Black Mountain Breakdown (6 page)

Crystal shakes her head to clear it and goes out into the yard. Devere is in the dog pen and the dogs are leaping all over him. He is covered with bluetick hounds and spotted spaniels. Their frenzy seems crazy in this hot late afternoon, and Devere among them is as immovable as a wooden man. He sees Crystal and smiles. “Looky here,” he says, and brushes the dogs off him like bugs and takes Crystal by the hand around to the little pen where Dollie has got some new puppies.

“Oh,
Devere!
” Crystal cries, getting down on her knees
to feel them, warm and blind and squirming. They lick and lick at her hands with their little tongues no bigger than her thumbnail. She plays with them for a long time and Devere stands still, smiling and watching her, until the sun starts slanting down and it’s time for him to do some chores. Crystal helps him, and then it’s time to sit on the porch.

NORA GOES TO
bed early because she gets up every morning at five o’clock. There is not any particular reason for Nora to get up so early, but she has done it all her life almost, ever since she came to live in this county with Emma and found out that she was a country woman at heart; she took to the place and the life in a way that neither of her sisters ever had. Devere goes to bed at nine-thirty every night. So Crystal and Grace are left in the parlor and Crystal makes Grace tell her everything she can remember about Baltimore, about Cousin Sam’s house, and about her daddy when he was a boy. Crystal likes to hear about her daddy best of all.

Crystal goes to bed in the feather bed in the downstairs bedroom where she always stays when she’s here, and waits until Grace has tiptoed in like a fairy in her long diaphanous gown to see if she’s asleep. Then Crystal sits up in bed.

Crystal used to play a game when she was little and visited here. She made the game up so she wouldn’t be scared if she had to go to the bathroom at night, and now that she’s older and knows it’s nonsense she still believes it a little bit, sometimes plays it still. This game involves wood. If you have to get up in the night, you will be all right if you touch
wood all the way wherever you go. In her grandfather’s house this is easy because dark woodwork runs along everywhere. If you fail to touch wood, though, the ghosts will come, and then it will all be over. This is Sunday and the yellow ghosts come on Sunday nights with yellow smoke around their heads and long hot teeth. There are different-colored ghosts for different nights of the week. The green ghosts, on Fridays, are not as bad as the others, because they are very sad. It makes them sad to hurt you, but they can’t help it if you don’t touch the wood. Behind all the ghosts, beyond and above them, stands Clarence B. Oliver, the Ghost King, greatest of ghosts. Clarence B. Oliver is as big as the world. He can do anything he wants to. He can kill anybody he wants to, anytime. If you touch wood and are obedient and fair with the colored ghosts, then Clarence B. Oliver will be there when you need him to help you out. But you don’t mess around with Clarence B. Oliver. You don’t ask him for anything unless you really want it so bad you will die if you don’t get it, whatever it is.

Moonlight comes in the window and picks out the fan pattern on the old quilt at the foot of Crystal’s bed. She smiles and traces a fan, green-figured feedsack calico, thinking of Clarence B. Oliver. Somewhere out there she hears an owl. Closer by, one of the dogs yelps in sleep and another wakes up to bark for a while and then hushes. It’s just light enough in this room to see. Crystal gets out of bed, touches the night table, stretches over to touch the dresser and holds to its grainy old wood while she tiptoes the three steps over to it and stands squarely before it, looking into the wavy, tilted mirror. She sees herself in shadow, backlighted; the
dog barks again. Who is it there in the mirror? She sees long bright hair and no face, no eyes, no nose, no mouth. Moonlight spreads over the quilt. Who? she wonders, shaping the word with the mouth she doesn’t have.
Who?

Touching the chair rail all around the room, she moves to the window and stands looking out for a long time, her fingers on the sill. Again and again she traces the initials carved deep in the wood. W.G.S. William Grant Spangler. Her father’s initials, and he must have carved them there, must have stood sometime at this window where she is standing now, with a new sharp knife, young then, maybe just a boy her own age, leaving his mark. She wonders what he was thinking about when he carved those initials. W.G.S. Crystal thinks of her father as a boy passing through this house, walking up the stairs. But now her father is a grown man; that boy is dead. W.G.S. is dead whoever he was who carved these initials here, and she thinks of all the other people, of Grant and Devere as little children, of Mae Peacock, of bleeding Emma, of big rough Iradell and all the others who have passed through this house, sat on this furniture, breathed this air and slept in this bed and used this space she is using now. And in ten years she will be dead, too, the Crystal who stands here now, this Crystal up so late in the night. She’ll be so different, all grown up and changed. Who will she be then?
Who?
The dogs are barking loud now. They have heard something off in the woods. The yellow ghosts have thin long fingers just like wire, but Crystal holds on to the wood.

