Black Mountain Breakdown (8 page)

Crystal’s daddy is dying, but she doesn’t allow herself to realize this. He’s a lot like he has always been, only now he lies down all the time on his sofa. When Crystal comes in, he seems animated. When she’s not at home, he does nothing. Lorene’s brother the Reverend Garnett Sykes mounts a stiff campaign to talk to Grant, who refuses. The Reverend Sykes comes into the front room several times, but
Grant turns his face to the wall. “Well, we can’t pray him into heaven, honey,” Garnett tells Lorene.

Once when Crystal goes to see
Thunder Road
at the drive-in with Roger Lee Combs, she gets out of Roger Lee’s yellow Ford to go over to speak to Pearl Deskins, who is in another car, two cars away. It’s November now and cold at the drive-in, and a lot of people have their car heaters on so they can’t see the screen at all since their windows are all fogged up. Also, a lot of the drive-in speakers don’t even work, but there’s nothing much else to do in Black Rock on Saturday night. Roger Lee says wait a minute. He says he thinks Crystal ought to stay just where she is. “No,” says Crystal, “I want to talk to Pearl a minute,” and she crunches through the gravel and opens the front door on the shotgun side. Pearl’s date, some boy Crystal has never seen before, is sprawled out on the seat. Crystal can’t see very well in the dark. “Excuse me,” she says, “I was looking for Pearl Deskins.” “Shit,” says Pearl Deskins’s date. He fiddles around and then sits up, and then Pearl sits up, too, holding her dress up in front of her chest. In the pale light from the movie, Crystal sees Pearl’s white shoulders and back, and her hair all messed up. “Crystal,” says Pearl in a voice with no tone to it at all. She sounds like she’s only stating a fact. “Excuse me,” Crystal says, and shuts the door.

She shivers in the cold air. Petting! It was all abstract before. Now she wants to know exactly what they do, how they go about it there in that foggy front seat. Crystal is in love with Roger Lee, of course, but they have never petted. Should they? Crystal can’t imagine how it would be with Roger Lee, how they would ever begin.
Petting
. Even the
word is animal, all tied up with kittens and barnyards and goats. Nobody will respect you; Lorene has said it so many times. You’ve got to save yourself for Mr. Right.

When Crystal gets back to Roger Lee’s car, she won’t talk to him at all. She doesn’t even thank him when he brings her a vanilla Coke, but sits huddled up on her side by the window. “What’s the matter?” asks Roger Lee, but Crystal isn’t talking. “Look at that,” he says when Robert Mitchum wrecks three state troopers in a row. Crystal won’t look. Roger Lee, not used to moodiness, is charmed. In the darkness of that drive-in, he falls in love. Even though Crystal won’t speak to him right now, he vows to make her happy for the rest of her life.

Agnes wins the potato salad contest at the district level and goes on to compete in the state contest held at Longwood College in Farmville, Virginia, all the way across the state. She practices and practices. But she is disqualified in the final elimination because she fails to wear a hair net. “Unsanitary procedure,” rules a trio of snippy state judges, even though they eat big helpings of her potato salad. So Agnes comes back on the Greyhound bus with her mother. She is not so unhappy. After all, she did reach the top level of the 4-H hierarchy in the whole state, she did get her picture on the front page of the
Black Rock Mountaineer
, and she did get a free chopping block just for being there.

One day while Agnes is out of town on the potato salad trip, Crystal walks over to town after school by herself and buys some creme rinse in the Rexall. Then she calls Lorene to come pick her up. She stands outside on the sidewalk to
wait for Lorene, facing the gray stone courthouse with the clock in the tower and the black benches out in front. It’s cold and the benches are empty now, and nobody much is downtown. There are empty parking places all around the square. “Think it’ll snow?” asks Edwin Sykes, her uncle, hurrying by with his coat collar up.

“I wish it would,” Crystal says. She looks up at the close gray clouds. There’s a cold place between the top of her knee socks and the bottom of her coat, and she wishes her mother would hurry up. Trash scuttles along the side-walk.

“Hello, Crystal,” says Mack Stiltner. It’s the first time he has ever spoken to her. But suddenly he’s there on the sidewalk beside her, wearing somebody’s old navy pea jacket. Crystal is surprised to see that he’s not much taller than she is.

