Horns by Joe Hill
All Lee could think was that on some level Ig held on to her out of a perverse desire to hold her over Lee. Ig was glad to have Lee as his sidekick—the reformation of Lee Tourneau had been Ig’s high-school hobby—but he would want Lee to know there were limits to their friendship. He would not want Lee to forget who had won her. As if Lee did not remember every time he closed his right eye and the world became a dim shadowland, a place where ghosts crept through the darkness and the sun was a cold and distant moon.
A part of Lee respected how Ig had taken her away from him, back when they both had an equal shot at her. Ig had simply wanted that red pussy more than Lee, and under pressure he had become someone different, someone wily and smooth. With his asthma and bad hair and head full of Bible trivia, no one would ever think of Ig as ruthless or cunning. Lee had stayed close to Ig for most of ten years, following his lead. He thought of them as lessons in disguise, lessons in how to appear harmless, safe. Faced with any ethical quandary, Lee had learned it was best to ask, What Would Ig Do? The answer, usually, was apologize, abase himself, and then fling himself into some entirely unnecessary act of make-nice. Lee had learned from Ig to admit he was wrong even when he wasn’t, to ask for forgiveness he didn’t need, and to pretend he didn’t want the things he had coming to him.
For a brief time, when he was sixteen, she had been his by right. For a few days, he had worn Merrin’s cross around his neck, and when he sometimes pressed that cross to his lips, he could imagine he was kissing it while she wore it about her throat—the cross and nothing else. But then he let her cross and his chance at her slip through his fingers, because even more than he wanted to see her pale and naked in the dark, he wanted to see something shatter, wanted to hear an explosion loud enough to deafen him, wanted to see a car erupt into flame. His mother’s Caddy maybe, with her in it. The very thought made his pulse racy and strange in a way fantasies of Merrin couldn’t match. So he gave her up, gave her back. Made his fool’s deal with Ig—a deal with the devil, really. It had not just cost him the girl. It had cost him his eye. He felt there was meaning in this. Lee had done a miracle once, had touched the sky and caught the moon before it could fall, and ever since, God had pointed him toward other things that needed fixing: cats and crosses, political campaigns and senile old women. What he fixed was his forever, to do with as he liked, and only once had he given away what God put into his hands, and he had been blinded as a reminder not to do it again. And now the cross was his once more, proof, if he needed it, that he was being guided toward something, that he and Merrin were being brought together for a reason. He felt he was supposed to fix the cross and then fix her in some way, maybe simply by setting her free of Ig.
Lee might’ve kept his distance from Merrin all summer, but then Ig made it easy for him to go see her, sent him an e-mail from NYC:
Merrin wants her dresser but doesn’t have a car and her dad’s got work. I said ask you to bring it down and she said you aren’t her bitch, but you and I both know you are, so bring it down next time you get to Boston for the congressman. Besides, she has snared an available blonde for you. Imagine the children this woman will bear you, little Vikings with eyes like the Arctic Ocean. Go to Merrin now. You cannot resist her summons. Let her buy you a nice dinner. You’ve got to be ready to leap in to do her dirty work now that I’m heading off.
Are you hanging in there?—Ig
Lee didn’t understand the last part of Ig’s e-mail for hours—Are you hanging in there?—puzzled over it all morning, then remembered that his mother was dead, had been dead for two weeks. He was more interested in that line about leaping in to do Merrin’s dirty work, a kind of message in and of itself. That night Lee suffered overheated, sexually complicated dreams; he dreamed that Merrin was naked in his bed, and he sat on top of her arms and held her down while he forced a funnel into her mouth, a red plastic funnel, and then poured gasoline into it, and she began to buck under him as in orgasm. He lit a match, holding the matchbook in his teeth to keep the strike strip steady, and dropped it down the funnel, and there was a whoosh, and a cyclone of red flames rose from the hole, and her surprised eyes ignited. When he woke, he found the sheets soaked, had never before had a wet dream of such power, even as a teenager.
