Nitro Mountain

by Lee Clay Johnson

  “I promise you,” Ricky says, “you’re the last person in the world I care about right now.”

  “That gives me hurt feelings,” Turner says.

  Derek laughs, then stops when Ricky cocks his head at him. “Where was he going?”

  “Like I say, he was walking. Could either be somewhere along 231, or anywhere on the back access. Or East Ridge. Might as well check Buzzard Hollow while you’re at it. And how about Kentucky, too?”

  “All right,” Ricky says. “So if you have no assumptions about Arnett’s whereabouts, why are you sitting in this bar with the lights out?”

  “Thinking,” Turner says.

  “There’s a lie,” Derek says.

  Through the rain-spattered windshield, Arnett watches the cops leave Misty’s, get into their Bronco and pull out, the tires peeling and yipping over the wet road.

  “About fucking time,” Arnett says. “Daddy go get drinky. Go listen to somebody whining about somebody with no love in their life. Daddy’s thirsty.”

  He steps out of the car holding the fiddle case and moves through the tall wet grass without hurry. He decides not to be drunk anymore and only trips a couple times. Rain’s just an idea he can take or leave. He walks through the waterfall coming off the roof and slides into Misty’s like the old days when he was just a drinker getting into innocent crimes, and later when he worked here for a year. He’s too drunk to be surprised when he sees Turner standing behind the bar, his back to the door, taking something off the top shelf.

  “I thought y’all left already.” Turner begins pouring himself a drink. “I told you everything I know about that murdering son of a bitch.”

  Arnett takes a seat at a booth and opens his fiddle case. “What’d you just call my momma?”

  Turner looks around.

  “So them bastards’re after me because of you?”

  “I didn’t say bull to them.”

  “Now you can say it to me.”

  “What do you want, Arnie?”

  “Let’s start right there. Don’t call me that fucking name again. How about some respect. Got any of that? Go ahead. Call me that fucking name again.” He’s definitely still drunk—can almost see two Turners—but feels a lot clearer than he did a minute ago. He’ll shoot Turner. Both of hims. He will do that. That’s what’s about to happen. “Now where’s this guy Jones at?”

  Turner looks at the open fiddle case with Arnett’s hands inside. “You got a gun in that thing there, I bet.”

  “Why ain’t you pouring me a cold one?” Arnett says. “How long must Daddy gotta wait for?”

  Turner grabs a pint glass from the rack.

  Arnett aims the pistol and pulls the trigger. A bottle bursts and liquor pours down the shelves as Turner drops down below. Arnett gets up and trips as he fires again and a piece of the bar opens in a disaster of splinters.

  “Officer down, officer down!” Turner yells. “We got a predicament. Send in backup.”

  “Where’d I hit you at?” Arnett says. He falls back on the bench, gun now in both hands, and sweeps the barrel back and forth, aiming at bottles like at a carnival shooting gallery. But then, strange as hell, something comes whistling at him through the shattered bar board. He feels the speed of it grazing past and then there’s a bolt stuck next to him in the bench he’s sitting on.

  “Fucking what, motherfucker?” Arnett finds himself moving toward the bar, unsure of what all the noise is about, until he realizes he’s discharging bullets in Turner’s general direction. Splinters of wood popping, bottles exploding. He’s still pulling the trigger, the chamber turning and the hammer clicking, after the last bullet’s spent. He steps around the bar and there’s Turner with blood soaking his pants.

  “Almost got me,” Arnett tells him. “With that damn thing there. How’d you do that?”

  “You. You sick son of a bitch.” Turner’s holding on to his leg. “And, and I know what you done and…” He spits through his teeth. “And where you done it. And.” His face closes up in pain. “You’re under arrest. Police. Me.”

  A crossbow lies on the floor against the cooler. “That the only arrow comes with it?” Arnett picks it up, checks it out, brings it back to where he was sitting and yanks the bolt out of the bench and tries to figure how to load it.

  “Those troopers’re bound to be back any minute now,” Turner says.

  “You say that like you’re praying.”

  “They’ll be back.”

