Horns

“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 Gle

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 FOURTEEN

LEE TOURNEAU 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.

“How’s your nose?” Lee asked.

Ig touched the tape across the bridge of his nose, then dropped his hand. “I wasn’t that pretty to begin with. You want to come in?”

Lee took a step in through the door and stood there, a pool forming under his feet.

“Looks like you’re the one who drowned,” Ig said.

Lee didn’t smile. It was as if he didn’t know how. It was as if he’d put his face on for the first time that morning and didn’t know how to use it.

“Nice tie,” Lee said.

Ig looked down at himself, had forgotten he was wearing it. Terry had rolled his eyes at Ig when Ig came downstairs Tuesday morning with his blue tie knotted around his throat. “What’s that?” Terry had asked derisively.

Their father had been wandering through the kitchen at that exact moment and looked over at Ig, then said, “Class. You ought to put some on sometime, Terry.” Ig had worn a tie every day since, but there’d been no more discussion of the matter.

“What are you selling?” Ig asked, nodding at the canvas bag.

“They’re six bucks,” Lee said. He folded back the flap and withdrew three different magazines. “Take your pick.”

The first was called, simply, The Truth! The cover showed a groom and his bride kneeling before the altar in a vast church. Their hands were clasped in prayer, their faces raised into the light slanting through stained-glass windows. Their expressions suggested that the both of them had been sucking laughing gas; they wore identical looks of maniacal joy. A gray-ski

“All three for fifteen,” Lee said. “They’re to raise money for the Christian Patriots Food Bank. The Truth! is really good. It’s all great celebrity sci-fi stuff. There’s a story about how Steven Spielberg got to tour the real Area 51. And there’s another one about the guys from Kiss, when they were on an airplane that got hit by lightning and the engines conked out. They were all praying to Christ to save them, and then Paul Stanley saw Jesus on the wing, and a minute later the engines started up again and the pilot was able to pull out of the dive.”

“The guys in Kiss are Jewish,” Ig said.

Lee didn’t seem troubled by this news. “Yeah. I think most of what they publish is bullshit. It was still a good story.”

This struck Ig as a remarkably sophisticated observation.

“Did you say it’s fifteen for all three?” he said.

Lee nodded. “If you sell enough, you’re eligible for prizes. That’s how I wound up with the mountain board I was too chickenshit to use.”

“Hey,” Ig said, surprised at the calm, flat way Lee copped to being a coward. It was worse hearing him say it about himself than it was hearing Terry say it on the hill.

“No,” Lee said, unperturbed. “Your brother had me right. I thought I’d impress Gle

Ig felt a brief but intense flash of hate for his older brother. “Like he’s got room to talk. He almost pissed himself when he thought I was going to go home and tell Mom what really happened to me. One thing about my brother, in any given situation you can always count on him to cover his ass first and worry about other people second. Come on in. I got money upstairs.”

“You want to buy one?”

“I want to buy all three.”

Lee narrowed one eye to a squint. “I can see Modern American Militia, because it’s all stuff about guns and how to tell a spy satellite from a normal satellite. But are you sure you want Tax Reform Now?”

“Why not? I’ll have to pay taxes someday.”

“Most of the people who read this magazine try not to.”

Lee followed Ig to his room but then stopped in the hall, peering cautiously within. Ig had never thought of the room as particularly impressive-it was the smallest on the second floor-but wondered now if it looked like the bedroom of a rich kid to Lee and if this would count against him. Ig had a glance around the place himself, trying to imagine how Lee saw it. The first thing he noticed was the view of the swimming pool out the window, the rain dimpling its vivid blue surface. Then there was the autographed poster of Mark Knopfler over the bed; Ig’s father had played horns on the last Dire Straits album.