Nitro Mountain

by Lee Clay Johnson

  The steering wheel was slick in my hands. I kept my eyes on the road. The world outside was flying by in a blur. There was a turn ahead I knew I couldn’t make at this speed.

  “In the basement the day I got my present,” she said, “I put my feet into those socks and they fit perfect. How did Good Steve know? I never had socks so nice. I promised myself I would never forget them anywhere. I promised to always keep them. Forever. It looked like a mother’s hands had made them. And maybe so. Maybe my friend’s mother, Good Steve’s wife. I’m wearing them right now. Wanna see?”

  She pulled her pant leg up and flashed one of the socks. Then she vanished. I couldn’t make the turn. Daylight broke apart into pieces of shattering glass. I was alone and it was a dark night out, and freezing cold, and she wasn’t there anymore and I couldn’t protect her.

  —

  “Oscar, you are amazing graces.” My sister’s face against a hospital ceiling.

  “What’s wrong?” I said. “Why you here, Krystal?”

  But soon I realized it was me she was worried about, me why she was here and me why I was here. A cast held my arm in place, and when I tried to move it a shock of light flashed behind my eyes. I only remembered taillights I couldn’t catch.

  She told me the truck flipped and landed on its side. The cops found me stuck there in my seat belt. When they looked into my window, I’d said, “Nothing to see here, ociffer.” It was all written down in the report. Apparently there were recordings of it that I was welcome to listen to. I had broken my arm and totaled my truck. The hospital released me later that day, and Krystal drove me to the station down a strip littered with stores like Virginia Cash Cow, Tony’s Terrific Title Loans and a couple doc-in-a-box places. One of them, the Med Care Clinic, was where my mom worked. At the station I picked up some of my things and learned I was being charged with a DUI, reckless driving, damage of public and private property, plus some other shit I couldn’t afford. I would’ve been in the drunk tank, but the hospital had been the first stop and my injuries were bad enough that they just let me stay. Everybody was nice about everything. They didn’t even allow me the luxury of feeling like a mean guy.

  Krystal waited on a bench on the sidewalk, and when I came out she stood up and asked if I was done, like I’d been shopping. I hadn’t accomplished shit in my life, and it was embarrassing to have her here for this milestone.

  “I’m done,” I said. “Done for good.”

  “Oh, Oscar,” she said. She called me Oscar because the only thing I’d ever liked on Sesame Street was the Grouch. We’d spent a portion of our young lives in foster care, before a couple from the church took us in and fed us saltines and juice and let us play with their yellow Lab for a couple years, then we moved back in with our parents after my mom had finally shown the courts she could keep our lives together. There was nothing interesting about any of it. At the beginning of ninth grade I was expelled for reasons that aren’t even worth explaining. I spent the next ten years hanging around town, between my sister’s apartment and my parents’ house, sometimes living with a friend for a while until he told me I needed to start pulling my own weight, which I could never do.

  “You still have a lot ahead of you,” she said.

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  “I like when you smile,” she said. Her eyes were the color of lake ice. Her hair was blond, mine mud brown. I wondered if we came from different people.

  “I’m not smiling,” I said. “My arm hurts.”

  “It reminds me of Grandpa. Y’all were so much alike. I wish you could’ve known him at an older age.”

  Grandpa had been a motorcycle-riding military man turned whiskey-drinking minister. He would disappear late every week and show up at his Sunday morning services smelling of it. Communion, for him, was hair of the dog. Everybody said he swore off the stuff later in life, but the damage had been done and he had maintained a haze of drunkenness in everything he did—broad gestures and a loud voice for minor occasions. At family picnics he’d make trips to the trunk to check on the spare tire, the one thing I did remember. His great tragedy, my sister liked to say, was that he couldn’t express the love he felt for me.

  “Boo-hoo for him,” I always said back.

  My truck had been his before he died. He gave it to Krystal and she gave it to me, telling me to keep the oil changed, which was the first thing I didn’t do.

