Black Mountain Breakdown (3 page)

“Come on,” Crystal says. Agnes gets a saltine from the box on the table, cuts herself a slice of Velveeta from the
foil-wrapped brick of it lying there, and follows Crystal through the house.

Lorene shakes her head. Then she spreads her hands out on the table and looks at them. Neva gave her a manicure, too, while she was over here, and they are trying out a new shade: Florida Rose. It looks good. Lorene wishes she had some lipstick the same color, to match; probably Neva could order her some. Lorene fixes herself another cup of coffee and turns back to the TV, where Perry Mason is trying to solve a mystery about a rich beautiful heiress who is receiving murder threats. Lorene thinks she has solved it already; she thinks the heiress is doing it to herself, to get attention. Lorene smiles after the commercial, when Perry begins to realize this, too. She would have made a good detective, she thinks, or a psychiatrist. She can always tell what makes somebody tick. Nearing fifty now, Lorene is still a blond, strong woman, running to fat maybe, but she keeps herself up, wears heels when she goes to town. “I may not be a lady,” she says, “but by God I’ll dress like one.” Although she has been married to Grant Spangler for nearly thirty years, she’s still more Sykes than Spangler. She has never lost that hustle which brought him to her in the first place like a pale summer moth to a porch light, that same hustle all the Sykeses have, which enabled old man Sykes, for instance—Lorene’s father—to turn a junk business into a car dealership and invent a rivet that would give every one of them a guaranteed income for the rest of their lives. And the rivet money is in Lorene’s name, not Grant’s. She thinks about her rivet money downtown in the bank, accumulating interest. Lorene has a passbook savings account and a
part interest in Neva’s Clip-N-Curl. She’s no fool, which is a good thing, since she is married to one.

Of course it irritates her the way things have turned out, and it especially gets her the way Grant just lies there in her front room with the Venetian blinds drawn so that he doesn’t know sometimes if it’s night or day and she can’t even get in there to vacuum. But this has come about slowly, over a period of years, so she is accustomed to it now. His removal to the front room was so gradual as to be almost imperceptible, a slow receding from life, and her own move to the back of the house was just as gradual. Lorene does not complain. She may have married Grant because he was a Spangler, but even now that his father’s Little Emma mine has failed, even if she could have seen ahead somehow through all the years to this time and this year, Lorene is not sure she would have done anything different. She takes pride in the fact that she has never said a word against him to anyone, has never mentioned his drinking to anybody, not even to her brother Garnett when he has come around hinting at it.

At least Lorene has Crystal, the child of her old age, the joy of her heart. When Crystal was born, she quit hollering at Grant and trying to change things, fixed up her kitchen and grew philosophical, centering herself firmly in the child. Maybe it was because Crystal was a Caesarean baby and didn’t get all pushed and pulled and wrinkled coming through the tubes, but Lorene thought when she first saw her that she had never, never seen a more beautiful child. Lorene named her the prettiest name she could think of, Crystal Renée. Lorene thinks of the little dresses she used
to dress Crystal in, and the little white shoes with straps. Crystal will grow up to be somebody; Lorene will see to that. Crystal will go to a fine school on that rivet money. She will marry a doctor. But whatever she does, she will be somebody special, because Lorene is raising her that way. Of course Grant has a bad influence on Crystal, but Lorene ignores it, as she ignores everything she can’t change. Lorene deals with her problems by rising above them. Now she stares at the closed door and drums her rosy nails for a minute on the tabletop. Then she switches the channels to see what else might be on TV.

