Black Mountain Breakdown

by Lee Smith

  Agnes and Crystal could ride the bus home if they wanted to, and sometimes they do. But the bus smells. It’s so full of people, so slow. It takes forever to go the two miles from school to home, and then they can’t get off in front of their own houses but have to get off at the Davidson Apartments, a bad place where a lot of people on welfare live, the men sitting out sometimes on old wooden Coke boxes right by the road, smoking, with their hair greased back and their T-shirts on, and they yell things at Agnes and Crystal. Nothing bad, usually something like “How’s school, honey?” or “What’d you learn today, sugar?” but there’s some tone, some insinuation in their voices. Several of these men have tattoos. And a passel of children runs off the bus each time and into the Davidson Apartments, whooping and grimy, rushing behind the thin doors where their mamas wait with another new baby, as likely as not.

  Things happen in high school.

  Crystal makes cheerleader, much to her surprise. She is the only ninth-grader chosen. The football team elects the cheerleaders and it is whispered that Crystal got it for her looks, that Becky Ball has a higher jump, that Susie Knight can do a cartwheel and land in a split. Crystal hears these rumors and cries. But no matter. At the first game she’s right there, running out onto the field in her gold-and-black uniform, the black V-neck sweater with the big gold letters BR, the short black skirt with the gold pleats, the gold knee socks, the new black-and-white saddle oxfords. Lorene is so proud. The football games are held at night and Crystal can’t see much of the crowd because of the lights. She’s surprised when the crowd actually cheers along with the cheerleaders. Lean to the left, lean to the right, stand up, sit down, fight, fight, fight. Crystal is amazed that the crowd does all these things. It’s cold out there on the field, but Crystal isn’t cold. She feels something like a fire inside her every time she jumps, each time the crowd yells. When they make a touchdown, she thinks she’ll die.

  Crystal attracts attention out there on the field. Boys start calling her up, even juniors and seniors. One of the boys who calls the most is Roger Lee Combs, a football star. His father owns the Family Dry Goods Store downtown. Roger Lee is a nice boy with a nice family and a yellow Ford of his own. He is very tall, with wavy brown hair, and it’s rumored that he will make all-state.

  Crystal dates Roger Lee Combs and holds his hand in the movies. They switch hands when their hands get too sweaty. She goes to the Homecoming Dance with him and dances very close when they play “The Twelfth of Never,” her favorite song, and Roger Lee’s sports jacket leaves an indented crossweave pattern which lasts for a minute or two on her face. At lunch he buys Peppermint Patties for her and she saves the wrappers in a little silver stack in her bureau drawer at home. She has decided to be in love with Roger Lee.

  But there’s this boy in her biology class, Mack Stiltner, a mean country boy that she keeps looking at. She knows she shouldn’t look at him, but she can’t help it. Most days he isn’t even there; he cuts school all the time. Mack Stiltner has long dark hair and bad teeth and a bad reputation. He wears shiny black boots and terrible-looking loud shirts. But he has ropy white muscles in his skinny arms. He has a way of putting his feet up in class and leaning back, head cocked, like he doesn’t give a damn. He stares at Crystal all the time out of his strange eyes, half blue and half greenish gray, no color really. He does not smile. In the hall when Crystal is laughing and talking with her friends or flirting with Roger Lee Combs, she sees him: just staring. He knows she’s too good for him. Crystal knows this, too. But she can’t help herself—she begins staring back.

  Now that Crystal has to go to cheerleading practice and all the away games, Agnes takes up 4-H. Immediately she becomes an officer. She wins the school 4-H contest with her demonstration of how to make potato salad. Agnes prepares the potato salad in front of the judges, describing the nutrient value of each ingredient and the history of the potato as she goes along. Now Agnes is practicing for the district 4-H contest, making potato salad and giving her speech at home, until Babe refuses to eat any more.

  On Saturday mornings Crystal takes piano lessons from Miss Belle Varney, at Miss Belle Varney’s house, where the walls inside are stucco and Miss Varney has cactuses growing everywhere in pots. Miss Belle Varney raps Crystal hard on the knuckles with a ballpoint pen if Crystal has failed to practice. There’s a funny smell about Miss Belle Varney’s house, as if she’s always cooking meat loaf. Crystal memorizes “The Trisch-Trasch Polka.”

  Crystal can’t fix upon a handwriting. She writers a different way each day. Sometimes she favors a tight, small, back-slanted hand. Other times she writes in a forward sprawl similar to the signatures on the Declaration of Independence. Sometimes she prints: rounded, uniform letters with squatty capitals. It changes every day.

  There’s a stir in the neighborhood; it is discovered that Chester Lester has never learned to read. A dressed-up lady comes to tell his mother, who has a bad back. Chester Lester is furious, setting fire to the inside of his mother’s Chevrolet. But the Chevrolet doesn’t burn well, and by the time the volunteer fire department gets there Chester is bored with all of it and helps them extinguish the blaze.

  The young French teacher leaves mysteriously in November. She is replaced by a fat blond young man named Mr. Roach, who waves his hands a lot and cooks quiche Lorraine for the class. They are astonished, and several parents protest. Mr. Roach is so strange. But he remains until the end of the year, when he goes back to graduate school at Charlottesville.

  Crystal reads Madame Bovary and Miss Lonelyhearts from Mrs. Muncy’s list. She writes a poem comparing life to a candle flame, and Mrs. Muncy reads it aloud to the whole class while Crystal blushes furiously in her seat.

  One Friday night, her aunts Grace and Nora appear at a football game, wildly out of place, to see Crystal cheer. They sit with Lorene. Mack Stiltner sits on the second row hunched over in an old red plaid shirt, smoking cigarettes and talking to some other wild boys, staring at her, and Roger Lee Combs makes a sixty-yard run. Crystal thinks she’s going to explode, but she doesn’t. Her color deepens and she jumps higher and higher and shakes her pom-poms wildly, and everyone says she’s the very best cheerleader of all.

  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, ho
w 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.

  “Oh, I’m thinking tonight of my Blue Eyes

  Who is sailing far over the sea

  Oh, I’m thinking tonight of him only

  And I wonder if he ever thinks of me.”

  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.