Nitro Mountain (22 page)

But he is, he is. What he did to Jennifer. That's a large dull thing in the middle of his chest fucking with his breathing.

There's also the other stuff he did, but don't think about that right now—you didn't do it. That's what you got to believe to make it through this. You didn't do a goddamn thing. Why would he have? He had no reason to.

He reaches around on the floor. The full bottle of whiskey he took from Misty's, a fifth of something fancy, is clicking between some beer cans. He picks it up, closes his knees around it, pulls the cork and tosses it out the window. He lifts the kisser to his mouth and listens to the whiskey making its exit music, glugging lower in pitch with every gulp. Din, don, down, done. “Apple juice,” he says. “What if one time Daddy got thirsty and there ain't no more apple juice? What does he do then? Must he go into town? Why must Daddy do these things?”

He backhands his lips. Goddamn this shit's good. Why did anybody ever keep coming to buy his daddy's corn with stuff like this around? Why risk law and decency when you could drive somewhere and steal a bottle like this one right here? The world is a cage full of starving animals that don't realize they can just push the door open. So let's push it open.

He rounds a curve and a mashed-up buck lying in the road comes into the headlights. He has no time to swerve—good thing too, else he'd have thrown his ass off the road—and it thumps beneath him. He drives on with the sound of dragging and the smell of burning meat wafting from the vents.

He stops there in the middle of this county highway on a plateau overlooking blackness. The noise of crickets and cicadas. The car's brights bring out the dead gray of maples and oaks and poplars and telephone poles covered in kudzu and the road ahead of him and the steam rising up off the car's grille. When he gets out, he sees a five-point antler and a duffel-bag-size body, what used to be a body, now just twisted fur and muscles and a stomach split open and spilling chewed grass. He grabs into the neck. His fingers go deep, it's still warm in there, fresh dead, and he slides them back out to inspect the color in the headlights and then wipes around his eyes, painting himself like Bob used to do when they went out. A buck-blood warrior.

The only thing watching him is a barred owl up in a treetop. He doesn't see it, just hears its call. He listens, considering its question:
Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you?

He tears free a piece of flesh, puts it in his mouth and chews. It makes his stomach clench and growl.
I cook for me
.

He speeds off drinking whiskey to wash down the meat. He could jump a fence right now. With the buck's blood around his eyes, he can see things nobody else can or ever has.

The marble eyes of a baby coon flash in the left lane and he crosses the center line to try and hit it, and then the car's rocking and bouncing and a tree crashes into the left side and a ditch of shale and leaves and weeds jumps up at him and throws the car in the air, and he sees the ridge and sky and valley and a life of endless mistakes and stupid ideas on how to make money and then somehow the car lands evenly on all four wheels, right back in the middle of the road.

The engine's still running. Which direction was he going? He would never do anything without a reason to do it. The rearview broke off. He turns and looks for what sounds like footsteps—some stranger coming up on him to see what happened? But it's just his heart. Shit. He reaches down and finds the bottle. It spilled some. Double shit. The left headlight's out and the other one's bent crooked so it looks to him like he's constantly turning, but he's not even moving. He takes a hot splash down his throat to stay clear. She tried to kill him. He should've shot her dead. Left her like that and saved everybody the trouble. She tried to kill him. But he loves her and he could never do that to her, not her, can't even believe what he already did. She even bailed him out when he got spanked with that voyeurism bullshit. He still has yet to be convicted there. Free till then, motherfuckers. Let's make the most of this. He's not hiding anything. There are reasons for what Daddy does. He had a camera in the bathroom. So…fucking…what? There's bigger problems now.

The bottle's gone. He tosses it somewhere. He needs to get back to Jennifer and make sure she's cool.

L
ocked in under double-shoulder seat belts, Ricky and Derek jolt on the Bronco's front bench. They're both chewing dip, spitting into the same paper cup.

When they left Misty's the first time, it was just old Turner in there. They drove ten miles down 231, then turned around and saw the sky glowing. They came tearing back into the lot and found Turner lying there surrounded by a trio of old-timers. One was pouring something from a mug onto Turner's duct-taped mouth and hands while the other pushed at the tape with the rubber end of his cane. “I don't want to touch him,” he said. Ricky bent down and stripped off the tape. “Almost got him!” Turner gasped through his lips. Then Ricky's radio crackled. Arnett was seen driving out of town, not toward the Lookout but heading back on 15 toward Buzzard Hollow Road.

