When These Mountains Burn

by David Joy

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Then what did you say?”

  “You’re putting words in my mouth.”

  “Why don’t you tell me about it then?”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Why?”

  “Because there was nothing easy about it. There’s nothing easy about nothing.”

  “I guess you’re right. I guess you’re right about that. Nothing easy about nothing.” Watty paused and looked at the picture again. “Awfully messy, though. It never crossed your mind to just use a pistol? Would’ve made things a lot easier on yourself.”

  “I ain’t have one.”

  “Dead’s dead, I guess. Sure is a mess you left, though. Open up that jacket.”

  There was blood smeared across the front of Denny’s sweatshirt.

  “Didn’t even bother to change clothes.”

  “I came straight here.”

  “Exactly. And like I said, you didn’t even bother changing clothes.”

  “I ain’t got no other clothes.”

  “No clothes. No gun. No nothing.” Watty shook his head and smirked. “You’re a sad sight, friend. What would’ve happened if you’d been pulled over somewhere between there and here? What would you have said if some deputy asked how you got that blood all over you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That’s a problem, Denny.”

  “What’s a problem?”

  “That you don’t have any answers.”

  “I mean I don’t know right off the top of my head, you just asking me like that. But I’d come up with something if I had to.”

  “And you’re absolutely sure there’s nothing at that old man’s house that’s going to lead back to you when the police get to looking? Because they’re going to get to looking, Denny, and you better hope to God you didn’t leave anything behind. If you did, you better come up with a better answer than ‘I don’t know.’”

  “I was careful.”

  “Yeah, it looks like you were real careful. Erase that picture off this phone. Matter of fact, get rid of this phone altogether. They can pull shit nowadays off a cell phone and tell right where you were standing.” Watty handed the phone back and smashed the cigarette he’d been smoking into a porcelain ashtray on the coffee table in front of him. “Get rid of those clothes too. Burn them. I don’t care if you’ve got to go naked. You understand?”

  “Yeah,” Denny said. “I understand.”

  “And if any of this ever does come back on you, that’s where it ends. If that line ever goes any farther than you, the same thing’s at stake then as it is right now. You understand what I’m telling you?”

  “It won’t ever come back on me.”

  “But if it does, you see what I’m saying?” Watty raised his eyebrows, but didn’t wait for an answer. “I’ll kill that sister of yours with my own hands just so I can come visit you in the jailhouse and watch the light go out of your eyes. I’ll take her apart like a goddamn science experiment.”

  Denny felt his hands tighten into fists. His brow lowered and he clenched his jaw. It felt like his teeth were going to break. It was all he could do not to come off that couch and stretch Watty Freeman’s neck like a length of taffy.

  “Don’t look like that, Denny.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like it’s already happened. Like I’ve already done it.”

  Denny didn’t speak.

  “You took from me and that’s how this started. Don’t forget that. One hand washes the other.”

  “Yeah, all right.”

  “And just to show there’s no hard feelings, I’ve got you a present.” Watty reached under the table and came up with a white plastic package molded in the shape of a cigar. “Given what all has happened, it’s going to be a little while before I can come through for you, so in the meantime, this here’s for you.”

  “What is it?”

  Watty twisted the package in his hand and the plastic popped. He held a short stick with a white bullet on one end. “Morphine sucker. Buddy of mine got them off a friend of his works in hospice.”

  “I’m good.”

  “You’re good? You mean like already loaded?”

  “No.”

  “Well, put it in your pocket. Take it with you. I don’t care.”

  “I don’t want it.”

  “You don’t want it?”

  “I’m getting clean.”

  Watty laughed and set the morphine sucker on the table where it rolled a half circle like the hand of a clock. He grabbed a pack of smokes and lit one as he stood. He was hovering over Denny now and Denny didn’t know what to make of what was happening. There was a shift in the air, a physical change in tension the way it feels sometimes in summer when a thunderstorm is coming in and the poplar leaves turn on their silver sides. Every hair on Denny’s body stood on end.

