Black Mountain Breakdown

by Lee Smith

  Crystal wonders who the people are in all these cars and trucks and where in the world they are going. The traffic puts her in a kind of trance. She watches it sometimes for hours. Sometimes the same cars go up and down, up and down, until she wonders what they’re looking for. Sometimes she sees a car from out of state. Now all she can see is their lights, flashing out into the night when they come around the curve by the Esso station, then beamed again on the road through their neighborhood, headed downtown. A lot of times cars rattle when they hit the hole in the road in front of Agnes’s house. Now something clanks on the side of the road.

  “What’s that?” Crystal says.

  “Beer can,” says Agnes.

  Crystal stretches. She was almost asleep in the swing. Summer rolls out in front of her as far as that road goes; fall, and junior high school, seem far, far away. Already this summer Crystal has read Scaramouche. Right now she is reading Quo Vadis.

  “Who’s that?” Agnes asks. Agnes can’t see very well in the dark, but Crystal has cat eyes. A couple walks up the side of the road toward the Esso Station, holding hands.

  “Pearl Deskins,” Crystal whispers, “and some boy.”

  “Who is it?”

  “I don’t know,” Crystal whispers back. “I can’t see him real good, but I probably wouldn’t know him anyway. He looks a whole lot older to me.”

  The traffic has slacked off now, and for a minute no car comes. Pearl Deskins and the boy are like shadows without bodies, walking. They stop to light cigarettes and when the match flares up, Crystal sees momentarily Pearl’s thin, feral face, black eyes, her red mouth.

  “I wish you’d look at that!” Agnes says. “Smoking!”

  Pearl Deskins lives in a trailer up by the Esso station. She is only two years older than Agnes and Crystal, but it seems like ten years to them. Pearl is thin, but her breasts poke out like hard little rocks through the tight little sweaters she wears, and she was on the Absentee Hot List last year for skipping school so much. Crystal is sure that Pearl doesn’t even know their names. Pearl is wild and mysterious; Crystal wonders where she goes and what she does with boys.

  “She’s got an awful reputation,” Agnes says.

  “I know it,” Crystal answers. A thrill shoots through her and makes her tremble inside; to hide it, she stretches again.

  “You remember what we said,” says Agnes, “in the club.”

  “I know it,” Crystal says again, and thinks how they cut their fingers and mixed their blood and said they would be best friends always and have nothing to do with boys.

  Pearl giggles and the sound floats back at them over the neighborhood. Crystal shivers. Jubal Thacker’s daddy has quit picking and gone to bed. Fluorescent arc lights go on up at the Esso station, past the Presbyterian church. They think you’re born saved or damned already, Presbyterians do. Chester Lester’s house is all dark, too, although Crystal can’t imagine he’s gone to bed yet. He’s too mean to sleep. Chester Lester has got something wrong with him, she knows. Once he threw lighted matches at her and Agnes and another time he had a kitchen knife and made them pull down their pants for him to see. Still another time, Chester Lester tied Crystal up to a sycamore tree in the Raineses’ yard and put frogs on her. That’s why she hates them so much now. The Varney boys have gone off in one of their cars making a racket as usual. Nancy Shortridge, who is visiting her grandmother several houses down, has gone to Bristol today to get her braces adjusted and she won’t be back until tomorrow. Crystal is jealous of Nancy for getting to stay in a motel. Agnes is jealous of Nancy for existing, for ever coming to stay with her grandmother at all. Crystal always wants to ask Nancy to be in their games.

  “Where’s Jubal?” Crystal asks. Sometimes he plays with them, too. Jubal is skinny and tousle-headed and small; Agnes can beat him at any game. He has a wide sweet smile and sometimes he gets so tickled that he will roll over and over laughing.

  “Don’t you remember?” Agnes sits up and jerks the swing. Sometimes she gets so exasperated with Crystal.

  “Remember what?” Crystal says.

  “He’s gone to Bible camp.”

  “Oh yeah,” says Crystal. “Well. He can have it,” she says after a minute. “You couldn’t pay me to go there.”