* * *

“HOW LONG
is this going to take?” Crystal asks as politely as she can. She sits on a straight-backed kitchen chair in the conversation area of Lorene’s kitchen, surrounded by women. They have poked holes into an old tight-fitting aqua rubber bathing cap and put it on Crystal’s head. Now Lorene and Neva are into the slow process of pulling Crystal’s hair up through the holes with long silver crochet hooks, jabbing them down into each hole and then jerking, the slow pull up until a whole long strand of hair emerges. It is incredibly painful, especially around the temples and the ears. Susie Sykes, Neva and Lorene’s youngest brother’s wife, rocks in the rocker, giving her baby a bottle. The baby is a two-month-old boy named Denny. Her aunt Susie keeps Denny so dressed up that Crystal has never yet really seen what he looks like.
Days of Our Lives
, which Lorene watches every day, has just come on television, and every now and then the women pause in their conversation to see what’s going on in Meadville and then resume, jabbing and pulling and talking, while Neva’s cigarette burns itself out in the ashtray and Crystal bites her lip. Neva lights cigarettes and lets them burn out. It’s hot and getting hotter in the kitchen, damp August heat that makes it hard to do anything active or even breathe.

Every morning Crystal plays a private game, trying to guess what kind of day it will be. She has plenty of time to guess, because the sun doesn’t come up until ten o’clock or so. It comes up, that is, but it only hits the mountaintops and never makes it down into the bottom until ten or eleven o’clock. If Crystal has guessed
pretty day
, and it is, she buys herself a Coke at the Esso station. If she guesses wrong, she
has to pay a penalty, but these penalties vary from day to day. One time it was clean up her room. Another time it was be nice to Chester Lester. It depends.

“Crystal, honey, turn your head over this way a little bit,” Neva directs. Crystal turns her head. Her eyes are on a level with Neva’s armpits and she sees a wide wet patch of perspiration on the blue uniform; Crystal sniffs but it doesn’t smell. Lorene always says that horses sweat, men perspire, and women glow. But Neva sweats. Neva looks a lot like Lorene, but she is larger all over, a big-boned energetic woman. This year her hair is auburn red.

“I cannot go on like this!” says a beautiful woman in Meadville, clutching at a doctor in a hospital corridor. “Let me tell Gregory! We cannot live this way. Always meeting in secret—the motels, the deceitful lies. It’s killing me.”

“You must calm yourself, Karen,” the doctor says dispassionately, looking quickly up and down the hospital corridor to see if anyone has heard. “Remember my position. Remember your own. Besides, there is something I must tell you.” He smooths his white coat.

“Let me tell Gregory, please!
We could live together
, Paul! Who cares what people think?”

“Darling,” the doctor says rapidly, “we will discuss this at another time. Just now there is something I have to tell you. It is not good news. I want you to brace yourself, Karen. Are you ready?”

Karen gulps and bats her eyelashes tremulously. It’s clear that she is not ready at all.

“The test results from your physical have come back, darling, and I regret to say they indicate that you may have a—”

Organ chords crash and a commercial for Oxydol appears.

“Well, shoot!” Lorene says.

“I bet she’s got a malignant tumor,” Neva says, jabbing.

“She might,” Lorene admits. “You know she hasn’t been feeling so good. But I thought it was just nerves.”

“Maybe she’s pregnant,” says Susie, tilting Denny’s bottle up so he can get it all.

“I don’t think I can stand this anymore,” Crystal says suddenly, surprising everyone including herself. Usually she has such nice manners. “It really hurts.”

“That’s because we’re around your face right now, honey,” Neva soothes her. “We’ll be all through in a minute. Go get her some aspirin, Lorene.”

