Breakheart Hill

Feeling that heat, but unable to act upon it, I began to construct my mask and hide behind it. I gave her no indication that she was becoming anything more to me than a friend. I made small talk with her and occasional jokes. I gave her quick tips on southern speech and sometimes made fun of her northern accent. From time to time, I would even talk about some other girl, making up feelings that I did not have, pretending to desires that were far more commonplace and manageable than those I had actually begun to feel.

  Because of that, our conversations on those rides to her house during the next few weeks continued to be more or less routine, mostly composed of the usual high school trivialities. We talked about Luke and Betty Ann, joking about how they already seemed so settled with each other, like an old married couple. Sheila Cameron’s name came up occasionally, along with a teacher here and there.

  But from time to time, we also talked about things outside Choctaw High, particularly the years after graduation, our futures.

  “I’ve never asked you this,” I said on one occasion toward the end of November, “but what do you plan to do when you finish high school?”

  The days had become very short by then. The evening shade already covered us as we made our way down the walkway to my car, and I remember that even in that deep afternoon haze I could see a strange perplexity drift into Kelli’s face.

  “I don’t really have any plans,” she said.

  It was an answer that surprised me. “Well, I mean, what college are you going to?” I persisted.

  She shook her head. “I don’t know that either.” She thought a moment, then asked a question of her own. “Do you think everybody has to go to college?”

  “It seems like the next step.”

  “In what?”

  I had no answer for her.

  “The next step in life, you mean?” Kelli asked.

  “I guess you could call it that,” I admitted. “I don’t know any other step.”

  “Lots of people just get jobs, or get married,” Kelli said. “They have children and settle into life.”

  “But not you,” I told her. “You wouldn’t settle for a life like that.”

  “Why not?” she asked.

  “Because you wouldn’t be happy with it, Kelli. Because you’re so … different.”

  I remember hearing the emphatic, almost passionate tone of my voice as I said it, and I also remember that it was followed by a sudden, fearful retreat, as if I’d exposed the outer membrane of something infinitely tender and carefully guarded in myself, something I rushed to put back in its shell.

  “I mean, you’re so smart and everything,” I added hastily. “You should definitely go to college.”

  The momentary perplexity dissolved from Kelli’s face, replaced by the more familiar airiness of her manner. “Well, if I can get the money,” she said as she opened the door and slid inside the car.

  I pulled myself in behind the wheel. “Can your mother afford to send you?” I asked casually as I hit the ignition.

  Kelli shook her head.

  I hesitated a moment, then added, “Is there anybody else who could help you?” By which, of course, I meant some other family member, and even hinted at the absent father.

  “There’s no one else,” she said crisply.

  We drove all the way to Collier in complete silence. Kelli sat motionlessly, her hands in her lap, her eyes trained on the road ahead. From time to time I would glance toward her, trying to think of something that might draw her out of the trouble I could see in her face. But everything that occurred to me seemed callow and mundane, and so I lapsed into silence.

  It was nearly dark by the time I pulled into Kelli’s driveway, and a deep shadow had fallen over the valley.

  “Well, see you tomorrow,” I said weakly.

  For a moment, Kelli didn’t move. Then her eyes shifted over to me. “I don’t have a father, Ben,” she said in a voice that was absolutely resolute.

  I had no idea how to respond to such a statement. I had heard people speak of bad fathers, drunken fathers, fathers who had vanished, but I had never heard anyone declare so forthrightly that she had no father at all.

  Kelli’s eyes bored into me. “Let’s just leave it at that, okay?”

  I nodded. “Sure,” I said. “Okay.”

  She continued to stare at me fiercely, as if waiting for a challenge. Then she said, “Well, good night, then,” and got out of the car.

  I turned on the headlights and watched as she walked through their yellow beams to her house. She went quickly up the wooden stairs and just as quickly disappeared into the house itself. Normally, I would have pulled out of the driveway immediately, but something in the sudden, unexpected intensity of our final exchange clung to me determinedly so that I didn’t actually leave until I’d gotten another glimpse of her, this time merely as a form passing a lighted window, but unmistakably Kelli’s form, her long arms delicately unwrapping the scarf from around her neck.

