Horns

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 thi

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 Ha

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. Gle

“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 di

“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 banda

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, Gle

“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, Gle

“Fuck you,” she said. To the bunch around the trash can, the look of hurt on her face was the fu