  “You don’t have to be so ugly about it if you never have been there yourself,” Agnes says. She is very righteous. “It might be fun.”

  “Not Baptist,” Crystal says.

  “You’ll be sorry,” Agnes warns her. She is quite serious. Agnes is a Baptist, too, but of course her daddy is a businessman and so they are not hard-shell Baptists like the Thackers are. Crystal’s mother is a Methodist, but Crystal is not anything; her daddy is not anything, either. Crystal is surprisingly firm on this point, which worries Agnes a lot. What kind of a heaven will it be, if Crystal can’t even get one foot inside the gate?

  “Ag-nes?” Agnes’s mama calls her from inside the screen door, going up on the last syllable like she always does. Agnes’s mama has a tired, pretty voice.

  “I’m coming in a minute, Mama. I’m going to walk Crystal home.”

  Crystal picks up her jar and they go down the concrete front steps and across the grass to Crystal’s house, not more than thirty yards away.

  “Why don’t you come in for a minute?” Crystal says.

  By habit they walk around back, knowing without even thinking about it that the front door will be locked, and go into the kitchen-dinette area, as Crystal’s mother calls it.

  “Don’t slam the door,” Lorene says when they open it. “Hi, Agnes, come on in,” she adds. Lorene looks at the lightning bug jar in Crystal’s hands. “Not more of those!” she says.

  Lorene can’t understand how her own daughter could enjoy staying out in the dark night fooling with bugs. Or how she could have a best friend like Agnes. Why, Crystal is almost big enough to start dating! And Lorene can’t even get her to roll up her hair. Lorene’s own hair is rolled up right now, in pink plastic curlers with snap-on tops. Neva, her sister who is a beautician, came over and did it right after supper and told Lorene all the news she heard that day at the beauty shop.

  “Is Daddy still up?” Crystal says.

  “How should I know?” snaps Lorene. “I’ve got better things to do than sit around in there in the dark.”

  “Crystal honey?” He has heard her voice; he is calling her from the front room.

  “Come on,” Crystal says. Agnes gets a saltine from the box on the table, cuts herself a slice of Velveeta from the foil-wrapped brick of it lying there, and follows Crystal through the house.

  Lorene shakes her head. Then she spreads her hands out on the table and looks at them. Neva gave her a manicure, too, while she was over here, and they are trying out a new shade: Florida Rose. It looks good. Lorene wishes she had some lipstick the same color, to match; probably Neva could order her some. Lorene fixes herself another cup of coffee and turns back to the TV, where Perry Mason is trying to solve a mystery about a rich beautiful heiress who is receiving murder threats. Lorene thinks she has solved it already; she thinks the heiress is doing it to herself, to get attention. Lorene smiles after the commercial, when Perry begins to realize this, too. She would have made a good detective, she thinks, or a psychiatrist. She can always tell what makes somebody tick. Nearing fifty now, Lorene is still a blond, strong woman, running to fat maybe, but she keeps herself up, wears heels when she goes to town. “I may not be a lady,” she says, “but by God I’ll dress like one.” Although she has been married to Grant Spangler for nearly thirty years, she’s still more Sykes than Spangler. She has never lost that hustle which brought him to her in the first place like a pale summer moth to a porch light, that same hustle all the Sykeses have, which enabled old man Sykes, for instance—Lorene’s father—to turn a junk business into a car dealership and invent a rivet that would give every one of them a guaranteed income for the rest of their lives. And the rivet money is in Lorene’s name, not Grant’s. She thinks about her rivet m
oney downtown in the bank, accumulating interest. Lorene has a passbook savings account and a part interest in Neva’s Clip-N-Curl. She’s no fool, which is a good thing, since she is married to one.

