Black Mountain Breakdown

by Lee Smith

  Maybe if Crystal hadn’t been born looking like that, Agnes thinks, maybe that was the trouble all along. Crystal’s famous beauty. Maybe if Grant hadn’t been so crazy. But things happen the way they do, and if you look back you think, “Oh, if I hadn’t closed the door just then when the carpet salesman from Bristol was here that time,” or “What if I had gone over to Knoxville for the summer that year Aunt Donna asked me, what then?,” but you didn’t do it, you didn’t go, and so you never know, and looking back it’s hard to say when the important things happened or even what they were because all the days went along so fast back then, like water under the bridge.

  Well, they’re gone now. You’ve got to salvage what you can and keep ahold of what you’ve got, and not be looking off in the clouds someplace. If Agnes’s daddy hadn’t gotten so bad off, she never would have taken over the hardware store, for instance. She didn’t know a two-by-four from a hole in the wall that day she started. She didn’t know she was starting it either; she thought she was just going in to see how everybody was getting along with her daddy so sick.

  And if Lorene hadn’t sent Crystal off to that so-called college on her rivet money, Crystal would be happily married to Roger Lee Combs today, and that’s the truth. She would have babies and maids. If somebody hadn’t let on to Crystal that she was smart—which was a real mistake, in Agnes’s opinion, because Crystal never had a grain of common sense in her life, not a grain of it, and that’s the only kind that does you any good in the long run.

  In college Crystal majored in English and started looking like some kind of a beatnik. She never came home if she could help it—just like her brother Jules, all over again. It’s funny how things will repeat. Lorene clearly didn’t like the way things were going, but there wasn’t much she could do about it after she had sent Crystal up there. Whenever anybody asked Lorene if Crystal was in a sorority where she was, Lorene just glazed over and said something about the weather. By that time, Crystal wouldn’t have touched a sorority or a beauty contest either with a ten-foot pole. She always had to be one way or the other. She never knew about in-between. When she did come home, she dated Roger Lee Combs, who was out of business graduate school by then and held an advanced degree, but she wouldn’t go out with him much even though Lorene was really pushing it and he was still crazy about her.

  Roger Lee had come into the hardware store several times to talk to Agnes about it. “I just can’t understand that girl!” he said, shaking his head. “She’s the damnedest thing I ever saw.” But he was smiling about it. Roger Lee was the best catch in town until Crystal ruined him. You would have thought he would have known better by then. He wouldn’t look at anybody else, and she treated him so mean! Agnes used to bake him some gingerbread and take it by every now and then to try and pep him up. Because Crystal was morally loose, that was the plain truth about it, and everybody knew it. It killed Roger Lee. That’s how she wrapped him around her little finger, and that’s why she got those long-distance person-to-person calls all the time when she was home. To talk to her, though, you wouldn’t have known it: she tried to pull the wool over everybody’s eyes by acting so sweet. Agnes asked her straight out one time if she was ever going to marry Roger Lee or just keep stringing him along, and she laughed and said she was going back to school to get a master’s degree, so she couldn’t very well marry anybody right now, could she? She had let her hair grow out and it was hanging all the way down her back by then. Of course she didn’t need any more education. She just wanted to hang around with those weird people you find in places like that, and sure enough she got tangled up with one of them and started living with him in New York City without the benefit of clergy. That’s the “we” of “We’re in Key West,” Agnes is sure of it. A wild-eyed hippie agitator of some sort, like the ones you see on TV. Go around burning things down.

  Agnes gets up, takes her cake layers out of the oven, and sets them on the counter to cool. They look fine. She’ll get at that icing later; you have to concentrate on icing. Agnes pulls up her sweater sleeves and goes at the mess in the sink. She can handle him, whatever he’s like. She’s probably getting herself all worked up over nothing, anyway. Crystal saying she’ll come is no guarantee that she will. But it is Thursday, and there’s not much of Thursday left. At least Agnes was farsighted enough to spare her mama all of this. Her mama is up at Cousin Junior’s and won’t be back until Agnes goes to get her. Mama never did learn how to drive. And Daddy will sleep until she wakes him up. Agnes wipes the counters, wondering what Crystal will be like this time, and wondering about her friend. Her lover—now, that’s more like it! You might as well call a spade a spade.

