Horns

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

IG STOOD, A BURNING MAN, devil in a gown of fire. For half a minute, the gasoline flames roiled off him, streamed away from his flesh in the wind. Then, as quickly as it had come roaring to life, the blaze began to flutter weakly and sputter out. In a few moments, it was gone entirely, and a black, oily smoke rose from his body in a thick, choking column. Or what would’ve been choking to any man but was, to the demon in the center of it, as sweet as an alpine breeze.

He cast off his robe of smoke, stepped forth from it, entirely naked. The old skin had burned away, and the new skin beneath was a deeper, richer shade of carmine. His left shoulder was still stiff, although the wound had healed to a tormented mass of whitish scar tissue. His head was clear; he felt well, felt as if he had just run a mile and was ready for a swim. The grass around him was black and smoldered. A burning red line was marching across the dry weeds and bunches of grass, moving toward the forest. Ig looked beyond it to the dead cherry tree, pale against its background of evergreens.

He had left the Tree House of the Mind in flames, had burned down heaven, but the cherry still stood undamaged. A wind rose in a hot gust, and the leaves thrashed, and even from here Ig could see there was no tree house up there. It was fu

Ig climbed through the foundry doorway. He stepped over his brother’s trumpet.

Terry knelt before the open door of the furnace, head bowed. Ig saw his perfect stillness, the calm look of concentration on his face, and thought his brother looked good even in death. His shirt drawn smoothly across his broad back, cuffs folded carefully past his wrists. Ig lowered himself to his knees beside Terry. Two brothers in the pews. He took his brother’s hand in his and saw that when Terry was eleven, he had stuck gum in Ig’s hair on the school bus.

“Shit,” Ig said. “It had to be cut out with scissors.”

“What?” Terry asked.

“The gum you put in my hair,” Ig said. “On Bus Nineteen.”

Terry inhaled a small sip of air, a whistling breath.

“Breathing,” Ig said. “How are you breathing?”

“I’ve got,” Terry whispered, “very strong. Lungs. I do. Play the horn. Now. And then.” After a moment he said, “It’s a miracle. We both. Got out. Of this. Alive.”

“Don’t be so sure about that,” Ig said.

Gle

“You called,” Terry said. “For help.”

“No,” Ig said. “You called for help. Listen closely, Terry. Let me tell you what you’re going to remember-and what you’re going to forget. You have a lot to forget. Things that happened tonight and things that happened before tonight.” And as he spoke, the horns throbbed, a hard jolt of animal pleasure. “There’s only room for one hero in this story-and everyone knows the devil doesn’t get to be the good guy.”

Ig told him a story, in a soft and pleasing voice, a good story, and Terry nodded as he listened, as if to the beat of a song he particularly liked.

IN A FEW MINUTES, it was done. Ig sat with him for a while longer, neither of them speaking. Ig was not sure Terry still knew he was there; he had been told to forget. He seemed to be asleep on his knees. Ig sat until he heard the distant wail of a trumpet, playing a single, razzy note of alarm, a musical sound of panicked urgency: the fire trucks. He took his brother’s head in his hands and kissed his temple. What he saw was less important than what he felt.

“You’re a good man, Ignatius Perrish,” whispered Terry, without opening his eyes.

“Blasphemy,” Ig said.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

HE CLIMBED DOWN from the open doorway and then, as an afterthought, reached up and took his brother’s trumpet. Then he turned and looked across the open field, along the avenue of fire, which reached in a straight line toward the cherry tree. The blaze leaped and flickered around the trunk for a moment-and then the tree itself erupted into flames, as if it were soaked in kerosene. The crown of the tree roared, a parachute of red and yellow flame, and in its branches was the Tree House of the Mind. Curtains of flame billowed in the windows. The cherry alone burned in the wood, the other trees untouched by fire.

Ig strode along the path the fire had cut through the field, a young lord on the red carpet that led to his manor. By some trick of optics, the headlights of Lee’s Caddy fell upon him and cast a vast, looming, four-story-high shadow against the boiling smoke. The first of the fire trucks was thumping its slow way down the rutted dirt road, and the driver, a thirty-year veteran named Rick Terrapin, saw it, a horned black devil as tall as the foundry’s chimney, and he cried out and jerked at the wheel, took the fire truck right off the road and clipped a birch tree. Rick Terrapin would retire three weeks later. Between the devil in the smoke and the horrors he saw inside the foundry, he didn’t much feel like putting out fires anymore. After that he was just as happy to let shit burn.

Ig went with his stolen trumpet into the yellow blaze and came at last to the tree. He did not lose a step but started straight up the burning ladder of its branches. He thought he heard voices above, irreverent, cheerful voices, and laughter-a celebration! There was music, too, kettledrums and the saucy bump-and-grind of trumpets. The trapdoor was open. Ig climbed through, into his new home, his tower of fire, which held his throne of flame. He was right; there was a celebration under way-a wedding party, his wedding party-and his bride awaited him there, with her hair aflame, naked but for a loose wrap of fire. And he took her into his arms, and her mouth found his, and together they burned.

CHAPTER FIFTY

TERRY CAME BACK HOME in the third week of October, and the first warm afternoon with nothing to do he drove out to the foundry for a look around.

The great brick building stood in a blackened field, amid the trash heaps that had gone up like bonfires and were now hills of ash, smoked glass, and burnt wire. The building itself was streaked with soot, and the whole place had a faint odor of char about it.

But around back, at the top of the Evel Knievel trail, it was nice, the light good, coming sideways through the trees in their Halloween costumes of red and gold. The trees were on fire, blazed like enormous torches. The river below made a soft rushing sound that played in gentle counterpoint to the easy soughing of the wind. Terry thought he could sit there all day.

He had been doing a lot of walking the last few weeks, a lot of sitting and watching and waiting. He had put his L.A. house on the market in late September and moved back to New York City, went to Central Park almost every day. The show was over, and without it he didn’t see any reason to hang around in a place where there weren’t seasons and where you couldn’t walk to anything.

Fox was still hoping he’d come back, had issued a statement that in the aftermath of his brother’s murder Terry had opted to take a professional sabbatical; this conveniently overlooked the fact that Terry had in fact formally resigned, weeks before the incident at the foundry. The TV people could say what they wanted to say. He wasn’t coming back. He thought maybe in another month or two he might go out, do some gigging in clubs. He wasn’t in any hurry to work again, though. He was still getting unpacked, trying not to think too much. Whatever happened next would happen on its own schedule. He’d find his way to something eventually. He hadn’t even bought himself a new horn.