Lorene gets a glass of water and two aspirins and Crystal takes them. Through the screen door she sees Babe in a two-piece red bathing suit, playing in the sprinkler. Jubal Thacker rides by on his bike. Crystal would give anything to be out there. August. She can’t believe that the summer has come and gone so fast and now she can’t even remember what she did with it, long days out riding her bike, reading, going to the movies with Agnes every time the picture changed downtown. Just sitting, mostly, in different places: by the river, on the back steps, on Agnes’s front porch. Mooning, her mother calls it. But she wasn’t mooning. She was biding her time. Only now that it’s August that time is nearly up, and she can’t imagine why she agreed to have her hair streaked in the first place. She would rather be out in that sprinkler with Babe.

“Well,” Susie says, standing up and giving her pedal pushers a hitch, “if you all don’t mind, I think I’ll leave Denny right here on this blanket on the floor, he’s sleeping so good, while I run on down to the Piggly Wiggly and do my shopping. You don’t mind, do you?” She’s asking Lorene, but her eyes travel nervously back and forth between the two women.

“No, honey, you go ahead,” Lorene says. Susie’s out the door in no time flat.

“I knew she was going to do that,” Neva says.

“Well, but you know how it is being cooped up in the house with a real little one,” Lorene says, “and Edwin don’t do a thing to help out.”

“Those big kids could help her a lot if they weren’t spoiled rotten,” Neva goes on. “I told her about that. You could see it coming as plain as the nose on your face. But you can’t tell Susie anything, she knows it all.”

“Edwin could have done worse,” Lorene remarks, and Neva says, “I guess so.”

“What do you mean, you spent the night at your friend’s house? You don’t have any friends. That’s a miserable lie,” cries Mrs. Bennett in Meadville. “Sandra, answer me.”

Sandra, a long-haired skinny teenager, rushes up a flight of stairs. Mrs. Bennett goes into the bathroom and takes a pill.

“If you give them an inch they take a mile,” Neva says to no one in particular. “OK, honey,” she says to Crystal, “now shut your eyes while I put this on.” Neva pulls on her rubber gloves and mixes up some terrible-smelling purple solution and spreads it over all the hair that the women have pulled through the cap.

“Can Crystal come out now?” Agnes is at the screen door sun-blinded, trying to see in.

“No, she can’t,” Lorene says. “She won’t be done for a long time. How long, Neva?”

“Depends on how fast she turns. Hour and a half, anyway. I’ve got to wash it and roll it up after this.”

“I can’t breathe,” Crystal says.

“Run along, Agnes. You can see Crystal after a while,” Lorene says just as Denny starts crying and she has to pick him up.

Agnes disappears and Lorene sits down in the rocker with Denny.

“
Anyway
,” Neva goes on, back to an earlier conversation they were having before Susie came in, ”don’t you breathe this to a soul, but they say you can hear her screaming every time you go around that curve at night, right by the big pine, that one with the split top was the one she crashed at.”

“I don’t believe a word of that,” Lorene says.

“What? What?” Crystal’s voice is muffled by the towel around her face.

“I’m just telling you what I heard. I’m not saying if it’s true or if it isn’t. But you know as well as I do, if you die in an upset frame of mind your spirit don’t just lie down.”

“Who?” Crystal asks.

“Nothing, honey,” Neva tells her, and takes Crystal over to the sink. “Turned out good,” she announces in a minute, fingering the squeaky pinkish strands of hair.

“Why, that looks awful!” Lorene almost drops the baby and he starts to cry again.

“Well, it’s got to have a toner on it,” Neva says. “It won’t look like anything till you get a toner on it.”

“What does it look like now?” Crystal asks.

“What did the doctor say?” Neva has pulled off the cap and now she’s washing Crystal’s hair, kneading the scalp with her knuckles, holding her head under the faucet. Neva nods her head at Grant’s closed door.

“Said there’s five stages of emphysema and he’s in the last part of number four,” Lorene answers, glad that the doctor came and went and that she has a big name to put to Grant’s illness now, whether it’s the right one or not.

“Lord, Lord,” Neva says.

“Who—Daddy?” Crystal tries to ask through the towel, but the women are watching TV because Karen is telling Gregory everything. Crystal thinks about that time in August two or three years ago, when her daddy took her over to the miniature golf course at Richlands and they played through windmills and castles and over lakes in the sun. Once Grant left his putter at the hole they had just finished playing. Crystal went to get it for him and came up behind him and said, “Here, catch,” real quick, and tossed it, and it clattered down to the green artificial grass while her father, all shaken and gray with surprise, cringed and mumbled something nobody could understand. Several people were staring at them. Crystal went and picked up the club and put it back nice into his hand.