Crum

Chapter 1

3 Chapter 1 When I was growing up there, the population of Crum, West Virginia, was 219 human beings, two sub-humans, a few platoons of assorted dogs, at least one cat that I paid any attention to, a retarded mule and a very vivid image of Crash Corrigan. At first there were no whores, but later on I got to watch one in the Making. “Crum—unincorporated” the road sign said, at the edge of town. It should have said “unnecessary.” The place is located deep in the bowels of the Appalachians, on the bank of the Tug River, the urinary tract of the mountains. Across the flowing urine is Kentucky. Life in Crum was one gay, mad whirl of abject ignorance, emotions spilling over emotions, sex spilling over love, and sometimes blood spilling over everything. The Korean War happened to be going on at the time, but it was something being fought in another world and, besides, who really gave a damn about all those gooks anyway. Our boys could handle them. Or so they said in the beer gardens. And what the hell were gooks? I had never seen one. Or a nigger. Or a Jew. Or a wop. I had heard those names from some of the men who had been outside of West Virginia, working in the steel mills of Pittsburgh and the factories of Detroit. But I didn’t know what the names meant and I had never seen any of those people. During the winters in Crum the days were long, boring and cold, and during the summers the days were long, boring and hot. In Crum, only the temperature changed. The sad little town lay in a narrow valley, squeezed between the river and the hills, trapped before the floods, baked by the ancient heat of the mountains, awaiting each stagnant winter with all the patience , good looks and energy of a sloth. It was a collection of small 4 houses, an assemblage of shacks, a reflecting pond of tin roofs. The only paved highway into Crum came from downriver, from the general direction of Huntington. Actually, the road entered the valley by coming over the top of Bull Mountain, a dark and brooding hill that hung over the far ridge, closing off the valley. At the top of the hill the Mountaintop Beer Garden was penned between the ridge and the twisting road. Once past the beer garden, the road dropped into the valley like a dead snake. As soon as the road hit the valley floor it met the railroad tracks, a few miles downriver from the town. The two ran side by side from there on, seeming to be tied to each other, right through the middle of Crum and out the other end. The highway and the tracks stayed together until they were farther away from the town than any of us had ever ridden our bicycles. If you drove down the highway from Bull Mountain and kept on going through town, the highway and the tracks divided the town into the hillside on the left, and the valley floor, across the tracks to the right. At the beginning of town a narrow dirt lane led off the highway and crossed the tracks and then followed the rails closely all the way through town, recrossing the tracks at the far end. The few people who lived along the hillside used the paved highway to come and go. The folks who lived on the valley floor used the dirt lane, and the even smaller dirt lanes that left it and ran off between the houses in the general direction of the river. When the dirt lane first crossed the tracks on the way into Crum, it separated the tracks from the high school football field, with the school building sitting back across the field on the edge of the river bank. That school building was one of the first things you saw when you drove through Crum, and it was one of the places I always went when I was lonely. I could sit on the school steps and watch the cars go by—whenever there were any cars. And I could think about the 5 people in the cars and wonder where they were going. I wanted to find out. There were only a few houses along the hillside. Yvonne lived there, and so did Elvira...