Nitro Mountain

by Lee Clay Johnson

  “Thanks,” I said, “but I better get back onstage.”

  “You’ll never make it.” He held out his hands as if offering some great revelation.

  “I won’t?”

  “I’m seeing your future right now. It’s not there.” He got a small plastic bag out of his pocket, took a rock from it and packed it into a glass pipe. “No harm done,” he said. “We’re just two extremely nice gentlemen.” The lighter flicked and he took a hit. “Any minute,” he said, holding his breath and turning back to the screen. “Done no harm.” The smoke he blew into the room smelled like burnt mints. “My brother,” he said, “be not afraid.”

  I leaned over to see what he was watching, and he grabbed my cast.

  “Watch me,” he said.

  In the glow of his phone he licked his dry lips. The door opened and the glare of the sandwich room came in. The crowd was loud out at the bar. Jerry kicked his bass drum a couple times, my cue. Old Bob stood there in the doorway and whined like a puppy.

  “Shut the door,” the man said, “shut the door, shut the fucking door.”

  Bob pushed past me and held out a kind of pencil, presenting it to us like it was some secret key.

  “Draw it,” the man said. “It’s about to happen. Draw it.”

  Bob turned the pencil toward his own face and started drawing lines around his eyes. Broken circles of black eyeliner traced the inside of his sunken sockets and zagged onto his face. The man took another hit from his pipe, moaning and begging for something, I couldn’t tell what, and then turned back to the screen. “It’s happening,” he said, stuffing a fist down his Dickies. Black streaks ran down Bob’s cheeks. He was crying. The man passed him the pipe without turning away from the phone and Bob grabbed at it, pulling hard when the flame finally found the little rock, then exhaled and touched his fingers on the Daffy Duck.

  I glanced between them at what they were watching. A white border circled the screen but something else was emerging in the middle of the frame. I leaned closer and the man roared into my face, took his fist from his pants and punched me in the stomach. “Have y’all been doing druggies?”

  “Oh, no!” Bob said, then splayed his fingers over his sketched eyes, opened them enough to peek through and said, “Oh, no no no!”

  I heard Jerry kick his bass drum again.

  “That’s my cue,” I said.

  “Your cue,” the man said. “What if somebody just stepped into your life one day and took your cue?” Tears were soaking into the cracked skin of his cheekbones, but it didn’t seem like crying. He looked dizzy. “What if they took it out from under you like a rug and you realized there was no floor under you.”

  “I don’t know what you’re saying.” But what he said made me wonder. What if I didn’t have any excuses? What if, like Rachel had said, I was running out of chances?

  “Go fetch your cue,” the man said. “But don’t tell Mommy or nobody y’all been doing druggies.” He inhaled again and Bob pushed my head into the man’s face. Our lips found each other’s and he blew smoke into my mouth.

  The two erupted into something that wasn’t laughter. I made it back into the packed barroom and pushed toward the stage, looking for Rachel with every shove. I picked up my bass and saw her coming out of the pinball room. Customers were going behind the bar and pulling their own drafts, tossing nickels into the tip jar. Bob came out with a dark mess smeared around his eyes.

  Jones stomped a pedal tuner and turned around to face me. “The hell were you doing in there?”

  “Where? Oh—they just wanted to hang out.”

  “Stay away from those dudes. Especially if you’re playing with me. You hear? I won’t have it.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “no problem.”

  It felt like flying, talking to Jones and feeling the stuff start to kick. I had something nobody else could touch.

  Jones went back to the mic, stomped the pedal again and counted us in. The music was even better now, the pocket deep and the melody soaring. Jones’s voice sounded so close through the system that I could picture his vocal cords, long and rough. I was floating above the crowd now, but Jerry snapped the snare to bring me back down and he yelled at me over the music to get my shit together. But whatever cloud the man had blown into my mouth was beautiful, and I’d never felt sharper in all my life.

  —

  After the gig, I sat at one of the tables out on what people were calling the veranda, these pieces of plywood nailed onto pallets in the parking lot with red Christmas lights strung from garden posts Quikreted into the cracked asphalt. Rachel was hovering around me, talking to a few straggling regulars, and I was listening for one of them to say her name, to see how well she knew them. That’s how I planned on trusting her.

  The band had left with the tip bucket, and for pay I was stuck drinking pints of Natty Light, which really wasn’t so bad. She’d already offered to drive me home but I still didn’t want to go. One more beer? Why not. Bob had tried to rub away the eyeliner and by now he just looked dirty. He stood at my table, arms behind his back like he was trying to undo his own bra, asking if I wanted a new beverage.

  “Another one of these,” I said.

  “Another those,” he said, and sidestepped over to Rachel, who was now talking to a group of guys about how hard it was to be a woman. “It’s like,” she said. “It’s like,” she said. “It’s like.”

  They nodded along with her, following her point: It is like.

  “Order now or forever hold your peas,” Bob said, cupping his crotch.

  One guy smacked his hand away and asked for a round of whiskeys.

  “How round?” Bob said, reaching for Rachel’s breasts.

  “Do it,” she said, “and I’ll bite your nose off.”

  “It’s all right, Rachel,” another guy said. “He don’t mean nothing by it.”

  When I went back in to pack my gear, I did something on purpose.

  After I’d slid my bass into its bag, I left my power cord and guitar cable on the corner of the stage. Daffy Duck was mopping up behind the bar, sweating and cursing at himself. I expected him to look over as I walked by, but he didn’t. With the gig bag over my right shoulder, the amp in that hand and my broken arm thumping hot pain through my neck, I kicked open the door and dumped it out on the edge of the veranda. The shots the group ordered had come out, and Rachel left the circle to hand me mine. “Here’s to you,” she said. “For trying.”

  I wasn’t sure what she meant. Trying to play bass? Trying to get with her? Trying to be a big boy and carry my own shit? But I tapped my shot glass against hers, splashing a burning drizzle of whiskey over the hangnail on my thumb.

  Daffy led Bob, who was crying again, in by the shirt collar, and without looking at me Rachel said she wanted to go.

  “I’m riding with you,” I said.

  “I’ll load your stuff,” she said. “It looks heavy. Don’t lift a thing. You looked all night like you were hurting.”

  She had a green Subaru Outback with one blue door. “A train hit me one time,” she said. “It was going five miles an hour.”

  “Story of my life,” I said.

  She fit my stuff in the back among jugs of antifreeze, oil, transmission fluid. The heat in her car was a miracle; it even came up out of the leather seats. I told her to drive slow so we could enjoy it.

  She lived in a condo on top of a treeless yard. A basketball goal lay on its side across part of the driveway with sand pouring out of its base. “The family that lived in the other half of the house left it like that,” she said. “A Mexican bunch that was always fixing my car for free. They moved out last week. We can stretch our limbs tonight. Make all the noise we want.”

  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 si
nce 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.