me, though. Cowards have more fun.”
Terry doesn’t move, doesn’t reply, and can’t look at Lee. His pulse trip-traps in his wrist.
“Tell you what,” Lee says, speaking in a tone of soothing reason. “If you took a drug test right now, you’d fail. You don’t want to go to the cops like this. You’ve had three hours’ sleep, tops, and you aren’t thinking clear. She’s been dead all night, Terry. Why don’t you give yourself the morning to think about this thing? They might not find her for days. Don’t rush into anything you can’t take back. Wait until you’re sure you know what you want to do.”
This is a dreadful thing to hear-they might not find her for days-a statement that brings to mind a vivid image of Merrin lying amid ferns and wet grass, with rainwater in her eyes and a beetle crawling through her hair. This is followed by the memory of Merrin in the passenger seat, shivering in her wet clothes, looking back at him with shy, unhappy eyes. Thanks for picking me up. You just saved my life.
“I want to go home,” Terry says. He means it to sound belligerent, hard-assed, righteous, but instead it comes out in a cracked whisper.
“Sure,” Lee says. “I’ll drive you. But let me get you one of my shirts before we go. You’ve got her blood all over that one.” He gestures toward the filth Terry rubbed off on the front of his shirt, which only now, in the pearly, opalescent light of dawn, can be identified as dried blood.
IG SAW IT ALL IN A TOUCH, just as if he had sat in the car with them, the whole way to the old foundry-saw it all, and more besides. He saw the desperate and pleading conversation Terry had with Lee, thirty hours later, in Lee’s kitchen. It was a day of impossible sunshine and unseasonably cool weather; kids shouted in the street, some teenagers splashed in a swimming pool next door. It was almost too jarring, trying to match the bright normalcy of the morning with the idea that Ig was locked up and Merrin was in a refrigerated cabinet in a morgue somewhere. Lee stood leaning against a kitchen counter, watching impassively, while Terry leaped from thought to thought and emotion to emotion, his voice sometimes strangled with rage, sometimes with misery. Lee waited for him to spend his energy, then said, They’re going to let your brother go. Be cool. The forensic evidence won’t match, and they’ll have to publicly clear him. He was passing a golden pear from hand to hand.
What forensic evidence?
Shoe prints, Lee said. Tire prints. Who knows what else? Blood, I guess. She might’ve scratched me. My blood won’t match with Ig, and there’s no reason they’d ever test me. Or at least you better hope they don’t test me. You wait. They’ll let him go inside of eight hours, and he’ll be clear by the end of the week. You just need to stay quiet a while longer, and you and him will both be out of this thing.
They’re saying she was raped, Terry said. You didn’t tell me you raped her.
I didn’t. It’s only rape if she doesn’t want you to do it, Lee said, and he lifted the pear and took a wet bite.
Worse than that was the glimpse Ig had of what Terry had attempted to do five months later, sitting in his garage, in the driver’s seat of his Viper, the windows down and the garage door shut and the engine running. Terry was on the twitching edge of unconsciousness, exhaust boiling up around him, when the garage door rumbled open behind him. His housekeeper had never once in her life shown up on a Saturday morning, but there she was, gaping at Terry through the driver’s-side window, clutching his dry cleaning to her chest. She was a fifty-year-old Mexican immigrant and understood English well enough, but it was unlikely she could read the part of the folded note sticking out of Terry’s shirt pocket:
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN,
Last year my brother, Ignatius Perrish, was taken into custody under suspicion of assaulting and murdering Merrin Williams, his closest friend. HE IS INNOCENT OF ALL CHARGES. Merrin, who was my friend, too, was assaulted and murdered by Lee Tourneau. I know because I was present, and although I did not assist him in the crime, I am complicit in covering it up, and I cannot live with myself another-
But Ig didn’t get any further than that, dropped Terry’s hand, reacting as if he’d been zapped by static electricity. Terry’s eyes opened, his pupils huge in the darkness.
“Mom?” Terry said in a doped, heavy voice. It was dark in the room, dark enough so Ig doubted he could make out anything more than the vague shape of him standing there. Ig held his hand behind his back, squeezing the hilt of the knife.
Ig opened his mouth to say something; he meant to tell Terry to go back to sleep, which was the most absurd thing he could say, except for any other thing. But as he spoke, he felt a throb of blood surge up into the horns, and the voice that came from his mouth was not his own, but his mother’s. Nor was it an imitation, a conscious act of mimicry. It was her. “Go back to sleep, Terry,” she said.
Ig was so surprised at himself he stepped back and thumped a hip into the night table. A glass of water clashed softly against the lamp. Terry shut his eyes again but began to stir feebly, as if in another moment he might sit up.
“Mom,” he said. “What time is it?”
Ig stared down at his brother, not wondering how he’d done it-how he had summoned Lydia’s voice-but only if he could do it again. He already knew how he’d done it. The devil could, of course, speak in the voice of loved ones, telling them the things they most wanted to hear. The gift of tongues…the devil’s favorite trick.
“Shh,” Ig said, and the horns were filled with pressure, and his voice was the voice of Lydia Perrish. It was easy-he didn’t even have to think about it. “Shh, dear. You don’t need to do anything. You don’t need to get up. Rest. Take care of yourself.”
Terry sighed and rolled away from Ig, turning a shoulder to him.
Ig had been prepared for anything except to feel sympathy for Terry. There was no cheapening what Merrin had been put through, but in a sense-in a sense Ig had lost his brother that night, too.
He crouched in the darkness, looking at Terry lying on his side under the sheets, and thought for a spell, considering this newest manifestation of his powers. Finally he opened his mouth, and Lydia said, “You should go home tomorrow. Get back to your life, dear. You’ve got rehearsals. You’ve got things you need to do. Don’t you worry about Grandma. Grandma is going to be fine.”
“What about Ig?” Terry asked. He spoke in a low murmur, with his back turned. “Shouldn’t I stay until we know where Ig went? I’m worried.”
“Maybe he needs to be alone right now,” Ig said in his mother’s voice. “You know what time of year it is. I’m sure he’s fine and would want you to take care of work. You need to think about yourself-for once. Straight back to L.A. tomorrow, Terry.” Making it an order, pushing the weight of his willpower behind the horns so they tingled with delight.
“Straight back,” Terry said. “Okay.”
Ig retreated, backing for the door, for daylight.
Terry spoke again, before Ig could go.
“Love you,” he said.
Ig held up in the door, his pulse tripping strangely in his throat, his breath short.
