When These Mountains Burn

by David Joy

  When he found the front room, he went straight for a glass-faced gun cabinet catty-cornered behind the front door. The cabinet was filled with long guns, shotguns and rifles braced neatly in plush saddles. The door was locked, but such locks were useless. If Gig Wolfe was dumb as most people, he probably hid the key on top of the cabinet, but Denny just slipped a jackknife out of his pocket, ran the blade along the seam, and jimmied the lock loose.

  In the mirror at the back of the cabinet, he caught his own reflection and it startled him. The drugs had whittled his face down to bone and shadow. A thick mustache that didn’t connect in the center stretched across his lip and a disheveled beard grew scraggly on his cheeks. His hair was cut into a shabby mullet, the back parted and draped over his shoulders. A tinged NASCAR shirt from a race in Bristol hung about his chest, the neck stretched loosely. Skin like fallow earth and hair as black as night, it was his eyes that struck him as different, a hollowed emptiness about them now that hadn’t been there a few months before. Looking at himself, he felt ashamed, and he focused back on the rifles so as not to bear that feeling any longer than he had to.

  A .270 Weatherby with a walnut Monte Carlo stock as smooth as glass stood proudly on display at the front of the line. He could probably get five hundred easy out of that rifle alone, but Gig would notice it missing just as soon as he sat down in his ratty recliner for supper. Denny settled on an old Iver Johnson single-shot twelve at the very back, something Gig was probably given as a kid that he never shot anymore but held on to out of sentimentality. He probably wouldn’t realize that gun was gone till the next time he emptied the cabinet to oil the barrels. It never even crossed Denny’s mind that losing something like that would be ten times as hard.

  The junk drawer in the kitchen was the last place Denny looked and he found what he’d come to expect. People always chucked their old cell phones in a drawer rather than throwing them away. The drawer was filled with screwdrivers and a hammer, a Tupperware container loaded with mismatched nuts and bolts, old keys, a rusted knife, a roll of camouflage duct tape. The screen wasn’t even busted on the iPhone 5. They’d probably discarded the 5 for the 6, and by now traded the 6 for the 7, because every American had to have the latest and greatest, every American was dumb as rocks.

  Denny did the math in his head like some drug-rattled abacus. Twenty-five dollars for the necklace, one twenty-five for the gun, a hundred dollars even for the iPhone. Bundles were going for one twenty-five. Ten bags to a bundle, so this made twenty. Twenty bags would go a week if he maintained the same speed, a week and a half if he was lucky enough to slow down, though the truth was that nobody ever slowed down.

  A week and a half, he thought, and that was as satisfying a thing as had crossed his mind all morning. That was as far ahead as he could dare to look. Life had become little more than one foot in front of the other, though if he was being completely honest it had never been anything more. For as long as he’d been alive, the future had only ever been as far as his next meal, and things were no different now.

  With the necklace around his neck and the phone in his pocket, he traipsed through the house, the shotgun cradled in his arms, everything left just the way he’d found it. When he was outside, he fit the box fan back into the window and slithered to the side of the house. Two crows cawed from the naked boughs of a blighted hemlock, but there was no one around to heed their warning. A hard sun burned directly overhead. There was still plenty of time to hit another house.

  FIVE

  Junkies called the clump of trailers the Outlet Mall. Didn’t much matter what you were looking for, this was where you found it.

  Horse was sold out of the singlewide with the green plastic roof over the porch, crystal in the one with the Trump flag hanging in the window like a curtain. Sometimes they’d bring a load of Mexican gals in and they’d work out of the old ’70s model Charger with orange trim for a hundred dollars a turn. But the girls hadn’t been there in a while from what Denny’d seen, and he came often enough to know.

