Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories

by Sharyn McCrumb

  Carl realized that there was complete silence in the room. He had been asked a question. What was it? Oh, yes, had he liked the previous match arranged for him? Finally, he said, “No, I suppose it didn’t work out. That’s why I’m back.”

  The director set down the folder and stared across the desk with raised eyebrows and an unpleasant smile. “Didn’t work out. Oh, Mr. Wallin, you’re too modest. We think it did work out. Very well, indeed.”

  Carl kept his face carefully blank, wondering if it would look suspicious if he just got up and walked out. Slowly, of course, as if he couldn’t be bothered with such an inefficient business.

  Ms. Erinyes went on talking in her steady, slightly ironic voice. “Perhaps it’s time we revealed a little more about Matchmakers to you, Mr. Wallin. Most of the time, you see, we are just what we say we are: a dating service, matching up poor lonely souls who are too afraid of AIDS or con artists to pick up strangers on their own. People don’t want to risk their lives or their life savings in the search for love. So we provide a safe referral. Ninety-nine percent of the time that is all we do; ninety-nine percent of the time, that is quite sufficient. But sometimes it is not enough. Sometimes, Mr. Wallin, we get a wolf asking to be let loose among the sheep.”

  “Con men?”

  “Occasionally. We can usually spot them by their psychological profiles. And of course we do a criminal record check. I don’t believe I mentioned that to you.”

  “So what? I’ve never been arrested.”

  “Quite true. You are a different kind of danger to our little flock.” Carl shook his head, but Ms. Erinyes tapped his folder emphatically. “Oh, yes, you are, Mr. Wallin. Our questionnaires are carefully designed to screen out abnormal personalities, and we are very seldom mistaken.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with me,” said Carl. He wanted to walk out, but something about the fat lady’s stare transfixed him. She was a tough old bird. Like his grandmother.

  “There’s quite a bit wrong with you, I’m afraid. Not that we’re blaming you, necessarily, but on this particular scavenger hunt, you come up with every single item: abuse in childhood, alcoholism in the family, lower-middle-class background, illegitimacy, cruelty to animals. Oh dear, even a head injury. And the answers you gave on our test questions were chilling. I’m afraid that you are a psychopath with a dangerous hatred for women. There’s no cure for that, you know. It’s very sad indeed.”

  “What are you talking about?” said Carl. “I never-”

  “Just so,” said Ms. Erinyes, nodding. “You never had. We know that. We checked your criminal record quite thoroughly. But the tendency is there, and apparently it is only a matter of time before the rage in you builds up past all containment, and then-you strike. An unfortunate, unbeatable compulsion on your part, perhaps, but all the same, some poor innocent girl pays the price of your maladjustment. Usually quite a few innocent girls. Ted Bundy killed more than thirty before he was stopped. But how could we stop you? The deadly potential was there, but, as you pointed out, you had done nothing.”

  Carl glanced at the closed door that led to the receptionist’s office. Was anyone listening behind that door, waiting for him to make a fatal confession? He had to stay calm. He hadn’t been accused of anything yet. Besides, what could they prove with all this crap about psychology? There were no witnesses, no fingerprints. He had made sure of that. The girl had no friends. It had taken two days to find her body, and the police had no clue. Carl’s palms were sweating.

  The director had taken a piece of paper out of the manila folder labeled WALLIN, C. It was Carl’s drawing of the stick figure woman with no mouth. “Not a very attractive opinion of women, is it, Mr. Wallin? I’m afraid there’s no way to alter your mind-set, though. We could not cure you, but we had to stop you. That’s the dilemma: how do we prevent you from slaughtering a dozen trusting young women in your rage? That is always the difficult part-making the sacrifice, for the good of the majority. We don’t like doing it, but in cases like yours, there’s really no alternative. So, we found a match for you.”

  Carl sneered. “Her? Miss Mousy? I’m supposed to be a dangerous guy, and you pick her as my ideal woman?”

  “Precisely. It was not a love match, you understand. Far from it. Although, I suppose it was ‘till death do us part,’ wasn’t it?”

