Breakheart Hill (25 page)

“I’ve already called him,” she said eagerly. “He was very nice. He said he could talk to me tomorrow morning.” She paused, then added, “Mrs. Phillips thinks he may know the whole story.”

“That would be great,” I said.

We both ordered Cokes, and we were still sipping them when a group of road workers came in, walking slowly, dog tired after a long day. One of them was Lyle Gates.

He did not see us as he came in. His head was lowered, his face hidden by the bill of his dark red baseball cap. He sat down with the other men, and from where Kelli and I sat, we could hear them talking in low voices, making small jokes, chuckling.

Kelli sat opposite me, her back to the front of the cafe so that Lyle could not have recognized her from his position, facing me from near the front of the room. He could have seen only her back, the glossy black hair that fell across her shoulders, though at last, when he glanced over in our direction, I think he did sense that the girl who was with me that afternoon was the same one he’d met in Gadsden on a freezing night some time before.

In any event, Lyle first nodded to me, then rose and came toward me slowly, in that lanky, still vaguely boyish gait of his. I remember that his shadow fell over Kelli’s body as he neared the table, then skirted away, as if half frightened to come too near.

“How ya’ll doin’?” he said as he came to a halt at our table.

He spoke to both of us, but his eyes were on Kelli.

I answered him. “Pretty good. How about you, Lyle?”

His eyes remained fixed on Kelli. “I remember you from Gadsden,” he said.

Kelli smiled tentatively. “Hi,” she said.

“Kelli Troy, right?” Lyle asked. “From Baltimore.”

Kelli nodded.

He grinned, again boyishly, though awkwardly now, perhaps a little intimidated both by the beauty he saw and the intelligence he must have sensed. For a moment he did not seem to know what to say, and so, as I believe now, he thoughtlessly blurted out something that at the time he meant only as a redneck jibe.

“Well, I guess that explains you writing that piece about the niggers.”

He was still smiling broadly when he said it, but Kelli’s face stiffened and turned cold.

For a moment, they stared at each other, Kelli’s eyes full of an icy contempt, Lyle’s oddly baffled, as if trying to figure out why Kelli now glared at him as she did, in utter rebuke, and from what he must have taken as the great height of her beauty, her intelligence, the wide sweep of her grand future. She gazed at him and saw, he was sure, a small, insignificant hillbilly who had not gone to college, had not even finished high school, had lost his daughter and his wife, and ended up in jail, who now worked with a lowly bunch of dusty laborers, dull and futureless and despised.

All of that, as I know now, must have been in Lyle Gates’s mind, though I did not say that to Mr. Bailey or the twelve jurors who listened to me from behind the squat wooden rail that separated them from the rest of us. Instead, I clung as closely as possible to the bare facts.

So Lyle Gates knew that Kelli Troy was the girl who’d written about the “niggers,” and told her so, isn’t that right?

Yes, sir
.

And how did Miss Troy react?

I think she was shocked
.

What did she do?

She just stared at him for a second, then she got up
.

She rose in a single flawless motion, spun to the left and headed for the door. For a brief moment I remained in my seat, no less shocked by what Lyle had said than by the uncompromising fierceness of Kelli’s response. I had expected her to argue a bit, perhaps defend herself, all the while remaining as calm, and even respectful, as she’d remained when she’d been called a Yankee bitch by the anonymous caller. But she’d done something completely different, something that a southern man of that time could have regarded only as a brutal gesture of contempt.

Lyle’s eyes shot over to me, utterly puzzled, as stunned as if she’d risen and slapped his face.

“What the fuck!” he snapped.

I got to my feet. “Forget it, Lyle,” I said quickly, then moved past him, following Kelli toward the door.

“Forget it yourself,” Lyle said, though not loudly, or even angrily, a remark simply added as a parting shot.