  Roger Lee was the one who told her about it. He went up there to try to talk some sense into Crystal and there they were in one room, he said, with a bare light bulb hanging down from the ceiling, eating off of two portable burners. Roger Lee said it was a terrible neighborhood with trash piled up all over the street. You can just imagine. But Crystal sent him back, and Roger Lee just about died. Then he married Judy Bond, who had always liked him anyway, and they had little baby twin girls right away and moved out of town.

  Agnes looks over next door. Lorene’s new car is there, but that doesn’t mean anything. Now that they are mining the old Dry Fork property again, Lorene has put herself on the payroll and she is gone a good bit of the time, off with that Odell Peacock, and even Agnes has to hand it to him. Odell saw this energy crisis coming a mile off. A lot of people, over a barrel with a lawyer like Odell was, would have just sold outright when they made the first offer. But Odell kept his cool, as Pauletta used to say. Strike while the iron is hot, Agnes thinks, but she’s absentminded, looking out the window at Lorene’s house.

  Agnes wonders if Lorene got one of those postcards, too. Of course she wouldn’t ask her, and Lorene would never say. Lorene has not mentioned Crystal one time in three years, not voluntarily, not ever since the Thanksgiving when Crystal came home and said all those things about the United States Government to Sykes at the dinner table and to his poor little Vietnamese wife who didn’t, thank God, speak enough English at the time to know what was going on. To poor old Sykes, who got a Purple Heart and is now a deputy sheriff and a good one, too. Agnes wonders if Crystal has become a Communist. It’s something she has turned over in her mind for a long time. Roger Lee assured Agnes she wasn’t, but then that was back before Roger Lee married Judy Bond, and who knows what Crystal might be now?

  Oh, Agnes would give her eye teeth to know if Lorene got one of those cards! If you come right out and ask Lorene a question, like if Crystal is still in New York, she’ll answer you, but she will never bring the topic of Crystal up on her own. It’s her own fault partly, as Agnes sees it. Lorene set too much store by Crystal, always did. Maybe she couldn’t help it, but that’s the way it was. So that now she has been too deeply hurt.

  Agnes admires the way Lorene handles it, though. If a truck ran over Lorene, she wouldn’t bleed unless she felt like it, that’s the way she is. Lorene just goes on about her business, and if people talk about her and Odell she never seems to notice it or care. Everything is all right along that line anyway, as far as Agnes can tell, and if there was anything else to know about what goes on next door, she’d know it. There’s nothing wrong with a business partner, Agnes thinks, although she wouldn’t have one herself.

  Agnes likes to run her own show, and, thinking about the Laundromat she just bought down at Harmon Junction, she smiles. Nobody, not even Mama, knows about that yet! It’s her little secret, her very own, until she decides to tell it. Agnes knows it won’t be very gratifying to tell it to Mama. Mama will just smile and say, “That’s nice, dear,” no matter what you do. Lorene, on the other hand, will wrinkle up the corners of her eyes appreciatively—Agnes can just see her—the sharp upturned wrinkles cutting into the skin. Lorene is holding up. She goes right on singing in the choir, getting older, taking care of Sykeses and treating Sykes’s wife better than anybody else would, treating
her in fact like she is white, which Agnes feels she is not. Lorene goes right on giving everybody these little Mason jars of green tomato pickles every year for Christmas, acting like she never had any daughter who ever raised such a commotion at all.

  Agnes is setting out all the ingredients for the icing when the doorbell rings. At once her whole heart jumps into her stomach and she feels like she’s getting diarrhea, which is ridiculous. She takes her time removing her apron, buttoning up the jacket of the light-blue polyester pantsuit, smoothing it down over her hips. She takes off her house shoes and puts on her heels, and by then the doorbell has rung again. Well, let them wait. It won’t hurt Crystal Spangler to wait for something for once in her life. Agnes walks slowly along the plastic runner through the dining room into the front room, putting her feet down firmly with great precision, hearing the plastic crackle with every step.

