by Joe Hill
“You and Merrin’s mother—have you really been praying for me to die?”
“More or less,” Mould said. “To be honest, most of the time when she’s calling to God, she’s riding my dick.”
“Do you know why He hasn’t struck me down?” Ig asked. “Do you know why God hasn’t answered your prayers?”
“Why?”
“Because there is no God. Your prayers are whispers to an empty room.”
Mould lifted the bar again—with great effort—and lowered it and said, “Bullshit.”
“It’s all a lie. There’s never been anyone there. You’re the one who ought to use that rope in the shed.”
“No,” Mould said. “You can’t make me do that. I don’t want to die. I love my life.”
So. He couldn’t make people do anything they didn’t already want to do. Ig had wondered if this might not be the case.
Mould made a face and grunted but couldn’t lift the bar again. Ig turned from the weight bench and started toward the stairs.
“Hey,” Mould said. “Need some help here.”
Ig put his hands in his pockets and began to whistle “When the Saints Go Marching In.” For the first time all morning, he felt good. Mould gasped and struggled behind him, but Ig did not look back as he climbed the steps.
Sister Bennett passed Iggy as he stepped into the atrium. She was wearing red slacks and a sleeveless shirt with daisies on it and had her hair up. She started at the sight of him and almost dropped her purse.
“Are you off?” Ig asked her.
“I…I don’t have a car,” she said. “I want to take the church car, but I’m scared of getting caught.”
“You’re cleaning out the local account. What’s a car matter?”
She stared at him for a moment, then leaned forward and kissed Ig at the corner of his mouth. At the touch of her lips, Ig knew about the awful lie she had told her mother when she was nine, and about the terrible day she had impulsively kissed one of her students, a pretty sixteen-year-old named Britt, and about the private, despairing surrender of her spiritual beliefs. He saw these things and understood and did not care.
“God bless you,” Sister Bennett said.
Ig had to laugh.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THERE WAS NOTHING LEFT for him but to go home and see his parents. He pointed the car toward their house and drove.
The silence of the car made him restless. He tried the radio, but it jangled his nerves, was worse than the quiet. His parents lived fifteen minutes outside of town, which gave him too much time to think. He had not been so unsure of what to expect of them since the night he’d spent in jail, brought in for questioning about Merrin’s rape and murder.
The detective, a man named Carter, had begun the interrogation by sliding a photo of her across the table between them. Later, when he was alone in his cell, that picture was waiting for Ig every time he closed his eyes. Merrin was white against the brown leaves, on her back, her feet together, her arms at her sides, her hair spread out. Her face was darker than the ground, and her mouth was full of leaves, and there was a dark dried trickle of blood that ran from under her hairline and down the side of her face to trace her cheekbone. She still wore his tie, the broad strip of it demurely covering her left breast. He couldn’t drive the image from his mind. It worked on his nerves and on his cramping stomach, until at some point—who knew when, there was no clock in his cell—he fell to his knees in front of the stainless-steel toilet bowl and was sick.
He was afraid to see his mother the next day. It was the worst night of his life, and he thought it likely was also the worst night of hers. He had never been in trouble for anything. She wouldn’t sleep, and he imagined her sitting up in the kitchen, in her nightdress, with a cup of cold herbal tea, red-eyed and waxy. His father wouldn’t sleep either, would sit up to be with her. He wondered if his father would sit beside her quietly, the two of them scared and still, with nothing to do but wait, or if Derrick Perrish would be agitated and bad-tempered, pacing the kitchen, telling her what they were going to do and how they were going to fix it, who he was going to come down on like a sack of motherfucking cinder blocks.
Ig had been determined not to cry when he saw his mother, and he didn’t. Neither did she. His mother had made herself up as if for a luncheon with the board of trustees at the university, and her slim, narrow face was alert and calm. His father was the one who looked as if he’d been crying. Derrick had trouble focusing his stare. His breath was bad.
His mother said, “Don’t talk to anyone except the lawyer.” That was the first thing out of her mouth. She said, “Don’t admit to anything.”
His father repeated it—“Don’t admit to anything”—and hugged him and began to weep. Then, through his sobs, Derrick blurted, “I don’t care what happened,” and that was when Ig realized that they believed he had done it. It was the one notion that had never occurred to him. Even if he had done it—even if he’d been caught in the act—Ig had thought his parents would believe in his innocence.
Ig walked out of the Gideon police station later that afternoon, his eyes hurting in the strong, slanting October light. He hadn’t been charged. He was never charged. He was never cleared. He was, to this day, considered a “person of interest.”
Evidence had been collected on scene, DNA evidence, maybe—Ig wasn’t sure, since the police kept the details to themselves—and he had believed with all his heart that once it was analyzed, he would be publicly cleared of all wrongdoing. But there was a fire at the state lab in Concord, and the samples taken from around Merrin’s corpse were ruined. This news poleaxed Ig. It was hard not to be superstitious, to feel that there were dark forces lined up against him. His luck was poison. The only surviving forensic evidence was a tire imprint from someone’s Goodyear. Ig’s Gremlin had Michelins on it. But this was not decisive one way or another, and if there was no solid proof that Ig had committed the crime, there was nothing to take him off the hook either. His alibi—that he’d spent the night alone, passed out drunk in his car behind a derelict Dunkin’ Donuts in the middle of nowhere—sounded like a desperate, threadbare lie, even to himself.
