Free Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories by Sharyn McCrumb

didn’t want to feel better, I wanted to get back at Anthony! By the end of the slow dance, Hampton and I were looking at each other with new interest: I was seeing an instrument for revenge, and he was seeing a five-foot-three-inch mound of fresh meat. When he suggested that we go for a walk in the arboretum, I didn’t even pretend to think it over.
    We left the party hand in hand and headed for the arboretum in silence; we still couldn’t think of anything tosay to each other. Hampton led me to a spot between two large azalea bushes that he apparently knew quite well, and we sat down on the wet ground. Fortunately it had stopped raining. At this point I considered mentioning my inexperience, but I decided to rely on dance etiquette: let him lead and do your best to keep up. What followed could best be compared to having a pelvic exam while someone blew beer and Lavoris fumes in your face. After a discreet interval—the time it took for Hampton to smoke one Benson & Hedges cigarette—he walked me back to my dorm. As we reached the front door, Hampton shuffled his feet awkwardly and mumbled: “I’ll call you.”
    “Yeah, sure,” I said. “Good night.” I didn’t offer to tell him my real name; I was inside and running up the stairs before he got to the edge of the porch.
    When I reached the third floor, the hall was dark and quiet—most everybody was in Vicki’s room and the door was half open. Confessions would be heard until one A.M. I hesitated outside her door for a moment, staring down the barrel of LBJ’s machine gun, and then I turned and walked off toward the lair of P. J. Purdue.
    There comes a time when you outgrow Vicki Baird.

A SNARE AS OLD AS SOLOMON

    F RANCHETTE BELTED HER car coat over her swollen belly and eased her way down the icy back steps. Ramer was still in the shed. Her breath made little puffs of smoke in the chill morning air as she stumbled down the path toward the road. She hurried as if she could still hear the cries coming from the crate out front, or the sound of the hatchet on the hen’s neck.
    She didn’t look back as she made for the dirt road beyond the trees. The crocuses she’d planted were beginning to put up green shoots. It was going to be an early spring, and that was good. Soon she wouldn’t have to worry about the pipes freezing, or about having to carry firewood in her condition, when Ramer went out drinking and left her alone. She couldn’t stop to look at the plants just now, or to check for deer tracks in the yard. She wished she could do something about the prisoner in the crate, but she couldn’t. She had left the kettle boiling on the stove, and the butcher knife laid out on the newspapers, just like Ramer had asked her to, but she had to get out of there.
    If she ignored the catch in her side, she could be around the bend to Della’s trailer in five minutes. Della worked the lunch shift at her uncle’s diner in town, so she’d be leaving soon. If Franchette said she had a doctor’s appointmenton account of the baby, Della would let her ride in to town with her for nothing. She couldn’t tell Della the real reason she wanted to go. Della’s man was living over across the river with a bleached blond dental assistant, and he never sent Della a cent for the kids or the payments on the Pontiac. Della would laugh and say that pregnant women always got fanciful, that Ramer was being protective like a man ought to be, and he was a heap better than some. Maybe he was being protective, but Franchette didn’t think so. She thought he was saving his own pride at the cost of hers. And the worst part was the way he’d done it. It was like the Bible story turned inside out, but she hadn’t seen that until today. Della couldn’t be made to understand. She’d say: “Ramer killed that old stray hen. So what?”
    It had been no use trying to talk about it to Ramer either. They had been married a year now, and already the talk had run out. Used to be, Ramer would