Satan is one of us; so much more so than Adam or Eve.
—MICHAEL C HABON, “O N D AEMONS & D UST”
Contents
Epigraph
Hell
Chapter One
IGNATIUS MARTIN PERRISH SPENT the night drunk and doing terrible…
Chapter Two
HE SHOVED HIMSELF BACK into his khaki shorts—he was still…
Chapter Three
HE DROVE TO THE MODERN Medical Practice Clinic, where they…
Chapter Four
THE NURSE WHO TOOK Ig’s weight and blood pressure told…
Chapter Five
HE DROVE. HE DIDN’T THINK WHERE, and for a while…
Chapter Six
HE HAD GONE DOWN to the river to work out…
Chapter Seven
THERE WAS NOTHING LEFT for him but to go home…
Chapter Eight
WHEN HE WAS BACK in the front hallway, he looked…
Chapter Nine
HE STOOD IN THE DOORWAY of his bedroom for a…
Chapter Ten
TERRY LEANED AGAINST THE WALL, just inside the swinging door.
Cherry
Chapter Eleven
SHE WAS SENDING HIM a message.
Chapter Twelve
THREE DAYS BEFORE IG and Merrin met for the first…
Chapter Thirteen
IG HAD A FRAGMENTARY MEMORY of the time he was…
Chapter Fourteen
LEE TOURNEAU WAS SHIVERING and soaking wet the next time…
Chapter Fifteen
THE WHOLE WAY TO CHURCH, Ig’s palms were sweating, felt…
Chapter Sixteen
THE NEXT TIME LEE CAME OVER, they went into the…
Chapter Seventeen
IG WAS WAITING FOR HIS TURN in the barber’s chair…
Chapter Eighteen
LEE OPENED HIS MOUTH to say something, then changed his…
Chapter Nineteen
IG SAW MERRIN WILLIAMS and then pretended he hadn’t: no…
Chapter Twenty
FOR ALL THE REST of the summer, they had a…
The Fire Sermon
Chapter Twenty-One
IG DROVE AWAY FROM HIS PARENTS’ HOUSE, from his grandmother’s…
Chapter Twenty-Two
IG STOOD JUST INSIDE THE DOOR of The Pit, waiting…
Chapter Twenty-Three
THE WAITRESS SAID HE’D BE more interesting if he killed…
Chapter Twenty-Four
HE STAYED OFF THE INTERSTATE on the way back—back where?
Chapter Twenty-Five
IGGY WOKE IN THE FURNACE, wrapped in the old, piss-stained…
Chapter Twenty-Six
MIDMORNING HE WALKED INTO THE WOODS to take a shit,…
Chapter Twenty-Seven
SOMEWHERE SOUTH OF TOWN, he pulled over to the side…
Chapter Twenty-Eight
IN THE AFTERNOON IG DROVE up the highway to a…
Chapter Twenty-Nine
IG WOKE, STIRRED BY A CLANG and a steely shriek.
Chapter Thirty
LEE TOURNEAU STOOD ON THE RIVERBANK and watched the current…
The Fixer
Chapter Thirty-One
HIS MOTHER WAS DEAD in the next room, and Lee…
Chapter Thirty-Two
AFTER HIS MOTHER DIED, Merrin called and e-mailed more frequently,…
Chapter Thirty-Three
MERRIN ANSWERED THE DOOR in sweatpants and a bulky hoodie,…
Chapter Thirty-Four
LEE HAD HOPED FOR A LATE NIGHT with Merrin, but…
Chapter Thirty-Five
HIS MOTHER DIDN’T HAVE A LOT to say at the…
Chapter Thirty-Six
HE REMEMBERED THE FENCE. He did not remember much about…
Chapter Thirty-Seven
HE SAT UP A WHILE LATER. The corn whispered frantically,…
Chapter Thirty-Eight
LEE HAD A SMILE READY for Merrin when she opened…
Chapter Thirty-Nine
HE LOOKED BACK AND FORTH with his one good eye,…
Chapter Forty
AFTER HE HIT HER with the stone, Merrin stopped trying…
The Gospel According to Mick and Keith
Chapter Forty-One
IT WAS EARLY WHEN IG collected his pitchfork from the…
Chapter Forty-Two
I KNEW IT WAS YOUR CAR right away,” Dale said,…
Chapter Forty-Three
IG SAT AT THE BOTTOM of the chimney, in a…
Chapter Forty-Four
AFTER HE HAD READ MERRIN’S final message, and set it…
Chapter Forty-Five
HE FIGURED LEE WOULD NEED at least half an hour…
Chapter Forty-Six
NO SOONER HAD HE PULLED himself into the room than…
Chapter Forty-Seven
SHADOWS LAPPED UNSTEADILY at the walls, rising and falling, the…
Chapter Forty-Eight
IG STOOD, A BURNING MAN, devil in a gown of…
Chapter Forty-Nine
HE CLIMBED DOWN from the open doorway and then, as…
Chapter Fifty
TERRY CAME BACK HOME in the third week of October,…
Acknowledgments, Notes, Confessions
About the Author
Other Books by Joe Hill
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
HELL
CHAPTER O NE
IGNATIUS M ARTIN P ERRISH SPENT the night drunk and doing terrible things. He woke the next morning with a headache, put his hands to his temples, and felt something unfamiliar, a pair of knobby pointed protuberances. He was so ill—wet-eyed and weak—he didn’t think anything of it at first, was too hungover for thinking or worry.
But when he was swaying above the toilet, he glanced at himself in the mirror over the sink and saw he had grown horns while he slept. He lurched in surprise, and for the second time in twelve hours he pissed on his feet.
CHAPTER T WO
HE SHOVED HIMSELF BACK into his khaki shorts—he was still wearing yesterday’s clothes—and leaned over the sink for a better look.
They weren’t much as horns went, each of them about as long as his ring finger, thick at the base but soon narrowing to a point as they hooked upward. The horns were covered in his own too-pale skin, except at the very tips, which were an ugly, inflamed red, as if the needle points at the ends of them were about to poke through the flesh. He touched one and found the point sensitive, a little sore. He ran his fingers along the sides of each and felt the density of bone beneath the stretched-tight smoothness of skin.
His first thought was that somehow he had brought this affliction upon himself. Late the night before, he had gone into the woods beyond the old foundry, to the place where Merrin Williams had been killed. People had left remembrances at a diseased black cherry tree, its bark peeling away to show the flesh beneath. Merrin had been found like that, clothes peeled away to show the flesh beneath. There were photographs of her placed delicately in the branches, a vase of pussy willows, Hallmark cards warped and stained from exposure to the elements. Someone—Merrin’s mother, probably—had left a decorative cross with yellow nylon roses stapled to it and a plastic Virgin who smiled with the beatific idiocy of the functionally retarded.
He couldn’t stand that simpering smile. He couldn’t stand the cross either, planted in the place where Merrin had bled to death from her smashed-in head. A cross with yellow roses. What a fucking thing. It was like an electric chair with floral-print cushions, a bad joke. It bothered him that someone wanted to bring Christ out here. Christ was a year too late to do any good. He hadn’t been anywhere around when Merrin needed Him.
Ig had ripped the decorative cross down and stamped it into the dirt. He’d had to take a leak, and he did it on the Virgin, drunkenly urinating on his own feet in the process. Perhaps that was blasphemy enough to bring on this transformation. But no—he sensed that there had been more. What else, he couldn’t recall. He’d had a lot to drink.
He turned his head this way and that, studying himself in the mirror, lifting his fingers to touch the horns, once and again. How deep did the bone go? Did the horns have roots, pushing back into his brain? At this thought the bathroom darkened, as if the lightbulb overhead had briefly gone dim. The welling darkness, though, was behind his eyes, in his head, not in the light fixtures. He held the sink and waited for the feeling of weakness to pass.
He saw it then. He was going to die. Of course he was going to die. Something was pushing into his brain, all right: a tumor. The horns weren’t really there. They were metaphorical, imaginary. He had a tumor eating his brain, and it was causing him to see things. And if he was to the point of seeing things, then it was probably too late to save him.
The idea that he might be going to die brought with it a surge of relief, a physical sensation, like coming up for air after being underwater too long. Ig had come close to drowning once and had suffered from asthma as a child, and to him, contentment was as simple as being able to breathe.
“I’m sick,” he breathed. “I’m dying.”
It improved his mood to say it aloud.
He studied himself in the mirror, expecting the horns to vanish now that he knew they were hallucinatory, but it didn’t work that way. The horns remained. He fretfully tugged at his hair, trying to see if he could hide them, at least until he got to the doctor’s, then quit when he realized how silly it was to try to conceal something no one would be able to see but him.
He wandered into the bedroom on shaky legs. The bedclothes were shoved back on either side, and the bottom sheet still bore the rumpled impression of Glenna Nicholson’s curves. He had no memory of falling into bed beside her, didn’t even remember getting home—another missing part of the evening. It had been in his head until this very moment that he’d slept alone and that Glenna had spent the night somewhere else. With someone else.
They had gone out together the night before, but after he’d been drinking awhile, Ig had just naturally started to think about Merrin, the anniversary of her death coming up in a few days. The more he drank, the more he missed her—and the more conscious he was of how little like her Glenna was. With her tattoos and her paste-on nails, her bookshelf full of Dean Koontz novels, her cigarettes and her rap sheet, Glenna was the un-Merrin. It irritated Ig to see her sitting there on the other side of the table, seemed a kind of betrayal to be with her, although whether he was betraying Merrin or himself, he didn’t know. Finally he had to get away—Glenna kept reaching over to stroke his knuckles with one finger, a gesture she meant to be tender but for some reason pissed him off. He went to the men’s room and hid there for twenty minutes. When he returned, he found the booth empty. He sat drinking for an hour before he understood that she was not coming back and that he was not sorry. But at some point in the evening, they had both wound up here in the same bed, the bed they’d shared for the last three months.
He heard the distant babble of the TV in the next room. Glenna was still in the apartment, then, hadn’t left for the salon yet. He would ask her to drive him to the doctor. The brief feeling of relief at the thought of dying had passed, and he was already dreading the days and weeks to come: his father struggling not to cry, his mother putting on false cheer, IV drips, treatments, radiation, helpless vomiting, hospital food.
Ig crept into the next room, where Glenna sat on the living-room couch, in a Guns N’ Roses tank top and faded pajama bottoms. She was hunched forward, elbows on the coffee table, tucking the last of a doughnut into her mouth with her fingers. In front of her was the box, containing three-day-old supermarket doughnuts, and a two-liter bottle of Diet Coke. She was watching daytime talk.
She heard him and glanced his way, eyelids low, gaze disapproving, then returned her stare to the tube. “My Best Friend Is a Sociopath!” was the subject of today’s program. Flabby rednecks were getting ready to throw chairs at one another.
She hadn’t noticed the horns.
“I think I’m sick,” he said.
“Don’t bitch at me,” she said. “I’m hungover, too.”
“No. I mean…look at me. Do I look all right?” Asking because he had to be sure.
She slowly turned her head toward him again and peered at him from under her eyelashes. She had on last night’s mascara, a little smudged. Glenna had a smooth, pleasantly round face and a smooth, pleasantly curvy body. She could’ve almost been a model, if the job was modeling plus sizes. She outweighed Ig by fifty pounds. It wasn’t that she was grotesquely fat but that he was absurdly skinny. She liked to fuck him from on top, and when she put her elbows on his chest, she could push all the air out of him, a thoughtless act of erotic asphyxiation. Ig, who so often struggled for breath, knew every famous person who had ever died of erotic asphyxiation. It was a surprisingly common end for musicians. Kevin Gilbert. Hideto Matsumoto, probably. Michael Hutchence, of course, not someone he wanted to be thinking about in this particular moment. The devil inside. Every one of us.
“Are you still drunk?” she asked.
When he didn’t reply, she shook her head and looked back at the television.
That was it, then. If she had seen them, she would’ve come screaming to her feet. But she couldn’t see them because they weren’t there. They existed only in Ig’s mind. Probably if he looked at himself now in a mirror, he wouldn’t see them either. But then Ig spotted a reflection of himself in the window, and the horns were still there. In the window he was a glassy, transparent figure, a demonic ghost.
“I think I need to go to the doctor,” he said.
“You know what I need?” she asked.
“What?”
“Another doughnut,” she said, leaning forward to look into the open box. “You think another doughnut would be okay?”
He replied in a flat voice he hardly recognized, “What’s stopping you?”
“I already had one, and I’m not even hungry anymore. I just want to eat it.” She turned her head and peered up at him, her eyes glittering in a way that suddenly seemed both scared and pleading. “I’d like to eat the whole box.”
“The whole box,” he repeated.
“I don’t even want to use my hands. I just want to stick my face in and start eating. I know that’s gross.” She moved her finger from doughnut to doughnut, counting. “Six. Do you think it would be okay if I ate six more doughnuts?”
It was hard to think past his alarm and the feeling of pressure and weight at his temples. What she had just said made no sense, was another part of the whole unnatural bad-dream morning.
“If you’re screwing with me, I wish you wouldn’t. I told you I don’t feel good.”
“I want another doughnut,” she said.
“Go ahead. I don’t care.”
“Well. Okay. If you think it’s all right,” she said, and she took a doughnut, pulled it into three pieces, and began to eat, shoving in one chunk after another without swallowing.
Soon the whole doughnut was in her mouth, filling her cheeks. She gagged, softly, then inhaled deeply through her nostrils and began to swallow.
Iggy watched, repelled. He had never seen her do anything like it, hadn’t seen anything like it since junior high, kids grossing out other kids in the cafeteria. When she was done, she took a few panting, uneven breaths, then looked over her shoulder, eyeing him anxiously.
“I didn’t even like it. My stomach hurts,” she said. “Do you think I should have another one?”
“Why would you eat another one if your stomach hurts?”
“’Cause I want to get really fat. Not fat like I am now. Fat enough so you won’t want to have anything to do with me.” Her tongue came out, and the tip touched her upper lip, a thoughtful, considering gesture. “I did something disgusting last night. I want to tell you about it.”
The thought occurred again that none of it was really happening. If he was having some sort of fever dream, though, it was a persistent one, convincing in its fine details. A fly crawled across the TV screen. A car shushed past out on the road. One moment naturally followed the last, in a way that seemed to add up to reality. Ig was a natural at addition. Math had been his best subject in school, after ethics, which he didn’t count as a real subject.
“I don’t think I want to know what you did last night,” he said.
“That’s why I want to tell you. To make you sick. To give you a reason to go away. I feel so bad about what you’ve been through and what people say about you, but I can’t stand waking up next to you anymore. I just want you to go, and if I told you what I did, this disgusting thing, then you’d leave and I’d be free again.”
“What do people say about me?” he asked. It was a silly question. He already knew.
She shrugged. “Things about what you did to Merrin. How you’re like a sick sex pervert and stuff.”
Ig stared at her, transfixed. It fascinated him, the way each thing she said was worse than the one before and how at ease she seemed to be with saying them. Without shame or awkwardness.
“So what did you want to tell me?”
“I ran into Lee Tourneau last night after you disappeared on me. You remember Lee and I used to have a thing going, back in high school?”
“I remember,” Ig said. Lee and Ig had been friends in another life, but all that was behind Ig now, had died with Merrin. It was difficult to maintain close friendships when you were under suspicion of being a sex murderer.
“Last night at the Station House, he was sitting in a booth in back, and after you disappeared, he bought me a drink. I haven’t talked to Lee in forever. I forgot how easy he is to talk to. You know Lee, he doesn’t look down on anyone. He was real nice to me. When you didn’t come back after a while, he said we ought to look for you in the parking lot, and if you were gone, he’d drive me home. But then when we were outside, we got kissing kind of hot, like old times, like when we were together—and I got carried away and went down on him, right there with a couple guys watching and everything. I haven’t done anything that crazy since I was nineteen and on speed.”
Ig needed help. He needed to get out of the apartment. The air was too close, and his lungs felt tight and pinched.
She was leaning over the box of doughnuts again, her expression placid, as if she had just told him a fact of no particular consequence: that they were out of milk or had lost the hot water again.
“You think it would be all right to eat one more?” she asked. “My stomach feels better.”
“Do what you want.”
She turned her head and stared at him, her pale eyes glittering with an unnatural excitement. “You mean it?”
“I don’t give a fuck,” he said. “Pig out.”
She smiled, cheeks dimpling, then bent over the table, taking the box in one hand. She held it in place, shoved her face into it, and began to eat. She made noises while she chewed, smacking her lips and breathing strangely. She gagged again, her shoulders hitching, but kept eating, using her free hand to push more doughnut into her mouth, even though her cheeks were already swollen and full. A fly buzzed around her head, agitated.
Ig edged past the couch, toward the door. She sat up a little, gasping for breath, and rolled her eyes toward him. Her gaze was panicky, and her cheeks and wet mouth were gritted with sugar.
“Mm,” she moaned. “Mmm.” Whether she moaned in pleasure or misery, he didn’t know.
The fly landed at the corner of her mouth. He saw it there for a moment—then Glenna’s tongue darted out, and she trapped it with her hand at the same time. When she lowered her hand, the fly was gone. Her jaw worked up and down, grinding everything in her mouth into paste.
Ig opened the door and slid himself out. As he closed the door behind him, she was lowering her face to the box again…a diver who had filled her lungs with air and was plunging once more into the depths.