“Hi,” she says. Then a terrible embarrassment descends and Crystal looks away from his strange light eyes that close to hers, nods to a friend of her mother’s rushing by, and Mack kicks the toe of his boot on the sidewalk. The wind comes down the street and Crystal shivers in her coat.

“Cold?” asks Mack.

Crystal nods yes. There does not seem to be anything else to say.

“Listen to this,” says Mack, and to Crystal’s astonishment, although she knows Mack has the reputation of being liable to do anything, anytime, he whips a harmonica out of some inside pocket in the pea jacket and starts playing “Blue Eyes,” playing really well, right there in front of the Rexall. His hair falls into his eyes while he plays. Somebody
opens the door of the Rexall to see what’s going on, then closes it to keep in the heat.

Crystal moves closer to Mack. Now she’s so close that she can see how his skin is greasy and he has hair growing in the V of his plaid shirt collar. Mack finishes playing with a long sad trill and wipes off the spit on his sleeve.

“OK,” he says and puts the harmonica back into his pocket. Crystal stares. She’s very close to him and she feels funny, weak at the top of her legs, the way she feels when she considers the circulation of the blood.

“It’s starting to snow,” she says.

Mack Stiltner grabs her shoulders with both hands and pulls her to him, roughly, and kisses her on the mouth. He never closes his eyes and neither does Crystal. He puts his tongue into her mouth, and Crystal is kissing him back. Then suddenly he lets her go, almost pushing her, back against the Rexall wall and he’s gone, rushing off into the wind. Snowflakes swirl around him until he disappears, never once looking back, and snowflakes fall all over Crystal’s face. She looks straight up at the sky and catches them in her mouth. They melt on her tongue immediately, sweet and cold and utterly strange. Then Lorene is honking the horn.

“Didn’t you see me?” she asks, cross, when Crystal finally gets in.

“No,” Crystal says. All she can think about is how Mack Stiltner’s tongue felt in her mouth. That night she sits by the telephone, but Mack Stiltner doesn’t call, and the next day he isn’t at school.

One Sunday afternoon, Roger Lee borrows his daddy’s Jeep and picks up Crystal and another couple, Sue Mustard and Russell Matney, and they go way up on the Paw Paw fork of Knox Creek for a picnic. The day is crisp and cold and sunny, the sunlight pale but strong. All the leaves have fallen off the trees. For a while they are on a hardtop road, going up Paw Paw, although it narrows until there’s room for only one car at a time. They pass the three-room Paw Paw elementary school, pass several independent mines, pass all the houses and trailers crowded along the road.

“Look at that,” says Roger Lee, pointing and slowing down.

He says something else, but Crystal can’t hear him over the roar and clank of the Jeep. She looks where he points and sees it, a house with polished hubcaps all over the front. The sun hits the hubcaps all at once and they shine together, a single incredible jewel in the cold bright light.

“That’s the tackiest thing I ever saw,” Sue Mustard says, swishing her pony tail.

“I like it,” says Crystal.

Roger Lee grins at her. He knew she would like it. He wears a yellow hunting cap with green fur earflaps, turned up. His brown eyes are steady, flecked with gold. They leave the hardtop and go onto a dirt road which has big ruts in it, so that Crystal has to hold on to the edge of the seat. She loves the way the Jeep smells, like leather and oil and sweat,
like a hunting trip. The wind on her face feels cold and new. The road is steep, and off to their right is a sheer drop down. Way below them they can see the town like a toy down there. One more curve and then they’re right up on top of the mountain, which has been leveled off for strip mining and then left, a huge dirt expanse with no trees and nothing growing on it, the biggest piece of flat land Crystal has ever seen in this county, something like the surface of the moon. Roger drives figure eights all over it, and they know they’re the only people around for several miles.

