by Joe Hill
“No,” Ig said. What she told him instead was that they should see other people. Ig had not read the two-page note in the envelope but thought he already understood. He said, “Your older daughter. Regan. I’ve never talked to you about her. I didn’t think it was my business. But I know it was hard losing her.”
“She was in so much pain,” Dale said. His next breath shuddered strangely. “It made her say awful things. I know she didn’t mean a lot of it. She was such a good person. Such a beautiful girl. I try to remember that, but mostly…mostly I remember how she was at the end. She was barely eighty pounds, and seventy pounds of that was hate. She said unforgivable things to Mary, you know. I think she was mad because Mary was so pretty, and—Regan lost her hair, and there was, you know, a mastectomy and a surgery to remove a block on her intestines, and she felt…she felt like Frankenstein, like something from a horror movie. She told us if we loved her, we’d put a pillow over her face and get it done. She told me I was probably glad it was her dying and not Merrin, because I always liked Merrin better. I try to put it all out of my mind, but I wake up some nights thinking about it. Or thinking about how Mary died. You want to remember how they lived, but the bad stuff kind of crowds out the rest. There’s probably some sound psychological reason for that. Mary took courses in psychology, she would’ve known why the bad stuff leaves a deeper mark than the good stuff. Hey, Ig. You believe my little girl got into Harvard?”
“Yes,” Ig said. “I believe it. She was smarter than you and me put together.”
Dale snorted, face still turned away. “Don’t you know it. I went to a two-year college, all my old man would pay for. God, I wanted to be a better father than he was. He told me what classes I could take and where I could live and what I’d do for work after I graduated to pay him back. I used to say to Heidi I’m surprised he didn’t stand in my bedroom on our wedding night and instruct me in the approved method of screwing her.” He smiled, remembering. “That was back when Heidi and I could joke about those kinds of things. Heidi had a funny, dirty streak before she got a head full of Christ. Before the world stuck its taps in her and drained out all the blood. Sometimes I want so bad to leave her, but she doesn’t have anyone else. She’s all alone…except for Jesus, I guess.”
“Oh. I don’t know about that,” Ig said, and let out a slow, seething breath, thinking about how Heidi Williams had pulled down all Merrin’s pictures, had tried to shove her daughter’s memory up away into dust and darkness. “You should drop in on her some morning when she’s working for Father Mould at the church. As a surprise. I think you’ll find she has a much more active…intercourse with life than you give her credit for.”
Dale flicked a questioning look at him, but Ig remained poker-faced and said no more. Finally Dale offered a thin smile and said, “You should’ve shaved your head years ago, Ig. Looks good. I used to want to do that, go bald, but Heidi always said if I ever did it, I could consider our marriage over. She wouldn’t even let me shave it to show my support for Regan, after Regan had chemo. Some families do that. To show they’re all in it together. Not our family, though.” He frowned and said, “How did we get off on this? What were we talking about?”
“When you went to college.”
“Yeah. Well. My father wouldn’t let me take the theology course I wanted, but he couldn’t stop me from auditing it. I remember the teacher, a black woman, Professor Tandy, she said that Satan turns up in a lot of other religions as the good guy. He’s usually the guy who tricks the fertility goddess into bed, and after a bit of fiddling around they bring the world into being. Or the crops. Something. He comes into the story to bamboozle the unworthy or tempt them into ruination, or at least out of their liquor. Even Christians can’t really decide what to do with him. I mean, think about it. Him and God are supposed to be at war with each other. But if God hates sin and Satan punishes the sinners, aren’t they working the same side of the street? Aren’t the judge and the executioner on the same team? The Romantics. I think the Romantics liked Satan. I don’t really remember why. Maybe because he had a good beard and was into girls and sex and knew how to throw a party. Didn’t the Romantics like Satan?”
“Yer whisperin’ in my ear,” Ig whispered. “Tell me all the things I wanna hear.”
Dale laughed again. “No. Not those Romantics.”
Ig said, “They’re the only ones I know.”