  Carl did not smile at this witticism. He thought of lunging across the desk, but Ms. Erinyes simply nodded toward the corner of the office, and he saw a video camera mounted near the ceiling. He had not noticed it before. Still, they had no evidence. Let the stupid woman talk.

  “It was definitely a match,” Ms. Erinyes was saying. “Just as we get the occasional killer for a client, we also get from time to time his natural mate: the victim. Patricia Bissel was, as you say, a mouse. Shy, indifferent in looks and intelligence-and, most important, she was suicidal. Her childhood was quite sad, too. It is unfortunate that you could not have comforted each other, but I’m afraid you were both past that by the time you met. Patricia Bissel wanted to die, perhaps without even being aware of it herself. Did she mention any of her accidents to you?”

  Carl shook his head.

  “She fell down the stairs once and broke her ankle. She ran her mother’s car into a tree, when she was sober, in daylight on a dry, well-paved road. Twice she has been treated for an overdose of medication, because-she said-she had forgotten how much she’d taken.”

  “She wanted to die?” said Carl.

  “She was quite determined, I’m afraid, and through her own fatal blunders, she would have managed it, or-worse-she would have found someone else to do it for her. If not a psychotic blind date picked up in a bar, then an abusive husband or a drunken boyfriend. Since the accidents had failed, but the suicidal impulses were still strong, we concluded that cringing, whining little Patricia was going to make someone a murderer. Why not you?”

  “Maybe she needed a doctor,” said Carl.

  “She’d had them. Years of therapy, all financed by her long-suffering mother. Medicine can’t cure everybody, Mr. Wallin. Nice of you to care, though.”

  Her sarcasm was evident now. Carl’s eyes narrowed. He was beginning to feel himself losing control of the interview. The tension was seeping back into his muscles, knotting his stomach, and making him sweat more profusely. “You can’t prove a thing, lady!”

  Ms. Erinyes’s sigh seemed to convey her pity for anyone who could be so obtuse. “Did our brochure not assure you that we had years of experience, Mr. Wallin? Years.” She withdrew a half-letter-size envelope from his folder, and took out a stack of photographs. “We are not a shoestring operation, Mr. Wallin. You have been observed by a number of Matchmaker employees, who took care that you should not see them. Here is a nice telephoto shot of you entering Patricia Bissel’s apartment building. A concealed camera snapped this one of you knocking on the door of her apartment. Didn’t the number come out clearly? And there are the two of you in the doorway, together for the first and last time.”

  Carl stuck out his hand, as if to make a grab for the pictures.

  “Why, Mr. Wallin, how rude of me. Would you like this set of prints? The negatives and several other copies are, of course, elsewhere. You do look nice in this one. No? All right, then. Where was I? Oh, yes, the police. So far they have no leads in the Bissel case, but I think that if pointed in the right direction-your direction, that is-they could find some evidence to connect you to the murder.”

  Carl had the closet feeling again. He knew that he must be a good boy and sit quietly, or else the feeling would never go away. “What are you going to do?” he asked in his most polite voice.

  Ms. Erinyes put the pictures back in the envelope and slid it into Carl’s folder. “Ah, Mr. Wallin, there’s the question. What shall we do? We’ve spent the past week looking into your background, and there is no doubt that you have had a rough life. Your grandmother-well, let’s just say that some of your rage is entirely understandable. And it’s true that Patricia
was self-programmed to die. So for now, we will do nothing.”

  Carl exhaled in a long sigh of relief. He could feel his muscles relaxing.

  The director shook her head. “It’s not that simple, Mr. Wallin. You understand, of course, that this cannot continue. You have no right to take the lives of people who don’t want to die. So we will keep the evidence, and we will watch you. If you ever strike again, I assure you that you will be caught immediately.”

  Carl returned her stern gaze with an expressionless stare. The director seemed to understand. “Oh, no, Mr. Wallin, you won’t try to harm any of us here at the dating service. For you, it has to be passive, powerless women.”

  She stood up to indicate that the interview was over. “Well, I think that’s all. You won’t be coming here again, but we will keep in touch. You were one of our greatest successes, Mr. Wallin.”