  So Agnes is ready, or thinks she’s ready, by the time she gets to the door and opens it, but when she sees them really there on her own front porch she knows she wasn’t ready at all. The wind is cold. It whips Crystal’s long blond hair all around her face, and Crystal is hunched up, obviously cold in her thin raincoat, a dirty old belted raincoat like a detective might wear in a movie. Crystal looks just awful, not even clean. Skinny as a rail with that coat all bunched up around her. As for her friend, he doesn’t look like the weather or anything else could bother him. He doesn’t look like he would let it. He has wild black hair that stands out from his head in a big bush all around, so kinky that not one hair of it moves in the wind. He has thick eyebrows that grow almost all the way across his face, a messy black mustache that half covers his mouth, and he wears no jacket, just stands in the wind like he owns it with his shirt open so Anges can see the curly black hair on his chest. He is one of the hairiest men Agnes has ever seen. He probably has it growing in clumps on his back. He wears faded old blue jeans like any common day laborer, and sandals (imagine a man wearing sandals!) with his toes showing long and brown. The sight of these strong brown toes offends Agnes more than anything else, for some reason. Bare feet in February! This hairy man, who has his foreign-looking face half turned from Agnes as he looks up at Black Mountain, turns back now, no hurry, and stares at her there in the door. His stare gives Agnes quite a jolt. His eyes are black and liquid in the manner of Omar Sharif. They stare down into Agnes’s own small pale-blue ones, down, down, until Agnes jerks her eyes away and feels herself turning brick red.

  “Well, look who’s here!” she says with a high silly giggle, but she makes no move away from the door.

  They look so funny, Crystal Spangler and this man, deeply tanned and ragged, on her own front porch. They look like something the cat dragged in. No, stranger than that—like people from some other planet.

  “Agnes,” Crystal says. “Aren’t you going to let us in?” she asks.

  Agnes stands back from the door. She says, “Come on in,” but she knows that Crystal can tell how she feels.

  “This is Jerold Kukafka,” Crystal says, but Agnes can’t bring herself to look straight at him again. Agnes would say something to him, if she could think of something to say. He doesn’t look like any kind of a brainy writer, that’s for sure, even though Agnes knows that’s what he’s supposed to be. Only of course he hasn’t published any books, probably too busy getting a tan.

  Crystal sits on the sofa wrinkling up Anges’s mama’s antimacassars. She keeps pulling at them with her long fingers, and her fingernails are all bitten off. No wedding ring, Agnes notices. Crystal seems lost in her coat.

  As for this Jerold Kukafka, he keeps walking around and around the room like some kind of skinny hairy jungle cat in a cage at the zoo. Agnes has one whole wall full of shelves where she keeps her teacup collection and he keeps picking up the teacups and looking at them. Then he walks away and then he comes back and does it again. It makes Agnes so nervous. Finally she reaches out and turns on a light, not to give Jerold Kukafka any light to see by, but to give herself some purchase on her own living room, which looks so unfamiliar with these brown windblown people taking it over.

  “You’re still collecting your teacups, I see,” says Crystal. Her voice is low and musical. Her face is still beautiful, too, Agnes thinks, if you go for that half-starved look.

  “Yes, I am,” says Agnes.

  “You haven’t changed a bit,” Crystal says. “You still look the same, only now you look sort of, I don’t know, impo-sing.”

  It’s a typical Crystal remark, and Agnes lets it pass.

  “We’re on our way back from Florida,” Crystal goes on. “From the Keys. Jerold has been doing some research for his novel.”

  “Well, why don’t you write a novel?” Agnes asks her point-blank. “Looks to me like you’d have plenty of material.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t do that,” Crystal answers lightly, her blue eyes roving around the room, finding Jerold, jumping away, finding him again. Not that he’s paying Crystal any mind, with his kinky head bent down over the cups.

  “I don’t see why not,” Agnes tells her, remembering then the way Crystal always thought she had to have a man to do anything. “I don’t see why not,” she repeats. “You know I’m running the hardware store now.” Agnes begins to relax.

  “I heard that,” Crystal says. “Is your daddy still sick?”

  “Terminal,” Agnes says.

  “Oh, I’m sorry!” Crystal seems sorry, too, but you can’t ever tell about her, Agnes reminds herself. “How awful, Agnes,” Crystal goes on. “I didn’t realize. What’s the matter with him?”

  “He’s got the big C,” Agnes says, enjoying the look on Crystal’s face.

  “What?” Jerold Kukafka barks out, clashing a cup back into its saucer, and Agnes almost jumps out of her skin. It is the first word he’s said in her house. He cat-foots around to stand behind the sofa where Crystal is sitting and he puts his hands on her shoulders, staring right straight at Agnes.

  “What did you say?” he asks, almost interrogating her, but Agnes refuses to be intimidated by the likes of Jerold Kukafka, so she stares stubbornly down at the coffee table.

  “Cancer,” she says briefly. “It’s only a matter of time.”

  “Shit,” says Jerold Kukafka.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Crystal says again, drawing her long brown legs up under her on the sofa like she thinks she might catch it, too, and Jerold Kukafka resumes his stalking.

