Breakheart Hill

CHAPTER 3

IT IS LUKE’S VOICE THAT HAS FORMED THE CONTRAPUNTAL rhythm of my life, and so it is fitting that he was with me on the day Kelli Troy appeared again.

It was the last weekend of the summer before my sophomore year, and the two of us had gone to the town park for a game of tennis.

It seems strange to me now that Luke and I ever became friends. He was a year older, tall, well built and athletic, while I was much smaller, somewhat bookish and not in the least inclined toward sports. His nature was open and expansive, mine much more closed and guarded. Perhaps, in the end, that was what drew him to me in the first place, the feeling that he might be able to open me up a little, a labor which, once begun, has not ended to this day.

“You’re pretty tough for a little guy” were the first words he said to me. It was after I’d gotten into a scrape with Carter Dillbeck, a large, ill-tempered boy who’d tried to take my turn at bat.

I was a freshman at Choctaw High that year, and I was on the softball field during PE, unenthusiastically Standing at home plate, ready to take my turn, when Carter stormed up from behind me and yanked the bat from my hands.

“Get back, squirt,” he said as he pushed me away and stepped up to the plate to take my turn.

I had no love for softball, and certainly no ability at it, but to have my turn stolen from me merely because I was small, and presumably a coward, and even worse, to have it taken by an oafish bully whom I had long ago pegged for a small-town loser, this was more than I was willing to take.

And so I refused to step away from the plate.

Because of that, the pitcher hesitated, staring confusedly while Carter crouched over the plate, the bat held high above his head.

“Get out of the way, runt,” Carter bawled at me. “Right now, or I’ll stomp your ass.”

I remained in place. “You’ll have to,” I told him.

Carter Dillbeck was big and mean and very angry, and for the next forty-five seconds he tried his best to kill me, slamming me to the ground and pounding me into the dust until Coach Sanders rushed up, jerked him off me and marched him to the principal’s office, where, as I found out later, he was soundly paddled.

It was Luke Duchamp who offered his hand and helped me to my feet. “You’re pretty tough for a little guy,” he said.

I was anything but graceful in defeat. Hunched and enraged, dust caked in my mouth, I stormed back into the school.

To my astonishment, Luke followed me all the way to my locker. “You okay?” he asked.

I nodded sullenly.

His next question completely surprised me. “You like to play tennis?”

I shrugged, angrily tossed my geology book into my locker’s cluttered interior and pulled out the math text I’d need for my next class. “I’ve never played it,” I told him.

“You want to try?”

“I don’t know,” I answered dully, trying to appear more or less indifferent to his invitation.

It was an act, of course, for I in no way wanted to refuse Luke’s offer. Almost without knowing it, I had always wanted to have a friend exactly like him, tall, self-confident, in command of those physical skills that eluded me, the sort of boy even Carter Dillbeck would stay clear of. By then I had surrounded myself with “friends” very different from what I supposed Luke to be, boys like Jerry Peoples, who hungered after each issue of Mad magazine and wanted to be a taxidermist, or Bradley Sims, a ham radio zombie. In Choctaw, Jerry and Bradley were the intellectual types, as I well knew, but they were also freakish and unattractive, with big ears and goofy smiles, and I had always felt a secret embarrassment at being associated with them. Luke seemed to offer a way out of such entanglements, but I still didn’t want to appear too eager.

And so I stalled a moment longer. “Why me? I mean, you don’t know me.”

Luke shifted slightly, then leaned against the wall of green metal lockers. “It doesn’t seem like anybody knows you, Ben,” he replied.

The line pierced me to the quick. For until that moment I’d felt sure that my fellow classmates regarded me as a mysterious figure, quiet, inward, somewhat superior, a boy who lived contentedly in his own world and who was perhaps even a bit disdainful of the one they lived in. But the fact that this might add up to being thought of as featureless and inconsequential had never occurred to me, and I found it disturbing.

“Anyway,” Luke added, “I just thought I’d ask.” He pulled himself away from the locker and started to walk away.

“Well, I guess I’d like to try it,” I said quickly, blurting out the words in order to draw him back.

Luke looked back at me, now hesitant himself, as if I’d refused a gift he wasn’t sure he wanted to offer a second time. “Okay, I’ll call you sometime,” he said finally, but without enthusiasm, so that as he walked away, I assumed he never would.