  Carl blinked. “What do you mean?”

  “You were going to be a serial killer, but we have stopped you. Oh-one last thing. We will keep your description in the active file of our computer. If anyone should come in with your particular problem-the urge to kill-and you happen to fit his or her victim profile…” She shrugged. “Who knows? You may find yourself matched up again.”

  OLD RATTLER

  SHE WAS A city woman, and she looked too old to want to get pregnant, so I reckoned she had hate in her heart.

  That’s mostly the only reasons I ever see city folks: babies and meanness. Country people come to me right along, though, for poultices and tonics for the rheumatism, to go dowsing for well water on their land, or to help them find what’s lost, and such like, but them city folks from Knoxville, and Johnson City, and from Asheville, over in North Carolina-the skinny ones with their fancy colorless cars, talking all educated, slick as goose grease-they don’t hold with home remedies or the Sight. Superstition, they call it. Unless you label your potions “macrobiotic,” or “holistic,” and package them up fancy for the customers in earth-tone clay jars, or call your visions “channeling.”

  Shoot, I know what city folks are like. I coulda been rich if I’d had the stomach for it. But I didn’t care to cater to their notions, or to have to listen to their self-centered whining, when a city doctor could see to their needs by charging more and taking longer. I say, let him. They don’t need me so bad nohow. They’d rather pay a hundred dollars to some fool boy doctor who’s likely guessing about what ails them. Of course, they got insurance to cover it, which country people mostly don’t-diem as makes do with me, anyhow.

  “That old Rattler,” city people say. “Holed up in that filthy old shanty up a dirt road. Wearing those ragged overalls. Living on Pepsis and Twinkies. What does he know about doctoring?”

  And I smile and let ’em think that, because when they are desperate enough, and they have nowhere else to turn, they’ll be along to see me, same as the country people. Meanwhile, I go right on helping the halt and the blind who have no one else to turn to. For I will restore health unto thee, and I will heal thee of thy wounds, saith the Lord. Jeremiah 30. What do I know? A lot. I can tell more from looking at a person’s fingernails, smelling their breath, and looking at the whites of their eyes than the doctoring tribe in Knoxville can tell with their high-priced X rays and such. And sometimes I can pray the sickness out of them and sometimes I can’t. If I can’t, I don’t charge for it-you show me a city doctor that will make you that promise.

  The first thing I do is, I look at the patient, before I even listen to a word. I look at the way they walk, the set of the jaw, whether they look straight ahead or down at the ground, like they was waiting to crawl into it. I could tell right much from looking at the city woman-what she had wrong with her wasn’t no praying matter.

  She parked her colorless cracker box of a car on the gravel patch by the spring, and she stood squinting up through the sunshine at my corrugated tin shanty (I know it’s a shanty, but it’s paid for. Think on that awhile). She looked doubtful at first-that was her common sense trying to talk her out of taking her troubles to some backwoods witch doctor. But then her eyes narrowed, and her jaw set, and her lips tightened into a long, thin line, and I could tell that she was thinking on whatever it was that hurt her so bad that she was willing to resort to me. I got out a new milk jug of my comfrey and chamomile tea and two Dixie cups, and went out on the porch to meet her.

  “Come on up!” I called out to her, smiling and waving most friendly-like. A lot of people say that rural mountain folks don’t take kindly to strangers, but that’s mainly if they don’t know what you’ve come about, and it makes them anxious, not knowing if you’re a welfare snoop or a paint-your-house-with-whitewash con man, or the law. I knew what this stranger had come about, though, so I didn’t mind her at all. She was as harmless as a buckshot doe, and hurting just as bad, I reckoned. Only she didn’t know she was hurting. She thought she was just angry.

  If she could have kept her eyes young and her neck smooth, she would have looked thirty-two, even close-up, but as it was, she looked like a prosperous, well-maintained forty-four-year-old, who could use less coffee and more sleep. She was slender, with natural-like brownish hair-though I knew better-wearing a khaki skirt and a navy top and a silver necklace with a crystal pendant, which she might have believed was a talisman. There’s no telling what city people will believe. But she smiled at me, a little nervous, and asked if I had time to talk to her. That pleased me. When people are taken up with their own troubles, they seldom worry about anybody else’s convenience.

