Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories

FOGGY MOUNTAIN BREAKDOWN

THAT AFTERNOON THE Haskell girls came by collecting money for a funeral wreath. Davy gave them a nickel and ten pennies from the baking powder can in the pantry. Mama would probably have given them a quarter, since Dad was working a couple of days a week at the railroad shop now, but she was visiting over at the Kesslers, talking about the accident. All the mothers in the community would be talking about the tragedy, with their eyes red from crying, because, as the preacher said, death is always a pang of sorrow no matter who is taken, but sooner or later, every one of them would say, “It might have been my boy.” It wasn’t one of their boys, though; it was Junior Mullins. Fifteen cents was enough for Junior Mullins, Davy thought.

The money collected from the twenty-three families living back in the hollow of Foggy Mountain would be enough for a decent bunch of store-bought flowers from the shop in Erwin. One of the Haskell girls would write every family’s name on the card to be given to Junior’s parents. There would probably be bigger, fancier wreaths from Mr. Mullins’s fellow managers at the railroad, maybe even one from the president of the railroad himself, considering the circumstances, but the neighbors would want to send one anyway, to show that their thoughts and prayers were with the family in this time of sorrow.

Davy was still in mourning for his bicycle. Nobody was collecting flowers for it. Two dollars it had cost. Two dollars earned in solitary misery with sweat and briar-pricks, picking blackberries in the abandoned fields, and selling them door to door at ten cents a gallon. It takes a lot of blackberries to make a gallon. Getting two dollars’ worth of dimes had cost Davy two precious weeks of summer-two weeks of working most of the day dragging a gallon bucket through the briars, sidestepping snakes and poison oak, while everybody else went swimming or played ball at the old gravel pit. Two weeks without candy, soda pop, or Saturday matinees.

Saturday afternoons were the hardest. Davy would be alone in a field of brambles, so hot that the air was wavy when you looked into the distance, with the mountains shutting him in like the green walls of an open air prison. Somewhere on the other side of that ridge, his friends were having fun. Hour after hour he stooped over blackberry thickets, and to keep his mind off his sore back and his stuck fingers he’d try to imagine what was playing at the picture show. The cowboys, like Buck Jones or Tom Mix and his horse Tony, were his favorite, but he went every Saturday he could afford, no matter what was playing. When you’re eleven years old and home seems duller than ditch water, anything on the screen is better than real life. You had to want something real bad to miss the movies on account of it. Right now the movie house was showing Hills of Peril: Buck Jones helps a young woman save her gold mine from outlaws. The pictures were silent, but the dialogue was printed on cards that were projected onto the screen. Davy reckoned most of the boys in the county had learned more about reading at the picture show than they had in the schoolhouse. At Saturday matinees, with all those boys reading the lines out loud as they flashed on the screen, the theater hummed with a steady drone that sounded like the Johnsons’ beehives at swarm time.

Davy’d missed most of the Phantom serial. He’d had to make do with a summary of the story from Johnny Suttle, who forgot bits of the story and kept repeating the parts he liked. But Davy didn’t care. There’d be other movies, and his reward for missing this one was his very own bicycle. He had done it.

His hard-earned two dollars bought one bicycle frame with no accessories: no tires, no brakes, no pedals. He had made tires for the wheels himself, with a little help from Old Lady Turner’s yard. She had never missed that twelve feet of red rubber garden hose, and the tires he made from them were the perfect width and strength for the homemade bike. He’d caught hell, though, for cutting Mama’s clothesline and taking the galvanized wire to run through the four lengths of garden hose so that he could fasten them around the wheel rims. The beating he got for taking the clothesline had been worth it, though. Now he was riding.

Davy’s two-dollar bike had cast-off railroad spikes for pedals, and the Morris coaster brakes didn’t work, but that didn’t matter. He was riding. Dad had brought home an almost-empty can of blue paint from one of the railroad shops, and Davy had painted his bike so that from a distance it looked almost store-bought.

Up and down the gravel pit he wheeled and turned, dipping into the chug-holes and jumping out on the far side high enough to clear an upright Quaker Oats box set there as an obstacle. If he needed to stop the bike, he pressed his foot on the front wheel. That worked fairly well for solitary riding, but when he wanted to get into the bicycle polo games in Wells’s pasture, he needed something more reliable.

