When These Mountains Burn

by David Joy

  The man walked over and took a seat on a concrete bench that lined one wall. He rested his elbows on his knees, dirty jeans with seams cut at the ankles so the denim hung over his sneakers. He’d lost his hair up front, his forehead tall and shiny as polished marble. The man dropped his head and his hair jabbed out all over like a porcupine.

  “What did they pick you up for?” Rodriguez tried to keep him talking.

  “Shoplifting.”

  “What’d you steal?”

  “A coyote tail.”

  Rodriguez laughed, but the man kept that dumbass look about his face like he was serious as a heart attack.

  “I swear. Hand to God. I was at Uncle Bill’s Flea Market and this woman was selling all kinds of skulls and shit, possums, deer. She even had the hide off a raccoon. Looked about like she’d scraped it off the side of the highway with a shovel. But she had this little coffee can and it was filled up with coyote tails.”

  “So why in the fuck did you steal that?”

  “I don’t know. I just wanted one, I guess.”

  “A coyote tail.”

  “Yeah,” Rudolph said. “What about you?”

  “I passed out in a gas station.”

  “That ain’t a crime.”

  “I was fucked up.”

  “Drunk?”

  “No. I had a bag on me.”

  “So they got you for possession?”

  “Yeah, possession.”

  “How much?”

  “Just a stamp. Or what was left of it. Not shit really.”

  “You from here?”

  “No,” Rodriguez said.

  “Where you from?”

  “I’ve been staying in Asheville.”

  “How the hell did you wind up here?”

  “Got a line on a construction job.”

  “That’s all y’all do.”

  “Who?”

  “Mexicans,” Rudolph said. “Seems like every last one of you works construction.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I ain’t ever been one for horse. I like uppers. Chrystie. One time I dated this girl and we got off on a bag of crystal and we fucked each other for a week straight. We ain’t even eat. Thought she was going to wear my cod off. I was raw for a month. I don’t know what the fuck people want to lay around for. Me, I’d rather be up there on the moon someplace than passed out in some gas station.”

  “I don’t guess I ever cared one way or another.”

  “Well, buddy, I’ve got just the place for you.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Place over in Cherokee. You can find anything you want. Place is like a goddamned outlet mall. That’s what they call it. Buddy of mine sells horse over there.”

  “You find some dope and I’ll get you some crystal. How about that?”

  “You buying?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “I think that sounds like a deal, amigo.” Rudolph interlaced his fingers and turned his hands out, stretching his arms before him. He yawned and leaned his head back against the cinder-block wall. “What’d you say your name was again?”

  “Rodriguez.”

  “Hot Rod,” Rudolph said. “When you think you’ll get out of here?”

  “I don’t know, but I’d guess they’ll hold me longer than you.”

  “You know where the paper mill is?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you get out just look off above the trees. You’ll see the smoke. I live up on the hill there above it. There’s a couple trailers mixed in with some houses on top of a kudzu patch.”

  “How do I know which one is yours?”

  “I’m the one with the basketball goal out front. You come by there and we’ll take a ride over to that buddy of mine’s.”

  “And he’s got dope?”

  “Amigo, he’s got anything you’re looking for.”

  Rodriguez walked over to a steel toilet affixed to the far wall. He unzipped his pants to take a leak. There was a warped mirror in front of him that bent his face as he stared into it like he was in a funhouse. The man behind him was humming the tune to “A Country Boy Can Survive.” Rodriguez smiled.

  Adrenaline coursed through him and left him light-headed and trembling. There were the unanswered questions and the possibilities. There was the thrill of living a lie. Those types of things were hard to explain to anyone who hadn’t felt them. As crazy as it sounded, this was the part of the job he lived for.

  TWELVE

  On a Tuesday, Denny woke up shivering in the passenger seat of his LeBaron. He couldn’t see anything through the windshield. The glass was snow white and he was freezing cold. For a second, he wondered if he’d slept all the way through the last of fall, or maybe it was that he just couldn’t remember all those days between. His neck locked up as he tried to turn his head and he cringed in pain when he reached for the ignition. Rolling the key to the accessory position, he twisted the dial on the turn signal and the wipers slapped across the glass. Outside, the mountains were just as he’d left them.