  “Sit down,” I said, smiling to put her at ease. “Time runs slow on the mountain. Why don’t you have a swig of my herb tea, and rest a spell. That’s a rough road if you’re not used to it.”

  She looked back at the dusty trail winding its way down the mountain. “It certainly is,” she said. “Somebody told me how to get here, but I was positive I’d got lost.”

  I handed her the Dixie cup of herb tea, and made a point of sipping mine, so she’d know I wasn’t attempting to drug her into white slavery. They get fanciful, these college types. Must be all that reading they do. “If you’re looking for old Rattler, you found him,” I told her.

  “I thought you must be.” She nodded. “Is your name really Rattler?”

  “Not on my birth certificate, assuming I had one, but it’s done me for a raft of years now. It’s what I answer to. How about yourself?”

  “My name is Evelyn Johnson.” She stumbled a little bit before she said Johnson. Just once I wish somebody would come here claiming to be a Robinson or an Evans. Those names are every bit as common as Jones, Johnson, and Smith, but nobody ever resorts to them. I guess they think I don’t know any better. But I didn’t bring it up, because she looked troubled enough, without me trying to find out who she really was, and why she was lying about it. Mostly people lie because they feel foolish coming to me at all, and they don’t want word to get back to town about it. I let it pass.

  “This tea is good,” she said, looking surprised. “You made this?”

  I smiled. “Cherokee recipe. I’d give it to you, but you couldn’t get the ingredients in town-not even at the health-food store.”

  “Somebody told me that you were something of a miracle worker.” Her hands fluttered in her lap, because she was sounding silly to herself, but I didn’t look surprised, because I wasn’t. People have said that for a long time, and it’s nothing for me to get puffed up about, because it’s not my doing. It’s a gift.

  “I can do things other folks can’t explain,” I told her. “That might be a few logs short of a miracle. But I can find water with a forked stick, and charm bees, and locate lost objects. There’s some sicknesses I can minister to. Not yours, though.”

  Her eyes saucered, and she said, “I’m perfectly well, thank you.”

  I just sat there looking at her, deadpan. I waited. She waited. Silence.

  Finally, she turned a little pinker, and ducked her head. “All right,” she whispered, like it hurt. “I’m not perfect
ly well. I’m a nervous wreck. I guess I have to tell you about it.”

  “That would be best, Evelyn,” I said.

  “My daughter has been missing since July.” She opened her purse and took out a picture of a pretty young girl, soft brown hair like her mother’s, and young, happy eyes. “Her name is Amy. She was a freshman at East Tennessee State, and she went rafting with three of her friends on the Nolichucky. They all got separated by the current. When the other three met up farther downstream, they got out and went looking for Amy, but there was no trace of her. She hasn’t been seen since.”

  “They dragged the river, I reckon.” Rock-studded mountain rivers are bad for keeping bodies snagged down where you can’t find them.

  “They dragged that stretch of the Nolichucky for three days. They even sent down divers. They said even if she’d got wedged under a rock, we’d have something by now.” It cost her something to say that.

  “Well, she’s a grown girl,” I said, to turn the flow of words. “Sometimes they get an urge to kick over the traces.”

  “Not Amy. She wasn’t the party type. And even supposing she felt like that-because I know people don’t believe a mother’s assessment of character-would she run away in her bathing suit? All her clothes were back in her dorm, and her boyfriend was walking up and down the riverbank with the other two students, calling out to her. I don’t think she went anywhere on her own.”

  “Likely not,” I said. “But it would have been a comfort to think so, wouldn’t it?”

  Her eyes went wet. “I kept checking her bank account for withdrawals, and I looked at her last phone bill to see if any calls were made after July sixth. But there’s no indication that she was alive past that date. We put posters up all over Johnson City, asking for information about her. There’s been no response.”