Black Mountain Breakdown

by Lee Smith

  Crystal sips her beer, letting it slide slowly down her throat. The beer—or perhaps it’s the story—is helping. “Who went?” she asks.

  “Well, let’s see. There was me driving, and Iradell and Goldie in the front seat. Iradell used to sit over by the window with a paper bag full of apples and a pint of bourbon. He’d take a bite of the apple and then a drink of bourbon and chew it up together, glub it around in his mouth a long time before he swallowed. He used to pinch Goldie every now and then and she’d holler at him.”

  “What did Goldie look like?”

  “Well, I don’t know how to tell you exactly, honey. It’s been a long time. Styles have changed. She had a whole lot of hair, all this yellow curly hair that she got her name from. Her real name used to be something else, but nobody knew what it was. She used to comb her hair all the time with this little tortoiseshell comb. She was sort of fat, I guess, except for her legs. She had big old long legs.”

  “Was she pretty?”

  “She was pretty when she kept her mouth closed.”

  “Was that all of you who went?” Crystal asks.

  “No, Nora was in the back seat and—”

  “Nora! I thought she wouldn’t go anywhere with Granddaddy.”

  “Well, she says she didn’t, but she did. She used to go, all right. In fact, it was hard to go off anyplace without her. She wanted to go to Charlottesville this time to get your daddy some culture, as I remember it. He was in the back seat, too. Nora used to make him hold a paper bag in case he got carsick.”

  “Did he?”

  “Did he what?”

  “Get carsick.”

  “I don’t know, Crystal. I can’t remember if he did that time or not. Sometimes he did, though.”

  “What did he do, riding along?”

  “Do? Well, hell, there wasn’t nothing to do on a trip like that but ride, honey. That’s all. Besides, he never talked much when he was little, anyway. He was scared of your granddaddy, I guess.”

  “Everybody was, right?” Crystal asks.

  “Yep. Including me.”

  “How old were you then, Odell?”

  “Me? Well, let’s see, I guess I was sixteen maybe, something like that. I started driving your granddaddy when I was fourteen years old.” Odell seems inclined to stop talking, but Crystal keeps asking him questions.

  “Then what? What happened on the trip?”

  “Let’s see. The main thing I remember is I had to keep putting the window up and down. If it was up, Nora would holler that the smoke was killing her. Then I’d put it down, then Goldie would start in about how the wind was messing up her hairdo, then I’d put it up. I put it up and down for two days. Neither one of them ever rolled their own window up or down for theirself.”

  Crystal is laughing. It reminds her of going to the Miss Virginia Contest with Neva and Lorene.

  “The other thing is, every time we stopped for gas, your granddaddy used to make everybody get out and go to the bathroom. Make ’em, he didn’t care whether they had to go or not. He’d stand over there by the gas pump and holler.

  “We went in a restaurant,” Odell continues, pleased and somewhat surprised that Crystal is laughing so hard. “I tell you, it was the first time I was ever in a resturant like that, silver and all. Goldie said she wanted something with a cream sauce, anything with a cream sauce, she didn’t care what. We had this pop-eyed nigger in a red suit waiting on us. Then Nora, she’d eat up everything left on everybody’s plate when you were through.”

  “Then what? Then did Goldie get her teeth?”

  “Hell, yes, she got ’em all right. See, this was the second time we went up there. The first time they got her fitted. This time, Goldie kept saying, ‘Do you reckon it’s going to hurt?’ and your granddaddy would take out his bottom teeth and let her look at them. Then Nora got to looking for this special wall, once we got up there, and I had to drive her around to find it.”

  “Serpentine,” Crystal supplies.

  “Yes, well, we got there, and Nora took Grant off to look at tombstones or something, and I had to sit with your granddaddy in the waiting room while they put in Goldie’s teeth.”

  “What did he do in the waiting room?”

  “Went to sleep,” Odell says. “Snored.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I just sat there, I guess.”

  “Then what?”

  “Well, then, around four o’clock this nurse came out and told me they were almost finished with Miss Coe and I had to wake your granddaddy up. I used to hate to have to wake him up, he never knew where he was. I tell you what he said,” Odell adds suddenly.