CHAPTER T HREE
HE DROVE TO THE M ODERN Medical Practice Clinic, where they had walk-in service. The small waiting room was almost full, and it was too warm, and there was a child screaming. A little girl lay on her back in the center of the room, producing great howling sobs in between gasps for air. Her mother sat in a chair against the wall and was bent over her, whispering furiously, frantically, a steady stream of threats, imprecations, and act-now-before-it’s-too-late offers. Once she tried to grip her daughter’s ankle, and the little girl kicked her hand away with a black buckled shoe.
The remainder of the people in the waiting room were determinedly ignoring the scene, looking blankly at magazines or at the muted TV in the corner. It was “My Best Friend Is a Sociopath!” here, too. Several of them glanced at Ig as he entered, a few in a hopeful sort of way, fantasizing, perhaps, that the little girl’s father had arrived to take her outside and deliver a brutal spanking. But as soon as they saw him, they looked away, knew in a glance that he wasn’t there to help.
Ig wished he’d brought a hat. He cupped a hand to his forehead, as if to shade his eyes from a bright light, hoping to conceal his horns. If anyone noticed them, however, they gave no sign of it.
At the far end of the room was a window in the wall and a woman sitting at a computer on the other side. The receptionist had been staring at the mother of the crying child, but when Ig appeared before her, she looked up and her lips twitched, formed a smile.
“What can I do you for?” she asked. She was already reaching toward a clipboard with some forms on it.
“I want a doctor to look at something,” Ig said, and lifted his hand slightly to reveal the horns.
She narrowed her eyes at them and pursed her lips in a sympathetic moue. “Well, that doesn’t look right,” she said, and swiveled to her computer.
Whatever reaction Ig expected—and he hardly knew what he expected—it wasn’t this. She had reacted to the horns as if he’d shown her a broken finger or a rash—but she had reacted to them. Had seemed to see them. Only if she’d really seen them, he could not imagine her simply puckering her lips and looking away.
“I just have to ask you a few questions. Name?”
“Ignatius Perrish.”
“Age?”
“Twenty-six.”
“Do you see a doctor locally?”
“I haven’t seen a doctor in years.”
She lifted her head and peered at him thoughtfully, frowning again, and he thought he was about to be scolded for not having regular checkups. The little girl shrieked even more loudly than before. Ig looked back in time to see her bash her mother in the knee with a red plastic fire truck, one of the toys stacked in the corner for kids to play with while waiting. Her mother yanked it out of her hands. The girl dropped onto her back again and began to kick at the air—like an overturned cockroach—wailing with renewed fury.
“I want to tell her to shut that miserable brat up,” the receptionist remarked, in a sunny, passing-the-time tone of voice. “What do you think?”
“Do you have a pen?” Ig asked, mouth dry. He held up the clipboard. “I’ll go fill these out.”
The receptionist’s shoulders slumped, and her smile went out.
“Sure,” she said to Ig, and shoved a pen at him.
He turned his back to her and looked down at the forms clipped to the board, but his eyes wouldn’t focus.
She had seen the horns but hadn’t thought them unusual. And then she’d said that thing about the girl who was crying and her helpless mother: I want to tell her to shut that miserable brat up. She had wanted to know if he thought it would be okay. So had Glenna, wondering if it would be all right to stick her face in the box of doughnuts and feed like a pig at the trough.
He looked for a place to sit. There were exactly two empty chairs, one on either side of the mother. As Ig approached, the girl reached deep into her lungs and dredged up a shrill scream that shook the windows and caused some in the waiting area to flinch. Advancing forward into that sound was like moving into a knee-buckling gale.
As Ig sat, the girl’s mother slumped in her chair, swatting herself in the leg with a rolled-up magazine—which was not, Ig felt, what she really wanted to hit with it. The little girl seemed to have exhausted herself with this final cry and now lay on her back with tears running down her red and ugly face. Her mother was red in the face, too. She cast a miserable, eye-rolling glance at Ig. Her gaze seemed to briefly catch on his horns—and then shifted away.
“Sorry about the ridiculous noise,” she said, and touched Ig’s hand in a gesture of apology.
And when she did, when her skin brushed his, Ig knew that her name was Allie Letterworth and that for the last four months she’d been sleeping with her golf instructor, meeting him at a motel down the road from the links. Last week they had fallen asleep after an episode of strenuous fucking, and Allie’s cell phone had been off, and so she had missed the increasingly frantic calls from her daughter’s summer day camp, wondering where she was and when she would be by to pick up her little girl. When she finally arrived, two hours late, her daughter was in hysterics, red-faced, snot boiling from her nose, her bloodshot eyes wild, and Allie had to get her a sixty-dollar Webkinz and a banana split to calm her down and buy her silence; it was the only way to keep Allie’s husband from finding out. If she had known what a drag a kid was going to be, she never would’ve had one.
Ig pulled his hand away from her.
The girl began to grunt and stamp her feet on the floor. Allie Letterworth sighed and leaned toward Ig and said, “For what it’s worth, I’d love to kick her right in her spoiled ass, but I’m worried about what all these people would say if I hit her. Do you think—”
“No,” Ig said.
He couldn’t know the things he knew about her but knew them anyway, the way he knew his cell-phone number or his address. He knew, too, with utter certainty, that Allie Letterworth would not talk about kicking her daughter’s spoiled ass with a total stranger. She had said it like someone talking to herself.
“No,” repeated Allie Letterworth, opening her magazine and then letting it fall shut. “I guess I can’t do that. I wonder if I ought to get up and go. Just leave her here and drive away. I could stay with Michael, hide from the world, drink gin, and fuck all the time. My husband would get me on abandonment, but, like, who cares? Would you want partial custody of that?”
“Is Michael your golf instructor?” Ig asked.
She nodded dreamily and smiled at him and said, “The funny thing is, I never would’ve signed up for lessons with him if I knew Michael was a nigger. Before Tiger Woods there weren’t any jigaboos in golf except if they were carrying your clubs—it was one place you could go to get away from them. You know the way most blacks are, always on their cell phones with f-word this and f-word that, and the way they look at white women. But Michael is educated. He talks just like a white person. And it’s true what they say about black dicks. I’ve screwed tons of white guys, and there wasn’t one of ’em who was hung like Michael.” She wrinkled her nose and said, “We call it the five-iron.”
Ig jumped to his feet and walked quickly to the receptionist’s window. He hastily scribbled answers to a few questions and then offered her the clipboard.
Behind him the little girl screamed, “No! No, I won’t sit up!”
“I feel like I have to say something to that girl’s mother,” said the receptionist, looking past Ig at the woman and her daughter, paying no attention to the clipboard. “I know it’s not her fault her daughter is a screechy puke, but I really want to say just one thing.”
Ig looked at the little girl and at Allie Letterworth. Allie was bent over her again, poking her with the rolled-up magazine, hissing at her. Ig returned his gaze to the receptionist.
“Sure,” he said, experimentally.
She opened her mouth, then hesitated, gazing anxiously into Ig’s face. “Only thing is, I wouldn’t want to start an ugly scene.”
The tips of his horns pulsed with a sudden unpleasant heat. Some part of him was surprised—already, and he hadn’t even had the horns for an hour—that she hadn’t immediately given in when he offered his permission.
“What do you mean, start one?” he asked, tugging restlessly at the little goatee he was cultivating. Curious now to see if he could make her do it. “It’s amazing how people let their kids act these days, isn’t it? When you think about it, you can hardly blame the child if the parent can’t teach them how to act.”
The receptionist smiled: a tough, grateful smile. At the sight of it, he felt another sensation shoot through the horns, an icy thrill.
She stood and glanced past him, to the woman and the little girl.
“Ma’am?” she called. “Excuse me, ma’am?”
“Yes?” said Allie Letterworth, looking up hopefully, probably expecting that her daughter was about to be called to her appointment.
“I know your daughter is very upset, but if you can’t quiet her down, do you think you could show some fucking consideration to the rest of us and get off your wide ass and take her outside where we won’t all have to listen to her squall?” asked the receptionist, smiling her plastic, stapled-on smile.
The color drained out of Allie Letterworth’s face, leaving a few hot, red spots glowing in her waxy cheeks. She held her daughter by the wrist. The little girl’s face was a hideous shade of crimson now, and she was pulling to get free, digging her fingernails at Allie’s hand.
“What?” Allie asked. “What did you say?”
“My head!” the receptionist shouted, dropping the smile and tapping furiously at her right temple. “Your kid won’t shut up, and my head is going to explode, and—”
“Fuck you!” shouted Allie Letterworth, coming to her feet, swaying.
“—if you had any consideration for anyone else—”
“Shove it up your ass!”
“—you’d take that shrieking pig of yours by the hair and drag her the fuck out—”
“You dried-up twat!”
“—but oh, no, you just sit there diddling yourself—”
“Come on, Marcy,” said Allie, yanking at her daughter’s wrist.
“No!” said the little girl.
“I said come on!” said her mother, dragging her toward the exit.
At the threshold to the street, Allie Letterworth’s daughter wrenched her wrist free from her mother’s grip. She bolted across the room but caught her feet on the fire truck and crashed onto her hands and knees. The girl began to scream once again, her worst, most piercing screams yet, and rolled onto her side, holding a bloody knee. Her mother paid no mind. She threw down her purse and began to yell at the receptionist, and the receptionist hollered shrilly back. Ig’s horns throbbed with a curiously pleasurable feeling of fullness and weight.
Ig was closer to the girl than anyone, and her mother wasn’t coming to help. He took her wrist to help her to her feet. When he touched her, he knew that her name was Marcia Letterworth and that she had dumped her breakfast into her mother’s lap on purpose that morning, because her mother was making her go to the doctor to have her warts burned off and she didn’t want to go and it was going to hurt and her mother was mean and stupid. Marcia turned her face up toward his. Her eyes, full of tears, were the clear, intense blue of a blowtorch.
“I hate Mommy,” she told Ig. “I want to burn her in her bed with matches. I want to burn her all up gone.”
CHAPTER F OUR
THE NURSE WHO TOOK Ig’s weight and blood pressure told him her ex-husband was dating a girl who drove a sporty yellow Saab. The nurse knew where she parked and wanted to go over on her lunch break and put a big long scratch in the side with her car keys. She wanted to leave dog shit on the driver’s seat. Ig sat perfectly still on the exam table, his hands balled into fists, and offered no opinion.
When the nurse removed the blood-pressure cuff, her fingers brushed his bare arm, and Ig knew that she had vandalized other people’s cars, many times before: a teacher who’d flunked her for cheating on a test, a friend who had blabbed a secret, her ex-husband’s lawyer, for being her ex-husband’s lawyer. Ig could see her in his head, at the age of twelve, dragging a nail along the side of her father’s black Oldsmobile, gouging an ugly white line that ran the length of his car.
The exam room was too cold, air conditioner blasting, and Ig was trembling from the chill and his nervousness by the time Dr. Renald entered the room. Ig lowered his head to show him the horns. He told the doctor he couldn’t tell what was real and what wasn’t. He said he thought he was having delusions.
“People keep telling me things,” Ig said. “Awful things. Telling me things they want to do, things no one would ever admit to wanting to do. A little girl just told me she wanted to burn her mother up in her bed. Your nurse told me she wants to ruin some poor girl’s car. I’m scared. I don’t know what’s happening to me.”
The doctor studied the horns, worry lines furrowed across his brow. “Those are horns,” he said.
“I know they’re horns.”
Dr. Renald shook his head. “They look inflamed at the points. Do they hurt?”
“Like hell.”
“Ha,” said the doctor. He rubbed a hand across his mouth. “Let me measure them.” He ran the tape around the circumference, at the base, then measured from temple to point and from tip to tip. He scratched some numbers on his prescription pad. He ran his calloused fingertips over them, feeling them, his face attentive, considering, and Ig knew something he didn’t want to know. He knew that Dr. Renald had, a few days before, stood in the dark of his bedroom, peering around a curtain and out his bedroom window, masturbating while he watched his seventeen-year-old daughter’s friends cavorting in the swimming pool.
The doctor stepped back again, his old gray eyes worried. He seemed to be coming to a decision. “You know what I want to do?”
“What?” Ig asked.
“I want to grind up some OxyContin and have a little snort. I promised myself I’d never snort any at work, because I think it makes me stupid, but I don’t know if I can wait six more hours.”
It took Ig a moment before he realized that the doctor was waiting for his thoughts on the matter.
“Can we just talk about these things on my head?” Ig said.
The doctor’s shoulders sank. He turned his face away and let out a slow, seething breath.
“Listen,” Ig said. “Please. I need help. Someone has to help me.”
Dr. Renald reluctantly looked up at him.
Ig said, “I don’t know if this is happening or not. I think I’m going crazy. How come people don’t react more when they see the horns? If I saw someone with horns, I’d piss down my own leg.” Which, in fact, was exactly what he had done, when he first saw himself in the mirror.
“They’re hard to remember,” the doctor said. “As soon as I look away from you, I forget you have them. I don’t know why.”
“But you see them now.”
Renald nodded.
“And you’ve never seen anything like them?”
“Are you sure I can’t have a little sniff of Oxy?” the doctor asked. He brightened. “I’d share. We could get fucked up together.”
Ig shook his head. “Listen, please.”
The doctor made an ugly face but nodded.
“How come you aren’t calling other doctors in here? How come you aren’t taking this more seriously?”
“To be honest,” Renald said, “it’s a little hard to concentrate on your problem. I keep thinking about the pills in my briefcase and this girl my daughter hangs out with. Nancy Hughes. God, I want her ass. I feel sort of sick when I think about it, though. She’s still in braces.”
“Please,” Ig said. “I’m asking for your medical opinion—your help. What do I do?”
“Fucking patients,” the doctor said. “All any of you care about is yourselves.”
CHAPTER F IVE
HE DROVE. H E DIDN’T THINK WHERE, and for a while it didn’t matter. It was enough to be moving.
If there was a place left to Ig that he could call his own, it was this car, his 1972 AMC Gremlin. The apartment belonged to Glenna. She had lived there before him and would continue to live there after they were through with each other, which was apparently now. He had moved back in with his parents for a time, immediately after Merrin was killed, but he’d never felt at home, no longer belonged there. What was left to Ig now was the car, which was a vehicle but also a place of habitation, a space in which much of his life had been lived, good and bad.
The good: making love to Merrin Williams in it, banging his head on the roof and his knee on the gearshift. The rear shocks were stiff and screeched when the car jolted up and down, a sound that would cause Merrin to bite her lip to keep from laughing, even as Ig moved between her legs. The bad: the night Merrin was raped and killed, out by the old foundry, while he’d been sleeping off a drunk in this car, hating her in his dreams.
The AMC had been a place to hang out when there was nowhere else to go, when there was nothing to do except drive around Gideon, wishing something would happen. Nights when Merrin worked or had to study, Ig would cruise around with his best friend, tall, lean, half-blind Lee Tourneau. They’d drive down to the sandbar, where sometimes there would be a campfire and people they knew, a couple trucks parked on the embankment, a cooler full of Coronas. They would sit on the hood of the car and watch the sparks from the fire sail up into the night to vanish, the flames reflected in the black, swiftly moving water. They would talk about bad ways to die—a natural subject for them, parked so close to the KnowlesRiver. Ig said drowning would be worst, and he had personal experience to back it up. The river had swallowed him once, held him under, forced itself down his throat, and it had been Lee Tourneau who swam in to pull him out. Lee said there was lots worse than drowning and that Ig had no imagination. Lee said burning had drowning beat any day of the week, but then he would say that, he’d had an unfortunate run-in with a burning car. Both of them knew what they knew.
Best of all were nights in the Gremlin with Lee and Merrin both. Lee would accordion himself in the rear—he was courtly by nature and always let Merrin sit up front with Ig—and then lie stretched out, with the back of his hand draped over his brow, Oscar Wilde lounging in despair on his davenport. They’d go to the Paradise Drive-In, drink beer while madmen in hockey masks chased half-naked teenagers, who would fall under the chain saw to cheers and honking horns. Merrin called these “double dates” Ig was there with her, and Lee was there with his right hand. For Merrin, half the fun of going out with Ig and Lee was ragging on Lee’s ass, but the morning Lee’s mother died, Merrin was the first to his house, to hold him while he wept.
For half an instant, Ig thought of paying a visit to Lee now; he had pulled Ig out of the deep water once, maybe he could again. But then he remembered what Glenna had told him an hour ago, the terrible bad-dream thing she had confessed over doughnuts: I got carried away and went down on him, right there with a couple guys watching and everything. Ig tried to feel the things he was supposed to feel, tried to hate them both, but couldn’t even manage low-grade loathing. He had other concerns at the moment. They were growing out of his fucking head.
And anyway: It wasn’t as if Lee were stabbing him in the back, swiping his beloved out from under him. Ig wasn’t in love with Glenna and didn’t think she was or ever had been in love with him—whereas Lee and Glenna had history, had been sweethearts once upon a very long time ago.
It was still maybe not the sort of thing one friend would do to another, but then Lee and Ig weren’t friends anymore. After Merrin had been killed, Lee Tourneau had casually, without overt cruelty, cut Ig out of his life. There had been some expressions of quiet, sincere sympathy in the days right after Merrin’s body was found, but no promises that Lee would be there for him, no offers to meet. Then, in the weeks and months that followed, Ig noticed he only ever called Lee, not the other way around, and that Lee did not work too hard to hold up his end of a conversation. Lee had always affected a certain emotional disengagement, and so it was possible Ig did not immediately register how fully and completely he’d been dropped. After a while, though, Lee’s routine excuses for not coming over, for not meeting, added up. Ig was maybe not smart about other people, but he’d always been good at math. Lee was the aide to a New Hampshire congressman and couldn’t have a relationship with the lead suspect in a sex-murder case. There were no fights, no ugly moments between them. Ig understood, let it be over without begrudging him. Lee—poor, wounded, studious, lonely Lee—had a future. Ig didn’t.