He eased the door gently shut on his way out.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
IG SAT AT THE BOTTOM of the chimney, in a circle of hot afternoon light, holding the glossy mammogram of Merrin’s breast over his head. Lit from behind by the August sky, the tissues within looked like a black sun, going nova, looked like the End of Days, and the sky was as sackcloth. The devil turned to his Bible: not to the Old Testament, nor to the New, but to the back page, where years before he had copied the key to the Morse-code alphabet from his brother’s encyclopedias. Even before he translated the papers within the envelope, he knew they were a testament of a different sort: a final one. Merrin’s final testament.
He started with the dots and dashes on the front of the package, a simple enough sequence. It spelled FUCK OFF, IG.
He laughed—a dirty, convulsive shout of crowlike amusement.
He slipped out the two pages of notebook paper, covered in dots and dashes, both sides, the labor of months, of an entire summer. Working with his Bible, Ig set to translating them, occasionally fingering the cross around his neck, Merrin’s cross. He had put it back on as soon as he left Dale’s. It made him feel she was with him, was close enough to lay her cool fingers on the nape of his neck.
It was slow work, converting those lines of dots and dashes to letters and words. He didn’t care. The devil had nothing but time.
Dear Ig,
You will never read this while I’m alive. I’m not sure I want you to read it even if I’m dead.
Whoo, this is slow writing. I guess I don’t mind. It passes the time when I’m stuck in a lobby somewhere waiting on the result of this or that test. Also forces me to say just what needs to be said and no more.
The sort of cancer I have is the same that struck my sister down, a sort known to run in families. I won’t bore you with the genetics. It is not advanced yet, and I’m sure if you knew, you would want me to fight. I know I should, but I’m not going to. I have made up my mind not to go like my sister. Not to wait until I’m filled with ugliness, not to hurt the people I love and who have loved me, and that is you, Ig, and my parents.
The Bible says suicides go to hell, but hell is what my sister went through when she was dying. You don’t know this, but my sister was engaged when she was diagnosed. Her fiancé left her months before she died. She drove him away, one day at a time. She wanted to know how long he’d wait after she was buried to fuck someone else. She wanted to know if he’d use her tragedy to win sympathy from girls. She was horrible. I would’ve left her.
I’d just as soon skip all that, thanks. But I don’t know how to do it yet, how to die. I wish God would find a way to do it to me all at once, when I’m not expecting it. Put me in an elevator and then have the cable snap. Twenty seconds of flight and it’s over. Maybe as a bonus I could fall on someone bad. Like a child-molesting elevator repairman or something. That would be all right.
I’m afraid if I tell you I’m sick, you will give up your future and ask to marry me, and I will be weak and say yes, and then you’ll be shackled to me, watching while they cut pieces off and I shrink and go bald and put you through hell, and then I die anyway and ruin what was best in you in the process. You want so much to believe that the world is good, Ig, that people are good. And I know when I’m really sick I won’t be able to be good. I will be like my sister. I have that in me, I know how to hurt people, and I might not be able to help myself. I want you to remember what was good in me, not what was most awful. The people you love should be allowed to keep their worst to themselves.
You don’t know how hard it is n
ot to talk about these things with you. That’s the reason I’m writing this, I guess. Because I need to talk to you, and this is the only way. A bit of a one-sided conversation, though, huh?
You’re so excited to go to England, to be up to your neck in the world. Remember that story you told me about the Evel Knievel trail and the shopping cart? That’s you every day. Ready to fly bare-naked down the steep pitch of your own life and be flung into the human stream. Save people drowning in unfairness.
I can hurt you just enough to push you away. I’m not looking forward to it, but it will be kinder than letting this thing play itself out.
I want you to find some girl with a trashy Cockney accent and take her back to your flat and screw her out of her knickers. Someone cute and immoral and literary. Not as pretty as me, I’m not that generous, but it’s okay if she’s not terrible-looking. Then I’m hoping she will callously dump you and you will move on to someone else. Someone better. Someone earnest and caring and with no family history of cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, or any other bad stuff. I also hope by then I am long dead so I don’t have to know anything about her.