  Soon as he opened the front door, Jonah Rathbone reached into the couch cushions and came out with a .357 Mag that he rested on his knee like a baby. Jonah wore a pair of cutoff jeans and a faded white tank top with the words MYRTLE BEACH airbrushed fluorescent on the front. He was leaned so far back on the couch that his ass was hovering off the front of the cushion. A lanky white girl was curled on the far end of the sofa, her legs hugged to her chest inside a black T-shirt. Her eyes were haloed by shadow, barely open, and she was swaying back and forth staring at the floor, oblivious the earth was turning.

  “Dang, Denny, you ever think about knocking?” Jonah swallowed hard and slicked his fingers back through the sides of his hair. The full-framed revolver rested on his knee and Denny couldn’t turn his eyes from its engraved frame. Picking the gun back up, Jonah twirled the heavy Ruger loosely by its trigger guard, the gun spinning a Tilt-A-Whirl orbit around his finger. “What sort of worthless shit you bring today?”

  Denny came into the room and set his offering on a heavy iron-framed coffee table in front of the couch. He laid the shotgun down first, then stretched the sterling necklace in a straight line paralleling the barrel. “Oh, and I got this,” he said, fishing around in the pocket of his jeans for the cell phone.

  “When you going to start stealing something worth having?”

  “That gun’s worth a hundred and fifty dollars all day long,” Denny said. “That and that necklace and this phone, I’d say you give me at least two fifty.”

  Jonah tossed the revolver casually between him and the girl. He stretched for the shotgun and looked it over in his hands, shouldered the twelve-gauge and aimed the muzzle at Denny’s belly button. After checking the barrel stamp, he set the gun back where he’d found it. “An Iver Johnson, Denny! What the fuck you want me to do with this? When you going to bring something I can sell? A Benelli, hell, a Mossberg, anything.”

  “That gun and this phone, that’s easy money,” Denny said. “That’s an easy two fifty.” Every time it was the same old game: Denny trying to talk him up and Jonah trying to dicker him down. Thing about it was, Jonah held all the power. He knew Denny wasn’t going to go to a pawnshop and he knew he wasn’t leaving without the dope. Jonah reached for the necklace and checked the clasp. He shook his head, wadded the thin herringbone chain up like string, and chucked it at the girl at the end of the couch.

  “What’s that, a gram of sterling?” Jonah laughed. “What the hell you want me to do with that?”

  “I’ll take two hundred, but I can’t go no lower.”

  “This ain’t fucking Pawn Stars,” Jonah said. “You want two hundred dollars, you can fly your ass out to Vegas and talk to Chumlee. I’ll give you a hundred cash or a bundle for one twenty-five and that’s all you’re going to get. You can take it or leave it.”

  The girl on the end of the couch was rocking fast all of a sudden, biting her bottom lip. Denny couldn’t help but stare.

  “You want a go at her?” Jonah asked. “I’ll give you that and two bags.”

  Denny turned his eyes back to Jonah, a sly grin cutting Jonah’s scruffy cheeks. “She don’t look good,” Denny said.

  “Hell, you wouldn’t know it to look at her, but you get her back in that bedroom, she’s something else. This girl’ll suck the chrome off a trailer hitch for a rail of horse.” Jonah reached across the couch and slid his hand under the girl’s ass and she gasped and jerked back from wherever her mind had taken her, and in a flash she’d snatched the revolver that lay between them and almost had it between Jonah’s eyes. Even racing, her movements were labored and sluggish, and Jonah fought for her wrist and leveraged the gun against the wall with little effort. Standing over her, he slapped her in the face. She choked each time he hit her, her bloodshot eyes glassing over with tears.

  Denny didn’t move. He wanted desperately to help her, but he didn’t move. The need to fix always outwei
ghed principle.

  When Jonah had the gun, he shoved the front sight post into her forehead and she squalled and collapsed to the floor. Her legs were bare, just a pair of loose-fitting briefs beneath that T-shirt, and as she crawled for the door, Jonah booted her in the back end and she sprawled flat on her stomach. Fighting to her hands and knees, she scuttled over the stained carpet for the door and then she was gone, the door slamming closed, just Jonah and Denny left inside the tiny trailer. For a second or two, the only sound was that of the television in the corner of the room, an episode of Swamp People on the History Channel, some mush-mouthed Cajun yelling, “Choot ’em! Choot ’em!”