Maybe because he’d been thinking of the sandbar, he wound up parked off Knowles Road, at the base of the OldFairRoadBridge. If he was looking for a place to drown himself, he couldn’t have hunted down a better spot. The sandbar reached a hundred feet into the current before dropping off into deep, fast, blue water. He could fill his pockets with stones and wade right in. He could also climb onto the bridge and jump; it was high enough. Aim for the rocks instead of the river if he wanted to do the job right. Just the thought of the impact made him wince. He got out and sat against the hood and listened to the hum of trucks high above him, rushing south.
He had been here lots of other times. Like the old foundry on Route 17, the sandbar was a destination for people too young to have a destination. He remembered another time down here, with Merrin, and how they had gotten caught out in the rain and sheltered under the bridge. They were in high school then. Neither of them could drive, and they had no car to run to. They shared a soggy basket of fried clams, sitting up on the weedy cobblestone incline under the bridge. It was so cold they could see their breath, and he held her wet, frozen hands in his.
Ig found a stained two-day-old newspaper, and when they got bored of not really reading it, Merrin said they should do something inspiring with it. Something that would lift the spirits of everyone everywhere who looked out on the river in the rain. They sprinted up the hill, through the drizzle, to buy birthday candles at the 7-Eleven, and then they ran back. Merrin showed him how to make boats out of the pages of the newspaper, and they lit the candles and put them in and set them off, one by one, into the rain and gathering twilight—a long chain of little flames, gliding serenely through the waterlogged darkness.
“Together we are inspiring,” she said to him, her cold lips so close to his earlobe that it made him shiver, her breath all clams. She trembled continuously, struggling with a laughing fit. “Merrin Williams and Iggy Perrish, making the world a better, more wonderful place, one paper ship at a time.”
She either didn’t notice or pretended not to see the boats filling with rain and sinking less than a hundred yards offshore, the candles in them winking out.
Remembering how it had been, and who he had been when they were together, stopped the frantic, out-of-control whirl of thoughts in his head. Perhaps for the first time all day, it was possible for Ig to take stock, to consider without panic what was happening to him.
He considered again the possibility that he had suffered a break with what was real, that everything he’d experienced over the course of the day had only been imagined. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d confused fantasy with reality, and he knew from experience that he was especially prone to unlikely religious delusions. He had not forgotten the afternoon he spent in the Tree House of the Mind. Hardly a day had passed in eight years that he hadn’t thought about it. Of course, if the tree house had been a fantasy—and that was the only explanation that ever made sense—it had been a shared one. He and Merrin had discovered the place together, and what had happened there was one of the secret silken knots that bound them to each other, a thing to puzzle over when a drive got dull or in the middle of the night, after being woken by a thunderstorm, when neither of them could get back to sleep. “I know it’s possible for people to have the same hallucination,” Merrin said once. “I just never saw myself as the type.”
The problem with thinking that his horns were nothing but an especially persistent and frightening delusion, a leap into madness that had been a long time coming, was that he could only deal with the reality in front of him. It did no good to tell himself that it was all in his head if it went on happening anyway. His belief was not required; his disbelief was of no consequence. The horns were always there when he reached up to touch them. Even when he didn’t touch them, he was aware of the sore, sensitive tips sticking out into the cool riverside breeze. They had the convincing and literal solidity of bone.
Lost in his thoughts, Ig didn’t hear the police car rolling down the hill until it crunched to a stop behind the Gremlin and the driver gave the siren a brief whoop. Ig’s heart lunged painfully, and he quickly turned. One of the policemen was leaning out the passenger window of his cruiser.
“What’s the story, Ig?” said the cop, who was not just any cop but the one named Sturtz.
Sturtz wore short sleeves that showed off his toned forearms, toasted a golden brown from routine exposure to the sun. It was a tight shirt, and he was a good-looking man. With his windblown yellow hair and his eyes hidden behind his mirrored sunglasses, he could’ve been on a billboard advertising cigarettes.
His partner, Posada, behind the steering wheel, was trying for the same look but couldn’t carry it off. His build was too slight, his Adam’s apple too prominent. They both had mustaches, but on Posada it was dainty and vaguely comical, the sort of thing that belonged on the face of a French maître d’ in a Cary Grant comedy.
Sturtz grinned. Sturtz was always glad to see him. Ig was never glad to see any cop but in particular preferred to avoid Sturtz and Posada, who had, ever since Merrin’s death, made a hobby out of hassling Ig, pulling him over for going five miles above the limit and searching his car, ticketing him for littering, loitering, living.
“No story. Just standing here,” Ig said.
“You been standing there for half an hour,” Posada called to him as the partners got out of their cruiser. “Talking to yourself. The woman lives back that way brought her kids in because you were freaking her out.”
“Think how freaked out she’d be if she knew who he is,” Sturtz said. “Your friendly neighborhood sex deviant and murder suspect.”
“On the bright side, he’s never killed any kids.”
“Not yet,” Sturtz said.
“I’ll go,” Ig said.
Sturtz said, “You’ll stay.”
“What do you want to do?” Posada asked Sturtz.
“I want to run him in for something.”
“Run him in for what?”
“I don’t know. Anything. I’d like to plant something on him. Bag of coke. Unregistered gun. Whatever. Too bad we don’t have anything. I really want to fuck with him.”
“I want to kiss you on the mouth when you talk dirty,” Posada said.
Sturtz nodded, unperturbed by this admission. That was when Ig remembered the horns. It was starting again, like the doctor and the nurse, like Glenna and Allie Letterworth.
“What I really want,” Sturtz said, “is to bust him for something and have him put up a struggle. Have an excuse to knock his fucking teeth out of his sorry mouth.”
“Oh, yeah. I’d like to watch that scene,” Posada said.
“Do you guys even know what you’re saying?” Ig asked.
“No,” Posada said.
“Kind of,” Sturtz said. He squinted, as if trying to read something printed on a distant sign. “We’re talking about whether we ought to bust you just for the fun of it, but I don’t know why.”
“You don’t know why you want to bust me?”
“Oh, I know why I want to bust you. I mean I don’t know why we’re talking about it. It’s not the kind of thing I usually discuss.”
“Why do you want to bust me?”
“Because of that faggot look you’ve always got on your face. That faggot look pisses me off. I’m not a big fan of homos,” Sturtz told him.
“And I want to bust you because maybe you’ll struggle and then Sturtz will bend you over the hood of the car to put the cuffs on,” Posada said. “That’ll give me something to beat off over tonight, only I’ll be picturing both of you naked.”
“So you don’t want to bust me because you think I got away with killing Merrin?” Ig asked.
Sturtz said, “No. I don’t even think you did it. You’re too much of a pussy. You would’ve confessed.”
Posada laughed.
Sturtz said, “Put your hands on the roof of the car. I want to poke around. Have a look in the back.”
Ig was glad to turn away from them and stretch his arms out over the roof of the car. He pressed his forehead to the glass of the driver’s-side window. The cool of it was soothing.
Sturtz made his way around to the hatchback. Posada stood behind Ig.
“I need his keys,” Sturtz said.
Ig took his right hand off the roof and went to dig them out of his pocket.
“Keep your hands on the roof,” Posada said. “I’ll get them. Which pocket?”
“Right,” Ig said.
Posada eased his hand into Ig’s front pocket and curled a finger through his key ring. He jangled them out, tossed them to Sturtz. Sturtz clapped his hands around them and popped the hatchback.
“I’d like to put my hand in your pocket again,” Posada said. “And leave it there. You don’t know how hard it is not to use my position of power to cop a feel. No pun intended. Cop. Ha. I never imagined how much of my job would involve handcuffing fit, half-naked men. I have to admit, I haven’t always been good.”
“Posada,” Ig said, “you should really let Sturtz know how you feel about him sometime.” As he said it, the horns throbbed.
“You think?” Posada asked. He sounded surprised but curious. “Sometimes I’ve thought—but then I think, you know, he’d probably pound the snot out of me.”
“No way. I bet he’s been waiting for you to do it. Why do you think he leaves the top button of his shirt open like that?”
“I’ve noticed he never gets that button.”
“You should just unzip his fly and go down on him. Surprise him. Give him a thrill. He’s probably only waiting on you to make the first move. But don’t do anything until I’m gone, okay? Something like that, you’re going to want your privacy.”
Posada cupped his hands around his mouth and exhaled, sampling the odor of his breath.
“Hot damn,” he said. “I didn’t brush this morning.” Then he snapped his fingers. “But there’s some Big Red in the glove compartment.” He turned and hurried over to the cruiser, muttering to himself.
The hatchback slammed. Sturtz swaggered back to Ig’s side.
“I wish I had a reason to arrest you. I wish you’d put a hand on me. I could lie and say you touched me. Propositioned me. I’ve always thought you looked more’n half queer, with your swishy walk and those eyes that always look like you’re going to start crying. I can’t believe Merrin Williams ever let you in her jeans. Whoever raped her probably gave her the first good fuck of her life.”
It felt as if Ig had swallowed a coal and it was stuck halfway down, behind his chest.
“What would you do,” Ig asked, “if a guy touched you?”
“I’d shove my nightstick up his asshole. Ask Mr. Homo how he likes that.” Sturtz considered a moment, then said, “Unless I was drunk. Then I’d probably let him blow me.” He paused another second before asking, in a hopeful sort of voice, “Are you going to touch me so I can shove my—”
“No,” Ig said. “But I think you’re right about the gays, Sturtz. You’ve got to draw the line. You let Mr. Homo get away with touching you, they’ll think you’re a homo, too.”
“I know I’m right. I don’t need you to tell me. We’re done here. Go on. I don’t want to find you hanging around under the bridge anymore. Got me?”
“Yes.”
“Actually, I do want to find you hanging around here. With drugs in your glove compartment. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Long as we got that straight. Now beat it.” Sturtz dropped Ig’s car keys in the gravel.
Ig waited for him to walk away before he bent and collected them and climbed behind the wheel of the Gremlin. He took a last glance at the cruiser in the rearview mirror. By then Sturtz was sitting in the passenger seat holding a clipboard in both hands and frowning down at it, trying to decide what to write. Posada was turned sideways in the seat so he was facing his partner and was looking at the other man with a mix of yearning and greed. As Ig pulled away, Posada licked his lips, then lowered his head, ducking under the dash and out of sight.
CHAPTER S IX
HE HAD GONE DOWN to the river to work out a plan, but for all the thinking he had done, Ig was as mixed up now as he’d been an hour ago. He thought of his parents and even got as far as driving a couple blocks in the direction of their house. But then he nervously jerked the wheel, turning the car off course and down a side road. He needed help but didn’t think they’d be able to give him any. It unnerved him to think about what they might offer him instead…what secret desires they might share. What if his mother harbored an urge to fuck little boys? What if his father did!
And anyway, it had been different between them in the time since Merrin died. It hurt them to see what had happened to him in the aftermath of her murder. They didn’t want to know about how he was living, had never once been inside Glenna’s place. Glenna asked why they never had a meal together and insinuated that Ig was ashamed to be with her, which he was. It hurt them, too, the shadow he had cast over them, because it was a well-known fact in town that Ig had raped and murdered Merrin Williams and got away with it because his rich and connected parents had pulled strings, called in favors, and twisted arms to interfere with the investigation.
His father had been a small-time celebrity for a while. He had played with Sinatra and Dean Martin, was on their records. He had cut records of his own, for Blue Tone, in the late sixties and early seventies, four of them, and had scored a Top 100 hit with a dreamy, cool-cat instrumental called “Fishin’ with Pogo.” He married a Vegas showgirl, played himself on TV variety shows and in a handful of movies, and finally resettled in New Hampshire, so Ig’s mom could be close to her family. Later he had been a celebrity professor at Berklee College of Music who sat in on occasion with the Boston Pops.
Ig had always liked to listen to his father, to watch him while he played. It was almost wrong to say his father played. It often seemed the other way around: that the horn was playing him. The way his cheeks swole out, then caved in as if he were being inhaled into it, the way the golden keys seemed to grab his fingers like little magnets snatching at iron filings, causing them to leap and dance in unexpected, startling fits. The way he shut his eyes and bent his head and twisted back and forth at the hips, as if his torso were an auger, screwing its way deeper and deeper into the center of his being, pulling the music up from somewhere in the pit of his belly.
Ig’s older brother had gone into the family line of work with a vengeance. Terence was on TV every night, star of his own music-and-comedy late-night show, Hothouse, which had come out of nowhere to mop the floor with the other late, late guys. Terry played horn in apparently death-defying situations, had done “Ring of Fire” in a ring of fire with Alan Jackson, had played “High & Dry” with Norah Jones, the both of them in a tank filling with water. It hadn’t sounded good, but it was great TV. Terry was making it hand over fist these days.
He had his own way of playing, too, different from their father. His chest strained so hard at his shirt it looked as if at any moment he would pop a button. His eyes bulged from his sockets so he seemed perpetually surprised. He jerked back and forth at the waist like a metronome. His face glistened with happiness, and sometimes it sounded as if his horn were screaming with laughter. He had inherited their father’s most precious gift: The more he practiced at a thing, the less practiced it sounded and the more natural and unexpected and lively it became.
Ig had hated to listen to his brother play when they were teenagers and would make up any excuse to avoid going with his parents to Terry’s performances. He got indigestion from jealousy, couldn’t sleep the night before Terry put on a big show at the school or, later, at local clubs. He had hated especially to be with Merrin watching Terry perform, could hardly stand to see the delight in her face, to see her in thrall to his music. When she swayed to Terry’s swing music, Ig imagined his brother reaching for her hips with invisible hands. He was over that now, though. He had been over it for a long time, and in fact the only part of his day he enjoyed now was watching Hothouse when Terry played.
Ig would’ve played, too—but for his asthma. He could never capture enough air in his chest to make the horn wail that way. He knew that his father wanted him to play, but when Ig pushed himself, he ran out of oxygen and his chest would grow sickeningly tight and a darkness would rise up at the edge of his vision. He had occasionally pushed himself until he fainted.
When it was clear he wasn’t getting anywhere with the trumpet, Ig had tried piano, but it had gone badly. The teacher, a friend of his father’s, was a drunk with bloodshot eyes who stank of pipe smoke and who would leave Ig to practice some hopelessly complex piece on his own while he went into the next room to nap. After that, Ig’s mother had suggested bass, but by then Ig wasn’t interested in mastering an instrument. He was interested in Merrin. Once he was in love with her, he didn’t need his family’s horns anymore.
He was going to have to see them sometime: his father and his mother, and Terry, too. His brother was in town, had come in on the red-eye for their grandmother’s eightieth birthday tomorrow, with Hothouse on summer hiatus. It was Terry’s first time back to Gideon since Merrin had died, and he wasn’t staying long, was going back the day after tomorrow. Ig didn’t blame him for wanting a quick getaway. The scandal had come just as the show was taking off and could’ve cost him everything; it said something about Terry that he would return to Gideon at all, a place where he would be at risk of being photographed with his sex-murderer brother, a picture that would be worth a grand at least to the Enquirer. But then, Terry had never believed that Ig was guilty of anything. Terry had been Ig’s loudest and angriest defender, at a time when the network would’ve preferred him to issue a terse “No comment” and move on.
Ig could avoid them for now, but sooner or later he would have to risk facing them. Maybe, he thought, it would be different with his family. Maybe they would be immune to him, and their secrets would stay secrets. They loved him, and he loved them. Love had to count for something. Maybe he could learn to control it, to turn it off, whatever “it” was. Maybe the horns would go away. They had come without warning, why shouldn’t they go the same way?
He pushed a hand back through his limp and thinning hair—thinning at twenty-six!—then squeezed his head between his palms. He hated the frantic scurry of his thoughts, how desperately one idea chased after another. His fingertips brushed the horns, and he cried out in fright. It was on his lips to say, God, please, God, make them go away… but then he caught himself and said nothing.
A crawly sensation worked its way up his forearms. If he was a devil now, could he still speak of God? Would lightning strike him, shatter him in a white flash? Would he burn?
“God,” he whispered.
Nothing happened.
“God, God, God,” he said.
He cocked his head, listening, waiting for some response.
“Please, God, make them go away. I’m sorry if I did something to piss you off last night. I was drunk. I was angry,” Ig said.
He held a breath, lifted his eyes, looked at himself in the rearview mirror. There were the horns. He was getting used to the sight of them now. They were becoming a part of his face. This thought caused him to shiver with revulsion.
At the edge of his vision, slipping past on his right, he saw a blaze of white and yanked the wheel, pulling up to the curb. Ig had been driving without thinking, paying no mind to where he was and with no idea where he was going. He had arrived, without meaning to, at the Sacred Heart of Mary, where he’d gone with his family to church for over two-thirds of his life and where he’d seen Merrin Williams for the first time.
He stared at the Sacred Heart with a dry mouth. He hadn’t been in there, or in any other church, since Merrin was killed, had not wanted to be part of a crowd, to be stared at by other parishioners. Nor had he wanted to get right with God; he felt God needed to get right with him.
Maybe if he walked in there and prayed to God, the horns would go away. Or maybe—maybe Father Mould would know what to do. Ig had an idea then. Father Mould might be immune to the influence of the horns. If anyone could resist the power of them, Ig thought, wouldn’t it be a man of the cloth? He had God on his side, and the protection of God’s house. Maybe an exorcism could be arranged. Father Mould had to know people he could contact about something like that. A sprinkle of holy water and a few Our Fathers and Ig might be right back to normal.
