When These Mountains Burn

by David Joy

  “One and the same.” Denny chuckled and smiled but he couldn’t look Cordell in the eye. He was embarrassed, the same way he was when he ran into his sister unexpectedly in town, or any of his kin for that matter, anybody who remembered him from before.

  Cordell leaned back in a chair across the table and rested his hands on his stomach. “Eating cupcakes.” He closed his eyes, pinched at the meat under his chin, and shook his head in disbelief.

  Denny didn’t know what to say.

  “Now, to most folks that wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense, some guy strolling around Food Lion shoving sugar in his mouth. But I’ve been at this thing long enough I’d say that sweet tooth is you coming off the dope.”

  Denny nodded.

  “How long you got?”

  “Eight days.”

  “Eight days, huh. Think you’ll make it ten?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Well, I hope so, Denny. I surely do.” Cordell leaned forward and folded his arms on the tabletop. “There’s a whole lot of folks willing to help if you’ll let them. You gone over there to the recovery center?”

  “No.”

  “You know where it is?”

  “No,” Denny said, but he did.

  “It’s over there behind the Bureau of Indian Affairs office where the credit union used to be. You know where I’m talking about?”

  “I think so.”

  “You know they just opened up a halfway house right there in Whittier. They’ll find you a job, put you to work, help you with your recovery. Get you back on your feet.”

  “Living in a house full of drunks and addicts, getting babysat, that don’t sound like my cup of tea. I think I’d rather just spend a couple nights here and get it over with.”

  “You know they broke ground on Kanvwotiyi this summer,” Cordell said. The word sounded like kah nuh woe tee yee, which translated to “a place where one is healed.” “They think they’ll have that place up and running by next fall. Top of the line. It really is going to be something special.”

  “I bet,” Denny said.

  Cordell clawed at the back of his head. Denny could tell he was getting frustrated.

  “The thing is, Denny, you’ve got more resources at your disposal as a native than any white man in these mountains and you’re still pissing your life away. All these people are. We build a recovery center, nobody comes. We get college paid for, nobody goes. Now, why the hell is that?”

  “I don’t know what you want me to tell you.”

  “I don’t want you to tell me anything. I want you to do something. Do something for yourself. I want you to get back to building houses, cutting trees, playing music, doing something, anything other than wasting away like you are. I want the same thing everybody that’s ever known you wants. I wouldn’t be sitting here saying it if I didn’t.”

  “I know you do.”

  “The thing is, you’re going to keep coming in and out of here until you get yourself into something that you can’t get out of. Either that or we’re going to find you dead in some bathroom someplace. That’s the endgame one way or another the way you’re running, and I don’t want to be the one to find you like that. I know damn well your sister don’t.”

  Denny was getting a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach. A heart could be in the right place and still make a man feel worthless, and it was that worthlessness that most often sent him searching for something fast and easy. That word “fix” was more accurate than most people would ever know. Lately, though, he’d been sinking into a darker place. There’d only ever been one thing faster than the needle and there was no coming back from that ride.

  “I went ahead and made a phone call and spoke with the manager up there at Food Lion. What I’m hoping is that you’ll let me ride you over there to that recovery center tomorrow morning. There’s people there I’ve known a long time, Denny. Good people.”

  “I think I’ll just do whatever time it is I’ve got to do and be on my way.”

  “You don’t have any time.” Cordell scrunched the left side of his face and rubbed the back of his neck. “Like I said, I talked with that manager up there and it’s took care of. I did you a favor and I’m thinking maybe you’ll do me one.”

  “I didn’t ask for any favors.”

  “I know you didn’t.”

  “So does that mean I’m free to go?”

  “I guess it does,” Cordell said. “But where exactly you going?”

  “Carla’s,” Denny said. “She’ll let me crash with her a few days.”

  “How is Carla?”

  “Good.”

  “She still got that job at the casino?”