  I thought of her all the way home that evening, though I can’t remember in what way I thought of her, and because of that I can only surmise that I had begun to feel her around me in a way that was not only sensuous and full of yearning, but shadowy and mysterious as well, and that this mysteriousness was also oddly seductive. For compared with Kelli, the other girls at Choctaw High seemed simple and transparent, predictable products of the world that had produced them. They spoke in familiar accents about familiar things, and their futures were as open as their pasts. Of all the girls I knew, Kelli alone possessed the allure of something unrevealed, a mystery that drew me toward her as steadily as the touch of her flesh.

  IT WAS DURING THE NEXT FEW WEEKS THAT I BECAME SO preoccupied with Kelli that other people actually began to notice it. Luke even went so far as to mention it to me.

  “You must have a thing for Kelli Troy,” he said as we drove toward Cuffy’s one afternoon.

  I retreated into denial. “Bullshit,” I said.

  “You talk about her all the time,” Luke said. “It’s always ‘Kelli and I went here’ or ‘Kelli and I are working on this or that.’ ” He gave me a knowing look. “And you’re always down in that little office with her. Either that or driving around with her.”

  “We have to work on the Wildcat after school,” I told him hotly, as if defending myself from an accusation. “The buses have left by the time we finish, so I have to take her home.”

  Luke offered a piercing stare. “Have to?” He laughed. “Like it’s a job or something?”

  I retreated into silence.

  “You should ask her out, Ben,” Luke said. “That’s what boys do when they like girls. They go out with them. Like on a date. They don’t just work together at school and drive home together. They go out to a movie, or maybe roller skating, something like that.”

  I shook my head.

  “Why not?”

  I shrugged.

  “She’s not going to be the new girl forever,” he warned. “Eventually somebody’s going to ask her out, and you’ll have lost your chance.”

  I stared straight ahead, not wanting to look him in the eye, afraid of what he might see, a gesture I have increasingly resorted to in the years since then.

  “I don’t get it,” Luke said. “If you like her, just ask her out. It’s simple.”

  I searched for a reply until I found one. It was flimsy, but the best I could do. “There’s no point in asking Kelli out,” I said. “Because she lives in Choctaw now, and she likes it here, and I’m not going to come back after college.… So there’s no point in getting … you know … involved with her like that.”

  Luke looked at me, utterly puzzled by such reasoning. “So you’re just going to delay your whole life until you leave Choctaw?” he asked wonderingly. “You’re just going to stay in neutral for the next year and a half?”

  “I’ll be busy,” I answered. “It’s not easy getting into medical school.”

  Luke’s faintly derisive laugh stung me. “You know what your trouble is,
Ben? You have to have everything in a certain order.”

  I said nothing.

  Luke stared at me teasingly. “Well, maybe I’ll ask her out then,” he said. “You think she might go?”

  My eyes shot over to him. “I thought you were going steady with Betty Ann.”

  “Betty Ann’s nice,” Luke said dismissively, “but I’d like to get to know somebody a little different. Like a girl from up north.”

  I pretended indifference. “Go ahead and ask her, then,” I said.

  Luke gave me a penetrating look, a gaze that always went right through me. He asked, “You’re afraid of her, aren’t you?”

  I bristled. “Afraid? Why would I be afraid?”

  Luke looked at me almost tenderly, as if teaching something to a child. I have never forgotten what he said. “We’re always afraid of the girl we’re in love with, Ben.”

  It was a statement that astonished me. For the idea of being in love was so distant from anything I had previously thought about that I found myself entirely unable to respond. I knew that when I took Kelli home in the afternoons, I wanted to sit in the car and talk to her until dawn broke, and that when I made some small mistake in her presence, I felt a keen sense of exposure and embarrassment, as if I’d shrunk a bit in her eyes. I also knew that when I heard her body rustle beneath her skirt, or felt her shoulder touch mine as we leaned over the small table in the basement office, at those moments I felt a piercing tension overwhelm me, as if my body had suddenly received a slight electric shock. More than anything, I knew that everyone else paled before her, that whatever interest I had previously had in other girls had entirely withered. But was that love? Even if from the beginning I had known that what I felt for Kelli Troy was love, it still would have seemed inconceivable to me that at such an early age one might feel the grip of so powerful an emotion and be marked forever by the imprint that it made.

