Nitro Mountain

by Lee Clay Johnson

  “So you do like looking at her. That’s what you’re saying. You’re here to eyeball my girl.”

  “Ain’t nothing wrong with her. That’s all I’m saying.”

  He nodded. “Nope. She’s a tight little piece. You ought to see her upside down,” he said. “Like when she can’t breathe? And her face is about to bust out. Sometimes I want to see her dead, you know? That’s how much I love her. Sometimes while we’re crunching, I’ll tell her, ‘Die, you bitch, just die.’ ” He was making serious progress with the drink and his voice was slurring. His eyes fixed on a point ahead of us, not in the forest beyond or the yard where we sat, but something somewhere in the space between.

  “What’s she think about that?” I said.

  “She likes it when I tell her to die. It’s not my fault that’s what she wants. You think it’s my fault?”

  “No. You really love her.”

  “Don’t tell me who I fucking love. She’ll say shit like, ‘Tell me to die again.’ Shit like that. And if I do it long enough, when she’s about to come she’ll say, ‘Oh God, oh my God, I’m dying, I’m dying.’ ”

  He took a live shotgun shell from the table, shoved it between two boards supporting the porch roof and pointed at the brass circle gleaming around the nickel hammer button. “Hit the bull’s-eye,” he said, and took a socket wrench and smacked it.

  The blast split my ears. Splinters of wood flying.

  “I’m dead! I’m dead!” He threw his hands back. The slurpee was at his feet. He picked it up, gulped again and then went around the corner to piss.

  The cup stood next to me. I took the bottle out of my pocket, ears still singing and beating, unscrewed the cap, poured the solution into the drink and stirred it around with the straw, then shoved the bottle in my pocket. I’d bury it in the woods later. I walked to the edge of the yard, in case he sniffed the drink, and looked down over the world.

  Some other leaf was sailing around out there. But the more I stared at it, the more it looked like a small hole, a little puncture wound in the sky. What if there was an entire world behind the surface of this one? A darker place made of all the things we hide?

  He came back, picked up the cup and drained it, hissed like a match getting doused, went up the porch steps and took a seat at the table. “Unadulterated,” he said, pulling out a pack of cigarettes. “Smooth morning time.” He ran his fingers through his hair and tossed his head a few times like he had water in his ears. “Over there,” he said. “The fuck is that?”

  It was the sound of an engine. “I’ll check it out,” I told him.

  The noise of tires on shale rose from the bottom of the hollow. Jennifer’s truck was moving up the access road, trailing a dust cloud.

  He leaned back in the chair. “Think I need to lie down.”

  “Somebody’s coming,” I said.

  “Oh yeah? What other secrets you want to let me in on?”

  Arnett looked like he’d become very heavy. He got out of the chair and lay on his back on the boards. The truck was making steady progress. With her shades on, Jennifer sat in the cab clutching the wheel, and it looked like she was grooving. Arnett lay next to the plates of possum bones, his hand across his middle as it rose and fell.

  —

  The grass out back between the inn and the barn was knee high. It sounded like a breath in the breeze. The worn boards of the barn had collapsed into some kind of fencing, and that’s where the pigs and dogs were waiting. Two bungee cords held the gate shut, and they hung back against the fence when I unlatched them. The hogs were squealing and bouncing, the hounds slinking behind them and starting into an open cry when I pushed the gate door, and they raced out, snatching and slavering at one another. I’d heard of pigs eating their own farmers, and they ran away from the barn like they knew what they were supposed to do.

  I met the truck partways down and climbed in. “Turn around,” I told her. “Now.”

  “You get it done?”

  “I did what you said.”

  She drove up to the edge of the lot to turn around. I looked at the porch but couldn’t make out whether Arnett was there or not. “Keep turning,” I said. “Keep going.”

  “Let’s just check.” She yanked the emergency brake. “See how capable you really are.”

  “He was down the last I saw. There’s nothing else we can do. Let’s please get the fuck away from here.”

  She started back down the access and my hands shook as I gripped my knees, from nerves and the road rattling us. She took a longneck from her purse. Trees blended green in the window behind her. She eased the bottle between my legs with fingers around the top of it, but I couldn’t appreciate the sight. “I can’t right now,” I said.

