Be Not Far from Me(23)

Still, I delay.

I walk clear into early evening, ignoring a rainstorm that kicks up and soaks me, pushing forward and hoping for a house, a road, someone’s wandering dog that I can follow home. But there is nothing and no one, and soon I realize I’m singing a song from my childhood, one that I always loved.

The bear went over the mountain

The bear went over the mountain

The bear went over the mountain . . .

And what do you think he saw?

That poor fucker saw another mountain, and while I’m not climbing peaks exactly they may as well be for all the effort it’s taking. My foot is hot and heavy in the sling, my knee screaming about being bent for so long, my arms shaky and a fresh trickle of blood running down my side from where the crutch has flat punctured my back. I got nothing to look forward to but self-dismemberment and maybe seeing another mountain, and I’m so much more into my singing than thinking about that I don’t realize I’m going over the edge of a ridge until too late.

I roll, ass over teakettle, my hand clenching tight onto my chunk of flint and the other gripping my crutch because these are the most valuable things I own. My foot slips free of the sling, my leg bending hard under me as I crash into the little trickle of water at the bottom. I am nothing but nerves, hot and severed, a warm bag of skin filled with pain. I can’t even make a noise, I hurt so bad, like the inhale of a baby right before it throws a rip-roaring fit, a moment of silence to consider what’s about to come.

There aren’t even swears for how I feel right now, or enough languages to cover it. I stare up at the sky and let pain have its way, rain starting to spatter my face. I’m considering just lying here until the water rises enough to cover my mouth, then my nose. Then the clouds part for a moment, and a ray of light breaks through, pointing like a spotlight. At camp they called those Jesus clouds, but they’re not landing on Christ right now; the heavens opened for me so that I could find a meth lab.

Meth smells like ass.

I know this because my uncle Chuck went into what he called a “business venture” a few years ago, and my dad called a “federal offense.” Dad didn’t like it too much when Chuck handed me and Duke each a wad of bills and asked us to keep an eye on a trailer he set up out in the woods. He said since we were minors we couldn’t get slapped with anything too serious and he’d been sure to put the lab out on public land so that we could claim we were just wandering if anybody official ever showed up.

Dad was not happy with my new job, but Chuck said he owed him one. Apparently back in the nineties Uncle Chuck told my dad wouldn’t it be great to start a business where you rented your DVDs to people, mailed the DVDs to them, and they mailed them back and it’d be better than running to the video store and easy money besides. He had it all worked out until Dad told him it was stupid, and nobody wanted to rent somebody else’s porn anyway, and then Netflix happened and Uncle Chuck hasn’t really forgiven him.

So that’s how I got a job guarding a meth lab, but I didn’t dare touch the stuff or I knew Dad would kill me. Given the messes I saw coming to buy, I wasn’t in a big hurry to try it. Chuck paid us pretty good, and Duke and I would just sit out there in our lawn chairs, him smoking weed while we talked. I earned enough to buy myself a real nice backpack, but then a bigger dealer than Uncle Chuck got word of his little lab and we found it torched one day, Chuck lying off in the brush with the shit kicked out of him.

The setup I’ve discovered looks to be about the same type of deal as Uncle Chuck’s, but smaller. It’s a little pop-up camper, pulled in here so long ago that the tracks are gone and any brush that got whacked down in the process has sprung back up and done a few years of growing in the meantime. It’s even up on blocks, which tells me whoever is running things has been doing so for a while and feels secure enough to stay.

Which means I’m in the ass middle of nowhere.

The door’s locked, but I kick it in with my good leg just as the storm gets a second wind, letting down a sheet of rain that makes the roof on this thing sing louder than I did after my foot got crushed. I drag myself into the camper, pushing the door shut behind me just in time. A wall of water hits the side of the camper so hard I feel it shift on the blocks and cross my fingers that I’m not about to go back over the ridge and die, crushed in a meth lab. It settles back into place and so does my stomach, so I take a minute to catch my breath.

I know enough about the cooking process to know this place hasn’t been used in a while. All the cook stuff—beakers, flasks, pans—is pushed off to the side of the counter, and scummy from the last use that never got washed away. I get to my feet and start opening cupboards, hoping somebody used this place enough to have some food squirreled away.

That’s when I find the pills.

Apparently, they decided to upgrade.

The cupboards are lined with orange prescription bottles, the labels torn away. Some are full, some only have a few pills, but there’s enough here to get the whole county high as a kite, and their dogs too. There’s also an old Whitman’s candy tin full of cash, the bills filthy and lumped together, making it clear that it’s a dirty business but it’s a good one too, because there’s enough here to probably send me to college even if I lost both my legs right up to the hip.

I put it back, wiping my hands on my jeans.

More useful to me is a box of granola bars, six months expired and likely to break my teeth, but it’s food, and deeply needed. I crawl onto the bare mattress and find a moldy blanket shoved down between it and the wall. As night takes over day I curl into a ball and huddle under it, chewing on granola until my gums bleed.