“I love you, too, Terry,” he said, and gently shut the door between them.
IN THE AFTERNOON IG DROVE up the highway to a small country grocery. He picked out some cheese and pepperoni, brown mustard, two loaves of bread, two bottles of red table wine, and a corkscrew.
The shopkeeper was an old man with a scholarly look, in granny glasses and a sweater that buttoned up the front. He slumped behind the counter with his chin on his fist, leafing through the New York Review of Books. He glanced at Ig without interest and began to ring up his purchases.
As he pressed the keys of the cash register, he confessed to Ig that his wife of forty years had Alzheimer’s, and he had been thinking about luring her to the basement stairs and pushing her down them. He felt sure a broken neck would be ruled an accident. Wendy had loved him with her body, and written him letters every week while he was in the army, and given him two fine daughters, but he was tired of listening to her rave and washing her, and he wanted to go live with Sally, an old friend, in Boca Raton. When his wife died, he could collect an insurance payment of almost three-quarters of a million dollars, and then there would be golf and tennis and good meals with Sally for however many years he had left. He wanted to know what Ig thought about it. Ig said he thought he would burn in hell. The shopkeeper shrugged and said of course-that went without saying.
He spoke to Ig in Russian, and it was in this language that Ig gave his reply, although he didn’t know Russian, had never studied it. Yet he was entirely unsurprised by his sudden, undeserved fluency. After speaking to Terry in their mother’s voice, it seemed a small enough thing. Besides: The language of sin was universal, the original Esperanto.
Ig started away from the cash register, thinking how he’d fooled Terry, how something in him had been able to bring forth just exactly the voice Terry wanted to hear. He wondered at the limits of such a power, wondered how completely he could lead another mind astray. He stopped at the door and looked back, staring with interest at the shopkeeper, who sat behind the counter looking at his paper once again.
“Aren’t you going to answer your phone?” Ig asked.
The shopkeeper lifted his head to stare at him, his eyebrows bunched together in puzzlement.
“It’s ringing,” Ig said. The horns pounded with a feeling of pressure and weight, entirely pleasurable.
The shopkeeper frowned at the silent phone. He picked it up and put it to his ear. Even from across the room, Ig could hear the dial tone.
“Robert, it’s Sally,” Ig said-but the voice that came from his lips was not his own. It was hoarse, deep, but unmistakably female, and with a Bronx twang; a voice entirely unfamiliar, and yet he was sure it was the one that belonged to Sally Whoever.
The shopkeeper screwed up his face in confusion and said to the empty line, “Sally? We just talked a few hours ago. I thought you were trying to save on the long distance.”
The horns throbbed, in a state of sensual exhilaration.
“I’ll save money on long distance when I don’t have to call you every day,” Ig said in the voice of Sally in Boca Raton. “When are you coming down here? This waiting is killing me.”
The shopkeeper said, “I can’t. You know I can’t. Do you know what it would cost to put Wendy in a home? What would we live on?” Speaking to a dead line.
“Who said we need to live like Rockefellers? I don’t need oysters. Tuna salad will do. You want to wait until she dies, but what if I go first? Then where are we? I’m not a young woman, and you aren’t a young man. Put her in a place where people will care for her, and then get on a plane and come down here so someone can care for you.”
“I promised her I wouldn’t put her in a home while she was alive.”
“She isn’t the person you made that promise to anymore, and I’m scared what you might do if you stay with her. Pick a sin we can both live with, is what I ask. Give me a call when you’ve got a ticket, and I’ll come get you at the airport.”
Ig broke the connection then, let go; the painful-sweet feeling of pressure drained from the horns. The shopkeeper drew the phone away from his ear and stared at it, lips parted slightly in confusion. The dial tone droned. Ig eased himself out the door. The shopkeeper didn’t look up, had forgotten all about him.
IG BUILT A FIRE in the chimney, then opened the first bottle of wine and drank deeply, without waiting for it to breathe. The fumes filled his head, dizzying him, a sweet asphyxiation, loving hands around his throat. He felt he ought to be working on a plan, ought to have decided by now the proper way to deal with Lee Tourneau, but it was hard to think while staring into the fire. The ecstatic movement of the flames transfixed him. He marveled at the whirl of sparks and the orange tumble of falling coals, marveled at the bitter-harsh taste of the wine, which peeled away thought like paint stripper going to work on old paint. He tugged restlessly at his goatee, enjoying the feel of it, glad for it, felt that it made his thinning hair more acceptable. When Ig was a child, all his heroes had been bearded men: Jesus, Abraham Lincoln, Dan Haggerty.
“Beards,” he muttered. “I am blessed in facial hair.”
He was on the second bottle of wine when he heard the fire whispering to him, suggesting plans and schemes, offering encouragement in a soft, hissing voice, putting forth theological arguments. Ig canted his head and listened to it, listened carefully, in a state of fascination. Sometimes he nodded in agreement. The voice of the fire said the most sensible things. Over the next hour, Ig learned a great deal.
AFTER IT WAS DARK, he opened the hatch and found the teeming faithful gathered in the room beyond, waiting to hear The Word. Ig emerged from the chimney, and the crawling carpet of snakes-a thousand of them at least, lying on top of one another, braided together in mad tangles-cleared a path for him to the heap of bricks in the center of the floor. He climbed to the top of the little hill and settled himself with his pitchfork and his second bottle of wine. From his perch upon the low mound, he ministered to them.
“It is a matter of faith that the soul must be guarded, lest it be ruined and consumed,” Ig told them. “Christ himself forewarned his apostles to beware him who would destroy their souls in Hell. I advise you now that such a fate is a mathematical impossibility. The soul may not be destroyed. The soul goes on forever. Like the number pi, it is without cessation or conclusion. Like pi it is a constant. Pi is an irrational number, incapable of being made into a fraction, impossible to divide from itself. So, too, the soul is an irrational, indivisible equation that perfectly expresses one thing: you. The soul would be no good to the devil if it could be destroyed. And it is not lost when placed in Satan’s care, as is so often said. He always knows exactly how to put his finger on it.”
A thick brown rope of snake dared to climb the pile of bricks. Ig felt it moving across his bare left foot but paid it no mind at first, attending instead to the spiritual needs of his flock.
