Nitro Mountain (18 page)

T
urner busts into Durty Misty's holding a xerox of his old badge in one hand and the loaded crossbow in the other, swinging it around and yelling for everybody to clear the fuck out, move-move-move, code red, code red, everybody out, we got a code red.

When he sees it's Turner, a single scream leaves Old Bob's mouth and then he's out the door and in his car and gone.

The drunks remain calm, picking up their lighters and cigarettes. Not really many of them. They almost seem thankful somebody's forcing them to leave.

It doesn't take long to empty Misty's out. Never did.

Turner came here to break up a fight once. Bob was the one that called him. The men had been brawling for half an hour, everybody watching and shouting with every swing. Grown men hitting each other in the face for that long. Some serious damage. Turner watched them going at it and wouldn't let anybody leave the barroom until they finished. He held his gun on them, the spotlight in the cruiser's dash shining on them through the window. He reminded the peckernecks that somebody better fall and not get up, or else.

Eventually one of them did, a guy named Kenny. Turner bought a beer for the winner, somebody from Ohio called Lewis the Linebacker. Turner drove Kenny home. He looked bad but was breathing fine and the wife took him in without a word. Just another Friday night.

But later when Lewis was drinking his victory beer he fell flat on his face on the table. His friends shook him, tried waking him up. But he wasn't asleep. He was dead. He had died, and Kenny was just fine.

Now wasn't that some shit. When the winner ain't the winner. Turner sits at the empty bar alone. Arnett, man. You best show up.

T
here's a bum camp in a run-down state park off 15 East. Jones used to come here to get ideas for songs. He's here now just for the company of men who have it worse than he does. That and he needs a nap.

The sign on the front gate reads
Closed for the Winter,
over which someone has spray-painted
Forever
. He pulls around the gate, drives over the knocked-down chain-link fencing and parks in a derelict campsite in the shade of tall pines. There's a warped picnic table and a grill cemented into the ground. He puts the windows halfway up for mosquitoes and shuts off the engine. The deep quiet of the forest, the endless rustling and bending and prickling of the pines—this is what being out among the stars would sound like. He opens the guitar case, cracks a can of Busch. The campsite where the guys stay is farther back toward the railroad tracks. El Rancho Relaxo, they call it. He'll go find them in a little bit. He begins fingerpicking—and the rest of the words to the song he's been thinking about nearly pour out of his mouth. He works on them for a while, switching verses around and trying to come up with a chorus that feels natural but unlocks the song with some surprise. He doesn't want to sound clever. He hates clever songs. That's not him. Never was. A guitar in his lap and a few brews left on the floor—hard to believe you could ever want anything more than a summer day alone in a van with a guitar. And no girls allowed.

He drinks another beer, eats a piece of fried chicken he bought at a gas station and falls asleep on the floor under the backseat on top of his stinking sleeping bag and his boots for a pillow. He wakes up in the afternoon to hear the call of a barred owl:
Who books for you? Who books for you?
He's never heard one in daylight before. But it's true, who books for him? Maybe he does need an agent.

The van's side is catching sun and it's getting hot in here. He reaches for the ignition and rolls down the electric windows, letting out his fumes. It takes a while for the forest air to come in. He's in no rush. He rests his head back and closes his eyes. This morning's hangover is finally gone, thank holiness. When was the last morning he didn't wake up with one? Maybe once in the last five years. Maybe not. With his eyes closed, his mind feels open. Ready to be filled. Nothing but time here.

He sits up again, looks out the window and sees a ragged man in a disaster of a jumpsuit not twenty yards away, pumping water from a rusted spigot. Trying to, at least. He gets out of the sleeping bag, pulls on his boots and crawls from the van. At first he doesn't notice how old the man is. But walking over, he sees white hairs curling out from beneath his cap, around his black forehead and down his face.

“You need any help there?” Jones says.

The man holds his hands in front of his face, inspecting them like they were two pieces of a tool that should never have come apart. Then he considers the pump handle. “Well sure,” he says.

Jones pumps it a few times and cold groundwater flows out.

“You don't remember me,” the guy says.

Jones turns back to him. The long white beard, yellow around the mouth from nicotine. Brown pupils painted onto yellow eyeballs. The missing teeth. The big smile. “Cory,” Jones says.

“I thought you about didn't recognize me.”

“I didn't.”

“Now you do, though, now you do.” He slips a galvanized pail under the spigot and Jones watches the water rush and swirl into it. All that shapeless water taking form. Jones keeps pumping until it's filled.

“Thank you, boy.”

“I ain't your boy,” Jones says.

“Then your mama's a liar.” He puts up his dukes while Jones air-boxes at him. “It's good to see you. You was on the road.”

“I was. I'm back. I'm hitting solo. Too much stress trying to keep musicians in line.”

“You been to Nashville?”

“You always ask me that. Yeah, we were there. Just weren't prepared enough to be playing in front of those folks. Fuck that shit anyhow.”