  Of course it irritates her the way things have turned out, and it especially gets her the way Grant just lies there in her front room with the Venetian blinds drawn so that he doesn’t know sometimes if it’s night or day and she can’t even get in there to vacuum. But this has come about slowly, over a period of years, so she is accustomed to it now. His removal to the front room was so gradual as to be almost imperceptible, a slow receding from life, and her own move to the back of the house was just as gradual. Lorene does not complain. She may have married Grant because he was a Spangler, but even now that his father’s Little Emma mine has failed, even if she could have seen ahead somehow through all the years to this time and this year, Lorene is not sure she would have done anything different. She takes pride in the fact that she has never said a word against him to anyone, has never mentioned his drinking to anybody, not even to her brother Garnett when he has come around hinting at it.

  At least Lorene has Crystal, the child of her old age, the joy of her heart. When Crystal was born, she quit hollering at Grant and trying to change things, fixed up her kitchen and grew philosophical, centering herself firmly in the child. Maybe it was because Crystal was a Caesarean baby and didn’t get all pushed and pulled and wrinkled coming through the tubes, but Lorene thought when she first saw her that she had never, never seen a more beautiful child. Lorene named her the prettiest name she could think of, Crystal Renée. Lorene thinks of the little dresses she used to dress Crystal in, and the little white shoes with straps. Crystal will grow up to be somebody; Lorene will see to that. Crystal will go to a fine school on that rivet money. She will marry a doctor. But whatever she does, she will be somebody special, because Lorene is raising her that way. Of course Grant has a bad influence on Crystal, but Lorene ignores it, as she ignores everything she can’t change. Lorene deals with her problems by rising above them. Now she stares at the closed door and drums her rosy nails for a minute on the tabletop. Then she switches the channels to see what else might be on TV.

  Behind the door is another room, another world almost. Here where Grant stays, even the air seems denser and different somehow. It smells like old smoke, like liquor, like Grant himself, yet the combination is not unpleasant really and Crystal loves it. The room is shadowy now, the only light coming from a floor lamp in the corner by the armchair, but even this light must have been too bright and so a blue shirt, or a piece of a shirt, has been thrown carelessly over the shade. This creates an irregular spread of light and a jagged shadow in the far corner of the room. Clearly this was Lorene’s best room once, her parlor. There is a gold sunburst clock above the mantel, no longer running. The artificial logs in the fireplace have fallen off their wrought-iron stand. The furniture is mostly a French Provincial living-room set, with shiny off-white brocaded upholstery: a sofa and three matching chairs. Now the brocade is dirty and some stuffing sticks out from the arm of the chair by the door. A squatty coffee table sprawls at a rakish angle before the sofa, only its gold claw feet protruding from the papers and books jumbled high on its top and spilling over onto the floor. Other books are stacked about the room, and there are piles of clothing in the corners. The fancy gold drapes hang limp and open, but the Venetian blinds behind them are shut tight, a flat gray dusty expanse on the wall by the locked front door.

  Grant is reading poetry to the girls. He half sits, half lies in the armchair so that the light falls on his thin dog-eared book, One Hundred and One Famous Poems. Crystal sits close to him on the floor, holding on to his knee under the old blue silk robe he always wears. She is careful not to knock over the glass on the floor by his chair. Agnes is stretched out full length facing them with her chin on her fists, her plump bottom sticking straight up.

  “‘Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)

  Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace…’”

  Grant begins, his voice gaining strength as he goes on, until it is as rich and full again as it used to be back when people said he ought to make a preacher—how he laughed at them—or a courtroom lawyer at least.

  “‘And saw within the moonlight in the room,

  Making it rich and like a lily in bloom,

  An angel writing in a book of gold…’”

  Now Grant is into it fully, the cadenced rhythms, the rise and dip and fall of the lines, and his voice drops nearly to a whisper and then comes out strong and loud and resonant as he gestures grandly with the book and waves it in the air, going mostly from memory and rising to his fullest power on “Lo! Ben Adhem’s name led all the rest!” The final word of the poem echoes in the room and the giant shadow of the book and Grant’s arm on the opposite wall disappears as his arm drops back to his lap and he sinks again, spent, into the battered chair. Grant laughs to break the silence.

  “Oh, I love that one,” Crystal says. Her face is turned up to her father and she is smiling. He reaches down to touch her hair.

