Lee Johnson - Nitro Mountain

One country standard after another. Those songs, that music — when it’s done right it plays itself.

We were halfway into the first set when I saw Rachel. She had her arms in the air, a beer in one hand, and was dancing around with her eyes closed like she was climbing an invisible ladder. All kinds of bad dudes were looking at her. Nobody was talking to her. Then the man with the Daffy Duck tattoo handed her another drink.

When the set break came, Jerry pulled a pack of Camels from his cymbal case, said it wasn’t his fault and stepped off the stage.

“Who?” I said.

“It’s your first gig with us in a while,” Jones said. “You’re doing fine. For the first one.”

“If he’d just waited for me,” I said of Jerry.

“Jerry always does that. Don’t take it personal. He thinks it’s fun, throwing everybody off.” Jones thumbed toward the audience. “Anyway. I think you already got one fan.”

People were talking and laughing as classic rock came on through the busted house speakers. She sat on a stool with her back to the bar, staring at me. I bent down to pick up a cord, pretending I hadn’t noticed her, but when I’d gotten everything situated our eyes met and she motioned for me to come over.

I carried a tallboy in my cast hand. The crowd was thinning from people going outside to smoke and take nips from bottles hidden in their trucks. She had thin, painted lips and drawn cheeks like she was permanently sucking on something. She looked like a different person, wearing so much makeup. This could happen.

“So your flyer must’ve worked,” she said, taking her feet off the stool’s footrest, her legs stretching straight to the floor while she stayed sitting. She turned a can vertical to her mouth, crushed the middle with her fingers when she was through and set it behind her on the bar. Bob replaced it with a cold one.

“I’ve played with these boys before,” I said. “That was only like a week or two ago I put up the flyer here. That day we saw each other.”

“Only? How long you expect you got left?”

“Until what?”

“Till you run out of chances.” She reached behind her without looking and grabbed the fresh beer. “You didn’t even get my number.”

The man with the Daffy Duck tattoo was standing too close to us. He kept grabbing his belt buckle and shaking it. “Feel good,” he said, nodding in agreement with himself. “I feel all right. Swell. Decent. Indecent exposure. I feel fucking fantastic. I like good music. I’m a man of pure taste.”

“I’ll be right back.” She walked around the stage and into the pinball room.

“She going to use the little girls’ room,” he said. “Come here.”

I followed him into the back room where they made sandwiches. It reeked of rancid sliced meats and warm mayo. A door ajar in the corner and roaches racing across the floor. He pulled the chain of a bare lightbulb above us and we were in a cleaning-supply closet. He reached around me and shut the door.

We stood shoulder to shoulder among gallons of Clorox, rags and buckets, mops and brooms. He took an iPhone out of his pocket and set it upright on a shelf. He flicked his fingers across the screen, tapped a code into the keypad and told me to watch. He pulled the chain and the light went out. A dim image appeared on the screen. The glow of the phone transformed his face into that of a corpse, skull bones pushing through skin. “Look at me,” he said. He was breathing harder. Our eyes met for the first time and he said, “Watch me watch this.”

“Thanks,” I said, “but I better get back onstage.”

“You’ll never make it.” He held out his hands as if offering some great revelation.

“I won’t?”

“I’m seeing your future right now. It’s not there.” He got a small plastic bag out of his pocket, took a rock from it and packed it into a glass pipe. “No harm done,” he said. “We’re just two extremely nice gentlemen.” The lighter flicked and he took a hit. “Any minute,” he said, holding his breath and turning back to the screen. “Done no harm.” The smoke he blew into the room smelled like burnt mints. “My brother,” he said, “be not afraid.”

I leaned over to see what he was watching, and he grabbed my cast.

“Watch me ,” he said.

In the glow of his phone he licked his dry lips. The door opened and the glare of the sandwich room came in. The crowd was loud out at the bar. Jerry kicked his bass drum a couple times, my cue. Old Bob stood there in the doorway and whined like a puppy.

“Shut the door,” the man said, “shut the door, shut the fucking door.”

Bob pushed past me and held out a kind of pencil, presenting it to us like it was some secret key.

“Draw it,” the man said. “It’s about to happen. Draw it.”

Bob turned the pencil toward his own face and started drawing lines around his eyes. Broken circles of black eyeliner traced the inside of his sunken sockets and zagged onto his face. The man took another hit from his pipe, moaning and begging for something, I couldn’t tell what, and then turned back to the screen. “It’s happening,” he said, stuffing a fist down his Dickies. Black streaks ran down Bob’s cheeks. He was crying. The man passed him the pipe without turning away from the phone and Bob grabbed at it, pulling hard when the flame finally found the little rock, then exhaled and touched his fingers on the Daffy Duck.

I glanced between them at what they were watching. A white border circled the screen but something else was emerging in the middle of the frame. I leaned closer and the man roared into my face, took his fist from his pants and punched me in the stomach. “Have y’all been doing druggies?”

“Oh, no!” Bob said, then splayed his fingers over his sketched eyes, opened them enough to peek through and said, “Oh, no no no!”

I heard Jerry kick his bass drum again.

“That’s my cue,” I said.

“Your cue,” the man said. “What if somebody just stepped into your life one day and took your cue?” Tears were soaking into the cracked skin of his cheekbones, but it didn’t seem like crying. He looked dizzy. “What if they took it out from under you like a rug and you realized there was no floor under you.”

“I don’t know what you’re saying.” But what he said made me wonder. What if I didn’t have any excuses? What if, like Rachel had said, I was running out of chances?

“Go fetch your cue,” the man said. “But don’t tell Mommy or nobody y’all been doing druggies.” He inhaled again and Bob pushed my head into the man’s face. Our lips found each other’s and he blew smoke into my mouth.

The two erupted into something that wasn’t laughter. I made it back into the packed barroom and pushed toward the stage, looking for Rachel with every shove. I picked up my bass and saw her coming out of the pinball room. Customers were going behind the bar and pulling their own drafts, tossing nickels into the tip jar. Bob came out with a dark mess smeared around his eyes.

Jones stomped a pedal tuner and turned around to face me. “The hell were you doing in there?”

“Where? Oh — they just wanted to hang out.”

“Stay away from those dudes. Especially if you’re playing with me. You hear? I won’t have it.”

“Yeah,” I said, “no problem.”

It felt like flying, talking to Jones and feeling the stuff start to kick. I had something nobody else could touch.

Jones went back to the mic, stomped the pedal again and counted us in. The music was even better now, the pocket deep and the melody soaring. Jones’s voice sounded so close through the system that I could picture his vocal cords, long and rough. I was floating above the crowd now, but Jerry snapped the snare to bring me back down and he yelled at me over the music to get my shit together. But whatever cloud the man had blown into my mouth was beautiful, and I’d never felt sharper in all my life.