Nitro Mountain (8 page)

“So just to prove he's not up to any illegal shit he breaks into somebody's place.”

“It's his,” she said. “Or used to be his dad's. Whoever owns it's letting him live up there. We even have animals. Dogs, pigs. You know, real animals. It's, like, ours. He's happy. I'm not going to spell it out for you.”

“Maybe I'm missing something. What brought you here to me?”

“You're definitely missing something.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You.”

She took off her glasses. A bag of dark skin cradled a bloodshot eyeball. “I never see anybody,” she said. “Arnett does most of the work on the place. I just sweep things up and stay out of his path. We hooked a keg to one of the old taps, so the downstairs bar is kind of running now. We started it as a business.”

“I thought nobody goes up there.”

“It's in case they do.”

“Does he know you're here?”

“You kidding? Hell no. He thinks I'm running errands. Which I am.”

“Why're you with him?”

“Because. He had what I needed when I needed it. That and he makes me think of somebody I knew one time.” She turned her head away from what she was thinking about and looked out the window. She pushed it up, and heat rolled in like she'd just opened an oven. She lit a cigarette, blew smoke at the screen and tapped her ash onto the sill.

“Does he have a crew?” I said.

“Sure needs one,” she said, and then stopped to consider the idea. “He's working by himself right now. You ever work carpentry?”

“I'm no good,” I said, lifting my hurt arm as far as it would go.

“He needs a few bums he can pay to swing hammers. If you know anybody.”

“Me,” I said.

“Would you do it?”

“Only joking.”

“He probably wouldn't even remember you. He was still high from the night before, that morning we came into the store. Sorry about that. I didn't know you were working there.”

“I'm glad it happened. You need help.”

“You should shave your beard, just to make sure.”

“Like it?”

“Doesn't matter. It's got to go.”

“I'll think about it.”

When she left, I lay facedown on the floor, sniffing where she'd been sitting. I didn't think she actually wanted me working up there, and until I was certain that she did I wasn't planning on shaving or doing much of anything.

I went to Foodville that afternoon but I was hardly there. About an hour before closing, my boss came out of his office. “It wasn't even busy,” he told me, “but you
made
it busy. You had a line an aisle long. You look tired—go get some sleep.”

Mom was already gone to work and I was eating stale cereal from the box when Jennifer knocked. I told her to wait and went to check on my dad. He was drinking beer and didn't look up when I came in.

“Jennifer's here,” I said.

“Send her in.”

“We're going to talk. Alone. You need anything before I close my door?”

“Jennifer'll do. We could all of us,” he said, “just sleep like little puppies together.”

In my room she lifted up her shirt. Scars covered her belly and up toward her breasts. Not surgical-looking, just puckered things that still needed healing. I leaned over and touched one. My finger looked young next to it.

“Kind of numb,” she said.

“Can you feel this?” I traced the shape of hurt flesh. Some of the crests were still scabbed.

“Only if I'm watching.” She pushed her shirt back down. “I meant to show you yesterday.”

“What the hell?”

She told me that when she and Arnett first moved into the inn she tried to leave him, but he tied her to a board and brought her out to the pen where they kept the pigs and the dogs. All the animals lived together and it drove them crazy. He dropped her down into it and dumped slop all over her. The hogs came out of the barn and went straight for the feed. The dogs stayed back, whining and yapping. When she started bleeding, he shot a rifle into the air and sent the hogs running. Then he asked if she really planned on leaving him. “He shoots the air a lot,” she said.

I'd heard some shit about what people did to each other, but this beat all of it.

She pushed down the waist of her jeans and showed me another one. I studied what Arnett had done to her and considered my options.

“What are you going to do about it?” I said.

“Don't know.”

“Can't you call somebody? Make a report or something.”

“What if he tries stopping me?”

“Tries is different than stopping.” I got up.

“Where
you
going?” she said.

“Call the cops.”