  Luke said nothing more about Kelli that afternoon, and now when he mentions her, it is no longer within a context of teenage love. Other things haunt him, questions that will not let him go, and which he continually approaches, sometimes from one angle, sometimes from another, but always closing in on the many things that still trouble and elude him when he thinks of Kelli Troy.

  There are times when he will suddenly blurt out a question, as if it had just occurred to him, but which I know has come only after a lengthy rumination, rising like a body long submerged.

  “Why didn’t Kelli call you that day, Ben?”

  It is a bright summer day, not unlike that other bright summer day thirty years before, when he dropped Kelli off on the mountain road.

  “Call me when?”

  “When she needed a ride up to Breakheart Hill that afternoon. You were always giving her a ride, weren’t you?”

  “Yes, I was.”

  “So why didn’t she call you that day? I’ve never been able to figure that out.”

  I settle my eyes on the dark spire of a distant steeple. “Maybe she did try to call me.”

  “You mean, you weren’t home that afternoon?”

  “No, I wasn’t.”

  “Where were you?”

  I cannot help but wonder if, after years of plotting, he is about to spring the trap. “Just riding around,” I tell him.

  He watches me doubtfully. “Why?”

  I shrug. “I guess I had things on my mind.”

  “What things?”

  I can feel him drawing me closer to that moment. There is a whiff of violets in the air. I escape into a lie. “Nothing particular. The play, maybe.”

  Although my answer does not seem to satisfy him, he has no way to contradict it. He has nothing but his long suspicion, nothing but his memory of my face as he stood before me in his bloody trousers, trying desperately to describe what he’d seen on Breakheart Hill. And yet, through all the years, it has been enough to drive him forward, one question at a time.

  “Did you know she was going up there that day?” he asks.

  I shake my head.

  For a moment, he looks at me evenly, then turns away. “She was upset about something. But she didn’t tell me what it was.” He falls silent for a moment, then adds, “Why would she have wanted to go up there in the first place?”

  “She told you that, didn’t she?”

  “Just that she needed to think. That’s all she said.”

  “Maybe she did.”

  “But what could have been so important for her to think about that afternoon?”

  “Maybe she wanted to study her lines. The play was set to open the next night.”

  “If that were why, she’d have brought a copy of the play with her,” Luke insists. He looks at me significantly. “Sheriff Stone had another idea. He thought she was planning to meet somebody up there.”

  “Why did he think that?”

  “Because she hadn’t made any arrangements for somebody to pick her up later,” Luke answers. “That always bothered Sheriff Stone. He asked me if she’d mentioned anything about my coming back for her. I told him that I’d offered to come back for her, but that she had told me not to. And you know what Sheriff Stone said? He said, ‘There’s something wrong. There’s something wrong with all this.’ ”

  I say nothing.

  Luke shakes his head slowly. “Why would Kelli not have wanted me to come back for her, Ben?” he asks softly.

  “Well, maybe she intended to walk back,” I answer lightly, making nothing of the question.

  “I don’t think so,” Luke says. “Hell, it’s over two miles back down to Choctaw. She wouldn’t have been planning to walk that far, would she?”

  “Probably not,” I admit. “But back then there was that little store right near where you let her out. Grierson’s, remember?”

  “What about it?”

  “Well, she might have been planning to call somebody from there.”

  “To pick her up, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “No way, Ben. It was a Sunday. That store was closed.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because that’s where he was. That’s where I saw him. Remember?”

  I instantly recall the moment when I’d first heard Luke describe what he’d seen that afternoon. The courtroom had been jammed with spectators, my father and I crammed in with all the others. Not far away, I could see Miss Carver sitting stonily on the front bench, her eyes trained on Luke as he walked to the witness box.