  Jonah ran his left hand through a thin widow’s peak of hair with his eyes wide and his head canted to the side, the gun hanging loosely in his right. “Like I said, I’ll give you a hundred cash or you can take a bundle.”

  Denny’s hands were clammy and he kept clenching them into fists and raking his fingernails back across his palms nervously. He wiped his open hands along the front of his pants to dry them of sweat and nodded his head.

  Jonah reached into his pocket and flipped a bundle of bags onto the table before falling onto the couch. “Supposed to be some tar coming in from out West sometime next week. I’m talking brown town, buddy. California shit.”

  Leaning over, Denny swiped the dope from the table, a stack of small plastic bags the size of stamps rubber-banded together, each filled with light brown powder. Denny held the bundle close to his face and ticked the corner of each bag with his finger, counting his way down the stack till he got to ten.

  “You steal something worth some money and I’ll get you some fentanyl.”

  “Yeah, all right,” Denny said, half-listening, his mind already someplace else.

  Out on the porch, the girl sat at the bottom of the steps with her legs bent crooked beneath her as she smoked a long cigarette. Denny stood there for a minute outside the door, moths batting around the light at his back. She rocked steadily with one arm thrown over her legs, the other holding that cigarette up to her lips.

  A couple scabs scurried around the trailer across the way, and down the hill through the woods, a pair of headlights shone on the house where the man who ran things counted cash without ever having to deal with the headache. Denny always felt dirty just being here, always swore this time would be the last.

  With his hand in his pocket, he clenched the bundle tight in his fist. He’d come for twenty and was leaving with ten, ten days dwindling to five faster than he could cry uncle. Way he figured, his whole life weighed about as much as what he held in his hand.

  Don’t take half a brain to know ten hits ain’t much at all.

  SIX

  By the time Denny drove to where he’d been sleeping, he was getting sick. Pavement broke away to gravel that wound along switchbacks for miles before topping out on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Halfway to the top, on the outside edge of a slow curve, a field reached back into the mountain before dissolving into laurel and this was where he’d parked each night for the past month. So far no one had run him off.

  For Denny, the feeling always started in his hands. His palms sweat and his joints ached and he’d hold his trembling fingers open in front of his eyes in a mesmerized sadness, terrified in knowing what would come if he didn’t score. Next his legs would cramp up and get restless and after that came the nausea. Usually, if it got that far he was a goner, so the trick was not letting it get that far. When it did, he’d lie on the ground both burning alive and freezing to death as cold sweats blistered his forehead and withdrawals curled him up like the flu. At the peak, somewhere around three days in, there was a feeling like he’d shriveled down inside himself, like his body was a husk he couldn’t shed, and he’d think, This is it. This is the end. This is how I’m going to die.

  Getting that sick was enough to make a man beg God for mercy, to swear he’d never do it again if he could just get to the other side. But then he would come out of it and the pain would start easing off after the fourth day so that seven days clean he’d feel almost completely better. An insatiable appetite would hit and he’d want to eat everything in sight and he’d go to Ingles and walk around the store eating an entire tray of cupcakes, licking pink and blue frosting from his grubby fingers. When the food finally filled his belly, he’d tell himself he could dip his toe in the water without falling fully in, and the thing was, you never realized you were at the bottom till there you were, staring up, right back where you started.

  He twisted his grip on the steering wheel and stared through the windshield into the woods where the night turned a deeper black. The air was acrid with smoke as the wind carried the smell of fire northeast from Tellico. He reached across to the passenger seat and drew a red Gatorade from a plastic shopping bag, screwed the cap off, and took two long pulls.