But he did. He called the next weekend, and the two of us headed to the only public court in Choctaw. After that, we saw a lot of each other. We went on long drives along the mountain roads, hunted in the woods behind his house, swam and fished in the nearby creek, and on those humid Saturday nights when Luke didn’t have a date, we would sit on my front porch, talking quietly about what might lay ahead of us.

Although I was already thinking about medicine, I hadn’t really decided on any future course at that point. The only thing I knew for sure was that I wanted to leave Choctaw, that in some way I felt myself too big for its limited confines. Even now I don’t know exactly why I had always been so determined to leave. And yet, from my earliest years, I had dreamed of the day when I would put Choctaw behind me, strike off into a wider world, become something larger than anything or anyone I saw around me.

But I knew nothing of that larger world I hungered for. In terms of those things one learns in school, I had some understanding of both European and American history, enough mathematics “to cipher,” as the old people used to say, and a rudimentary grasp of science.

Geographically, I was no less limited. I had traveled only as far east as Chattanooga, as far west as Mississippi, as far north as Nashville and as far south as Birmingham. I had never met anyone who might describe himself as something other than an American.

I knew about friendship, however, and the love one may feel for one’s father. Because my mother had died when I was four, I also knew a little about grief, perhaps even a bit about loneliness. But I knew very little about regret, and nothing at all about passion. All that awaited Kelli Troy.

SHE WAS SITTING ON A WOODEN BENCH IN A PATCH OF SUN, dressed in a white blouse and a blue skirt, her legs pulled up under her. She had slipped off her shoes, and her bare feet rested casually on the bench. She was reading, and did not look up as Luke and I strolled by.

Since that time, the image of a young woman in such a pose, reading silently, concentrated and self-contained, has always returned me to that instant before it all began. Not to relive it as it actually was, however, but as I would have it be, knowing all that I have since come to know. It is a dream of reaching back into the past and erasing some circumstance or making some small adjustment that will alter the course of our lives forever, and as time moves forward and mistake piles upon mistake, it becomes the deepest longing that we know.

In my particular vision, I am walking cheerfully toward the tennis court. I am hopeful and optimistic. I know myself, and am serene, perhaps even happy, in that knowledge. Luke is at my side, his face quite open and carefree, utterly untroubled by those questions that now haunt him. He is talking to me. I can see his lips moving. But in my vision the world is silent, and so I cannot hear his voice. We walk on a few paces, my eyes drifting downward idly, glimpsing first the shaded ground, then Luke’s white tennis shoes and finally lifting slowly upward until I catch sight of something terrible, wrenching in its unexpected suddenness, a glistening red stain on Luke’s otherwise spotless jeans. I know instantly that it is blood, and it is at that moment I hear a rustle of leaves, the sound of birds taking flight, animals scurrying through the undergrowth. I feel my skin tighten as a fierce heat sweeps over me. The rustling subsides, replaced by angry voices, then a dull thud, and after that a swirl of disconnected sounds, the whimpering of a little boy, the hollow thump of a child’s body as it slams against a cement curb, the whir of a pickax slicing through the air. My eyes widen in the horror of complete understanding, and I wheel around to face Kelli.

She is still seated on the bench, still reading obliviously, her face utterly serene. I call to her, she glances up, and I can see my own stricken face in her uncomprehending eyes. Almost in a whisper I say, “Run.” She looks at me, puzzled, not knowing what to do. “Run,” I repeat, this time more insistently. “Run. Run.” I can hear the desperation building in my voice, the tense, nearly shrill alarm. “Run!” She stares at me, suddenly frightened. My voice is high now, keening, vehement, and I can see that she is both baffled and alarmed by the terror she can hear locked within it. “Run!” I shout again, as if trying to drive her from a blazing house. Her face turns very grave, and I know that the whole dreadful story has suddenly unfolded before her. For an instant, she seems suspended in that nightmare, numb and motionless. Then I see her hand move toward her mouth, her fingers trembling at her lips. “Please, run,” I implore her, my voice breaking. She nods, places the book she had been reading on the wooden bench and rises to her feet. She is wearing the same white dress she will wear on Breakheart Hill, and I can see a single curl of dark hair as it falls across her forehead. For a moment, she hesitates, so I tell her a final time, now very softly, in a tone of absolute farewell, “Go.”

Her lips part, then close. She moves to stretch her hand toward me, then draws it back. For a single luxurious instant she looks as I always wanted her to look, full of love for me. Then she turns and walks out of my life forever, disappearing into the green of the town park rather than the green of Breakheart Hill, and I know that the malevolent hand has been stayed.