  “Far as I know,” Denny said. Truth was, he hadn’t talked to his sister in months. After he lost his house, she let him stay with her for a while, but eventually they had a falling-out. Denny had already pawned nearly everything he owned. Down to nothing, he sold a beat-up Epiphone acoustic that had belonged to their uncle. Denny swapped the guitar for a ten-dollar bill that wouldn’t get him through the night and that was what finally pushed Carla over the edge.

  There was still some stuff in her garage—clothes, knickknacks, a little 50cc Suzuki scooter that somehow survived the squandering. He hadn’t really meant it when he blurted her name, but the more he thought about it, the more going to Carla’s didn’t sound like such a bad idea. If she’d let him stay, he could get a shower, get into some fresh clothes. A little tinkering and he could even get the moped running.

  “I’ve got a little bit of paperwork to finish here in the office and a couple emails to send, but it shouldn’t take long. I can give you a ride over there if you want.”

  “Yeah, all right,” Denny said.

  Any place with a roof beat sleeping outside.

  TWENTY-ONE

  For years, Carla Rattler taped every episode of Jeopardy! until her VCR caught fire on a marathon and almost burned her house down. Every night she hunched forward in her La-Z-Boy with a TV dinner on her knees while she watched the show. She used a clicking pen to simulate a buzzer, trying to train the muscles in her hand for when she finally got her shot. When Denny lived with her, she’d have him quiz her with questions from Ken Jennings’s Trivia Almanac. He always tried to turn it into a drinking game, but she didn’t drink, so he usually just wound up shitfaced and lonely.

  Denny could hear the pen clicking away in the den when he opened the bathroom door. He’d stayed in the shower until the hot water ran out, lathering himself up with a half dozen soaps and shampoos lining the edge of his sister’s tub. Steam emptied into the hallway and settled onto the laminate walls. Carla had stacked some clothes on the floor for him. The jeans were a little big, but not bad. He slid into a knockoff Tommy Hilfiger T-shirt that was wrinkled and creased to the point the fabric looked like mosaic.

  In the kitchen, a Hungry-Man dinner was set on the stovetop. No one in the Rattler family had ever been able to cook, so TV dinners had always constituted a home-cooked meal. Denny peeled the plastic wrap off the tray and discarded it into a trash can at the end of the counter. Fried chicken, corn, mashed potatoes, and a brownie were separated into small compartments. He grabbed a glass out of the cabinet and poured tea from an old pickle jar his sister used for a pitcher.

  The category on the game show was country music and the clue was simple. Anybody with half a brain knew the Red Headed Stranger, but that didn’t stop some overweight goon from buzzing in and hollering “Who is Reba McEntire?” like he’d been asleep for the last forty years.

  “Willie Nelson, you shit brain,” Carla hollered. A piece of sweet corn flew from her mouth as she yelled. “The answer’s Willie Nelson. Who is Willie Nelson?” She was clicking the pen and screaming, but no one else buzzed in.

  “Even I knew that.” Denny laughed.

  “Damned if these three ain’t dumber than hemorrho
ids.”

  Though they were twins born just six minutes apart, his sister didn’t look anything like him. Denny looked Indian, which was to say he looked the way white people wanted an Indian to look—dark-skinned, dark-haired, dark-eyed like cowboys and Indians, like folded arms, say-how, tomahawk, and teepee Indian. Every white woman grew up believing her great-great-grandmother had been a Cherokee princess. Every white man believed Indians could talk to birds. As far as skin color and hair, the truth was there was about as much diversity within the tribe as a fan deck of paint swatches, so much so that tourists would wander into shops along the main drag and ask the person behind the register where all the Indians were, only to have the storekeeper tell them, “You’re looking at one.” Carla was fair-skinned with red oak hair and deep green, lake water eyes. She looked like their mother. Whereas Denny had always been long and lean, Carla was built like a bulldog. String Bean and Stumpy. That’s what one of the old men at church had always called them and that was about right. She had the sides of her hair pulled back into a messy bun, a line of bangs cut straight across her forehead. Her face was big around as a Chinet plate, but there’d always been something pretty about her. Maybe it was her smile, or the way she laughed. Maybe it was how she’d never really given a shit what anybody thought.

