Horns

He turned his head this way and that, considering his profile. He thought he was the very image of the romantic, raffish young Asmodeus.

His reflection turned its head and eyed him slyly.

Why are you fishing here? said the devil in the water. For are you not a fisher of men?

“Catch and release?” Ig asked.

His reflection contorted with laughter, a dirty, convulsive shout of crowlike amusement, as startling as a string of firecrackers going off. Ig jerked his head up and saw that it was indeed only the sound of a crow, lifting off from Coffin Rock and skimming away over the river. Ig toyed with his chinlock, his little schemer’s beard, listening to the woods, to the echoing silence, and at last became aware of another sound, voices drifting upriver. After a while there sounded the brief, distant squawk of a police siren, a long way off.

Ig climbed back up the hill to dress. Everything he had brought with him to the foundry had burned in the Gremlin. But he recalled the mildewed old clothes strung in the branches of the oak that overhung the top of the Evel Knievel trail: a stained black overcoat with a torn liner, a single black sock, and a blue lace skirt that looked like something from an early-eighties Mado

Ig set out, his blue lace skirt flouncing about his thighs, fa

They had found the car. It had followed the current all the way to the sandbar below the Old Fair Road Bridge, where the local kids had their yearly bonfire to mark the end of summer. The Gremlin looked as if it had tried to drive right up out of the river, the front tires embedded in the soft sand, the rear end underwater. A few cop cars and a tow truck had driven partly out onto the sandbar toward it. Other cars-police cruisers, but also local yokels who had pulled over to stare-were scattered on the gravel landing below the bridge. Still more cars were parked up on the bridge itself, people lined along the rail to look down. Police sca

The Gremlin didn’t look like itself, the paint cooked right off it and the iron body beneath baked black. A cop in waders opened the passenger-side door, and water flooded forth. A sunfish spilled out in the torrent, its scales iridescent in the late-morning sunshine, and landed in the wet sand with a splat. The cop in rubber boots kicked it into the shallows, and it recovered itself and shot away.

A few uniformed cops stood in a knot on the sandbar, drinking coffee and laughing, not even looking at the car. Snippets of their conversation came to Ig, carried on the clear morning air.

“-fuck is it? A Civic, you think?”

“-du

“-someone decided to get the bonfire goin’ a couple days early-”

They gave off an air of summery good humor and ease and masculine indifference. As the tow truck slammed into gear and began to roll forward, hauling the Gremlin out, water gushed from the rear windows, which had shattered. Ig saw that the license plate had been removed from the back end. Probably gone from the front, too. Lee had thought to remove them before he hauled Ig out of his chimney and put him into it. The police didn’t know what they had, not yet.

Ig made his way down through the trees and settled at last on some rocks above a steep drop to watch the sandbar through the pines, from a distance of maybe twenty yards. He didn’t look down until he heard the sound of soft laughter directly below. He took a casual glance over the edge and saw Sturtz and Posada, in full uniform, standing side by side, holding each other’s prick while they urinated into the brush. When they locked mouths, Ig had to grab a low nearby tree to keep from toppling off the rocks and falling onto them. He scrambled back to where he wouldn’t be seen.

Someone shouted, “Sturtz! Posada! Where the fuck are you guys? We need someone on the bridge!” Ig took another peek over the side to watch them go. He had meant to turn them against each other, not turn them on to each other, and yet was not altogether surprised by this outcome. It was, perhaps, the devil’s oldest precept, that sin could always be trusted to reveal what was most human in a person, as often for good as for ill. There was a whisper and the rustle of the two men adjusting their clothing and Posada laughing, and then they started back.

Ig moved to a position higher on the slope, where he had a better view of both the sandbar and the bridge, and that was when he saw Dale Williams. Merrin’s father stood at the railing among the other onlookers, a pasty man with a buzz cut, in a striped, short-sleeved shirt.

The sight of the nuked car seemed to hold Dale fascinated. He leaned against the rusted railing, his fat fingers entwined, staring at it with a stricken, empty expression on his face. Maybe the cops didn’t know what they’d found, but Dale did. Dale knew cars, had sold them for twenty years, and he knew this car. He hadn’t just sold it to Ig, he’d helped Ig fix it up and had seen it in his driveway almost every night for six years. Ig could not imagine what Dale saw now, looking over the bridge at the fire-blackened ruin of the Gremlin on the sandbar and believing that his daughter had taken her last drive in it.

There were cars parked along the bridge and on the sides of the road at either end of the span. Dale stood on the eastern tip of the bridge. Ig began to cross the hill, angling through the trees toward the road.

Dale was moving, too. For a long time, he had simply been standing there staring at the burned-out shell of the Gremlin, the water pouring off it. What finally broke him out of his trance was the sight of a cop-it was Sturtz-coming up the hill to provide some crowd control. Dale began to squeeze by the other onlookers, making his slow water-buffalo way off the bridge.

As Ig reached the verge of the road, he spotted Dale’s ride, a blue BMW station wagon; Ig knew it was his by the dealer plates. It was parked in the gravel breakdown lane, in the shadow of a stand of pines. Ig stepped briskly from the woods and climbed into the back, shut the door behind him, and sat there with his pitchfork across his knees.

The rear windows were tinted, but it hardly mattered. Dale was in a hurry and didn’t glance into the backseat. Ig understood he might not want to be seen hanging around. If you made a list of the people in Gideon who would most want to see Ig Perrish burned alive, Dale would definitely be in the top five. The car salesman opened the door and dropped behind the wheel.