Sharyn McCrumb - Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories

The sheep killer was hurrying away now, but he was headed in my direction, and I thought, Risk it. What called your name, Rattler, wasn’t an owl . So just as he’s about to pass by, I stepped out at him, and said, “Hush now. You’ll scare the deer.”

He was startled into screaming, and he swung out at me with something that flashed silver in the moonlight. As I went down, he broke into a run, crashing through weeds, noisy enough to scare the deer across the state line-but the moonlight wasn’t bright enough for him to get far. He covered maybe twenty yards before his foot caught on a fieldstone, and he went down. I saw the sheriff closing distance, and I went to help, but I felt lightheaded all of a sudden, and my shirt was wet. I was glad it wasn’t light enough to see colors in that field. Red was never my favorite.

I opened my eyes and shut them again, because the flashing orange light of the rescue squad van was too bright for the ache in my head. When I looked away, I saw cold and dark, and knew I was still on Locust Ridge. “Where’s Spencer Arrowood?” I asked a blue jacket bending near me.

“Sheriff! He’s coming around.”

Spencer Arrowood was bending over me then, with that worried look he used to have when a big one hit his fishing line. “We got him,” he said. “You’ve got a puncture in your lung that will need more than herbal tea to fix, but you’re going to be all right, Rattler.”

“Since when did you get the Sight?” I asked him. But he was right. I needed to get off that mountain and get well, because the last thing I saw before I went down was the same scene that came to me when I first saw her get out of her car and walk toward my cabin. I saw what Evelyn Albright was going to do at the trial, with that flash of silver half hidden in her hand, and I didn’t want it to end that way.

THE FACE WAS a little blurry, but she was used to seeing it that way. She must have looked at it a thousand times in old magazines-grainy black-and-white shots, snapped by a magazine photographer at a nightclub; amateurish candid photos on the back of record albums; misty publicity stills that erased even the pores of his skin. She knew that face. A poster-sized version of it had stared down at her from beneath the high school banner on her bedroom wall, twenty-odd years ago. God, had it been that long? Now the face was blurry with booze, fatigue, and the sagging of a jawline that was no longer boyish. But it was still him, sitting in the bar, big as life.

Maggie used to wonder what she would do if she met him in the flesh. In the tenth grade she and Kathy Ryan used to philosophize about such things at slumber parties: “Why don’t you fix your hair like Connie Stevens’s?” “Which Man from U.N.C.L.E. do you like best?” “What would you do if you met Devlin Robey?” Then they’d collapse in giggles, unable even to fantasize meeting a real, live rock ’n’ roll singer. He lived a glamorous life of limousines and penthouse suites while they suffered through gym class, and algebra with Mrs. Cady. Growing up seemed a hundred years away.

When Maggie was a senior, she did get to see Devlin Robey. When you live on Long Island, sooner or later your prince will come. Everybody comes to the Big Apple. But the encounter was as distant and unreal as the airbrushed poster on her closet door. Devlin Robey was a shining blur glimpsed on a distant stage, and Maggie was a tiny speck in a sea of screaming adolescents. She and Kathy squealed and cried and threw paper roses at the stage, but it didn’t really feel like seeing him. He was a lot clearer on the television screen when she watched American Bandstand . After the concert, they had fought their way through a horde of fans to reach the stage door, only to be driven off by three thugs in overcoats-Mr. Robey’s handlers -while Devlin himself plowed his way through the throng to a waiting limousine, oblivious to the screams of protest in his wake.

They cried all the way home.

Maggie was so disillusioned by her idol’s callous behavior that she wrote him a letter, in care of his record company, complaining about how he let his fans be treated. She enclosed her ticket stub from the concert, and one of her wallet-size class pictures. A few weeks later, she received an autographed eight-by-ten of Devlin Robey, a copy of his latest album, and a handwritten apology on Epic Records notepaper. He said he was sorry to rush past them like that, but that he’d had to hurry back to the hotel to call his mother, who had been ill that night. He hoped that Maggie would forgive him for his thoughtlessness, and he promised to visit with his fans after concerts whenever he possibly could.

That letter was enough magic to keep Maggie going for weeks, and she played the album until it was scarred from wear. But eventually the wonder of it faded, and the memory, like the albums and the fan magazines, was packed away in tissue paper in the closet of her youth, while Maggie got on with her life.

She took business courses, and made mostly B’s. She thought she’d probably end up as a secretary somewhere after high school. It was no use thinking about college. Her parents didn’t have that kind of money, and if they had, they wouldn’t have spent it sending her off to get more educated. Since she’d just end up getting married anyway, her father reasoned, wasting her time and their savings on fancy schooling made no sense. Maggie wished she could have taken shop or auto mechanics like the guys did, but the guidance counselor had smiled and vetoed the suggestion. Home economics and typing-that’s what girls took. He was sure that Maggie would be happier in one of those courses, where she belonged. Now, sometimes, when the plumbing needed fixing or the toaster wouldn’t work, Maggie wished she had insisted on being allowed to take practical courses, so that she wouldn’t have to use the grocery money to pay repair bills. But it was no use looking back, she figured. What’s done is done.

The summer after high school, Maggie married Leon Holtz, who wasn’t as handsome as Devlin Robey, but he was real. He said he loved her, and he rented a sky blue tux and bought her a white gardenia corsage when he took her to the senior prom. There wasn’t any reason not to get married, that Maggie could see. Leon had a construction job in his uncle’s business, and she was a clerk at the Ford dealership, which meant nearly six hundred a month in take-home pay. They could afford a small apartment, and some furniture from Sofa City, so why wait? If Maggie had any flashes of pre-wedding jitters about happily-ever-after with Leon, or any lingering regrets at relinquishing dreams of some other existence, where one could actually know people like Devlin Robey-if she had misgivings about any of it, she gave no sign.

Richie was born fourteen months later. The marriage lasted until he was two. He was a round-faced, solemn child with his mother’s brown eyes, but he had scoliosis-which is doctor talk for crookback-so there were medical bills on top of everything else, and finally Leon, fed up with the confinement of wedded poverty, took off. Maggie moved to Manhattan, because she figured the pay would be better, especially if she forgot about being a clerk. She was just twenty-one then, and her looks were still okay.

After a couple of false starts, she got a job as a cocktail waitress in the Red Lion Lounge. She didn’t like the red velvet uniform that came to the top of her thighs, or the black net stockings she had to wear with it, but the tips were good, and Maggie supposed that the outfit had a lot to do with that. She was twenty-seven now. Sometimes, when her feet throbbed from spending six hours in spike heels and her face ached from smiling at jerks who like to put the make on waitresses, she’d think about the high school shop classes, wondering what life would have been like if she’d learned how to fix cars.