  “Come over here a second, Billy.”

  The big boy that was standing in the doorway thumped across the room, splitting the cigarette smoke that had settled chest level.

  “Hold him down for me.”

  “What?” Denny said, but before another thought could come to him, the big boy had ahold of his wrists and pinned him flat on his back to the couch. Denny’s elbows flapped around like wings, but his wrists were anchored there as he twisted and turned to get free. Watty yanked a pistol from his hip and Denny kicked his legs wildly.

  “You kick me, Denny, and I’ll hammer out every tooth in your head one at a time,” he said, leaning out of reach.

  There was no point in struggling. The dog was barking so loudly that it hurt Denny’s ears. He let his legs fall flat. Watty shoved the barrel under Denny’s chin until Denny’s head tilted back. He was looking up into the underside of a lamp, a spiraled bulb burning bright and blinding. All he could see was light, but he could smell Watty hovering over him, the smell of dandruff shampoo and dollar-store deodorant, cigarettes and dog.

  “A couple things bother me about what you’re saying.” Watty spoke in a voice low and stern. “You come back from having done what you said you’ve done and there’s not a scratch on your hands. You don’t even seem bothered. Now, a man does something from a distance, he might be able to convince himself that things had to be done the one way. But up close like that? A man kills another man in the way you’re saying, that’s not the kind of thing he just up and walks away from. And now you’re saying you want to get clean. Not a day ago you were so strung out you couldn’t keep from nodding off on this couch and now you’re talking just as clearheaded as a preacher. That doesn’t make sense, Denny. Something doesn’t add up.”

  “I did exactly what you told me.” Denny huffed for air.

  “Yeah, that’s what you’re saying and I’ll know soon enough. I’ll make a couple phone calls and we’ll find out real fast if the story you’re telling holds water.”

  Denny felt the sweatshirt he was wearing come up around his neck. There were cold hands on his stomach. He felt Watty’s fingers slide over the slats of his ribs, then climb his chest, patting him down, riffling through the pockets of his jacket and jeans.

  “What the fuck are you doing?”

  “Where’s the wire?”

  “I ain’t wearing no goddamn wire!”

  “Don’t you lie to me, Denny.”

  The tag end of Denny’s belt slapped against Watty’s forearm as Watty ripped the buckle loose and opened the front of Denny’s pants. Suddenly Denny’s jeans were down around his ankles and he tried to kick his feet, but the clothing had him wrapped up and hog-tied and he didn’t know what was about to happen. He was absolutely certain that this was how it was going to end, with that big boy holding him down and Watty Freeman cutting his guts out and just that fast, just as all those thoughts went whirling around his head like a cyclone, it was over.


  Watty stood straight and ran his eyes over Denny’s body inspecting him from head to toe. His hair hung over his face and he whipped it back with a flick of his neck. He ran his fingers through the sides of his hair, pulled it into a fist at the back of his head, and rolled a rubber band off of his wrist to hold the ponytail together. “Let him up.”

  The big boy turned Denny loose.

  “What the fuck’s wrong with you?” Denny jerked up fast and reached for his ankles, bare-assed as he tried to get his pants pulled up. The backs of his legs peeled from the cheap leather cushions. He wrestled with his jeans and when he had them over his hips he worked to get the belt cinched down and fastened. “I told you I wasn’t wearing no wire. I did what you told me to do. You told me to kill that man and that’s what I did. If you wanted it done a certain way you should’ve said so, but you didn’t.”

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

  Denny stood up from the couch and bent over to grab the morphine sucker from the coffee table. He stuck it in his pocket and without asking swiped a cigarette from the pack Watty’d left sitting on the arm of the chair. Watty chuckled and shook his head.

  “This is over,” Denny said. “It ends right here.”

