Lee Johnson - Nitro Mountain

In my room she lifted up her shirt. Scars covered her belly and up toward her breasts. Not surgical-looking, just puckered things that still needed healing. I leaned over and touched one. My finger looked young next to it.

“Kind of numb,” she said.

“Can you feel this?” I traced the shape of hurt flesh. Some of the crests were still scabbed.

“Only if I’m watching.” She pushed her shirt back down. “I meant to show you yesterday.”

“What the hell?”

She told me that when she and Arnett first moved into the inn she tried to leave him, but he tied her to a board and brought her out to the pen where they kept the pigs and the dogs. All the animals lived together and it drove them crazy. He dropped her down into it and dumped slop all over her. The hogs came out of the barn and went straight for the feed. The dogs stayed back, whining and yapping. When she started bleeding, he shot a rifle into the air and sent the hogs running. Then he asked if she really planned on leaving him. “He shoots the air a lot,” she said.

I’d heard some shit about what people did to each other, but this beat all of it.

She pushed down the waist of her jeans and showed me another one. I studied what Arnett had done to her and considered my options.

“What are you going to do about it?” I said.

“Don’t know.”

“Can’t you call somebody? Make a report or something.”

“What if he tries stopping me?”

“Tries is different than stopping.” I got up.

“Where you going?” she said.

“Call the cops.”

“Please, please don’t,” she said. “Oh, please. Don’t. You can’t.” She dropped to her knees and grabbed my hands. “They won’t hold him long enough. He’ll come and find me. I mean, even after they found the cameras, he’s still out. He’ll probably end up going to jail once he’s convicted. But Jesus, it takes so long. And for this there’s no proof.”

“Your body’s proof.”

She covered her ears. “I don’t want to be anybody’s proof,” she said. “He’ll get me back. He’ll find me, and if he knows I’m even talking to anybody…Oh, God. I’m nobody’s proof.”

I turned the volume up on the TV so Dad couldn’t hear us. I sat down next to her on the bed.

She handed me the same bottle she’d shown me when she’d first arrived yesterday. “This,” she said.

“For what?”

And she said: “To kill him.”

The bottle held a homemade embalming fluid, for when Arnett shot animals. “He makes the stuff,” she said. “Swallow it just a little bit and you’ll die.” She looked at her nails. “Drink him with it.”

We looked into each other’s eyes. She sat directly in front of me in the messy nest of a sheet. Our legs were crossed, knees touching. I laid the bottle down beside us like it might explode. She filled my palms with her fists. The whole world was easily fixed. I felt more needed than I ever had in all my life.

“This is your idea,” I said.

“I was just thinking out loud,” she said. “But you look interested.”

We stayed in my room all day, watching TV and talking and touching and watching more TV and touching. I heated Chinese in the microwave. While we were eating, I asked her how she was allowed to stay gone so long, and she said he sometimes let her get made up in town. “I’ll hit the Hairport after this,” she said. “Get my hair and nails and lips and toes done.”

Some real shit was playing on Unsolved Mysteries . She turned off the TV and the noise of summertime droned and knocked against the window, the static of wings and legs and hard knobby bodies, millions of them, all zipping around and fighting for that same old thing.

We lay close together but I was afraid if I reached out to touch her I wouldn’t be able to feel her at all. She sat up. “Grab me a beer?”

When I got back, her clothes were thrown next to the bed with the sheet across her bottom half. Another piece of hurt bloomed on her white belly. That place that had once been pure and untouched. I couldn’t stand it. She reached for the cold longneck, took a swallow and told me to sit down.

“You wanna see something?” She pulled her iPhone out of her jeans on the floor and spider-fingered through lit menus of options. The screen flipped to unfocused darkness. “Watch this.”

The sound of random noise came through the little speaker. The image now had a bright spot in the middle. I couldn’t tell what was happening but the noise eventually made sense. It was the barroom clatter of Durty Misty’s. Right here in the stupid little bedroom of my life. The screen darkened again and the image came into focus. Short tapered pillars of sitting thighs. The drawn line and darkened thatch through the middle of a lady’s ass. There was a sloppy kiss mark on one cheek, a tattoo labeled Kiss My Ass .

Rachel’s.

“Sexy-looking stuff,” Jennifer said. “Isn’t it?” She held out the phone like the video was something a person of talent had made.

“How recently was this taken?” I said.

“I don’t know. Arnett showed it to me last night. I went ahead and asked about the cameras — you know, after we talked about it? — and he just hauled it out and showed it to me. This phone’s his. He doesn’t know I took it. I’m going to throw it away.”

Rachel started peeing.

Jennifer touched my knee and walked her hand like a beetle up my thigh. “So,” she said, “maybe he was lying about the cameras.” Her hand went from my leg to her crotch. “He’s an asshole, but I do like watching this stuff. Doesn’t it kinda turn you on?”

“No,” I said. “This is serious.”

“I just can’t believe he was actually doing it behind my back. I mean, you ’d never do anything like this.”

“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.