“Satan has long been known as the Adversary, but God fears women even more than He fears the devil-and is right to. She, with her power to bring life into the world, was truly made in the image of the Creator, not man, and in all ways has proved Herself a more deserving object of man’s worship than Christ, that unshaven fanatic who lusted for the end of the world. God saves-but not now, and not here. His salvation is on layaway. Like all grifters, He asks you to pay now and take it on faith that you will receive later. Whereas women offer a different sort of salvation, more immediate and fulfilling. They don’t put off their love for a distant, ill-defined eternity but make a gift of it in the here and now, frequently to those who deserve it least. So it was in my case. So it is for many. The devil and woman have been allies against God from the beginning, ever since Satan came to the first man in the form of a snake and whispered to Adam that true happiness was not to be found in prayer but in Eve’s cunt.”
The snakes writhed and hissed and fought for space at his feet. They bit one another, in a state close to rapture.
The thick brown snake at Ig’s feet began to twist around one of his ankles. He bent and lifted her in one hand, peering down at her at last. She was the color of dry, dead autumn leaves, aside from a single orange stripe that ran along her back, and at the end of her tail was a short, dusty rattle. Ig had never seen a rattle on a snake, outside of Clint Eastwood movies. She allowed herself to be hoisted in the air, made no effort to get away. The serpent peered back at him through golden eyes, crinkled like some kind of metallic foil and with long slotted pupils. Her black tongue flicked out, tasting the air. The cool material of her skin felt as loose on the muscle beneath as an eyelid closed over an eye. Her tail (but perhaps it was wrong to speak of tails; the whole thing was a tail, with a head stuck on one end) hung down against Ig’s arm. After a moment Ig looped the viper over his shoulders, wearing her like a loose scarf or like an unknotted tie. Her rattle lay against his naked chest.
He stared out at his audience, had forgotten what he was saying. He tipped his head back and had a sip of wine. It burned going down, a sweet swallowed flame. Christ, at least, was right in his love of devil drink, which, like the fruit of the garden, brought with it freedom and knowledge and certain ruination. Ig exhaled smoke and remembered his argument.
“Look at the girl I loved and who loved me and how she ended. She wore the cross of Jesus about her neck and was faithful to the church, which never did anything for her except take her money from the collection plate and call her a sinner to her face. She kept Jesus in her heart every day and prayed to Him every night, and you see the good it did her. Jesus on His cross. So many have wept for Jesus on His cross. As if no one else has ever suffered as He suffered. As if millions have not shuffled to worse deaths, and died unremembered. Would I had lived in the time of Pilate, it would have pleased me to twist the spear in His side myself, so proud of His own pain.
“Merrin and I were to each other like man and wife. But she wanted more than me, wanted freedom, a life, a chance to discover herself. She wanted other lovers and wanted me to take other lovers as well. I hated her for this. So did God. For simply imagining she might open her legs to another man, He turned His face from her, and when she called to Him, as she was raped and murdered, He pretended He did not hear. He felt, no doubt, that she received her due. I see God now as an unimaginative writer of popular fictions, someone who builds stories around sadistic and graceless plots, narratives that exist only to express His terror of a woman’s power to choose who and how to love, to redefine love as she sees fit, not as God thinks it ought to be. The author is unworthy of His own characters. The devil is first a literary critic, who delivers this untalented scribbler the public flaying He deserves.”
The serpent around his neck let her head fall to lovingly graze against Ig’s thigh. He stroked her gently as he came to the point, the crux of his fire sermon. “Only the devil loves humans for what they are and rejoices in their cunning schemes against themselves, their shameless curiosity, their lack of self-control, their impulse to break a rule as soon as they hear tell of it, their willingness to forsake their immortal soul for nookie. The devil knows that only those with the courage to risk their soul for love are entitled to have a soul, even if God does not.
“And where does this leave God? God loves man, we are told, but love must be proved by facts, not reasons. If you were in a boat and did not save a drowning man, you would burn in Hell for certain; yet God, in His wisdom, feels no need to use His power to save anyone from a single moment of suffering, and in spite of his inaction He is celebrated and revered. Show me the moral logic in it. You can’t. There is none. Only the devil operates with any reason, promising to punish those who would make earth itself Hell for those who dare to love and feel.
“I do not claim that God is dead. I tell you He is alive and well but in no position to offer salvation, being damned Himself for His criminal indifference. He was lost the moment He demanded fealty and worship before He would offer His protection. The unmistakable bargain of a gangster. Whereas the devil is anything but indifferent. The devil is always there to help those who are ready to sin, which is another word for ‘live.’ His phone lines are open. Operators are standing by.”
The viper around Iggy’s shoulders gave her rattle a dry little shake of approval, like castanets. He lifted her in one hand and kissed her cold head, then set her down. He returned to the chimney, the snakes boiling away from his feet to allow him to pass. He left his pitchfork leaning against the wall, just outside the hatch, and climbed inside but did not rest. For a time he read his Neil Diamond Bible by the firelight. He paused, twisting nervously at his goatee, considering the law in Deuteronomy that forbade clothes with mixed fibers. A problematic bit of Scripture. A matter that required thought.
“Only the devil wants man to have a wide range of lightweight and comfortable styles to choose from,” he murmured at last, trying out a new proverb. “Although there may be no forgiveness for polyester. On this one matter, Satan and the Lord are in agreement.”
IG WOKE, STIRRED BY A CLANG and a steely shriek. He sat up in the soot-smelling darkness, rubbing his eyes, the fire long out. He squinted to see who had opened the hatch, and caught an iron wrench in the mouth, hard enough to snap his head to the side. Ig rolled onto his elbows and knees, his mouth already full of blood. He felt solid lumps rolling against his tongue. He spit a slimy string of blood; teeth came with it, three of them.
A hand in a black leather glove reached into the chimney and got Ig by the hair and dragged him out of the furnace, bouncing his head off the iron hatch on the way out. It made a brassy ringing sound, like someone striking a gong. Ig was dumped onto the concrete floor. He tried to pick himself up, doing a rough push-up, and caught a steel-tipped black boot in the side. His arms gave out, and he went straight down, struck the concrete with his chin. His teeth banged together like a clapboard: Scene 666, take one, action!
His pitchfork. He had leaned it against the wall, just outside the furnace. He rolled and flung himself at it. His fingers swatted the handle, and it fell over with a clang. When he grabbed for the shaft, Lee Tourneau brought the heel of his boot down on Ig’s hand, and Ig heard the bones snap with a brittle crunch. It sounded like someone breaking a fistful of dry twigs. He turned his head to look up at Lee as Lee came down with the wrench again, and he was clubbed right between the horns. A white flash bomb went off in Ig’s head, brilliant burning phosphorus, and the world disappeared.