He left the Gremlin at the curb and walked up the concrete path to the Sacred Heart. He was reaching for the door when he caught himself, drew his hand back. What if, when he touched the latch, his hand began to burn? What if he couldn’t go in? he wondered. What if when he tried to step through the door, some black force repelled him, threw him back on his ass? He saw himself staggering through the nave, smoke boiling from under his shirt collar, his eyes bulging from their sockets like a character’s in a cartoon, imagined suffocation and lacerating pain.
He forced himself to reach out and take the latch. One leaf of the door opened to his hand—a hand that did not burn, or sting, or feel any pain at all. He looked into the dimness of the nave, out over the rows of dark-varnished pews. The place smelled of seasoned wood and old hymnals, with their sun-worn leather covers and brittle pages. He had always liked the smell and was surprised to find he still liked it now, that the odor didn’t cause him to choke.
He stepped through the door. Ig spread his arms and waited. He looked down the length of one arm, then the other, watching to see if any smoke would come trickling out of his shirt cuffs. None did. He lifted a hand to the horn at his right temple. It was still there. He expected them to tingle, to pulse, something—but there was nothing. The church was a cavern of silence and darkness, lit only by the pastel glow of the stained-glass windows. Mary at her son’s feet as He died on the cross. John baptizing Jesus in the river.
He thought he should approach the altar, kneel there, and plead with God for a break. He felt a prayer forming on his lips: Please, God, if You make the horns go away, I’ll always serve You, I’ll come back to church, I’ll be a priest, I’ll spread the Word, I’ll spread the Word in hot Third World countries where everyone has leprosy, if anyone has leprosy anymore, just please, make them go away, make me who I was again. He didn’t get around to saying it, though. Before he took a step, he heard a gentle clang of iron on iron and turned his head.
He was still in the entrance to the atrium, and there was a door to his left, slightly ajar, which looked into a staircase. There was a little gym down there, available to the parishioners for various functions. Iron banged softly again. Ig touched the door, and as it eased back, opening wider, a trickle of country music spilled out.
“Hello?” he called, standing in the doorway.
Another ding of iron and a breathless gasp.
“Yes?” called Father Mould. “Who is it?”
“Ig Perrish, sir.”
A moment of silence followed. It lasted a little too long.
Mould said, “Come on down and see me.”
Ig went down the stairs.
At the far end of the basement, a bank of fluorescent lights shone down on a puffy floor mat, some giant inflatable balls, a balance beam—equipment for a kids’ tumbling class. Here by the stairwell, though, some of the lights were out and it was darker. Arranged along the walls were a circuit of cardiovascular machines. Close to the foot of the stairs was a weight bench, Father Mould stretched out on his back upon it.
Forty years before, Mould had been a wingman for Syracuse and afterward was a marine, serving a tour of duty in the Iron Triangle, and he still had the mass and overwhelming physical presence of a hockey player, the self-assured authority of a soldier. He was slow on his feet, hugged people when they amused him, and was lovable in the way of a gentle old St. Bernard who likes to sleep on the furniture even though he knows he isn’t supposed to. He was dressed in a gray warm-up suit and ancient, beat-up Adidas. His cross hung from one end of the weight bar, swinging softly as he dropped the bar and then ponderously raised it again.
Sister Bennett stood behind the bench. She was built a little like a hockey player herself, with broad shoulders and a heavy, mannish face, her short, curly hair held back by a violet sweatband. She wore a purple tracksuit to match. Sister Bennett had taught an ethics class at St. Jude’s and liked to draw flow charts on the chalkboard, showing how certain decisions led inexorably to salvation (a rectangle she filled with fat, puffy clouds) or inexorably to hell (a box filled with flames).
Ig’s brother, Terry, had mocked her relentlessly, drawing flow charts of his own, for the amusement of his classmates, showing how, after a variety of grotesque lesbian encounters, Sister Bennett would wind up arriving in hell herself, where she would be only too glad to indulge in disturbing sexual practices with the devil. These had made Terry the hit of the St. Jude’s cafeteria—an early taste of celebrity. It had also been his first brush with notoriety, as he’d eventually been ratted out (by an anonymous tipster, whose identity was unknown to this day). Terry had been invited to Father Mould’s office. Their meeting took place behind closed doors, but that was not enough to muffle the sound of Mould’s wooden paddle striking Terry’s ass or, after the twentieth stroke, Terry’s cries. Everyone in school heard. The sounds carried through the vents of the outdated heating system to every classroom. Ig had writhed in his chair, in agony for Terry. He had eventually stuck his fingers into his ears so he wouldn’t have to hear. Terry was not allowed to perform at the year-end recital—for which he’d been practicing for months—and was flunked in ethics.
Father Mould sat up, wiping his face with a towel. It was darkest there at the foot of the steps, and the thought crossed Ig’s mind that Mould genuinely couldn’t see the horns.
“Hello, Father,” Ig said.
“Ignatius. Seems like it’s been forever. Where have you been keeping yourself?”
“I’ve got a place downtown,” Ig said, his voice hoarsening with emotion. He had been unprepared for Father Mould’s solicitous tone, his easy, avuncular affection. “It isn’t far, really. I keep meaning to stop in, but—”
“Ig? Are you all right?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what’s happening to me. It’s my head. Look at my head, Father.”
Ig stepped forward and bowed slightly, leaning into the light. He could see the shadow of his head on the swept cement floor, the horns a pair of small pointed hooks sticking out from his temples. He was afraid almost to see Mould’s reaction and glanced at him shyly. The ghost of a polite smile remained on Father Mould’s face. His brow furrowed in thought as he studied the horns with a kind of glassy bewilderment.
“I was drunk last night, and I did terrible things,” Ig said. “And when I woke up, I was like this, and I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what I’m becoming. I thought you could tell me what to do.”
Father Mould stared for another long moment, openmouthed, baffled.
“Well, kiddo,” he said at last. “You want me to tell you what to do? I think you ought to go home and hang yourself. That’d probably be the best thing for you, for your family—really, for everyone. There’s rope in the storeroom behind the church. I’d go get it for you if I thought that would point you in the right direction.”
“Why—” Ig started, and then had to clear his throat before he went on. “Why do you want me to kill myself?”
“Because you murdered Merrin Williams and your daddy’s big-shot Jew lawyer got you off. Sweet little Merrin Williams. I had a lot of affection for her. Not much of a rack, but she did have one fine little ass. You should’ve gone to jail. I wanted you to go to jail. Sister, spot me.” He stretched out on his back for another set of reps.
“But, Father,” Ig said. “I didn’t do it. I didn’t kill her.”
“Oh, you big kidder,” said Mould as he put his hands on the bar above him. Sister Bennett settled into position at the head of the bench press. “Everyone knows you did it. You might as well take your own life. You’re going to hell anyway.”
“I’m there already.”
Mould grunted as he lowered the bar to his chest and heaved it up again. Ig noticed Sister Bennett staring at him.
“I wouldn’t blame you for killing yourself,” she said without preamble. “Most days I’m ready to commit suicide by lunchtime. I hate how people look at me. The lesbian jokes they make about me behind my back. I could use that rope in the shed if you don’t want it.”
Mould shoved the bar up with a gasp. “I think about Merrin Williams all the time. Usually when I’m balling her mother. Her ma does a lot of work for me here in the church these days, you know. Most of it on her hands and knees.” Grinning at the thought. “Poor woman. We pray together most every day. Usually for you to die.”
“You…you took a vow of chastity,” Ig said.
“Chastity shmastity. I figure God is just glad I keep it in my pants around the altar boys. Way I see it, the lady needs comfort from someone, and she sure isn’t going to get any from that four-eyed sad sack she’s married to. Not the right kind of comfort anyway.”
Sister Bennett said, “I want to be someone different. I want to run away. I want someone to like me. Did you ever like me, Iggy?”
Ig swallowed. “Well…I guess. Somewhat.”
“I want to sleep with someone,” Sister Bennett continued, as if he hadn’t said anything. “I want someone to hold me in bed at night. I don’t care whether it’s a man or a woman. I don’t care. I don’t want to be alone anymore. I can write checks for the church. Sometimes I want to empty the account and run away with the money. Sometimes I want to do that so bad.”
“I’m surprised,” Mould said, “that no one in this town has stepped up to make an example out of you for what you did to Merrin Williams. Give you a taste of what you gave her. You’d think some concerned citizens would pay you a visit some night, take you for a relaxing tour of the countryside. Right back to that tree where you killed Merrin and string you up from it. If you won’t do the decent thing and hang yourself, then that’d be the next best thing.”
Ig was surprised to find himself relaxing, unbunching his fists, breathing more steadily. Mould wobbled with the bench press. Sister Bennett caught the bar and settled it in its cradle with a clank.
Ig lifted his gaze to her and said, “What’s stopping you?”
“From what?” she asked.
“From taking the money and leaving.”
“God,” she said. “I love God.”
“What’s He ever done for you?” Ig asked her. “Does He make it hurt less when people laugh at you behind your back? Or more—because for His sake you’re all alone in the world? How old are you?”
“Sixty-one.”
“Sixty-one is old. It’s almost too late. Almost. Can you wait even one more day?”
She touched her throat, her eyes wide and alarmed. Then she said, “I’d better go,” and turned and hurried past him to the stairs.
Father Mould hardly seemed aware she was leaving. He was sitting up now, wrists resting on his knees.
“Were you done lifting?” Ig asked him.
“One more rep to go.”
“Let me spot you,” Ig said, and came around behind the bench.
As he handed Mould the bar, Ig’s fingers brushed Mould’s knuckles, and he saw that when Mould was twenty, he and a few other guys on the hockey team had pulled ski masks over their faces and driven after a car full of Nation of Islam kids who had come up from New York City to speak at Syracuse about civil rights. Mould and his friends forced the kids off the road and chased them into the woods with baseball bats. They caught the slowest of them and shattered his legs in eight different places. It was two years before the kid could get around without the help of a walker.
“You and Merrin’s mother—have you really been praying for me to die?”
“More or less,” Mould said. “To be honest, most of the time when she’s calling to God, she’s riding my dick.”
“Do you know why He hasn’t struck me down?” Ig asked. “Do you know why God hasn’t answered your prayers?”
“Why?”
“Because there is no God. Your prayers are whispers to an empty room.”
Mould lifted the bar again—with great effort—and lowered it and said, “Bullshit.”
“It’s all a lie. There’s never been anyone there. You’re the one who ought to use that rope in the shed.”
“No,” Mould said. “You can’t make me do that. I don’t want to die. I love my life.”
So. He couldn’t make people do anything they didn’t already want to do. Ig had wondered if this might not be the case.
Mould made a face and grunted but couldn’t lift the bar again. Ig turned from the weight bench and started toward the stairs.
“Hey,” Mould said. “Need some help here.”
Ig put his hands in his pockets and began to whistle “When the Saints Go Marching In.” For the first time all morning, he felt good. Mould gasped and struggled behind him, but Ig did not look back as he climbed the steps.
Sister Bennett passed Iggy as he stepped into the atrium. She was wearing red slacks and a sleeveless shirt with daisies on it and had her hair up. She started at the sight of him and almost dropped her purse.
“Are you off?” Ig asked her.
“I…I don’t have a car,” she said. “I want to take the church car, but I’m scared of getting caught.”
“You’re cleaning out the local account. What’s a car matter?”
She stared at him for a moment, then leaned forward and kissed Ig at the corner of his mouth. At the touch of her lips, Ig knew about the awful lie she had told her mother when she was nine, and about the terrible day she had impulsively kissed one of her students, a pretty sixteen-year-old named Britt, and about the private, despairing surrender of her spiritual beliefs. He saw these things and understood and did not care.
“God bless you,” Sister Bennett said.
Ig had to laugh.
CHAPTER S EVEN
THERE WAS NOTHING LEFT for him but to go home and see his parents. He pointed the car toward their house and drove.
The silence of the car made him restless. He tried the radio, but it jangled his nerves, was worse than the quiet. His parents lived fifteen minutes outside of town, which gave him too much time to think. He had not been so unsure of what to expect of them since the night he’d spent in jail, brought in for questioning about Merrin’s rape and murder.
The detective, a man named Carter, had begun the interrogation by sliding a photo of her across the table between them. Later, when he was alone in his cell, that picture was waiting for Ig every time he closed his eyes. Merrin was white against the brown leaves, on her back, her feet together, her arms at her sides, her hair spread out. Her face was darker than the ground, and her mouth was full of leaves, and there was a dark dried trickle of blood that ran from under her hairline and down the side of her face to trace her cheekbone. She still wore his tie, the broad strip of it demurely covering her left breast. He couldn’t drive the image from his mind. It worked on his nerves and on his cramping stomach, until at some point—who knew when, there was no clock in his cell—he fell to his knees in front of the stainless-steel toilet bowl and was sick.
He was afraid to see his mother the next day. It was the worst night of his life, and he thought it likely was also the worst night of hers. He had never been in trouble for anything. She wouldn’t sleep, and he imagined her sitting up in the kitchen, in her nightdress, with a cup of cold herbal tea, red-eyed and waxy. His father wouldn’t sleep either, would sit up to be with her. He wondered if his father would sit beside her quietly, the two of them scared and still, with nothing to do but wait, or if Derrick Perrish would be agitated and bad-tempered, pacing the kitchen, telling her what they were going to do and how they were going to fix it, who he was going to come down on like a sack of motherfucking cinder blocks.
Ig had been determined not to cry when he saw his mother, and he didn’t. Neither did she. His mother had made herself up as if for a luncheon with the board of trustees at the university, and her slim, narrow face was alert and calm. His father was the one who looked as if he’d been crying. Derrick had trouble focusing his stare. His breath was bad.
His mother said, “Don’t talk to anyone except the lawyer.” That was the first thing out of her mouth. She said, “Don’t admit to anything.”
His father repeated it—“Don’t admit to anything”—and hugged him and began to weep. Then, through his sobs, Derrick blurted, “I don’t care what happened,” and that was when Ig realized that they believed he had done it. It was the one notion that had never occurred to him. Even if he had done it—even if he’d been caught in the act—Ig had thought his parents would believe in his innocence.
Ig walked out of the Gideon police station later that afternoon, his eyes hurting in the strong, slanting October light. He hadn’t been charged. He was never charged. He was never cleared. He was, to this day, considered a “person of interest.”
Evidence had been collected on scene, DNA evidence, maybe—Ig wasn’t sure, since the police kept the details to themselves—and he had believed with all his heart that once it was analyzed, he would be publicly cleared of all wrongdoing. But there was a fire at the state lab in Concord, and the samples taken from around Merrin’s corpse were ruined. This news poleaxed Ig. It was hard not to be superstitious, to feel that there were dark forces lined up against him. His luck was poison. The only surviving forensic evidence was a tire imprint from someone’s Goodyear. Ig’s Gremlin had Michelins on it. But this was not decisive one way or another, and if there was no solid proof that Ig had committed the crime, there was nothing to take him off the hook either. His alibi—that he’d spent the night alone, passed out drunk in his car behind a derelict Dunkin’ Donuts in the middle of nowhere—sounded like a desperate, threadbare lie, even to himself.
In those first months after he moved home, Ig was looked after and cared for, as if he were a child again, home with flu, and his parents intended to see him through his sickness by providing him with soup and books. They crept through their own house, as if afraid that the business and noise of their everyday lives might unnerve him. It was curious that they should feel so much concern for him, when they thought it possible he’d done such horrible things to a girl they, too, had loved.
But after the case against him fell apart and the immediate threat of prosecution had passed, his parents drifted away from him, retreating into themselves. They had loved him and been ready to go to the mattresses for him when it looked as if he was going to be tried for murder, but they seemed relieved to see the back of him as soon as they knew he wasn’t going to jail.
He lived with them for nine months but did not have to think long when Glenna asked if he wanted to split her rent. After he moved out, he saw his parents only when he came by the house to visit. They didn’t meet in town for lunches, or to go to the movies, or to shop, and they never came to the apartment. Sometimes, when Ig stopped by the house, he would discover that his father was away, in France for a jazz festival or in L.A. to work on a sound track. He never knew about his father’s plans in advance, and his father didn’t call to say he was going out of town.
Ig had harmless chats on the sunporch with his mother in which nothing of any importance was discussed. He had been about to begin a job in England when Merrin died, but that part of his life had been derailed by what happened. He told his mother he was going to go back to school, that he had applications for Brown and Columbia. And he really did; they were sitting on top of the microwave in Glenna’s apartment. One of them had been used as a paper plate for a slice of pizza, and the other was stained with dried brown crescents from the bottom of a coffee cup. His mother was willing to play along, to encourage and approve, without asking uncomfortable follow-up questions, such as if he was ever going to visit these schools for an interview, if he had any notions of getting a job while he waited to hear from admissions. Neither of them wanted to rattle the fragile illusion that things were getting back to normal, that everything still might work out for Ig, that his life was going to resume.
On his occasional visits home, he was really only ever at ease when he was with Vera, his grandmother, who lived with them. He wasn’t sure she even remembered that once he had been arrested for a sex murder. She was in a wheelchair most of the time, following a hip replacement that had inexplicably left her no better off, and Ig took her for walks, on the gravel road, through the woods north of his parents’ house to a view of Queen’s Face, a high shelf of rock that hang gliders leaped from. On a warm, windy day in July, there might be five or six of them riding the updrafts, distant, tropically colored kites weaving and bobbing in the sky. When Ig was with his grandmother and they watched the hang gliders daring the winds off Queen’s Face, he almost felt like the person he’d been when Merrin was alive, someone who was glad to do for others, who was glad for the smell of the outdoors.
