Nitro Mountain (7 page)

That cast eventually came off but the bone was still fucked. The nurse that sawed the plaster apart told me to relax and wait to see how it healed. If I tried to push things, the bass might be off my shoulders forever.

That spring I did a lot of walking without ever knowing where I was going. I'd follow the train tracks for miles, stopping to inspect various dead critters. Once I found a turkey vulture trapped inside a deer's ribcage, the bones picked clean and the spine arching over the bird with the ribs bending down around it. I couldn't understand how it ever got itself into such a mess, but there it was, totally stuck. I tried to push the skeleton over, but a piece of bone had wedged between the rail and a tie. The vulture growled out a stream of puke and let off a gassy stink. I kicked and pulled until the skeleton broke free, and the vulture hobbled out, its wing broken and hanging loose at its side. “Go!” I said. “You're free. Get!” But it just kind of stayed there, staring at me through the side of its head.

Other times I'd sit on the guardrail of the highway and watch the vehicles blow by. I'd hope for somebody to stop, but nobody ever did.

One day I decided I wasn't coming home until I found a job. There weren't that many places to look, and I needed something close enough to walk to. I didn't get far before my shirt was plastered to my back. No breeze in this bowl of a town. The sky was the color of steam and I was careful not to stay out in it too long. The road I was walking down narrowed and cars went swerving and honking past me. I dropped into Foodville for the AC and hung out in the front near the smokes until this man asked if I needed help finding something.

“Yeah,” I said. “A job.”

“Aisle six,” he said.

I looked in that direction, and he said, “Just kidding. Follow me.”

We went into his office. He talked while I looked out the two-way mirror; none of the customers knew I was watching. The next day he put me on bagging.

I worked part-time, not enough to save anything, but Dad got pissed when he heard I'd found work and asked if I thought I was better than he was. I did, but I didn't tell him that. He bought dime bags from our neighbor that stunk like ammonia and spent his working hours with a cloud of blue smoke above his head. I almost asked him if he'd heard about Rachel until one day he did it for me.

“I heard Carol talking?” he said. “About that girl you lost?”

“Which one?”

He nodded off, and then shook his head, either to wake himself up or simply to disagree with the sudden, unwelcome consciousness. Choked by the smell of the chair he slumped in, I asked him to tell me more. He clicked his tongue as if trying to decide whether to play a hand or fold.

“Forget it,” I said.

“I almost did.”

Summertime, and our yard was going wild. The mower was where I'd left it, stuck in its own track, and I figured the rabbits had built a little bunny kingdom under there by now. I kept my job at Foodville because the AC was reliable.

I started a beard, didn't trim it, kept it rough, and looked at myself in windows whenever I got the chance. My left arm still hurt when I tried to straighten or flex it, the muscle withering and the whole thing shriveling. It looked like somebody had accidentally put the wrong part on my body, and I made sure to turn so I could only see my right side. I pretended I didn't know who I was and rated myself on a scale of one-to-ten handsomeness. When I was honest I never made it past five. But if I glanced in the perfect direction, my teeth spreading below that darkening mustache, my right arm strong and straight, I could almost see myself as somebody worthy of Jennifer.

One morning after I'd just unlocked the grocery's doors, I was looking in the window and thinking I might be moving into a six when this girl comes up to the other side of the window. I was looking at myself, and she steps right into my reflection. I didn't recognize her at first. She was wearing a hoodie, long jeans, work boots. It was ninety damn degrees outside. The store hadn't been open ten minutes. She walked in and squinted around.

It was Jennifer, heading for the dairy wall.

A man old enough to be her dad came in behind her and stood in the doorway. He wasn't even wearing a shirt. His chest was dark and at first it looked like he had some kind of wing tattoo below his collarbone, but then I saw it was a rug of hair. He asked if he could come in, and before I said no, he did. I realized it was a chest full of tattoos, of chest hair, or small feathers, or flames. A hand-done job, that was all I could really tell. The hair hanging from his head was real, and on his neck was Daffy Duck. Arnett Atkins had arrived.

