Black Mountain Breakdown (24 page)

“Aren’t you going to stop for a drink and a Slim Jim?” Crystal asks suddenly. “Don’t you remember when I was little, every time you took me someplace in the truck we used to stop at a store and you’d get us both a Slim Jim and me an RC and you’d get a beer. Don’t you remember that? I thought you couldn’t even go on a trip without a drink and a Slim Jim.”

Odell had forgotten. “Road beer.” He grins. “Well, your mother has got me counting the calories now.”

“Let’s get some road beer,” Crystal says. Maybe it will help her stomach, help her head; the top of her head feels like it’s going to fly off and disappear. Anxiety, of course, and she knows it. But still…

“Your mother would have a fit.”

“She would not. This is a celebration. Pull in there, Odell. No, we’ve missed it now. Pull in the next one.”

When Crystal gets her Slim Jim she gulps it down, barely chewing. She hasn’t had a Slim Jim or a pickled hard-boiled egg in years. She drains about half of her beer and makes a face at Odell. “Schlitz! I thought you drank Pabst all the time.”

“I’ll be honest with you, honey, I don’t remember.”

“It was Pabst,” Crystal insisted.

“Well, I’ll tell you,” Odell says. “That might be so. But things change, and you have to just kind of go with it, if you know what I mean.”

Odell drives fast through Swords Creek, whipping around the curves.

“Now tell me a story,” Crystal says after a while, and her voice is so high and so peculiar that Odell looks away from the road for a minute to stare at her. But she just smiles back at him, all open and golden, and he goes back to driving without a word. It’s funny about Crystal. Trying to figure her out. There was one time, years back up on Dry Fork, when she had that sick spell or something, and now he can’t remember it. Peculiar, though. Trouble with Crystal is, sometimes she almost makes you think something, but then she makes you stop and you never know what it was. You never get it thought through.

“I don’t know no stories, now,” Odell says. “Grant was the one with the stories.”

“Tell me something true, then,” Crystal said. “Let’s see—tell me about Goldie Coe.”

“Goldie Coe? What you want to hear about
her
for?” Odell hasn’t thought of her in years.

“Grace used to tell me about Granddaddy,” Crystal says. “But she never would tell about Goldie Coe.”

“Hah!” Odell laughs. “That Grace is really a case, now. You just wait till you see old Grace.”

“Please tell about Goldie Coe. Nobody ever would.”

“Well, there’s actually not much to tell, Crystal. She was just a girl from up on Hurley, worked at the Ben Franklin, and Iradell took a fancy to her, that’s all. She used to work the popcorn machine.”

“Then what?”

“Then, hell, I don’t know. Iradell got to buying popcorn, he’d take me with him, then he got to bringing her up to the house, then the first thing I knowed, we was all in the car going to Charlottesville to get Goldie some new teeth.” Odell’s own gold tooth flashes in the sun as he tells it. “It was a long trip in those days, two days it took us. We put up at Natural Bridge. But she was about to bust to get those teeth.”

Crystal sips her beer, letting it slide slowly down her throat. The beer—or perhaps it’s the story—is helping. “Who went?” she asks.

“Well, let’s see. There was me driving, and Iradell and Goldie in the front seat. Iradell used to sit over by the window with a paper bag full of apples and a pint of bourbon.
He’d take a bite of the apple and then a drink of bourbon and chew it up together, glub it around in his mouth a long time before he swallowed. He used to pinch Goldie every now and then and she’d holler at him.”

“What did Goldie look like?”

“Well, I don’t know how to tell you exactly, honey. It’s been a long time. Styles have changed. She had a whole lot of hair, all this yellow curly hair that she got her name from. Her real name used to be something else, but nobody knew what it was. She used to comb her hair all the time with this little tortoiseshell comb. She was sort of fat, I guess, except for her legs. She had big old long legs.”

“Was she pretty?”

“She was pretty when she kept her mouth closed.”

“Was that all of you who went?” Crystal asks.

“No, Nora was in the back seat and—”

“Nora! I thought she wouldn’t go anywhere with Granddaddy.”

“Well, she says she didn’t, but she did. She used to go, all right. In fact, it was hard to go off anyplace without her. She wanted to go to Charlottesville this time to get your daddy some culture, as I remember it. He was in the back seat, too. Nora used to make him hold a paper bag in case he got carsick.”