You know how I want to die? On the Evel Knievel trail, roaring down it on a cart of my own. I could close my eyes and imagine your arms around me. Then go right into a tree. She never knew what hit her. That’s how. I would like very much to believe in a Gospel of Mick and Keith, where I can’t get what I want—which is you, Ig, and our children, and our ridiculous daydreams—but at least get what I need, which is a quick, sudden ending and the knowledge that you got away clean.
And you will have some stout and kindly mother-wife to give you children, and you will be a wonderful, happy, energetic father. You will see all of the world, every corner of it, and you will see pain, and you will ease some of it. You will have grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. You will teach. You will go for long walks in the woods. On one of these walks, when you are very old, you will find yourself at a tree with a house in its branches. I will be waiting for you there. I will be waiting by candlelight in our tree house of the mind.
This is a lot of lines and dots. Two months of work, right here. When I started writing, the cancer was a pea in one breast and less than a pea in my left armpit. Now, wrapping up, it’s…well. From small things, Mama, big things one day come.
I’m not sure I really needed to write so much. Probably could’ve saved myself a lot of effort and just copied out the first message I ever sent you, flashing you with my cross. US. That says most of it. Here’s the rest: I love you, Iggy Perrish.
Your girl, Merrin Williams
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
AFTER HE HAD READ MERRIN’S final message, and set it aside, and read it again, and set it aside once more, Ig climbed out of his chimney, wanted to be away from the smell of cinder and ash for a while. He stood in the room beyond, breathing deeply of the late-afternoon air, before it came to him that the snakes had not gathered. He was alone in the foundry, or almost. A single snake, the pit viper, lay coiled in the wheelbarrow, sleeping in fat loops of herself. He was tempted to go close and stroke her head, even took a single step toward her, then stopped. Better not, he thought, and looked down at the cross around his neck, then shifted his gaze to stare at his shadow climbing the wall in the last of the day’s red light. He saw the shadow of a man, long and skinny. He still felt the horns at his temples, felt the weight of them, the points slicing into the cooling air, but his shadow showed just himself. If he walked to the snake now, with Merrin’s cross around his throat, he thought there was a good chance she would bury her fangs in him.
He considered the black length of his shadow, climbing the brick wall, and understood that he could go home if he liked. With the cross about his throat, his humanity was his again, if he wanted it. He could put the last two days behind him, a nightmare time of sickness and panic, and be who he had always been. The thought brought with it an almost painful sense of relief, was an almost sensual pleasure: to be Ig Perrish and not the devil, to be a man and not a walking furnace.
He was still thinking it over when the serpent in the wheelbarrow lifted her head, white lights washing over her. Someone was coming up the road. Ig’s first thought was Lee, coming back to look for his lost cross and any other incriminating evidence he might’ve left behind.
But as the car rolled up in front of the foundry, he recognized it as Glenna’s battered emerald Saturn. He could see it through the doorway that opened on a six-foot drop. She climbed out, trailing veils of smoke behind her. She pitched her cigarette into the grass and ground it out with her toe. She had quit twice in the time Ig had been with her—once for as long as a week.
Ig watched her from the windows while she made her way around the building. She had on too much makeup. She always had on too much makeup. Black cherry lipstick and a big hair perm and eye shadow and shiny pink paste-ons. She didn’t want to go inside, Ig could tell from the look on her face. Beneath her painted mask, she looked afraid and miserable and pretty in a plain, forlorn sort of way. She wore tight, low-riding black jeans that showed the crack of her ass, and a studded belt and a white halter, which bared her soft belly and exposed the tattoo on her hip, the Playboy Bunny rabbit head. It hurt Ig, looking at her and seeing how it was all put together in a kind of desperate plea: Want me, somebody want me.
“Ig?” she called. “Iggy! Are you in there? Are you around?” She cupped a hand to her mouth to amplify her voice.
He didn’t reply, and she dropped the hand.
