Read Online Nitro Mountain by Lee Clay Johnson - Free Book Online Page A

recognize me. “I don’t know,” I said.
    “That’s your problem. You need to make a decision.”
    “About what?”
    Arnett sucked a finger and cleaned his ear with it. “Your store. Keep an eye on it. Good old workingman boy. You do your job and she’ll do mine.”
    He went to the bright wall where she stood. She seemed tiny in those baggy clothes, probably his. They talked and he threw his thumb behind his head. She glanced in my direction, then covered her face and turned away. He took her by the shoulder and said something into the hair dangling from her hood and all down her face. She shook her head. Finally he let her go and she walked straight for me over the shining floors I’d mopped that morning before opening.
    “Look at you,” I said.
    “Look at me.” She kept her head down until she reached my checkout counter. “What the hell’d you just say to him?” She put her hands down on the conveyor belt and it started moving, pulling her closer.
    “Find everything you need, ma’am?” I said.
    She laughed. She was beautiful. Then she spun away again and the color left her face. Her eyes screwed shut with exhaustion, and lines cracked through her skin. “Listen,” she said, and I turned off the belt. “He told me to tell you to quit thinking what you’re thinking.”
    “He doesn’t know what I’m thinking.”
    “But he knows what you want.”
    “Who is he to you?”
    “He’s my…Well.”
    Arnett was wandering up the aisle with a quart of milk. I wrote my parents’ phone number on the back of a receipt, the numbers crossing over the print of a half-off coupon for hickory-smoked ham hocks. She stuffed the paper into her pocket and said, “What happened to your arm?”
    “Call me and I’ll tell you.”
    She pushed through the door to leave, before the motion sensor had time to swing it open.
    There were still sweaty fingerprints on the black rubber belt. Her hands were always damp. It was something I’d forgotten about.
    “What’s the holdup?” Arnett said, setting the milk where her hands had been.
    I turned on the switch. “You want a bag for this, sir?”
    “Yeah,” he said. “I’d love a fucking bag.”
    —
    I waited days, but she didn’t call and I figured I’d freaked her out. Then she did, and she sounded scared, but I told her to hold on for a minute and went into my dad’s room. Standing over him, I said, “Your disability came through.” He didn’t budge. So far as I could tell, he was free of all worries. Percocet, beer, a couple joints—that’s the kind of place that helps you forget you have a wife who’ll wipe your mouth clean but won’t kiss you goodnight. I stepped over piles of dirty clothes and unplugged the phone he kept on the carpet between his bed and the wall.
    I talked to her in my room with the door locked and a pillow over my face to insulate the sound. In bursts of muffled weeping, she told me Arnett was at it again only this time it was even worse. She talked until the phone got hot against my ear. “Jennifer,” I said, “slow down. What exactly’s going on?”
    “A whole damn lot,” she said. “It’s all—I don’t know—everything.”
    While she was busy not telling me, I heard Mom’s tires in the gravel driveway. Car door shutting. Storm door slamming. “Come over,” I said. “Tomorrow.”
    She asked where I was living and I told her. “Oh,” she said, “that place.”
    I told her we’d have my room to ourselves, with one parent at work and the other in bed. I could hear Mom in the hallway now, dropping her purse and kicking off her shoes. I told Jennifer I’d even pay for the gas, fill up her tank.
    “I’ll be there early,” she said.
    Our connection crackled when the line in my parents’ room got plugged in. “I’ll see you then,” I said.
    She’d hung up by the time Mom was on the line saying, “Hello? Hello? Is somebody there? I can hear you breathing.” She sounded so hopeful, like it might’ve been someone