Lee Johnson - Nitro Mountain

She rolled into a position I’d never seen before. She stuck her backside up, clutching her ass and spreading it and begging to get hit. “All this, all yours. Think of our years together,” she said. “Or months or whatever. All I wanted was.”

Afraid I’d be done in her before she felt it, I took her by the ribs with my good hand and she looked over her shoulder. “Hit me,” she said. “Come on.”

The light behind us colored my fist. Her hair went flying and her face went down and I kept hitting her and hitting her until she stopped talking.

—

No sun yet. But it was warm out and the woods were beginning to brighten. My body was covered in chiggers and ticks. I pulled up my pants leg and it looked like I had scales. Her swollen face was a mound of putty painted in generous dark layers. Bruises from my own hands dotted her neck and arms and side and legs. Marks of my own teeth on top of the hogs’. The pain of light fired into my temple like a nail gun. I must’ve gotten up and then fallen down, because when I woke up again I was in the truck riding beside her.

“Get out,” she said. “We’re here.”

I saw where we were: my parents’ house. Her face looked even worse. “You need to get help,” I said.

“We can’t be seen together.”

“Where you going to go?”

“Give me forty bucks,” she said. “I’ll get a room at the Knight’s Inn and we can meet there later.”

I handed her two twenties from my wallet.

—

The kitchen smelled like burnt toast. I didn’t see Mom at first, even though she was sitting right there at the table. It seemed like she’d been waiting for this moment and now here it was and she didn’t know what to say.

“Foodville’s been calling for you,” she said. “Where’ve you been?”

“I moved out like you told me to.”

“I told you nothing of the sort,” she said.

“I got another job. You can’t yell at me anymore.”

“I never yell at you. Are you all right? Look at you.”

“Fuck Foodville. They can go fuck themselves. I do what I want. They should’ve figured that out by now. You too.”

“My boy,” she said. “Please sit down.”

I opened the fridge and she told me to take what I wanted. I looked in, then punched the door shut. “I don’t want any of that,” I said.

Dad moved into the kitchen doorway, gripping his lower back. “He been sleeping with that slut,” he said, talking to Mom but looking at me. “That’s where he been. Can’t you smell it on him?”

Mom tried stopping me but she couldn’t. She cried for me to quit. I had pushed my father to the floor and he was lying there yelling.

“After everything we done give you,” he said.

“You call this everything?” I stepped over him into the living room. “Take a look around.” He wouldn’t, so I helped him. “This lamp,” I said, and threw it. “This coffee table,” I said, and dumped it.

“What do you want?” my mother said. “You’re my boy. What do you want? I’ll do anything.”

She was the only one in our little world holding shit together, and I couldn’t face her. “Throw it all away,” I said. “Flush it.”

“I won’t let you,” she cried.

Dad lay there in the mess I’d made. “If I get up I’ll kill your ass,” he said.

“That’s exactly your problem,” I said. “You can’t.”

“I sure will.”

“Let me help you.” I pulled him by the arm and dragged him around the room. He seemed so small, like a toy dad. Mom was begging. When I realized he actually couldn’t get up, I let him go.

“Call the cops,” he told my mom.

I could see his heart hammering in his chest. It was a crazy hammer. “What?” I said. “For me not kicking your ass? Make sure you hide your weed before they get here.”

I slammed the front door so hard the storm glass fell out and shattered on the front stoop. The dealer boy stood in his yard and watched me walk down the driveway. I sensed his attention. Down the road a ways I figured he’d stopped staring, but when I turned around he was still there.

I walked for miles through fields and scrub forest to the Knight’s Inn. A lot of it was creek land, and my pants were soaked by the time I got there. A truck was parked between two yellow lines on the new asphalt; it wasn’t hers. A few sedans were lined up in front of other rooms. I didn’t want to ask or knock or let anybody notice me, so I went over to the wooden fence around the dumpsters, pushed the chained doors apart and squeezed through.

I crouched against the slats, sweat stinging my eyes. The sun was getting high, no shade anywhere. A couple cars came. In one of the dumpsters I found a pizza box and ate the crusts. I reconsidered knocking on some doors but decided not to listen to myself anymore. When I heard another car turning in, I peeked out and watched a guy park. He walked up and knocked on a door. It opened and he went in. I wiped my face with my shirt, then held it over my nose and mouth to keep out the stench of baking garbage. I waited for so long before the guy came out with a girl. They stood around the hood of his car, smoking and talking, just a couple that had nothing to do with me.

—

The sun touched the treetops and I hitched a ride out of town with a man who asked if I believed in aliens. When I said I didn’t know, he unwrapped a stick of gum, folded it into his mouth and chewed it for a while before swallowing it.

“Everybody says yes or no,” he said.

“Everybody but me,” I said. When we got to the foot of Nitro I told him to drop me off.

“Only if you say yes or no,” he said.

“I already told you.”

He slowed onto the shoulder and we rolled to a stop. “That’s what I thought,” he said. “No yes, no no .”

—

I took the woods. Each time I dropped into a hollow I lost my directions and got turned around. At a rocky overhang with cool dirt beneath it, I lay down and fell asleep. When I woke up it was dark as a rat snake.

Quartz jutted along a ridge like broken spine and I followed it up to the inn. Over the front field, the clouds smeared the sky and passed beneath a cut of moon heading west. A hallway light was on. No police tape anywhere.

He wasn’t on the porch where I’d left him. But the plates of possum bones were.

In the barroom, I turned on the lights and lit the place up. I searched under the tables and behind the bar and in the kitchen but nobody was there, so I went to the next floor up and walked down the long hallway, every single door wide open, and realized I could go into whichever room I wanted. It was a strange feeling, such freedom. I went to the door at the end of the hall. Arnett’s bedroom. A rifle lay across the sheets, but otherwise there was nothing except the same dead animals.

Hearing something downstairs, I grabbed the rifle, went back down to the bar and shut out the lights, took a stool and steadied the rifle in my lap. Listening. I thought to check for a bullet in the chamber and flicked a lighter at it. I heard footsteps outside in the grass. Then a bright beam shot through a slit in the blinds. Then the footsteps again, now on the porch boards.

In the voice of someone who knew what he was doing, who was supposed to be here, I said, “Who is it?”

I almost believed it was just Wesley coming to check on things. When he stepped inside, I’d show him the rifle and explain that I was guarding his place. I’d tell him to sit down, have a beer, the tap’s open. Draw you one and get a seat. He would ask me what was wrong. He’d say I didn’t look like the kind of guy to hurt anybody. Then Jennifer would walk into the room and say, He’s not.

Do you know what growing up means? It means learning to beat a woman. Trying to kill a man. Posting up at a worn-out palace with a loaded gun and waiting to deal with the consequences of what you’ve done.