Horns

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. Gle

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 Ha

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 gri

“Well,” Eric Ha

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 te

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 Knowles River, 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, spi

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.