“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.”
His face was swollen to the point of looking like he’d been stung by some huge insect. He also owned guns. A lot of them. Since moving up here, he’d developed the habit of going killing—not hunting—and then preserving the corpses with homemade embalming fluids, filling the rooms upstairs with them. A few days in, prying away some rotten wood, I peeked into a window and saw busts of bucks, flying geese, a fox forever frozen in the motion of running. Some were mounted on the walls, most just piled on the floor, a few already rotting. The next window gave a view into Arnett and Jennifer’s bedroom, where a hog and a dog hung together by wires in a screeching position above the bed.
It turned into a week of fluorescent green mountains, the sickly scent of pines, vistas so high my stomach turned. I was working up on the ladder one day when a vulture floated past and brushed my ear with its wing. “Hello, my friend,” I said. It glided away, combing the clouds with its feathers. “I knew you’d make it.”
When I looked down, Arnett was watching me. “I bet it’s hard jerking off up there, ain’t it?” he said. “Oh, I’m a very fine person.” He went away for a while and came back carrying a long-barreled shotgun. I tried not to fall off the ladder. “Get down here and follow me,” he said.
We walked behind the barn to the pigpen and I kept my distance. When I caught up, he told me to get on my knees. “Look under there,” he said, pointing at where the wall met the ground. I could see a possum hiding in the washout. It had purple ears and pink fingertips. “Scare it out of there,” he said.
I took a shovel and kind of rolled the thing into the light. It moved like its eyes hurt, probably trying to decide whether to play dead or make a run for it. Arnett pumped the action, pulled the trigger and the little guy’s entire head just went poof into a wet cloud, the blast cracking and echoing down the valley.
I did what he told me, broke some dead branches over my knee, dropped them in a metal trash can lid, sprinkled some gasoline over it and got a fire going. Arnett gutted and skinned the possum. I stretched chicken wire across the lid over the coals. When it was cooked, Arnett divided up the smoking carcass onto two plastic plates and poured vinegar and beer all over his. He pulled a handful of wild onion shoots from the yard and laid them on top. “You know how to start a love letter to a possum?” he said. “Possum, O! possum…”
He dug in like I’d never seen anyone eat before, juice dripping off his chin while he chewed and sucked the meat. He looked like a feral beast that needed to be put down. We kept quiet until there were only bones left. “Feed the rest to the hogs,” he said, handing me his plate. “They’ll eat anything.”
“You really got quite an operation out here,” I said.
“Last-resort desperation. What was I supposed to do? Not move in?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah move
in? Or yeah not move in? I’m asking you.”
“Yeah, it was empty,” I said.
“I put a camera in the toilet bowl. Maybe you’ve heard of me. Toilet Bowl Guy. That’s why I’m up here. Get some peace and fucking quiet. I’m not ashamed. It’s all happening anyways, all that piss and shit. Why can’t I watch? It’s not like it’s not happening if I can’t see it.”
“True.”
“People ought to be open with each other. Share what’s on the inside of ourselves, you know? I’m a caring person. I like to know how a woman feels on the inside.”
“You’re a sensitive guy.”
“Did I ask you to touch me? Don’t touch me, fuck. K?”
“I didn’t.”
“I said, Don’t!”
The noise of wind over my ears. The bending pines. I shut up and listened.
“You know, some motherfucker turned me in. That’s why I’m up here. I’ll figure out who it was. Soon as I finish going through all my footage. The stuff they didn’t get from me. Got weeks of it, man. Months.”
We were sitting around an open cooler watching a few cans of Coors float in the melted ice. I dumped a gym bag of Arnett’s power tools onto the porch and started untangling cords. He told me good luck and got up to go inside. “I’m going to find Jennifer,” he said. “Learn about her interior self.”
I worked for a while longer on the cords, drank some beer and watched the day get hotter. The plates of bones remained on the porch. Eventually a green Jeep Wrangler with mud splashes on the sides rolled into the middle of the lot and parked with its front wheels at a cut. The man driving had some trouble getting out. His shoulders sloped under a gray suit jacket and his head, even when he looked up, seemed bowed. “Howdy,” he said.
“Wesley?”
“How you know me?” He opened his hands and then closed them. “Wait.” He put on his glasses. “It’s you.”
“I’m up here working,” I said. “Finally got a job, you know.” I still owed him shy of a grand.
“Working,” he said, like the idea was something to consider. It was Saturday and he was wearing a tie, hadn’t even loosened it. We stood there not talking, him looking around and taking it all in. Not knowing what else to do, I invited him inside for a cold drink. He nodded as if that was a possible solution.
Arnett came out the front door in army shorts and a tuxedo top. When he saw Wesley, he held out a finger of warning.
“Just came up for a smoke,” Wesley said.
Arnett looked from Wesley to me and then back to him. “Told you I’m out right now,” he said. “We already talked about this. Go ahead and take notes this time, if you need to. I’m not a fucking magician. Write it down. I didn’t go to clown school. Write that down.”
“Then remind me, please, why I’m letting you stay here.”
“We talked about this already,” Arnett said.
“Yes, we did, and I didn’t believe you, so I thought I’d come in and see for myself.”
Arnett walked back into the house, striding like he was wading through deep water toward something he was going to squeeze the life out of. Then some shouting and banging around inside.
“I think maybe you better get,” I said.
“I own this heap of shit,” Wesley said. “I let this convict live up here for free, under one condition. And here he goes breaking it.” He crossed his arms and started scratching both elbows hard enough to leave welts. “And you,” he said. “You still owe me money.”
Arnett appeared in the second-story staircase window, then ducked back out of sight. He flashed past a window on the third floor. Then the fourth.