Behind the door is another room, another world almost. Here where Grant stays, even the air seems denser and different somehow. It smells like old smoke, like liquor, like Grant himself, yet the combination is not unpleasant really and Crystal loves it. The room is shadowy now, the only light coming from a floor lamp in the corner by the armchair, but even this light must have been too bright and so a blue shirt, or a piece of a shirt, has been thrown carelessly over the shade. This creates an irregular spread of light and a jagged shadow in the far corner of the room. Clearly this was Lorene’s best room once, her parlor. There is a gold sunburst clock above the mantel, no longer running. The artificial logs in the fireplace have fallen off their wrought-iron stand. The furniture is mostly a French Provincial living-room set, with shiny off-white brocaded upholstery: a sofa and three matching chairs. Now the brocade is dirty and some stuffing sticks out from the arm of the chair by the door. A squatty coffee table sprawls at a rakish angle before the sofa, only its gold claw feet
protruding from the papers and books jumbled high on its top and spilling over onto the floor. Other books are stacked about the room, and there are piles of clothing in the corners. The fancy gold drapes hang limp and open, but the Venetian blinds behind them are shut tight, a flat gray dusty expanse on the wall by the locked front door.

Grant is reading poetry to the girls. He half sits, half lies in the armchair so that the light falls on his thin dog-eared book,
One Hundred and One Famous Poems.
Crystal sits close to him on the floor, holding on to his knee under the old blue silk robe he always wears. She is careful not to knock over the glass on the floor by his chair. Agnes is stretched out full length facing them with her chin on her fists, her plump bottom sticking straight up.

Grant begins, his voice gaining strength as he goes on, until it is as rich and full again as it used to be back when people said he ought to make a preacher—how he laughed at them—or a courtroom lawyer at least.

Now Grant is into it fully, the cadenced rhythms, the rise and dip and fall of the lines, and his voice drops nearly to a whisper and then comes out strong and loud and resonant
as he gestures grandly with the book and waves it in the air, going mostly from memory and rising to his fullest power on
“Lo!
Ben Adhem’s name led all the rest!” The final word of the poem echoes in the room and the giant shadow of the book and Grant’s arm on the opposite wall disappears as his arm drops back to his lap and he sinks again, spent, into the battered chair. Grant laughs to break the silence.

“Oh, I love that one,” Crystal says. Her face is turned up to her father and she is smiling. He reaches down to touch her hair.

“How do you like that one, Agnes?” Grant asks. He has to smile when he looks down at the great hulking spread of Agnes there on the floor.

“Not much,” Agnes says. She is always truthful. Grant laughs again and then coughs.

“Do the raven,” Agnes says. It’s the only one she really likes.

“No, no, don’t do that one!” Crystal sits up, her heart beating fast. “Please don’t do that one. Do the daffodils.”

“I hate the daffodils,” says Agnes.

“Well,” says Grant, thumbing through the book, “How about ‘I Have a Rendez-vous with Death’?”

“No, no.” Crystal shakes her head until the fine blond hair swirls across her face. “That’s too sad. Don’t do that one.”

Grant looks through the book and the girls wait. Agnes is not much for poetry, but Crystal loves it, and Agnes will do what Crystal does.

“Here we go.” Always the showman, Grant smooths the
book with a flourish. He pushes his glasses, which have gotten too big for him now, up higher on his hawk nose, clears his throat, and begins:

“No, no!” Crystal is almost sobbing. “Don’t do that one, don’t do that one, Daddy!” She pounds on his knee with her fist.

Grant grins at her, a surprisingly incongruous mischievous grin in his sick wrecked face. He raises his voice and continues over Crystal’s pleas.

“Oh, oh,” Crystal says, but it’s hard to tell by the tone of her voice whether she’s delighted or upset—intense emotion all unfocused—and her usually dreaming face is wholly alive.

Grant’s voice goes soft as she hushes, and he reads the part about the toys standing faithful to Little Boy Blue through all the long ensuing years. Grant almost whispers the last lines.

Crystal bursts into huge racking sobs as she hugs her father’s knees, and the tears run down her cheeks. “I can’t stand it,” she cries. “Oh, it’s the saddest thing!”

“Don’t cry, Crystal,” Agnes directs from the floor, but Crystal doesn’t even hear her, her face pressed tight into the old blue silk.

Grant is smoothing his daughter’s hair.

“He died, didn’t he?” Crystal sobs. “The one that put them there.”

Agnes grows uncomfortable and begins to pick at her face.

