Nitro Mountain (4 page)

We were walking up the stairs to her front door when the blinds in the picture window broke open, then snapped shut. I stopped at the top step and asked who was in there.

“Why so nervous?”

I wanted to tell her that I was fine with coming inside tonight, especially since I needed a place to stay. I would do it as long as I didn't have to get to know her. It was about Jennifer. “Is somebody else here?” I said.

“It's just my dog. He crashes the blinds when he gets excited. Nobody ever comes over. Until they do.”

I slept soundly for the first time since Jennifer had ditched me. Rachel's boxer was there on the bed where she'd been, twisting on its back, all muscle and muzzle, snorting and sneezing. The smell of bacon came into the room in the dog's coat and made me think of my folks' place. I should've told them I wasn't coming home. But I was old enough. I didn't have to call anybody.

Rachel bounded onto the bed with the dog and they both covered me in kisses and paws and fingers, like we were actually lovers.

“Food's almost done,” she said. “Come on.” She kissed my cheek and stood up over me, her nylon nightgown opening, and on the lower cheek of her ass I saw a tattoo of lips, three little words printed under it.

“That,” I said, and touched it.

“Kiss my ass.”

“Let me.”

She stepped off the bed and said, “I gotta,” holding herself. The thought of her going in there to do that sent a rush through my groin, but I slid into my jeans and walked down the hallway to the kitchen, slowing past the bathroom to hear her pissing.

Over eggs and bacon I told her, “They're up to some bullshit at Misty's.”

“I didn't know you were a detective.”

“No. I mean, really.” The black coffee steamed in her bright kitchen. By the time we'd finished talking about Misty's, what I'd seen, it was cold and untouched. “Drive me over there and I'll prove it,” I said.

“Don't you think it's best to sometimes let things be?”

“Sometimes, yeah. I just got to pick up a couple cords.”

“If you'll leave it at that. I don't want to get involved in this nonsense.”

“You might already be.”

“They're not even open yet,” she said. “Not for another few hours.”

“Hey,” I said, getting an idea. I threw the coffee back, took her to the bedroom and kicked the dog out.

The day was the kind of clean and clear that almost made the weather seem warm. The top branches of a twisting white oak caught the light as we turned onto the road to town. The bare mountainside was the color of a deer. She clicked the radio to some station playing opera. I never liked that music, didn't understand it, but this time a man's voice wailed out an endless lonesome cry, and I knew exactly what he was saying. He was just some lost dude, down on his luck and looking for love. All he had to his name was a busted heart. And that's all he needed. I turned the volume up, closed my eyes and listened.

She parked in front of the veranda, the front tires butting against a pallet.

“Careful,” I said.

“
You
be careful.”

The pub door sucked shut behind me. Pine walls slick and blackened, a low dropped ceiling with fluorescent lights. “Anybody here?” I called toward the kitchen. “Just getting my shit.”

Next to the cash register Bob's front half lay stretched across the bar. His head rested on a folded arm while the other reached out in front of him, as if ready to take payment. The greased hairdo flopped over dead. His dentures had slid halfway out of his mouth. I walked past him and gathered my cords. Didn't take but a second, and then I slid back to the pinball machines, past buzzers and flashing lights and into the ladies' room and the sharp stink of urine and bleach.

A little black thing like a clip-on microphone was stuck outside the toilet up around the back of the bowl with a kind of lens that looked like a water droplet. A thin black cable snuck down to the floor and into the wall. In case somebody was watching, I grabbed some toilet paper so I'd have an excuse and took it to the men's room. I stood around for an ass-wiping minute and then stepped out like nothing was wrong, just a bass player come to get his usual forgottens.

Bob was where I'd left him, but now he was on his other side, the mirror image of a minute ago. The heater hanging from the ceiling coughed a blast of dry air into my hair and poured out rolling fumes of oil heat.