In those first months after he moved home, Ig was looked after and cared for, as if he were a child again, home with flu, and his parents intended to see him through his sickness by providing him with soup and books. They crept through their own house, as if afraid that the business and noise of their everyday lives might unnerve him. It was curious that they should feel so much concern for him, when they thought it possible he’d done such horrible things to a girl they, too, had loved.
But after the case against him fell apart and the immediate threat of prosecution had passed, his parents drifted away from him, retreating into themselves. They had loved him and been ready to go to the mattresses for him when it looked as if he was going to be tried for murder, but they seemed relieved to see the back of him as soon as they knew he wasn’t going to jail.
He lived with them for nine months but did not have to think long when Glenna asked if he wanted to split her rent. After he moved out, he saw his parents only when he came by the house to visit. They didn’t meet in town for lunches, or to go to the movies, or to shop, and they never came to the apartment. Sometimes, when Ig stopped by the house, he would discover that his father was away, in France for a jazz festival or in L.A. to work on a sound track. He never knew about his father’s plans in advance, and his father didn’t call to say he was going out of town.
Ig had harmless chats on the sunporch with his mother in which nothing of any importance was discussed. He had been about to begin a job in England when Merrin died, but that part of his life had been derailed by what happened. He told his mother he was going to go back to school, that he had applications for Brown and Columbia. And he really did; they were sitting on top of the microwave in Glenna’s apartment. One of them had been used as a paper plate for a slice of pizza, and the other was stained with dried brown crescents from t
he bottom of a coffee cup. His mother was willing to play along, to encourage and approve, without asking uncomfortable follow-up questions, such as if he was ever going to visit these schools for an interview, if he had any notions of getting a job while he waited to hear from admissions. Neither of them wanted to rattle the fragile illusion that things were getting back to normal, that everything still might work out for Ig, that his life was going to resume.
On his occasional visits home, he was really only ever at ease when he was with Vera, his grandmother, who lived with them. He wasn’t sure she even remembered that once he had been arrested for a sex murder. She was in a wheelchair most of the time, following a hip replacement that had inexplicably left her no better off, and Ig took her for walks, on the gravel road, through the woods north of his parents’ house to a view of Queen’s Face, a high shelf of rock that hang gliders leaped from. On a warm, windy day in July, there might be five or six of them riding the updrafts, distant, tropically colored kites weaving and bobbing in the sky. When Ig was with his grandmother and they watched the hang gliders daring the winds off Queen’s Face, he almost felt like the person he’d been when Merrin was alive, someone who was glad to do for others, who was glad for the smell of the outdoors.
As he rolled up the hill to the house, he saw Vera in the front yard, in the wheelchair, a pitcher of iced tea on an end table set out next to her. Her head was bent at a crooked angle; she was asleep, had dozed off in the sun. Ig’s mother had maybe been sitting outside with her—there was a rumpled plaid blanket spread on the grass. The sun struck the pitcher of iced tea and turned the rim into a hoop of brilliance, a silver halo. It was as peaceful a scene as could be, but no sooner had Ig stopped the car than his stomach started to churn. It was like the church. Now that he was here, he didn’t want to get out. He dreaded seeing the people he’d come to see.
He got out. There was nothing else to do.
A black Mercedes he didn’t recognize was parked to one side of the drive, Alamo plates on it. Terry’s rent-a-car. Ig had offered to meet him at the airport, but Terry said it didn’t make sense, he was getting in late and wanted to have a car of his own, and they could see each other the next day. So Ig had gone out with Glenna instead and wound up drunk and alone at the old foundry.
Of all the people in his family, Ig was least afraid to see Terry. Whatever Terry might have to confess, whatever secret compulsions or shames, Ig was ready to forgive him. He owed him that. Maybe, on some level, Terence was who he had really come to see. When Ig was in the worst trouble of his life, Terry had been in the papers every day, saying that the case against him was a sham, utter nonsense, saying that his brother didn’t have it in him to hurt someone he loved. Ig thought if anyone could find it in himself to help him now, it would have to be Terry.
Ig padded across the turf to Vera’s side. His mother had left her turned to face the long grassy slope, slanting down and away to the old log fence at the bottom of the hill. Vera’s ear rested against her shoulder, and her eyes were closed, and her breath whistled softly. He felt some of the tension drain out of him, seeing her at rest that way. He wouldn’t have to talk to her, at least, wouldn’t have to hear her babble her secret, most dreadful urges. That was something. He stared into her thin, worn, lined face, feeling almost sick with fondness for her, for mornings they had spent together with tea and peanut-butter cookies and The Price Is Right. Her hair was bound behind her head but coming loose from its pins, so that long strands the color of moonglow wandered across her cheeks. He put his hand gently over hers—forgetting for a moment what a touch could bring.