  Let me say something about that truck. It was a 1980 F-150 Ranger Explorer V8 longbed with double gas tanks and an aluminum brush guard on the grille. The paint job was the color of autumn. The bench seat was the size of a sofa, like you were rolling down the road in your living room. You could sleep in the cab if you had to, and more than once I did. But those are other stories, and what hurt now was this: The one thing my grandfather had given us to show his love, I had thrown away. What did that make me?

  My sister asked where I wanted to go. None of my friends were talking to me, so I told her our parents’. I hated saying it, but with my wheels gone, my arm broke and no money, I was going to need a place to sit down and figure shit out.

  Krystal offered her place, but I could hear hesitation in her voice. I’d been there the last few nights. Who wants to live with their loser little brother? Who wants to see him become everything you overcame?

  —

  The first week wasn’t so bad. Mom worked daylong shifts at Med Care and would come home at odd hours in the evening not wearing her work clothes. Dad stayed in bed with back problems, waiting for his disability. He got stoned in the mornings and kept quiet until lunch. I’d bring him a sandwich and a couple cracked cans of Bud. Sometimes he’d send me over to the neighbors’ house, a family by the name of Habitte, to buy more pot from Nicholas, their high school son. My room hadn’t changed at all, still a couple sunken mattresses and that same rat-matted carpet underneath everything.

  My Fender P Bass leaned against the wall in the corner, plugged into a Peavey practice amp. It was nice to see it there. I ran my finger along its body through the dust and drew a line of gloss across the top horn.

  It was the left arm I’d broken, and my cast kept the elbow bent at such an angle that when I flipped the on switch on, sat down and put the bass in my lap, I was pretty much ready to play. I tuned it up. There was a cassette player on top of the TV that still had a practice tape in it. Mostly country and blues and rock. Loud, overstated bar stuff. I played along until my arm sizzled and sent glowing lines of pain up my wrist and into my backbone. Waiting for things to ease, I went for a walk behind the house to make sure my legs still worked.

  We lived against a forest of cedar and pine that peaked to a point of beech trees the color of bone. The other side of the hill sloped down into maples, oaks and hickory. I wandered along the fence line and watched the sun toss flakes of gold into the sky. The pain in my arm and side had faded. A pack of hounds in the distance. I worried that my life had ended, and then that it hadn’t.

  —

  The reason I decided to play the bass was because I’d heard everybody was always looking for bass players. Apparently that had changed. There was even a cover band in town that admitted they didn’t have a bass, and said no, they didn’t want one.

  I called the shelter and asked if they needed anyone to cover shifts. They asked where I’d been, and why I’d missed my last few mornings. When I told them, they said, “Okay. We’ve been worried. Don’t come back.”

  “But I need you,” I said.

  “We’re open every day,” the lady said. “You’re welcome here to wash your clothes, take a shower, eat a meal.” Her name was Alisha. I’d heard her use her phone voice before, but I never thought it would be directed at me.

  Mom was starting to get on my case about the electricity I was pulling in my room, and I kept promising her I’d figure something out. One cold Saturday I took a one-handed bike ride over to Durty Misty’s. I had bassman-for-hire flyers in my backpack. The only thing between our house and the bar was the F
oodville and the Joy Imperial gas station. I wobbled into the parking lot there to tape a flyer up in their window.

  Somebody must’ve been watching me, because when I set my bike against the front wall the door opened for a couple seconds, bells swinging from the inside handle. I followed a woman to the counter. Little jewels and studs stuck into the ass of her jeans. She turned around and I recognized her face from high school. “Rachel?” I said.

  “It’s you,” she said. “You! Um. What’s your name again?”

  “It’s Leon.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I knew that.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  The smell of burning dust on the space heater in the corner filled the room. She sat behind the register. “So this is how you reignite old friendships?” she said. “You kick it off by getting pissed about something?”

  “I’m just. I don’t know. It’s been.” I motioned to my cast.

  “I see that,” she said. “What happened?”

