Lee Johnson - Nitro Mountain

—

I ended up sleeping with him, except there was no sleeping. Don was older and I guess he was out to prove something with me, set a record or something. I was lying on my back, taking it like a champ and staring out the window, when a rooster crowed. “I like a good cock,” I said, and I think that’s what made him finally come. He pulled his angry stiff thing out of me and told me to lift up my shirt, which I did, just a little, and it spat gray suds into my belly button.

“With half her clothes still on, ladies and gentlemen!” Don said.

He thought I kept my shirt on to tease him. He hadn’t seen my scars.

“You’re a beauty,” I said, because I wanted to have somebody, some body, to keep me company at night. But the night was long done with. I asked him to lie down next to me and he rolled on his side and brought his hand over my forehead like he was taking my temperature. I calmed the fuck down.

He got up and brought me a paper towel and apologized for being so small.

I wasn’t crying but for some reason I’d gotten teary. No, I was not crying. I wiped my eyes, then my belly, and said, “That was long!”

“I’m talking dick.” He blubbered his tongue between his lips. “I know it’s small.” He put his hands on his hips and let his belly sag. “But I make up for it in hours, right? I know this,” he said, “because that is what they say.”

He had a bushy mustache, like a miniature version of the push broom I used when we closed. There should be a rule about not hurting the feelings of a man with a mustache. “You’re big,” I said. “There’s no stopping you.”

He sat down next to me for that one.

Not many people knew I was smart. I could tell by how he talked to me that he thought I was pretty stupid. When I told Don he was big, it wasn’t exactly true. I mean, he wasn’t small small. He was normal. Normal normal. Which I liked. I didn’t need some alien fathership crash-landing in my cunt every time I wanted a little romance.

I swear, if it’s not big enough to give you a walking disability, men think it’s useless. They want something that immobilizes you. Move. Don’t move. Look at me. Don’t look at me.

He thought it was a shame if it wasn’t something he could bludgeon a baby seal with.

But he did leave me sore.

—

You should’ve tried talking to me. Nothing came back. Even if I liked you, which I probably did.

There were a lot of people where I worked who weren’t lonely, far from it, and they were always worse off than me. Sure, they were surrounded by friends, but they weren’t in control of their lives. They reminded me of me back in the day. All the stuff that comes with the territory. No thanks. I’d had enough of it. I’ll take lonely any day of the week.

The man I tried to have killed wrote me from jail while I was in the hospital. My nurse brought me the letter. She wasn’t supposed to, so I didn’t tell anybody about it. The letter was written in this neat handwriting I never knew he had.

Just the rising and falling of his cursive script made me want to see him again. I knew the nice curling tattoos on his skin but never thought he could be as neat as them. And he was. In this unbelievable handwriting he said he was in for good. We would never see each other again. I mean you could come see me, he wrote, but we won’t really see each other, so I’m not putting you on my visitation list. So actually you can’t come see me . Then he asked if I couldn’t just get over everything that happened— he had — and we could start loving and trusting each other again. He needed somebody to write with. He gave me his jail number, if I ever wanted to respond. He wasn’t going anywhere.

I kept that number and the jail’s address. Never wrote back to him while I was in the hospital. They wouldn’t have sent it. But that day before work, in bed after Don, I started thinking about Arnett’s letter and how scared he must be. Or how pissed. There was responsibility here, and it was mine. I needed to follow through with it. I wobbled Don-legged to the drugstore and bought envelopes and stamps, then asked the cashier if I could have a piece of printer paper out of his printer. “I’m trying to write my boyfriend in jail.”

“That’s so sweet,” he said.

“Can I use your pen too?”

I didn’t want to write in the store. The music. The lights.

The rough surface of the trash-can lid outside made the lines I wrote look shaky. I told Arnett I’d talked to Wesley, which I hadn’t. Thought you were only getting a few years for violations of such and such. That’s what Wesley said. You were at your home defending yourself and whatnot. Out of your mind from the formaldehyde. I’ve seen it on the news like everybody has — kids dipping joints in the shit. Anybody on a jury will know what that does to your brain.

A man stood in the street in my periphery. I held my hand over the paper and looked. I hadn’t slept at all the night before. The guy was a mirage, whisking away like steam when a car drove through him. That’s when I knew I’d better make it quick. The man was Arnett.

And what about probation? How about bail? By the way, how is your stomach feeling? I really am sorry about all that.

I stuffed it in an envelope, signed the top left with a heart dotting my i . I began to put my new street address below, but even though he was still locked up, I decided not to. Instead I used Ball Breakers’. Then I filled out a form at the post office that directed my mail from the pool hall to me.

At home my mailbox was nailed above my downstairs neighbor’s. I checked it every day before I went to work. The day his reply arrived, I opened it standing right there in the sun. That same unbelievable handwriting. He didn’t sign his name. Only his number.

From then on I got one every other day, more and more letters in the neat cursive. His message was always the same as the first: You are the love of my life, nobody in this world understands me like you do . Stuff like that. It gave me the creeps. But then I read it again, because it’s nice to be the center of somebody’s universe. Forget what I said about loneliness. It was an amazing feeling to be forgiven, to be needed.

Anyway, like he said, I owed him. I did.

We knew we’d never see each other again and that made it easier. Besides me as his queen and the problems of jail — never enough food, too cold, too hot, never dark enough at night — he didn’t say much in his letters. Mostly a lot of begging me to promise I was his. I wrote back and said yes. What else did he have?

And then his letters stopped. They just stopped.

—

Have you ever been locked up? I was. For two days on a weak claim that I was behind some of Arnett’s sex videos, which is about the only illegal thing I didn’t do. Though I did like it, I’ll admit to you. When the court-appointed lawyer proved I wasn’t involved with that, they let me fly on the drug stuff.

But not without a serious talking-to from the judge, a man just a little older than me with the eyes of a wanter. “I want to not hear anything else about you,” he told me. “You. You. Not even a speeding ticket. Ever again. Never be here.”

That scared me right out of town, really. But I was also scared that Arnett was going to make bail before the conviction date. Crossing the state line seemed like a smart thing to do.

—

Letters had fallen off the bus I took, and all it said on the side was OUND .

The station was in small little Ashland, by the abandoned Wal-Mart building. The back of the lot was full of old buses in disrepair. Better buses idled single file between the sidewalk and the traffic cones, destination signs above their windshields. One said Kingsport.