HE OPENED HIS EYES and saw the floor of the foundry sliding by beneath him. Lee had him by the collar of the shirt and was dragging him, his knees sliding across concrete. His hands were in front of his body, held together at the wrists by something. Loops of duct tape, it felt like. He tried to leap up and only managed to weakly kick his feet. The world was filled with the infernal drone of the locusts, and it took him a moment before he understood that the sound was only inside his head, because locusts were silent at night.
It was wrong, when considering the old foundry, to think about an outside and an inside. There was no roof; the inside was the outside. But Ig was hauled through a doorway and sensed that somehow they had come out into the night, although there was still dusty concrete under his knees. He couldn’t lift his head but had an impression of openness, of having left all walls behind. He heard Lee’s Caddy idling somewhere nearby. They were behind the building, he thought, not far from the Evel Knievel trail. His tongue moved sluggishly around in his mouth, an eel swimming in blood. The tip touched an empty socket where a tooth had been.
If he was going to try to use the horns on Lee, he was going to have to do it now, before Lee did what he had come here to do. But when he opened his mouth to speak, there came a black grinding shock of pain, and it was all he could do not to scream. His jaw was broken-shattered, maybe. Blood bubbled and ran from his lips, and he made a muzzy, damaged sound of pain.
They were at the top of a flight of concrete stairs, Lee breathing hard. He paused there. “Christ, Ig,” Lee said. “You don’t look like you’re that heavy. I’m not cut out for this kind of thing.”
He dropped Ig down the steps. Ig hit the first on his shoulder and the second on his face, and it felt like his jaw was breaking all over again, and he couldn’t help it, he did scream this time, a gravelly, strangled sound. He rolled the rest of the way to the bottom and sprawled across the dirt, nose in the earth.
After he came to rest, he held himself perfectly still-it seemed important to be still, the most important thing in the world-waiting for the black throb of pain in his smashed face to relent, at least a little. Distantly he heard boots scuff on the concrete stairs and crunch away across the earth. A car door opened. A car door slammed. The boot heels came crunching back. Ig heard a tinny clang and a hollow sloshing sound, neither of which he could identify.
“I knew I’d find you out here, Ig,” Lee said. “Couldn’t stay away, could you?”
Ig fought to lift his head and look up. Lee squatted beside him. He wore dark jeans and a white button-down shirt, sleeves rolled back to show his lean, strong forearms. His face was calm, almost good-humored. With one hand he absently picked at the cross nestled in the curls of golden hair on his chest.
“I’ve known I’d find you out here ever since Glenna called me a couple hours ago.” A smile flickered at the corners of his mouth for a moment. “She came home to find her apartment trashed. TV kicked in. Shit tossed everywhere. She called me right up. She was crying, Ig. She feels terrible. She thinks somehow you found out about our-what’s the right language for this?-our parking-lot tryst and that you hate her now. She’s scared you might hurt yourself. I told her I was more scared about you hurting her and that I thought she ought to spend the night with me. Would you believe she turned me down? She said she wasn’t afraid of you and needed to talk to you, before things went any further between me and her. Good ol’ Glenna. She’s sweet, you know. A little too desperate to please. A lot insecure. Pretty slutty. The second-closest thing to a disposable human being I’ve ever met. You’d be the first.”
Ig forgot his shattered jaw and tried to tell Lee to stay the fuck away from her. But when he opened his mouth, all that came out was another scream. Pain radiated from his smashed jawbone, and a darkness rushed up with it, gathering at the corners of his vision and then closing in around him. He breathed out-snorted blood from his nostrils-and fought it, pushed the darkness back by an effort of will.
“Eric doesn’t remember what happened in Glenna’s place this morning,” Lee said, in such a soft voice Ig almost missed it. “Why is that, Ig? He can’t remember anything except you throwing a pot of water in his face and nearly passing out. But something happened in that apartment. A fight? Something. I maybe would’ve had Eric along with me tonight-I’m sure he’d like to see you dead-but his face. You burned his face real good, Ig. If it was any worse, he would’ve had to take himself to a hospital and make up some lie about how he got hurt. He shouldn’t have gone in Glenna’s apartment anyway. Sometimes I think that guy has no respect for the law.” He laughed. “Maybe it’s for the best, though, that he’s not part of this. This kind of thing is just easier when there are no witnesses.”
Lee’s wrists rested on his knees, and the wrench hung from his right hand, twelve pounds of rusting iron.
“I can almost understand Eric not remembering what happened over at Glenna’s. A steel pot to the head will shake up a person’s memory. But I don’t know what to make of what happened when you showed up at the congressman’s office yesterday. Three people watched you walk in: Chet, our receptionist, and Cameron, who runs the X-ray, and Eric. Five minutes after you left, none of them could remember you being there. Only me. Even Eric wouldn’t believe you’d been there until I showed him the video. There’s video of the two of you talking, but Eric couldn’t tell me what you talked about. And there’s something else, too. The video. The video doesn’t look right. Like there’s something wrong with the tape…” His voice trailed off, and he was silent for a musing moment. “Distortion. But just around you. What did you do to the tape? What’d you do to them? And why didn’t it seem to touch me? That’s what I’d like to know.” When Ig didn’t reply, Lee lifted the wrench and poked him in one shoulder. “Are you listening, Ig?”
Ig had listened to every word, had been getting ready while Lee blabbed away, gathering what strength he had left to spring. He had pulled his knees under him and got his breath back and had just been waiting for the right moment, and here it was at last. He came up, batting the wrench aside and throwing himself at Lee, nailed him in the chest with his shoulder, knocked him back onto his ass. Ig got his hands up and put them around Lee’s throat-
– and in the moment of skin-to-skin contact nearly screamed again. He was, for an instant, in Lee’s head, and it was like being in the Knowles River all over again; he was drowning in a rushing black torrent, pulled down into a cold, roaring place of darkness and desperate motion. In that one moment of contact, Ig knew everything and wanted not to, wanted to make it go away, to unknow.
Lee still had the wrench, and he came up with it, pounded it into Ig’s gut, and Ig coughed explosively. He was shoved off, but as Ig was jolted aside, his fingers caught on the golden chain around Lee’s neck. It came apart with hardly a sound. The cross sailed away into the night.
Lee squirmed out from under him, climbed back to his feet. Ig was on elbows and knees, struggling to breathe.
“Try and choke me, you piece of shit,” Lee said, and kicked him in the side. A rib snapped. Ig groaned and slumped onto his face.