“Did he?”

“Did he what?”

“Get carsick.”

“I don’t know, Crystal. I can’t remember if he did that time or not. Sometimes he did, though.”

“What did he do, riding along?”

“
Do?
Well, hell, there wasn’t nothing to do on a trip like that but ride, honey. That’s all. Besides, he never talked much when he was little, anyway. He was scared of your granddaddy, I guess.”

“Everybody was, right?” Crystal asks.

“Yep. Including me.”

“How old were you then, Odell?”

“
Me?
Well, let’s see, I guess I was sixteen maybe, something like that. I started driving your granddaddy when I was fourteen years old.” Odell seems inclined to stop talking, but Crystal keeps asking him questions.

“Then what? What happened on the trip?”

“Let’s see. The main thing I remember is I had to keep putting the window up and down. If it was up, Nora would holler that the smoke was killing her. Then I’d put it down, then Goldie would start in about how the wind was messing up her hairdo, then I’d put it up. I put it up and down for two days. Neither one of them ever rolled their own window up or down for theirself.”

Crystal is laughing. It reminds her of going to the Miss Virginia Contest with Neva and Lorene.

“The other thing is, every time we stopped for gas, your granddaddy used to make everybody get out and go to the bathroom.
Make
’em, he didn’t care whether they had to go or not. He’d stand over there by the gas pump and holler.

“We went in a restaurant,” Odell continues, pleased and somewhat surprised that Crystal is laughing so hard. “I tell you, it was the first time I was ever in a resturant like that, silver and all. Goldie said she wanted something with a cream sauce, anything with a cream sauce, she didn’t care
what. We had this pop-eyed nigger in a red suit waiting on us. Then Nora, she’d eat up everything left on everybody’s plate when you were through.”

“Then what? Then did Goldie get her teeth?”

“Hell, yes, she got ’em all right. See, this was the second time we went up there. The first time they got her fitted. This time, Goldie kept saying, ‘Do you reckon it’s going to hurt?’ and your granddaddy would take out his bottom teeth and let her look at them. Then Nora got to looking for this special wall, once we got up there, and I had to drive her around to find it.”

“Serpentine,” Crystal supplies.

“Yes, well, we got there, and Nora took Grant off to look at tombstones or something, and I had to sit with your granddaddy in the waiting room while they put in Goldie’s teeth.”

“What did he do in the waiting room?”

“Went to sleep,” Odell says. “Snored.”

“What did you do?”

“I just sat there, I guess.”

“Then what?”

“Well, then, around four o’clock this nurse came out and told me they were almost finished with Miss Coe and I had to wake your granddaddy up. I used to hate to have to wake him up, he never knew where he was. I tell you what he said,” Odell adds suddenly.

“What?”

“I kept saying to get up, that they were just about through with Goldie, and he kept saying for me to go on and leave him alone. See, the bourbon used to get to him, is what it was.”

“Then what did he say?”

“He said just as plain as anything, ‘Well, that’s that,’ and I said, ‘What, sir?’ and he said, ‘You get a girl a set of new teeth and she’ll leave you every time. She won’t even stop to pack her clothes.’ He told me to remember that.”

Crystal is silent, sipping.

“I always thought that was funny, him knowing it and then going on and buying her the teeth anyway.”

“You’re right,” Crystal said. “It
is
funny.” She lights another Salem and leans back against the seat to smoke it. The only thing real now is Odell beside her driving this big car, the road climbing and twisting out in front of them.
Not real
includes the city, includes Jerold. She and Jerold in the city seem like characters in a novel she read so long ago that she has trouble remembering the plot. Jerold, of course, is dead. It was funny when his sisters showed up from New Jersey, big hefty women with frizzy black hair. “He had it coming!” one of them kept insisting, while the other kept shutting her up. They were Catholic and so there was some question about the funeral, which in any case Crystal did not attend. Of her stay in the hospital, she remembers little. She had been tired, anemic, and everyone kept saying she needed a rest. Then they were annoyed when she rested more than they thought she should. Later after they got her up they encouraged her to talk, but there just wasn’t anything to say. Then one day she said, “This is a waste of time. I ought to get up and go home,” and she did. The doctor she was talking to had seemed surprised, and he had called in another doctor and they argued about her right in front
of her while she got out of bed and packed. Crystal didn’t even bother to listen. In the end they had released her.