“Please, please don't,” she said. “Oh, please. Don't. You can't.” She dropped to her knees and grabbed my hands. “They won't hold him long enough. He'll come and find me. I mean, even after they found the cameras, he's still out. He'll probably end up going to jail once he's convicted. But Jesus, it takes so long. And for this there's no proof.”

“Your body's proof.”

She covered her ears. “I don't want to be anybody's proof,” she said. “He'll get me back. He'll find me, and if he knows I'm even talking to anybody…Oh, God. I'm nobody's proof.”

I turned the volume up on the TV so Dad couldn't hear us. I sat down next to her on the bed.

She handed me the same bottle she'd shown me when she'd first arrived yesterday. “This,” she said.

“For what?”

And she said: “To kill him.”

The bottle held a homemade embalming fluid, for when Arnett shot animals. “He makes the stuff,” she said. “Swallow it just a little bit and you'll die.” She looked at her nails. “Drink him with it.”

We looked into each other's eyes. She sat directly in front of me in the messy nest of a sheet. Our legs were crossed, knees touching. I laid the bottle down beside us like it might explode. She filled my palms with her fists. The whole world was easily fixed. I felt more needed than I ever had in all my life.

“This is your idea,” I said.

“I was just thinking out loud,” she said. “But you look interested.”

We stayed in my room all day, watching TV and talking and touching and watching more TV and touching. I heated Chinese in the microwave. While we were eating, I asked her how she was allowed to stay gone so long, and she said he sometimes let her get made up in town. “I'll hit the Hairport after this,” she said. “Get my hair and nails and lips and toes done.”

Some real shit was playing on
Unsolved Mysteries
. She turned off the TV and the noise of summertime droned and knocked against the window, the static of wings and legs and hard knobby bodies, millions of them, all zipping around and fighting for that same old thing.

We lay close together but I was afraid if I reached out to touch her I wouldn't be able to feel her at all. She sat up. “Grab me a beer?”

When I got back, her clothes were thrown next to the bed with the sheet across her bottom half. Another piece of hurt bloomed on her white belly. That place that had once been pure and untouched. I couldn't stand it. She reached for the cold longneck, took a swallow and told me to sit down.

“You wanna see something?” She pulled her iPhone out of her jeans on the floor and spider-fingered through lit menus of options. The screen flipped to unfocused darkness. “Watch this.”

The sound of random noise came through the little speaker. The image now had a bright spot in the middle. I couldn't tell what was happening but the noise eventually made sense. It was the barroom clatter of Durty Misty's. Right here in the stupid little bedroom of my life. The screen darkened again and the image came into focus. Short tapered pillars of sitting thighs. The drawn line and darkened thatch through the middle of a lady's ass. There was a sloppy kiss mark on one cheek, a tattoo labeled
Kiss My Ass
.

Rachel's.

“Sexy-looking stuff,” Jennifer said. “Isn't it?” She held out the phone like the video was something a person of talent had made.

“How recently was this taken?” I said.

“I don't know. Arnett showed it to me last night. I went ahead and asked about the cameras—you know, after we talked about it?—and he just hauled it out and showed it to me. This phone's his. He doesn't know I took it. I'm going to throw it away.”

Rachel started peeing.

Jennifer touched my knee and walked her hand like a beetle up my thigh. “So,” she said, “maybe he was lying about the cameras.” Her hand went from my leg to her crotch. “He's an asshole, but I do like watching this stuff. Doesn't it kinda turn you on?”

“No,” I said. “This is serious.”

“I just can't believe he was actually doing it behind my back. I mean,
you
'd never do anything like this.”

“If I wanted to I would,” I said. “But I don't. That's the difference. Do you know who that is there?”

Rachel finished, the last bit dripping from her hairs, no wiping, just a quick finger tap over her slice. “Some girl,” Jennifer said. “That ain't the point.”

“You've never seen her?”

“Who?”

“That girl,” I said, touching the phone.