“I think that’s enough for tonight,” Grant says, taking a drink from his glass and closing the book of poems.

“No, no,” Crystal nearly screams. “Do the spider and the fly.”

“You know you don’t like that one,” Agnes says. “That scares you to death every time.”

“Do it, do it,” Crystal begs. Crystal wipes at her eyes with her fist. She has stopped crying now, but her eyes are dark and liquid and she has bright patches of color along her cheeks. “Please do it, Daddy.”

“I don’t see what you want to hear it for if you know you’re going to get scared,” Agnes says. “I think that’s dumb.”

Grant smiles. He picks up the book from the floor. “Ready?” he asks.

Crystal bobs her head up and down. Agnes nods re-luctantly.

Grant makes his voice deep and full of cunning malice as he begins,

Unconscious of what she’s doing, Crystal twists the hem of her father’s robe into a hard tight ball and bites it. Grant goes on and the spider tempts the silly fly with flattery until the fly has lost all caution and the spider drags her up to his dreary den. Grant’s tone is gravely serious as he reads the moral lesson at the end.

Crystal shivers and lets all her breath out in one long shuddering sigh.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself!” Lorene flings the door open and stands in silhouette as the kitchen light streams in behind her. Everybody blinks. “Scaring little girls like that! I don’t know what gets into you. Look at Crystal Renée, now she’s all wrought up, see what you’ve done, she probably won’t go to sleep for a week. Agnes, it’s time to go home. I just heard your mama call. Crystal, come on. It’s bedtime. You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” Lorene says again to Grant, who chuckles way back in his chair.

“I’ll see you in the morning,” Agnes says, but Crystal feels dazed and only nods as Agnes leaves.

“Good night, pumpkin,” Grant says.

“Good night, Daddy,” Crystal tells him, leaning over the chair to kiss the top of his head before she follows her mother out.

“Good night, Mama,” Crystal says and kisses her, too, and takes the jar of lightning bugs with her up the stairs, leaving Lorene alone in the kitchen to wrap up the Velveeta and put it back into the refrigerator, turn off the TV, wipe off her countertops with a damp rag. That done, Lorene goes to the door and pushes it open and sticks her head in.

“You want anything?” she asks her husband. “I’m fixing to go to bed.”

There is no answer from the room.

“Grant?” she says more sharply. “Do you want anything? I’m fixing to go up now.”

“Nothing, honey, thank you,” Grant says from his chair. “Good night.”

Lorene closes the door and goes up the stairs to bed. Grant sleeps in the front room, on the sofa or sometimes in his chair, sometimes passed out and other times sleepless so that he wanders the house after the rest of them have gone to sleep. Lorene knows that Odell, Grant’s bastard half brother, buys the liquor for him and brings it when he comes, but she never see it and usually she never sees Odell either, since he comes late when she is asleep or while she’s gone to church or prayer meeting. When Lorene does see Odell, he holds his Caterpillar hat in his hands and mumbles down into the floor. He acts more like an animal than a man. But even if Odell isn’t smart, he is a hard worker, they say, and it wasn’t his fault they lost the mine. Lorene wonders where Sykes is now. She peers out the window at the highway when she pulls the blinds.

All up and down the bottom it is dark except for the lights from an occasional car or truck on the road and the arc lights at the Esso station, which will be open all night, catering to truckers and men on the graveyard shift in the mines. If you go back up the road away from the town of Black Rock toward Richlands, after five or six miles you leave the Levisa River bottom and go into the Dismal River bottom and start climbing, following 460 up and up until you reach the bend of Dismal where the coke ovens are, nearly eight hundred of them, roaring and sending up smoke and red fire into the night. The coke ovens stretch in irregular lines along the Dismal River and then up the steep slopes, too, above the railroad track, and the sight of them is awesome, as vast and red and terrible as hell itself. The trees on the mountains around the coke ovens have long since
died, their blackened shapes like ghosts of trees on the blackened hills. This is where the high-school students come to make out, parked along the old mine road off 460 above the bend where they have the best view.