Black Mountain Breakdown (2 page)

“Get that one,” Agnes says. “Go on.”

Crystal catches it and puts it into her jar and screws the
top back on. It looks lonesome in there by itself and so she catches another one and then another and some more, and by then they are in Agnes’s back yard by the clothesline, close enough to hear Jubal Thacker’s daddy picking his guitar on his back porch beyond the Thackers’ garden. He’s doing “Wildwood Flower,” Crystal realizes as she goes up the steps, doing it slow, with the music floating out soft and a little bit sad in the green June night across all the back yards.

I will laugh, I will sing, and my heart will be gay
.

A light bulb hangs down low over Agnes’s kitchen table and it makes Crystal blink. With her finger she traces a pattern on the red oilcloth and looks in the open door through the dining room which is almost never used and into the living room where the television is on and Agnes’s family is sitting around.

Agnes’s father, Hassell McClanahan, a fat red-faced man, is shining shoes. He runs the hardware store downtown and he has his shoes all spread out on newspaper to shine them. “Hello there, Crystal,” he calls. He has a big smile and a big rough friendly voice, his customer smile and voice which he has used so much in the hardware store that they come natural now. Agnes’s mama is fat, too. She is sewing something all the time. It is through her that Crystal is somehow related to Agnes, because Agnes’s mama was a Hibbitts, but Crystal isn’t sure how it works.

“You sure you don’t want some?” Agnes says. “This is real good buttermilk.”

“We just had supper before I came out,” Crystal says.

“That was a long time ago. That was
hours
,” Agnes says. As usual she is right.

Agnes puts a blue bowl on the table with a thick square of cornbread in it, then pours buttermilk over the cornbread and into the bowl. She gets a spoon and sits down to eat. Crystal is looking through a
Life
magazine that she got from a pile of magazines on one end of the big table. She stops at some pictures of Mexico.

“I’d like to go there,” she says, pointing.

“Not me,” declares Agnes. “You can’t drink the water. Gives you diarrhea all the time.”

“Well,” Crystal says.

“I want to go to Lookout Mountain, Tennessee,” says Agnes’s little sister Pauletta, who has recently changed her name to Babe, dancing in on the plastic runner which goes from the living room through the dining room to protect the beige wall-to-wall carpet. Babe, at ten, is a showoff and old for her age. But Crystal likes her. Babe is plump, too, but she has curly red hair and giggles a lot.

“What are you all fixed up for?” Agnes says, wiping her mouth.

“Mama doesn’t care,” says Babe. She is wearing dark-red lipstick and has used it on her cheeks, too, for rouge, and over her T-shirt she has a long double strand of imitation pearls, one pink, one blue. “Watch this,” she says. She does a tap dance step that she has seen on TV, which ends by Babe slapping her foot behind her back with her hand.

“That’s pretty good,” Crystal says.

“I know it,” says Babe.

“Huh,” Agnes says.

Babe gets a Coke from the refrigerator and shakes it up to make it fizz, then opens it and sticks the whole top into
her mouth, so that some of the fizz runs down her chin and gets on the pearls.

“You all want to watch
The Dating Game
?” Babe asks.

“I don’t think so,” Crystal says. Now she is looking at pictures of California. “I’ve got to go home in a minute.”

“You know who I’d like to have a date with?” Babe says. “Frankie AV-a-lon, that’s who. See you around, clowns.” She shakes up the Coke some more on her way back to the living room. Agnes’s mama’s head is bent and she sews.

Crystal laughs.

“What’s so funny?” Agnes says.

“Pauletta. I mean Babe.”

“If you had to live with her twenty-four hours every day you wouldn’t think she’s so funny,” Agnes says, licking the back of her spoon. She takes the blue bowl over and puts it into the sink.

“Well, maybe,” Crystal says.