As he rolled up the hill to the house, he saw Vera in the front yard, in the wheelchair, a pitcher of iced tea on an end table set out next to her. Her head was bent at a crooked angle; she was asleep, had dozed off in the sun. Ig’s mother had maybe been sitting outside with her—there was a rumpled plaid blanket spread on the grass. The sun struck the pitcher of iced tea and turned the rim into a hoop of brilliance, a silver halo. It was as peaceful a scene as could be, but no sooner had Ig stopped the car than his stomach started to churn. It was like the church. Now that he was here, he didn’t want to get out. He dreaded seeing the people he’d come to see.
He got out. There was nothing else to do.
A black Mercedes he didn’t recognize was parked to one side of the drive, Alamo plates on it. Terry’s rent-a-car. Ig had offered to meet him at the airport, but Terry said it didn’t make sense, he was getting in late and wanted to have a car of his own, and they could see each other the next day. So Ig had gone out with Glenna instead and wound up drunk and alone at the old foundry.
Of all the people in his family, Ig was least afraid to see Terry. Whatever Terry might have to confess, whatever secret compulsions or shames, Ig was ready to forgive him. He owed him that. Maybe, on some level, Terence was who he had really come to see. When Ig was in the worst trouble of his life, Terry had been in the papers every day, saying that the case against him was a sham, utter nonsense, saying that his brother didn’t have it in him to hurt someone he loved. Ig thought if anyone could find it in himself to help him now, it would have to be Terry.
Ig padded across the turf to Vera’s side. His mother had left her turned to face the long grassy slope, slanting down and away to the old log fence at the bottom of the hill. Vera’s ear rested against her shoulder, and her eyes were closed, and her breath whistled softly. He felt some of the tension drain out of him, seeing her at rest that way. He wouldn’t have to talk to her, at least, wouldn’t have to hear her babble her secret, most dreadful urges. That was something. He stared into her thin, worn, lined face, feeling almost sick with fondness for her, for mornings they had spent together with tea and peanut-butter cookies and The Price Is Right. Her hair was bound behind her head but coming loose from its pins, so that long strands the color of moonglow wandered across her cheeks. He put his hand gently over hers—forgetting for a moment what a touch could bring.
His grandmother, he learned then, had no hip pain at all but liked people pushing her here and there in the wheelchair and waiting on her hand and foot. She was eighty years old and entitled to some things. She especially liked to order around her daughter, who thought her shit didn’t stink because she was rich enough to wipe with twenty-dollar bills, wife of the big has-been and mother of a showbiz phony and a depraved sex killer. Although Vera supposed that was better than what Lydia had been, a cheap prostitute who’d been lucky to bag a small-time celebrity john with a sentimental streak. It was still a surprise to Vera that her daughter had come out of her Vegas years with a husband and a purse full of credit cards, not ten years in jail and an incurable venereal disease. It was Vera’s privately held belief that Ig knew what his mother had been—a cheap whore—and that it had led to a pathological hate of women and was the real reason he had raped and killed Merrin Williams. These things were always so Freudian. And of course the Williams girl, she had been a frisky little gold digger, had been waving her little tail in the boy’s face from day one, looking for a ring and Ig’s family money. In her short skirts and tight tops, Merrin Williams had been hardly more than a whore herself, in Vera’s opinion.
Ig let go of her wrist as if it were a bare wire that had given him an unexpected jolt, cried out, and took a stumbling step backward. His grandmother stirred in her chair and opened one eye.
“Oh,” she said. “You.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“I wish you hadn’t. I wanted to sleep. I was happier asleep. Do you think I wanted to see you?”
Ig felt cold seeping behind his breastbone. His grandmother turned her head away from him.
“When I look at you, I want to be dead.”
“Do you?” he asked.
“I can’t see any of my friends. I can’t go to church. Everyone stares at me. They all know what you did. It makes me want to die. And then you show up here to take me for walks. I hate when you take me for walks and people see us together. You don’t know how hard it is to pretend I don’t hate you. I always thought there was something wrong with you. The screamy way you’d get breathing after you ran anywhere. You were always breathing through your mouth, like a dog, especially around pretty girls. And you were slow. So much slower than your brother. I tried to tell Lydia. I said I don’t know how many times that you weren’t right. She didn’t want to hear it, and now look what’s happened. We all have to live with it.”
She put her hand over her eyes, her chin trembling. As Ig backed away across the yard, he could hear her beginning to cry.
He walked across the front porch and through the open door and into the cave darkness of the front hall. He had ideas about going up to his old bedroom and lying down. He felt like he could use some time to himself, in the shadowy cool, surrounded by his concert posters and childhood books. But then, on his way past his mother’s office, he heard the sound of shuffling papers, and he swiveled toward it automatically to look in on her.
His mother was bent over her desk, finger-walking through a handful of pages, occasionally plucking one out and slipping it into her soft leather briefcase. Leaning over like that, she had her pinstripe skirt pulled tight across her rear. His father had met her when she danced in Vegas, and she still had a showgirl’s can. Ig flashed again to what he’d glimpsed in Vera’s head, his grandmother’s private belief that Lydia had been a whore and worse, and then he just as quickly discounted it as senile fantasy. His mother served on the New Hampshire State Council for the Arts and read Russian novels and even when she was a showgirl at least had worn ostrich feathers.
When Lydia saw Ig staring at her from the doorway, her briefcase tilted off her knee. She caught it, but by then it was too late. Papers spilled out, cascading to the floor. A few drifted down, swishing from side to side, in the aimless, no-hurry way of snowflakes, and Ig thought of the hang gliders again. People jumped off Queen’s Face, too. It was beloved of suicides. Maybe he would drive there next.
“Iggy,” she said. “I didn’t know you were coming by.”
“I know. I’ve been driving around and around. I didn’t know where else to go. I’ve been having a hell of a morning.”
“Oh, baby,” she said, her brow furrowing with sympathy. It had been so long since he’d seen a sympathetic look, and he wanted sympathy so badly that he felt shaky, almost weak to be looked at that way.
“Something terrible is happening to me, Mom,” he said, his voice cracking. For the first time all morning, he felt close to tears.
“Oh, baby,” she said again. “Why couldn’t you have gone somewhere else?”
“Excuse me?”
“I don’t want to hear about any more of your problems.”
The stinging sensation at the back of his eyeballs began to abate, the urge to cry draining away as quickly as it had come. The horns throbbed with a tender-sore feeling of ache, not entirely unpleasant.
“I’m in trouble, though.”
“I don’t want to listen to this. I don’t want to know.” She squatted on the floor and began picking up her papers and stuffing them into her briefcase.
“Mother,” he said.
“When you talk, I want to sing!” she shouted, and let go of her briefcase and clapped her hands over her ears. “Lalala-la-la-la! When you talk, I don’t want to hear it. I want to hold my breath until you go away.”
She took a great swallow of air and held her breath, her cheeks popping out.
He crossed the room to her and sank down before her, where she would have to look at him. She crouched with her hands over her ears and her mouth squeezed tight. He took her briefcase and began to put her papers into it.
“Is this how you always feel when you see me?”
She nodded furiously, her eyes bright and staring.
“Don’t suffocate yourself, Mom.”
His mother stared at him for a moment longer, then opened her mouth and drew a deep, whistling breath. She watched him put her papers into her bag.
When she spoke, her voice was small and shrill and rapid, words running together. “I want to write you a letter a very nice letter with very nice handwriting on my special stationery to tell you how much Dad and I love you and how sorry we are you aren’t happy and how much better it would be for everyone if you’d just go.”
He put the last of her papers into her briefcase and then squatted there, holding it across his knees. “Go where?”
“Didn’t you want to hike in Alaska?”
“With Merrin.”
“Or see Vienna?”
“With Merrin.”
“Or learn Chinese? In Beijing?”
“Merrin and I talked about going to Vietnam to teach English. But I don’t think we were ever really going to do it.”
“I don’t care where you go. As long as I don’t have to see you once a week. As long as I don’t have to hear you talk about yourself like everything’s okay, because it’s not okay, it’s never going to be okay again. It makes me too unhappy to see you. I just want to be happy again, Ig.”
He gave her the briefcase.
“I don’t want you to be my kid anymore,” she said. “It’s too hard. I wish I just had Terry.”
He leaned forward and kissed her cheek. And when he did, he saw how she had quietly resented him for years for giving her stretch marks. He had single-handedly spoiled her Playboy-centerfold figure. Terry had been a small baby, considerate, and left her shape and skin intact, but Ig had fucked it all up. She had been offered five grand for a single night by an oil sheik in Vegas once, back before she had children. Those were the days. Easiest and best money she ever made.
“I don’t know why I told you all that,” Lydia said. “I hate myself. I was never a good mother.” Then she seemed to realize she had been kissed, and she touched her cheek, smoothing one palm across it. She was blinking back tears, but when she felt the kiss on her skin, she smiled. “You kissed me. Are you…are you going to go away, then?” Her voice unsteady with hopefulness.
“I was never here,” he said.
CHAPTER E IGHT
WHEN HE WAS BACK in the front hallway, he looked at the screen door to the porch and the sunlit world beyond and thought he ought to go, go now, get out of here before he ran into someone else, his father or his brother. He had changed his mind about looking for Terry, had decided to avoid him after all. Considering the things his mother had said to him, Ig thought it was better not to test his love for anyone else.
Yet he did not walk back out through the front door but instead turned and began to climb the stairs. He was here, he thought, he should look in his room and see if there was anything he wanted to take with him when he left. Left for where? He didn’t know yet. He wasn’t sure, though, that he would ever be coming back.
The stairs were a century old and creaked and muttered as Ig climbed. No sooner had he reached the top of them than a door across the hall, to the right, popped open, and his father stuck out his head. Ig had seen this a hundred times before. His father was distractible by nature and couldn’t stand for anyone to go by on the stairs without looking out to see who it was.
“Oh,” he said. “Ig. I thought you might be…” but his voice trailed off. His gaze drifted from Iggy’s eyes and on to the horns. He stood there in a white wifebeater and striped suspenders, his feet bare.
“Just tell me,” Ig said. “Here’s the part where you tell me something awful you’ve been keeping to yourself. Probably something about me. Just say it, and we’ll get it out of the way.”
“I want to pretend I was doing something important in my studio so I don’t have to talk to you.”
“Well. That’s not so bad.”
“Seeing you is too hard.”
“Gotcha. Just covered all this with Mom.”
“I think about Merrin. About what a good girl she was. I loved her, you know, in a way. And envied you. I was never in love with anyone the way you two were in love with each other. Certainly not your mother—status-obsessed little whore. Worst mistake I ever made. Every bad thing in my life has come out of my marriage. But Merrin. Merrin was the sweetest little thing. You couldn’t hear her laugh without smiling. When I think about the way you fucked her and killed her, I want to throw up.”
“I didn’t kill her,” Ig said, dry-mouthed.
“And the worst part,” Derrick Perrish said, “she was my friend and looked up to me, and I helped you get away with it.”
Ig stared.
“It was the guy who runs the state forensics lab, Gene Lee. His son died of leukemia a few years back, but before he croaked, I helped him get tickets to Paul McCartney and arranged for Gene and his kid to meet him backstage and everything. After you were arrested, Gene got in touch. He asked me if you did it, and I said—I told him—that I couldn’t give him an honest answer. And two days later there was that fire in the state lab up in Concord. Gene wasn’t in charge there—he works out of Manchester—but I’ve always assumed…”
Ig felt his insides turn over. If the forensic evidence gathered from the scene had not been destroyed, it might’ve been possible to establish his innocence. But it had gone up in flames—like every other hope Ig held in his heart, like every good thing in Ig’s life. In paranoid moments he had imagined there was an elaborate and secret conspiracy to condemn and destroy him. Now he saw he was right, there had been a secret agency at work, only it had been a conspiracy of people who wanted to protect him.
“How could you have done that? How could you have been so stupid?” Ig asked, breathless with a shock that wavered on the edge of hate.
“That’s what I ask myself. Every day. I mean, when the world comes for your children, with the knives out, it’s your job to stand in the way. Everyone understands that. But this. This. Merrin was like one of my kids, too. She was in our house every day for ten years. She trusted me. I bought her popcorn at movies and went to her lacrosse games and played cribbage with her, and she was beautiful and loved you, and you bashed her fuckin’ brains in. It wasn’t right to cover for you, not for that. You should’ve gone to jail. When I see you in the house, I want to slap that morose look right off your stupid face. Like you have anything to be sad about. You got away with murder. Literally. And dragged me into it. You make me feel unclean. You make me want to wash, scrub myself with steel wool. My skin crawls when you talk to me. How could you do that to her? She was one of the best people I ever knew. She was sure as shit my favorite thing about you.”
“Me, too,” Ig said.
“I want to go back into my office,” his father said, his mouth open, breathing heavily. “I see you and I just want to go away. Into my office. Off to Vegas. Or Paris. Anywhere. I’d like to go and never come back.”
“And you really think I killed her. You don’t sometimes wonder if maybe the evidence you had Gene burn up could’ve saved me? All the times I told you I didn’t do it, you didn’t sometimes think maybe—just maybe—I was innocent?”
His father stared, for a moment couldn’t reply. Then he said, “No. Not really. Tell the truth, I was surprised you didn’t do something to her sooner. I always thought you were a weird little shit.”
CHAPTER N INE
HE STOOD IN THE DOORWAY of his bedroom for a full minute but did not enter the room, didn’t lie down, as he had imagined doing. His head hurt again, in the temples, at the base of the horns. There was a feeling of pressure mounting behind them. Darkness twitched at the edges of his vision, in time to the beat of his pulse.
More than anything, he wanted rest, wanted no more madness. He wanted the touch of a cool hand on his brow. He wanted Merrin back—wanted to cry with his face buried in her lap and her fingers moving over the nape of his neck. All thoughts of peace were wrapped up in her. Every restful memory seemed to include her: A breezy July afternoon, lying in the grass above the river. A rainy October, drinking cider with her in her living room, huddled together under a knitted blanket, Merrin’s cold nose against his ear.
He cast his gaze around the room, considering the detritus of the life he’d lived here. He spied his old trumpet case, sticking out a little from under the bed, and picked it up, set it on the mattress. Within was his silver horn. It was tarnished, the keys worn smooth, as if it had seen hard use.
It had. Even once he knew that his weak lungs would not allow him to play the trumpet—ever—Ig had, for reasons he no longer understood, continued to practice. After his parents sent him to bed, he would play in the dark, lying on his back under the sheets, his fingers flying over the keys. He played Miles Davis and Wynton Marsalis and Louis Armstrong. But the music was only in his head. For while he placed the mouthpiece to his lips, he did not dare blow, for fear of bringing on a wave of light-headedness and a storm of black snow. It seemed now an absurd waste of time, all that practice to no useful end.
He emptied the case onto the floor in a sudden convulsion of fury, cast out the trumpet, and the rest of his horn paraphernalia—leadpipes and valve oil, spare mouthpiece—chucking it all. The last thing he grabbed was a mute, a Tom Crown, a thing that looked like a great Christmas ornament made out of brushed copper. He meant to launch it across the room, and he even made the throwing motion, but his fingers wouldn’t open, wouldn’t allow it to be flung. It was a beautiful piece of metalwork, but that wasn’t why he held on to it. He didn’t know why he held on to it.
What you did with a Tom Crown, you shoved it down into the bell of the horn to choke off the sound; if used properly, it produced a lascivious, hand-up-the-skirt squall. Ig stared down at it now, frowning, an imperceptible something tugging at his consciousness. It wasn’t an idea, not yet. It wasn’t even half an idea. It was a drifting, confused notion. Something about horns. Something about the way they were played.
Finally Ig set the mute aside, turned again to the trumpet case. He pulled out the foam padding, packed in a change of clothes, then went looking for his passport. Not because he thought he was leaving the country but because he wanted to take everything that was important with him, so he wouldn’t have to come back later.
His passport was tucked into the fancy-pants Bible in the top drawer of his dresser, a King James with a white leather cover and the words of Jesus printed in gold. Terry called it his Neil Diamond Bible. He had won it as a child, playing Scriptural Jeopardy in his Sunday-school class. When faced with answers from the Bible, Ig had all the right questions.
Ig picked his passport out of the Good Book, then paused, looking at a column of dots and lines in blurred pencil scrawled on the endpapers. It was a key to Morse code. Ig had copied it into the back of the Neil Diamond Bible himself, more than ten years before. He once believed that Merrin Williams had sent him a message in Morse code, and he spent two weeks working out a reply to be sent the same way. The response he had come up with was still scribbled there in a string of circles and dashes: his favorite prayer in the book.
He threw the Bible into the trumpet case as well. There had to be something in there, some useful tips for his situation, a homeopathic remedy you could apply when you came down with a bad case of the devil.
It was time to go, to get out before he saw anyone else, but at the bottom of the stairs he noticed how dry and tacky his mouth felt and that it was painful to swallow. Ig detoured into the kitchen and drank from the sink. He cupped his hands together and splashed water into his face and then held the sides of the sink with his face dripping and shook himself like a dog. He rubbed his face dry with a dish towel, enjoying the rough feel of it against his raw, cold-shocked skin. At last Ig tossed down the towel and turned, to find his brother standing behind him.
CHAPTER T EN
TERRY LEANED AGAINST THE WALL, just inside the swinging door. He didn’t look so well—the jet lag, maybe. He needed a shave, and his eyelids had a puffy, swollen look, as if he were suffering from allergies. Terry was allergic to everything—pollen, peanut butter; he had once nearly died of a bee sting. His black silk shirt and tweed slacks hung loose on his frame, as if he had lost weight.