Two days later it was Friday, and he drove to Merrin’s to get the dresser. He had to move a heavy, rusting toolbox from the trunk to the backseat to make room for it, and even then he had to borrow straps from Merrin’s father to keep the lid down and the dresser in place. Halfway to Boston, Lee pulled over at a rest area and sent her a text message:
Coming down to Boston tonight, got this heavy SOB in the trunk, you better be there to take it. Is my ice queen around, maybe I can meet her.
There was a long wait before Merrin replied:
ah, sht Lee you are the best dam man for cuming to c me but shouldve told me you were on the wy no icequeen tonite shes workin guess youll have to make do with me.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
MERRIN ANSWERED THE DOOR in sweatpants and a bulky hoodie, and her roommate was there, a butchy Asian girl with an annoying snicker. She was pacing around the living room, talking on a cell phone, her voice nasal and painfully cheerful.
“What do you have in this thing anyway?” Lee said. He leaned on the dresser, breathing hard and wiping sweat from his face. He had wheeled it in, strapped to a dolly that Merrin’s dad had told him to take with him, banged it up seventeen steps to get it to the landing, nearly dumping it twice. “Chain-mail underwear?”
The roomie looked over Merrin’s shoulder and said, “Try a cast-iron chastity belt.” And wandered off, trailing goose-honk laughter.
“Thought your roomie moved,” Lee said when she’d got out of earshot.
“She’s going away the same time Ig does,” Merrin told him. “San Diego. After that I’ll be all alone here for a while.”
Looking him in the eyes and smirking a little. Another message.
They wrestled the dresser in through the door, and then Merrin said just leave it and went into the kitchen to heat up some Indian food. She brought paper plates to a round, stained table under a window with a view of the street. Kids were skateboarding in the summer night, gliding out of the shadows and into the orange-tinted pools of light cast by the sodium-vapor streetlamps.
Merrin’s notebooks and papers were spread all over one side of the table, and she began putting them in a pile to get them out of the way. Lee bent over her shoulder, pretending to look at her work while he drew in a long, sweet breath of her scented hair. He saw loose sheets of ruled notebook paper with dots and dashes arranged on them in a grid.
“What’s with connect-the-dots?”
“Oh,” she said, collecting the papers and sticking them in a textbook and putting them up on the windowsill. “My roommate. We play that game, you know that game? Where you make all the dots, and then connect them into squares, and whoever has the most squares wins. Loser has to do laundry. She hasn’t had to wash her own clothes in months.”
Lee said, “You should let me have a look. I’m good at that game. I could help you with your next move.” He had only caught a brief glimpse of it, but it didn’t even look like the grid had been drawn correctly. Maybe it was a different version of the game than the one he knew.
“I think that would be cheating. You’re saying you want to make a cheater out of me?” she asked.
They held each other’s stares for a moment. Lee said, “I want what you want.”
“Well. I think I should try to win fair and square. No pun intended.”
They sat across from each other. Lee looked around, considering the place. It wasn’t much of an apartment: a living room, a kitchenette, and two bedrooms on the second floor of a rambling Cambridge house that had been divided into five units. Dance music thumped below.
“Are you going to be able to cover the rent with no roommate?”
“No. I’ll have to find someone to shack up with eventually.”
“I
She said, “He’d pay the whole thing. I could be his kept mistress. I had an offer like that once, you know.”
“What offer?”
“One of my professors asked me out to lunch a few months ago. I thought we were going to talk about my residency. Instead he got us a two-hundred-dollar bottle of wine and told me he wanted to rent me a place in Back Bay. Sixty-year-old guy with a daughter two years older than me.”
“Married?”
“Of course.”
Lee sat back in his chair and whistled through his teeth. “Ig must’ve shit himself.”
“I didn’t tell him. And don’t you say anything about it either. I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”
“Why didn’t you tell Ig?”
