Black Mountain Breakdown (21 page)

Suddenly, with no warning, the wind stops. There’s no sound at all. Crystal hears her own heart beating, and the blood runs like a creek in her veins. She expects to plummet down some awful immediate spiral into the lack of wind and sound. But she doesn’t. She’s suspended, and it grows lighter and lighter in the hall as surfaces everywhere grow distinct once more. Edges appear.

“Crystal!” It’s a man’s voice, very deep, mournful, and somehow familiar, coming from far away. Coming across unbelievable distance, echoing in empty places, but close, too. Close to her.

“What?” Now Crystal can speak, and she does, and she can sit up, too. Pulling her knees up to her chest and pulling her sheet up tight around her, she hugs her knees and looks
everywhere carefully, bunk by bunk. He could be anywhere in this big room, hiding behind any bed.

“What?” she says again. She waits.

“Crystal,” he calls again, drawing her name out long, making it last forever, and it becomes clear that he’s not here inside this room.

“Wait!” she calls out. “Wait!” She pulls her bathrobe off the rail at the head of her bunk and puts it on, not stopping to button it, and climbs down the iron ladder.

“Please wait!” Crystal calls again.

She runs up the rows of bunks the length of the hall, not looking back once to see Diane Williams sit bolt upright in bed, not noticing the girls all around her waking up now, getting up. She runs straight out the front door onto the cement sidewalk, then around the side of the building and along its length, past shrubs and windows, to where the fountain is, and the tree. The mist is not so thick now. The sun is up, and only wisps of gray are left. Her feet are wet from the grass.

“Where are you?” Crystal stops and holds on to the fountain. “Where are you? Here I am.”

The bugle sounds reveille very close, so loud and brassy it nearly scares her to death. Crystal runs around the fountain and the tree, along the facing wall. No one is there. A Coke bottle is wedged in a crook of the tree. “Where are you?” she screams although she knows that nobody could hear anything over that bugle.

When the bugle stops, she hears all the girls, far away and babbling, getting dressed. Crystal sits down in the grass where she is. It’s still wet, feels good. She gets a blade and
looks at it, licks it, chews it. She doesn’t think the man will call again. He called, and she couldn’t find him, and now it’s full morning and he won’t call again. She has missed him. Crystal puzzles over who it might have been: it wasn’t ex-actly her father’s voice; it wasn’t anybody here; it wasn’t anybody she knows. Not anybody she
really
knows, that is, even though in a way she knows it as well as she knows her own. When Crystal was little and Grant told her about China being on the other side of the earth, she used to dig and dig for it at the edge of Lorene’s tomato patch. Then when that didn’t work, she took to imagining another girl or maybe a little boy, a Chinese mirror self in China, sleeping when she was awake and playing when she was asleep. Everything she dreamed was what the other did, and everything she did was dreamed by the Chinese mirror child. Maybe that was who was calling her, grown now. Maybe it was Clarence B. Oliver. More likely it was God. Whoever it was, she has failed to find him.
Shit.
She sits exhausted in the grass at the side of the dormitory with no will to go in and dress to go to the General Assembly, which seems totally meaningless anyway. More shit.

The bugle blows again and the girls come out at the front of the building. When they say the Pledge of Allegiance it’s like a litany, just far enough away so Crystal can make out the words, close enough for her to catch the rhythm. Crystal looks up at the bare flagpole across the roof of the dormitory and here comes the flag. It droops and furls and then is caught by a breeze.

Crystal sighs and gets up. Maybe she can find Agnes. She can always count on Agnes to tell her what to do. Holding
her nightgown up, Crystal runs around to the front of the dormitory, where the straight lines of girls are breaking up, forming groups, and starting off to breakfast. Everybody stares at her, but Crystal doesn’t care.

“Agnes!” she yells. “Hey, Agnes! Wait a minute!”

Agnes, way up the walk with two other girls from her own hall, stops, pauses, and looks back. Then she says something to the two girls, who look back, too, before they walk on. Agnes moves quickly and officiously back to where Crystal waits in the grass near the flagpole, with one hand shading her eyes.

