Black Mountain Breakdown

by Lee Smith

  “I guess I want it all,” Mack says. “Like you do. Only I know I can’t have it all and you don’t, baby, that’s the difference. That’s the only difference between us.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Crystal says. Mack is really giving her a headache now. “I want to go home.” She gets all her things together and goes into the bathroom to brush her hair and fix her face in the wavy mirror. The toilet smells; there are lots of yellow stains inside the bowl. Crystal feels a lot like throwing up, but she doesn’t. She puts some of Buddy’s woman’s Evening in Paris behind her ears instead.

  “How do you like it?” she asks Mack when she comes out.

  “What?” He’s moody, removed.

  “Smell me.”

  “You smell like shit,” Mack says.

  On the way back to Crystal’s house in the truck, he doesn’t say much even though Crystal tries to kid him out of it; she calls him Mr. Blue. She touches his cock one time and says, “How’s your hammer hanging, Mr. Blue?” But Mack doesn’t answer. He shifts into overdrive doing sixty down the road.

  “You better slow down,” Crystal says, and he does, and a coal train goes by on the railroad track and its whistle splits the whole spring night. “I’ll see you next Saturday,” Crystal calls back as she goes into her house. Under the porch light she’s beautiful, like a princess in her shawl.

  Mack picks up some more beer and goes back up to Buddy’s and he’s still up drinking it, out on the front steps, when Buddy comes in from the mine.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Buddy says. He hits Mack playfully on the shoulder.

  “Cut it out,” Mack says.

  “Well, what’s the matter?” Buddy says.

  “Christ, I don’t know,” Mack says finally, because Buddy keeps standing there and looking at him. “Women,” he says. Mack looks out over the whole valley and up and down the bottom, dark and lonesome, and there’s not anywhere, no middle ground, for him and Crystal.

  “Hell, if it’s not one thing it’s another,” Buddy says. “I been telling you that.”

  IT’S MAY 4, the night of the Black Rock High School Beauty Contest, and everything is ready. The Junior Women’s Club has had the auditorium closed off to students for two whole days while they worked feverishly to decorate the stage. This is the first time Black Rock High School has ever held a beauty contest, and the president of the Junior Women’s Club, Mrs. Luke Wooldridge, is taking it all very seriously. She feels that the club has to do a real bang-up job on this one because they will be setting a precedent, as she told the club, just like the Supreme Court or something. Everything has to be right. Everything has to be in good taste. The club chose “A Springtime Bower” as its theme, and they have totally transformed the stage. They have made several thousand colored Kleenex carnations and hooked them up on fanciful chicken-wire frames to suggest a fairy-tale hedge all across the back and sides of the stage. They have painted a blue sky backdrop with cotton clouds on it, featuring a small migration of gilt birds in flight. They have constructed a little pink wishing well with a canopy over it at front stage right, for the emcee to stand in. They have made two large trees toward the back of the stage, fabricated from wooden bases painted like bark and real branches cut just a few hours ago for freshness. Burl’s Florist and the Black Rock Funeral Home have donated generously of both time and money to place standing arrangements everywhere, and the Junior Women have borrowed the funeral home’s red carpet for the finalists to walk out on. The Junior Women were not through with the stage until right before show time, but now it’s just like a picture.

  Mack Stiltner leans on the green wooden fence in front of the high school and smokes, watching the cars go by. He’s pissed because he had to get here so early; Crystal had to be here one whole hour before the contest starts. He’s also pissed because he couldn’t even get close to her in the truck. Her hoop was in the way and the white net ruffles on her skirt kept jamming the gears. She looked pretty all right, but she was so excited that all she did was talk about nothing all the way. Mack is pissed, too, because he’s sure she’ll win, and how will he feel about that? If she was his girl, he’d be proud of it, but she is not his girl. He had to get off work early to get here on time, and Mr. Story told him if he had so many social obligations maybe he ought to think whether he wanted to work for the Piggly Wiggly or not. “I’d hate to interfere with your night life,” Mr. Story said. Well, fuck him. Mack goes back out to his truck and gets a beer and drinks it, watching the cars roll in and the people get out of them. The safety-patrol kids direct traffic with their bright-orange gloves. These are town kids, dipshits all of them, and Mack wouldn’t care if any one of them got run over. He takes a long cold swallow of beer and watches with some interest to see if this might happen, but like everything else around here, it doesn’t.

