Black Mountain Breakdown (25 page)

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 prices 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?”

“
Good!
” Mrs. Muncy snorts, exactly the way she used to do whenever someone said something stupid in class. “You were the most talented student I ever had,” she says to Crystal, putting her lips in a severe, straight line. She sets the Santa candle back down decisively on the table and turns and leaves, clutching her old-fashioned jet-beaded bag close to her as she heads for the door. She looks like a little black crow, Crystal thinks. Mrs. Muncy makes her bleak way through the brightly dressed, busy women and leaves.

“Well!” Crystal says to Sue.

“Old bitch,” Sue says, and Crystal laughs. But she isn’t so sure. It occurs to her that she should find a job—that she
could
find a job. Maybe a teaching job. The jobs she had before were exactly that: just jobs, none of them having anything at all to do with her education or with all this ability which some people thought she had. She had taken
whatever jobs she could get, depending upon whatever man she was with. Face it. But it was also true that she used to be good at certain things. She might be able to get a teaching job right here, for instance. Of course she doesn’t have a degree in education—she isn’t certified—but probably they won’t be as picky here in Black Rock as they might be somewhere else. Crystal grins, remembering Mr. Roach: his plump white hands, his quiche Lorraine. She might just go by the Board of Education tomorrow and ask. It wouldn’t hurt anything just to ask, even if school has already started.

“Crystal!” Sue is practically yelling at her. “This lady wants to buy a paperweight.”

“Sorry,” Crystal says. She adjusts the ruffles on her striped apron and takes the woman’s money, smiling.

The next day she goes by the Board of Education—just to inquire about the possibilities—and to her surprise they say that in fact they will have an opening in two weeks at the ninth-grade level, since a Mrs. Marcum has gotten pregnant.

“I’ll take it,” Crystal says.

BUT THAT FIRST
DAY, Crystal is awake for hours before it’s time to get up, going over her lesson plan in her mind. Mrs. Marcum has said she ought to have a lesson plan every day, so she will. She will do everything she’s supposed to. In fact, she has Mrs. Marcum’s own lesson plans for the first week and a half, since Mrs. Marcum did them so far in advance. Mrs. Marcum learned to make these lesson plans as an education major at Longwood, a teachers college in Farmville,
Virginia, where she also studied adolescent and child psychology and philosophies of testing, among other things. She knows the ropes, and she has made it quite clear to Crystal that Crystal does not. Mrs. Marcum is one of those early-aging women with a saggy, doughy face but a surprisingly trim body aside from the pregnancy, no hips at all and skinny legs. “Don’t let a thing get by you,” she advised Crystal. “The harder you are, the more they’ll learn. If you start off too easy, they’ll walk all over you, believe me. You’ll never get it back.” Crystal is not sure what “it” is. She’s not sure why she’s doing this at all, and as she lies in bed it seems that the most sensible thing to do would be to go back to sleep. But she knows she can’t do it. She slept so much in the hospital, for days and days and days. Remembering those days—or
not
remembering them, that’s most accurate—she shudders. This time, she really cannot.
Must
not: there. She hears Lorene getting up and then she can smell the bacon frying. OK.

Crystal gets out of bed and puts on a black pleated skirt and a black-and-white striped blouse. She looks in the mirror for a long time, putting her makeup on. Does she look like a teacher? Does she? What will her students think? Crystal has a headache right behind her eyes. It’s raining, too, outside; beyond the window, fog covers the top of the mountain.

“You look nice, honey,” Lorene tells her when she goes downstairs, and this helps some, but Crystal can’t eat much breakfast and she still has the headache, even later, after three Bufferins, when she faces her first class.

They come in after the first bell and go right to their
seats, which seem to be predetermined—probably by Mrs. Marcum, Crystal realizes. In alphabetical order, no doubt. Her hands are sweating as they fill up the desks and she opens Mrs. Marcum’s grade book and her lesson plan book on her desk, smoothing the pages again and again. The tardy bell rings. The ninth-graders look at her with cold little narrowed eyes. Crystal stands up.

“Hello,” she says in a voice which rings in her ears. “I’m Miss Spangler, your new ninth-grade English teacher. Mrs. Marcum’s replacement.”

The ninth-graders continue to stare, and a radiator hisses in the corner.

“Here,” Crystal says. “I’ll write my name on the board.” She takes the chalk from the desk where Mrs. Marcum has urged her to keep it locked away so it won’t be stolen, turns to the blackboard and writes MISS SPANGLER across it in large block letters.

“Can’t you do cursive?” somebody asks.

“What?” Crystal turns.

“
Cursive
,” repeats the black-haired girl in the second row. “You know,
cursive
. Where you link your letters together. Mrs. Marcum won’t take anything if it’s not in cursive. She gives you an F if you print.”

“Oh.” Crystal can’t think of what to say next. They used to call it longhand when she was in school. She flushes, fiddling with the chalk and looking at them (“Maintain eye contact at all times,” Mrs. Marcum said), as a low rolling contagious giggle starts somewhere in the back of the room and crawls forward across the desks. They’re laughing at her. Or are they? Better not press it. She’ll write on the
board some more. Crystal turns and prints: WORK FOR TODAY, followed by the page number and the exercise numbers from the grammar book, but while she’s putting up the exercise numbers there’s a commotion at the back of the room, and a door slams as loud as a shot. She turns to see a boy come slouching into the room and take a seat in the back row, slamming his books down hard on the desk. Just then a blond girl in the front row passes a note across the aisle right in front of her, and Crystal for a minute is caught up in trying to decide if she should take it away or not. She could: all she’d have to do is reach out and grab it. But on the other hand…

“Good morning, Miss Spangler.” The boy in the back has a nasal, insolent voice. “How are you today?”

“I’m fine,” Crystal snaps. “But you’re late for class.” Amusement ripples across the classroom again at this exchange, and Crystal feels she’s scored her first point, or maybe half a point.

Which she loses right away when another student says, “Aren’t you going to mark him tardy?” and before she can answer, the little blonde right under her nose says, “Of course she’s not, stupid. She doesn’t even know his name. She doesn’t know any of our names. She hasn’t even called the roll.”

Crystal sits down, pulls the roll book closer, and starts: “Abbot, Janice. Blackman, Eugenia. Claris, Susie Louise. Clapp, Pamela. Dark, Ross Junior…” She has twenty-six ninth-graders in this class. Sure enough, they’re seated in alphabetical order except for the boy in the back row, who apparently sits where he wants. He looks like
he’s twenty if he’s a day, although of course he couldn’t be. His name, surprisingly, turns out to be Lee Fontaine Hallahan. “Everybody calls me Bull,” he says.