Lee followed with a second kick and a third. The third thudded into the small of Ig’s back and sent a withering shock of pain through kidney and bowels. Something wet hit the back of his head. Spit. Then, for a while, Lee was still, and the both of them had a chance to get their breath back.
And at last Lee said, “What are those goddamn things on your head?” He sounded genuinely surprised. “Jesus, Ig. Are those horns?”
Ig shivered against the waves of hurt and sick in his back, his side, his hand, his face. He scratched at the dirt with his left hand, digging furrows in the black earth, clawing at consciousness, fighting for each second of clarity. What had Lee just said? Something about the horns.
“That’s what was on the video,” Lee said, a little breathlessly. “Horns. Holy fucking shit. I thought it was bad tape. But it wasn’t something wrong with the tape. It was something wrong with you. You know, I think I saw them yesterday, looking at you through my bad eye. Everything is just shadows through that eye, but when I looked at you, I thought, Hunh…” His voice trailed off, and he touched two fingers to his bare throat. “How about that.”
When Ig closed his eyes he saw a bright, brassy Tom Crown mute, pushed deep into a trumpet to choke off the sound. He had found a mute for the horns at last. Merrin’s cross had choked off their signal, had made a circle of protection around Lee Tourneau that they couldn’t get through. Without it Lee was open to the horns at last. Naturally, too late to do Ig any good.
“My cross,” Lee said, still touching his neck. “Merrin’s cross. You broke it. You broke it trying to strangle me. That was uncalled for, Ig. You think I want to do this to you? I don’t. I don’t. The person I want to do this to is a little fourteen-year-old girl who lives next door to me. She likes to sunbathe in her backyard, and I watch her sometimes from my bedroom window. She looks real cherry in her American-flag bikini. I think about her the way I used to think about Merrin. Not that I’d ever do anything to her. Too big a risk. We’re neighbors, I’d be a natural suspect. You don’t shit where you eat. Unless-unless you think maybe I could get away with it. What do you think, Ig? Do you think I ought to do her?”
Through the black spoke of pain in his shattered rib and the swelling heat in his jaw and smashed hand, Ig noted that Lee’s voice was different now-that he was speaking in a dreamy, talking-to-himself kind of tone. The horns were going to work on Lee as they had gone to work on everyone else.
Ig shook his head and made a pained sound of negation. Lee looked disappointed.
“No. It isn’t a good idea, is it? Tell you what, though. I did almost come out here with Glenna just a couple nights ago. I wanted to like you wouldn’t believe. When we walked out of the Station House Tavern together, she was really drunk, and she was going to let me give her a ride home, and I was thinking I could drive her out here instead and fuck her in the fat tits and then beat her head in and leave her. That would’ve been on you, too. Ig Perrish strikes again, kills another girlfriend. But then Glenna had to go and blow me in the parking lot, right in front of three or four guys, and I couldn’t do it. Too many people could’ve placed us together. Oh, well. Another time. Thing about girls like Glenna, girls with rap sheets and tattoos, girls who drink too much and smoke too much-they disappear all the time, and six months later even people who knew them can’t remember their name. And tonight, Ig-tonight, at least, I’ve got you.”
He bent and took Ig by the horns and dragged him through the weeds. Ig could not find the strength to so much as kick his feet. Blood ran from his mouth, and his right hand beat like a heart.
Lee opened the front door of Ig’s Gremlin and then got him under the arms and heaved him into it. Ig sprawled facedown across the seats, his legs hanging out. The effort of tossing him into the car almost pulled Lee over-he was tired, too, Ig could feel it-and he half fell into the Gremlin himself. He put a hand on Ig’s back to steady him, his knee on Ig’s ass.
“Hey, Ig. Remember the day we met? Out here on the Evel Knievel trail? Just think, if you went and drowned way back then, I could’ve had Merrin when she was cherry, and maybe none of the bad things would’ve happened. Although I don’t know. She was quite the stuck-up little bitch even then. There’s something you need to know, Ig. I’ve felt guilty about it for years. Well. Not guilty. But you know. Funny. Here it is: I really. Truly. Did not. Save you. From drowning. I don’t know how many times I’ve told you that or why you never believed me. You swam out on your own. I didn’t even smack your back to get you breathing again. I only kicked you by accident, trying to get away from you. There was this big fucking snake right next to you. I hate snakes. I have, like, an aversion. Hey, maybe the snake pulled you out. It sure was big enough. Like a fucking fire hose.” He patted a gloved hand on the back of Ig’s head. “There. I’m glad I got that off my chest. I feel better already. It’s true what they say. Confession is good for the soul.”
He rose, got Ig’s ankles, and pushed his legs up and into the car. A tired part of Ig was glad he was going to die here. Most of the best times of his life had happened in the Gremlin. He had loved Merrin here, had had all his happiest conversations with her here, and had held her hand on long drives in the dark, neither of them speaking, just enjoying a shared quiet. He felt that Merrin was close to him now, that if he looked up, he might see her in the passenger seat, reaching to put her hand gently on his head.
He heard scuffling from behind him and then that echoing, tinny, sloshing sound, and at last he could identify the noise. It was the sound made by liquid slopping about in a metal can. He had just struggled up onto his elbows when he felt a cold, wet splashing over his back, soaking his shirt. The eye-watering reek of gasoline filled the cockpit.
Ig rolled over, struggled to sit up. Lee finished dousing him, gave the can a last shake, and tossed it aside. Ig blinked at the stinging fumes, the air wavering around him with gasoline stink. Lee fished a small box out of his pocket. He had picked up Ig’s Lucifer Matches on the way out of the foundry.
“I’ve always wanted to do this,” Lee said, struck the match, and flicked it through the open window.
The burning match hit Ig’s forehead, flipped, and fell. Ig’s hands were taped together at the wrists, but they were in front of his body, and he caught the match as it dropped through the air, not thinking about it, just acting on reflex. For a moment-just one-his hands were a cup filled with fire, brimming with golden light.
Then he wore a red suit of flame, became a living torch. He screamed but couldn’t hear his own voice, because that was when the interior of the car ignited, with a low, deep whump that seemed to suck all the oxygen out of the air. He caught a glimpse of Lee staggering back from the Gremlin, the flame light playing across his startled face. Even braced for it, he had not been ready for it: The Gremlin became a roaring tower of fire.
Ig grabbed the door and tried to push it open and climb out, and Lee stepped forward and kicked it shut. The plastic of the dash blackened. The windshield began to soot over. Through it Ig could see the night, and the drop of the Evel Knievel hill, and the river was down there somewhere. He reached blindly through the flames and found the gearshift, slammed it into neutral. With his other hand, he released the parking brake. As he lifted his palm from the gearshift, tacky strands of plastic came away, fusing with skin.