  “Then I don’t got time to fool with this.” He sets the crossbow down, goes to Turner and shoves the pistol barrel into Turner’s mouth, metal scraping against teeth. Turner cries out and Arnett pulls the trigger. The hammer clicks. Turner squeals a denial of his false fate and Arnett tosses the gun into the drain bucket by the taps where it splashes and disappears beneath the foamy muck.

  He grabs a thick roll of duct tape from the top of the cooler, kicks some sense out of Turner’s head, clamps his hands over his mouth, runs the tape around the back of his head, over and under his wrists and around the back of his head again and again. Then he tapes Turner’s ankles together and staggers out the door.

  Around the side of the building he unfastens the green hose from the spigot and pulls it over to the fuel oil tank, unscrews the cap and drops one end of the hose in until he feels it go slack from touching bottom. He unreels it alongside him as he shuffles back in through the side door.

  He sucks and sucks on the end of the hose until the siphon finally works and he spits out the sour oil. The hose continues pissing onto the floor, filling the place with fumes. Turner’s tape-muted shouts from behind the bar remind Arnett he almost forgot something. He steps over Turner and grabs a bottle for the road. Some beers for hydration. Keep this shit fucking going. The oil is pooling and mixing with blood. Turner kicks at his feet but Arnett stomps him and sends him into a distorted howl. The fumes are making it hard to breathe. Pretty good buzz. Fuck yeah. Arnett picks the crossbow up and gets his lighter out.

  Flames rise and lap in succession. Tall tongues of fire. Black smoke billows and hides the stars.

  Three county elders have gathered, standing back from the blaze in solemn speculation. Their thin silhouettes bend and wave in the heat and light.

  “Somebody call the cops,” says Elvin.

  “We already done that,” says Bill. He’s the one who started this Senior Citizen Security Force. He got out of bed to rush over here, and his sweatsuit’s wrinkled. He taps a Maglite against his thigh and makes it come back on.

  Elvin takes the cigarette from his mouth and points with it. “I seen his car driving that a way, boys, north toward 231 there.”

  “Nah, he went there a way,” says Rob, pointing in the opposite direction. He’s sipping from a steaming mug that smells of instant coffee and Old Crow.

  “He didn’t drive nowhere,” says Bill. “His car’s still here. Right there.” He points. “That’s Turner’s car. I bet he done it, crazy rat bastard.”

  They all step back as a section of tiled roof melts and collapses and the front of the building blooms.

  “Jesus drinking a Bloody Mary,” says Elvin.

  “Find a dimmer bulb than Turner,” says Bill, “and the whole world’ll go dark. You want to burn down a bar, you oughtn’t go leaving your car there.”

  Rob drops his light. “Wait, y’all. Is that him there?”

  And yes, it is.

  Turner’s crawling from somewhere behind the building, elbowing and kneeing and grub-worming toward them, cursing through his hands taped over his mouth.

  Sharon and Larry, beneath the blankets. Just voice, breath, touch. Let the rest of the world fall away.

  When the phone rings, she whispers, “Don’t get it.”

  “I’ll be right back.”

  “Just for once? It’ll stop.”

  She used to make him come so hard from a blow job that his feet would rattle the end of the bed. She plans on that now.

  The phone starts ringing again.
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  He leaves the bedroom door open and the light from the hallway hurts her eyes. She brings the sheet up to her nose, smells the detergent in its fabric, then pulls it over her face and turns the light into a glow. She smoothes her hand down her belly and listens.

  She can’t make out what he’s saying in there, but she pretends it’s another woman. Back when they got together, he used to say all kinds of nasty things, even talk about other women when she let him. At first it embarrassed her. But when they were alone, in bed in the dark, she was okay with that talk. Sometimes she asked him to. Just don’t go around thinking it’s for real, she told him. And then he stopped for good when he admitted it was making him want others. But right now she misses those words. Those women. Even if they were names they both knew.

  He’s talking to one of them now. Telling her now’s a good time to come over. Wife’s in bed, ready to go. I’m waiting for you both, Sharon thinks, and dips her middle and ring finger inside herself.