Not a whole lot had changed for me since last winter, and those moments at Misty's felt far gone and up close all at once. Rachel hadn't yet floated to any surface. She occupied a small place in my mind, like some bad dream that wasn't possible to confront. But Arnett—had he heard I was the one who'd turned him in?

Jennifer was reaching for something high on the wall.

“The fuck you looking at?” Arnett said. He leaned in, and I could smell beer on his breath, a gamey odor from his flesh.

“That girl,” I said. “Nothing.”

“Who are you?” he said. “And why?”

I didn't answer.

“That's what I thought. I classify this situation NFI: Not Fucking Important. Mommy's little hunchy boy.”

I straightened up. “What'd you just say?”

“Put down your feathers, banty.” Arnett's eyes wouldn't keep still. They were wet and he pulled a rag from his pants and wiped them. He was taking in everything except me, his jugular pulsing through the skin of his neck. He held a hand in front of his face, stared into his palm, brought it to his mouth, licked it. He smiled and revealed a dark space in the side of his mouth. Teeth were missing since I'd last seen him. His bottom ones were thin and burnt-looking like used matches. All the gold in the back molars, gone. His tongue filled a gap and his eyes rolled back like something was moving inside him. “Let's start over again, okay?” he said. “I'll give you another chance, yes? Here's a better question. What do you want to be?”

“That's deep,” I said.

“Answer the fucking question, hunch.”

Maybe he actually didn't recognize me. “I don't know,” I said.

“That's your problem. You need to make a decision.”

“About what?”

Arnett sucked a finger and cleaned his ear with it. “Your store. Keep an eye on it. Good old workingman boy. You do your job and she'll do mine.”

He went to the bright wall where she stood. She seemed tiny in those baggy clothes, probably his. They talked and he threw his thumb behind his head. She glanced in my direction, then covered her face and turned away. He took her by the shoulder and said something into the hair dangling from her hood and all down her face. She shook her head. Finally he let her go and she walked straight for me over the shining floors I'd mopped that morning before opening.

“Look at you,” I said.

“Look at me.” She kept her head down until she reached my checkout counter. “What the hell'd you just say to him?” She put her hands down on the conveyor belt and it started moving, pulling her closer.

“Find everything you need, ma'am?” I said.

She laughed. She was beautiful. Then she spun away again and the color left her face. Her eyes screwed shut with exhaustion, and lines cracked through her skin. “Listen,” she said, and I turned off the belt. “He told me to tell you to quit thinking what you're thinking.”

“He doesn't know what I'm thinking.”

“But he knows what you want.”

“Who is he to you?”

“He's my…Well.”

Arnett was wandering up the aisle with a quart of milk. I wrote my parents' phone number on the back of a receipt, the numbers crossing over the print of a half-off coupon for hickory-smoked ham hocks. She stuffed the paper into her pocket and said, “What happened to your arm?”

“Call me and I'll tell you.”

She pushed through the door to leave, before the motion sensor had time to swing it open.

There were still sweaty fingerprints on the black rubber belt. Her hands were always damp. It was something I'd forgotten about.

“What's the holdup?” Arnett said, setting the milk where her hands had been.

I turned on the switch. “You want a bag for this, sir?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I'd love a fucking bag.”

I waited days, but she didn't call and I figured I'd freaked her out. Then she did, and she sounded scared, but I told her to hold on for a minute and went into my dad's room. Standing over him, I said, “Your disability came through.” He didn't budge. So far as I could tell, he was free of all worries. Percocet, beer, a couple joints—that's the kind of place that helps you forget you have a wife who'll wipe your mouth clean but won't kiss you goodnight. I stepped over piles of dirty clothes and unplugged the phone he kept on the carpet between his bed and the wall.

I talked to her in my room with the door locked and a pillow over my face to insulate the sound. In bursts of muffled weeping, she told me Arnett was at it again only this time it was even worse. She talked until the phone got hot against my ear. “Jennifer,” I said, “slow down. What exactly's going on?”