“Because I’m doing coursework with the guy. I wouldn’t want Ig to report him for sexual harassment or something.”
“Ig wouldn’t report him.”
“No. I guess not. But he would’ve wanted me to drop coursework with him. Which I didn’t want to do. However he acts outside the classroom, the guy is one of the best oncologists in the country, and at the time I wanted to see what he could teach me. It seemed important.”
“It doesn’t seem important any more?”
“Hell. I don’t need to graduate first in anyone’s class. I have mornings when I think I’ll be lucky just to graduate at all,” she said.
“Ah, come on. You’re doing great.” Lee paused and said, “How’d the old bastard take it? When you told him to get screwed?”
“With good humor. The wine was nice. Early nineties from a little family vineyard in Italy. I have a feeling he’s bought the exact same bottle for a few other girls. Anyway, I didn’t tell him to get screwed. I told him I was in love with someone and also didn’t think it would be appropriate while I was studying with him, but under other circumstances I would’ve been glad to entertain the idea.”
“That was kind of you.”
“It’s true. If I weren’t his student and if I’d never met Ig? I could imagine going out with him to a foreign film or something.”
“Get the hell out. Didn’t you say he’s old?”
“Old enough to qualify for AARP.”
Lee sank back into his chair, feeling something unfamiliar: disgust. And surprise. “You’re kidding.”
“Sure. He might teach me about wines. And books. And stuff I don’t know about. What life looks like from the other end of the telescope. What it’s like to be in an immoral relationship.”
“It’d be a mistake,” Lee said.
“I think maybe you have to make a few,” Merrin said. “If you don’t, you’re probably thinking too much. That’s the worst mistake you can make.”
“What about the old dude’s wife and daughter?”
“Yeah. I don’t know about that part. Course, it’s the third wife, so it’s not like she’d be terribly shocked.” Merrin narrowed her eyes and said, “You think every guy gets bored sooner or later?”
“I think most guys fantasize about what they don’t have. I know I’ve never been in a relationship in my life where I wasn’t fantasizing about other girls.”
“At what point? When in a relationship does a guy start thinking about other girls?”
Lee tipped his head back to stare at the ceiling, pretended to think. “I dunno. About fifteen minutes into the first date? Depends if the waitress is hot.”
She smirked, then said, “Sometimes I’ll see Ig looking at a girl. Not often. If he knows I’m around, he keeps his eyes in his head. But, like, when we were down to Cape Cod this summer and I went to the car to get the suntan lotion and then remembered I’d stuck it in my windbreaker. He didn’t think I’d be back so soon, and he was looking at this girl on her belly, with the back of her bikini top undone. Pretty girl, maybe nineteen, twenty. When we were in high school, I would’ve raked him up and down for looking, but now I don’t say anything. I don’t know what to say. He’s never been with anyone except me.”
“Is that right?” Lee asked in an incredulous tone, although he already knew.
“Do you think when he’s thirty-five he’ll feel like I trapped him too young? You think he’ll feel like he was cheated out of fun high-school sex and be fantasizing about the girls he missed out on?”
“I’m sure he fantasizes about other girls now,” said Merrin’s roommate, passing through with a Hot Pocket in one hand, holding the phone to her ear with another. She continued on into her room and slammed her door. Not because she was angry, or even aware of what she was doing. Just because she was the kind of person who slammed doors without noticing.
Merrin sat back in her chair, arms crossed. “True or false. What she said?”
“Not in a serious way. Like him checking out the girl on the beach. He might enjoy thinking about it, but it’s just a thought, so what’s it matter, right?”
Merrin leaned forward and said, “Do you think Ig will do a little sleeping around in England? To get it out of his system? Or do you think he’d feel like he was stepping out in an unforgivable way on me and the kids?”
“What kids?”
“The kids. Harper and Charlie. We’ve been talking about them since I was nineteen.”
“Harper and Charlie?”