He looked again through the open driver’s-side window and saw Lee sliding away from him. His face was pale and stunned in the glow of the moving inferno. Then Lee was behind him, and trees were beginning to rush past as the Gremlin tilted forward down the hill. Ig did not need the headlights to see ahead of him. The interior of the car produced a soft golden rush of light, was a burning chariot that cast a reddish glow ahead of it into the darkness. Comin’ for to carry me home, Ig thought randomly.
The trees closed in from above, and brush swiped at the sides of the car. Ig had not been on the trail since that time on the shopping cart, more than ten years before, and had never ridden it at night, or in a car, or while burning alive. But for all that, he knew the way, knew the trail by the plunging sensation in his bowels. The hill got steeper and steeper as he went, until it seemed almost as if the car had been dropped off the side of a cliff. The back tires lifted off the ground and then came back down, with a metallic, bashing sound. The passenger-side window exploded from the heat. The evergreens whipped audibly by. Ig had the steering wheel in his hands. He didn’t know when he had grabbed it. He could feel it softening in his grip, melting like one of Dalí’s watches, sagging in on itself. The front driver’s-side tire struck something, and he felt the wheel try to twist free from his grip, turn the burning Gremlin sideways, but he pulled against it, held it on the trail. He couldn’t breathe. All was fire.
The Gremlin hit the slight dirt incline at the bottom of the Evel Knievel trail and was catapulted into the stars, out over the water, a burning comet. It left a coil of smoke behind, like a rocket. The forward motion opened the flames in front of Ig’s face, as if invisible hands had parted a red curtain. He saw the water rushing up at him, like a road paved in slick black marble. The Gremlin hit with a great wallop that smashed the windshield in at him, and water followed after.
LEE TOURNEAU STOOD ON THE RIVERBANK and watched the current slowly turn the Gremlin around so it was pointed downriver. Only the back end stuck out of the water. The fire was out, although white smoke still poured from around the edges of the hatchback. He stood with the wrench, while the car listed and sank a little deeper, following the current. He stared until a sliding movement near his foot caught his attention. He looked down, then leaped back with a revolted little cry, kicking at a water snake in the grass. It slipped past him and plopped into the Knowles. Lee retreated, his upper lip curled in disgust, as a second, and then a third, slithered into the water, causing the moonlight on the river to shiver and break into silver pieces. He cast a final look out toward the sinking car and then turned and set off up the hill.
He was gone by the time Ig rose from the water and climbed the embankment, into the weeds. His body smoked in the darkness. He walked six shaky paces, across the dirt, and sank to his knees. As he flung himself onto his back in the ferns, he heard a car door slam at the top of the hill and the sound of Lee Tourneau turning his Caddy around and driving away. Ig lay there, resting beneath the trees along the riverbank.
His skin was no longer a pale, fish-belly white but had assumed a deep red burnish, like certain varnished hardwoods. His breathing had never been so easy, or his lungs so full. The bellows of his ribs expanded effortlessly with each inhalation. He had heard one of those ribs snap, not twenty minutes before, but felt no pain. He did not note until much later the faint discolorations of month-old bruises on his sides-all that remained to show he’d been attacked. He opened and closed his mouth, wiggling his jaw, but there was no pain, and when his tongue searched for the missing teeth, it found them, smooth and whole, back where they belonged. He flexed his hand. It felt fine. He could see the bones in the back of it, the rods even and undamaged. He had not been aware of it at the time but saw now that he’d never been in pain, all the while he burned. He had, instead, come out of the fire unharmed and made whole. The warm night air was redolent with the smell of gasoline and melted plastic and scorched iron, a fragrance that stirred something in Ig, in much the same way Merrin’s odor of lemons and mint and girlsweat had stirred him. Iggy Perrish closed his eyes and drew restful breath after restful breath, and when next he looked up, it was dawn.
His skin felt stretched tight across muscle and bone, felt clean. He had never felt cleaner. This was how baptism was supposed to feel, he thought. The banks were crowded with oaks, and their broad leaves fluttered and waved against a sky of precious and impossible blue, their edges shining with a golden green light.
MERRIN HAD SEEN THE TREE HOUSE among leaves that were lit just so. She and Ig were pushing their bikes along a trail in the woods, coming back from town, where they had spent the morning as part of a volunteer team painting the church, and they were both wearing baggy T-shirts and cutoffs spattered in white paint. They had walked and biked this particular path often enough, but neither of them had ever seen the tree house before.
It was easy to miss it. It had been built fifteen feet off the ground, up in the broad, spreading crown of some tree Ig couldn’t identify, hidden behind ten thousand slender leaves of darkest green. At first, when Merrin pointed, Ig didn’t even think there was anything there. It wasn’t there. Then it was. The sunlight reached through the leaves to shine against white clapboard. As they went closer, stepping under the tree, the house came into clearer view. It was a white box with wide squares cut out for windows, cheap nylon curtains hanging in them. It looked as if it had been framed out by someone who knew what he was doing, not a casual weekend carpenter, although there was nothing particularly showy about it. No ladder led to it, nor was one needed. Low branches provided a natural series of rungs leading to the closed trapdoor. Painted on the underside of the door in whitewash was a single, presumably comic sentence: BLESSED SHALL YOU BE WHEN YOU GO IN.
Ig had stopped to look at it-he snorted softly at what was written on the trap-but Merrin didn’t lose a step. She set her bike down in the soft tufts of grass at the base and immediately began to climb, jumping with an athletic self-assurance from branch to branch. Ig stood below, watching her make the ascent, and as she worked her way up through the boughs, he was struck by her naked brown thighs, smooth and limber from a long spring of soccer. As she reached the trapdoor, she turned her head to look down at him. It was a struggle to move his gaze from her cutoffs to her face, but when he did, she was smirking at him. She did not speak but pushed the trapdoor back with a bang and wiggled up through the opening.
By the time he poked his head into the tree house, she was already pulling her clothes off. The floor had a little square of dusty carpet on it. A brass menorah, holding nine half-melted candles, stood on an end table surrounded by small china figures. An easy chair with moldering moss-colored upholstery sat in one corner. The leaves moved outside the window, and their shadows moved over her skin, in constant rushing motion, while the tree house creaked softly in its cradle of branches, and what was the old nursery rhyme about cradles in trees? Ig and Merrin up in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. No, that wasn’t the one. Rock-a-bye baby, in the treetop. Rock-a-bye. Ig closed the trapdoor behind him and moved the chair over it, so no one could enter and surprise them. He undressed, and for a while they went rock-a-bye together.
