Nitro Mountain (27 page)

Just the rising and falling of his cursive script made me want to see him again. I knew the nice curling tattoos on his skin but never thought he could be as neat as them. And he was. In this unbelievable handwriting he said he was in for good. We would never see each other again.
I mean you could come see me,
he wrote,
but we won't really see each other, so I'm not putting you on my visitation list. So actually you can't come see me
. Then he asked if I couldn't just get over everything that happened—
he
had—and we could start loving and trusting each other again. He needed somebody to write with. He gave me his jail number, if I ever wanted to respond. He wasn't going anywhere.

I kept that number and the jail's address. Never wrote back to him while I was in the hospital. They wouldn't have sent it. But that day before work, in bed after Don, I started thinking about Arnett's letter and how scared he must be. Or how pissed. There was responsibility here, and it was mine. I needed to follow through with it. I wobbled Don-legged to the drugstore and bought envelopes and stamps, then asked the cashier if I could have a piece of printer paper out of his printer. “I'm trying to write my boyfriend in jail.”

“That's so sweet,” he said.

“Can I use your pen too?”

I didn't want to write in the store. The music. The lights.

The rough surface of the trash-can lid outside made the lines I wrote look shaky. I told Arnett I'd talked to Wesley, which I hadn't.
Thought you were only getting a few years for violations of such and such. That's what Wesley said. You were at your home defending yourself and whatnot. Out of your mind from the formaldehyde. I've seen it on the news like everybody has—kids dipping joints in the shit. Anybody on a jury will know what that does to your brain.

A man stood in the street in my periphery. I held my hand over the paper and looked. I hadn't slept at all the night before. The guy was a mirage, whisking away like steam when a car drove through him. That's when I knew I'd better make it quick. The man was Arnett.

And what about probation? How about bail? By the way, how is your stomach feeling? I really am sorry about all that.

I stuffed it in an envelope, signed the top left with a heart dotting my
i
. I began to put my new street address below, but even though he was still locked up, I decided not to. Instead I used Ball Breakers'. Then I filled out a form at the post office that directed my mail from the pool hall to me.

At home my mailbox was nailed above my downstairs neighbor's. I checked it every day before I went to work. The day his reply arrived, I opened it standing right there in the sun. That same unbelievable handwriting. He didn't sign his name. Only his number.

From then on I got one every other day, more and more letters in the neat cursive. His message was always the same as the first:
You are the love of my life, nobody in this world understands me like you do
. Stuff like that. It gave me the creeps. But then I read it again, because it's nice to be the center of somebody's universe. Forget what I said about loneliness. It was an amazing feeling to be forgiven, to be needed.

Anyway, like he said, I owed him. I did.

We knew we'd never see each other again and that made it easier. Besides me as his queen and the problems of jail—never enough food, too cold, too hot, never dark enough at night—he didn't say much in his letters. Mostly a lot of begging me to promise I was his. I wrote back and said yes. What else did he have?

And then his letters stopped. They just stopped.

Have you ever been locked up? I was. For two days on a weak claim that I was behind some of Arnett's sex videos, which is about the only illegal thing I
didn't
do. Though I did like it, I'll admit to you. When the court-appointed lawyer proved I wasn't involved with that, they let me fly on the drug stuff.

But not without a serious talking-to from the judge, a man just a little older than me with the eyes of a wanter. “I want to not hear anything else about you,” he told me. “You. You. Not even a speeding ticket. Ever again. Never be here.”

That scared me right out of town, really. But I was also scared that Arnett was going to make bail before the conviction date. Crossing the state line seemed like a smart thing to do.

Letters had fallen off the bus I took, and all it said on the side was
OUND
.

The station was in small little Ashland, by the abandoned Wal-Mart building. The back of the lot was full of old buses in disrepair. Better buses idled single file between the sidewalk and the traffic cones, destination signs above their windshields. One said Kingsport.