“Maybe I’ll go,” Wesley said. “I didn’t come up here to make trouble. I just can’t win right now. This place here?” he said, pointing at the inn. “I bought it for my lady. Bought it off Jack, Arnett’s daddy or whatever he was. Got it for one…dollar…bill. My lady always wanted to run a breakfast-and-bed kind of thing up here. I cleared this front field myself, had chainsaws going for a month straight. I did it for her. Then one day I come home and there she is in one of our beds with another guy, some asshole with a ponytail. I asked her what she thought she was doing, and she looked at me and said, ‘You’ve changed, Wesley.’ Know what I told her?” He pointed at the invisible coward in front of him. “ ‘So will he.’ ”
He took a moment licking his teeth. I believed him but couldn’t tell where I fit in his story, and that worried me.
Arnett came out onto the widow’s walk, holding that same shotgun to his shoulder. Up there his hair swirled and tangled in the wind, and he yelled down that he was going to shoot himself and everybody else. He waited a moment and then called out, “Not in that order.”
“Arnett!” I shouted. “Everything’s cool.”
“He always shows off like this,” Wesley said.
Arnett pointed the gun into the air without aiming and fired. “I ain’t going shitwhere!” he yelled.
“I heard you,” Wesley called. He was still crouching after ducking from the shot. “You go ahead and stay right where you are.”
Arnett dropped behind the walkway’s railing as if to avoid return fire.
“Everybody calm the fuck down!” I said.
Wesley touched my shoulder. “Don’t worry about the rest of your fee with me. We’re good. Just stay up here and keep all this to yourself. Yes? And good luck.” He got in his Jeep and pulled out.
Arnett came up to me shaking his head. “You realize how much information you just gave away?”
“We were just talking.”
“He’s a lawyer,” he said. “They use everything.”
“He’s also your landlord.”
“Is that what he said?”
“There wasn’t really a problem until you started shooting.”
“That’s how you got to treat them,” he said, looking up at where he’d been. “They’ll walk all over you, bub. K?” He called over his shoulder, “Everything’s clear, Jenny. Come on out, baby.”
—
I earned my sunburn, waking early and working hard. I took long lunch breaks, drinking beer because it was good for my strength. Every now and then a couple named Eads and Terri stopped by. I watched them come and go from above. They never talked much to me, only asked where Arnett was. They seemed innocent, for potential buyers.
The sun was turning my wrinkled arm to bronze and I was almost able to get my wrist above my head.
I was beyond the trial period now but Arnett still wasn’t paying me. He locked the doors at night and made me sleep on the porch. Then I lost track of the days. I hadn’t seen Jennifer in a while, had only heard her voice coming from one of the bedrooms. It sounded like crying but probably wasn’t.
I started working crazy hours, sun to moon. One afternoon the moon rose early and I climbed down, sat in the uncut grass and watched a tick sink itself into my leg. Arnett came out and said, “You like science? Get in here and witness this shit.”
A flashlight was taped to the antler of a mount on the wall. A few oil lanterns burned in the corners. The room smelled of mildew and kerosene. Jennifer sat in a chair sipping from a milk jug, not looking at anybody. Arnett had tools and fluids spread out on the bar, around a raccoon that was still alive. He was trying to embalm it before it died. It moved so slow, focusing on every little thing, like it was amazed. He picked it up and walked it around and made it talk to Jennifer. She didn’t say a word.
—
The next morning I woke up on the porch with her kneeling next to me, her hair making a tent over my face. “You my man, right?” she said. “I know you are. When I get back, I want him done.”
She left in the truck, and I finished securing the topside of a gutter before it got too hot, then climbed down the scaffolding. Back on stable ground I rubbed my sweating palms together and sat on the edge of the porch, near my bedding.
Arnett stepped out carrying a big Styrofoam cup, his regular morning drink. He bought these at a station off
231 North and kept them in the freezer with some of the animals. He rubbed the sleep out of his eye with a fist and said, “All right, let’s get to work, gotta finish before the fall.”
“I been up there since seven,” I told him.
“Where’s Jennifer?” he said. “Where’s she at?” He dumped some of the frozen green stuff from the cup into the grass and replaced it with what remained of a bottle of vodka that had been left uncapped on the table last night. He brought the cocktail over and sat beside me, took a pull, asked if I wanted some and then told me sorry, it was his. “Should’ve thought ahead,” he said, tapping the bone between his eyebrows.
The little purple bottle was in my pocket.
He sucked at the stuff for a while, then said, “Let’s talk like men.” His mouth was outlined by the sharp growth of a goatee. I watched it move while he talked. “I’ve seen you before,” he said. “Do you remember?”
My throat went dry and I couldn’t swallow. A list of lies flitted through my mind.
“You were the one at Foodville,” he said. “The register. Remember?” He shook the cup around, opened his mouth to where I could see his green tongue and dumped in a gulp. “Brain freeze,” he said, like he’d just won something. “I remember you. You were checking her out.”
The breeze blew a beech leaf over the edge of the porch. I watched it go. The humidity out here was so thick you could see it. I held a breath and tried to slow my heart.
I remembered what my boss at Foodville had told me about spotting thieves. They’ll never look at you, he said. That’s how you know they’re about to take your shit. When they won’t look at you. So I looked at Arnett and said, “Maybe, now that you mention it.”
“Now that I fucking mention it,” he said.
“I appreciate you hiring me,” I said. “I’ve been needing the work.”
“Really? It’s not because of Jennifer?” He twinkled his fingers around like he was tickling something, then closed them into a fist. “You saying you don’t like looking at her? What’s wrong with her? I take issue with the fact that you don’t fucking like looking at her.”
“Nothing’s wrong with her,” I said.
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