  Setting the empty dinner tray on a side table, Carla tucked her legs beneath her body and leaned with her elbow on the arm of the chair so that her head rested on her fist. A turquoise T-shirt fit her like a hockey jersey. Her shorts rode high on her thighs so that the way she sat made it look as if she didn’t have any britches on. On the TV the show broke to commercial and she hit the mute button on the remote. Denny glanced over, then cut his eyes back to the television.

  “I put the clothes you had on in the wash with some of your stuff from the garage,” she said. “Soon as they get done you can get out of those and put some clean ones on. I know those are a little musty, but that’s just from being in the garage. They might not smell fresh but they’re clean. I remember washing them before we put them out there.”

  “Thank you,” Denny said. He was watching a pharmaceutical ad. An old gray-headed man was smiling real big and pushing a little kid in a swing.

  “Cordell said you’ve got a little over a week clean.”

  “Something like that.” Denny held a forkful of corn in front of his lips. His hand was shaking. A few niblets rattled back into the tray. He rarely made eye contact with anyone anymore, but especially not with anyone he cared about.

  “Hey, a week’s better than nothing,” she said. “You ought to be proud of that, Denny. A week’s good.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  A week wasn’t something to brag about. Half that time he’d been curled up sick as a dog and he’d have slit someone’s throat for a bag. The truth was, this wasn’t so much getting clean as it was running dry. Wasn’t like he’d made some deliberate choice to put down the needle. The money ran out. Some fellow croaked and the dope got gone. That wasn’t sobriety. That was shit luck.

  There’d been a summer Denny made it almost three months clean. He even managed to get a job hanging Sheetrock for some outfit out of Andrews. The paycheck was steady and he finally had some money in his pocket and from the outside things appeared to be looking up. But an addict’s mind was a rocking chair. You could have full understanding that moderation didn’t apply to people like you and at the same time convince yourself that you could do a little without wanting a lot. It was almost like the drugs were talking when things got like that, like the voice you were hearing in your head wasn’t even your own even though it sounded like you and reasoned like you. You wanted to reward yourself for how good things were going. You deserved it. After all you’ve done, you deserve one night. And nine times out of ten, that’s how you relapsed: believing one night wouldn’t be the beginning of forever.

  It was a misguided faith in self-control.

  Denny knew what it was like to get clean and he knew what it was like to fall back in. But right then, he wasn’t wrestling with any of that. He wanted to get high just to feel something. It was as simple and selfish as that. He’d never wanted to come down in the first place. This was nothing but shit luck.

  “Cordell said you were thinking about going over there to the recovery center, maybe even try to get in that new halfway house.”

  “No,” Denny said. “I never said that.”

  There was a physical change in the room. He could feel the tension knotting up between them, but Carla didn’t speak.

  “I don’t know why he told you that,” Denny said, but he knew exactly.

  Cordell fed Carla what she needed to hear for her to open the door, and knowing him it wasn’t so much a matter of dishonesty as some sort of naïve hopefulness. Cordell knew Carla would bring up the recovery center and the halfway house and maybe that would get Denny and her to talking. If there was anybody in the world who could get through to him, it was his sister. Unfortunately, Cordell didn’t know the half of what those two had been through.

  Denny took a bite of fried chicken and all the skin slid away from the thigh. He nodded at the television with grease running down his chin. “Your show’s back on.”

  Carla took the remote and tapped it against her thigh. She was staring at the floor like she was thinking long and hard about something. The silence was unbearable. He ran his fork around the edges of the brownie to cut the cake free from the tray, then scooped the whole gooey thing into his mouth.