Rachel's butt left the bowl and the video paused on her pulling her jeans halfway up, and like that she was gone. Jennifer said, “I can't go around asking every woman I see, ‘Will you please pull your pants down?' That might sound weird.”

I thought about it. No cops this time. They'd had enough of me, and me of them. Jennifer was right. We could handle this on our own.

“What are you thinking about right now?” she said.

But I couldn't tell her I knew that ass. “That girl could've been you,” I said. “That's what I'm worried about. It could be any of these girls,” I said, pointing past the wall and out into the world.

“Why would he video me?” she said. “He's seen it all in person. Anyway, listen, the real problem's this.” She showed me a wound on her hip that looked like a gigantic nightcrawler twisting out from under her skin.

“I'll do anything,” I said. “We got to get you away from him.”

“I already told you. He likes drinking those slurpees from the station. He mixes vodka into that shit. It's his cocktail. All we do is add a little something else.” She flicked the bottle, her fingernail clicking against the glass. “We could be safe loving each other. We can't even love each other right, me and you.”

She held her breasts in her hands and weighed them. Despite the scars from the pigs, the full round nipples were there, dark and unbitten. She lay back and told me to come heal her. It didn't feel real but I did it anyway. I had no choice anymore, now that I was on her, outside my body, and inside hers.

After, my head in her lap, her finger drawing on my ear, she said, “I seen shit like this in detective movies. The thing that gets you is the cops tracing the killing back to some kind of deal.”

“You ever tell the cops about what he did to you?”

“Never told nobody shit.”

“But people know y'all were together.”

“Are,” she said. “
Are
together. You got to do it. Get close to him. Get him in a situation where he sees you as the giving type. You call my phone and I'll let you talk to him.”

“But he'll know something's up if I'm calling your number.”

“I'll tell him tonight I met somebody looking for work. Ran into you outside the Hairport. When you talk to him, tell him that. And tell him about the trouble you been in. Lost your license. He'll like that part. Tell him you're needing work. Make everybody see you as being on his side.”

The Lookout was a four-story disaster, twisting clapboard siding and slate shingles sliding off the roof, the whole thing leaning just below the peak of Nitro Mountain. Arnett had set up ladders and scaffolding all over the place. I was using my bad arm to steady myself, climb, hold nails straight, even pull away siding. I spent most of my working hours up around the roof, beneath the sun's nose. I could look down over my shoulder and see the scab that was Bordon, the infected area around it, and past that the curve of the earth.

Stilted behind me on the last rocky incline was that tower with the red light. I'd grown up gazing at it, wondering what it was, but even now, being so close to it, I still didn't have much of an idea. Planes never flew near here. Just some souvenir left by the coal company.

The mountain had a different name before Nitro. I'd heard old-timers call it Paran. But that was before coal miners hollowed it out and created air pockets that made the ground unfit to stand on, not to mention all the explosives they'd left behind in those tunnels. By now the county had condemned it.

I'd never been any closer than the highway or had any reason to risk stepping on that forsaken land, but I'd ended up doing exactly what Jennifer said. I called Arnett, explained myself and asked if he'd let me work for him.

“Jennifer told me about you,” he said. “We know each other?”

“Nah.”

“Good. Let's do a trial run. See if you're desperate enough.”

My parents' house was a dozen miles down the road from the Lookout's front access, and Arnett picked me up in Jennifer's truck that same day. Bouncing and bottoming out along the dusty trail back up, he said, “There'll have to be a lot of training before I actually start paying you.”

“That's all right. I'm a quick study.”

“That's what she said.”

That night he got too drunk to drive me home and decided to keep me on. Anyway, he needed another worker to make the project look real. According to him, the place had once been his uncle's and he now believed it ought to be his, but blood rights didn't mean much in the legal world. He wouldn't say more than that. We were hanging out in the downstairs bar and he asked if I'd ever been in a strip club, a whorehouse, anywhere. “The bar's where it all goes down.”