Crystal took the last of her money out of the bank and went straight to the airport and flew to Richmond, where she checked into a Holiday Inn, bought some clothes and a bathing suit at Montaldo’s, called Lorene, got Lorene’s check and cashed it, threw all her old clothes into a Dumpster in the motel parking lot, bought more clothes and a suitcase in Miller and Rhoads. For three days she lay by the motel pool and got a suntan, burning the last traces of her hospital whiteness away, making jokes with the boy who cleaned the pool. On the fourth day she had her hair frosted and cut and spent the night with an International Harvester salesman who picked her up in the motel’s Jolly Roger Pirate Club. Then she made her plane reservation, packed her new clothes in her new bag, and flew home. Jerold was wrong, wrong. She had proved him wrong. He used to tell her over and over that she was doomed—Jerold was into doom—but she wasn’t doomed. She was saved. Crystal grins, remembering the time Agnes told Jubal Thacker she didn’t need to go to his revival, thanks anyway, she had been saved for years. Well, so has Crystal.

At the door, Lorene hugs her so hard that Crystal thinks she’ll suffocate, be drawn entirely into Lorene’s big soft body and absorbed. “Honey, honey,” Lorene says. “I’m just so glad you’re home! Look here—I even fixed you some three-bean salad for dinner.”

Odell grins, chewing on a toothpick: he keeps toothpicks, cigarettes, and a lot of his clothes at Lorene’s these days.

Crystal wanders the house before dinner, picking up
objects and putting them down. She has some trouble, not much, in telling how far anything is from her hand. The objects seem to recede and then flow back to her. It’s very strange. There are some things she remembers and some things she does not, and then other things are completely new, like the back sun porch with all the plants. She doesn’t realize that she’s looking for Grant’s poetry books until she finally finds them, upstairs in a pile on the bottom shelf of the bookcase by the phone, next to two stacks of old
Reader’s Digest
s. Lorene follows Crystal around, giving her all the news. One thing is that Neva is considering leaving Charlie, who has had something going on the side for the past eight years. Neva never even suspected, if you can imagine that! Lorene says
she
wasn’t surprised, though; she felt it coming, and Charlie has always had a screw loose someplace.

Then Lorene goes into the kitchen to set the table, and Crystal sits on the sun porch and looks at the Bluefield paper while Odell talks on the phone to a man about some roofing.

“Come and get it,” Lorene calls. “I’m taking the cornbread out of the oven right now, and the bean salad is already on the table.”

Crystal bursts into tears.

Lorene and Odell go ahead and eat, leaving her alone in her room upstairs, and Crystal sits by the window and looks out at the lightning bugs rising. On the bureau sits a gold-framed picture of her at sixteen, wearing a tiara and a long white gown. Crystal gets up and looks at it for a while and then she puts it back and turns off the light and
sits in the dark, looking out her window. The phone rings two times, and after a while Lorene comes up the stairs. Crystal can hear her heels clicking down on the wood. Lorene switches on the light and Crystal blinks.

“Crystal Renée, that was Sykes on the phone. He and Bunny are coming over here to see you in a minute,” Lorene says. “You’d better go put on your face.”

BEING BACK HOME
in Black Rock is not as difficult as Crystal thought it might be, and it isn’t as boring either. Black Rock itself has changed a great deal during those years she has been away. With the climbing price of coal, millions and millions of dollars have poured into the county. Odell and Lorene have grown rich, for instance, not that you could tell it from the way they live. But the new prosperity has touched everyone. Some people have more money than they know what to do with. Other people know exactly what to do with it: they’ve bought Cadillacs, diamonds, boats. The Jurgensens flew to Colorado to ski. Another time they flew to Venezuela. There are people who go to Duke Hospital for three weeks at a hundred dollars a day to lose weight on the Rice Diet. Mrs. Cartwright saw Elvis Presley there; he was on the Rice Diet, too. The Lord Brothers have recently bought a whole island off the coast of South Carolina. A whole island! The Lord Brothers go everywhere in private planes, and their wives fly up to New York to shop. The Lord Brothers opened a new bank downtown a few weeks before Crystal came home, and the first day they took in over a million dollars in deposits.