  Watty stepped forward and fished a Zippo out of the pocket of his Dickies. He struck a tall flame and held it into the space between them. Denny dipped his head into the light and backed away as the tobacco caught. He took a long drag from the cigarette and exhaled through his nose so that the smoke poured down his chest like a waterfall. He started across the room and was almost to the hall when Watty spoke.

  “You forgot something.”

  Denny turned and Watty had the cell phone. Sometime during the tussle, the phone had come out of Denny’s pocket and wound up on the couch without him knowing. Denny reached out and took the phone from Watty’s hand.

  “Burn those clothes, Denny.”

  Denny looked down and studied the front of his sweatshirt. It looked like he’d been painting a barn. He slid the phone into his pocket and glanced at the dog one last time. When he was outside he looked back at the porch light for the moth but it was no longer there. The air was cold and the smoke from the fires would make it hard to see. He had nowhere to go. There was nothing easy about nothing.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  When Denny passed the trailers on the hill, a pair of high beams hit him from the side and cast his silhouette against the tree line—a worn body hunkered low over the handlebars of a scooter—like a figure thrown onto a wall by the light of a carousel lamp. The car spun out behind him and when Denny reached the gate he swerved into a small gap in the laurel to let them pass.

  “Get the fuck out of the way, Evel Knievel!” some redneck yelled from the passenger window of a ragged-out Corsica. There were two girls strung out like scarecrows in the backseat cackling, cheekbones and buckteeth flashing past as the driver mashed the gas and threw a rooster tail of gravel over Denny like a rainbow.

  Denny’s ears were ringing and he looked back one last time to ensure that no one was following. The helmet he wore made a lollipop out of his head so that he looked like some sort of aquanaut or astronaut headed for the great beyond.

  A mile or so up the road, the black SUV was backed in at the side of the church. The agents were waiting for him just like they’d said, and he wondered what it would’ve taken for them to have barged through the door and come after him if things had gone sour because things sure had seemed to go that way. Denny stopped along the side of the road, but didn’t enter the parking lot. A streetlight cast a wide blue oval onto the blacktop and in the outer edge he could see them watching.

  There was a tin mailbox standing beside him. Denny wiggled out of the denim jacket and took the phone from his pocket. He held them both in the air for the agents to see, then shoved them inside the mailbox and slapped the lid shut. He didn’t know if they’d follow or chase him down but he didn’t really care anymore. The world felt like it was closing in on him and he needed room to breathe.

  By the time he reached the village, he realized there was no one coming. The anxiety gave way to a different feeling, a mournful nostalgia as he steered along the same stretch of road he’d ridden all his life, the parking lots now empty, the night silent aside from the drone of his engine.

  The main drag through Cherokee was an odd juxtaposition, a run-down tourist town sprinkled with new construction. Growing up here, before the casino, there had only been the former, and there had always been a part of Denny that was ashamed by the way they sold themselves—stores peddling leather tomahawks with brightly dyed feathers strung from the handles; cheesy beadwork of birds and fishes sewn onto change purses made in Vietnam; neon signs and trifold brochures showing teepees like they were some Plains tribe who were not of these mountains at all. Somewhere in Indonesia there was a machine spitting out five-cent arrowheads merchants could buy by the thousand and sell for two dollars a pop.

  The smoke from the wildfires made it seem as if he were driving through a dream. Off to the right, an open-air shelter with a cedar shake roof stood just as it had all his life, and he pulled to the side of the road, his mind turning back and turning back. Denny remembered the first summer they went to live with his uncle. The old man didn’t have money for summer camp or daycare, so Denny and Carla spent their days drawing on cracked pavement with sidewalk chalk, playing games of hopscotch and tic-tac-toe in the parking lot while their uncle danced for tourists.