Roger stops the Jeep and they get out, Sue Mustard and Russell Matney holding hands in their matching His and Her sweatshirts. There’s a kind of pool, like a quarry and not so deep, and they put their blankets out by that and then eat Lorene’s fried chicken and potato chips and some chocolate cake that Sue Mustard made. Russell eats pistachio nuts, his trademark. You can always tell where Russell has been because he leaves a little pile of the bright-red shells behind. Then Russell and Sue go off to make out, and Roger takes Crystal’s hand and leads her over to a mine entrance. Crystal wonders if he wants to pet, and she thinks of Mack Stiltner again. It makes her stomach feel weird. They go into the mine pretty far, until Roger says it’s not safe. The timbers are rotting now. He takes a railroad stake from the little old railroad track that goes into the mine, as a souvenir. Suddenly Crystal remembers a time years ago, when she was about seven or eight, and her daddy took her up into the mountains to see a man he had to see about some land, and there was a small mine like this one, where they still used ponies to pull out the coal cars. The mine ponies
were small and shaggy, just the right size for Crystal. The ponies blinked in the sun. The men let Crystal ride them, in and out of the mine. The men all grinned and waved to her each time she came out. Her daddy stood there with them, smiling. Suddenly Crystal is sure that this mine will cave in. She can see the timbers giving, the rocks pouring in on each side. She can practically smell the dust. Panic thuds in her chest and she grabs Roger’s arm. “Let’s go! Let’s get out of here.” Her words echo way back in the mine. Then she lets go of his arm and starts running and runs all the way out.

“Hey!” yells Roger. “Crystal! It’s all right. Wait a minute.”

Crystal collapses on a rock outside, breathing hard. Of course she’s being silly. The sun feels good out here, and everything is totally calm and peaceful. Flat red dirt, the town down there, the other ridgetops across the valley, all the cliffs and big rocks showing everywhere with the leaves gone. The vertical line up the opposite ridge where the power line runs.

Roger Lee finds her and sits down, too. “What happened in there?” he says. “Something spook you?”

Crystal only nods and stares around at the strange terrain. It’s just too complicated to explain. It seems particularly odd to be so high, up here above the town, where the sun would come right up in the morning. Roger Lee takes off his Black Rock High class ring and puts it into Crystal’s hand.

“What are you doing?” she asks, although of course she knows. The ring is warm and heavy in her fingers.

“I want you to go steady with me,” Roger Lee says. He’s all choked up. “I know you’re real young, and I hate to tie you down, but next year I’ll be going off to college, you know.” College seems crazy to Crystal right now, like any other idea of the future. She can’t even think about college. In fact, she can’t think about anything beyond this ridgetop, this rock, this day. She turns the ring in her hands.

“Try it on,” Roger says. He puts it on her finger. The ring is much too large and they both laugh at how funny it looks on Crystal’s small hand.

“I guess I could tape it,” she says.

Roger Lee turns Crystal around and kisses her, but Crystal doesn’t pay too much attention. She’s thinking about what her mother will say, about showing the ring off to Agnes and Babe and everybody else, about wearing it to school on a chain around her neck.

Sue Mustard kisses Crystal, too, later, on the cheek, when they all get back together at the Jeep and Roger breaks the news. “I just knew it!” says Sue. “You all make the cutest couple!”

Even Crystal knows this is true.

LORENE CLAPS HER
hands when she sees Roger’s ring, and hugs Crystal tight, and then she calls Neva to tell her the news. “Such a nice family,” Crystal hears her say into the phone. Grant, though, is sick that afternoon, napping, and when Crystal goes in to tell him the big news his response is unsatisfactory. All he does is smile into the shadows, beyond the glow of his lamp. “That’s nice, honey,” is what
he says, and then he turns over to sleep. So Crystal feels disconnected, funny in the middle of her stomach, and at supper she doesn’t eat much even though Lorene has made three-bean salad, usually one of her favorites. She puts Roger’s ring in the middle of the table and it sits there, shining at her, while they eat.

“Haven’t you got some homework, honey?” Lorene asks her after supper. After all, it’s Sunday night: school tomorrow.
Algebra.
Crystal doesn’t think she can possibly face algebra when she’s so much in love. It ought to be morning and she ought to be wearing a long lace dress, running through flowered fields. Instead it’s Sunday night, dark and cold, and she’s got fifteen problems which she can’t possibly solve by herself. Crystal puts three Band-Aids on the inside of Roger’s ring, to keep it on her finger, and then she gets her books and puts on her coat and goes next door, where Agnes and Babe and their parents are all in the front room around the television, watching
Sea Hunt
.

“Look!” Crystal drops her books on the floor. “Look what Roger gave me today!” She holds out her hand in the air.

“Well, shoot!” Hassell hollers. “You girls are growing up too fast for me.”

“Ooh, let me see,” Babe cries, running across the room. “Ooh, it’s so
big
,” she says.