  “You better.”

  I turned it up to my mouth and it foamed onto my shirt. She was right, it was calming, so I began telling her how it all went down. She stood on the brake and we side-tailed in the gravel. “So he’s alive,” she said. “You fucked up a perfectly easy thing.”

  I looked out my window and took another swig.

  She got out, came around to open my door and told me to get out. I set the bottle on the floorboard and stepped down just as she swung at me in the road. I jumped back and she went reeling from the miss, tripping and rolling into the ditch. I stood over her. “It might be working,” I said. “He drank the stuff. He did that. We need to get going.”

  “We need to stay right here.” She got up and went back to the truck and brought out a handle of bourbon. Some was already gone.

  “Don’t point that at me.”

  “Let’s get a blanket,” she said. “Go into the woods and hide out. I mean, camp. We don’t got a thing to hide because we didn’t do anything. We didn’t run. Only people who run are the people that did something.” She left the bottle on the bench seat, put a foot on the rear wheel and hopped into the bed.

  While she was gathering her stuff, I unscrewed the cap and poured warm whiskey down my throat. It burned my stomach. I took another drink for good luck. What was I worried about? Things had gone perfect. I gave a guy what he asked for. I didn’t have to explain shit to anybody. It was hot out and he drank too much. That same old story.

  The truck didn’t have a blanket, only a tarp. We hiked it far back in the woods, spread it out and started drinking properly in our nice little nest, all leaves and sticks and plastic. We drank until Nitro Mountain’s light started glowing somewhere behind us.

  “It’s getting dark,” I said.

  “It already did that,” she said.

  I got up and walked over to a tree for a piss and then a puke. “We gotta go.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t think you gave it to him,” she said. She was on her knees and brushing off the tarp, a black square in the thicket. She patted the place beside her. Somehow I made it there and we finished the bottle. “Next what we do is wait and see what happens and keep quiet,” she said. “But enough of that for now. There’s one more thing I need.”

  She rolled into a position I’d never seen before. She stuck her backside up, clutching her ass and spreading it and begging to get hit. “All this, all yours. Think of our years together,” she said. “Or months or whatever. All I wanted was.”

  Afraid I’d be done in her before she felt it, I took her by the ribs with my good hand and she looked over her shoulder. “Hit me,” she said. “Come on.”

  The light behind us colored my fist. Her hair went flying and her face went down and I kept hitting her and hitting her until she stopped talking.

  —

  No sun yet. But it was warm out and the woods were beginning to brighten. My body was covered in chiggers and ticks. I pulled up my pants leg and it looked like I had scales. Her swollen face was a mound of putty painted in generous dark layers. Bruises from my own hands dotted her neck and arms and side and legs. Marks of my own teeth on top of the hogs’. The pain of light fired into my temple like a nail gun. I must’ve gotten up and then fallen down, because when I w
oke up again I was in the truck riding beside her.

  “Get out,” she said. “We’re here.”

  I saw where we were: my parents’ house. Her face looked even worse. “You need to get help,” I said.

  “We can’t be seen together.”

  “Where you going to go?”

  “Give me forty bucks,” she said. “I’ll get a room at the Knight’s Inn and we can meet there later.”

  I handed her two twenties from my wallet.

  —

  The kitchen smelled like burnt toast. I didn’t see Mom at first, even though she was sitting right there at the table. It seemed like she’d been waiting for this moment and now here it was and she didn’t know what to say.

  “Foodville’s been calling for you,” she said. “Where’ve you been?”

  “I moved out like you told me to.”

  “I told you nothing of the sort,” she said.

  “I got another job. You can’t yell at me anymore.”

  “I never yell at you. Are you all right? Look at you.”

  “Fuck Foodville. They can go fuck themselves. I do what I want. They should’ve figured that out by now. You too.”

  “My boy,” she said. “Please sit down.”

  I opened the fridge and she told me to take what I wanted. I looked in, then punched the door shut. “I don’t want any of that,” I said.