  Down in the cafeteria, the girls prepare for the contest. The whole room is chaos and color, movement, as the girls check their faces in the mirrors in the top of their train cases or their makeup cases, and work on their makeup some more. Sisters and mothers tease their hair and then brush it back down, trying to get it right, to attain just the degree of bouffant. A lot of giggling goes on. Lorene and Neva did Crystal’s makeup at home, except for the lipstick. Crystal puts it on now, Revlon’s Summertime, and practices different kinds of smiles in the mirror. When Crystal turns her head, her neck and shoulders feel too bare. Neva has done up her hair in a beehive French twist, all shining and elegant, with two spit curls hanging down in front of her ears. Crystal is perplexed by her made-up face in the mirror. It doesn’t seem to go with her hair. Or the hair doesn’t fit the face. Anyway, she doesn’t look like herself in the mirror. She twists her head around, feeling like her hair is some hat that might fall right off, but the beehive is perfectly stable.

  Crystal wears a strapless white ballerina-length gown covered all over in seed pearls, with rows of net ruffles going all the way down its skirt, bright-red patent-leather high-heeled shoes with straps, a red velvet ribbon around her waist and another around her neck. Crystal takes a careful look around the cafeteria to see that no one else is wearing a velvet ribbon, and she is assailed by doubt. This neck ribbon was Lorene’s big idea: she saw it in a magazine. After thinking about how mad Lorene will be if she takes the ribbon off, Crystal leaves it on.

  Agnes is to be in the beauty contest, too. She never wanted to be in it, not from the beginning she didn’t, but Lorene convinced her mama that being in the contest is good for your poise. The contest also supports the United Fund, as Lorene pointed out. So here Agnes is, too, in a long green velvet A-line dress that looks like a long sundress, made by her mama and guaranteed to be slenderizing. Agnes knows she’ll go off in the first round and she doesn’t care. She never wanted to do this, anyway.

  Now Mrs. Luke Wooldridge lines the girls up, using a bullhorn. There are sixty-two girls in the contest. The girls go upstairs in a line, tripping over their skirts, and crowd the hall outside the auditorium’s backstage door. There are too many girls to fit backstage all at once. They grasp each other’s hands nervously, for support, as they hear the crowd. Why, there must be a million people out there! The crowd claps madly for the stage decorations, which have just been revealed, then for Arvis Ember in his wishing well, who starts things off with a few jokes. Then the music begins—the music they have practiced with until they hear it ringing in their ears as they go to sleep—and two at a time the girls emerge from backstage right and left, stepping out smartly to “That’s Amore,” sung by Dean Martin and amplified for the crowd.

  Two by two they come, walking together to the front of the stage, turning slowly all the way around, then going to stand at each side, making a V of two double lines of girls. The applause is continuous and deafening, and the yellow tile walls of the auditorium seem to shake with the noise. Arvis Ember can barely be heard. Agnes has to walk out with Sue Mustard, whom she hates. Crystal comes out with Lynette Lukes, Bobby’s sister. The Junior
Women’s Club, attempting tact, has matched the girls up for this first round according to both height and popularity, trying to put a popular girl with a shy one each time, afraid there might be some who would draw no applause. But the crowd is in a clapping mood, and there is deafening applause for all. The auditorium is filled to capacity and overflowing. Folding seats have been placed in the aisles, and the space between the edge of the stage and the first row of seats is filled with kids sitting right down on the floor.

  Crystal turns right; Lynette Lukes turns left. Crystal can tell that she’s smiling, because she feels a strain on her face. She hears the whistles and the clapping, so she must be doing all right. Out of the corner of her eye as she turns, she sees a small official group there in the wings: Mrs. Luke Wooldridge, wearing a corsage; Burl of Burl’s Florist; a Junior Woman with a first-aid kit; and Bill Hart with that same wide smile. Crystal stops, just for a second, in mid-turn. Then she recovers herself and continues, finishing up and taking her place in the line.

  Now Crystal can see the audience a little better. She can pick out some real people to smile at, Lorene and Neva and Agnes’s mother, Jubal Thacker, Mrs. Muncy. But where is Mack?

  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.