Bicycle polo was played with an old softball and croquet mallets that one of the boys had scrounged from somebody’s trash pile. They would divide up into teams and race up and down the pasture on their bikes, swatting at the softball. You needed brakes, though, to keep from crashing into your teammates, or so that you could change directions suddenly when the ball was intercepted by the other team and swatted off in the other direction. After a few hours of tinkering, he had repaired the Morris coaster brakes with a brake drum fashioned from a Coca-Cola bottle cap. After two or three hours of hard riding, the cap would grind up, leaving him brakeless again, but by then the polo game would be over, and he could go home and make repairs for the next match.

He had been able to hold his own just fine on his jerry-rigged bike-that is, until Junior Mullins showed up for the game, riding piggyback on Charlie Bestor’s motorcycle. Davy thought Junior and Charlie were two of a kind: big arrogant bully, little arrogant bully. Charlie was a high school senior who had been going to ROTC Camp at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, every summer. On the last trip he had brought home the motorcycle, and now he roared up and down the paved roads, promising his toadies rides on his motorcycle, and lording it over every other boy around.

Junior Mullins was the kind of big, loud kid that other boys hate but nobody stands up to. His father was a manager down at the railroad, working steady, so Junior had clothes that weren’t hand-me-downs, and meat sandwiches and an apple or an orange in his lunch box, while everybody else had corn bread and a cold potato. Junior Mullins had a store-bought bike, a shiny red one, brand-new, that his dad had bought in Johnson City for his birthday. Junior thought that he was better than the other boys in the neighborhood because his father was the boss of everybody else’s father, because the Mullins family lived in a brick house, and because Junior got a toy truck and a model airplane for Christmas, instead of just an orange, a stick of rock candy, and a new pair of shoes. Junior enforced his superiority with the ruthless cruelty of a ten-year-old tyrant. His weapons were scorn, derision, taunting, and, as a last resort, his fists. Davy tried to stay out of his way, and most of the time he succeeded, but nobody could escape Junior Mullins’s notice forever.

Davy’s turn came in Wells’s pasture, when Junior Mullins showed up just as the boys were starting a game of polo. Charlie Bestor stopped the motorcycle a few yards away from the group, and Junior climbed down, his red face curled into its usual sneer. He was wearing a pair of blue dungarees without a single patch on them and a leather jacket. “You babies still riding bikes?” he said. “We’ve got a real set of wheels.” He jerked his thumb toward the motorcycle.

Charlie Bestor patted his motorcycle and called out, “You fellows want to race?”

Johnny Suttle scuffed the toe of his shoe in the dirt. “We were just fixing to play polo,” he mumbled.

Junior Mullins hooted. “Hear that, Charlie? They were fixing to play polo! You sissies don’t know how to play polo,” he announced, swaggering over to the gaggle of bikers. “I reckon I’ll just have to teach you.”

“You can’t play without a bike,” Dewey Givens pointed out. As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he wished he hadn’t said them, because Junior’s face lit up with spiteful glee, and he stepped back to survey the taut faces of his victims. He was showing off for his big-shot friend now, which would make him more vicious than ever. He let the boys squirm in silence while he pretended to consider the matter.

“I believe you’re right about that, Dewey,” Junior said at last. “Yep. I got to agree with you. I sure can’t play polo without no bike, now can I? I reckon I’ll just have to borrow me one.” He surveyed the knot of squirming boys, each one carefully looking anywhere except in Junior Mullins’s face.

When he couldn’t stand the suspense anymore, Davy spoke up. “You could go home and get yours,” he said.

Even Charlie Bestor laughed at that. Everybody knew that Junior Mullins wouldn’t risk scratching up his brand-new bike in a rough-and-tumble game like polo, where crashing your bike into the other players’ mounts was inevitable. All the other boys had beat-up second-hand bikes, or scrounged homemade ones. His was store-bought, too good for the likes of them. Junior grinned at Davy. “No. I think I’ll just borrow one,” he said. He eyed the polished blue bike at Davy’s side. “Yours is new, isn’t it? You make it yourself?”

Davy nodded, proud of himself, despite the threat of Junior Mullins, looming within punching distance and sneering at him like he was a night crawler in a fishing bucket. Junior made a great show of examining Davy’s bike, inspecting the garden-hose tires, the flawless paint job, the Coca-Cola cap brakes. Maybe he’ll see how much pride I took in it, and he’ll leave it be, Davy thought, hoping that respect would win him what mercy could not.

