Free Nitro Mountain by Lee Clay Johnson

going to spell it out for you.”
    “Maybe I’m missing something. What brought you here to me?”
    “You’re definitely missing something.”
    “Yeah,” I said. “You.”
    She took off her glasses. A bag of dark skin cradled a bloodshot eyeball. “I never see anybody,” she said. “Arnett does most of the work on the place. I just sweep things up and stay out of his path. We hooked a keg to one of the old taps, so the downstairs bar is kind of running now. We started it as a business.”
    “I thought nobody goes up there.”
    “It’s in case they do.”
    “Does he know you’re here?”
    “You kidding? Hell no. He thinks I’m running errands. Which I am.”
    “Why’re you with him?”
    “Because. He had what I needed when I needed it. That and he makes me think of somebody I knew one time.” She turned her head away from what she was thinking about and looked out the window. She pushed it up, and heat rolled in like she’d just opened an oven. She lit a cigarette, blew smoke at the screen and tapped her ash onto the sill.
    “Does he have a crew?” I said.
    “Sure needs one,” she said, and then stopped to consider the idea. “He’s working by himself right now. You ever work carpentry?”
    “I’m no good,” I said, lifting my hurt arm as far as it would go.
    “He needs a few bums he can pay to swing hammers. If you know anybody.”
    “Me,” I said.
    “Would you do it?”
    “Only joking.”
    “He probably wouldn’t even remember you. He was still high from the night before, that morning we came into the store. Sorry about that. I didn’t know you were working there.”
    “I’m glad it happened. You need help.”
    “You should shave your beard, just to make sure.”
    “Like it?”
    “Doesn’t matter. It’s got to go.”
    “I’ll think about it.”
    When she left, I lay facedown on the floor, sniffing where she’d been sitting. I didn’t think she actually wanted me working up there, and until I was certain that she did I wasn’t planning on shaving or doing much of anything.
    I went to Foodville that afternoon but I was hardly there. About an hour before closing, my boss came out of his office. “It wasn’t even busy,” he told me, “but you
made
it busy. You had a line an aisle long. You look tired—go get some sleep.”
    —
    Mom was already gone to work and I was eating stale cereal from the box when Jennifer knocked. I told her to wait and went to check on my dad. He was drinking beer and didn’t look up when I came in.
    “Jennifer’s here,” I said.
    “Send her in.”
    “We’re going to talk. Alone. You need anything before I close my door?”
    “Jennifer’ll do. We could all of us,” he said, “just sleep like little puppies together.”
    In my room she lifted up her shirt. Scars covered her belly and up toward her breasts. Not surgical-looking, just puckered things that still needed healing. I leaned over and touched one. My finger looked young next to it.
    “Kind of numb,” she said.
    “Can you feel this?” I traced the shape of hurt flesh. Some of the crests were still scabbed.
    “Only if I’m watching.” She pushed her shirt back down. “I meant to show you yesterday.”
    “What the hell?”
    She told me that when she and Arnett first moved into the inn she tried to leave him, but he tied her to a board and brought her out to the pen where they kept the pigs and the dogs. All the animals lived together and it drove them crazy. He dropped her down into it and dumped slop all over her. The hogs came out of the barn and went straight for the feed. The dogs stayed back, whining and yapping. When she started bleeding, he shot a rifle into the air and sent the hogs running. Then he asked if she really planned on leaving him. “He shoots the air a lot,” she said.
    I’d heard some shit about what people did to each other, but this beat all of it.
    She pushed down the waist of her jeans and showed me another one. I studied what Arnett had done to