  “You know,” Carla said. “It’s bad enough what I’ve got going on with my health. You’d think that’s what would keep me up most nights, but it’s not. Half the time, Denny, I waste my time worried about you. Where you are, what you’re doing. Whether you’re laying off in a ditch dead somewhere.”

  “What in the hell are you talking about?”

  “You don’t know anything about anybody because you don’t think about nothing but yourself, Denny. It’s always been like that. Even when we was kids.”

  “Don’t give me that shit. There’s plenty on my plate.”

  “Your plate, Denny. That’s right. That’s exactly what I’m saying. It’s always your plate. I don’t think it ever even occurs to you that every single person in this world has shit on their plate. Some of us got a whole lot more piled on it than others, but every single person you pass is dealing with something.”

  Denny kept his attention on his dinner. He was scarfing down everything on the tray just to keep from having to look at her.

  Carla’s brow lowered over her eyes and she got a real sour look on her face. She turned away from her brother and stared up at the ceiling. There was a window just to her left with a heavy brown curtain drawn closed. Denny could tell she was doing everything she could to keep from crying.

  He took a long swig of tea so he could talk. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “They found a lump in my breast.” She snapped back around to face him. Her cheeks glowed red and her eyes were glass.

  “What are you talking about, Carla?”

  “Exactly what I just said.”

  “Cancer?” Denny muttered. The word felt too big for his mouth. All of a sudden he felt empty, like he was floating there in the room. He felt like he was going to be sick.

  “They don’t know yet.”

  “What do you mean they don’t know?”

  “They’ve got to run some more tests, but given our history what do you think the odds are that it ain’t? That’s exactly what killed Mama. Spread up into her lymph node and that was that.”

  Carla stood up from the chair and grabbed her dinner from the side table. She glanced down at Denny’s and gestured for him to hand her his empty tray. The sound of her walking felt like a hammer against his chest. He could feel her steps thumping across the kitchen tile, hear the clank of the forks hitting the sink, the crinkle of the bag as she mashed the trays in
to the trash. Everything was suddenly loud.

  When she came back into the room, she sat down just how she’d been with her legs folded beneath her, her elbow on the armrest propping her body into a hard angle. Denny could see her out of the corner of his eye, but he was staring blankly at the television. The show was over and Alex was making his way around the studio, talking casually to the winner and losers.

  “Denny.” His mind was someplace else. “Denny, I need you to look at me.”

  He was stooped forward as he turned and looked at his sister over his shoulder.

  “What I’m about to say, I’m only saying because I love you. Whether you can see it or not, it’s coming out of that place.” Carla reached for a pack of cigarettes on the side table and lit a USA Gold for an after-dinner smoke.

  Denny wanted to say something, but who was he to try to tell her anything.

  “I can’t let you stay here if you’re not willing to do the recovery,” she said. “This can’t be some roof over your head while you kill yourself. I just can’t do it. I can’t watch it. I can’t do that to myself again.”

  There was an immense pressure at the backs of his eyes. He rubbed the tips of his fingers into his temples and squinted hard until there was a bright red light painting the insides of his eyelids. He didn’t know where he was headed, but he knew what he was going to do when he got there and that made the decision easy as pie. “Soon as them clothes get done in there, I’ll get out of your hair.”

  “That’s not what I’m saying, Denny. You know that.”

  Denny stood up and walked out of the room. She called his name again, but he didn’t make an effort to look at her.

  A door in the kitchen opened to the garage. The engine on Carla’s beat-up Ford Festiva ticked as it cooled, her having driven down to the corner store for cigarettes while her brother was in the shower. There was a treadmill in the corner covered in liquor store boxes. The boxes were filled with odds and ends from Denny’s house, but he knew there was nothing there that could be sold. Pieced-together shelving units lined the walls with everything from paint cans and Rubbermaid tubs to tattered towels and an old Beanie Baby collection neatly aligned with tags still pinned to the ears.