Free Black Mountain Breakdown by Lee Smith

seat.
    One Friday night, her aunts Grace and Nora appear at a football game, wildly out of place, to see Crystal cheer. They sit with Lorene. Mack Stiltner sits on the second row hunched over in an old red plaid shirt, smoking cigarettes and talking to some other wild boys, staring at her, and Roger Lee Combs makes a sixty-yard run. Crystal thinks she’s going to explode, but she doesn’t. Her color deepens and she jumps higher and higher and shakes her pom-poms wildly, and everyone says she’s the very best cheerleader of all.
    Crystal’s daddy is dying, but she doesn’t allow herself to realize this. He’s a lot like he has always been, only now he lies down all the time on his sofa. When Crystal comes in, he seems animated. When she’s not at home, he does nothing. Lorene’s brother the Reverend Garnett Sykes mounts a stiff campaign to talk to Grant, who refuses. The Reverend Sykes comes into the front room several times, butGrant turns his face to the wall. “Well, we can’t pray him into heaven, honey,” Garnett tells Lorene.
    Once when Crystal goes to see
Thunder Road
at the drive-in with Roger Lee Combs, she gets out of Roger Lee’s yellow Ford to go over to speak to Pearl Deskins, who is in another car, two cars away. It’s November now and cold at the drive-in, and a lot of people have their car heaters on so they can’t see the screen at all since their windows are all fogged up. Also, a lot of the drive-in speakers don’t even work, but there’s nothing much else to do in Black Rock on Saturday night. Roger Lee says wait a minute. He says he thinks Crystal ought to stay just where she is. “No,” says Crystal, “I want to talk to Pearl a minute,” and she crunches through the gravel and opens the front door on the shotgun side. Pearl’s date, some boy Crystal has never seen before, is sprawled out on the seat. Crystal can’t see very well in the dark. “Excuse me,” she says, “I was looking for Pearl Deskins.” “Shit,” says Pearl Deskins’s date. He fiddles around and then sits up, and then Pearl sits up, too, holding her dress up in front of her chest. In the pale light from the movie, Crystal sees Pearl’s white shoulders and back, and her hair all messed up. “Crystal,” says Pearl in a voice with no tone to it at all. She sounds like she’s only stating a fact. “Excuse me,” Crystal says, and shuts the door.
    She shivers in the cold air. Petting! It was all abstract before. Now she wants to know exactly what they do, how they go about it there in that foggy front seat. Crystal is in love with Roger Lee, of course, but they have never petted. Should they? Crystal can’t imagine how it would be with Roger Lee, how they would ever begin.
Petting
. Even theword is animal, all tied up with kittens and barnyards and goats. Nobody will respect you; Lorene has said it so many times. You’ve got to save yourself for Mr. Right.
    When Crystal gets back to Roger Lee’s car, she won’t talk to him at all. She doesn’t even thank him when he brings her a vanilla Coke, but sits huddled up on her side by the window. “What’s the matter?” asks Roger Lee, but Crystal isn’t talking. “Look at that,” he says when Robert Mitchum wrecks three state troopers in a row. Crystal won’t look. Roger Lee, not used to moodiness, is charmed. In the darkness of that drive-in, he falls in love. Even though Crystal won’t speak to him right now, he vows to make her happy for the rest of her life.
    Agnes wins the potato salad contest at the district level and goes on to compete in the state contest held at Longwood College in Farmville, Virginia, all the way across the state. She practices and practices. But she is disqualified in the final elimination because she fails to wear a hair net. “Unsanitary procedure,” rules a trio of snippy state judges, even though they eat big helpings of her potato salad. So Agnes comes back on the Greyhound bus with her mother. She is not so unhappy.