  A hush had come over the room as Mr. Bailey had begun to question him.

  Now, Luke, you dropped Kelli Troy off on the mountain just up from Breakheart Hill on the afternoon of May twenty-seventh, isn’t that right?

  Yes, sir.

  And about what time would you say that was? Around three-thirty.

  And after you dropped Kelli off, did you come on down the mountain by yourself?

  Yes, sir.

  All the way back in to Choctaw, is that right, son?

  Yes, sir.

  And on the way back down the mountain, did you have occasion to see anybody else up on that ridge?

  Yes, sir, I did.

  And where did you see that person?

  In front of Grierson’s Store.

  What was he doing?

  He was walking up the mountain road.

  Toward where exactly?

  Toward Breakheart Hill.

  How far would you say Grierson’s Store is from Breakheart Hill, Luke?

  About a mile, I guess.

  It would take about thirty minutes to walk that, wouldn’t it?

  About that, yes, sir.

  Now, Luke, if you saw him again, would you recognize the person you saw walking up toward Breakheart Hill that day?

  Yes, sir.

  Is that person in the courtroom today? Yes.

  Could you point him out and say his name?

  Luke had pointed with a firm, steady hand as he’d said the name: Lyle Gates.

  At the mention of his name, I could remember glancing ove
r to see Lyle as he sat beside his lawyer. He was wearing a gray suit that was too small for him, the cuffs of his shirt extending well beyond the sleeves of his jacket, his white socks stretching up toward the legs of his pants. His hands were clasped in front of him, and I remember noticing how the cuts and scrapes Sheriff Stone had found upon them when he’d first questioned him had healed during the period between his arrest and trial. I studied his slumped shoulders, the way he kept his head slanted, as if dodging an invisible blow. His eyes shifted about, unable to light on anything in particular, until they suddenly swept over toward me and locked there, as if he were studying me now, just as I had been studying him. I looked away, concentrating on Luke, until, after a few minutes, my eyes drifted back toward Lyle. He’d sat back in his chair by then so that I could see only his face in profile, but even so I knew that his eyes were still ceaselessly moving in quick, nervous jerks.

  Mr. Bailey was finishing up with Luke.

  Now, when you saw Lyle Gates, he was on foot, is that right?

  Yes, sir.

  Was there a car or truck anywhere around?

  I didn’t see one.

  You only saw Lyle Gates walking, is that right?

  Yes, sir.

  Now, son, I have to ask you one more time, because so much rides on your answer. Are you absolutely sure you saw the defendant, Lyle Walter Gates, walking up toward Breakheart Hill at approximately three-thirty on the afternoon of May twenty-seventh?

  Yes, sir.

  You saw him with your own eyes?

  Yes, sir. I saw him with my own eyes.

  I believe that despite all the years that have passed since then, Luke still sees Lyle Gates at times when he closes those same pale blue eyes. But does he see him exactly as he saw him that day on the mountainside, a slender young man trudging wearily past Grierson’s Store, the radiant afternoon sunlight glinting in his slick blond hair? Or does he see Lyle the way I so often see Kelli Troy, as a runner racing up a torturous slope, her body plunging through a brutal undergrowth of vine and briar?

  CHAPTER 8

  LUKE IS NOT THE ONLY ONE WHO REMEMBERS KELLI TROY. Sheila Cameron remembers her, and several years ago, after the small stone memorial was erected on Breakheart Hill, she broke the long silence that had enveloped her since Rosie’s death. We’d not come to the ceremony together, and I had not expected her to approach me. During the speeches that had preceded the unveiling of the memorial, Sheila had stood off by herself, listening silently, almost motionless. Over the past few years, I’d often tried to breach the stony isolation in which she lived, but she’d refused each attempt, though always politely, saying only that she was “not very social.” But on that particular day, something eased its grip on her, and at the end of the ceremony, she stepped alongside me as I made my way up the hill. She’d wrapped herself in a long coat despite the warmth of the day, and her eyes, as always, were hidden behind the dark lenses of her glasses.