  His voice stops and she hears his footsteps in the hallway, heavier than usual. The weight of bad news. He walks across their room to the closet and gets his rain jacket. “That was Kevin,” he says. “Durty Misty’s is on fire.”

  “You’re driving all the way over there in this rain?”

  “Turner’s asking for me. They’ve got him in an ambulance. Sounds like he’s in bad shape. And the cops are questioning him.”

  “Don’t go.”

  “I got to.”

  She sits there on the side of the bed, listening to his car roll down their driveway and accelerate into the night. He better be careful going over that mountain. He knows damn well he doesn’t always have to get involved. She pushes her toes into the thick carpet, traces the stretch marks on her breast with a bitten fingernail. Then she does something she’s never done before. She gets down and prays, naked.

  Arnett knows you can’t do over what you’ve already done. He knows that. And if you try to, that’s you going back on yourself and still not fixing shit. Like any of it could be fixed anyway. It’s all fucked up and you can’t unfuck it up, shouldn’t even think about it. That’s you putting everything that makes you who you are in the dump, and then what are you? Nothing. Absolutely fucking nothing left of you, except for the trouble you started, and then you can’t even stand behind that and say, That’s right, I done that. I stood up for myself. No, you got to have something to live by. Some people have religion, family—shit like that. You got you and what you done. So say it with me: I am not sorry.

  But he is, he is. What he did to Jennifer. That’s a large dull thing in the middle of his chest fucking with his breathing.

  There’s also the other stuff he did, but don’t think about that right now—you didn’t do it. That’s what you got to believe to make it through this. You didn’t do a goddamn thing. Why would he have? He had no reason to.

  He reaches around on the floor. The full bottle of whiskey he took from Misty’s, a fifth of something fancy, is clicking between some beer cans. He picks it up, closes his knees around it, pulls the cork and tosses it out the window. He lifts the kisser to his mouth and listens to the whiskey making its exit music, glugging lower in pitch with every gulp. Din, don, down, done. “Apple juice,” he says. “What if one time Daddy got thirsty and there ain’t no more apple juice? What does he do then? Must he go into town? Why must Daddy do these things?”

  He backhands his lips. Goddamn this shit’s good. Why did anybody ever keep coming to buy his daddy’s corn with stuff like this around? Why risk law and decency when you could drive somewhere and steal a bottle like this one right here? The world is a cage full of starving animals that don’t realize they can just push the door open. So let’s push it open.

  He rounds a curve and a mashed-up buck lying in the road comes into the headlights. He has no time to swerve—good thing too, else he’d have thrown his ass off the road—and it thumps beneath him. He drives on with the sound of dragging and the smell of burning meat wafting from the vents.

  He stops there in the middle of this county highway on a plateau overlooking blackness. The noise of crickets and cicadas. The car’s brights bring out the dead gray of maples and oaks and poplars and telephone poles covered in kudzu and the road ahead of him and the steam rising up off the car’s grille. When he gets out, he sees a five-point antler and a duffel-bag-size body, what used to be a body, now just twisted fur and muscles and a stomach split open and spilling chewed grass. He grabs into the neck. His fingers go deep, it’s still warm in there, fresh dead, and he slides them back out to inspect the color in the headlights and then wipes around his eyes, painting himself like Bob used to do when they went out. A buck-blood warrior.

  The only thing watching him is a barred owl up in a treetop. He doesn’t see it, just hears its call. He listens, considering its question: Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you?

  He tears free a piece of flesh, puts it in his mouth and chews. It makes his stomach clench and growl. I cook for me.

  He speeds off drinking whiskey to wash down the meat. He could jump a fence right now. With the buck’s blood around his eyes, he can see things nobody else can or ever has.

  The marble eyes of a baby coon flash in the left lane and he crosses the center line to try and hit it, and then the car’s rocking and bouncing and a tree crashes into the left side and a ditch of shale and leaves and weeds jumps up at him and throws the car in the air, and he sees the ridge and sky and valley and a life of endless mistakes and stupid ideas on how to make money and then somehow the car lands evenly on all four wheels, right back in the middle of the road.