“Yessir, I was there. That was ten, naw, shoot, fifteen years ago. When you go back, you tell that man Randy I said hi. I wrote a song while I was there. Sang it to some talent finder and soon before I knew it that song was on the radio without me even knowing. Got to be careful who you show your music to. But Randy's all right.”

“You've told me that story before,” Jones says.

“And ain't a bit changed. Because it's true.”

“I'll be careful.” Jones can tell by how Cory's rambling that he's been at the campsite for a long time. Close to the rail line here, and thirty minutes down the highway there's the junk stores around I-81. That must be where he goes for his amenities.

Cory catches a few drops from the spigot, lifts his cap and runs his wet hand through his hair. “You want some dinner?”

“What time is it?”

“Dinner time. Though you look about half asleep. You want some coffee?”

“I wouldn't turn it down.”

“I'll show you what we got going on around here. Bring that bucket.”

Jones jogs back to the van for his guitar, then grabs the water and follows. They come through a thicket into a clearing with tarps and tents. An old camper covered with emerald moss sits there flat-tired. Smoke rises from coals in the middle of the camp, where a man with cheeks full of scars sits at the fire in layers of sweatpants and hoodies under a yellow poncho, his palms hovering toward the flames. He looks like he's been in this same spot, in the same clothes, in the same position, since last winter. It's possible.

“That's Eddie,” Cory says. “He always cold. Welcome home, Jones.”

Jones sets down the water pail and the guitar case and takes a seat on a cinderblock across from Eddie, who's still warming his hands back and forth as if it's a long ritual that requires relentless concentration.

“How you?” Jones says.

Eddie looks up and stares past him with cloudy gray eyes.

Jones can see he's blind.

Cory walks up to the fire with an iron skillet, the handle broken off, and some cans of Vienna sausages. He lays the skillet on glowing branches that crumble under the weight. Cory rips the tops off the cans and dumps in the small pallid cylinders of meat.

“You ain't got no tobacco on you, do you?” Cory says.

Jones takes a pack of Camels from his shirt pocket, hands him one and takes out another for Eddie.

“Eddie here suffers from blindness of the physical eyes,” Cory says. “But I swear he'll surprise you with what-all he sees. Stuff I don't even recognize.”

“Y'all are doing all right out here,” Jones says.

“I'd sooner be here than that shelter,” Cory says.

“I know that's right,” Eddie says.

“People like that man coming around. What's his name?”

“Arnett,” Eddie says.

“Arnett,” Cory says. “Coming around and paying folks like us off to do things. His things.”

Eddie shakes his head. “I tell you,” he says. “I stick to my own things. I don't need no other folks' things.”

“Ar-fucking-nett,” Jones says. “His father shot my best friend. Bad blood in that pack. What things does Arnett pay y'all to do?”

Eddie makes the motions of smoking from a pipe and then jerking off. “Y'all white folks can keep it,” he says.

After the meal, Cory brings out a pint of gin and he and Eddie pass it back and forth. They offer it to Jones, who holds up a hand. “I still got some driving left,” he says.

“You a good boy,” Cory says. “I always knew that. Take you some of that coffee there.”

Jones asks if he can play them a song he's been working on. Not sure what he's thinking about calling it. After the first verse and chorus, he makes up words for a second verse; he's forgotten some of what he came up with before he fell asleep, and he stops in the middle. “I'm still fooling with it,” he says.

“Sing that first part again,” Eddie says. “Faster like.”

“And really beat that guitar,” Cory says. “Give it hell.”

Jones begins, “If I had my way, I'd leave here tomorrow, hitch up a ride and ride on down to Mexico. But there's just one thing I gotta do…”

“Wait, wait, wait now,” Eddie says. “Hell yeah. That even the same song?”

“It is,” Cory says. “It's the same words. But he ain't afraid of them strings no more. Now the song's missing just the one thing. What about the pussy? Give me that here.”

Jones hands over the guitar. Cory makes a C chord correctly but a fret too high. Still, he strums. “I wrote this one I'm gonna sing,” he says. “ ‘I got friends in low places…' ”

“No chance they get any lower than this,” Jones says. “Here, give it back.”

“So you're leaving town, or want to,” Eddie says. “And you got one thing you gotta do. What is it? It better be damn good. 'Cause we all got shit we gotta to do. But do we do it?”

“Hell naw!” Cory says.

“You don't know that,” Eddie says. “Give the boy back his guitar and let's see.”

Jones takes a pick out of his pocket. Don't rush it, just drive it. “There's just one thing I gotta do,” he sings, “and I don't want murder on my soul.” He flatpicks the melody and rises into the chorus, now remembering the words and their feel: “I don't want murder on my soul, dear mother, I don't want murder on my soul. Just one thing I gotta do—and I don't want murder on my soul.”

“That's it, that's right,” Cory says. “Sing it.”

Strumming and humming, Jones looks up, trying to remember. “Can't think how the rest goes.”

“It's
done
,” Eddie says. “That thing's
done
. Done and done. Cory, next song.”

Cory starts into “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall,” which he says he also wrote, and Eddie begins belting it out with him. Cory looks at Jones. “You know we ain't gonna stop till you give us money for some.”