  Dad moved into the kitchen doorway, gripping his lower back. “He been sleeping with that slut,” he said, talking to Mom but looking at me. “That’s where he been. Can’t you smell it on him?”

  Mom tried stopping me but she couldn’t. She cried for me to quit. I had pushed my father to the floor and he was lying there yelling.

  “After everything we done give you,” he said.

  “You call this everything?” I stepped over him into the living room. “Take a look around.” He wouldn’t, so I helped him. “This lamp,” I said, and threw it. “This coffee table,” I said, and dumped it.

  “What do you want?” my mother said. “You’re my boy. What do you want? I’ll do anything.”

  She was the only one in our little world holding shit together, and I couldn’t face her. “Throw it all away,” I said. “Flush it.”

  “I won’t let you,” she cried.

  Dad lay there in the mess I’d made. “If I get up I’ll kill your ass,” he said.

  “That’s exactly your problem,” I said. “You can’t.”

  “I sure will.”

  “Let me help you.” I pulled him by the arm and dragged him around the room. He seemed so small, like a toy dad. Mom was begging. When I realized he actually couldn’t get up, I let him go.

  “Call the cops,” he told my mom.

  I could see his heart hammering in his chest. It was a crazy hammer. “What?” I said. “For me not kicking your ass? Make sure you hide your weed before they get here.”

  I slammed the front door so hard the storm glass fell out and shattered on the front stoop. The dealer boy stood in his yard and watched me walk down the driveway. I sensed his attention. Down the road a ways I figured he’d stopped staring, but when I turned around he was still there.

  I walked for miles through fields and scrub forest to the Knight’s Inn. A lot of it was creek land, and my pants were soaked by the time I got there. A truck was parked between two yellow lines on the new asphalt; it wasn’t hers. A few sedans were lined up in front of other rooms. I didn’t want to ask or knock or let anybody notice me, so I went over to the wooden fence around the dumpsters, pushed the chained doors apart and squeezed through.

  I crouched against the slats, sweat stinging my eyes. The sun was getting high, no shade anywhere. A couple cars came. In one of the dumpsters I found a pizza box and ate the crusts. I reconsidered knocking on some doors but decided not to listen to myself anymore. When I heard another car turning in, I peeked out and watched a guy park. He walked up and knocked on a door. It opened and he went in. I wiped my face with my shirt, then held it over my nose and mouth to keep out the stench of baking garbage. I waited for so long before the guy came out with a girl. They stood around the hood of his car, smoking and talking, just a couple that had nothing to do with me.

  —

  The sun touched the treetops and I hitched a ride out of town with a man who asked if I believed in aliens. When I said I didn’t know, he unwrapped a stick of gum, folded it into his mouth and chewed it for a while before swallowing it.

  “Everybody says yes or no,” he said.

  “Everybody but me,” I said. When we got to the foot of Nitro I told him to drop me off.

  “Only if you say yes or no,” he said.

  “I already told you.”

  He slowed onto the shoulder and we rolled to a stop. “That’s what I thought,” he said. “No yes, no no.”

  —

  I took the woods. Each time I dropped into a hollow I lost my directions and got turned around. At a rocky overhang with cool dirt beneath it, I lay down and fell asleep. When I woke up it was dark as a rat snake.

  Quartz jutted along a ridge like broken spine and I followed it up to the inn. Over the front field, the clouds smeared the sky and passed beneath a cut of moon heading west. A hallway light was on. No police tape anywhere.

  He wasn’t on the porch where I’d left him. But the plates of possum bones were.

  In the barroom, I turned on the lights and lit the place up. I searched under the tables and behind the bar and in the kitchen but nobody was there, so I went to the next floor up and walked down the long hallway, every single door wide open, and realized I could go into whichever room I wanted. It was a strange feeling, such freedom. I went to the door at the end of the hall. Arnett’s bedroom. A rifle lay across the sheets, but otherwise there was nothing except the same dead animals.