Crystal and Agnes are almost exactly the same age, one month apart. Agnes was born at home, in the room upstairs which is her room still, but Crystal was born in the Clinch Valley Hospital in Richlands, Virginia, because her mother had to have a Caesarean. Crystal is blond and fair, with features so fine they don’t look real sometimes; she looks like an old-fashioned painting of a girl, but the color comes and goes in her cheeks. Now, at twelve, she is thin and awkward, all bones and angles, but sometimes already people will stop and stare at her downtown. Crystal is not beautiful yet, but it is clear that she will be. The reason they stare is that already she looks so different. Her face is unusual here. She doesn’t look like a Spangler, her father’s people,
or a Sykes, either one. She doesn’t look like anybody else in Black Rock, and her eyes in particular are strange, a dark intense blue, dreaming and distant as she walks holding hands with her girl friends after school, always in a gaggle of girls, always somehow clearly separate among them. Agnes is there, too, these days, wherever Crystal is. Agnes is heavy and red-haired like any McClanahan, but her hair is curly and light-colored, sandy, and she has a broad flat nose (“nigger nose,” Chester Lester taunts, although he has never seen a Negro in his life) and a small, pursed mouth. She is always elected treasurer of her class. Agnes can take care of herself, but she is not sure that Crystal can. Crystal seems to lack something, some hard thing inside her that Agnes and Babe were born with. Agnes watches out for Crystal, and they are best friends, of course. They do everything together. (Once Crystal got her foot stuck in the old cattle guard at the end of Agnes’s driveway when they were walking up to the Esso station for a Milky Way, and Agnes put her own foot in and got it stuck there, too, until Mr. Thacker came out with a crowbar and pried them loose.)

Now Agnes and Crystal go out into the front yard and catch lightning bugs until they are tired of it and the jars are full, and then they sit together on the porch swing and put the jars on the little table before them, fantastic lanterns, while beyond the climbing clematis vine on the porch posts and beyond the little yard the traffic goes by on the road. They rock the swing. They sit out here a lot, because of the way things are over at Crystal’s house.

If they want to talk they have to talk loud, over the noise of the traffic, because the road is not far from the front of
these houses although the back yards are sizable, big enough for gardens, vast for children. And there is a lot of traffic: 460 is the only real road that runs through these mountains, going from Richlands, Virginia, up into the Black Rock area, following first the Dismal River and then the Levisa, winding and climbing up and then back down into Pikeville, Kentucky. There are other roads going up the hollers, some paved and some not, depending on how many people live up them. Houses everywhere are close to the roads because anything resembling flat land is so hard to come by, must be bulldozed out and created.

Crystal sees the map of this country in her mind; she has studied it in school. A ragged diamond shape. Heavily inhabited where it is inhabited, with people piled up all along the creeks while whole mountains and mountainsides go empty and wild. Crystal rocks and thinks about the wild places, how it would be there. They say that the first man who ever settled in this country was a trapper named Stigner who lived in a big hollow tree up near the bend of Slate Creek. Of course it would not have been Slate Creek
then
, Crystal reminds herself. There was no coal and so there would have been no slate either, just a big creek without a name and a hollow tree there, cut out by lightning perhaps.

Crystal wonders who the people are in all these cars and trucks and where in the world they are going. The traffic puts her in a kind of trance. She watches it sometimes for hours. Sometimes the same cars go up and down, up and down, until she wonders what they’re looking for. Sometimes she sees a car from out of state. Now all she can see
is their lights, flashing out into the night when they come around the curve by the Esso station, then beamed again on the road through their neighborhood, headed downtown. A lot of times cars rattle when they hit the hole in the road in front of Agnes’s house. Now something clanks on the side of the road.

“What’s that?” Crystal says.

“Beer can,” says Agnes.

Crystal stretches. She was almost asleep in the swing. Summer rolls out in front of her as far as that road goes; fall, and junior high school, seem far, far away. Already this summer Crystal has read
Scaramouche
. Right now she is reading
Quo Vadis
.

“Who’s that?” Agnes asks. Agnes can’t see very well in the dark, but Crystal has cat eyes. A couple walks up the side of the road toward the Esso Station, holding hands.

“Pearl Deskins,” Crystal whispers, “and some boy.”

“Who is it?”

“I don’t know,” Crystal whispers back. “I can’t see him real good, but I probably wouldn’t know him anyway. He looks a whole lot older to me.”

The traffic has slacked off now, and for a minute no car comes. Pearl Deskins and the boy are like shadows without bodies, walking. They stop to light cigarettes and when the match flares up, Crystal sees momentarily Pearl’s thin, feral face, black eyes, her red mouth.