  “How do you like that one, Agnes?” Grant asks. He has to smile when he looks down at the great hulking spread of Agnes there on the floor.

  “Not much,” Agnes says. She is always truthful. Grant laughs again and then coughs.

  “Do the raven,” Agnes says. It’s the only one she really likes.

  “No, no, don’t do that one!” Crystal sits up, her heart beating fast. “Please don’t do that one. Do the daffodils.”

  “I hate the daffodils,” says Agnes.

  “Well,” says Grant, thumbing through the book, “How about ‘I Have a Rendez-vous with Death’?”

  “No, no.” Crystal shakes her head until the fine blond hair swirls across her face. “That’s too sad. Don’t do that one.”

  Grant looks through the book and the girls wait. Agnes is not much for poetry, but Crystal loves it, and Agnes will do what Crystal does.

  “Here we go.” Always the showman, Grant smooths the book with a flourish. He pushes his glasses, which have gotten too big for him now, up higher on his hawk nose, clears his throat, and begins:

  “The little toy dog is covered with dust,

  But sturdy and stanch he stands;

  And the little toy soldier is red with rust,

  And his musket moulds in his hands.”

  “No, no!” Crystal is almost sobbing. “Don’t do that one, don’t do that one, Daddy!” She pounds on his knee with her fist.

  Grant grins at her, a surprisingly incongruous mischievous grin in his sick wrecked face. He raises his voice and continues over Crystal’s pleas.

  “‘Now don’t you go ’til I come,’ he said,

  ‘And don’t you make any noise.’”

  “Oh, oh,” Crystal says, but it’s hard to tell by the tone of her voice whether she’s delighted or upset—intense emotion all unfocused—and her usually dreaming face is wholly alive.

  Grant’s voice goes soft as she hushes, and he reads the part about the toys standing faithful to Little Boy Blue through all the long ensuing years. Grant almost whispers the last lines.

  “‘And they wonder, as waiting these long years through,

  In the dust of that little chair,

  What has become of our Little Boy Blue

  Since he kissed them and put them there.’”

  Crystal bursts into huge racking sobs as she hugs her father’s knees, and the tears run down her cheeks. “I can’t stand it,” she cries. “Oh, it’s the saddest thing!”

  “Don’t cry, Crystal,” Agnes directs from the floor, but Crystal doesn’t even hear her, her face pressed tight into the old blue silk.

  Grant is smoothing his daughter’s hair.

  “He died, didn’t he?” Crystal sobs. “The one that put them there.”

  Agnes grows uncomfortable and begins to pick at her face.

  “I think that’s enough for tonight,” Grant says, taking a drink from his glass and
closing the book of poems.

  “No, no,” Crystal nearly screams. “Do the spider and the fly.”

  “You know you don’t like that one,” Agnes says. “That scares you to death every time.”

  “Do it, do it,” Crystal begs. Crystal wipes at her eyes with her fist. She has stopped crying now, but her eyes are dark and liquid and she has bright patches of color along her cheeks. “Please do it, Daddy.”

  “I don’t see what you want to hear it for if you know you’re going to get scared,” Agnes says. “I think that’s dumb.”

  Grant smiles. He picks up the book from the floor. “Ready?” he asks.

  Crystal bobs her head up and down. Agnes nods re-luctantly.

  Grant makes his voice deep and full of cunning malice as he begins,

  “‘Will you walk into my parlor?’ said the spider to the fly;

  ‘’Tis the prettiest little parlor that ever you did spy.’”

  When the fly answers, Grant’s voice is high and in-nocent.

  “‘O no, no,’ said the little fly, ‘for I’ve often heard it said

  They never never wake again, who sleep upon your bed.”

  Unconscious of what she’s doing, Crystal twists the hem of her father’s robe into a hard tight ball and bites it. Grant goes on and the spider tempts the silly fly with flattery until the fly has lost all caution and the spider drags her up to his dreary den. Grant’s tone is gravely serious as he reads the moral lesson at the end.