“A whole damn lot,” she said. “It's all—I don't know—everything.”

While she was busy not telling me, I heard Mom's tires in the gravel driveway. Car door shutting. Storm door slamming. “Come over,” I said. “Tomorrow.”

She asked where I was living and I told her. “Oh,” she said, “that place.”

I told her we'd have my room to ourselves, with one parent at work and the other in bed. I could hear Mom in the hallway now, dropping her purse and kicking off her shoes. I told Jennifer I'd even pay for the gas, fill up her tank.

“I'll be there early,” she said.

Our connection crackled when the line in my parents' room got plugged in. “I'll see you then,” I said.

She'd hung up by the time Mom was on the line saying, “Hello? Hello? Is somebody there? I can hear you breathing.” She sounded so hopeful, like it might've been someone calling from her past, when she was young and innocent, or from her future, when she would be rescued from this house and these two useless men. I didn't have the heart to let her down, so I just listened. “I know you're there,” she said. “Who are you?”

I couldn't sleep that night, and the next morning I'd barely closed my eyes when I heard Mom calling for me outside. Early sunlight on the floor. Dizzy from getting up so fast, I jumped out the back door and limped and hopped around the house over the gravel. Mom was standing in front of her car and staring at this mutt of a pickup rumbling and crunching into the driveway, a white Chevy cab with a black Ford bed angled behind it. The whole thing rattled in disagreement with itself. Jennifer sat behind the wheel, her hair up in rubber bands just how I liked it.

“Don't even tell me,” Mom said. “I don't need to know.” She got in her car and pulled out around the truck, leaving tracks in the wet morning grass.

Jennifer kicked the door shut and checked in her purse for something. She always did this when she was buying time to think about what to say. Seeing her standing there was like watching the last half-year dissolve. Maybe everything was cool. Here she was, here I was. Nothing different, nothing new. She took a bottle from her purse. It was purple glass without a label, not much bigger than her hand. She shook it at me and said, “This could be the answer.”

I led her inside my dark place. Dad kept the blinds shut, and the window unit in the living room was surrounded with strips of cardboard duct-taped to the glass and covering up any space light might slither through. I usually didn't notice this, but once she stepped through the door it was like I was experiencing the house for the first time. The old kitty litter in the carpet, left over from our dead cat. The smell of Hamburger Helper in the walls. “Sorry,” I said. “I'm moving out soon.”

“Why? You'll just end up right back here.”

“Shh,” I said. “We got to be quiet.” I took her hand and led her down the hallway to my room, shut the door and pushed in the lock.

“We got to be quiet anywhere we go,” she said.

“Where you living? Are you safe?”

It took her a while to get to it. “I'm staying with that guy, Arnett, in an abandoned inn. Right at the top of that stupid mountain.”

“Which one?”

“The stupid one.” She pointed past the wall.

“They're all stupid,” I said. “Why're you out there?”

“Renovating. Nobody knows we're there,” she said. “Nobody even goes up there. It's on Nitro.” She was still wearing her sunglasses, but I could see her right eye was dark and swollen.

“He a lefty?” I said.

“Good thing you're not,” she said, looking at my arm.

“I broke it the night you left me.”

“And it still ain't healed?”

“It keeps breaking.”

“Just like your little heart,” she said.

“It's not funny. I wrecked my truck chasing after you and Greg.”

“Greg,” she said. “He seemed like a good idea at the time. Smart guy, you know?”

“I don't care anymore. Are you okay?”

“We been renovating,” she said. “We can do whatever we want with the building. Nobody gives a shit.”

“How long you been with this guy?”

“Since he lost his job at Misty's. That's about the time we met. He doesn't know how the cops figured out what he was doing. They found cameras. They were, like, in the bathrooms or something.” She looked away when she said it.

“Why the hell'd you follow him up to Nitro?”

“The cameras weren't his. Swears he doesn't know how they got there.”