Black Mountain Breakdown (16 page)

When the curtain comes down at last, the girls go back to the cafeteria to talk about how scared they were, to fix their makeup, get a Coke from the Coke machine, and await the results of the first elimination. While the judges—a trio of Junior Women from the sister club in Richlands—are deliberating, Martha Grover provides entertainment by singing “I Enjoy Being a Girl.” Before anyone can believe it, the judges have reached their decision and Mrs. Luke Wooldridge reads the list of eliminated numbers through her bullhorn: 32, 8, 14, 24… it’s a long, long list. Thirty girls go down in the very first round. Two of them burst into tears, but most shrug their shoulders and go out to sit with their boy friends and cheer for their friends. Agnes leaves, relieved. So does Crystal’s partner, poor little Lynette Lukes, but Crystal is still in the running.

This time out, the thirty girls do an intricate crossing maneuver, and the crowd begins to shout out individual numbers and names. “Crystal!” Crystal hears, and “Sixteen!” That’s her number. She finally spots Mack, sitting over to the side all slouched down in his chair, with no vacant seat beside him. Now where will she go, if they take her out after this round? Mack was supposed to save her a seat. Damn him, Crystal arches her neck and smiles brilliantly.

But they don’t ever take her out. Round after round she goes, until only six girls are left and Neva and Lorene have
come down to the cafeteria to work on her between rounds. “I just knew it!” Lorene says over and over. “I just knew it!” Neva bites bobby pins and concentrates on Crystal’s beehive.

“Oh, Mama, I haven’t won yet!” Crystal says, but she knows she will. She’d better, since Mack didn’t save her a seat.

All excited and bubbling, Crystal takes the cafeteria steps two at a time as she goes back up for the final round. She feels like she’s going to explode. The other finalists are more serious and nervous. Suetta Wheeler, a senior, was Miss Claytor Lake last summer; she’ll be really embarrassed if she doesn’t get this one, too. If she could just wear her bathing suit, Suetta knows she could win. Her legs are her best feature, she thinks. But the Junior Women vetoed bathing suits twenty-six to two; bathing suits simply are not in good taste. Suetta grinds her teeth at Crystal. Crystal smiles.

At the very end of the contest, Crystal feels like she has no legs left at all. She is borne up by the noise, the applause. Then Arvis Ember emerges from his wishing well with the sealed envelopes, and a hush falls, and Crystal is sure she will fall, too—
swoon
, like people in books.

“And the third-place winner is—Sue Mustard!”

Crystal claps soundlessly in her long white gloves as Sue goes forward to get her roses. The rest of them stand in a straight line across the middle of the stage: Crystal, Suetta Wheeler, two other seniors, and a pretty little ninth-grader rumored to be related to one of the judges.

“The second-place winner tonight for our first annual beauty pageant is”—here Arvis Ember pretends to drop the envelope and a chorus of boos rises up from the crowd—
“is—Miss Suetta Wheeler, forty-five! Let’s give the lovely lady a big hand!” And they do, and Suetta gets roses and a banner besides. Now the suspense is killing, but Arvis Ember, having a big time, prolongs it until Crystal thinks she’ll die, until at last he calls her name.

Crystal comes forward down the red carpet, takes the roses, helps Mrs. Wooldridge put the banner on her, helps them place the tiara on top of her beehive. She can’t even feel it up there. She smiles and smiles, and then she bursts into tears. The applause nearly doubles at this. They love it for her to cry. It’s all right to be that pretty if you cry about it. Then everybody is running out onto the stage and kissing her and hugging her, all the kids from her home room, which gets a new bulletin board now that Crystal has won, everybody from the neighborhood, all her relatives, everybody. Crystal is pushed and pulled and kissed and mauled, and somebody knocks the wishing well over on its side in an effort to get to her. Only once does Crystal stop smiling and crying, when Mack Stiltner appears just for a minute at her side not smiling, like a dark ghost, and whispers in her ear. Then he’s gone and she smiles even more while Lorene watches from the wings with her heart so full and her head so full of plans for the future. Oh, Lorene can see it all: the Miss Buchanan County Contest, the Miss Claytor Lake Contest, the UMW’s Miss Bituminous Coal Contest—everything seems within reach. Maybe, even—who knows?—Miss Virginia!

ONE HOUR LATER
, Agnes sits in her kitchen drinking a Dr. Pepper. She still wears her formal. Her mama and daddy
are in the living room watching Paladin. Babe is out on a date. Agnes thinks Babe is too young to date, but she gets to do it anyway, if she comes back home by eleven. It’s quiet in Agnes’s kitchen. Occasionally she hears a burst of gunfire from the living room, occasionally Uncle Jud has a coughing fit upstairs, but that’s about it. The wall clock ticks. Ten-thirty. Agnes stretches and sighs. She knows that Susie Belcher is having a party, but she has not been invited. Agnes tells herself she doesn’t care. Susie Belcher is trashy anyway and so are all her trashy friends. Besides, Agnes has to get up early for Sunday school tomorrow because she’s in charge of the program.