  The engine’s still running. Which direction was he going? He would never do anything without a reason to do it. The rearview broke off. He turns and looks for what sounds like footsteps—some stranger coming up on him to see what happened? But it’s just his heart. Shit. He reaches down and finds the bottle. It spilled some. Double shit. The left headlight’s out and the other one’s bent crooked so it looks to him like he’s constantly turning, but he’s not even moving. He takes a hot splash down his throat to stay clear. She tried to kill him. He should’ve shot her dead. Left her like that and saved everybody the trouble. She tried to kill him. But he loves her and he could never do that to her, not her, can’t even believe what he already did. She even bailed him out when he got spanked with that voyeurism bullshit. He still has yet to be convicted there. Free till then, motherfuckers. Let’s make the most of this. He’s not hiding anything. There are reasons for what Daddy does. He had a camera in the bathroom. So…fucking…what? There’s bigger problems now.

  The bottle’s gone. He tosses it somewhere. He needs to get back to Jennifer and make sure she’s cool.

  Locked in under double-shoulder seat belts, Ricky and Derek jolt on the Bronco’s front bench. They’re both chewing dip, spitting into the same paper cup.

  When they left Misty’s the first time, it was just old Turner in there. They drove ten miles down 231, then turned around and saw the sky glowing. They came tearing back into the lot and found Turner lying there surrounded by a trio of old-timers. One was pouring something from a mug onto Turner’s duct-taped mouth and hands while the other pushed at the tape with the rubber end of his cane. “I don’t want to touch him,” he said. Ricky bent down and stripped off the tape. “Almost got him!” Turner gasped through his lips. Then Ricky’s radio crackled. Arnett was seen driving out of town, not toward the Lookout but heading back on 15 toward Buzzard Hollow Road.

  So that’s the direction the troopers are rolling now, across the valley and into the mountains. It’s stopped raining but the clouds haven’t cleared.

  “Gets dark out here, huh?” Derek says, cutting the wheel left and leaning into the long turn that begins the steep incline.

  “Dangerous too, this fast.”

  “You want me to slow down?”

  “No. Just don’t jerk the wheel again.”

  They move through Green Hollow, past the lights of the Shifflett hou
se and on up through this natural disaster of trees and rocks and hills too steep for any four-legged creature to climb. Even a problem for vehicles on the road. Derek makes another hard turn and Ricky’s about to say something when they see a headlight.

  “That a motorcycle?” Derek says.

  “Slow down,” Ricky says. “Give your brights.”

  Derek flips the switch and the embankments on either side spring up into cliffs of clay and shale. Up ahead there’s a car trying to turn around in the middle of the road, with a buck’s bloody head hanging from the grille and a mess of meat dragging beneath. It comes on at a slow speed now and directly into their lights, which are bright enough to show who’s driving.

  They stop a moment to witness the face of Arnett in the steam, blood smeared all around his eyes and a trail of vomit from his mouth down his chest. As he passes he flicks a cigarette into the Bronco’s open window, right onto Derek’s lap. Derek smacks it out in short showers of sparks and then they’re on the shoulder, trying to turn around while Arnett speeds off.

  “Should I have blocked him?” Derek says, getting up to speed.

  “Probably. I wouldn’t have, though. See if we can’t catch up and persuade him off the road.”

  Anything’s better than jail. The hollow hallucinatory echoing through the tiled hallways and off the metal-and-concrete cells. The empty sound of doors opening and closing. And the people. Around when Jack ran away, Arnett went in on drunk charges and had this guy named Ray for a cellmate. Ray had one glass eye that made him look confused. Arnett was just twenty when he walked into that cell and saw Ray sitting on the top bunk with his hands inside his jumper.

  I lost my eye in a fight, Ray said.

  And though Arnett didn’t doubt him, he said, Who the fuck asked?

  I like to fuck, Ray said.

  The guard told Ray to get his hands out of there, then locked the door and went away.

  The metal cot hanging from the wall beneath Ray’s roost gave Arnett a place to lie down. He woke from a sleep he hadn’t had in a long time with Ray shaking his shoulder.