Sharyn McCrumb - Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories

“You’re teasing me!” Elissa protested.

“No. When somebody’s gone, you have to tell the bees they’re not coming back.”

Elissa shook her head. “There are some strange goings-on in your mountains,” she said.

Carl tucked one of the streamers away in the pocket of his jeans. He looked at her for a moment. “Well,” he said at last, “I guess I’d better start this fire.”

She answered the tone, rather than the words. “Carl! Are you angry with me?”

“Guess I’ll go out and gather up some leaves for kindling.” He started to get up.

“Carl! Please don’t go yet!” There was a catch in her voice, and she began to pace, not looking at him as she spoke. “I understand about your wanting me to see where you grew up and all, but I’m not used to this! I just didn’t know what to expect! I mean, you said cabin , but this isn’t like the cabins I’ve stayed in on ski trips! Carl, this is our honeymoon! I had to tell people we were going to Aspen, because how could I possibly explain that you wanted to come and stay in-this?”

He held another match to the sticks, concentrating on the feeble light in his hand.

“You dragged me up here and ruined my new boots-and for what? A shack with no water, no lights, and no heat!” She sat down on the arm of the sofa and sobbed. “I married an engineer, not a-a hillbilly!”

Carl watched the spark in the fireplace until it flickered out. “It’s all right, Elissa. We’ll leave in the morning. We’ll go wherever you want.”

She managed a moist smile. “Aspen?” she quavered.

“Sure. Aspen. Fine.”

“Oh, thank you, Carl! Things will be all right when we get back where we belong. You’ll see!”

He brushed off the legs of his pants. “I’ll go out and get those leaves now.”

“Do you want me to come along?”

“No. I won’t be long.”

He stood on the porch and looked at the quarter moon webbed in branches on the ridge until his eyes became accustomed to the dark. When the black shapes in the yard had rearranged themselves into familiar objects-a tree, a wagon wheel-he began to walk toward the back garden at the edge of the woods. Tomorrow he would stop at the farm and tell Whilden they were going. Maybe he’d send him something from California. Elissa would be all right when they got back. He pictured her at their glass-topped table pouring wine into Waterford goblets. She would be blond and tanned from a day of sailing, and she would tease him when he alternated Vivaldi and Ernest Tubb on the stereo. Elissa didn’t belong here, but… He tried to picture Roseanne Shull entertaining his engineer friends in the glass room over the Bay. It was time to go back.

He had reached the end of the garden. Glancing back at the cabin, Carl tried to remember how long he had been walking. Elissa would be impatient. It was time to gather the leaves and go back to her. He looked down at the abandoned beehive at his feet, the last of Uncle Mose’s collection. He had to go back. Pulling the black streamer from his pocket, he laid it gently on the box, and hurried away.

I SQUINTED BACK at the glass double door of Taylor High. Despite the glare of the afternoon sun and the glares of departing seniors, who kept jostling me back and forth as they passed, I saw Carol Lee’s grinning face in the doorway. She was twitching with excitement. I could tell by the way she was hugging her notebook as if it were a teddy bear and the way the ponytails over her ears bobbed up and down. She kept looking all around, obviously for me, so I prepared to be bored. By the time she fought her way through the crowd and reached the bottom step, I had an expression of utter disdain.

“Guess what, Elizabeth!” she said in tones of breathless excitement.

“I cannot imagine,” I said wearily. Trying to guess what Carol Lee Jenkins was excited about was always an exercise in futility. It could be anything from a B on a biology lab quiz to Neil Sedaka’s using her name in a song. (I kept telling her that she was not entitled to take “Oh! Carol” personally. Fat lot of good that did; she mooned over it for weeks.)

“There’s the cutest boy whose locker is right across from mine! I just noticed him.”

“Oh? Who is he?” I was only slightly curious.

“I don’t know. I think he’s a senior, though. He has the same lunch period as mine. I bumped into him after second period.”

I started to say “Accidentally?” and then thought better of it. Actually, I didn’t want to know. Encouraging Carol Lee only increases her intensity. Instead I said, “What does he look like?”

“Well, he’s kind of hard to describe, but he’s very cute. He has feathery brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses.”

“Incredible,” I said. She was too wound up to hear my sarcasm, but mentally I applauded my efforts.

“There he is. Coming out over there! Look! No-over there , stupid!”

I sniffed loudly and purposely stared in the opposite direction. “Good grief!” I hissed. “Do you have to point?”

“Look!” she pleaded.

I dutifully turned, expecting to see the president of the school or the star football player. Carol Lee was just idiotic enough to flip over somebody like that, but the object of her affections was not one of the school’s superstars. “You mean the one who’s bouncing?”

“Hey, yeah,” Carol Lee took only a moment to consider my description before she cheerfully agreed. “That’s exactly what it is: he’s bouncing.”

I’d never seen the boy with the weird gait before. I would have remembered that walk. He sort of loped along, bobbing up at every other step, like a rubber duck caught in the current of a bathtub drain. He was nice-looking in an ordinary kind of way: not too tall, not muscle-bound, definitely not a jock. He walked by himself, instead of surrounded by a clump of laughing madras-and-Weejun-clad companions, so he wasn’t one of the popular kids, into school politics and serious partying. All the candid shots in the yearbook seemed to be of the same eight people, laughing and posing prettily, with every hair in place, and he wasn’t one of them. He wore a plaid sport shirt and tan chinos, instead of a black turtleneck and black jeans, which meant that he wasn’t one of the “posturing poets for peace” crowd, either. I couldn’t place him in the rigid social hierarchy of Taylor High. He was just a guy who happened to be in school here.

I wondered what had made Carol Lee notice him in the first place. Of course, there is no telling what will attract Carol Lee to a guy; her affections are as random as tornadoes, and of similar duration. She likes to build souls for mysterious strangers; I suppose getting to know someone would spoil the effect. For one entire bewildering week in eighth grade, though, she actually had a crush on my brother Bill. Even she recognized the absurdity in that, and after a couple of chances to observe him closely, while she was visiting me, she gave it up. Bill would not notice someone flirting with him unless she used a flamethrower, and having lived a few doors down from him for most of her life, Carol Lee found it hard to fantasize about Bill as Mr. Wonderful. As I kept reminding her: she knew better.

I looked at her latest victim with clinical interest. Being a freshman, I knew by some sixth sense that the bouncer was definitely a senior, but despite that aura of upperclassman grandeur, he looked like a big kid. Except for the oversized glasses, he had a round cherub face and a pleasant, if absentminded, expression.

Just before he reached the square of sidewalk where we were standing, I dropped my eyes and gazed intently at a wad of chewing gum fossilized in the pavement. As soon as he was out of earshot, Carol Lee breathed rapturously into my ear, “He smiled at me, Elizabeth! He actually smiled at me.”