So that's the direction the troopers are rolling now, across the valley and into the mountains. It's stopped raining but the clouds haven't cleared.

“Gets dark out here, huh?” Derek says, cutting the wheel left and leaning into the long turn that begins the steep incline.

“Dangerous too, this fast.”

“You want me to slow down?”

“No. Just don't jerk the wheel again.”

They move through Green Hollow, past the lights of the Shifflett house and on up through this natural disaster of trees and rocks and hills too steep for any four-legged creature to climb. Even a problem for vehicles on the road. Derek makes another hard turn and Ricky's about to say something when they see a headlight.

“That a motorcycle?” Derek says.

“Slow down,” Ricky says. “Give your brights.”

Derek flips the switch and the embankments on either side spring up into cliffs of clay and shale. Up ahead there's a car trying to turn around in the middle of the road, with a buck's bloody head hanging from the grille and a mess of meat dragging beneath. It comes on at a slow speed now and directly into their lights, which are bright enough to show who's driving.

They stop a moment to witness the face of Arnett in the steam, blood smeared all around his eyes and a trail of vomit from his mouth down his chest. As he passes he flicks a cigarette into the Bronco's open window, right onto Derek's lap. Derek smacks it out in short showers of sparks and then they're on the shoulder, trying to turn around while Arnett speeds off.

“Should I have blocked him?” Derek says, getting up to speed.

“Probably. I wouldn't have, though. See if we can't catch up and persuade him off the road.”

A
nything's better than jail. The hollow hallucinatory echoing through the tiled hallways and off the metal-and-concrete cells. The empty sound of doors opening and closing. And the people. Around when Jack ran away, Arnett went in on drunk charges and had this guy named Ray for a cellmate. Ray had one glass eye that made him look confused. Arnett was just twenty when he walked into that cell and saw Ray sitting on the top bunk with his hands inside his jumper.

I lost my eye in a fight, Ray said.

And though Arnett didn't doubt him, he said, Who the fuck asked?

I like to fuck, Ray said.

The guard told Ray to get his hands out of there, then locked the door and went away.

The metal cot hanging from the wall beneath Ray's roost gave Arnett a place to lie down. He woke from a sleep he hadn't had in a long time with Ray shaking his shoulder.

I got a question, he whispered in the dark. You wanna be Mommy or Daddy?

Who the fuck are you? Arnett said.

Ray brought out a toothbrush of melted and sharpened plastic and sliced into Arnett's cheek, releasing the warmth of fresh blood.

Arnett saw that Ray's face had pores the size of needle holes. The glass eye was looking at the ceiling.

I ain't got to answer a single one of your fucking questions, Arnett told him.

But you will.

When the man showed him the toothbrush again, Arnett sat up and pressed back against those cold painted cinderbricks and said, Okay, okay. The two men sat there like overgrown boys playing a bunk-bed game of house. On the flat foam mattress that softened nothing, Arnett's hands were shaking. I'll be Daddy, he said.

Ray leaned toward him, grinned and said, Come here and suck Mommy's dick.

Arnett ain't going back this time.

He tells himself it's not them behind him until he can't anymore. That fucking Bronco's right up his ass. Then the brightest damn lights hit him from behind and the pull-over lights are strobing and spinning and he can't see a goddamn thing for all the steam in front of him and the wall of brightness behind him. What are they trying to do, make this situation more dangerous? Better not think of anything right now besides finding Jennifer and making sure she's all right. Make sure she drank her water. Got to keep going straight. Don't slow down. They'll stop you if you slow down, and then what are you? A cell rat again. Mommy's daddy.

A full beer can under the gas pedal keeps getting in his way. Where'd that come from? Must've been thinking ahead somewhere back there. He lets his foot off, rolls the can toward him and takes it up. The car won't go straight, or maybe it's just him. He brakes for a banked turn ahead and sees faces up in the tree branches, Leon wearing a mask of himself, breath smoking through the mouth hole, Leon lying there on the ground with his arms out flat, Leon flying crookedly like some ungainly bat, Leon staring past everything and trying to understand the dent in his head.

Arnett wipes his eyes and sees his mother in the barn stall, held to the cedar posts by ratchet straps. Deer leg hanging out of her like it was her third leg. Jack buried her in the ridge and Arnett watched him from the woods. Goddamn it. Jack came up to him with the leg. Bend over, son a mine. More weeping than he's used to these days but he can't help it. When he brakes again and looks behind him and sees the Bronco right there, it's hard to believe any of this.