But in real life, the dark hand struck, and after that never tired of striking. In real life, everything converged and Luke stopped his truck on the mountain road, then watched as Kelli got out and moved down the slope until her white dress was a mere point of light in the deepening forest. When that winked out, he drove away.

I have watched it many times through his eyes, seen her in the rearview mirror just as he did; each time her beauty returns to me so powerfully that I can hardly believe that when I first glimpsed her in the park that day, I took no particular notice. I remember seeing her in the corner of my eye as I walked toward the tennis court, but neither her dark eyes nor her black curly hair drew my attention from whatever it was Luke was saying to me, and certainly they did not call up the silent child I’d seen in my father’s store so many years before.

Luke and I worked at playing tennis for nearly an hour that afternoon. Luke lobbed ball after ball in my general direction, but I rarely managed to return his serve. During all that time, Kelli continued to sit on the bench, her eyes only occasionally lifting toward us, sometimes for no more time than it took for her to follow the flight of the ball from one side of the court to the other. She never spoke, or gave any deep indication of interest in either one of us, but even as those first minutes passed, I remember becoming more and more aware of her presence, feeling it like a steadily building charge. After an hour, my eyes seemed to drift toward her of their own accord, without my willing it, but always surreptitiously, not wanting her to notice my interest. I had begun to alter my behavior slightly, trying to play better, be less awkward, and once, when I spun around too quickly and my glasses went flying across the court, I felt a fierce pang of embarrassment until I glanced toward her and saw that she remained immersed in her book, unaware of my humiliation.

Then, abruptly, as the game was ending, she put on her shoes, rose and headed out of the park. As she strolled up the small hill that led past the tall granite monument to the Confederate dead, she glanced back, her face oddly concentrated, as if she were about to ask me some important question.

I remember it was enough to stop me, to hold my gaze, so that Luke’s final ball whisked by me, a small white blur against the emerald background of the park, and which seemed to dissect her at the exact point where her white blouse met the rising blue of her skirt.

“Who’s she?” Luke asked once she was out of sight.

“I don’t know,” I said, pretending indifference.

“Sure not from around here,” Luke added.

I have often wondered how he could have been so sure of that. There was nothing in Kelli’s dress to suggest it, and he had never heard her voice, so her northern accent was unknown to us. From all appearances, she could have been one of the mountain girls who sometimes drifted down to Choctaw for a day of shopping or to go to the town’s one ornately decorated movie theater.

Except that she was alone. More than any single factor, I have come to believe that it was the solitariness in which we found her, sitting alone, reading to herself, that gave both Luke and me the firm impression that day that Kelli Troy was “not from around here.”

A girl from Choctaw, or from one of its surrounding communities, would have been with another girl, possibly several other girls. She would have been part of a group, a member of what the boys always referred to as a “gaggle” of other girls of similar age and dress and attitude. She would have been chatting with them in that lively, somewhat self-conscious way young girls had in those days, giggling, but covering their mouths when they giggled. Aspects of her girlhood would still have clung to her as visibly as small pink ribbons fluttering in her hair.

So, in the end, I think that what made Kelli look as if she were from somewhere else that afternoon was the slow, steady lift of her eyes, the unhurried way she rose from the bench, the surefooted stride that took her from the park.

Because of that, as I watched her leave, I think I felt, and certainly for the first time, not the quick edge of desire that almost any teenage girl could call forth in almost any teenage boy, but the deep allure, richer, and surely more troubling and mysterious, that can be summoned only by a woman.

“She’s very pretty,” I remember Luke saying as we headed out of the park.

“Pretty” seemed entirely inadequate to me, but I added only, “Yeah, she is.”

We got into Luke’s truck, an old blue one that he’d chosen for the day, and the same one, as it turned out, that he would later use to take Kelli to the upper slope of Breakheart Hill.

“Want to go to Cuffy’s?” he asked as he hit the ignition.

“Yeah, okay.”

He gave me a devilish grin, then stomped the accelerator, and we hurled out of the lot, throwing arcs of dust and small stones behind the spinning wheels.

