Lee Johnson - Nitro Mountain

“Yeah,” I said. “A job.”

“Aisle six,” he said.

I looked in that direction, and he said, “Just kidding. Follow me.”

We went into his office. He talked while I looked out the two-way mirror; none of the customers knew I was watching. The next day he put me on bagging.

I worked part-time, not enough to save anything, but Dad got pissed when he heard I’d found work and asked if I thought I was better than he was. I did, but I didn’t tell him that. He bought dime bags from our neighbor that stunk like ammonia and spent his working hours with a cloud of blue smoke above his head. I almost asked him if he’d heard about Rachel until one day he did it for me.

“I heard Carol talking?” he said. “About that girl you lost?”

“Which one?”

He nodded off, and then shook his head, either to wake himself up or simply to disagree with the sudden, unwelcome consciousness. Choked by the smell of the chair he slumped in, I asked him to tell me more. He clicked his tongue as if trying to decide whether to play a hand or fold.

“Forget it,” I said.

“I almost did.”

—

Summertime, and our yard was going wild. The mower was where I’d left it, stuck in its own track, and I figured the rabbits had built a little bunny kingdom under there by now. I kept my job at Foodville because the AC was reliable.

I started a beard, didn’t trim it, kept it rough, and looked at myself in windows whenever I got the chance. My left arm still hurt when I tried to straighten or flex it, the muscle withering and the whole thing shriveling. It looked like somebody had accidentally put the wrong part on my body, and I made sure to turn so I could only see my right side. I pretended I didn’t know who I was and rated myself on a scale of one-to-ten handsomeness. When I was honest I never made it past five. But if I glanced in the perfect direction, my teeth spreading below that darkening mustache, my right arm strong and straight, I could almost see myself as somebody worthy of Jennifer.

One morning after I’d just unlocked the grocery’s doors, I was looking in the window and thinking I might be moving into a six when this girl comes up to the other side of the window. I was looking at myself, and she steps right into my reflection. I didn’t recognize her at first. She was wearing a hoodie, long jeans, work boots. It was ninety damn degrees outside. The store hadn’t been open ten minutes. She walked in and squinted around.

It was Jennifer, heading for the dairy wall.

A man old enough to be her dad came in behind her and stood in the doorway. He wasn’t even wearing a shirt. His chest was dark and at first it looked like he had some kind of wing tattoo below his collarbone, but then I saw it was a rug of hair. He asked if he could come in, and before I said no, he did. I realized it was a chest full of tattoos, of chest hair, or small feathers, or flames. A hand-done job, that was all I could really tell. The hair hanging from his head was real, and on his neck was Daffy Duck. Arnett Atkins had arrived.

Not a whole lot had changed for me since last winter, and those moments at Misty’s felt far gone and up close all at once. Rachel hadn’t yet floated to any surface. She occupied a small place in my mind, like some bad dream that wasn’t possible to confront. But Arnett — had he heard I was the one who’d turned him in?

Jennifer was reaching for something high on the wall.

“The fuck you looking at?” Arnett said. He leaned in, and I could smell beer on his breath, a gamey odor from his flesh.

“That girl,” I said. “Nothing.”

“Who are you?” he said. “And why?”

I didn’t answer.

“That’s what I thought. I classify this situation NFI: Not Fucking Important. Mommy’s little hunchy boy.”

I straightened up. “What’d you just say?”

“Put down your feathers, banty.” Arnett’s eyes wouldn’t keep still. They were wet and he pulled a rag from his pants and wiped them. He was taking in everything except me, his jugular pulsing through the skin of his neck. He held a hand in front of his face, stared into his palm, brought it to his mouth, licked it. He smiled and revealed a dark space in the side of his mouth. Teeth were missing since I’d last seen him. His bottom ones were thin and burnt-looking like used matches. All the gold in the back molars, gone. His tongue filled a gap and his eyes rolled back like something was moving inside him. “Let’s start over again, okay?” he said. “I’ll give you another chance, yes? Here’s a better question. What do you want to be?”

“That’s deep,” I said.

“Answer the fucking question, hunch.”

Maybe he actually didn’t recognize me. “I don’t know,” I said.

“That’s your problem. You need to make a decision.”

“About what?”

Arnett sucked a finger and cleaned his ear with it. “Your store. Keep an eye on it. Good old workingman boy. You do your job and she’ll do mine.”

He went to the bright wall where she stood. She seemed tiny in those baggy clothes, probably his. They talked and he threw his thumb behind his head. She glanced in my direction, then covered her face and turned away. He took her by the shoulder and said something into the hair dangling from her hood and all down her face. She shook her head. Finally he let her go and she walked straight for me over the shining floors I’d mopped that morning before opening.

“Look at you,” I said.

“Look at me.” She kept her head down until she reached my checkout counter. “What the hell’d you just say to him?” She put her hands down on the conveyor belt and it started moving, pulling her closer.

“Find everything you need, ma’am?” I said.

She laughed. She was beautiful. Then she spun away again and the color left her face. Her eyes screwed shut with exhaustion, and lines cracked through her skin. “Listen,” she said, and I turned off the belt. “He told me to tell you to quit thinking what you’re thinking.”

“He doesn’t know what I’m thinking.”

“But he knows what you want.”

“Who is he to you?”

“He’s my…Well.”

Arnett was wandering up the aisle with a quart of milk. I wrote my parents’ phone number on the back of a receipt, the numbers crossing over the print of a half-off coupon for hickory-smoked ham hocks. She stuffed the paper into her pocket and said, “What happened to your arm?”

“Call me and I’ll tell you.”

She pushed through the door to leave, before the motion sensor had time to swing it open.

There were still sweaty fingerprints on the black rubber belt. Her hands were always damp. It was something I’d forgotten about.

“What’s the holdup?” Arnett said, setting the milk where her hands had been.

I turned on the switch. “You want a bag for this, sir?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’d love a fucking bag.”

—

I waited days, but she didn’t call and I figured I’d freaked her out. Then she did, and she sounded scared, but I told her to hold on for a minute and went into my dad’s room. Standing over him, I said, “Your disability came through.” He didn’t budge. So far as I could tell, he was free of all worries. Percocet, beer, a couple joints — that’s the kind of place that helps you forget you have a wife who’ll wipe your mouth clean but won’t kiss you goodnight. I stepped over piles of dirty clothes and unplugged the phone he kept on the carpet between his bed and the wall.

I talked to her in my room with the door locked and a pillow over my face to insulate the sound. In bursts of muffled weeping, she told me Arnett was at it again only this time it was even worse. She talked until the phone got hot against my ear. “Jennifer,” I said, “slow down. What exactly’s going on?”