Horns

No one knew what had happened that night at the foundry, and since Terry refused to provide a public comment and everyone else at the scene was dead, there were a lot of crazy ideas going around about the evening Eric and Lee died. TMZ had published the craziest account. They said Terry had gone out to the foundry looking for his brother and found Eric Ha

Detective Carter had come to see Terry on his second day in the hospital. Terry didn’t remember much about the first day. He recalled when he was wheeled into the emergency room, remembered someone pulling an oxygen mask over his face, and a rush of cool air that smelled faintly medicinal. He remembered that later he had hallucinated, had opened his eyes to find his dead brother sitting on the edge of his hospital cot. Ig had Terry’s trumpet and was playing a little bebop riff. Merrin was there, too, pirouetting barefoot in a short dress of crimson silk, spi

But by the afternoon of the second day, Terry merely felt as if he were recovering from a very bad flu. His joints throbbed and he could not get enough to drink, and he was aware of an all-body weakness…but otherwise he was himself. When the doctor, an attractive Asian woman in cat’s-eye glasses, came in the room to check his chart, he asked her how close he had come to dying. She said it had been one-in-three that he would pull through. Terry asked her how she came up with odds like that, and she said it was easy. There were three kinds of timber rattlers. He had run into the kind that had the weakest venom. With either of the other two, he would’ve had no chance at all. One-in-three.

Detective Carter had walked in as the doctor was walking out. Carter took Terry’s statement down impassively, asking few questions but allowing Terry to shape the narrative, almost as if he were not a police officer but a secretary taking dictation. He read it back to Terry, making occasional corrections. Then, without looking up from his lined yellow notepad, he said, “I don’t believe a word of this horseshit.” Without anger or humor or much inflection at all. “You know that, don’t you? Not one goddamn word.” Finally lifting his dull, knowing eyes to look at him.

“Really?” Terry had said, lying in his hospital bed, one floor below his grandmother with her busted face. “What do you think happened, then?”

“I’ve come up with lots of other explanations,” said the detective. “And they all make even less sense than this pile of crap you’re handing me. I’ll be damned if I have any idea what happened. I’ll just be damned.”

“Aren’t we all,” Terry said.

Carter gave him a hard and unfriendly glare.

“I wish I could tell you something different. But that’s what really happened,” Terry said. And most of the time, at least when the sun was up, Terry really believed it was what had happened. After dark, though, when he was trying to sleep…after dark sometimes he had other ideas. Bad ideas.

THE SOUND OF TIRES on gravel roused him, and he lifted his head, looked back toward the foundry. In another moment an emerald Saturn came bumping around the corner, trolling across the blasted landscape. When the driver saw him, the car whined to a stop and sat there for a moment idling. Then it came on, finally pulling in not ten feet away.

“Hey, Terry,” said Gle

She looked good, a curvy girl in stonewashed gray jeans, a sleeveless black shirt, and a black studded belt. He could see the Playboy Bu

“Hey, Gle

“Sometimes I come here for lunch,” she said, and held up a sub in one hand, wrapped in white waxed paper. “It’s quiet. Good place to think. About Ig and…stuff.”

He nodded. “What’ve you got?”

“Eggplant parm. Got a Dr Pepper, too. You want half? I always get a large, and I don’t know why. I can’t eat a large. Or I shouldn’t. I guess sometimes I do.” She wrinkled her nose. “I’m really trying to take off ten pounds.”

“Why?” Terry asked, looking her over again.

She laughed. “Stop it.”

He shrugged. “I’ll eat half your sandwich, if it helps with the diet. But you don’t have anything to worry about. You’re all right.”

They sat on a fallen log along the side of the Evel Knievel trail. The water was spangled gold in the late-afternoon light. Terry didn’t know he was hungry until she gave him half her sandwich and he started to eat. Soon it was gone, and he was licking his fingers, and they were sharing out the last of the Dr Pepper. They didn’t talk. Terry was fine with that. He didn’t want to make small talk, and she seemed to know it. The silence didn’t make her nervous. It was fu

“Thanks,” he said finally.

“Don’t mention it,” she said.

He pushed a hand back through his hair. At some point in the last few weeks, he had discovered a thi

“I don’t work there anymore,” she said. “Gave my last cut yesterday.”

“Get out.”

“Mm-hm.”

“Well. Here’s to going on to other things, then.”

“Here’s to going on to other things.”

They each had a sip of Dr Pepper.

“Was it a good cut to end on?” Terry asked. “Did you give someone a completely awesome trim to finish up?”

“I shaved a guy bald. An older guy, actually. You don’t usually get older guys asking for a buzz job. That tends to be more of a younger-dude thing. You know him-Merrin Williams’s dad. Dale?”

“Yeah. I kind of know him,” Terry said, and grimaced, fought back an almost tidal surge of sadness that didn’t entirely make sense.

Of course Ig had been killed over Merrin; Lee and Eric had burned him to death because of what they thought he had done to her. Ig’s last year had been so bad, so unhappy, Terry almost couldn’t bear to think about it. He was sure Ig hadn’t done it, could never have killed Merrin. He supposed that now no one would ever know who had really killed her. He shuddered, remembering the night Merrin had died. He had been with fucking Lee Tourneau then-the revolting little sociopath-had even enjoyed his company. A couple of drinks, some cheap ganja out on the sandbar-and then Terry had dozed off in Lee’s car and not woken again until dawn. It sometimes seemed like that had been the last night he was really happy, playing cards with Ig and then aimlessly driving around and around Gideon through an August evening that smelled of the river and firecrackers. Terry wondered if there was any smell in all the world so sweet.