They regarded each other. Ig and Terry had not been in the same room together since the weekend Merrin had been killed, and Terry hadn’t looked much better then, had been inarticulate with grief for her, and for Ig. Terence had left for the West Coast shortly after—supposedly for rehearsals, although Ig suspected he’d been summoned for a damage-control meeting with the execs at Fox—and had not been back since, and no surprise. Terry had not much cared for Gideon even before the murder.
Terry said, “I didn’t know you were here. I didn’t hear you come in. Did you grow horns? While I was gone?”
“I thought it was time for a new look. Do you like them?”
His brother shook his head. “I want to tell you something,” Terry said, and his Adam’s apple jugged up and down in his throat.
“Join the club.”
“I want to tell you something, but I don’t want to tell you. I’m afraid.”
“Go ahead. Spill it. It probably isn’t so bad. I don’t think anything you could have to say would bother me much. Mom just told me she never wants to see me again. Dad told me he wishes I had gone to jail forever.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Oh, Ig,” Terry said. His eyes were watering. “I feel so bad. About everything. About how things turned out for you. I know how much you loved her. I loved her, too, you know. Merrin. She was a hell of a kid.”
Ig nodded.
“I want you to know…” Terry said in a choked voice.
“Go ahead,” Ig said gently.
“I didn’t kill her.”
Ig stared, a pins-and-needles sensation beginning to spread across his chest. The thought that Terry might have raped and killed her had never crossed his mind, was impossible.
Ig said, “Of course you didn’t.”
“I loved you two guys and wanted you to be happy. I never would’ve done anything to hurt her.”
“I know that,” Ig said.
“And if I had any idea Lee Tourneau was going to kill her, I would’ve tried to stop it,” Terry said. “I thought Lee was her friend. I’ve wanted to tell you so bad, but Lee made me keep quiet. He made me.”
“EEEEEEEEEE,” Ig screamed.
“He’s awful, Ig,” Terry said. “You don’t know him. You think you do, but you don’t have any idea.”
“EEEEEEEEEEEE,” Ig went on.
“Lee fixed you and me both, and I’ve been in hell ever since,” Terry said.
Ig fled into the hallway, ran through the dark for the front door, slammed through the screen, stumbled out into the sudden blinding glare of day, eyes blurring with tears, missed the steps, fell into the yard. He picked himself up, gasping. He had dropped his trumpet case—had hardly even been aware he was still carrying it—and he snatched it back up out of the grass.
He lurched across the lawn, barely looking where he was going. The corners of his eyes were damp, and he thought he might be crying, but when he touched his fingers to his face, they came away bloody. He lifted his hands to his horns. The points had ruptured through the skin, and blood was trickling down his face. He was aware of a steady throbbing in the horns, and although there was a feeling of soreness in them, there was also a kind of nervous thrill shooting through his temples, a sensation of release not unlike orgasm. He staggered along, and from his mouth poured a stream of curses, choked obscenities. He hated how hard it was to breathe, hated the sticky blood on his cheeks and hands, the too-bright blue sky, the smell of himself, hated, hated, hated.
Lost in his own head, he didn’t see Vera’s wheelchair until he had almost crashed into it. He pulled up short, staring down at her. She had dozed off again, a soft snore burring in her nostrils. She was smiling faintly, as at some pleasant, dreamy thought, and the look of peace and happiness on her face made Ig’s stomach roil with fury. He stomped on the brake on the back of her wheelchair and gave it a shove.
“Bitch,” he said as it began to roll forward, down the hill.
She lifted her head from her shoulder, put it back, then lifted it again, stirring weakly. The wheelchair thudded through the green, groomed grass, one wheel hitting a rock, juddering over it, going on, and Ig thought of being fifteen, the day he’d ridden the shopping cart down the Evel Knievel trail: the essential turning point of his life, really. Had he been going this fast then? It was something, the way the wheelchair picked up speed, the way a person’s life picked up speed, the way a life was like a bullet aimed at one final target, impossible to slow or turn aside, and like the bullet, you were ignorant of what you were going to hit, would never know anything except the rush and the impact. Vera was probably doing forty when she hit the fence at the bottom.
Ig walked on toward his car, breathing easily again, the tight, pinched feeling behind his breastbone gone as quickly as it had come. The air smelled of fresh grass, warmed in the late August sun, and the green of the leaves. Ig didn’t know where he was going next, only that he was going. A garter snake slithered across the lawn behind him, black and green and wet-looking. It was joined by a second, and then a third. He didn’t notice.
As Ig climbed in behind the wheel of the Gremlin, he began to whistle. It really was a fine day. He turned the Gremlin around in the drive and started down the hill. The highway was waiting where he’d left it.
CHERRY
CHAPTER E LEVEN
SHE WAS SENDING HIM a message.
At first he didn’t know it was her, didn’t know who was doing it. He didn’t even know it was a message. It began about ten minutes after the start of services: a flash of golden light at the periphery of his vision, so bright it caused him to flinch. He rubbed at his eye, trying to massage away the glowing blot that now floated before him. When his sight had cleared somewhat, he glanced around, looking for the source of the light but unable to find it.
The girl sat across the aisle, one pew up from him, and she wore a white summer dress, and he had never seen her before. His gaze kept shifting to her, not because he thought she had anything to do with the light but because she was the best thing to look at on that side of the aisle. He wasn’t the only one who thought so either. A lanky boy with corn-silk hair so pale it was almost white sat directly behind her and sometimes seemed to be leaning forward to look over her shoulder and down the front of her dress. Iggy had never seen the girl before but vaguely recognized the boy from school, thought the boy might be a year older than him.
Ignatius Martin Perrish searched furtively for a wristwatch or a bracelet that might be catching light and reflecting it into his eyeball. He examined people in metal-framed eyeglasses, women with hoops dangling from their earlobes, but could not pinpoint what was causing that bothersome flash. Mostly, though, he looked at the girl, with her red hair and bare white arms. There was something about the whiteness of those arms that made them seem more naked than the bare arms of other women in church. A lot of redheads had freckles, but she looked as if she had been carved from a block of soap.
Whenever he gave up searching for the source of the light and turned his face forward, the gold flash returned, a blinding flare. It was maddening, this flash-flash in his left eye, like a moth of light circling him, fluttering in his face. Once he even batted at it, trying to swat it aside.
That was when she gave herself away, snorting helplessly, quivering with the effort it took to contain laughter. Then she gave him the look—a slow, sidelong gaze, self-satisfied and amused. She knew she had been caught and that there was no point in keeping up a pretense. Ig knew, too, that she had planned to get caught, to continue until she was found out, a thought that gave his blood a little rush. She was very pretty, about his age, her hair braided into a silky rope the color of black cherries. She was fingering a delicate gold cross around her throat, and she turned it just so, into the sunlight, and it shone, became a cruciform flame. She lingered on the gesture, making it a kind of confession, then turned the cross away.
After that Ig was no longer able to pay the slightest attention to what Father Mould was saying behind the altar. He wanted more than anything for her to glance his way again, and for a long time she didn’t do it, a kind of sweet denial. But then she took another sly, slow peek at him. Staring straight at him, she flashed the cross in his eyes, two short and one long. A moment passed, and she flashed a different sequence, three short this time. She held her gaze on his while she winked the cross at him, smiling, but in a dreamy sort of way, as if she’d forgotten what she was smiling about. The intentness of her stare suggested she was willing him to understand something, that what she was doing with the cross was important.
“I think it’s Morse code,” said Ig’s father in a low voice out of the side of his mouth: one convict talking to another in the jail yard.
Ig twitched, a nervous reflex reaction. In the last few minutes, the Sacred Heart of Mary had become a TV show playing in the background, with the volume turned down to an inaudible murmur. But when his father spoke, Ig was jolted out of the moment and back into an awareness of where he was. He also discovered, to his alarm, that his penis had stiffened slightly in his pants and was lying hot against his leg. It was important that it go back down. Any moment they would stand for the final hymn, and it would be tenting out the front of his pants.
“What?” he asked.
“She’s telling you, ‘Stop looking at my legs,’” Derrick Perrish said, side of the mouth again, movie wiseguy. “‘Or I’ll give you a black eye.’”
Ig made a funny sound trying to clear his throat.
By now Terry was trying to see. Ig sat on the inside of the aisle, with his father on his right and then his mother and then Terry, so his older brother had to crane his neck to see the girl. He considered her merits—she had turned to face forward again—then whispered loudly, “Sorry, Ig. No chance.”
Lydia thumped him in the back of his head with her hymnal. Terry said, “Damn, Mom,” and she thumped him in the head with the book again.
“You won’t use that word here,” she whispered.
“Why don’t you hit Ig?” Terry whispered. “He’s the one checking out little redheads. Thinking lustful thoughts. He’s coveting. Look at him. You can see it on his face. Look at that coveting expression.”
“Covetous,” Derrick said.
Ig’s mother looked at him, and Ig’s cheeks burned. She shifted her gaze from him to the girl, who minded them not all, pretending to be interested in Father Mould. After a moment Lydia sniffed and looked toward the front of the church.
“That’s all right,” she said. “I was starting to wonder if Ig was gay.”
And then it was time to sing, and they all stood, and Ig looked at the girl again, and as she came to her feet, she rose into a shaft of sunshine and a crown of fire settled on her brushed and shining red hair. She turned and looked at him again, opening her mouth to sing, only she gave a little cry instead, soft yet carrying. She had been about to flash him with the cross when the delicate gold chain came loose and spilled into her hand.
Ig watched her while she bowed her head and tried to fix it. Then something happened to give him an unhappy turn. The good-looking blond kid standing behind her leaned in and made a hesitant, fumbling gesture at the back of her neck. He was trying to fasten the necklace for her. She flinched and stepped away from him, gave him a startled, not particularly welcome look.
The blond did not flush or seem embarrassed. He looked less like a boy, more like classical statuary, with the stern, preternaturally calm, just slightly dour features of a young Caesar, someone who could, with a simple thumbs-down, turn a gang of bloodied Christians into lion food. Years later his hair-style, that close-cropped cap of pale white, would be popularized by Marshall Mathers, but in that year it looked sporty and unremarkable. He also had on a tie, which was class. He said something to the girl, but she shook her head. Her father leaned in and smiled at the boy and began to work on the necklace himself.
Ig relaxed. Caesar had made a tactical error, touching her when she wasn’t expecting it, had annoyed instead of charmed her. The girl’s father worked at the necklace for a while but then laughed and shook his head because it couldn’t be fixed, and she laughed, too, and took it from him. Her mother glared sharply at the both of them, and the girl and her father began to sing again.
The service ended, and conversation rose like water filling a tub, the church a container with a particular volume, its natural quiet quickly displaced by noise. Ig’s best subject had always been math, and he reflexively thought in terms of capacity, volume, invariants, and above all, absolute values. Later he turned out to be good at logical ethics, but that was perhaps only an extension of the part of him that was good at keeping equations straight and making numbers play nice.
He wanted to talk to her but didn’t know what to say, and in a moment he had lost his chance. As she stepped out from between the pews and into the aisle, she gave him a look, suddenly shy but smiling, and then the young Caesar was at her side, towering over her and telling her something. Her father intervened again, nudging her forward and somehow inserting himself between her and the junior emperor. Her dad grinned at the kid, pleasant, welcoming—but as he spoke, he was pushing his daughter ahead of him, marching her along, increasing the distance between her and the boy with the calm, reasonable, noble face. The Caesar did not seem troubled and did not try to reach her again but nodded patiently, even stepped aside, to allow the girl’s mother and some older ladies—aunts?—to slip past him.
With her father nudging her along, there was no chance to talk to her. Ig watched her go, wishing she would look back and wave to him, but she didn’t, of course she didn’t. By then the aisle was choked with people departing. Ig’s father put a hand on his shoulder to let him know they were going to wait for things to clear out. Ig watched young Caesar go by. He was there with his own father, a man with a thick blond mustache that grew right into his sideburns, giving him the look of the bad guy in a Clint Eastwood western, someone to stand to the left of Lee Van Cleef and get shot in the opening salvo of the final battle.
Finally traffic in the aisle shrank to a trickle, and Ig’s father took his hand off Ig’s shoulder to let him know they could proceed. Ig stepped out from the pew and allowed his parents past him, as was his habit, so he could walk out with Terry. He looked longingly toward the girl’s pew, as if somehow she might’ve reappeared there—and when he did, his right eyeball filled with a flash of golden light, like it was starting up all over again. He flinched, shut his eye, then walked toward her pew.
She had left her little gold cross, lying atop some puddled gold chain, in a square of light. Maybe she had put it down and then forgotten about it, with her father rushing her away from the blond boy. Ig collected it, expecting it to be cold. But it was hot, delightfully hot, a penny left all day in the sun.
“Iggy?” called his mother. “Are you coming?”
Ig closed his fist around the necklace, turned, and began quickly down the aisle. It was important to catch up to her. She had left him a chance to impress her, to be the finder of lost things, to be both observant and considerate. But when he reached the door, she was gone. He had a glimpse of her in the back of a wood-paneled station wagon, sitting with one of her aunts, her parents in the front, pulling away from the curb.
Well. That was all right. There was always next Sunday, and when Ig gave it back to her it wouldn’t be broken anymore and he would know just what to say when he introduced himself.
CHAPTER T WELVE
THREE DAYS BEFORE I G and Merrin met for the first time, a retired serviceman who lived on the north side of Pool Pond, Sean Phillips, woke at one in the morning to a steely, eardrum-stunning detonation. For a moment, muddled up with sleep, he thought he was on the USS Eisenhower again and that someone had just launched a RAM. Then he heard squealing tires and laughter. He got off the floor—he had fallen out of bed and bruised his hip—and pushed aside the window shade in time to see someone’s shitty Road Runner peeling away. His mailbox had been blown off its post and lay deformed and smoking in the gravel. It was so full of holes it looked as if it had caught a blast from a shotgun.
Late the following afternoon, there was another explosion, this time in the Dumpster behind Woolworth’s. The bomb went off with a ringing boom and spewed gouts of burning garbage thirty feet into the air. Flaming newspaper and packing material came down in a fiery hail, and several parked cars were damaged.
On the Sunday that Ig fell in love—or at least in lust—with the strange girl sitting across the aisle from him in the Sacred Heart, there was yet another explosion in Gideon. A cherry bomb with an explosive force roughly equal to a quarter stick of trinitrotoluene erupted in a toilet at the McDonald’s on Harper Street. It blew the seat off, cracked the bowl, shattered the tank, flooded the floor, and filled the men’s room with greasy black smoke. The building was evacuated until the fire marshal had determined it was safe to reenter. The incident was reported on the front page of the Monday Gideon Ledger, in an article that closed with a plea from the marshal for those responsible to quit before someone lost some fingers or an eye.
Things had been blowing up all around town for weeks. It had started a couple days before the Fourth of July and continued well after the holiday, with increasing frequency. Terence Perrish and his friend Eric Hannity weren’t the primary culprits. They had never destroyed any property except their own, and they were both too young to be out joyriding at one in the morning, blowing up mailboxes.
But.
But Eric and Terry had been at the beach in Seabrook when Eric’s cousin Jeremy Rigg walked into the fireworks warehouse there and came out with a case of forty-eight vintage cherry bombs, which he claimed had been manufactured in the good old days before the power of such explosives was limited by child-safety laws. Jeremy had passed six of them on to Eric, as a late birthday present, he said, although his real motive might’ve been pity. Eric’s father had been out of work for more than a year and was an unwell man.
It is possible that Jeremy Rigg was patient zero at the center of a plague of explosions and that all of the many bombs that went off that summer could in some way be traced back to him. Or maybe Rigg only bought them because other boys were buying them, because it was the thing to do. Maybe there were multiple points of infection. Ig never learned, and in the end it didn’t matter. It was like wondering how evil had come into the world or what happens to a person after he dies: an interesting philosophical exercise, but also curiously pointless, since evil and death happened, regardless of the why and the how and the what-it-meant. All that mattered was that by early August both Eric and Terry had the fever to blow things up, like every other teenage male in Gideon.
The bombs themselves were called Eve’s Cherries, red balls the size of crabapples with the fine-grained texture of a brick and the silhouette of an almost-naked woman stamped on the side. She was a pert-breasted honey with the unlikely proportions of a girl on a mud flap: tits like beach balls and a wasp waist thinner than her thighs. As a gesture toward modesty, she wore what looked like a maple leaf over her crotch, leading Eric Hannity to conclude she was a fan of the Toronto Maple Leafs and therefore a fuckin’ Canuck slut who was just asking to get her tits lit up.
The first time Eric and Terry used one was in Eric’s garage. They chucked a cherry into a trash can and beat feet. The explosion that followed knocked the can over, spun it across the concrete, and fired the lid up into the rafters. The lid was smoking when it came back down, bent in the middle as if someone had tried to fold it in two. Ig wasn’t there but heard all about it from Terry, who said that afterward their ears were ringing so badly neither of them could hear the other one whooping. Other items followed in a chain of demolitions: a life-size Barbie, an old tire that they sent rolling down a hill with a bomb taped inside it, and a watermelon. Ig was present for exactly none of the detonations in question, but his brother was always sure to fill him in, at great length, on what he’d missed. Ig knew, for example, that there had been nothing left of the Barbie except for one blackened foot, which fell from the sky to rattle about on the blacktop of Eric’s driveway, doing a mad disembodied tap dance, and that the stink of the burning tire had made everyone who smelled it dizzy and ill, and that Eric Hannity was standing too close to the watermelon when it exploded and needed a shower as a result. The details thrilled and tormented Ig, and by mid-August he was half desperate to see something vaporized himself.
