Free Nitro Mountain by Lee Clay Johnson Page A

her and considered my options.
    “What are you going to do about it?” I said.
    “Don’t know.”
    “Can’t you call somebody? Make a report or something.”
    “What if he tries stopping me?”
    “Tries is different than stopping.” I got up.
    “Where
you
going?” she said.
    “Call the cops.”
    “Please, please don’t,” she said. “Oh, please. Don’t. You can’t.” She dropped to her knees and grabbed my hands. “They won’t hold him long enough. He’ll come and find me. I mean, even after they found the cameras, he’s still out. He’ll probably end up going to jail once he’s convicted. But Jesus, it takes so long. And for this there’s no proof.”
    “Your body’s proof.”
    She covered her ears. “I don’t want to be anybody’s proof,” she said. “He’ll get me back. He’ll find me, and if he knows I’m even talking to anybody…Oh, God. I’m nobody’s proof.”
    I turned the volume up on the TV so Dad couldn’t hear us. I sat down next to her on the bed.
    She handed me the same bottle she’d shown me when she’d first arrived yesterday. “This,” she said.
    “For what?”
    And she said: “To kill him.”
    The bottle held a homemade embalming fluid, for when Arnett shot animals. “He makes the stuff,” she said. “Swallow it just a little bit and you’ll die.” She looked at her nails. “Drink him with it.”
    We looked into each other’s eyes. She sat directly in front of me in the messy nest of a sheet. Our legs were crossed, knees touching. I laid the bottle down beside us like it might explode. She filled my palms with her fists. The whole world was easily fixed. I felt more needed than I ever had in all my life.
    “This is your idea,” I said.
    “I was just thinking out loud,” she said. “But you look interested.”
    We stayed in my room all day, watching TV and talking and touching and watching more TV and touching. I heated Chinese in the microwave. While we were eating, I asked her how she was allowed to stay gone so long, and she said he sometimes let her get made up in town. “I’ll hit the Hairport after this,” she said. “Get my hair and nails and lips and toes done.”
    Some real shit was playing on
Unsolved Mysteries
. She turned off the TV and the noise of summertime droned and knocked against the window, the static of wings and legs and hard knobby bodies, millions of them, all zipping around and fighting for that same old thing.
    We lay close together but I was afraid if I reached out to touch her I wouldn’t be able to feel her at all. She sat up. “Grab me a beer?”
    When I got back, her clothes were thrown next to the bed with the sheet across her bottom half. Another piece of hurt bloomed on her white belly. That place that had once been pure and untouched. I couldn’t stand it. She reached for the cold longneck, took a swallow and told me to sit down.
    “You wanna see something?” She pulled her iPhone out of her jeans on the floor and spider-fingered through lit menus of options. The screen flipped to unfocused darkness. “Watch this.”
    The sound of random noise came through the little speaker. The image now had a bright spot in the middle. I couldn’t tell what was happening but the noise eventually made sense. It was the barroom clatter of Durty Misty’s. Right here in the stupid little bedroom of my life. The screen darkened again and the image came into focus. Short tapered pillars of sitting thighs. The drawn line and darkened thatch through the middle of a lady’s ass. There was a sloppy kiss mark on one cheek, a tattoo labeled
Kiss My Ass
.
    Rachel’s.
    “Sexy-looking stuff,” Jennifer said. “Isn’t it?” She held out the phone like the video was something a person of talent had made.
    “How recently was this taken?” I said.
    “I don’t know. Arnett showed it to me last night. I went ahead and asked about the cameras—you know, after we talked about it?—and he just hauled it out and showed it to me.