“Harper is the girl, after Harper Lee. My favorite one-book novelist. Charlie if it’s a boy. ’Cause Ig likes when I say, ‘Solly, Cholly.’” The way she said it made Lee not like her so much. She looked distracted and happy, and he could tell from the suddenly distant look in her eyes that she was imagining them herself.
“No,” Lee said.
“No what?”
“Ig won’t sleep around on you. Not unless you slept around on him first and made sure he knew it. Then I guess, yeah. Maybe. Reverse this for a minute. Do you ever think maybe you’ll be thirty-five and feel like you missed something?”
“No,” she said with a flat, disinterested certainty. “I don’t think I’ll ever be thirty-five and feeling like I missed out on anything. That’s an awful idea, you know.”
“What is?”
“Screw someone just to tell him about it.” She wasn’t looking at him but staring out the window. “The thought kind of makes me sick.”
The funny thing is, she looked a little sick right then. For the first time, Lee noticed how pale she was, dull pink circles under her eyes, her hair limp. Her hands were doing something with her paper napkin, folding it into smaller and smaller squares.
“Do you feel okay? You look a little off.”
The corners of her mouth twitched in a half smile. “I think I’m coming down with something. Don’t worry about it. As long as we don’t tongue each other, you won’t catch it.”
He was fuming when he drove away, an hour later. That was the way Merrin operated. She had lured him down to Boston, led him to imagine they would be alone together, then answered the door in her sweatpants, looking like warmed-over shit, her roomie wandering around, and they had spent the night talking about Ig. If she hadn’t let him kiss her breast two weeks ago and given him her cross, he would’ve thought she had no interest in him at all. He was sick of being jerked around, and sick of her talk.
But as he crossed the Zakim Bridge, Lee’s pulse began to slow and he began to breathe more normally, and it came to him that Merrin had never once mentioned the ice-queen blonde, not the whole time he was there. This was followed by another notion, that there was no ice queen, there was only Merrin, seeing how much she could get him worked up, keeping him thinking.
He was thinking, all right. He was thinking Ig would be gone soon enough, and so would her roommate, and sometime in the fall, he would knock on her door, and when she opened it, she’d be alone.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
LEE HAD HOPED FOR A LATE NIGHT with Merrin, but it was just after ten when he crossed the border into New Hampshire and noticed he had a voice mail from the congressman. The congressman spoke in his slow, tired, migraine voice and said he hoped
Eleven o’clock, Lee pulled into the congressman’s driveway of crushed white seashells. The house, a vast white Georgian with a columned portico, sat on an acre of immaculately groomed green lawn. The congressman’s twins were playing croquet with their boyfriends, out in the front yard, under the floodlights. Champagne flutes stood on the path next to the girls’ high heels; they were running around in bare feet. Lee got out of the Caddy and stood next to it, watching them play, two limber and brown-legged girls in summer dresses, one of them bent over her mallet and her date reaching around from behind, offering his help as an excuse to spoon against her. The laughter of the girls carried on air that smelled faintly of the sea, and Lee felt himself again in his element.
The congressman’s girls loved Lee, and when they saw him coming up the walk, they ran straight to him. Kaley put her arms around his neck, and Daley planted a kiss on the side of his face. Twenty-one and tanned and happy, but there had been hushed-up trouble with both: binge drinking, anorexia, a venereal disease. He hugged them back and kidded and promised to come out and play croquet with them if he could, but his skin crawled at their touch. They looked smooth and fine but were as rancid as chocolate-covered cockroaches; one of them was chewing a stick of spearmint, and he wondered if it was to cover up the odor of cigarettes, weed, or dick. He would not have slept with both of them together at the same time in trade for a night with Merrin, who was, in some ways, still clean, still possessed of the body of a sixteen-year-old virgin. She had only ever slept with Ig, and knowing Ig as Lee did, that hardly counted. Ig probably kept a sheet between them the whole time.