Lee Johnson - Nitro Mountain

There’s no moon yet when Arnett’s silhouette, blacker than the night, bends down and rolls what looks like a body into the hole.

The phone lights up again, this time with a text from Turner: Sharon called said u wernt home where u?

Arnett’s shoveling the mound of dirt into the hole. Larry sinks behind the beech, risks the light of the phone, his hands shaking as he types with his thumbs. N E ridge off back access come quick.

Hold tite, Turner replies.

Larry can’t think straight. He’s trying to stay calm. Keep an eye on Arnett. But the body rolling into the hole, over and over, is all he sees now.

He checks his phone one last time. No service. Great. A fired cop and a tired bartender who used to be a cop. Perfect. Arnett isn’t carrying any weapons, as far as Larry can tell, except for the shovel, which is more than he’s got.

—

Arnett’s still sitting on a boulder near the mound when headlights finally come stretching through the trees. He drops to the ground and crawls behind the rock. When the car reaches the top it slows to a crawl. Larry watches, holding his breath. Just stop, right here, now.

The car goes past about twenty yards and then brakes. The door opens and the interior light shows Turner toddling out and standing there in the road, holding something in both hands. He’s too far away for Larry to see what it is.

“Larry?” Turner yells. “You out here?”

God Jesus. Larry’s on his belly, sweating and praying for this shit to be over with. He doesn’t want to lose another hand. Or worse. And what’s that Turner’s bringing up to his shoulder? It’s a fucking crossbow.

“Hut-hut-hut! Go long!” Turner yells, releasing an arrow into the treetops. The rushing thuck of it piercing leaves and vines and then whistling off into the sky. The moon has arrived. All goes quiet, and Turner gets back in the car. The red brake lights come on and go off.

The air smells void. Larry tastes copper in his mouth.

Arnett gets to his feet and his face flares with another cigarette. Larry sees the orange dot at the end of it. After a while, Arnett starts whistling to himself and begins moving back uphill toward the inn. He walks into a tree, spins and trips, the cigarette turning and making little line drawings in the dark.

Larry zips his windbreaker up and blows into his hands. It’s not cold yet but he’s got the chills from sweating. He hears Arnett walking and whistling. He can’t tell what tune it is. He’ll be goddamned if that guy thinks he can go around acting like this without anybody doing anything about it. But what can Larry do? He’s not a cop anymore. And look what happened when he was. He wishes he hadn’t seen what he saw.

Jones’s front passenger tire is low on air and slapping against the wet morning road. He’s been driving around for a while, stopping here and there to work out chords and words for this new song. Now he’s headed west on 15, which will take him back toward the lake, the Hickory, through dead-ass Ashland and on to Natalie’s house. The Gibson rests in the passenger seat beside him. “What’s wrong?” he says. “You don’t have anything to say about any of this?”

He reaches over and flicks the strings above the nut, right below the tuning pegs, bringing a thin, dissonant, high-pitched chime. “That’s what I think, too.”

Still bourbon brained, he’ll grab the case and leave it at that. No extra bullshit. None. They stopped doing that a long time ago. But what if it’s not there? Or if she trashed it? That’s not out of the question. His father gave him the case and guitar together. He knows better than to leave his shit around her place. Proof of how careless you really are.

He bites down on his tongue, hard, bites until he bleeds, and the flavor of it plus the alcohol from last night makes him heave. He chokes it back, sucks his tongue. The pain keeps his eyes open, alert and on the road.

He drives past a forgotten field of wheat, past random tobacco plants and scrub cedars, piles of trash in plastic bags with drawstrings, derelict farm equipment, collapsing Mail Pouch barns. The road’s rough shoulder pulls the low tire into its rut, the van jumps and he pulls back onto the dark pavement rushing toward him.

A straight line going in one direction is all he needs right now. It’ll be fine, so calm down. All this worry — it’s just his condition talking. The fields are steaming and drying beneath the day’s hard sky. He takes the almost empty bottle from between his legs and raises it up. Burns the hell out of his bit tongue. Serves him right.

The last time he saw Natalie was months ago, back when it was cold. They stood waiting at the end of her driveway. For what? A word, a cry — anything to break the paralyzing silence they were trapped in. He doesn’t remember what she was wearing, except for that red velvet cowboy hat. When he asked where she got it, she said from over the mountain and that she was planning to make some money with it.

He called her a slut and she smacked him across the face. I ain’t mad at you for saying that, she said. I’m mad at you for not saying it till now.

He drives into a tunnel of river birches, sucking on his tongue. A stretch of swampy land, miles of skeletal branches. A dead coon exploded on the shoulder, its mouth open in a scream. This is the marshland and floodplains of Hickory Lake. Sinkholes you can follow into Kentucky, some that men went missing in forever. Right ahead’s the Hickory, then five miles past that is her house. He cruises slowly and takes nips from the bottle, not enough to get drunker, just enough to burn the bite.

Larry’s sitting out front on the bench, smoking a cigarette. Shit. Now Jones’ll hear all about it. He only needs to get his hat. Grab it, maybe have one beer. He’s already half drunk, a beer would be nice.

He gets out of the van, walks up to Larry and stands there with his hands in his pockets. “Just came to get my hat.”

“That girl,” Larry says without looking up. “She might be the biggest mistake you ever made. You didn’t listen to a word she was saying last night.”

“Oh, I heard her. You actually believed that shit? She just likes getting a rise out of folks, seems to me.”

“That right? Well, listen. I drove to Nitro after y’all left and I walked up onto something worse than she even knows about. I saw the guy she was talking about. Arnett. He was digging a grave. Then he rolled something into it.”

“What the fuck?”

“I went home and Sharon called the cops. I could’ve been killed. I run a bar. That’s what I do.”

“Was it my bass player?”

Larry opens his hands like a book, lays his face in and begins crying. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I just ain’t slept is all.”

Jones watches Larry’s thumb rub the thick, fingerless area of his left hand. He never really believed Larry’s story about getting shot. He figured he’d just accidentally pulled the trigger on himself, something like that. A careless mistake. But now he’s starting to worry. “You didn’t do nothing wrong,” he says.

“I ain’t finished yet.”

Jones always wondered if Larry actually came from here, and now that he’s crying you can tell he did. When people start crying, their true voice comes out. That was how Jones taught himself to sing.

“Sharon called the cops after I got back,” Larry says. “I couldn’t even do it. Then I spent the rest of the night talking to these two trooper boys, Ricky and some monkey mouth behind him. They like to bit my head off for calling Turner first.”