Lee Johnson - Nitro Mountain

When I got back outside, I gasped as if I’d been holding my breath the whole time. The man with the tattoo was leaning against Rachel’s car. “You,” he said. “What’s everybody call you?” He was staring at the ground beside me.

I lifted the cables in my good hand to show him why I’d been in there, but then I saw what I still held in my left hand: the roll of toilet paper.

He looked at my face. “Now I’m interested,” he said.

“Oh,” I said. “Nothing.”

“Really?” He walked up and, without taking his eyes from mine, grabbed the toilet paper. “Because that looks like my double ply.”

Back in the car, Rachel and I kept quiet. It seemed darker even though there were still no clouds. Or maybe there was just one big one that had slugged in to cover everything.

“Well, that was weird as hell back there,” she said.

“What’d he say to you?”

“Nothing, really. I’m talking about what you did. The toilet paper.”

“How well do you know him?”

“Met him the other night,” she said. “First time. Swear.”

“You know what’s going on at that place?”

“Those guys are weirdos, straight up. But I think you’re making a big deal out of nothing.”

“Let me tell you what I saw.”

“But I won’t believe you, right?”

“You decide,” I said, and then told her about the little thing on the toilet bowl, that guy in the closet with his iPhone. “They were watching. Or whatever. Somebody ought to call the cops on him.”

“Then where would you play? Where would we drink?”

I thought about that. She had her points. “It’s just nasty,” I said. “What he’s doing in there, it’s wrong.”

“Somebody bring in the string section. Why you think he asked you into the closet? He probably thought you came off as the kind of guy who’d like that sort of thing.”

“Well, I’m not.”

“You sure about that?”

—

After we went back to her place to pick up my bag, I asked her to drop me off at my sister’s. Krystal lived in a white-and-tan apartment complex called River Creek. The name gave me a headache. Why not just call it Alive Dead? When Rachel pulled away, before I’d made it up onto the sidewalk, she blew me a kiss without looking.

I heard talking through Krystal’s door, set my stuff down outside on the walkway against the wall and wondered how I could have forgotten. It was Bible study night. She’d begged me to come many times, especially the morning she picked me up from the hospital.

This Bible group wasn’t the usual do-gooders, and that’s what bothered me the most. It was a collection of tattooed freaks and pierced punks. Goth Christians. One of them stepped outside to smoke while I was still looking over the railing down at the parking lot. Fog covered everything and the lights at the entrance had rings around them in the haze.

They fed me dinner that night, vegan casserole. One guy kept farting and making people laugh. Everybody asked me personal questions, which I answered honestly, which surprised me, then pissed me off, and when I excused myself from the table to go crash on the couch, a chubby girl asked if she could pray for me.

“If you got to,” I said.

—

The next day I went back to my parents’ place.

“Who’s breaking in?” Dad called from his bedroom.

“Just me.”

“Go ahead and take it all.”

There was a TV in my room that picked up a couple stations, and the days just dragged by. I knew I was going to need money for a lawyer. My first hearing, to set the date for the trial, was in a few days, and I figured it might be good to have somebody even for that. Walk in already lawyered up and shit.

Jones was a veteran of drunk driving charges. One time when he got pulled over, he stepped out of his van, forgetting there was a fifth in his lap, and sent the whiskey splashing all over the cop’s feet. He got out of that one because the lawyer proved he’d done nothing to get pulled over in the first place. The attorney’s name was Wesley, who everybody called Greasy Wesley because of the unbelievable help he’d given them. He was just the slime I needed.

I took the phone out of my dad’s room and called Jones. He gave me the number before I even asked.

“Who you calling now?” my dad said through my door.

“Quit listening,” I said.

“You’ll need to quit talking for that to happen.”

I turned the TV up and dialed. Wesley’s secretary answered and talked me through a few questions about what I was facing. “Can you turn down your TV?” she said. “It’s difficult to hear you.”

“No,” I said, “I actually can’t.”

She finally transferred me to Wesley, and throughout the conversation he kept going on about, “Are you Darrel? You sure this isn’t Darrel? Because you sound just like him.” I said I wasn’t Darrel, didn’t know who Darrel was, and that this was the first time anything like this had happened to me. He said he’d see me in a couple days. “And one more thing,” he said. “Bring half the money with you. I’ll need the first half. And I’m real glad you’re not Darrel.”

I didn’t have a quarter of the first half, but I said okay. Then I called the shelter again to see if they had any available shifts. The director, a pear-shaped man who wore loafers, asked how I was doing and said they’d been missing me. I felt the same around him as I did at my sister’s place. He said he’d check the schedule and call me back. I called Jones again and begged for more gigs.

“It’s no problem,” he said. “We got a residency kind of thing going at Misty’s. You’re welcome anytime. We just figured that, you know, with your arm and all.”

“I’ll be there,” I said. “My arm loves it.”

The shelter didn’t call back. We ended up playing a Thursty Thursdays gig the night before my first court date. It began at happy hour, some regulars just off work buying one-dollar bottles of Busch from the spray-painted refrigerator. After only a few songs, country standards with the same slow, swinging beat, pain splintered through my arm and down into the base of my spine.

I ordered a beer through the stage-right mic and when it came I chased down some painkillers with it. The mixture worked a little bit but mostly just fucked me up. The pain was still there, only now it seemed to be something on the outside of my body, a growth you could see. I got this idea it had a personality, that it and me were two different things.

Strumming over the muted strings of his acoustic, Jones counted us into one of his own songs about a girl and a dog. The feel was loose, but he made it interesting with a crosspicking pattern. The way it was written sounded like a letter. He was singing straight to some woman who’d left him: “It’s hard work, keeping up an old house, with the memory of your hands and the taste of your mouth.” It went on moping like that for a couple more verses—“I mowed the yard and made it look like new. Ain’t it strange to see all this beauty without you”—then he got silly with it and I could see some smiles breaking out in the crowd. “Thank God I got a dog,” he sang, “to cheer me up when I’m down. It makes me laugh when he gets a bath and goes running around.” He kept on like that, really hamming it up, and I’d never seen such happiness in Misty’s. He ended it by turning the lyrics unexpectedly back toward the song’s beginning: “My dog is my savior. He’s pretty stinky too. If it wasn’t for him, every song I sing would be about you.”

The crowd was clapping and I was slapping the body of my bass. “Jones Young, y’all!” I said into my mic, and a few people in the back whistled.

“Cheers, y’all,” Jones said. “I been married once and divorced twice. Here’s some Waylon.”