  The air was filled with smoke. Ash fell from the sky. The car was covered, as was the ground where he stood. There was something strange about knowing everything was burning down around him but not being able to see the flames. He’d caught the news on a screen at the gas station pump while he rattled the last of five dollars into his tank. Wildfires stretched the Appalachian chain from Alabama to Kentucky, tens of thousands of acres burning across western North Carolina alone and not a drop of rain to come. The sky was yellow with smoke and for Denny Rattler it felt like a sign from God. Deep down he figured it was probably the end of the world.

  He was thinking about the Rapture while he scarfed down a sausage biscuit outside McDonald’s. The restaurant was connected to a Shell gas station. Passing traffic hooked off 441 headed for the casino. Grape jelly dripped from the corner of his mouth. There was a dumbstruck look about him because he was dope dreaming, which was a lot like daydreaming except sometimes it lasted for hours. He’d shot the last bag he had before the sun broke the ridgeline that morning, a paler blue just beginning to eat away the night.

  There wasn’t any money left and he didn’t know how he was going to scrounge up enough to keep the run going. Per cap checks weren’t coming till December and that last batch of break-ins had caught a front-page story on the One Feather. He was going to have to hang low for a while. Ride it out while things cooled down. The traffic continued to file onto Casino Trail and he thought if worse came to worst he’d just break into a few cars outside Harrah’s. If a man stuck to out-of-state tags the tribal police wouldn’t bat an eye.

  Out of nowhere someone banged on the side glass and Denny jerked across the cab like a wildcat was on him. Some lanky white son of a bitch was keeled over horse laughing and it took Denny a second or two to recognize him. A few years back, when Denny was still framing houses and roofing, they’d worked a couple jobs together, but he hadn’t seen the guy since. Couldn’t remember the man’s name to save his life.

  He rolled down the window and hung his arm down the door. “What the fuck’s wrong with you?”

  “You’re Denny, ain’t you?” He spoke normal speed, but moved sluggish as one of those three-toed sloths on the animal channel.

  “Yeah.”

  “Boy, I scared you good.” The man cackled again, slammed his hands on the roof of the car, and leaned into the open window. “You don’t remember me, do you?”

  Denny could see track marks lined up like chigger bites down the man’s forearms. His long, narrow face was starved down to the bone and his eyes were solid brown, his pupils having dialed back to needlepoints. “Yeah, I remember,” Denny said. “We worked a few jobs together. Maybe one of those houses over in Barkers Creek.”

  “That’s right,” the man said. He smiled real wide and the wa
y the dope had thinned his face made his teeth too big for his mouth and he kept licking his tongue across the fronts of them. “Boy, they’re putting up the houses now, ain’t they? You still working for Josh Ward?”

  “No,” Denny said. “Not since the accident.”

  “What happened?”

  “We was doing some tree work and some young kid had run the lines and I didn’t think to double-check them before I climbed. Next thing I knew I was flat on my back. Couldn’t move my fingers or toes.”

  “And now you’re running the long hustle, huh, you lucky son of a bitch? Long as they keep sending the checks, I’d keep cashing them,” but what that fellow didn’t know was that Denny’d been denied disability and wasn’t fetching a dime.

  “What’s your name again?”

  “Breedlove,” the man said. “Everybody calls me Breedlove.”

  “I ain’t good with names.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Listen . . .” Breedlove leaned back from the car and glanced around the parking lot as if he were making sure no one was around. He wore a white T-shirt with cut-off sleeves that had an American flag and a hot rod on the front. “I was wondering if you knew where we could find some horse.”

  “Sure don’t,” Denny said. “Been dry as a bone.”