I could see the workmen turning around to face Lyle as he stood in place beside the now-empty table. He must have sensed their eyes upon him, too, and in their steady, evaluating gaze, felt the need for one further gesture of self-assertion and self-defense against a young girl’s arrogant rebuke. And so, fatally, he called out one more time.

“Run, you nigger-loving bitch,” he shouted, though almost comically, trailing it with a short, dismissive laugh.

It was the pat insult of the time, and yet hearing it fired at Kelli suddenly ignited an almost-smothered flame. This was my chance, the one I had been dreaming of for
so long, the “right moment” when I could take up the sword, slay the dragon in all its smoldering fury.

I turned toward Lyle in a slow, deadly motion, and felt the same trembling courage rise in me that had risen two years before when I’d faced Carter Dillbeck on the softball field. But now infinitely more was at stake. Now was the opportunity to prove myself once and for all.

“What did you call her?” I demanded.

He seemed reluctant to repeat it, but with the eyes of the other men leveled upon him, he had no choice but to do it.

“I called her a nigger-loving bitch.”

Like a sullen third-grader, I said, “Take it back.”

Lyle sneered. “You Choctaw High people, you think you’re so fucking great.”

“Take it back,” I repeated.

“They threw me out of that fucking school, and now they’re fixing to take niggers into it.”

The momentous consequences of desegregation could hardly have meant less to me at that moment. My mind was fixed exclusively on another matter.

“Take back what you said about Kelli,” I told him. I started to say something else, then felt a hand at my arm.

“Let’s go, Ben,” Kelli said. Her dark eyes were very tense, and I could see the fear in them, the sense that things were hurtling wildly out of control.

I did not answer.

She tugged again, this time more forcefully. “Please, Ben. Come on.”

I glanced at her, then back at Lyle. He did not move toward me, nor did he say anything else to either Kelli or me, and I don’t think he ever intended to do either. He would have let me go. He would not have pressed the issue further. I was the one who had to press it, though for reasons he could not have guessed.

And so in a single outrageous, sacrificial gesture, I
suddenly, and without any real provocation, lunged violently at Lyle Gates.

His eyes widened in disbelief as I rushed toward him. He stepped back, drew a fist, but did not swing it, so that I was the first to strike.

It was a glancing blow, just touching the side of his face, and Lyle responded instinctively with a quick punch to my chest. I swung again, missed and stumbled forward. I could feel his fist snap against the right side of my forehead, then another in my left eye, and finally a third on my jaw, halting, oddly cautious blows, as I realize now, meant only to warn me away.

Still, they had come fast and blindingly, and though I was not seriously hurt, I staggered anyway, dazed and helpless, until I tumbled over one of the tables, then rolled forward, my head coming to rest only inches from the tip of one of Lyle’s dusty work shoes.

I started to get up, expecting Lyle to deliver a quick kick to my face, but the shoe stepped away instead, other dusty shoes gathering around it as the workmen quickly surrounded him, edged him farther away from me, and finally eased him out the door.

I pulled myself up slightly, pressing my palms against Cuffy’s checkered tile floor. A slender trail of blood hung from my mouth, and I could feel a steady ache spread out from my jaw. Even so, I was not in the least dazed, and could easily have gotten to my feet. But suddenly I felt Kelli at my side, her arms wrapped around me, and I let myself drift down again, into her cradling arms.

“Are you all right, Ben?” she asked breathlessly.

I nodded.

Her arms tightened around me. “I’m sorry I got you into this,” she whispered.

I shook my head groggily. “I’m okay,” I told her, though hoping that she would not believe me and perhaps draw me even more closely to her.

Which, I suppose, she did. And so for a few delicious moments, I continued to lie silently in Kelli Troy’s arms, breathing slowly, though my mind was racing, aflame with the certainty that I had done it, unexpectedly and miraculously made her mine.

T
HOUGH THE FOLLOWING MORNING MY FACE WAS BRUISED
and one of my eyes was blue and swollen, I woke up with a terrible joy. For a time, I lay in my bed, reliving the brief heroism that had landed me in Kelli’s arms. I reviewed it all from beginning to end, from the moment Lyle had entered Cuffy’s to the moment he’d been hustled out of it by his fellow road workers, and each second of it was like a glittering gem.