  “Nothing. I saved a bunch of people’s lives. Not worth talking about right now. It’s all in the past. Well, okay, not really the past. But, you know, nothing important.”

  Coolers lined the walls of the small room, enclosing shelves of bagged chips and a maze of candy racks. She shook her head and threw a strand of hair out of her face. “What’s wrong with you?” she said.

  “Look, I got some flyers here. I need work. Hey, I saw the sign out there. Y’all’re hiring?”

  “You don’t want to work here,” she said.

  “It’s not about wanting to.”

  “They pay me to sit here and push buttons. What are the flyers for?”

  “I can push buttons.”

  “They’re paying minimum wage.” She sat back down and pulled at her breast pocket. “Anyway,” she said, catching my eyes on her chest, “you’d be distracted.”

  “Maybe you’re right.” I went to leave.

  “Wait,” she said. “Aren’t you going to ask me out?”

  “Will you say yes?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Rachel,” I said.

  I pushed the door open with my foot, making the bells bang around, and she said, “We’re not allowed to put up flyers anymore. It’s like the lost dog capital of the world around here.”

  “They’re flyers for me. Bass player looking for band.”

  “So you’re the lost dog,” she said. “Try Misty’s.”

  It was too early for them to be open when I got there, but I knocked on the door a few times anyway. The black-painted metal had a peephole in the middle. I didn’t knock again. From my backpack I took a flyer and looked for a spot on the wall where all the rain-stained show posters hung. I slapped my advertisement up and pinned it in there, then walked away and turned around to see how it looked. But I kept noticing the peephole—bright, and then dark, and then bright again, like the door was winking.

  —

  The next Friday, everybody but me was out partying. I was in the kitchen doing dishes, scrubbing taco beef off plates. My cast was still on and I had trouble holding things while I scrubbed them with my good hand. I didn’t bother with much rinsing, just stacked them with suds sliding down all over. The doorbell rang and from the couch Mom called, “Come in, come in, whoever you are.” She was feeling good because I was finally doing something.

  I knew who it was the minute he cleared his throat. Jones Young. Guitar player and singer. He wasn’t a lot older than me but he came across as an elder. A big deal in the bluegrass and old-school country scene. He was respected by purists who wouldn’t give me the time of day; I was just some overgrown kid playing loud music for girls. Jones knew all the standards and was a great rhythm player. Fiddlers liked him because he kept good time and rarely took solos. Banjo players liked him because he always brought the booze. One of the things that made him different from everybody else was that he liked me.

  He also wrote his own songs, stuff that actually made you think. When he wanted to get rowdy, he’d put an outlaw country-rock band together that he called Jones & the Young Divorcés. That band was how we knew each other. He used me for bass. It was also how I met Jennifer.

  I peeked into the living room and saw him standing there. He held a smoking cigarette toward our storm door like it hadn’t closed behind him. “Missus Carol,” he was saying, laying it on thick. “I haven’t seen you in a while. How ever are you? You look wonderful. By any chance is Leon around?”

  “Oh, he’s in there,” she said, “busy acting busy.”

  “How you, Jones?” I said, wiping my hand across the lap of my pants.

  “Whoa, dude. What the hell happened to your arm?”

  “You should see the other guy,” I said.

  Mom sang a word: “Buhuhullsheeeeit.”

  Jones shook his head and laughed, blowing smoke out his nose. He wore a denim jacket over a pearl-snap shirt tucked into worn-out jeans. Polished cowboy boots. “Damn,” he said. “I was gonna ask you—”

  “It still works,” I said. “See?” I played some air bass for him.

  Mom told him I’d been practicing along to the tape. “You wouldn’t believe it,” she said.

  “What? That he’s practicing?”

  “Thing is,” I said, “I’ve only got that little amp.”

  “Good,” he said. “You can use it as a monitor. It’s got a direct out, right? We can mic it and run it through the house mains.” The show was tonight, his regular bassist had backed out after double-booking and we were on in an hour. “If you don’t mind me taking your dishwasher,” Jones said to my mom.

  “They’ll still be dirty when he gets back.”