So on the morning Ig walked into the pantry and found Terry trying to zip a twenty-eight-pound frozen Butterball turkey into his school backpack, he knew right away what it was for. Ig didn’t ask to come along, and he didn’t bargain with threats: Let me go with you or I tell Mom. Instead he watched while Terry struggled with his backpack and then, when it was clear it wasn’t going to fit, said they should make a sling. He got his windbreaker from the mudroom, and they rolled the bird up in it, and each of them took a sleeve. Hauling it between them that way, it was no trouble to carry, and just like that, Ig was going with him.
The sling got them as far as the edge of the town woods, and then, not long after they started along the trail that led to the old foundry, Ig spotted a shopping cart, half sunk in a bog to the side of the path. The front right wheel shimmied furiously, and rust flaked off the thing in a continuous flurry, but it beat lugging all that turkey a mile and a half. Terry made Ig push.
The old foundry was a sprawling medieval keep of dark brick with a great twisting chimney stack rising from one end and the walls Swiss-cheesed with holes that had once held windows. It was surrounded by a few acres of ancient parking lot, the macadam fissured almost to the point of disintegration and tummocky bunches of grass growing up through it. The place was busy that afternoon, kids skateboarding in the ruins, a fire burning in a trash can out back. A group of teenage derelicts—two boys and a skaggy girl—stood around the flames. One of them had what looked like a misshapen wiener on a stick. It was blackened and crooked, and sweet blue smoke poured off it.
“Lookit,” said the girl, a pudgy blonde with acne and low-riding jeans. Ig knew her. She was in his grade. Glenna someone. “Here comes dinner.”
“Looks like fuckin’ Thanksgiving,” said one of the boys, a kid in a HIGHWAY TO HELL T-shirt. He gestured expansively toward the fire in the trash can. “Throw that scrumptious bitch on.”
Ig, just fifteen and uncertain around strange older kids, could not speak, his windpipe shriveling as if he were already suffering an asthma attack. But Terry was smooth. Two years older and possessed of a driver’s permit, Terry already had a certain sly grace about him and the eagerness of a showman to amuse an audience. He spoke for the both of them. He always spoke for the both of them: That was his role.
“Looks like dinner’s done,” Terry said, nodding at the thing on the stick. “Your hot dog is turning black.”
“It’s not a hot dog!” shrieked the girl. “It’s a turd! Gary’s cookin’ a dog turd!” Doubling over and screaming with laughter. Her jeans were old and worn, and her too-small halter looked like a half-price item from Kmart, but over it she wore a handsome black leather jacket with a European cut. It didn’t go with the rest of her outfit or with the weather, and Ig’s first thought was that it was stolen.
“You want a bite?” asked the kid in the HIGHWAY TO HELL shirt. He swung the stick away from the fire and offered it in Terry’s direction. “Cooked to perfection.”
“C’mon, man,” Terry said. “I’m a high-school virgin, I play trumpet in the marching band, and I got a teeny weenie. I eat enough shit as it is.”
The derelicts erupted into laughter, maybe less because of what had been said than because of who was saying it—a slender, good-looking kid with a faded American-flag bandanna tied around his head to hold back his shaggy black hair—and the way it was said, in a tone of exuberance, as if he were joyfully putting down someone else and not himself. Terry used jokes like judo throws, as a way to deflect the energy of others from himself, and if he couldn’t find any other target for his humor, he was glad to pull the trigger on himself—an inclination that would serve him well years later, when he was doing interviews on Hothouse, begging Clint Eastwood to punch him in the face and then autograph his broken nose.
Highway to Hell looked past Terry, across the broken asphalt, to a boy standing at the top of the Evel Knievel trail. “Hey. Tourneau. Your lunch is done.”
More laughter—although the girl, Glenna, looked suddenly uneasy. The boy at the top of the trail didn’t even glance their way but stood looking down the hill and clutching a big mountain board under one arm.
“Are you going?” Highway to Hell shouted when there was no response. “Or do I need to cook you up a pair of nuts?”
“Go, Lee!” shouted the girl, and she held an encouraging fist in the air. “Let ’er rip!”
The boy at the top of the trail cast a brief, disdainful look at her, and in that moment Ig recognized him, knew him from church. It was young Caesar. He had been dressed in a tie then, and he wore one now, along with a button-up short-sleeved shirt, khaki shorts, and Converse high-tops with no socks. Just by virtue of holding a mountain board, he managed to make the costume look vaguely alternative, the act of wearing a tie an ironic affectation, the kind of thing the lead singer in a punk band might do.
“He ain’t going,” said the other boy who stood at the trash can, a long-haired kid. “Jesus, Glenna, he’s got a bigger pussy’n you.”
“Fuck you,” she said. To the bunch around the trash can, the look of hurt on her face was the funniest thing yet. Highway to Hell laughed so hard the stick shook, and his cooked turd fell into the flames.
Terry lightly slapped Ig’s arm, and they moved on. Ig wasn’t sorry to be going, found something almost unbearably sad about the crew of them. They had nothing to do. It was terrible that this was the sum total of their summer afternoon, a burned shit and hurt feelings.
They approached the willowy blond boy—Lee Tourneau, apparently—slowing again as they reached the top of the Evel Knievel trail. The hill fell steeply away here, toward the river, a dark blue gleam visible through the black trunks of the pines. It had been a dirt road once, although it was difficult to imagine anyone driving a car down it, it was so steep and eroded, a vertiginous drop ideal for producing a rollover. Two half-buried and rusting pipes showed through the ground, and between them was a worn-smooth groove of packed earth, a kind of depression that had been polished to a hard gloss by the passage of a thousand mountain bikes and ten thousand bare feet. Ig’s Grandmother Vera had told him that in the thirties and forties, when people didn’t care what they put into the river, the foundry had used those pipes to wash the dross into the water. They looked almost like rails, like tracks, lacking only a coal car or a roller-coaster car to ride them. On either side of the pipes, the trail was all crumbling sun-baked dirt and protruding stones and trash. The hard-packed path between the pipes offered the easiest way down, and Ig and Terry slowed, waiting for Lee Tourneau to go.
Only he didn’t go. He was never going to go. He put the board on the ground—it had a cobra painted on it, and big, thick, knobby tires—and pushed it back and forth with one foot, as if to see how it rolled. He squatted and picked up the board and pretended to check the spin on one wheel.
The derelicts weren’t the only ones giving him a hard time. Eric Hannity and a loose collection of other boys stood at the bottom of the hill squinting up at him and occasionally hollering taunts. Someone yelled at him to stick a manpon in his mangina and go already. From over by the trash can, Glenna screamed again: “Ride ’er, cowboy!” Beneath her rowdy cheer, though, she sounded desperate.
“Well,” Terry said to Lee Tourneau, “it’s like this. You can live life as a cripple or as a lame-ass.”
“What’s that mean?” Lee asked.
Terry sighed. “It means are you going to go?”
Ig, who had been down the trail many times on his mountain bike, said, “It’s okay. Don’t be scared. The trail between the pipes is really smooth, and—”
“I’m not scared,” said Lee, as if Ig had made an accusation.
“So go,” Terry said.
“One of the wheels is sticking,” the kid said.
Terry laughed. He laughed mean, too. “Come on, Ig.”
Ig pushed the cart past Lee Tourneau and into the trench between the pipes. Lee looked at the turkey, and his brow furrowed with a question that he didn’t speak aloud.
“We’re going to blow it up,” Ig said. “Come see.”
“There’s a baby seat in the shopping cart,” Terry said, “in case you want a ride down.”
It was a shitty thing to say, and Ig grimaced sympathetically at Lee, but Lee’s face was a Spock-on-the-bridge-of-the-Enterprise blank. He stood aside, holding his board to his chest, watching them go.
The boys at the bottom were waiting for them. There were a couple of girls, too, older girls, maybe old enough to be in college. They weren’t on the riverbank with the boys, but sunning themselves out on Coffin Rock, in bikini tops and cutoffs.
Coffin Rock was forty feet offshore, a wide white stone that blazed in the sun. Their kayaks rested on a small sandbar that tailed upriver away from it. The sight of those girls, stretched upon the rock, made Ig love the world. Two brunettes—they might’ve been sisters—with tanned, toned bodies and a lot of leg, sitting up and talking to each other in low voices and staring at the boys. Even with his back turned to Coffin Rock, Ig was aware of them, as if the girls, and not the sun, were the primary source of light cast upon the bank.
A dozen or so boys had collected for the show. They sat indifferently in tree branches hanging out over the water, or astraddle mountain bikes, or perched on boulders, all of them trying to look coolly unhappy. That was another side effect of those girls on the rock. Every boy there wanted to look older than every other boy, too old to really be there at all. If they could, with a dour look and a standoffish pose, somehow suggest they were only in the vicinity because they had to babysit a younger brother, all the better.
Possibly because he really was babysitting his younger brother, Terry was allowed to be happy. He hauled the frozen turkey out of the shopping cart and walked it toward Eric Hannity, who rose from a nearby rock, dusting off the back of his pants.
“Let’s bake that bitch,” Hannity said.
“I call a drumstick,” Terry said, and some boys laughed in spite of themselves.
Eric Hannity was Terry’s age, a rude, blunt savage with a harsh mouth and hands that knew how to catch a football, cast a rod, repair a small motor, and smack an ass. Eric Hannity was a superhero. As a bonus, his father was an ex–state trooper who had actually been shot, albeit not in a gunfight, but in an accident at the barracks; another officer, on his third day, had dropped a loaded .30-06, and the slug had caught Bret Hannity in the abdomen. Eric’s father had a business dealing baseball cards now, although Ig had hung around long enough to get a sense that his real business involved fighting his insurance company over a hundred-thousand-dollar settlement that was supposedly coming any day but that had yet to materialize.
Eric and Terry lugged the frozen turkey over to an old tree stump, rotted at the center to make a kind of damp hole. Eric put a foot on the bird and pushed it down. It was a tight fit, and fat and skin bunched up around the edges of the hole. The two legs, pink bones wrapped in uncooked flesh, were squeezed together, pursing the turkey’s stuffing cavity to a white pucker.
From his pocket Eric took his last two cherry bombs and set one aside. He ignored the boy who picked up the spare and the other boys who gathered around, staring at it and making appreciative noises. Ig had an idea Eric had set down his extra cherry just to get this precise reaction. Terry took the other bomb and jammed it into the Butterball. The fuse, almost six inches long, stuck obscenely out of that puckered hole in the turkey’s rear end.
“You all want to find cover,” Eric said, “or you’re going to be wearing turkey dinner. And give me back that other one. If someone tries to walk off with my last cherry, this bird won’t be the only one getting a piece of ordnance stuck up the ass.”
The boys scattered, crouching at the bottom of the embankment, sheltering behind tree trunks. Despite their best efforts to look disinterested, there was a helium-touched air of nervous anticipation hanging over them now. The girls on the rock were interested, too, could see something was about to happen. One of them rose to her knees and shaded her eyes with a hand, looking over at Terry and Eric. Ig wished, with a wistful pang, there was some reason for her to look at him instead.
Eric put a foot on the edge of the stump and produced a lighter, which ignited with a snap. The fuse began to spit white sparks. Eric and Terry remained for a moment, peering thoughtfully down, as if there were some doubt about whether it was going to catch. Then they began to back away, neither in any hurry. It was nicely done, a carefully managed bit of stagy cool. Eric had told the others to take cover, and they had all obliged by running for it. Which made Eric and Terry look steely and unflappable, the way they stayed behind to light the bomb and then made a slow, unhurried retreat from the blast area. They walked twenty paces but did not duck or hide behind anything, and they kept steady watch on the carcass. The fuse made a continuous sizzling sound for about three seconds, then stopped. And nothing happened.
“Shit,” Terry said. “Maybe it got wet.”
He took a step back toward the stump.
Eric grabbed his arm. “Hang on. Sometimes it—”
But Ig didn’t hear the rest of the sentence. No one did. Lydia Perrish’s twenty-eight-pound Butterball turkey exploded with a shattering crack, a sound so loud, so sudden and hard, that the girls out on the rock screamed. So did many of the boys. Ig would’ve screamed himself, but the blast seemed to force all the air out of his weak lungs, and he could only wheeze.
The turkey was torn apart in a rising gout of flame. The stump half exploded as well. Smoking chunks of wood whirled through the air. The skies opened and rained meat. Bones, still garnished with quivering lumps of raw pink flesh, drizzled down, rattling through the leaves and bouncing off the ground. Turkey parts fell pitter-plitter-plop into the river. In stories told later, many boys would claim that the girls on Coffin Rock were decorated with chunks of raw turkey, soaked in poultry blood like the chick in fuckin’ Carrie, but this was embellishment. The farthest-flung fragments of bird fell a good twenty feet short of the rock.
Ig’s ears felt as if they were stuffed with cotton batting. Someone shrieked in excitement, a long distance off from him—or at least he thought it was a long distance off. But when he looked back over his shoulder, he found the shrieking girl standing almost directly behind him. It was Glenna in her awesomely awesome leather jacket and boob-clinging tank top. She stood next to Lee Tourneau, clasping a couple of his fingers with one hand. Her other hand was raised high into the air and closed into a white-knuckled fist, a hillbilly gesture of triumph. When Lee noticed what she was doing, he wordlessly slipped his fingers out of her grip.
Other sounds rushed into the silence: yells, hoots, laughter. No sooner had the last of the turkey remains dropped from above than the boys were out of their hiding places and leaping around. Some grabbed splintered bones and threw them in the air and then pretended to duck, reenacting the moment of detonation. Other boys leaped into low tree branches, pretending they had just stepped on land mines and were being blown into the sky. They swung back and forth from the boughs, howling. One kid was dancing around, playing air guitar for some reason, apparently unaware he had a flap of raw turkey skin in his hair. It looked like footage from a nature documentary. Impressing the girls out on the rock was, for the moment, inconsequential—for most, anyway. No sooner had the turkey erupted than Ig had looked out at the river to see if they were all right. He regarded them still, watching them rise to their feet, laughing and chattering brightly to each other. One of them nodded downriver and then walked out on the sandbar to the kayaks. They would go soon.
Ig tried to think of some contrivance that would make them stay. He had the shopping cart, and he walked it up the trail a few feet and then rode it back down the hill, standing on the rear end, just something to do because he thought better when he was moving. He did this once, then again, so deep in his own head he was hardly aware he was doing it.
Eric, Terry, and other boys had loosely collected around the smoldering remains of the stump to inspect the damage. Eric rolled the last remaining cherry in one hand.
“Whatchu going to blow up now?” someone asked.
Eric frowned thoughtfully and did not reply. The boys around him began to offer suggestions, and soon they were shouting to be heard over one another. Someone said he could get a ham to explode, but Eric shook his head. “We already done meat,” he said. Someone else said they ought to put the cherry in one of his little sister’s dirty diapers. A third person said only if she was wearing it, to general laughter.
Then the question was repeated—Whatchu going to blow up now?—and this time there was a pause, while Eric made up his mind.
“Nothing,” he said, and put the cherry in his pocket.
The gathered boys made despairing sounds, but Terry, who knew his part in this scene, nodded his approval.
Then came offers and bargaining. One boy said he would trade his father’s dirty movies for it. Another kid said he would trade his father’s dirty home movies. “Seriously, my mom is a fuckin’ crazy bitch in the sack,” he said, and boys fell into one another, laughing helplessly.
“There’s about as much chance of me giving up my last cherry,” Eric said, “as there is of one of you homos climbing in that shopping cart and riding it naked down from the top of the hill.” Jerking his thumb over his shoulder at Ig and the shopping cart.
“I’ll ride it down from the top of the hill,” Ig said. “Naked.”
Heads turned. Ig stood several feet away from the knot of boys around Eric, and at first no one seemed to know who had spoken. Then there was laughter and some disbelieving hoots. Someone threw a turkey leg at Ig. He ducked, and it sailed overhead. When Ig straightened up, he saw Eric Hannity staring intently at him while passing his last cherry bomb from hand to hand. Terry stood directly behind Eric, his face stony now, and he shook his head, almost imperceptibly: No you don’t.
“Are you for real?” Eric asked.
“Will you let me have it if I ride this cart down the hill with no clothes on?”
Eric Hannity considered him through slitted eyes. “All the way down. Naked. If the cart doesn’t reach bottom, you get nothing. Doesn’t matter if you break your fucking back.”
“Dude,” Terry said, “I’m not letting you. What the fuck do you think I’m going to tell Mom when you flay all the skin off your scrawny white ass?”
Ig waited for the howls of hilarity to subside before replying, simply, “I’m not going to get hurt on the hill.”
Eric Hannity said, “You got yourself a deal. I want to see this shit.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Terry said, laughing, waving a hand in the air. He hustled across the dry ground to Ig, came around the cart, and took his arm. He was grinning when he leaned in close to speak into Ig’s ear, but his voice was low and harsh. “Will you fuck off? You are not going to ride down this hill with your cock flapping around, making the both of us look like retarded assholes.”
“Why? We’ve been skinny-dipping down here. Half these guys have already seen me with my clothes off. The other half,” Ig said, glancing toward the rest of the gathering, “don’t know what they been missing.”
“You don’t have a prayer of making it down the hill in this thing. It’s a fucking shopping cart, Ig. It has wheels like this.” He held up his thumb and index finger in the OK sign.
Ig said, “I’m going to make it.”