Afterward she said, “What’s with the candles and those little glass guys?”
Ig got up on all fours to crawl toward them, and she sat up quickly and gave him a full-palmed smack on the ass. He laughed and jumped and scrambled away from her.
He knelt at the end table. The menorah was set on a piece of dirty parchment with big block letters on it in Hebrew. The candles on the menorah had been melted down quite a bit, to leave a lacework of wax stalactites and stalagmites built up around the brass base. A china Mary-a really quite foxy Jewess in blue-was sunk down on one pious knee before an angel of the Lord, a tall, sinewy figure in robes arranged almost toga fashion. She was reaching up, presumably for his hand, although the figure had been maneuvered so she was touching his golden thigh and looked like she was getting ready to reach for his crank. The Lord’s messenger glared down at her with haughty disapproval. A second angel stood a little ways off from them, his face lifted to heaven, his back turned to the scene, mournfully blowing a golden trumpet.
Into this tableau some joker had stuck a gray-skinned alien with the black, multifaceted eyes of a fly. He was posed beside Mary, bent to whisper in her ear. This figure was not china but rubber, a posable figure from some movie; Ig thought maybe Close Encounters.
“Do you know what kind of writing this is?” Merrin asked. She had crawled over to kneel beside him.
“Hebrew,” Ig said. “It’s from a phylactery.”
“Good thing I’m on the pill,” she said. “You forgot to put on your phylactery when we just did it.”
“That’s not what a phylactery is.”
“I know it isn’t,” she said.
He waited. Smiling to himself.
“So what’s a phylactery?” she asked.
“You wear them on your head if you’re Jewish.”
“Oh. I thought that was a yarmulke.”
“No. This is a different thing Jews wear on their head. Or maybe sometimes their arm. I can’t remember.”
“So what’s it say?”
“I don’t know. It’s Scripture.”
She pointed at the angel with his horn. “Looks like your brother.”
“No it doesn’t,” Ig said…although, in fact, considering it again, it did rather resemble Terry playing his horn, with his broad, clear brow and princely features. Although Terry wouldn’t be caught dead in those robes, except maybe at a toga party.
“What is all this stuff?” Merrin asked.
“It’s a shrine,” Ig said.
“To what?” She nodded at the alien. “You think it’s the holy altar of E.T.?”
“I don’t know. Maybe these figures were important to someone. Maybe they’re a way to remember someone. I think someone made this to have a place to pray.”
“That’s what I think, too.”
“Do you want to pray?” Ig asked automatically, and then swallowed heavily, feeling he had requested some obscene act, something she might judge offensive.
She looked at him under half-lowered eyelids and smiled in a sly sort of way, and it struck him for the first time ever that Merrin thought he had a streak of crazy in him. She cast her gaze around, at the window with its view of rippling yellow leaves, at the sunlight painting the weathered old walls, then looked back and nodded.
“Sure,” she said. “Beats the heck out of praying at church.”
Ig put his hands together and lowered his head and opened his mouth to speak, but Merrin interrupted.
“Aren’t you going to light the candles?” she asked. “Don’t you think we ought to create an atmosphere of reverence? We just treated this place like the set for a porno.”
There was a stained, warped box in the shallow drawer that had matches in it with funny black heads. Ig struck one, and it lit with a hiss and a sputter of white flame. He moved it from wick to wick, lighting each of the candles on the menorah. He was as quick at it as he could be, and yet still the match sizzled down to his fingers as he lit the ninth wick. Merrin shouted his name as he shook it out.
“Christ, Ig,” she said. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” he said, wiggling his fingertips. He really was. It didn’t hurt even a little.
Merrin slid the tray back into the matchbox and made to put them away, then hesitated to look at them.
“Hah,” she said.
“What?”
“Nothing,” she said, and closed the drawer on them.
She bowed her head then, and put her hands together, and waited. Ig felt his breath go short at the sight of her, her taut, white, naked skin and smooth breasts and the dark red tumble of her hair. He had himself not felt so naked at any other time in his life, not even the first time he’d undressed before her. At the sight of her, patiently waiting for him to say his prayer, he felt a sweet, withering rush of emotion pass through him, almost more love than he could bear.
Naked together, they prayed. Ig asked God to help them be good to each other, to help them be kind to others. He was asking God to protect them from harm when he felt Merrin’s hand moving on his thigh, slipping gently up between his legs. It required a great deal of concentration to complete the prayer, his eyes squeezed tightly shut. When he was done, he said “Amen,” and Merrin turned toward him and whispered “Amen” herself as she placed her lips on his and drew him toward her. They made love again, and when they had finished with each other, they dozed off in each other’s arms, her lips against his neck.
When Merrin finally sat up-shifting his arm off her, rousing him in the process-some of the day’s warmth had fled, and the tree house was filled with gloom. She hunched, covering her bare breasts with an arm, fumbling for her clothes.
“Shit,” she said. “We need to go. My mom and dad were expecting us for dinner. They’ll wonder where we are.”
“Get dressed. I’ll blow out the candles.”
He bent sleepily in toward the menorah to blow out the candles-and then twitched unhappily, a weird, sick thrill passing through him.
He had missed one of the china figures. It was the devil. He was set on the base of the menorah and, like the tree house itself in its cloak of leaves, was easy to miss, half hidden behind the row of wax stalactites hanging from the candles above. Lucifer was convulsed with laughter, his gaunt red hands clenched into fists, his head thrown back to the sky. He seemed to be dancing on his little goaty hooves. His yellow eyes were rolled back in his head in an expression of delirious delight, a kind of rapture.
At the sight, Ig felt his arms and back prickle with cold gooseflesh. It should’ve been just another part of the kitschy scene arranged before him, and yet it wasn’t, and he hated it, and he wished he hadn’t seen it. That dancing little figurine was awful, a bad thing to see, a bad thing for someone to have left; not funny. He wished, suddenly, that he had not prayed here. He almost shivered, imagining it had dropped five degrees in the tree house. Only he wasn’t imagining. The sun had gone behind a cloud, and the room had darkened and chilled. A rough wind stirred in the branches.
“Too bad we have to go,” Merrin said, pulling on her shorts behind him. “Isn’t that air the sweetest thing?”
“Yes,” Ig said, although his voice was unexpectedly hoarse.