Arnett and I used to make trips down to the Tri Cities. The Hillbilly Bermuda Triangle. We were transporting what he called Robot, a mixture of heroin and meth, and we felt good about the dynamics of the product. We traveled a lot of it in the spring, the hillsides blushing like baby cheeks. In Bristol we stopped at what looked like a garage to load the truck with gutted pinball machines, stuffed to their limit with Robot, then headed over to Johnson City and Kingsport, making the rounds to a few different bars, dropping off the machines and making bank.

We didn't drink on those trips. Arnett said we had to stay clear. I'd get the shakes so bad, but I pushed through and we made all the deliveries. Arnett knew everybody. I just stood there behind him like a smiling statue. Some of them were the nicest folks you ever met. They gave us beds in their houses. Fed us dinners. Coffee in the morning. Kingsport was the prettiest, with its open river and safe mountains. The downtown was like a cradle. It made me feel like everything was okay. Arnett was suspicious of that feeling, but I loved it. We ate a couple times at Ball Breakers. It sounded like they were always hiring. I marked it as a place to go, if I ever had to run.

I shared the front seat of the bus with a lady who'd just got out of a shelter for broken women. She was a sweet round toy who went by the name of Diana. Bandages over her wrists and no hands. We sat together and watched the night race at us headlong. I didn't mention her hands, the lack of them, but she brought it up. Said she was washing dishes one night when her husband came behind her and fed each one, fingernails first, into the garbage disposal.

I rested a hand on her shoulder.

She kept talking like she didn't notice. “My lawyer proved my husband had sharpened the blades or whatever in advance, so it showed premeditation. But I don't think that's true. He never meditated. It was passionate.”

I asked why he'd done it and she said, “He saw me touching his car in the driveway. He'd just washed it and polished it. That's why he done it. He just couldn't get the idea out of his head of my dirty hands all over his new car. It was a new Ford Focus.”

“Honey,” I said, “nobody's allowed to cut off anybody's hands, not over a Focus.”

“Mine you can,” she said. “He worked his whole life for that car.”

The bus let her off at some gas station, where not a single light was on in the parking lot. The driver asked if she had somebody coming to pick her up.

“Eventually,” she said.

Ball Breakers hired me like the day I got there, which was lucky. Probably because of Amanda, who I ended up ditching. And now I was a sorry-ass country song, thinking of the used-to-bes, remembering when, etcetera. Working this register. Just the words
green grass
would get my chin going. I never saw anybody, except for all those dudes playing pool. And their frosted girlfriends. And Don, of course, who smiled at me with pieces of leftovers in his teeth that his wife—yes, of course—packed and sent to work, even though we made our own food here.

I figured Arnett had got convicted. That's why he hadn't been writing me letters.

So I was standing there making change, bound to miscalculate something every other time, when Don walked up the stairs from the billiard room swinging his big hairy arms. “Mind mopping up a mess in the ladies' room,” he said, “if you're not doing anything? Thanks.” He shot me in the chest with his pointer finger.

I went down and dodged between the tables and through the noise of men drinking beer and betting and laughing. Loud radio rap-country from the ceiling speakers. A guy I didn't know put a cue in front of me like an arm at a tollbooth and nodded at a guy in jeans bending over to break in front of us. The triangle exploded. One solid and one stripe fell in at the same time in opposite corners. “Choose which you want,” he said to the guy who held me up. “You can have it either way.”

The cue lifted and I dodged through the crowd to the closet. I filled a yellow bucket on wheels with hot water and bleach, stuck the mop in and pushed it across the floor and into the ladies' room. It wasn't so bad and could've been cleaned up in less than a smoke break, but I wanted to take my time.

Don came in while I was down on one knee and reaching the mop head back beneath the toilets, trying to get it all up.

“That's good enough,” he said. Now that he was in here, I could feel my panties riding up behind and showing. “I didn't mean for you to take all night. We'll deep clean it when we close.”

I pulled the mop toward me and went to stand.

“Stay,” he said. “Good girl.”