  “We got money.” Breedlove nodded back toward a funny-looking ride parked a few spaces down, a piecemealed pickup cobbled together with spare parts and bubble gum welds. The quarter panels, hood, and doors were all different colors so that the body looked like a patchwork quilt. There was a diamond plate toolbox stretched across the bed. “We just need somebody to find it. Like I said, we got the money. Guy we get ours off ain’t picking up his phone, and my buddy in the truck’s done wore out his welcome where he gets his. I don’t know. But you help us find some, we’ll do you right. You got my word on that.”

  Denny figured this man’s word wasn’t worth a jar full of frog guts. He cut his eyes over at the car. Two people shared the cab, but from his angle he could only make out the man sitting against the passenger window. The fellow was staring right at him, a dark purple bruise surrounding his left eye like a birthmark. His lip was busted. Looked like he’d had the shit kicked out of him. When he saw Denny staring, he turned away, propped his elbow on the door, and hid his face behind his hand.

  There was a reason Denny Rattler preferred to do things alone—the break-ins, the dope, life in general. A man gets gooned out and he gets about as trustworthy as a church snake. You can drape a copperhead around your neck like a scarf and scream about Jesus all you want but sooner or later there’ll come a Sunday when you’re pulling the fangs out your throat. When it came to junkies, sketchy wasn’t so much the exception as the rule.

  “I can probably find something,” Denny said. His mouth watered. There was a hunger already brewing inside him and that hunger grabbed ahold of his tongue before reason had a chance. “How much you looking to get?”

  “What you getting stamps for?”

  “Anywhere from fifteen to twenty depending on what he’s got. He’ll usually do a bundle for one fifty, sometimes one twenty-five.” Denny added a little to the front end, hoping to carve it off the back.

  “What if we got two bundles, think he’d do that for two fifty?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Worst case three hundred.”

  “We’ll do that then.”

  “All right,” Denny said. His mind was gnawing at the thought of that much dope. He was up to shooting three times a day, and two bundles would last him a week. “You give me the money and I’ll meet you back here in an hour or so.”

  “Whoa, now,” Breedlove said. Taking a step back from the car, he raised his hands palms up at his chest like Denny’d just pulled a gun on him. “I ain’t seen you in damn near two years and you want me to hand you three hundred dollars, let you drive off into the sunset? I ain’t saying I don’t trust you, Denny, but I don’t trust you.”

  Denny stared at him expressionless and silent, the fellow having no clue how stupid he sounded.

  “How about we’ll hop in here and ride with you.” Breedlove patted the roof of the LeBaron. “I would say we could take mine, but, buddy, we’re already packed in there like Viennas.”

  “If you’re riding with me, it’s just you in the car,” Denny said. “I don’t know them boys from Tom, Dick, or Janey, and they ain’t going nowhere with me.”

  “What you want me to tell them?”

  “You tell them whatever you want,” Denny said. “You can tell them to go in that Shell station and eat Moon Pies for all I care, but if we’re riding it’s just me and you.”

  Breedlove looked at the pickup and scratched the crown of his head. He turned back toward Denny, nodding fast like he’d just weighed some heavy decision. “Yeah,” he said. “We’ll do that then. Just give me a minute.”

  Soon as those words left his lips, Breedlove was on the move. He walked around the back of his truck and opened the driver side door. Something was said and the two boys in the cab looked at Denny with faces equal parts confusion and fuck you. The one with the busted face opened the glove box and handed something across the cab to Breedlove, and Denny saw him shove whatever it was down the back of his britches but he didn’t much care. There wasn’t shit in the car worth taking aside from some Klonopin in the trunk. Besides, his mind was on the future.

  Just a few minutes before, Denny didn’t know where the next hit was coming from and now it had landed right square in his lap. He took the last bite of his biscuit, held his hands out the window to brush the crumbs from his fingers, then smeared the grease down his pant legs and started the car. There was no way of knowing what would come of tomorrow. But if the world was ending, at least it wouldn’t be tonight.