“So much for our little piece of heaven,” Merrin said, which was when something hit the trapdoor, with a loud crash that caused them both to scream.
The trap banged hard into the chair set on top of it, with so much force that the whole tree house seemed to shake.
“What was that?” Merrin cried.
“Hey!” Ig shouted. “Hey, is someone down there?”
The trap crashed into the chair again, and the chair hopped a few inches on its legs but remained on top of the hatch. Ig threw a wild look at Merrin, and then they were both grabbing at their clothes. Ig squirmed into his cutoffs while she refastened her bra. The trapdoor boomed against the underside of the chair again, harder than ever. The figurines on the end table jumped, and the Mary fell over. The devil peered hungrily out from amid his cave of melted wax.
“Cut it the fuck out!” Ig yelled, heart throbbing in his chest.
Kids, he thought, got to be fucking kids. But he didn’t believe it. If it was kids, why weren’t they laughing? Why weren’t they dropping out of the tree and sprinting away in a state of high hysterics?
Ig was dressed and ready, and he grabbed the chair to push it aside-then realized he was afraid to. He held up, staring at Merrin, who had frozen in the act of pulling on her sneakers.
“Go on,” she whispered. “See who’s out there.”
“I don’t want to.”
He really didn’t. His heart quailed at the thought of moving aside the chair and letting in whoever (whatever) was out there.
The worst of it was the sudden quiet. Whoever had been pitching themselves into the trapdoor had quit, waiting for them to open it of their own volition.
Merrin finished tugging on her sneakers and nodded.
Ig called out, “Listen, if there’s someone down there…you had your fun. We’re good and scared.”
“Don’t tell him that,” Merrin whispered.
“We’re coming out now.”
“Christ,” Merrin hissed. “Don’t tell him that either.”
They traded a glance. Ig felt a rising dread, did not want to open the door, was seized with the irrational conviction that if he did, he would allow in something that would do them both irreparable harm. And at the same time, there was nothing to do but open the door. He nodded at her and shoved back the chair, and as he did he saw that something else was written on the inside of the trap, big capital letters in white paint, but he didn’t pause to read what it said there, only flung back the hatch. He leaped down, not wanting to give himself time to think, grabbing the edge of the trap and lashing out with his legs, hoping to drive anyone who was on the branch off it, and fuck ’em if they broke their necks. He had assumed that Merrin would stay behind, that it was simply his role as the man to protect her, but she was going through the trapdoor with him and actually put her feet down on the branch below the tree house first.
Ig’s heart was beating so fast that the whole world seemed to jump and twitch around him. He settled onto the branch beside her, his arms still reaching up, hands gripping the edges of the opening. He searched the ground below, breathing hard; she was breathing hard, too. There was no one. He listened intently for the sound of tramping feet, people rushing away, crashing in the brush, but heard only wind, and branches scraping against the outside of the tree house.
He scrambled down out of the branches and made a series of widening circles around the tree, looking in the brush and along the path for signs of passersby, but found nothing. When he returned to the trunk of the tree, Merrin was still up in it, sitting on one of the long boughs below the tree house.
“You didn’t find anyone,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“Nope,” he said. “Must’ve been the big bad wolf.”
It felt right to joke it off, but he was still uneasy, his nerves jangled.
If she was feeling jangled, she didn’t show it. She had a last affectionate look up into the tree house and pulled the door shut. She hopped down out of the branches and scooped her bike up by the handlebars. They began to walk, leaving that bad moment of genuine fright farther behind them with each step. The path was still in the last of the day’s warm, generous light, and Ig became aware again of a pleasant, satisfied, freshly laid tingle. It was a good thing, to walk close to her, their hips almost touching and the sun on their shoulders.
“We’ll have to come back out here tomorrow,” she said, and in almost the same moment Ig said, “We could really do something with that place, you know?”
They laughed.
“We should get some beanbags for up there,” Ig said.
“A hammock. You put a hammock up in a place like that,” she said.
They were quiet, walking.
“Maybe grab us a pitchfork, too,” she said.
Ig stumbled, as if she had not just mentioned a pitchfork but pricked him with one, poking the tines into him from behind.
“Why a pitchfork?” Ig asked.
“To scare away the whatever. In case it comes back and tries to get in at us while we’re naked.”
“Okay,” Ig said, already dry-mouthed at the thought of having her again up on the boards, in the cool-blowing breeze. “It’s a plan.”
But Ig was back in the forest alone two hours later, hurrying along the path through the town woods. He had remembered over dinner that neither of them had blown out the candles in the menorah, and he’d been in a state of high distress ever since, imagining the tree ablaze, the burning leaves drifting into the crowns of the surrounding oaks. He ran, in terror that at any moment he would catch a whiff of smoke.
He smelled only the early-summer fragrances of sun-baked grass and the distant cold, clean rush of the Knowles River, somewhere down the hill from him. He thought he knew exactly where to find the tree house and slowed as he neared the general vicinity. He searched the trees for the dim glow of candle flame and saw nothing but the velvety June darkness. He tried to find that tree, that enormous scaly-barked tree of a kind he didn’t know, but in the night it was difficult to tell one leafy tree from another, and the trail didn’t look the same as it had in the daylight. Finally he knew he had gone too far-way too far-and he started for home, breathing hard and proceeding slowly. He went back and forth on the trail, two, three times but couldn’t find any sign of the tree house. He decided at last that the wind had blown the candles out, or they had guttered out on their own. It had always been a little paranoid to imagine them starting a forest fire. They were set in a heavy iron menorah, and unless it fell over, there wasn’t much chance of them igniting anything. He could find the tree house another time.
Only he never did, not with Merrin and not on his own. A dozen afternoons he searched for it, walking the main trail and all the offshoots, in case they had somehow wandered onto a side path. He looked for the tree house with a methodical patience, but it wasn’t to be found. They might as well have imagined the place, and in fact, in time, this was exactly what Merrin concluded: an absurd hypothesis but one that suited both of them. It had simply been there for an hour, one day, when they needed it, when they wanted a place to love each other, and then it was gone.
“We needed it?” Ig said.
“Well,” Merrin said, “I needed it. I was horny as hell.”
“We needed it, and it appeared. A tree house of the mind. The temple of Ig and Merrin,” Ig said. As fantastic and ludicrous as it seemed, the notion gave him a shiver of superstitious pleasure.
“That’s my best guess,” she said. “It’s like in the Bible. You can’t always get what you want, but if you really need something, you usually find it.”
“What part of the Bible is that from?” Ig asked her. “The Gospel of Keith Richards?”