The phone rings and Agnes gets it, but there’s just a funny buzzing noise on the other end of the line.

“Hello,” Agnes says. She waits a minute. “
Hello
,” she says again, but nobody answers. Then Agnes hears some clanking coins, and waits.

“Will you come over here and get me?” It’s Crystal, sounding far away and like she’s been crying.

“What’s the matter?” Agnes says immediately, a little bit put out. Crystal is the last person she expected to hear on the other end of this line tonight. The last time Agnes saw Crystal, Crystal was in that big crowd of people up on stage, and when Agnes hugged her it was just like hugging a metal robot.

“Where are you?” Agnes asks. “What’s the matter?”

“I’m still at school,” Crystal says. “You don’t have to come get me if you don’t want to.”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” Agnes says.

So Agnes puts on a sweater and gets the car keys and
tells her parents where she’s going. Agnes’s mama is full of questions: Why is Crystal still at school? Why is she calling Agnes instead of Lorene? But Agnes doesn’t have any answers.

“I don’t
know
, Mama,” she says again from the door. “But I wouldn’t mention it to Lorene if I was you.”

“Well…” says Agnes’s mama, which means yes, and Agnes leaves. Agnes got an A in drivers’ ed; they know she’s careful.

The school looks weird when Agnes gets there. Just one hour ago it was so full of people and light. Now it’s dark, with only three or four cars in the parking lot. Agnes shakes her head as she parks the car: you never know what Crystal is going to do next.

The big front doors are still open, though, and they echo like Chinese gongs when they close. Agnes goes straight ahead, hearing her own feet walk down the long empty hall. Litter is everywhere, she notices, wrinkling up her nose. When she gets to the auditorium it’s really a mess, paper cups and stuff all over the place as she walks down the aisle. Some men are cleaning it up. One of them tips his hat, mistaking Agnes for a Junior Woman. The auditorium lights are on, but the curtain has been drawn. Agnes walks all the way down the aisle and goes around backstage, coming into the wings exactly where she made her earlier entrance with trashy Sue Mustard.

She finds Crystal sitting on the overturned wishing well in the center of the stage, all by herself, surrounded by the seven-piece set of white Samsonite luggage that she won for being Miss Black Rock High. Crystal looks moony and
daydreamy. Her face is streaked and her beehive is askew, but the glitter on her banner shines in the full stage lights.

“Well, well!” Agnes says.

Crystal looks up. “Oh, hello, Agnes,” she says.

Something about the way she says it, sounding so sorry for herself when after all she
is
Miss Black Rock High, gets to Agnes.

“I thought you were going to the party,” Agnes says.

Crystal blinks. “Oh,” she says. There is a short silence during which Agnes volunteers nothing, offers no help, and after a while Crystal goes on. “Mack wouldn’t take me,” she says, still in that nearly inaudible, oddly formal pitiful voice.

“Why wouldn’t he take you?” Agnes asks.

“He said I’d be too popular now. He said I’d be stuck up. I’m not stuck up, am I?” Crystal raises her large wide eyes to look at Agnes, who stands jingling her car keys at the edge of all the luggage.

“Well, whether you are or whether you’re not is not any of my business,” Agnes says judiciously. “But I wouldn’t go out with that Mack Stiltner anymore if I was you, anyway.”

Crystal continues to stare inquiringly at Agnes. She says something that Agnes can’t hear.

“What?” Agnes asks.

Crystal looks down at her feet in the red patent shoes. “He plays the guitar,” she says. “He wrote a song about me last week, now he won’t even take me home.”

Agnes has nothing to say to that, it’s so dumb. Mack Stiltner is terrible and everybody knows it. She can’t see
why Crystal goes out with him in the first place. Not with all the nice boys she has her pick of. You wouldn’t catch Agnes dead with somebody like that! Agnes thinks Crystal should have stuck to Roger Lee all along. But the boys that Crystal really likes are always weird, and look how mean she was to Roger Lee. Agnes never would have done Roger Lee that way and neither would anybody else that had a grain of common sense, but Crystal has got a weird streak in her someplace, too. Maybe she got it from her father. Agnes knows it’s wrong to think bad of the dead, but she can’t help it and she doesn’t really care: how she used to hate all those dumb, dumb poems.