  “This room is the same, too,” Crystal goes on finally. “You haven’t changed anything except added those shelves. Do you remember sitting over there at the table and making paper dolls out of magazines? Do you remember how we used to play gin rummy and Babe would get so mad?”

  “I have to go get Mama in a minute,” Agnes says abruptly. “She’s up at Junior’s right now.”

  “Oh,” Crystal says.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Agnes sees Jerold Kukafka looking at her cup from Limoges, France.

  “How is Lorene?” Crystal asks.

  “Why, she’s all right,” Agnes says carefully. “I’d go over there if I was you.”

  “We went over there,” Crystal says, “but nobody came to the door.”

  “She might not be home,” Agnes says.

  “There’s a car in the driveway,” Crystal says.

  “What kind is it?”

  “A blue car,” Crystal says. “It looks new.”

  “That’s hers all right,” Agnes tells her. “Buick Skylark, she bought it about three months ago. But that’s still no guarantee that she’s home. She works part time now, you know, and lately she’s been helping Sykes’s wife pick out everything for that house he’s building up at Slate Creek.” Imagine, Agnes thinks, not knowing what kind of car your own mother drives!

  “Sykes is building a house?” Crystal says.

  “Ranch style,” says Agnes.

  “Well, how is Lorene?” Crystal asks again, sort of pitiful, as if she wants more information or possibly some other answer; Agnes can’t figure it
out. Agnes sits big and respectable in the light by her solid chair, and Crystal’s face is dim to her now over there on the couch. Crystal’s cheekbones stick out and her eyes look way too big and they keep shifting, shifting everywhere. She keeps running her tongue along the bottom of her upper lip and it puts her jaw at an angle. She’s still wearing her raincoat. God only knows what she’s got on underneath that, Agnes thinks. Probably some Indian thing. Outside it is starting to rain.

  “Your mother is just as well as you can expect,” Agnes says, “considering. In fact, I would say she is doing just fine. Maybe she was taking a nap.”

  Jerold Kukafka is looking at Agnes’s cup from the Brussels World’s Fair. “Let’s get out of here,” he says.

  Agnes jumps. Crystal stands right up and goes over to him like she is pulled by a magnet. She looks up at him and he leans down and kisses her on the mouth. When Crystal turns back to Agnes, she is holding his hand, and her eyes look exactly like they did that time when she had the religious vision at Girls’ State. Exactly like that, all starry and wild and blue.

  “Tell Lorene I asked about her,” Crystal says. “And tell her I’m real happy.” She is happy, too; Agnes can see that. Some people thrive on sin.

  Crystal leaves with Jerold Kukafka in the pouring rain not ten minutes before Junior brings Mama home on his way to town; he thought he’d save Agnes a trip. Not ten minutes! It’s a close call. Agnes does not mention Crystal’s visit to Mama, who comes in large and old and steamy out of the rain, shedding layers of clothing, turning on lights, taking over the icing for the cake. Agnes spreads her legs straight out in front of her and leans back in the chair, closing her eyes.

  She doesn’t want to, but behind her eyes Agnes can see suddenly and clearly the two of them, Jerold Kukafka and Crystal, brown and naked on a sandy beach kissing each other, and bright-blue water as shiny as glass behind them. Palm trees, and in slow motion he gets on top; she can see the hair on his back. Agnes grinds her teeth without knowing it, without ever opening her eyes. It’s disgusting, isn’t it, what they have all come to, all those girls she used to know. Agnes is always running into them downtown, Sue Mustard Matney, Lynette Lukes Ratliff, Susie Belcher Rife who is still as tacky as she ever was, all the girls who used to be in the 4-H club—heavier, married, with scabby little children that pull down the displays which Agnes has so carefully arranged in the hardware store. Still she smiles at them, keeping her voice even as she hands them back their change. It wouldn’t do to offend a customer. Agnes grows full of unfocused fury, of a sudden nameless loss. An unaccustomed, perverse little trickle of tears comes out the corners of her eyes and leaks down into her hair. She sits up with a start and why here is Mama with the cake iced already, the icing perfect for cortisone-puffy Hassel who will have some after dinner. Age sixty-one and half dead, no candles. Agnes’s mama can really make seven-minute icing, but she could never, never manage a hardware store. Agnes smiles as she remembers her little secret, and her mama smiles back, thinking that smile was for her. Agnes takes off her heels and slips into her house shoes again.