  THIRTEEN

  On the ride to the Outlet Mall, Breedlove explained how they’d come up with the money. He said someone on Facebook Marketplace advertised that if anyone had an old motorbike, scooter, or moped, they’d be interested and paid cash. That “paid cash” part is what got him. They lured the man to an old barn in the middle of nowhere and Breedlove shoved a gun up his nose. He had five hundred dollars in his pocket. Easiest lick Breedlove ever made the way he told it, and that was why Denny didn’t work with folks like him.

  The plan had been to buy the dope, drop Breedlove off at his truck, and get the fuck out of Dodge, but things didn’t work out that way. Two stamps turned to three if Denny’d give them a ride to a campground and RV park called the Fort.

  Breedlove had been tossed out of the place twice—once for ramming his truck into the camp store thinking he was in drive when he was really in reverse, and once for gutting a roadkill deer in the bathhouse and leaving the mess for the cleaning lady. “Looked about like a murder scene,” he said, smiling like he had a mouthful of briars. Now the owners called the law as soon as they saw his truck.

  The boy Breedlove had with him signed his name to the room. Denny didn’t know his real name, but he said to call him Turtle, a nickname Breedlove pronounced turkle. The carrot-top kid was short and baby-faced as hell with dimples any time he moved his mouth.

  If Turtle was on junk, he hadn’t been for long. His body was lean and fit. A men’s medium would’ve fit him fine, but he’d squeezed into a T-shirt that might’ve been a lady’s small, the sleeves cutting high on his freckled arms. He kept bending one arm across his body to flex his chest. First thing out of his mouth was how he’d never shot a vein, just skin-popped up till then, and soon as Denny heard that he didn’t want any goddamn part of it. Despite feeling that way, Denny didn’t make one move for the door. It was no different than the night he let Jonah Rathbone kick that girl around the trailer like a dog without saying a word. Moral dilemmas never stood a chance against a fix.

  The other fellow didn’t talk much. About all he’d said was that his name was Ricky. Up close, Denny could tell someone had beat the absolu
te brains out of him a week or so before. The bruising was starting to take on that dark yellow hue at the edges.

  Beneath the bruising, there was something familiar in his face, like Denny’d seen him before, though he couldn’t place him. Whereas the kid’s clothes were too small, Ricky’s looked two sizes too big—a black Pantera T-shirt with a rattlesnake on the front, a pair of dark denim jeans that bunched around his waist. He was barefoot and you could tell the bottoms of his feet were worn black from walking.

  The cabin they rented was what most folks would keep for a toolshed—cheap board-and-bat painted rust red, a two-pitch roof with gray asphalt shingles. A window-unit air conditioner was wired into the wall and wouldn’t turn off. It was running full blast and had the inside cold enough to hang meat. The room smelled like soured clothes. There was a queen bed, a TV, a mini fridge, a cold-water sink, and a toilet. The campground offered deluxe cabins a bit finer finished that went for a hundred a night, but the standards were only sixty-nine dollars and you could get one for fifty if you knew to ask for the one with the toilet that wouldn’t flush.

  The place was too small for four men, and being boxed in like that made Denny nervous like he was in a holding cell, so he fidgeted by the door until everyone else found their place. Ricky turned on the television soon as he walked in and slinked to the far side. He flipped the toilet lid down and took a seat. Turtle bounced on the edge of the queen bed and the box springs squeaked under his weight. There was a small countertop just to the left of where Denny stood and Breedlove had his back to him, breaking out the dope by the sink.

  “You ever seen one of these?” Turtle asked. He held up something shaped like a box of cigarettes, the label purple and yellow with a white arrow pointing up.

  “No,” Ricky said. “What is it?”

  “Naloxone, man. An auto-injector. This is the shit the law carries around for overdoses. Listen to it.”

  Turtle pulled an outer case off the device and an electronic voice started to speak. Denny didn’t catch the first part, something about needles or drugs. A set of tones played, then the voice said, “If you are ready to use, pull off red safety guard.” There was a red tab on the bottom of the device. “If not ready to use, replace the outer case.” Turtle slipped the device back together.