His grandmother, he learned then, had no hip pain at all but liked people pushing her here and there in the wheelchair and waiting on her hand and foot. She was eighty years old and entitled to some things. She especially liked to order around her daughter, who thought her shit didn’t stink because she was rich enough to wipe with twenty-dollar bills, wife of the big has-been and mother of a showbiz phony and a depraved sex killer. Although Vera supposed that was better than what Lydia had been, a cheap prostitute who’d been lucky to bag a small-time celebrity john with a sentimental streak. It was still a surprise to Vera that her daughter had come out of her Vegas years with a husband and a purse full of credit cards, not ten years in jail and an incurable venereal disease. It was Vera’s privately held belief that Ig knew what his mother had been—a cheap whore—and that it had led to a pathological hate of women and was the real reason he had raped and killed Merrin Williams. These things were always so Freudian. And of course the Williams girl, she had been a frisky little gold digger, had been waving her little tail in the boy’s face from day one, looking for a ring and Ig’s family money. In her short skirts and tight tops, Merrin Williams had been hardly more than a whore herself, in Vera’s opinion.
Ig let go of her wrist as if it were a bare wire that had given him an unexpected jolt, cried out, and took a stumbling step backward. His grandmother stirred in her chair and opened one eye.
“Oh,” she said. “You.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“I wish you hadn’t. I wanted to sleep. I was happier asleep. Do you think I wanted to see you?”
Ig felt cold seeping behind his breastbone. His grandmother turned her head away from him.
“When I look at you, I want to be dead.”
“Do you?” he asked.
“I can’t see any of my friends. I can’t go to church. Everyone stares at me. They all know what you did. It makes me want to die. And then you show up here to take me for walks. I hate when you take me for walks and people see us together. You don’t know how hard it is to pretend I don’t hate you. I always thought there was something wrong with you. The screamy way you’d get breathing after you ran anywhere. You were always breathing through your mouth, like a dog, especially around pretty girls. And you were slow. So much slower than your brother. I tried to tell Lydia. I said I don’t know how many times that you weren’t right. She didn’t want to hear it, and now look what’s happened. We all have to live with it.”
She put her hand over her eyes, her chin trembling. As Ig backed away across the yard, he could hear her beginning to cry.
He walked across the front porch and through the open door and into the cave darkness of the front hall. He had ideas about going up to his old bedroom and lying down. He felt like he could use some time to himself, in the shadowy cool, surrounded by his concert posters and childhood books. But then, on his way past his mother’s office, he heard the sound of shuffling papers, and he swiveled toward it automatically to look in on her.
His mother was bent over her desk, finger-walking through a handful of pages, occasionally plucking one out and slipping it into her soft leather briefcase. Leaning over like that, she had her pinstripe skirt pulled tight across her rear. His father had met her when she danced in Vegas, and she still had a showgirl’s can. Ig flashed again to what he’d glimpsed in Vera’s head, his grandmother’s private belief that Lydia had been a whore and worse, and then he just as quickly discounted it as senile fantasy. His mother served on the New Hampshire State Council for the Arts and read Russian novels and even when she was a showgirl at least had worn ostrich feathers.
When Lydia saw Ig staring at her from the doorway, her briefcase tilted off her knee. She caught it, but by then it was too late. Papers spilled out, cascading to the floor. A few drifted down, swishing from side to side, in the aimless, no-hurry way of snowflakes, and Ig thought of the hang gliders again. People jumped off Queen’s Face, too. It was beloved of suicides. Maybe he would drive there next.
“Iggy,” she said. “I didn’t know you were coming by.”
“I know. I’ve been driving around and around. I didn’t know where else to go. I’ve been having a hell of a morning.”
“Oh, baby,” she said, her brow furrowing with sympathy. It had been so long since he’d seen a sympathetic look, and he wanted sympathy so badly that he felt shaky, almost weak
to be looked at that way.
“Something terrible is happening to me, Mom,” he said, his voice cracking. For the first time all morning, he felt close to tears.
“Oh, baby,” she said again. “Why couldn’t you have gone somewhere else?”
“Excuse me?”
“I don’t want to hear about any more of your problems.”
The stinging sensation at the back of his eyeballs began to abate, the urge to cry draining away as quickly as it had come. The horns throbbed with a tender-sore feeling of ache, not entirely unpleasant.
“I’m in trouble, though.”
“I don’t want to listen to this. I don’t want to know.” She squatted on the floor and began picking up her papers and stuffing them into her briefcase.
“Mother,” he said.
“When you talk, I want to sing!” she shouted, and let go of her briefcase and clapped her hands over her ears. “Lalala-la-la-la! When you talk, I don’t want to hear it. I want to hold my breath until you go away.”
She took a great swallow of air and held her breath, her cheeks popping out.
He crossed the room to her and sank down before her, where she would have to look at him. She crouched with her hands over her ears and her mouth squeezed tight. He took her briefcase and began to put her papers into it.
“Is this how you always feel when you see me?”
She nodded furiously, her eyes bright and staring.
“Don’t suffocate yourself, Mom.”
His mother stared at him for a moment longer, then opened her mouth and drew a deep, whistling breath. She watched him put her papers into her bag.