  I ran to my room, holding my arm to make sure I didn’t knock it against anything.

  —

  I’d barely gotten the bass strap over my shoulder when the drummer clicked us into “Always Late.” I stumbled my way behind them up to the 4, this stupid little two-hit they liked to do, and as soon as I dropped back into the 1, I found the pocket and for the first time in a long while I knew what I was meant to be doing.

  It didn’t feel like my arm was broken at all. I moved around the fingerboard like I was healed, and maybe I was, just for now. The place was packed and people were dancing. I looked to Jerry, the drummer, his arms crossed as he held a tight shuffle on the high hat and snare, his head pointing upward with his mouth open like he was trying to catch a stream of fresh water falling from the sky. I looked to Matt, the lead guitarist, thrusting into the back of his Telecaster when he bent strings. Jones was turned to us with his ear to the floor, checking to hear if the engine we’d cranked up was firing on all cylinders.

  One country standard after another. Those songs, that music—when it’s done right it plays itself.

  We were halfway into the first set when I saw Rachel. She had her arms in the air, a beer in one hand, and was dancing around with her eyes closed like she was climbing an invisible ladder. All kinds of bad dudes were looking at her. Nobody was talking to her. Then the man with the Daffy Duck tattoo handed her another drink.

  When the set break came, Jerry pulled a pack of Camels from his cymbal case, said it wasn’t his fault and stepped off the stage.

  “Who?” I said.

  “It’s your first gig with us in a while,” Jones said. “You’re doing fine. For the first one.”

  “If he’d just waited for me,” I said of Jerry.

  “Jerry always does that. Don’t take it personal. He thinks it’s fun, throwing everybody off.” Jones thumbed toward the audience. “Anyway. I think you already got one fan.”

  People were talking and laughing as classic rock came on through the busted house speakers. She sat on a stool with her back to the bar, staring at me. I bent down to pick up a cord, pretending I hadn’t noticed her, but when I’d gotten everything situated our eyes met and she motioned for me to come over.

  I carried a tallboy in my cast hand. The crowd was thinning from people going outside to smoke and take nips from bot
tles hidden in their trucks. She had thin, painted lips and drawn cheeks like she was permanently sucking on something. She looked like a different person, wearing so much makeup. This could happen.

  “So your flyer must’ve worked,” she said, taking her feet off the stool’s footrest, her legs stretching straight to the floor while she stayed sitting. She turned a can vertical to her mouth, crushed the middle with her fingers when she was through and set it behind her on the bar. Bob replaced it with a cold one.

  “I’ve played with these boys before,” I said. “That was only like a week or two ago I put up the flyer here. That day we saw each other.”

  “Only? How long you expect you got left?”

  “Until what?”

  “Till you run out of chances.” She reached behind her without looking and grabbed the fresh beer. “You didn’t even get my number.”

  The man with the Daffy Duck tattoo was standing too close to us. He kept grabbing his belt buckle and shaking it. “Feel good,” he said, nodding in agreement with himself. “I feel all right. Swell. Decent. Indecent exposure. I feel fucking fantastic. I like good music. I’m a man of pure taste.”

  “I’ll be right back.” She walked around the stage and into the pinball room.

  “She going to use the little girls’ room,” he said. “Come here.”

  I followed him into the back room where they made sandwiches. It reeked of rancid sliced meats and warm mayo. A door ajar in the corner and roaches racing across the floor. He pulled the chain of a bare lightbulb above us and we were in a cleaning-supply closet. He reached around me and shut the door.

  We stood shoulder to shoulder among gallons of Clorox, rags and buckets, mops and brooms. He took an iPhone out of his pocket and set it upright on a shelf. He flicked his fingers across the screen, tapped a code into the keypad and told me to watch. He pulled the chain and the light went out. A dim image appeared on the screen. The glow of the phone transformed his face into that of a corpse, skull bones pushing through skin. “Look at me,” he said. He was breathing harder. Our eyes met for the first time and he said, “Watch me watch this.”