  The feeling settled deeper, and though the fix was right there in the back of the car, Denny didn’t move. There was a brief moment of hesitation that hit him every time, a split second where he told himself, You don’t have to go any farther. There was no reason for him to be there. Way he figured, his story wasn’t any worse than anybody else’s.

  Sure, he’d been raised by a single mother and she got cancer, never had insurance, and didn’t last a year, and, sure, he had to go live with his uncle who worked as a dancing Indian for tourists and took them on the road to sing gospel songs in winter. But he had a twin sister and she hadn’t ended up like this. Carla had a job at the casino and was thinking about going back to school. She wanted to be a teacher and help revive the Cherokee language.

  Denny couldn’t reconcile why he was the one who wound up like this. He couldn’t figure out what he’d done to deserve it. One minute he was making good money roofing houses and cutting trees on state bid. Next thing he knew, he was broken all to shit in the hospital. One thing led to another and now here he was. Remembering how he got there filled Denny with shame and that shame turned to sadness, the sadness to anger, and sometimes it was that anger that pushed him on over, though right then it wasn’t that at all. Right then, he just didn’t want to feel sick anymore.

  In the trunk of his pale yellow LeBaron, he kept a small gray Plano tackle box like might’ve been given to a kid. He popped the latch, flipped open the lid, and folded the trays back to needles, an Altoids tin he used for a cooker, a length of rubber tube, and half a bottle of Klonopin he saved for when things got bad. His palms were sweating and he rubbed at his eyes with the heels of his hands.

  Tapping a bag empty into the tin, he added a capful of water and stirred the mixture into a cloudy solution with the plunger top of a clean needle. He held the syringe in his teeth like he was biting a straw. The taste was bitter, but the heroin was more likely stomped with powdered milk than pure. Everything he ever bought was stepped on. The tips of his fingers were callused from cooking dope, so he didn’t feel the tin heating up as he waved the lighter back and forth beneath it. Smoke rose and just before it boiled he stopped and stirred, then set the cooker on the bumper to cool.

  Clenching his fist, he watched the veins rise in his forearm. He’d always had good veins. He tied off at his elbow and waited until everything looked like it was about to pop, then stirred the solution one more time and drew the tin empty with the syringe.

  When the needle was in, he pulled back just a hair and watched the barrel turn red with blood. Holding a deep breath in his chest, he eased forward and broke the tie from his arm. Everything gave way at once like a levee breaking into light and heat and sound so that he crumbled with legs bent, his eyelids falling half lit with wonder. He melted against the back bumper of the LeBaron and slid down until he was resting in the yellowed grass with his head propped against cold steel, his eyes angled toward the sky.

  Nightglow narrowed into starlight that shone like broken glass and he lifted his hands as if to dip his fingers into the firmament and wash them in that quicksilver shining
. The world settled onto him like fog on a mountain, and, in that moment, was as close a thing to love as he’d felt in forever.

  SEVEN

  Street-level addicts willing to flip for a get-out-of-jail-free card came a dime a dozen. Back when it was crystal hammering the mountains, tweakers came in so jacked up and paranoid you could twist a story around and have them believing in dragons. It was best to hit them before the drugs wore off. Get somebody who’d been up a week straight and they’d tell you anything you wanted to know.

  The junkies, though, were a different breed. If they were nodding out, it was like talking to a mailbox. Unlike the crankers, it was best to let them sit in a cell and stew for a day or two till the withdrawals got the better of them. Wait till the anxiety hit and their faces blistered with sweat and they’d get to talking so much you’d have to beg for quiet.

  Agent Ron Holland knew the game. He also knew that only a quarter of what an addict told you would hold water. On top of that, even if the intel gave you the drop on a bottom-tier dealer, the folks selling were harder to turn. Sometimes you might climb the ladder to some mid-level player who might very well know the supplier, but few got that far without knowing a stint in prison sure beat a casket. Holland had been at it long enough to know the cat-and-mouse bullshit was always two steps forward and ten steps back.