  Hearing something downstairs, I grabbed the rifle, went back down to the bar and shut out the lights, took a stool and steadied the rifle in my lap. Listening. I thought to check for a bullet in the chamber and flicked a lighter at it. I heard footsteps outside in the grass. Then a bright beam shot through a slit in the blinds. Then the footsteps again, now on the porch boards.

  In the voice of someone who knew what he was doing, who was supposed to be here, I said, “Who is it?”

  I almost believed it was just Wesley coming to check on things. When he stepped inside, I’d show him the rifle and explain that I was guarding his place. I’d tell him to sit down, have a beer, the tap’s open. Draw you one and get a seat. He would ask me what was wrong. He’d say I didn’t look like the kind of guy to hurt anybody. Then Jennifer would walk into the room and say, He’s not.

  Do you know what growing up means? It means learning to beat a woman. Trying to kill a man. Posting up at a worn-out palace with a loaded gun and waiting to deal with the consequences of what you’ve done.

  2

  The oak trees in the center of Bordon turn silver in the wind. Streetlamps blink on as another thunderstorm flashes the horizon. The pawnshop that used to be the antique shop along the square is closing; a shirtless man pulls in the sidewalk chalkboard, its slogan, You Lost It We Got It, smearing and running. The stoplight swings, turns red and a car runs right through it as the librarian watches, standing there by a shelf of free books. She stomps the wheel-lock open and rolls the cart back inside. A slinking cat pours off the top of a trash can and runs into the street, the same car missing it by inches.

  Carol drives north up 231. Leaving the town limits, she glances over and spots a pack of hounds standing in the field. A practice hunt, this time of year. The hunter has parked his Tacoma on the shoulder. He drops the tailgate, opens the cage and calls for them with a two-fingered whistle when she steers around him. Rain slashes the road, then her windshield. A few miles farther a lane peels off to the left with a row of low-income ranch houses sinking into the earth. The last one is hers. She pulls into the driveway, gets out, eyes heavenward, and asks where her boy went off to this time.

  A turkey
vulture glides over her house in the oncoming gale and then it’s gone, pulling more clouds and rain along behind it. “An omen,” she says out loud. Lightning flares, capturing each iridescent drop in its moment of falling. She remembers summer storms, but none like this.

  The vulture leaves Carol below, slipping upward in a warm whipstream over pastures and forests and fields toward the ridge, the foothills dipping and rising and rolling, streams and train tracks crossing and racing one another, flying higher until the town of Bordon is a spot of mold in the earth’s green carpeting.

  The vulture shelters in a tree-hole before the storm crashes in. Finally, with the sky opening, the rain easing, it flies again. Sensing something at the top of the ridge, it circles, finds a towering dead pine and takes roost in the bare branches. A figure in the woods below. The bird turns its head, helmeted in red scalded scar-flesh, toward the scent of carrion.

  Inside Larry’s Hickory Honky Tonk, Jones rests an elbow along the copper bar. He’s got Hank moaning through the old cathedral-shaped jukebox. When tears come down, like falling rain. Quarters bulge out his pants pocket and he’s patting them to the beat of the song. It’s happy hour, not late at all, but outside the rain’s pouring down. You’ll toss around, and call my name. Water gushes over the back windows. Out there, Larry has a makeshift marina, the dock made from planks and barrels, enough space for a couple bass boats. There’s also a spot for the pontoon he used to own; it sat in the water and served as the outdoor stage that Jones and his band used to play on. They packed this place during the summer months. But that’s not the deal anymore. Tonight the listening room’s empty, and it’s a goddamn shame—everybody staying home because of a little flash flood warning. Back in the day, folks braved tornadoes to hear Jones Young play.

  The tour with Marshall Mac ended on a low note, the band hungry and tired, Jones doing all the driving. After they’d played their last gig in Ohio, he drove Jerry and Matt back to their girlfriends’ houses in central Virginia and decided to take his time getting back south to Ashland, his old home place. He traveled around for a few days in the Econoline, gigging at dives to prove to himself he could still do it. That’s what he did all through high school. And compared to the big rooms he opened for Marshall Mac in, it’s what he prefers. The van’s paid off and he’s been writing his own songs. They’re good, people say. About to finish another one soon. Who needs a band anyway?