“Nice job,” drawled Junior, fingering the railroad-spike pedals. He glanced back to make sure that Charlie Bestor was watching. “For a homemade bike, that is. It looks sturdy enough. I guess I’ll try it out for you so we can see what kind of job you did.”

Davy gripped the handlebars tighter. “You’re too big for it, Junior,” he said. “You’d break it”

Junior’s face turned a deeper shade of red. He was a stocky boy, verging on fat, and he didn’t like comments about his size, however innocuously intended. He jerked the bike out of Davy’s hands. “We’ll just have to risk it, won’t we. I’ve got a polo match to play.” He snatched up a croquet mallet, hoisted his bulk onto the smaller boy’s bicycle, and teetered off into the center of the pasture. “Let’s get this show on the road!” he yelled to the other boys.

One by one they wheeled their bikes onto the playing field. Some of them gave Davy a look of apology or commiseration as they went past, but Davy didn’t care what the other boys thought of Junior or how sorry they were that he had been singled out as victim. He wanted his bike, and nobody was going to help him get it back. If he tried to fight Junior on his own, he would end up with a bloody nose and a torn shirt, and Junior would destroy the bike.

He stood on the sidelines with clenched fists, watching as the teams pedaled up and down the pasture, swatting the softball back and forth. Above the thwack of the wooden mallets hitting the ball, and the shouts of the players, Davy thought he could hear the creaking of his overloaded bike. Junior Mullins was playing with a vengeance, going out of his way to collide with the other boys, whether they were close to the ball or not. He seemed to have no interest in scoring goals or in affecting the outcome of the game. For Junior the polo match was an excuse to hit something. Davy winced at every crash, thinking of the dents Junior was putting in the bike, and the scratches scoring the new paint job. A few yards away Charlie Bestor leaned his motorcycle against a tree and watched the game with the wry amusement of a superior being, sometimes shouting encouragement to Junior, and egging him on to more reckless playing.

After nearly an hour Junior tired of the game. He threw Davy’s bike down in the weeds at the far end of the pasture, and loped back to Charlie Bestor’s motorcycle. “Let’s get out of here!” he said. “It’s no fun playing with this bunch of babies.”

As Junior climbed into the saddle behind the grinning Charlie Bestor, he called out to Davy, “Nice bike! Maybe I’ll try it again sometime.”

It was more than a threat. It was a promise.

Davy waited until the motorcycle roared out of sight, over the railroad track, and around the first curve, and then he hurried across the field to inspect the damage to his bike. The other boys hung back. One by one they drifted away from the pasture, and Davy was alone.

He reached into the briar-laced grass and pulled on the handlebars to his bike. After a few tugs, he was able to jerk it free. He set it down in the dirt, and ran his fingers along the shredded length of garden hose that had been the front tire. The frame was scratched and dented, and the handlebars were twisted out of alignment where the collisions and Junior’s weight had combined to over-stress the metal. Long gashes scarred the bike’s paintwork, and the battered brakes needed much more than a bottle cap to repair them. Davy wheeled his wrecked creation home, across the empty pasture, half carrying it across the rocky creek, picking his way along the rougher parts of the path. Davy’s face was pinched, and his jaw was set tighter than a bulldog’s, but his eyes had a faraway look as if he was somewhere other than the road to Foggy Mountain. He never once cried.

No one saw Davy from that Saturday until the next. Nobody stopped by to see how he was doing, because they knew how he was doing, and there wasn’t anything anybody could say. Best to let him be for a while. He’d come back when he was over it, and things would go on as before.

Davy stayed in the smokehouse in the backyard, working as long as it was light. He scrounged, and tinkered, and sanded, and hammered, and painted, and tinkered some more, until the bike looked almost the way it had before. It would never be as good, of course. He couldn’t get the handlebars completely straight, and the deeper scars showed through the new paint job, but the bike was fixed. It had brakes again. He could ride it.

When Mama asked him what happened to his bike, Davy told her that he’d tried to take it down too steep a hill, and that he’d wrecked on a hidden tree root. She had looked at him for a long minute, as if she was fixing to say more, but finally she shrugged and went back into the house. There wasn’t any point in telling his folks about Junior Mullins, whose dad was a boss down at the railroad shop. No point at all.