We drove nearly the whole length of Choctaw that afternoon, moving from the park on the north side to Cuffy’s Grill at its southern limits. In those days, it was a pretty town, mostly brick, and as Sherman’s march had veered farther south as it advanced upon Atlanta, some of its buildings, notably the Opera House and the old railway station, actually dated back to before the Civil War. It was a town of small shops, mostly clothing, jewelry and hardware stores, and on Saturday its one main thoroughfare was filled with people from the surrounding mountains who’d come down to pay their farm loans at the local bank and buy their weekly supplies. The sleek new air-conditioned mall that later emptied the downtown area, turning it into a desolate wasteland of storefront churches and used furniture stores, had yet to be built, and so as Luke and I drove toward Cuffy’s Grill that afternoon late in August of 1961, it was possible for us to believe that Choctaw would remain as fixed and changeless as the mountains that rose on either side.

Cuffy’s was nearly deserted when we got there, with no more than a scattering of road workers at its booths and tables, men who were building the area’s first interstate highway a few miles to the east. They were dressed in flannel work clothes, their shirts and trousers covered with the chalky, red dust of the clay hills they were leveling to prepare the roadbed for the four-lane highway that was to come. I remember only that Lyle Gates was among them. He was tall and lanky, with sharp, angular features and moist, red-lined eyes. Even so, there was a certain intelligence in his face, along with an odd woundedness, the sense that something had been unjustly taken from him, or never given in the first place, though he could not exactly grasp what it was.

The other men were older, with thinning hair and drooping bellies, and I have often thought that as Lyle sat among them that day, he must have seen them as grim images of his own destiny, men who had come to little, as he would come to little, though unlike them, he had had a moment of supreme possibility.

Though I had few details, I knew that Lyle had very nearly clawed his way out of the smoldering redneck world he’d been born into, and that he’d thrown that golden chance away in a sudden act of violence.

But that afternoon, Lyle Gates didn’t look violent at all as he sat calmly with the other road workers, talking quietly and sipping at the paper cup he held in his hand. He had a pack of Chesterfield cigarettes rolled up in his shirtsleeve, and a red baseball cap cocked playfully to the right, and from the ease and casualness of his manner it would have been hard to imagine that anything dark lurked in him, a personal history that had stripped him to the bone.

And yet it was precisely that history that separated Lyle from the other men. It was a violent history, raw and edgy and impulsive, and as a result of it, various court orders had separated him from his young wife and infant daughter, so that he now lived with his aging mother in a part of Choctaw that was perilously close to Douglas, the Negro section, a part of town that even the most respectable white people often referred to as “Niggertown,” using the word as casually as New Yorkers might speak of Little Italy or San Franciscans of Chinatown.

Lyle had been a senior at Choctaw High when Luke and I were still in junior high school, but we had heard a great deal about him nonetheless. For a brief, shining moment, Lyle had been famous in Choctaw, a star football quarterback who had very nearly taken his team to the state finals. As a player, he’d been smart and aggressive, and there’d been much talk of the various college football scholarships that were certain to be offered to him. But all of that had been abruptly swept away one night in November when Lyle had jumped another player from behind, slammed him to the ground and knocked him unconscious before his fellow teammates had been able to pull him off. After that, he’d been cut from the team and suspended from school, which he quit entirely several weeks later. It was even rumored that he might have gone to jail had the other player decided to press charges against him.

After that, there’d been trouble with his wife, calls to the police, overnight incarcerations. Once he’d tried to kidnap his daughter, and in the process threatened his wife with a shotgun. The police had arrived again, and this time Lyle had spent a week in the county jail.

But for all the tales of violence that surrounded him, Lyle Gates did not look particularly sinister at Cuffy’s that afternoon. Ringed by smoke from his cigarette, his clothes covered in a chalky orange dust, he looked rather like a human husk, something cast aside. Even his hairstyle, slicked back in a blond ducktail, located him at the fringes of a fading era, an artifact at twenty-three.

He didn’t see Luke and me until he got up and headed for the door. Then he hung back slightly, let the other, older men leave the diner and sauntered over to us.

“How ya’ll doing?” he asked.

“Just fine, I guess,” Luke answered a little tensely, aware as he was of Lyle’s reputation.

Lyle grinned, though something in his eyes remained distant and perhaps even a bit unsure as to whether he should have spoken to us at all. “Gettin’ any?”

Luke shrugged but didn’t answer.

Lyle’s eyes shifted over to me. “You look familiar,” he said.

“Ben Wade,” I told him.

He looked at me a moment, as if trying to think of something else to say. “You ever try the Frito Pie?” he asked finally.

“No.”