I did, out of hatred of him I stayed kneeling on one knee and bent over, holding the mop in my hands. He probably expected me to get up and say something sharp and walk away. But I stayed, letting him look at it, until he told me to move. He was going to feel bad for doing it when I didn't say anything back.

“Ah, Jennifer,” he said. “I'm just playing with you. Come on, get up, I'm just messing around. Don't make me feel like I'm making you do things you don't want to.” In the mirror, he flicked his dick through his jeans.

Why hadn't I just figured it out for myself? I called information and got connected to the Ashland County Regional Jail. A voice gave me a choice of extensions to hit and I finally guessed the right one: 5 for Records. Arnett Atkins? The lady said she'd check, came back on and said, “Left eight days ago.”

“But he told me he was in there for longer,” I said. “Like forever. That's what he said.”

“I don't know what he told you,” she said. “But he had a morning discharge on, let's look here, the fourteenth. Bail.”

“Well, where'd he go? You know what he's gonna do to me?”

“I can connect you with the magistrate if you'd like to make a file.”

I hung up and kept my hand over the receiver like it might lash back at me. But then I got this strange feeling of excitement. Couldn't believe I hadn't thought to call. Something so damn simple. I didn't think this was how I was going to feel. Now I could tell him about Don. But no, don't start that stuff.

He was out, that was enough. The one person who'd never judged me. The one person who'd ever forgiven me.

Back home I took a shower and got into bed. Clean skin between clean sheets. I missed my bed smelling like bodies, like sweat, like dirt, like him. My scars had mostly healed, except on my shoulder. You couldn't really tell what they were anymore. I threw off the sheets and looked down at them. They could've been anything. Birthmarks. Poison ivy. Except for that graze in my shoulder, just a shade pinker than my nipples, sewn shut like lips.

I knew he was to blame for my whole situation, and for the longest time I'd hated him. That's what had sent me going after him like I did. We were always drinking and we didn't know how to stay away from each other and keep from fighting. I'll go ahead and admit it: I was a big problem. I loved fighting. But I was past all that now.

I woke up with my face in the pillow. The morning was noisy with birds in the bushes out front. It was this big bush that Don wanted me to trim but I never got around to it. I was already slacking on my duties as a tenant.

What Arnett wrote, that he'd never see me again—I felt okay with that at the time. Maybe in normal society you're not worried every day. But when there's nothing wrong, what's the point?

I left to go to work and birds scattered out of the bush.

I'd given myself time to stop for coffee and was in no rush. The little strip of downtown started with Annie's Antiques, then Carl's Café, then Mike's Music & Pawn. Carl's wasn't so bad with the smell of fresh coffee grinding and the shiny wood floors. I took a seat at the counter. Reece was working today. He had hands that always moved toward you. He took a mug hanging from a hook with a dozen others and set it in front of me.

“To go,” I said.

“It's ten cents cheaper if you stay,” he said. “And we got the paper for you and everything. And
I'm
here.”

“I'll pay twenty cents extra,” I said. “It's to go.”

Reece put the mug back like it was something he'd bought just for me and now didn't know what to do with it. He was younger than me. At the small college studying remedial stuff with plans of working in forensics. If he knew half my story he wouldn't have even been trying. I walked across the street with my steaming cup. Fog on the hillsides beyond the buildings. I noticed something in the pawnshop window, an electric bass. It looked familiar. I stopped. That beat-up headstock. But it couldn't be. Or could it?

Leon, is that you?

People come and people go.

Let him go.

I clocked in, cleaned up and at noon I unlocked the doors and took my spot behind the register. The lunchtime drinkers crawled in and then the early-bird losers. From now until two, beer was only a dollar and all the games were free. The sign said so. You wouldn't believe the scum this deal brought in. And then he showed up.

Him. For real.

He was keeping his head down but I recognized how that body moved, forcing itself forward. He stopped in front of my register and looked at me like he was trying to think of the best way to describe me.