He practiced riding the bike on Friday night, up and down the road in front of the house until the fireflies lit up the yard and Mama called him in. He found that he could maneuver pretty well. With a few minor adjustments the bike would be ready to go.

On Saturday morning he set off early, before Dad could catch him with a list of chores or Mama could set him to work weeding the corn. His sneakers were still damp from dew when he heard shouting from up the dirt road past the quarry. He found the gang at the usual congregating place, Wells’s pasture. This time, though, no game was in progress. Five boys had pulled their bikes into a circle, and now they were arguing about what to do on a long Saturday morning. Davy looked at them: Johnny Suttle, Dewey Givens, Jack Howell, Bob Miller, and Junior Mullins. Davy walked his bike across the expanse of field, and slid silently into place between Johnny and Bob.

“Polo is a sissy game!” Junior was saying.

This declaration was followed by a doubtful silence. The younger boys looked at one another. Finally Bob Miller said, “How ’bout we jump potholes in the quarry?”

“How ’bout we jump potholes in the quarry?” said Junior, changing his voice to a mocking whine.

More silence.

“Anybody want to play pony express?” said Junior. “Or are you boys too yellow?”

Johnny Suttle whistled. “Chase a freight train on our bikes? My mama would skin me alive if she found out I was doing that.”

Several of the others grunted in agreement.

“How’s she going to find out?” said Junior.

“When I come home with my bike all tore up,” said Johnny.

Junior shrugged. “Not if you do it right. The only tricky part is when you grab onto the ladder of the boxcar and kick the bike away. But if we find a place where there’s a grassy slope alongside the track, it shouldn’t hurt the bike too much when it falls down the embankment.

“It’s dangerous,” said Davy softly.

“I’ve done it before,” said Junior. “It’s a great ride. When the freight train slows down to take the curve, you catch up to it, swing up on the ladder, and ride the rails until you find a nice soft jumping-off place. Don’t tell me you sissies have never tried it?”

Junior looked at each one in turn, daring somebody to admit he was scared. The five Foggy Mountain boys stared back, wide-eyed, and redder than their sunburns, but nobody objected and nobody looked away.

“It’s settled then,” said Junior. “I know just the place.”

The five boys followed him out to the dirt road, riding slowly along in single file up the hill until they reached the place where the railroad tracks crossed the road. Junior led the way on his store-bought red beauty, sitting tall in the saddle and signaling with an outstretched forearm, as if he were a cavalry officer in the matinee.

“We’ll follow the tracks to the right!” he shouted to his troops.

They turned on command and dismounted, wheeling their bikes along the gravel shoulder of the railroad tracks, while Junior inspected the terrain. “We need a long straightaway where we can build up speed, but it has to be just after a curve, so that the train will be slow enough for us to catch up with it.”

Nobody bothered to answer him. He was thinking out loud.

Johnny Suttle, following close behind Davy, was bringing up the rear. “He’s not looking at the embankment like he said he would. He’s not looking for a grassy place. There’s rocks all the way down this slope.”

“He doesn’t care,” said Davy.

They both knew why.

The solemn procession followed the tracks up the steep grade that would send the train up and over the mountain in a series of spirals. The fields below glistened green in the July sunshine, and the Nolichucky River sparkled as brightly as the railroad tracks that ran alongside it for the length of the valley. Here the gravel berm was two feet wide, and just beyond it the ground fell away into a steep slope of clay and loose rocks.

Johnny Suttle touched Davy’s arm. “We could turn back,” he said.

Davy shook his head. You couldn’t chicken out on a dare. That was part of the code. If you showed that you were afraid, you were out of the group, and Junior Mullins would hunt you like a rabbit from there on out.

They trudged on, past two more curves that Junior judged unsuitable for their purpose, and then they rounded the sharpest curve, midway up the mountain, and saw that there was nearly a hundred yards of straightaway before the tracks started up another incline. Junior turned and nodded, pointing to the ground. “Here!”

It was a good place. There was a thicket of tall laurels on the edge of the embankment that would hide them from the view of the engineer. Once the locomotive hurtled past their hiding place, they could give chase, and they had a hundred yards to build up speed and grab for the boxcar ladder.