Ig went from window to window, watching her stride through the weeds, around to the back of the foundry. The sun was on the other side of the building, the red tip of a cigarette sizzling through the pale curtain of the sky. As she crossed to the Evel Knievel trail, Ig slipped down through an open doorway and circled behind her. He crept through the grass and the day’s dying ember light: one crimson shadow among many. Her back was to him, and she did not see him coming toward her.
Glenna slowed at the top of the trail, seeing the scorch mark on the earth, the blasted place where the soil had been cooked white. The red metal gas can was still there, lying in the undergrowth on its side. Ig crept on, continuing across the field behind her, and into the trees and brush, on the right-hand side of the trail. In the field around the foundry, it was still late afternoon, but under the trees it was already dusk. He played restlessly with the cross, rubbing it between thumb and forefinger, his mind on how to approach Glenna and what he should say to her. What she deserved of him.
She looked at the burn in the dirt and then at the red metal gas can and, finally, down the trail, toward the water. Ig could see her putting the parts together, figuring it out. She was breathing faster now. Her right hand dived into her purse.
“Oh, Ig,” she said. “Oh, goddamn it, Ig.”
The hand came out with her phone.
“Don’t,” Ig said.
She tottered in her heels. Her phone, as pink and smooth as a bar of soap, slipped from her hand, hit the ground, bounced into the grass.
“What the hell are you doing, Ig?” Glenna said, shifting from grief to anger in the time it took to get her balance back. She peered past a screen of blueberry bushes and into the shadows under the trees. “You scared the shit out of me.” She started toward him.
“Stay where you are,” he told her.
“Why don’t you want me to—” she began, then stopped. “Are you wearing a skirt?”
Some faint rose-colored light reached through the branches and fell upon the skirt and his bare stomach. From the chest up, though, he remained in shadow.
The flushed and angry look on her face gave way to a disbelieving smile that did not express amusement so much as fright. “Oh, Ig,” she breathed. “Oh, baby.” She took another step forward, and he held up a hand.
“I don’t want you to come back here.”
She came no closer.
“What brings you to the foundry?”
“You trashed our place,” she said. “W
hy’d you do that?”
He didn’t answer, didn’t know what to say.
She dropped her gaze and bit her lip. “I guess someone told you about me and Lee the other night.” Not recalling, of course, that she had told him herself. She forced herself to look back up. “Ig, I’m sorry. You can hate me if you want. I got that coming, I guess. I just want to be sure you’re okay.” Breathing softly and in a small voice, she said, “Please let me help you.”
Ig shivered. It was almost more than he could bear, to hear another human voice offering to help him, to hear a voice raised in affection and concern. He had been a demon for just two days, but the time when he knew what it was like to be loved seemed to exist in a hazily recalled past, to have been left behind long ago. It amazed him to be talking with Glenna in a perfectly ordinary way, was an ordinary miracle, as simple and fine as a cold glass of lemonade on a hot day. Glenna felt no impulse to blurt her worst and most shameful impulses; her guilty secrets were just that, secrets. He touched the cross about his neck again, Merrin’s cross, enclosing a small, precious circle of humanity.
“How did you know to find me here?”
“I was watching the local news at work, and I saw about the burned-out wreck they found on the sandbar. The TV cameras were too far back, so I couldn’t tell if it was the Gremlin, and the newslady said the police hadn’t confirmed a make or model. But I just had a feeling, a kind of bad feeling. So I called Wyatt Farmer, do you remember Wyatt? He glued a beard on my cousin Gary once when we were kids, see if they couldn’t buy some beer.”
“I remember. Why did you call him?”
“I saw it was Wyatt’s tow truck that pulled the wreck off the sandbar. That’s what he does now. He has his own business in auto repair. I figured he could tell me what kind of car it was. He said it was so toasted they hadn’t figured it out yet, ’cause there was nothing to work from except the frame and the doors, but he thought it was a Hornet or a Gremlin, and he was thinking Gremlin because they’re more common these days. And I thought, oh, no, someone burned your car. Then I thought what if you were in it when it caught on fire. I thought what if you went and burned yourself up. I knew if you did it, you would’ve done it out here. To be close to her.” She gave him another shy, frightened look. “I get why you trashed our place—”