  “What?”

  “I kept saying to get up, that they were just about through with Goldie, and he kept saying for me to go on and leave him alone. See, the bourbon used to get to him, is what it was.”

  “Then what did he say?”

  “He said just as plain as anything, ‘Well, that’s that,’ and I said, ‘What, sir?’ and he said, ‘You get a girl a set of new teeth and she’ll leave you every time. She won’t even stop to pack her clothes.’ He told me to remember that.”

  Crystal is silent, sipping.

  “I always thought that was funny, him knowing it and then going on and buying her the teeth anyway.”

  “You’re right,” Crystal said. “It is funny.” She lights another Salem and leans back against the seat to smoke it. The only thing real now is Odell beside her driving this big car, the road climbing and twisting out in front of them. Not real includes the city, includes Jerold. She and Jerold in the city seem like characters in a novel she read so long ago that she has trouble remembering the plot. Jerold, of course, is dead. It was funny when his sisters showed up from New Jersey, big hefty women with frizzy black hair. “He had it coming!” one of them kept insisting, while the other kept shutting her up. They were Catholic and so there was some question about the funeral, which in any case Crystal did not attend. Of her stay in the hospital, she remembers little. She had been tired, anemic, and everyone kept saying she needed a rest. Then they were annoyed when she rested more than they thought she should. Later after they got her up they encouraged her to talk, but there just wasn’t anything to say. Then one day she said, “This is a waste of time. I ought to get up and go home,” and she did. The doctor she was talking to had seemed surprised, and he had called in another doctor and they argued about her right in front of her while she got out of bed and packed. Crystal didn’t even bother to listen. In the end they had released her.

  Crystal took the last of her money out of the bank and went straight to the airport and flew to Richmond, where she checked into a Holiday Inn, bought some clothes and a bathing suit at Montaldo’s, called Lorene, got Lorene’s check and cashed it, threw all her old clothes into a Dumpster in the motel parking lot, bought more clothes and a suitcase in Miller and Rhoads. For three days she lay by the motel pool and got a suntan, burning the last traces of her hospital whiteness away, making jokes with the boy who cleaned the pool. On the fourth day she had her hair frosted and cut and spent the night with an International Harvester salesman who picked her up in the motel’s Jolly Roger Pirate Club. Then she made her plane reservation, packed her new clothes in her new bag, and flew home. Jerold was wrong, wrong. She had proved him wrong. He used to tell her over and over that she was doomed—Jerold was into doom—but she wasn’t doomed. She was saved. Crystal grins, remembering the time Agnes told Jubal Thacker she didn’t need to go to his revival, thanks anyway, she had been saved for years. Well, so has Crystal.

  At the door, Lorene hugs her so hard that Crystal thinks she’ll suffocate, be drawn entirely into Lorene’s big soft body and absorbed. “Honey, honey,” Lorene says. “I’m just so glad you’re home! Look here—I even fixed you some three-bean salad for dinner.”

  Odell grins, chewing on a toothpick: he keeps toothpicks, cigarettes, and a lot of his clothes at Lorene’s these days.

  Crystal wanders the house befor
e dinner, picking up objects and putting them down. She has some trouble, not much, in telling how far anything is from her hand. The objects seem to recede and then flow back to her. It’s very strange. There are some things she remembers and some things she does not, and then other things are completely new, like the back sun porch with all the plants. She doesn’t realize that she’s looking for Grant’s poetry books until she finally finds them, upstairs in a pile on the bottom shelf of the bookcase by the phone, next to two stacks of old Reader’s Digests. Lorene follows Crystal around, giving her all the news. One thing is that Neva is considering leaving Charlie, who has had something going on the side for the past eight years. Neva never even suspected, if you can imagine that! Lorene says she wasn’t surprised, though; she felt it coming, and Charlie has always had a screw loose someplace.

  Then Lorene goes into the kitchen to set the table, and Crystal sits on the sun porch and looks at the Bluefield paper while Odell talks on the phone to a man about some roofing.

  “Come and get it,” Lorene calls. “I’m taking the cornbread out of the oven right now, and the bean salad is already on the table.”