Junior motioned the pack under the laurels. “Should be a freight train along any minute now,” he said, squinting up at the sun. He had sweated so much that his shirt stuck to his back, making the bulges show even more. He wiped his brow with a sweaty forearm, and surveyed the track. “This will do,” he said. “There’s just one more thing.” He set his red bicycle carefully against the trunk of the laurel, and stared at the gaggle of boys. He was grinning.

Everybody looked away except Davy.

“I’ll need to borrow a bike.”

“I just fixed mine,” said Davy quietly. He wasn’t pleading or whining about it, just stating a fact that ought to be taken into consideration.

“That’s real good,” said Junior. “I’m glad you got it working again. I wouldn’t want to borrow no sorry bike.” He gripped the newly repaired bike with one hand, and shoved Davy out of the way with the other. “You can watch, kid,” he said.

Davy shrugged. It wouldn’t do any good to argue with Junior Mullins. Things went his way or not at all. Everybody knew that. Complaining about the unfairness of his action would only get Davy labeled a crybaby.

Johnny Suttle looked at the railroad track, and then at his own battered bicycle. “Here, Junior. Why don’t you take mine?”

“That beat-up old thing? Naw. I want a nice blue one. I’m kinda used to Davy’s anyhow.”

Davy knelt down in the shade of the laurels next to Junior’s bike. “Okay,” he said.

Junior stepped forward, ready with another taunt, but a faint sound in the distance made him stop. They listened for the low whine, echoing down the valley, a long way off.

Train whistle.

“Okay,” said Junior, turning away as if Davy were no longer there. “Mount up, boys. I lead off. You wait till the coal car has gone past us, and then you count to five, and you start riding. Got that? When you get up alongside the boxcar, grab the ladder with both hands, and pull yourself up off the saddle. Then kick the bike away with both feet. Got it?”

They nodded. Another blast of the train whistle made them shudder.

“Won’t be long now,” said Junior.

It seemed like an eternity to Davy before the rails shook and the air thickened with the clatter of metal wheels against track, and finally the black steam locomotive thundered into view. They hunkered down under the laurels, close enough to see the engineer’s face, and to feel the gush of wind as the train swept past.

“Now!” screamed Junior above the roar. He took a running start out of the hiding place, and leaped onto Davy’s bike in midstride, pedaling furiously in an effort to stay even with the train. The other boys climbed onto their own mounts and sped off after him, whooping like the marauding Indians who attacked trains in the Buck Jones westerns down in the movie house.

Davy watched them go.

Junior kept the lead, leaning almost flat across the handlebar in a burst of speed that kept pace with the rumbling freight train. Fifty yards across the straightaway, he was nearly even with the ladder on the third boxcar.

What happened next seemed to take place in slow motion. The homemade bike seemed to pull up short, and wobble back and forth for one endless, frozen moment. Then, before Junior could scream or anyone else could blink, the bike crumpled and pitched to the left. It, and Junior, vanished beneath the wheels of the train. To Davy, despite the thunderous clatter of the boxcars, it all seemed to happen in perfect silence.

The oldest Haskell girl lingered in the doorway. She fingered the collection can with the words JUNIOR MULLINS printed in black capitals around the side. The funeral was tomorrow. Closed casket, they said. “You were there when it happened, weren’t you?” she said.

Davy nodded.

She leaned in so close to him that he could see her pores and smell the mint on her breath. “What was it like?” she whispered.

“He just fell.”

“I hear you couldn’t even tell who he was-after.”

“No.” The bike was unrecognizable, too. Just a tangle of metal caught underneath the boxcar and dragged another fifty yards down the track. Dad had told him how the workmen cut the bits of it away from the underside of the train. Out of consideration for the Mullins family, they hosed it down before they threw it in the scrap heap.

“You won’t be getting it back,” his father said. “Seems a shame, you losing your friend and your bike, too. It was a good bike. I know you worked a long time on it.”

Davy nodded. He had worked a long time. He had built it twice, almost from scratch, and he had been proud of it. On the night before the pony express game, the last thing he had done was to file through one link of the bicycle chain, so that when any stress was put on it, the chain would break, throwing the bike off balance.

“It’s all right, Dad,” said Davy. “It’s all right.”