“I wish you’d look at that!” Agnes says. “
Smoking!
”

Pearl Deskins lives in a trailer up by the Esso station. She is only two years older than Agnes and Crystal, but it seems like ten years to them. Pearl is thin, but her breasts poke
out like hard little rocks through the tight little sweaters she wears, and she was on the Absentee Hot List last year for skipping school so much. Crystal is sure that Pearl doesn’t even know their names. Pearl is wild and mysterious; Crystal wonders where she goes and what she does with boys.

“She’s got an awful reputation,” Agnes says.

“I know it,” Crystal answers. A thrill shoots through her and makes her tremble inside; to hide it, she stretches again.

“You remember what we said,” says Agnes, “in the club.”

“I know it,” Crystal says again, and thinks how they cut their fingers and mixed their blood and said they would be best friends always and have nothing to do with boys.

Pearl giggles and the sound floats back at them over the neighborhood. Crystal shivers. Jubal Thacker’s daddy has quit picking and gone to bed. Fluorescent arc lights go on up at the Esso station, past the Presbyterian church. They think you’re born saved or damned already, Presbyterians do. Chester Lester’s house is all dark, too, although Crystal can’t imagine he’s gone to bed yet. He’s too mean to sleep. Chester Lester has got something wrong with him, she knows. Once he threw lighted matches at her and Agnes and another time he had a kitchen knife and made them pull down their pants for him to see. Still another time, Chester Lester tied Crystal up to a sycamore tree in the Raineses’ yard and put frogs on her. That’s why she hates them so much now. The Varney boys have gone off in one of their cars making a racket as usual. Nancy Shortridge, who is visiting her grandmother several houses down, has gone to Bristol today to get her braces adjusted and she
won’t be back until tomorrow. Crystal is jealous of Nancy for getting to stay in a motel. Agnes is jealous of Nancy for existing, for ever coming to stay with her grandmother at all. Crystal always wants to ask Nancy to be in their games.

“Where’s Jubal?” Crystal asks. Sometimes he plays with them, too. Jubal is skinny and tousle-headed and small; Agnes can beat him at any game. He has a wide sweet smile and sometimes he gets so tickled that he will roll over and over laughing.

“Don’t you remember?” Agnes sits up and jerks the swing. Sometimes she gets so exasperated with Crystal.

“Remember what?” Crystal says.

“He’s gone to Bible camp.”

“Oh yeah,” says Crystal. “Well. He can have it,” she says after a minute. “You couldn’t pay me to go there.”

“You don’t have to be so ugly about it if you never have been there yourself,” Agnes says. She is very righteous. “It might be fun.”

“Not
Baptist
,” Crystal says.

“You’ll be sorry,” Agnes warns her. She is quite serious. Agnes is a Baptist, too, but of course her daddy is a businessman and so they are not hard-shell Baptists like the Thackers are. Crystal’s mother is a Methodist, but Crystal is not anything; her daddy is not anything, either. Crystal is surprisingly firm on this point, which worries Agnes a lot. What kind of a heaven will it be, if Crystal can’t even get one foot inside the gate?

“Ag-
nes
?” Agnes’s mama calls her from inside the screen door, going up on the last syllable like she always does. Agnes’s mama has a tired, pretty voice.

“I’m coming in a minute, Mama. I’m going to walk Crystal home.”

Crystal picks up her jar and they go down the concrete front steps and across the grass to Crystal’s house, not more than thirty yards away.

“Why don’t you come in for a minute?” Crystal says.

By habit they walk around back, knowing without even thinking about it that the front door will be locked, and go into the kitchen-dinette area, as Crystal’s mother calls it.

“Don’t slam the door,” Lorene says when they open it. “Hi, Agnes, come on in,” she adds. Lorene looks at the lightning bug jar in Crystal’s hands. “Not more of
those!”
she says.

Lorene can’t understand how her own daughter could enjoy staying out in the dark night fooling with bugs. Or how she could have a best friend like Agnes. Why, Crystal is almost big enough to start dating! And Lorene can’t even get her to roll up her hair. Lorene’s own hair is rolled up right now, in pink plastic curlers with snap-on tops. Neva, her sister who is a beautician, came over and did it right after supper and told Lorene all the news she heard that day at the beauty shop.

“Is Daddy still up?” Crystal says.

“How should I know?” snaps Lorene. “I’ve got better things to do than sit around in there in the dark.”

“Crystal honey?” He has heard her voice; he is calling her from the front room.