  Crystal bursts into tears.

  Lorene and Odell go ahead and eat, leaving her alone in her room upstairs, and Crystal sits by the window and looks out at the lightning bugs rising. On the bureau sits a gold-framed picture of her at sixteen, wearing a tiara and a long white gown. Crystal gets up and looks at it for a while and then she puts it back and turns off the light and sits in the dark, looking out her window. The phone rings two times, and after a while Lorene comes up the stairs. Crystal can hear her heels clicking down on the wood. Lorene switches on the light and Crystal blinks.

  “Crystal Renée, that was Sykes on the phone. He and Bunny are coming over here to see you in a minute,” Lorene says. “You’d better go put on your face.”

  BEING BACK HOME in Black Rock is not as difficult as Crystal thought it might be, and it isn’t as boring either. Black Rock itself has changed a great deal during those years she has been away. With the climbing price of coal, millions and millions of dollars have poured into the county. Odell and Lorene have grown rich, for instance, not that you could tell it from the way they live. But the new prosperity has touched everyone. Some people have more money than they know what to do with. Other people know exactly what to do with it: they’ve bought Cadillacs, diamonds, boats. The Jurgensens flew to Colorado to ski. Another time they flew to Venezuela. There are people who go to Duke Hospital for three weeks at a hundred dollars a day to lose weight on the Rice Diet. Mrs. Cartwright saw Elvis Presley there; he was on the Rice Diet, too. The Lord Brothers have recently bought a whole island off the coast of South Carolina. A whole island! The Lord Brothers go everywhere in private planes, and their wives fly up to New York to shop. The Lord Brothers opened a new bank downtown a few weeks before Crystal came home, and the first day they took in over a million dollars in deposits.

  Royal Looney, who owned nothing but a sidetrack ten years ago, now owns eight mines—a good percent of the coal in this county—and a lot of neighboring Wise County, too, where he has built a house with an aquarium wall separating the kitchen from the dining room. When the Looneys entertain, big old fish swim back and forth to watch everyone eat. In an interview with Charles Kuralt on CBS, Royal revealed that he first got into industry back when he was a poor little mountain boy of ten, when he found a sheep stuck in a ditch and carried it home and saved its life and started a flock. Odell claims that this is a lot of shit. It amuses people around Black Rock so much that they have taken to calling Royal “Little Bo Peep.”

  Lulu and Green Belcher received their share of comment, too, when they built a house up on Yellow Branch which is nothing but cubes of glass and some little wooden runways stringing them together. Martha and Johnny Reno have a car wash built into their garage.

  So Crystal is nothing to talk about, in comparison. Nobody bothers her at all. Only Agnes seems unable to recover from the sheer gall of her just coming home. But people don’t like Agnes much anyway, and after a while even Millie Shortridge at the bank gets tired of hearing Agnes go on about it. So Agnes shuts up and gives in. She grows friendly. She can tell which way the wind is blowing, after all.

  Crystal is grateful that Black Rock has turned into a boom town, that it is full of money and eccentricity. For she has changed, too. She has a lot to think about. All she wants is rest, quiet, time. Odell and Lorene give her plenty of room. She can hear them downstairs every night when she goes to bed, playing gin rummy and drinking Scotch and laughing and fussing over the score, but they do not insist that she join them. She lies upstairs on her old bed watching the changing shadows in her room made by the lights of the passing cars on 460 out in front, and listens to the sound of the tree frogs coming in through her open window. She hears the train whistle out in the night, mournful and far away.

  Sometimes it’s hard for her to believe that she ever left Black Rock at all, that she went off to school and grew up and moved away. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that Grant is not down there right now, in that front room. But Crystal likes Odell, she has to admit it, both for himself and also because he doesn’t try to take Grant’s place in any way. Her mother deserves some happiness, a measure of gaiety, after all. And Odell helps out; he takes care of people, that’s what he does, and right now he is helping to take care of Crystal. Gradually, Crystal begins to relax. One Sunday she goes to Garnett’s church with Lorene, wearing a seersucker suit and white shoes. She smiles at herself in the mirror, thinking of what Jerold or Lane would have said about her appearance. But Crystal likes the way she looks. She goes over to the Breaks Interstate Park, just across the line in Kentucky, with Lorene and Odell for Sunday-night supper. Finally one day she drives to the post office by herself to mail a letter for Lorene. Finally she goes to the Rexall.

