Horns

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 Ha

“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 su

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 ta

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 Ha

“Let’s bake that bitch,” Ha

“I call a drumstick,” Terry said, and some boys laughed in spite of themselves.

Eric Ha

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 di

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 ru