When I got back outside, I gasped as if I'd been holding my breath the whole time. The man with the tattoo was leaning against Rachel's car. “You,” he said. “What's everybody call you?” He was staring at the ground beside me.

I lifted the cables in my good hand to show him why I'd been in there, but then I saw what I still held in my left hand: the roll of toilet paper.

He looked at my face. “Now I'm interested,” he said.

“Oh,” I said. “Nothing.”

“Really?” He walked up and, without taking his eyes from mine, grabbed the toilet paper. “Because that looks like my double ply.”

Back in the car, Rachel and I kept quiet. It seemed darker even though there were still no clouds. Or maybe there was just one big one that had slugged in to cover everything.

“Well, that was weird as hell back there,” she said.

“What'd he say to you?”

“Nothing, really. I'm talking about what you did. The toilet paper.”

“How well do you know him?”

“Met him the other night,” she said. “First time. Swear.”

“You know what's going on at that place?”

“Those guys are weirdos, straight up. But I think you're making a big deal out of nothing.”

“Let me tell you what I saw.”

“But I won't believe you, right?”

“You decide,” I said, and then told her about the little thing on the toilet bowl, that guy in the closet with his iPhone. “They were watching. Or whatever. Somebody ought to call the cops on him.”

“Then where would you play? Where would we drink?”

I thought about that. She had her points. “It's just nasty,” I said. “What he's doing in there, it's wrong.”

“Somebody bring in the string section. Why you think he asked
you
into the closet? He probably thought you came off as the kind of guy who'd like that sort of thing.”

“Well, I'm not.”

“You sure about that?”

After we went back to her place to pick up my bag, I asked her to drop me off at my sister's. Krystal lived in a white-and-tan apartment complex called River Creek. The name gave me a headache. Why not just call it Alive Dead? When Rachel pulled away, before I'd made it up onto the sidewalk, she blew me a kiss without looking.

I heard talking through Krystal's door, set my stuff down outside on the walkway against the wall and wondered how I could have forgotten. It was Bible study night. She'd begged me to come many times, especially the morning she picked me up from the hospital.

This Bible group wasn't the usual do-gooders, and that's what bothered me the most. It was a collection of tattooed freaks and pierced punks. Goth Christians. One of them stepped outside to smoke while I was still looking over the railing down at the parking lot. Fog covered everything and the lights at the entrance had rings around them in the haze.

They fed me dinner that night, vegan casserole. One guy kept farting and making people laugh. Everybody asked me personal questions, which I answered honestly, which surprised me, then pissed me off, and when I excused myself from the table to go crash on the couch, a chubby girl asked if she could pray for me.

“If you got to,” I said.

The next day I went back to my parents' place.

“Who's breaking in?” Dad called from his bedroom.

“Just me.”

“Go ahead and take it all.”

There was a TV in my room that picked up a couple stations, and the days just dragged by. I knew I was going to need money for a lawyer. My first hearing, to set the date for the trial, was in a few days, and I figured it might be good to have somebody even for that. Walk in already lawyered up and shit.

Jones was a veteran of drunk driving charges. One time when he got pulled over, he stepped out of his van, forgetting there was a fifth in his lap, and sent the whiskey splashing all over the cop's feet. He got out of that one because the lawyer proved he'd done nothing to get pulled over in the first place. The attorney's name was Wesley, who everybody called Greasy Wesley because of the unbelievable help he'd given them. He was just the slime I needed.

I took the phone out of my dad's room and called Jones. He gave me the number before I even asked.

“Who you calling now?” my dad said through my door.

“Quit listening,” I said.

“You'll need to quit talking for that to happen.”

I turned the TV up and dialed. Wesley's secretary answered and talked me through a few questions about what I was facing. “Can you turn down your TV?” she said. “It's difficult to hear you.”

“No,” I said, “I actually can't.”

