Black Mountain Breakdown (15 page)

“Here’s one I wrote about you,” Mack says, hitting an A-minor chord, and he sings,

Crystal is sitting up in bed with the shawl around her, staring at him. He misreads her look, breaks the song for a minute while he keeps strumming. “I need me some jingle bells right in there, see? Right back there at the Christmastime part.” He goes back and starts again on the chorus.

“Stop it,” Crystal says.

“What?” Mack looks up.

“Stop it. Stop singing that song.”

“Come on now, Crystal,” Mack says.

Crystal starts putting her clothes back on.

“What’s the matter, honey?” But Mack puts his guitar back into its case and closes it carefully before he touches her. He’s surprised that she’s shaking all over. “You cold?” he asks.

“No.” Crystal pulls her sweater over her head; she feels all lost inside, like the bed is swaying. She remembers that the front of Buddy’s house is propped up on nothing but cinderblocks and she sees it all smashing up in the road. There was a slag slide up on Dicey once, her daddy told her there was, one Sunday morning. Killed fourteen people, he said, and would have killed more if they hadn’t all been at church. Only the bad people died.

“Crystal.” Mack pulls her back on the bed, stroking her hair, but she fights to sit up and he lets her go.

“I don’t like that song,” she says. “It’s about me, you said it was. It makes me sound awful. I don’t like it. Why did you have to go and write that?”

“It’s a good song,” Mack says.

“It’s not a good song.” Crystal wishes for a minute that he was Roger, who could never write a song in the first place, but if he did would never write a song like that. All Roger ever did was give her rings.

Crystal bursts into tears.

“I tell you,” Mack says, getting up. “You can’t have it every way you want it, honey. You’ve got to pick, some-time.”

“What do you mean?” Crystal sniffs from under her shawl. Mack sounds so serious; finally she looks at him.

“I’m getting out of here,” Mack says. He speaks in his soft voice, with all the country in it, and all the pent-up ways he feels come through. “I’m going to Nashville. I don’t know how good I am—I was just kidding you a while back when I said I was good. Buddy says I am, I don’t know whether I am or not. But I’ve got to find out, see? I figure I can get a job, I can hang around some, see what’s happening.”

“Please don’t go,” Crystal says.

“Why not?” Mack sounds so serious that she can’t believe it.

“Oh, just don’t, please don’t.” He’s giving her a headache being so serious this way. Crystal pauses for a minute and then does her lip in the Sandra Dee pout. “We’ve got a date next week for the beauty contest, remember that?”

Mack smiles a slow curling smile which she has never seen before, full of scorn and almost hate. “The beauty contest,” he says without inflection.

“You said you’d take me,” Crystal says.

“I don’t know,” Mack says. “I don’t know where I’ll be by then.”

“Please.”

“You ought to come with me,” Mack says after a while.

“Where?” Crystal moves around on the mattress, but she still can’t see his face because he’s back up at the window again.

“Nashville.”

“What would I do in Nashville, for goodness’ sake? I’m in high school, remember?”

“Fuck school. You could get a job, we could get married.”

“Married?”

“Yeah. Whether you know it or whether you don’t, we’re two of a kind, baby, we’re just alike, you and me.” Mack’s voice is flat and nasal, country.

Crystal draws back from it. “We are not,” she says.

“You can’t have it all.”
Mack hits the cheap wood headboard of Buddy’s bed viciously with his fist. “You’ve got to decide sometime what you want. You’ve got to settle down and decide on things. You ought to think about your mother sometime, too,” he adds.

Crystal doesn’t know what to say.

“My mother?” she repeats.

“Sure. Old Lorene. Old dumb Lorene. What’re you going
to tell her we did tonight, tell her we went to
The Sound of Music
? What’re you going to say?”

Crystal flares up. “You’re a fine one to talk about my mother! What do you want, anyway? You know perfectly well I can’t possibly get married. I don’t see what you’re acting this way for. I don’t see what you want.”

“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?