“Well, come on,” Agnes says. Then they have to make three trips back and forth to the car, loading all that Samsonite luggage, and Agnes has to carry most of it because Crystal has her roses and her trophy and her makeup case and her tiara to take care of, too. Finally they get it all in, and by the time Agnes drives back through town, carefully at the posted speed limit of twenty-five m.p.h., there’s no traffic at all and even the sidewalks are empty. On the way home, Agnes looks over at Crystal every now and then, but Crystal sits wrapped on the seat in that purple shawl her aunt made her, facing away, and her hoop sticks up over the dashboard.

“Don’t you tell Mama I didn’t go to that party,” Crystal says when they pull into Agnes’s drive. Then she gets out of the car and runs across the side yard as fast as she can go, leaving all that luggage in the car, and Agnes watches her go until the white of her dress is gone.

“Thank you,” Crystal calls back.

Thank you, my foot! Agnes thinks, but she knows when to keep her mouth shut, and she never tells Lorene a thing.

“SUMMER’S ON THE
way,” Lorene announces one night, looking up from her ironing board and out the open kitchen window, and Crystal looks up from a book and says, “Well, what time do you expect him?” Then she could bite her tongue off—it’s not her mother’s fault that Mack is gone.

Lorene blinks and wipes her face. She can’t decide if Crystal is being smart-alecky or just trying to make a joke. Crystal has been so moody lately, ever since she got to be Miss Black Rock High. Maybe it’s gone to her head.

“Ha ha,” Lorene decides to say, but by then Crystal has gone back to her book and so Lorene’s little effort goes noplace. Lorene concentrates on her ironing, doing up Crystal’s new pink formal for the Miss Buchanan County beauty pageant. This one has spaghetti straps and a big ruffle around the bottom; they bought it at King’s in Bristol. Lorene applies spray starch to the ruffle and it comes out perfect, and Lorene wishes that Crystal herself was this easy to straighten out. Lorene suspects that Crystal’s mood has got something to do with Mack Stiltner leaving town, but of course she doesn’t mention this idea to Crystal, and Crystal never says a word about Mack. So nobody mentions him, but he’s gone, as definitely as if he never was here at all, as if he has disappeared into outer space instead of going to Nashville, which he really did.

Somebody knocks on the door, three short taps.

“Come on in!” Lorene hollers, expecting it to be Susie
with that new little baby girl for her to watch awhile—a glutton for punishment, that’s what Neva calls Susie, who still won’t get her tubes tied but has these headaches in the afternoons—but instead it’s Jubal Thacker, child of God.

“Hello there, Mrs. Spangler, Crystal,” Jubal says formally. He looks funny standing by the door in his tennis shoes and his dirty white socks, his cut-off jeans, his old familiar angular face and crazy tousled hair, now overlaid, all of him, with a glistening spirituality as noticeable as spray paint.

Crystal looks up at Jubal and blinks. Something clicks inside her, something shifts and settles. She hasn’t looked at Jubal for about two years, she realizes. Here he has been two houses away and in her home room and she hasn’t even
seen
him for years! And he looks so different now. Crystal squints at him. “Well, hello, Jubal,” she says. “I haven’t seen you in a long time.”

“I guess I’ve been busy,” Jubal says, looking down modestly, because he knows they know he’s preaching now.

Crystal keeps staring at him, old skinny freckled-faced Jubal Thacker, and Lorene unplugs her iron and sits down and fans her face. Crystal wonders if Jubal ever hears voices, if Jubal has seen God’s face.

“I wanted to congratulate you on winning the beauty contest,” Jubal says formally, still standing right by the door. “She sure did look pretty, Mrs. Spangler,” he says to Lorene.

“Why, thank you,” Lorene says, and Crystal says nothing.

Silence hangs in the kitchen until Jubal clears his throat
finally and says it’s such a pretty night he just thought he’d go up to the Esso station to get a Coke and he just wondered if Crystal and Agnes wanted to come along.

Crystal gets up like a girl in a trance and follows him out the door before Lorene can say a word, and Lorene watches them go across the side yard to the McClanahans’ house, still fanning herself, worried about something even though she couldn’t say what exactly, that look on Crystal’s face. Lorene is a good Methodist. She doesn’t hold with all that Pentecostal carrying on, snakes, God knows what all they do. She sure hopes Crystal isn’t going to take it into her head to date Jubal Thacker. Lorene realizes she would hate that worse than Crystal dating Mack Stiltner. It sounds crazy, but it’s true. Anyway Jubal Thacker has probably never had a date in his life. Lorene has never heard of him having one. Maybe he’s just lonely tonight. Lorene is lonely herself: Sykes off in Vietnam, Jules on a trip to Greece with his friend Carter E. Black (“Greece!” Neva had snorted when she heard it. “I don’t see how he’s got time to go to Greece when he hasn’t even got time to come home!”). Lorene shakes her head. At least she still has Crystal.