  At the Rexall she runs into Sue Mustard Matney, who in the end married Russell after all. “Hi, Crystal,” Sue says nonchalantly with the same old flip of the head, and again Crystal has the sense that none of these intervening years ever happened. But Sue has had two children and gained twenty pounds. She’s in the Rexall buying birth-control pills and Valium, she tells Crystal, grinning. Then she invites Crystal to a baby shower she’s having for a girl who is going to marry Russell’s branch manager. Crystal goes straight into the Ben Franklin and buys pink and blue felt, glue, and sequins. When she gets back home, she makes a mobile to take to the shower, with little pink and blue sequined fish swinging from it. Lorene admires it profusely. Crystal can’t figure out exactly how she knew what to buy for the mobile, or how she knew how to make it. It’s as if the mobile has leaped fully made from some reservoir deep in her mind—and who knows what else might be lurking down there, unrecognized all these years? Recipes, Tupperware, polyester plaid. Crystal laughs at herself. But she is absurdly pleased with the mobile, which really did turn out well. “Oh, Crystal!” Sue exclaims at the shower. “How beautiful! You always were so creative.” Was she creative? Crystal laughs at Sue; she can’t remember. Never mind. She joins the Junior Women’s Club, and then they ask her to be head of the ornament committee for the annual Christmas bazaar. Crystal spends hours and hours making little red felt birds to sell. She is very proud of these little birds.

  In late October, at the bazaar, she sells them. The bazaar is held in the cafeteria of the high school where once Neva adjusted her beehive between rounds in the Miss Black Rock High pageant. When she reminded Sue of this, Sue throws back her head and laughs. “I’ll never see size ten again, that’s for sure! Do you remember that blue chiffon dress I had?” Sue seems perfectly comfortable with herself.

  “I didn’t have any choice about whether to win that beauty contest or not, you know,” Crystal says suddenly to Sue. “Mack Stiltner didn’t save me a seat. He was supposed to, but he didn’t, so I had to win. Then I was so upset about all that, I didn’t even enjoy winning the contest.”

  “Typical,” Sue says as she pric
es the red felt birds. “Just typical. Men,” she adds in a significant way, around the straight pins in her mouth where she keeps them while she prices the birds.

  Crystal buys a Coke for herself and one for Sue. Then the doors of the cafeteria are opened to the public, and a flood of women come chattering in, ready to buy at the bazaar. Crystal hurries back to the table she shares with Sue. Sue and Crystal and all the other young women in the Junior Women’s Club wear red-and-white striped ruffled aprons, so that they can be easily identified by customers. Crystal likes her apron; she likes being a part of this group of women, making things, talking about men in the deprecatory, resigned tone which all the women adopt whenever they talk about men.

  “Can I show you something?” Crystal asks an old, old lady who has come up to their table and is peering nearsightedly at the candles.

  “What? Why, Crystal Spangler!” The woman turns and looks at Crystal closely, still holding a Santa-shaped candle in one clawed hand.

  It’s Mrs. Muncy, who was old already when she was Crystal’s teacher, all those years ago. She must be ninety now.

  “How are you, Mrs. Muncy?” Crystal asks. “Just look who this is, Sue!”

  But Sue Mustard was never one of Mrs. Muncy’s favorites, and now Mrs. Muncy won’t even look at her. “Crystal Spangler!” she says again. “What in the world are you doing here?” Her voice is small and cracked, like a radio with static, and she’s bent nearly double with arthritis or plain old age, but her eyes behind the gold-rimmed glasses are still as alert and unclouded as ever.

  “I’ve come back home to stay with Mama for a while,” Crystal explains, conscious that Sue—who has carefully avoided asking her that same question—is listening intently. “So I’m just helping these girls out while I’m here. I think they do so much good, don’t you?”