  Uncle Griff was a short man with calves as thick as gallon jugs and the headdress dragged the ground behind him as he moved and chanted to the beat of a drum. The whole thing was hokey as hell. Their people had never even worn headdresses and it was only to fit the image the tourists wanted to believe. Denny and Carla would take turns mocking their uncle while he danced, a pair of grubby kids in thrift store clothes hopping around on one leg while they slapped their mouths in the shadows of minivans with out-of-state tags. Sometimes Denny would pray that his uncle’s feet would get caught up in that headdress and that he’d fall flat on his nose in front of all those people so that maybe he’d know how embarrassing the whole thing was for them, but of course that never happened. His uncle would dance with his eyes closed, every movement a tightly rehearsed step forward, feathers sliding over the ground behind him like a brightly colored tail.

  Cherokee was another place now. The casino had changed everything. All the mom-and-pop shops peddling projectile points and dream catchers were fading away. The children were learning and speaking a language that had once been washed with soap from their grandparents’ mouths. There were native words on all the new buildings and signs, words that twenty years before had been on the brink of extinction. There was a renaissance taking place and it should’ve filled Denny with pride, but instead it left him feeling empty and ashamed. He was the one the outsiders pointed to, the drunk Indian, the addict Indian waiting on a per cap check to shoot into his arm. In his mind, he could still hear the sound of the drum, still see his uncle dancing shirtless and sweaty through humid honeysuckle air, and he wanted desperately to just go back.

  The withdrawal was twisting him in on himself as he rode past dimly lit motels and glowing billboard signs. There were the aches and pains, the nausea, sure, but the feeling that always got to him was hard to explain to anyone who hadn’t felt it. It was as if there were an inner and an outer self, the consciousness and the body, and the more he came down, the more it felt like that inward part had detached and shriveled up like a sun-dried worm. That inward part shrank down into something cold and brittle, his body now nothing but a shell like he was rattling around inside a loose-fitting costume. There was a literal, physical gap between the two parts. He could feel the separation between them, maybe an inch, sometimes more, and the only thing that could pull them back together was the dope. He’d fire off and there’d come a heat that filled that inner part like a balloon, and oh he yearned to feel it n
ow.

  All the lights were off at Carla’s. He wasn’t sure if she was inside asleep or if Cordell Crowe had taken her to a safe house. Of course it didn’t really matter one way or the other. A few hours before, Denny had a plan in mind, but that plan to see his sister and go to rehab and get clean had disappeared right about the time Watty shoved that pistol under Denny’s chin. The good thoughts always seemed to flash and sparkle and burn out like fireworks. In the end, there was always the darkness.

  Denny imagined his sister asleep, arms folded under her head, a pillow stuffed between her knees. He imagined her just like that, sleeping, eyes flicking behind her eyelids, dreaming of something better than what her life was. Part of him wanted to knock on the door and tell her goodbye, but in the end he didn’t have the heart to wake her.

  He filled his tank by siphoning gas from a Jeep Wrangler with wide tires and a FOR SALE sign balanced between the dashboard and windshield, then headed on up the road. There was always this uneasiness when he reached the edge of the Boundary. Boundaries were strange to begin with—what belonged to who, and who belonged to where—all of these imaginary things treated as concrete so that our lives were governed by nonsense. It was hard for him to wrap his head around the meaninglessness of it all, but every time he crossed that line he got anxious. The Boundary was a blessing and a curse, a place where he felt at once safe and trapped, but he knew he could not stay there anymore.

  Denny Rattler didn’t have a clue what was in Atlanta, just a single image of a golden cupola shining in downtown sunlight as he passed on the highway as a child. He didn’t know anyone there. And that was the point. He’d started to believe that maybe the cyclical nature of it all was tied to the things that never changed, his life ticking past and catching on people and places as if they were the stopper on a gaming wheel.

  At the highway, he took 74 west toward Bryson City, and when he reached the tall bridge where the Little Tennessee River widened into Fontana, he could see the mountains burning a few miles south. The Tellico fire had grown to more than fourteen thousand acres. Denny Rattler whipped onto the shoulder and took the morphine sucker from his pocket.