“You ought to,” Lyle said. “It’s Cuffy’s special.” His eyes moved from mine to Luke’s, then back to mine. “Ya’ll were still in junior high when I played ball for Choctaw High, right?”

We nodded.

“What grade are you in now?”

“I’m going to be a senior,” Luke answered. “Ben’s going to be a junior.”

Lyle gave a quick nod. “I didn’t quite make it out of old Choctaw High. I guess ya’ll heard about that.”

Neither of us answered him.

His face seemed to darken momentarily with the memory of that cataclysmic failure, then brighten just as quickly as he tried to shrug it off. “Well, is the old school still about the same?”

“I guess,” Luke told him.

Lyle’s grin took a cruel twist. “They let any niggers in yet?”

Luke and I exchanged glances, then Luke said, “Not yet.”

“I hear they’re going to,” Lyle said.

Luke shook his head. “I haven’t heard anything about it.”

“Well, good,” Lyle said softly. He glanced outside. The other men had boarded the back of the truck. “I gotta go now,” he said as he turned back to us. Then he gave Luke a gentle pat on the shoulder. “Ya’ll be good,” he said.

With that, he strode out of Cuffy’s and hopped into the back of the truck. He was pulling the pack of Chesterfields from his shirt as it pulled away.

“You think Lyle’s right?” Luke asked.

I looked at him soberly, certain that he was referring to Lyle’s remark about “niggers” being admitted to Choctaw High.

“About the Frito Pie,” Luke added before I could answer. “You think it’s any good?”

I don’t remember my answer to that far less serious question, but I do recall that Luke tried the Frito Pie that afternoon, and that shortly after he’d finished it, he drove me to my house on Morgan Street.

My father came home around seven that evening, and we ate dinner together. After that, he took his place in the chair by the window, reading the paper silently while I watched television.

On those days when the past is like a movie endlessly playing in my head, I often think of him as he appeared on such evenings. I see him by the window, easing himself into the old chair, removing the rubber band that held the paper in a tight roll, then going through it page by page, concentrating, as he always did, on the darker side of things, stories about atrocious acts of violence, as if struggling to discover the single, irreducible source of such cruelty and murderousness in the way the ancient Greeks futilely searched for the single element from which, they supposed, all of earth’s variety had sprung. At last, he would shake his head, and say only, “There’s something missing in people who do things like that.”

Was it the dread of this “something missing” that lay at the center of whatever moral teaching my father offered me? Fearing it, he often encouraged me to “know myself” and “be true to my convictions.” To have a firm identity, to fill the inner void with character, that was the goal of every life, the most it could achieve. If you did not achieve it, you were lost, and in your lostness, capable of something dreadful. When he spoke of some rapist or murderer he’d just read about in the newspaper, it was this “something missing” that always hovered mysteriously around the outrages they had committed.

And so by the time I’d reached my sophomore year of high school, I was at least dimly aware that life could prove treacherous, that people might live well for a long time and then suddenly be swallowed up by the hole that had always secretly dwelled inside them.

But that night, after I’d come home from Cuffy’s, my father didn’t speak to me about such things. Instead, he read silently for a while, then let the newspaper slip from his hands, pulled himself to his feet and headed down the hallway to his bedroom. On the way, he ruffled my hair a little and gave me his usual “Don’t stay up too late, now.”

I went to bed a few hours after that, and I’m sure that during the interval before I fell asleep I must have thought of Kelli Troy, since something in the way she’d looked in the park that afternoon had already begun to attract me to her. With the same assurance, I can also say that I did not give Lyle Gates a single, fleeting thought.

But I think of him often now. I see him move slowly down the courthouse steps with Sheriff Stone walking massively at his side. It is raining, and Lyle’s shoulders are covered by the translucent plastic raincoat someone has draped around his slumped shoulders. My father stands next to me. He is wearing a gray hat, and I can see raindrops splattering onto its wide felt brim. I can see him clearly despite the slender watery trails that drift down the lenses of my glasses. The two of us stand side by side, part of a hushed crowd that has gathered on the courthouse steps. Lyle does not glance toward me as he passes, but merely continues on, his head lowered slightly, his hair drenched with rain as he is led down the stairs toward the waiting car. I look over toward my father. His eyes are still on Lyle, following his figure silently. I can see complicated things stirring in his head, unanswered questions, ideas he cannot voice, so that “There’s something missing in that boy” is all he says.