“What’s the matter?” Agnes asks immediately. “Are you sick?”

Crystal looks so pale and funny, and she has grass stains all over her bathrobe. She feels funny, too. She grabs Agnes’s arm, hard. “Listen,” she hisses, but then, looking at Agnes all dressed up in this bright morning light, she doesn’t know what to say. Suddenly, she’s just plain tired. The girls of Girls’ State stream by them on either side, staring curiously at Crystal.

“What?” asks Agnes. “
What?
” she asks with less patience, as Crystal continues to hold her arm and say nothing. Agnes begins to realize that Crystal isn’t sick at all, and she suspects that this is another one of Crystal’s stunts. But this morning Agnes has no time to waste. Girls’ State runs on a tight schedule, and since she’s Secretary of the General Assembly she has to be on time. Agnes grips her new notebook and her ballpoint pens firmly.

“Calm down, I’ll talk to you later,” she says. “Right now I’ve got to go.”

“Listen,” Crystal says.

Agnes looks at her good. Color is flooding her face and she seems to be much too excited.

“I had this vision,” Crystal says.

“What kind of a vision?” Agnes is looking around. Nearly all the girls have left for breakfast now.

“Well,” Crystal says, speaking slowly so she can get it right, “I woke up real early this morning and I was just lying there, with everybody else still asleep, and all of a sudden I heard somebody call my name.” Crystal decides not to mention the wind.

“So what?” Agnes says.

“It was a
man’s
voice.” Crystal pushes her fingernails into Agnes’s arm.

“Well?” asks Agnes, fidgeting.

“Well,
there aren’t any men in Girls’ State
.” Crystal pauses to let this sink in. “Then I heard it again. I heard it two times in all.”

“Who do you think it was?” Agnes is partly scornful, partly impressed.

“Probably God,” Crystal says solemnly. “It had to be.” Her heart beats just like thunder in her chest and this is how she wants to feel forever and ever, this much alive.

“I bet you’ve got the flu or something. You better calm down and I’ll see you at lunch,” Agnes says. She pulls away from Crystal’s fingers and runs up the sidewalk after the others. She looks back once at Crystal standing stock still there by the flagpole, staring off at nothing with that excited look all over her. Even the way she’s standing, you can tell that something is up.

Crystal feels a lot better after she brushes her teeth. While she’s dressing, she remembers something she read once in Lorene’s
National Observer
about visitors from outer space who come down in UFOs and try to contact earthlings. There are thousands of mysterious disappearances in the United States alone. The dining room is closed when Crystal arrives, but she persuades the kitchen help to let her have two doughnuts, and then she puts her name tag on and walks over to the General Assembly, where later that day she will vote against water pollution.

F
IVE YEARS LATER
, Agnes is in the kitchen making a Lady Baltimore cake for her poor old daddy’s birthday, and while she mixes and measures she looks over every now and then at the postcard lying on top of the stove. She butters and flours the pans. She pours in the batter, licks the spatula, and throws it into the sink. She puts the pans in the oven: 350 degrees. She wipes her hands down her sides on the apron and looks at the card again. One side has a picture of some big pink birds sticking their heads into the water. The other side says: “Hi! We’re in Key West. Will come through Black Rock on our way back North. See you probably on Thursday. Best, Crystal.”

Agnes tightens her mouth and puts the postcard into the trash. Today is Thursday, February 16. You could have knocked her over with a feather when she got this postcard in the mail. Good thing she was the one who looked in the mailbox, so Mama and Daddy don’t know a thing about it. And won’t, if she can help it! Not that Daddy knows
much of anything these days anyway, they keep him so doped up. “Best, Crystal.” Well, Crystal’s best is not good enough for Agnes anymore. Imagine writing somebody a card that you haven’t seen in three years, expecting them to say oh goody! Agnes fixes herself some instant coffee and sits down heavily in a kitchen chair. She has been up since 6
A.M.
Crystal takes too much for granted, always has.

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.