She finally transferred me to Wesley, and throughout the conversation he kept going on about, “Are you Darrel? You sure this isn't Darrel? Because you sound just like him.” I said I wasn't Darrel, didn't know who Darrel was, and that this was the first time anything like this had happened to me. He said he'd see me in a couple days. “And one more thing,” he said. “Bring half the money with you. I'll need the first half. And I'm real glad you're not Darrel.”

I didn't have a quarter of the first half, but I said okay. Then I called the shelter again to see if they had any available shifts. The director, a pear-shaped man who wore loafers, asked how I was doing and said they'd been missing me. I felt the same around him as I did at my sister's place. He said he'd check the schedule and call me back. I called Jones again and begged for more gigs.

“It's no problem,” he said. “We got a residency kind of thing going at Misty's. You're welcome anytime. We just figured that, you know, with your arm and all.”

“I'll be there,” I said. “My arm loves it.”

The shelter didn't call back. We ended up playing a Thursty Thursdays gig the night before my first court date. It began at happy hour, some regulars just off work buying one-dollar bottles of Busch from the spray-painted refrigerator. After only a few songs, country standards with the same slow, swinging beat, pain splintered through my arm and down into the base of my spine.

I ordered a beer through the stage-right mic and when it came I chased down some painkillers with it. The mixture worked a little bit but mostly just fucked me up. The pain was still there, only now it seemed to be something on the outside of my body, a growth you could see. I got this idea it had a personality, that it and me were two different things.

Strumming over the muted strings of his acoustic, Jones counted us into one of his own songs about a girl and a dog. The feel was loose, but he made it interesting with a crosspicking pattern. The way it was written sounded like a letter. He was singing straight to some woman who'd left him: “It's hard work, keeping up an old house, with the memory of your hands and the taste of your mouth.” It went on moping like that for a couple more verses—“I mowed the yard and made it look like new. Ain't it strange to see all this beauty without you”—then he got silly with it and I could see some smiles breaking out in the crowd. “Thank God I got a dog,” he sang, “to cheer me up when I'm down. It makes me laugh when he gets a bath and goes running around.” He kept on like that, really hamming it up, and I'd never seen such happiness in Misty's. He ended it by turning the lyrics unexpectedly back toward the song's beginning: “My dog is my savior. He's pretty stinky too. If it wasn't for him, every song I sing would be about you.”

The crowd was clapping and I was slapping the body of my bass. “Jones Young, y'all!” I said into my mic, and a few people in the back whistled.

“Cheers, y'all,” Jones said. “I been married once and divorced twice. Here's some Waylon.”

And just when I was back into the bass, cruising and thumping along through the songs, just when I thought my buzz was here and could never end, in floated Jennifer. She hovered there bobbing her head along to the beat—my bass beat, the beat I was beating—and it didn't look like she'd seen me yet. My pain pulsed. Her hair was longer now and that was strange. It swung with her turning, bending, leaning. She was moving around like she was after something.

We were on our last song when Rachel showed up.

“Here's a situation,” I said.

“What's wrong?” Jerry said. His shoulders were raised to a ride cymbal swing. “You look sick.”

“My arm.”

“All right,” he said, “let's end this, boys.”

Rachel came straight for the stage, doing some loopy dance with knees bent and her ass moving behind her like she was trying to fit into jeans tighter than the ones she was already wearing. Jennifer was watching her, then the Daffy Duck dude stepped over and talked into her ear. We tagged the end of the song and Jerry drove it right into the ground with a cymbal crash. He was a punk drummer and thought that gave him the right.

“Done,” he said. “Let's go get drunk.”

Rachel had danced right up to the stage, Jennifer still watching her. I shaped up my face, giving a handsome tight-jawed listen to what she was saying. She asked if she could get me a drink. On her. I said no and kept my periphery open. “They give the bands free Natties,” I said.

“I
said,
can I get you a drink?”

I could see Jennifer over at the bar playing with Daffy, her hands everywhere. She talked in a loud, flat tone, and I knew she was faking it. She was calling for me.