Terry’s lips parted to show his teeth in an angry, frustrated sneer. His eyes, though—his eyes were scared. In Terry’s mind Ig had already left most of his face on the side of the hill and was lying in a tangled, squalling mess halfway down it. Ig felt a kind of affectionate pity for Terry. Terry was cool, cooler than Ig would ever be, but he was afraid. His fear narrowed his vision so that he couldn’t see anything except what he stood to lose. Ig wasn’t built that way.
Now Eric Hannity was starting forward himself. “Let him go if he wants to. It’s no skin off your back. Off his, probably, but not yours.”
Terry went on arguing with Ig for another moment, not with words but with his stare. What finally caused Terry to look away was a sound, a soft, dismissive snort. Lee Tourneau was turning to whisper to Glenna, raising his hand to cover his mouth. But for some reason the hillside was, in that moment, unaccountably silent, and Lee’s voice carried, so everyone within ten feet of him could hear him saying, “—we don’t want to be around when the ambulance turns up to scrape dipshit off the hill—”
Terry spun on him, his face shriveling in a look of rage. “Oh, don’t go anywhere. You stand right there with that mountain board of yours you’re too chickenshit to ride and check out the show. You might want to see what a pair of balls look like. Take notes.”
The gathered boys burst into laughter. Lee Tourneau’s cheeks became inflamed, darkened to the deepest red Ig had ever seen in a human face, the color of a devil in a Disney cartoon. Glenna gave her date a look that was both pained and a little disgusted, then took a step away from him, as if his case of uncool might be catching.
In the tumult of amusement that followed, Ig slipped his arm from Terry’s grip and turned the cart up the hill. He pushed it through the weeds at the side of the trail, because he didn’t want the boys coming up the slope behind him to know what he knew, to see what he had seen. He didn’t want Eric Hannity to have a chance to back out. His audience hurried after him, shoving and shouting.
Ig had not gone far before the little wheels of the cart snagged in some brush and it started to veer violently to one side. He struggled to right it. Behind him there was a fresh outburst of hilarity. Terry was walking briskly at Ig’s side, and he grabbed the front end of the cart and pointed it straight, shaking his head. He whispered “Jesus” under his breath. Ig walked on, shoving the cart before him.
A few more steps brought him to the crest of the hill. He had settled himself to doing it, so there was no reason to hesitate or be embarrassed. He let go of the cart, grabbed the waistband of his shorts, and jerked them down, along with his underwear, showing the boys down the hill below his scrawny white ass. There were cries of shock and exaggerated disgust. When Ig straightened, he was grinning. His heartbeat had quickened, but only a little, like that of a man moving from a swift walk to a light jog—hurrying to catch his cab before someone else could get it. He kicked off his shorts without removing his sneakers and stripped off his shirt.
“Well,” Eric Hannity said, “don’t be shy, now.”
Terry laughed—a little shrilly—and looked away. Ig turned to face the crowd: fifteen and naked, balls and cock, shoulders hot in the afternoon sunshine. The air carried on it a whiff of smoke from the trash-can fire, where Highway to Hell still stood with his long-haired pal.
Highway to Hell threw up one hand, his pinkie and his index finger extended in the universal symbol of the devil’s horns, and shouted, “Fuckin’ yeah, baby! Lap dance!”
For some reason this affected the boys more than anything that had been said so far, so that several clutched at themselves and doubled over, gasping for breath, as if in reaction to some airborne toxin. For himself, however, Ig was surprised at how relaxed he felt, naked except for his loose tennis sneakers. He did not care if he was naked in front of other boys, and the girls on Coffin Rock would catch only the briefest glimpse of him before he flew into the river—a thought that did not worry him. A thought that, in fact, gave him a gleeful tickle of excitement, low down, in the pit of the stomach. Of course, there was one girl looking at him already: Glenna. She stood on tiptoes at the back of the crowd, her jaw hanging open in an expression that mingled surprise with hilarity. Her boyfriend, Lee, wasn’t with her. He had not followed them up the hill, had apparently not wanted to see what balls looked like.
Ig rolled the cart forward and maneuvered it into place, using the moment of chaos to prepare for the ride. No one gave any notice to the careful way he lined up the shopping cart with the half-buried pipes.
What Ig had discovered, riding the cart for short distances at the bottom of the hill, was that the two old and rusted pipes, sticking out of the dirt, were roughly a foot and a half apart and that the little back wheels of the shopping cart fit precisely between them. There was about a quarter inch of room on either side, and when one of the front wheels shimmied and tried to turn the cart off course, Ig had noticed it would strike a pipe and be turned back. It was very possible, on the steep pitch of the path, that the cart would hit a stone and flip over. It would not swerve off course and roll, however. Could not swerve off course. It would ride the inside of those pipes like a train on its rails.
He still had his clothes under one arm, and he turned and tossed them to Terry. “Don’t go anywhere with them. This’ll be over soon.”
“You said it,” Eric told him, which set off a fresh ripple of laughter—but which didn’t elicit quite the roar of amusement it maybe deserved.
Now that the moment had come and Ig was holding the handle of the cart, preparing to push off into space, he saw a few alarmed faces among the watching boys. Some of the older, more thoughtful-looking kids were half smiling in a quizzical way, and there was worried knowledge in their eyes, the first uneasy awareness that perhaps someone ought to put a stop to this thing before it went any further and Ig got himself seriously hurt. The thought came to Ig that if he didn’t go—now—someone might raise a sensible objection.
“See you,” Ig said before anyone could try to stop him, and he nudged the cart forward, stepping lightly onto the back.
It was a study in perspective, the two pipes leading away downhill, narrowing steadily to a final point, the bullet and the barrel. Almost from the moment he stepped onto the cart, he found himself plunging forward into a euphoric near silence, the only sounds the shrieking wheels and the rattle and bang of the steel frame. Rushing at him from below, he saw the KnowlesRiver, its black surface diamonded with sunlight. The wheels clattered right, then left, struck the pipes, and were turned back on course, just as Ig had known they would be.
In a moment the shopping cart was going too fast for him to do anything but hold on. There was no possibility of stopping, dismounting. He had not anticipated how quickly he would accelerate. The wind sliced at his bare skin so keenly it burned, he burned as he fell, Icarus ignited. The cart struck something, a squarish rock, and the left side vaulted off the ground, and this was it, it was going to overturn at whatever magnificent, fatal speed he was doing, and his naked body would be flung over the bars, and the earth would sand the skin off him and shatter his bones as the turkey bones had shattered, in a sudden, explosive slam. Only the front left wheel scraped the upper curve of the pipe and rode it back down onto the track. The sound of those wheels, spinning faster and faster, had risen to a mad, tuneless whistle, a lunatic piping.
When he glanced up, he saw the end of the trail, the pipes narrowing to their final point just before the dirt ramp that would launch him out over the water. The girls stood on the sandbar, by their kayaks. One of them was pointing at him. He imagined himself sailing overhead, hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle, Ig jumped over the moon.
The cart came screaming from between the pipes and shot at the ramp like a rocket leaving its gantry. It hit the dirt incline, and he was flung into the air, and the sky opened to him. The sunlit day caught Ig as if he were a ball lightly tossed into a glove, held him in its gentle clasp for one moment—and then the shopping cart snapped up and back and the steel frame struck him in the face and the sky let him go, dumped him into blackness.
CHAPTER T HIRTEEN
IG HAD A FRAGMENTARY MEMORY of the time he was underwater that he later assumed was false, because how could he remember anything about it if he’d been unconscious?
What he remembered was everything dark and roaring noise and a whirling sense of motion. He was poured forth into a thunderous torrent of souls, ejected from the earth and any sense of order and into this other, older chaos. He was in horror of it, appalled by the thought that this might be what waited after death. He felt he was being swept away, not just from his life but from God, the idea of God, or hope, or reason, the idea that things made sense, that cause followed effect, and it ought not to be like this, Ig felt, death ought not to be like this, even for sinners.
He struggled in that furious current of noise and nothing. The blackness seemed to shatter and peel away to show a muddy glimpse of sky but then closed back over him. When he felt himself weakening and sinking away, he had the sense of being grabbed and tugged along from beneath. Then, abruptly, there was something more solid under him. It felt like mud. A moment later he heard a far-off cry and was struck in the back.
The force of the impact shocked him, knocked the darkness out of him. His eyes sprang open, and he stared into a painful brightness. He retched. The river came out of his mouth, his nostrils. He was turned on his side on the mud, ear against the ground, so he could hear what was either the pounding of approaching feet or the slam of his own heart. He was downstream from the Evel Knievel trail, although in that first blurred moment of consciousness he wasn’t sure how far. A length of black rotted fire hose slithered across the liquid earth, three inches from his nose. Only after it was gone did he know that it had been a snake, sliding past him down the bank.
The leaves above began to come into focus, flitting gently against a background of bright sky. Someone was kneeling beside him, hand on his shoulder. Boys began to crash into sight, tumbling through the brush and then hitching up when they saw him.
Ig couldn’t see who was kneeling beside him but felt sure it was Terry. Terry had pulled him out of the water and gotten him breathing again. He rolled onto his back to look into his brother’s face. A skinny, sallow boy with a cap of icy blond hair stared expressionlessly back at him. Lee Tourneau was absentmindedly smoothing his tie against his chest. His khaki shorts were soaking wet. Ig didn’t need to ask why. In that moment, staring into Lee’s face, Ig decided he was going to begin wearing ties himself.
Terry came through the bushes, saw Iggy, and put on the brakes. Eric Hannity was right behind him and ran into him so hard he almost knocked him down. By now almost twenty boys were gathered around.
Ig sat up, drawing his knees close to his chest. He looked at Lee again and opened his mouth to speak, but when he tried, there was a bitter snap of pain in his nose, as if it were being broken all over again. He hunched and snorted a red splash of blood onto the dirt.
“Excuse me,” he said. “Sorry about the blood.”
“I thought you were dead. You looked a little dead. You weren’t breathing.” Lee was shivering.
“Well,” Ig said, “I’m breathing now. Thank you.”
“What’d he do?” Terry asked.
“He pulled me out,” Ig said, gesturing at Lee’s soaked shorts. “He got me breathing again.”
“You swam in for him?” Terry said.
“No,” Lee said. He blinked, seemed utterly baffled, as if Terry had asked him a much more difficult question: the capital of Iceland, the state flower. “He was already in the shallows by the time I saw him. I didn’t swim out for him or…or anything really. He was already—”
“He pulled me out,” Ig said over him, would have none of Lee’s stammering humility. He remembered quite clearly the feeling of someone in the water with him, moving close beside him. “I wasn’t breathing.”
“And you did mouth-to-mouth?” Eric Hannity asked, with unmistakable incredulity.
Lee shook his head, still confused. “No. No, it wasn’t like that. All I did was smack his back when he, you know…when he was…” He floundered there, didn’t seem to know how to go on.
Ig continued, “That’s what made me cough it up. I swallowed most of the river. My whole chest was full of it, and he pounded it out of me.” He spoke through gritted teeth. The pain in his nose was a series of sharp, bitter shocks, little electrical jolts. They even seemed to have color; when he closed his eyes, he saw neon-yellow flashes.
The gathered boys looked upon Ig and Lee Tourneau with a quiet, dumbstruck wonder. What had just transpired was a thing that happened only in daydreams and TV shows. Someone had been about to die, and someone else had rescued him, and now the saved and the savior were marked as special, stars in their own movie, which made the rest of them extras, or supporting cast at best. To have actually saved a life was to have become someone. You were no longer Joe Schmo, you were Joe Schmo who pulled Ig Perrish naked out of the KnowlesRiver the day he almost drowned. You would be that person for the rest of your life.
For himself, looking up into Lee’s face, Ig felt the first bud of obsession beginning to open in him. He had been saved. He had been about to die, and this pale-haired boy with questioning blue eyes had brought him back. In evangelical churches you went to the river and were submerged and then lifted up into your new life, and it seemed to Ig now that Lee had saved him in this sense as well. Ig wanted to buy him something, to give him something, to find out his favorite rock band so it could be Ig’s favorite rock band, too. He wanted to do Lee’s homework for him.
There was noisy crashing in the brush, as if someone were driving a golf cart toward them. Then the girl, Glenna, appeared among them, out of breath, her face blotchy. She bent at the waist, put one hand on her round thigh, and gasped, “Jesus. Look at his face.” Her gaze shifted to Lee, and her brow furrowed. “Lee? What are you doing?”
“He pulled Ig out of the water,” Terry said.
“He got me breathing,” Ig said.
“Lee?” she asked, screwing up her face in an expression that suggested utter disbelief.
“I didn’t do anything,” Lee said, shaking his head, and Ig could not help but love him.
The pain that had been beating in the bridge of Ig’s nose had flowered, opening behind his forehead, between his eyes, penetrating deeper into the brain. He was beginning to see those neon-yellow flashes even with his eyes open. Terry sank down on one knee at his side, put a hand on his arm.
“We better get you dressed and back home,” Terry said. He sounded chastened in some way, as if he, and not Ig, were guilty of idiot recklessness. “I think your nose is broken.” He looked up then at Lee Tourneau and gave him a brief nod of acknowledgment. “Hey. Looks like maybe I was full of shit back on the hill. Sorry about what I said a couple minutes ago. Thanks for helping my brother out.”
Lee said, “Skip it. It’s not worth making a big deal.” Ig almost shivered at the calm cool of it, his unwillingness to bask in the appreciation of others.
“Will you come with us?” Ig asked Lee, gritting his teeth against the pain. He looked at Glenna. “Both of you? I want to tell my parents what Lee did.”
Terry said, “Hey, Ig. Let’s not and say we did. We don’t want Mom and Dad to know this happened. You fell out of a tree, okay? There was a slippery branch, and you face-planted. That’s just…just easier.”
“Terry. We have to tell them. I’d be drowned if he didn’t pull me out.”
Ig’s brother opened his mouth to argue, but Lee Tourneau beat him to the punch.
“No,” he said, almost sharply, and looked up at Glenna with wide eyes. She stared back at him with much the same look and grabbed strangely at her black leather jacket. Then he was on his feet. “I’m not supposed to be here. I didn’t do anything anyway.” He hurried across the little clearing to grab Glenna’s chubby hand and tug her toward the trees. With his other hand, he carried his brand-new mountain board.
“Wait,” Ig said, getting to his feet. When he stood, a bright neon flash burst behind his eyes, carrying with it a feeling like he had a nose full of packed broken glass.
“I got to go. We both got to go.”
“Well. Will you come over to the house sometime?”
“Sometime.”
“Do you know where it is? It’s on the highway, just about—”
“Everyone knows where it is,” Lee said, and then he was gone, billygoating away through the trees, pulling Glenna after him. She cast a final, distressed look back at the boys before allowing herself to be led off.
The pain in Ig’s nose was more intense now and coming in steady, rolling waves. He cupped his hands to his face for a moment, and when he took them away, his palms were painted in crimson.
“Come on, Ig,” Terry said. “We better go. You need to see a doctor about your face.”
“You and me both,” Ig said.
Terry smiled and tugged Ig’s shirt loose from the ball of laundry he was holding. Ig was startled to see it, had forgotten, until that moment, that he was standing there naked. Terry pulled it on over Ig’s head, dressing him as if he were five and not fifteen.
“Probably need a surgeon to remove Mom’s foot from my ass, too. She’ll be ready to kill me after she gets a look at you,” Terry said. As Ig’s head came through the shirt hole, he found his brother peering into his face with unmistakable anxiety. “You aren’t going to tell, are you? For real, Ig. She’d murder me for letting you ride that fucking cart down the hill. Sometimes it’s just better not to tell.”
“Oh, man, I’m no good at lying. Mom always knows. She knows the second I open my mouth.”
Terence looked relieved. “So who said open your mouth? You’re in pain. Just stand there and cry. Leave the bullshit to me. It’s what I’m good at.”
CHAPTER F OURTEEN
LEE T OURNEAU WAS SHIVERING and soaking wet the next time Ig saw him as well, two days later. He wore the same tie, the same shorts, had his mountain board under one arm. It was as if he’d never dried off, as if he’d only just waded out of the Knowles.
It had started to rain, and Lee had been caught out in it. His almost-white hair was soaked flat, and he had the sniffles. He carried a wet canvas satchel over his shoulder; it gave him the look of a newsboy out to hawk some papers in an old Dick Tracy strip.
Ig was alone in the house, an uncommon occurrence. His parents were in Boston to attend a cocktail party at John Williams’s town house. Williams was in his last year as the conductor of the Boston Pops, and Derrick Perrish was going to perform with the orchestra in the farewell concert. They had left Terry in charge. Terry had spent most of the morning in his pajamas in front of MTV, on the phone, carrying on a series of conversations with equally bored friends. His tone at first was cheerfully lazy, then alert and curious, then, finally, clipped and flat, the toneless tone he used to express his highest levels of disdain. Ig had gone by the living room to see him pacing, an unmistakable sign of agitation. Finally Terry had banged down the phone and launched himself up the stairs. When he came back down, he was dressed and tossing the keys to their father’s Jag in one hand. He said he was going to Eric’s. He said it with his upper lip curled, the look of someone with a dirty job to do, someone who has come home to find the trash cans knocked over and garbage spread all over the yard.
“Don’t you need someone with a license to go with you?” Ig asked. Terry had his permit.
“Only if I get pulled over,” Terry said.
Terry walked out the door, and Ig closed it behind him. Five minutes later Ig was opening it again, someone thumping on the other side. Ig assumed it was Terry, that he had forgotten something and come back to get it, but it was Lee Tourneau instead.