At breakfast I sat proudly across from my father, and although he had always been a peaceful man, he had no quarrel with what I’d done.

“That boy shouldn’t have said something like that to Kelli,” he told me, “and I guess you didn’t have much choice but to stand up to him.” He gave me a small man-to-man smile, then returned to his newspaper.

After breakfast, I walked out into the front yard. The first green sprouts had begun to inch up from the tiny flower garden my father had planted along either edge of the driveway, and their determination to endure a long winter of isolation, then sprout suddenly to life struck me
as emblematic of my own situation in regard to Kelli. I had waited and endured. Now was the time for victory.

I was still reveling in such a glorious possibility when the phone rang inside the house. I rushed in to answer it.

“Hi, Ben,” Kelli said.

“Hi.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Fine.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” I said, heroically making light of my wounds. “How are you?”

“I’m fine, but I wasn’t the one who got hit.”

“My father put a little ice on my eye after you left, but it’s still swollen. But other than that, I’m okay.”

“I’m sorry, Ben. I didn’t mean to …”

“No, no,” I told her quickly. “It’s nothing. By Monday, nobody will even notice.”

There was a slight pause, then Kelli said, “Well, anyway, I wanted to let you know that I went up to see Mr. Prewett this morning.”

“Who?”

“The man I told you about on the way to Cuffy’s yesterday. The one who was supposed to know a lot about Choctaw.”

“Oh, yeah. I remember now.”

“Well, Mrs. Phillips was right, he did know a lot.”

“That’s great.”

“As a matter of fact, I found out why they call it Breakheart Hill.”

“You did?”

“And so I thought we might drive up there this afternoon. It would be easier to explain it if we were actually there and I could show you a few things.”

“Okay,” I said. “When do you want me to pick you up?”

“Well, I thought you might want to have lunch with
my mother and me, and after that we could go up to the hill.”

“All right.”

“So, could you come here at around noon?”

I knew that Kelli didn’t want to tell me more about what she’d discovered, so I didn’t press her further. “Well, I’ll see you then,” I said.

“Noon,” Kelli repeated. “Okay, then.”

I told her good-bye, then walked back out into the yard. The morning air was soothing on my bruised face, and I slumped back in an old lawn chair, closed my eyes and let the sunlight warm me. When I opened them again, they were focused on the mountain, and after a time they drifted to the left and settled on Breakheart Hill. The trees were trimmed in green by then, but I could still see through them, all the way down to the dark ground that made up the forest floor, a deep, rich loam that would soon nourish a wild summer lushness. For a little while my mind lingered on its name, just as Kelli’s had dwelled upon it for the past few weeks, but soon I drifted into a different realm than inquiry, and imagined myself on the hill, lying on my back in the warm, sun-soaked earth, with Kelli over me, the jet-black curls of her hair falling all around me, making a tent for my face. I knew that we were naked, that we were making love, but since I’d had no such experience, it came to me not in a single, sharply focused instant of excitement, but in a rich sensual fullness, so that I touched and was touched in every way and in every place at once. There were no separate explorations, no concentration upon any single part of her. I felt all of her simultaneously, in a limitless and impossible wholeness, felt all of her in each part of her, her fingers in her lips, her pulse in her breath, all of life in every touch of life.

I
SUPPOSE THAT SOME PART OF ME WAS STILL SWIRLING IN THE
eddies of this sensual undertow when I arrived at Kelli’s house a few hours later. When I think of it now, I see myself in a kind of swoon, and there are even times, despite all that has happened since then, when I cannot think of it without a hesitant and very slender smile. For surely, in a certain sense, there is nothing more comical than teenage love. But the smile can hold its place only for an instant before it vanishes into that more forbidding truth, that there is nothing more deadly earnest either.