Breakheart Hill (28 page)

“One thing has always bothered me,” he said. “Kelli didn’t have a thing with her when she got out of my truck that day.”

I nodded, but said nothing.

“You know how she always had something with her,” Luke added. “A book, I mean. Always.”

“Yes.”

“But not that time, Ben,” Luke said. “And that’s always made me think that Kelli had something in mind when she went up there that day.”

As he spoke I saw the black wheels of the car as they ground up the old mining road, snapping vines and crushing twigs and blowing leaves behind them until they finally came to a dusty halt at the base of Breakheart Hill.

“But why would she have gone up there?” Luke asked.

I saw the car door swing open, two feet lower themselves onto the dusty rut, pause a moment, then move forward determinedly, step by anguished step.

“Of course, Sheriff Stone always thought that she’d gone up there to meet somebody,” Luke added. “Somebody who had a reason to hurt her, I guess.”

The feet disappeared into the green, but I could still hear them rustling through the thick undergrowth, moving more slowly now as they mounted the upper slope of Breakheart Hill.

“Who did he think that might be, Luke?” I asked coolly.

Luke’s eyes drifted away from my even stare.

“Who, Luke?” I repeated, this time more insistently. “Did he say who he thought it was she was going to meet that afternoon?”

Still Luke did not turn toward me, and for a single chilling instant I believed that he was actually going to spin around suddenly and say it to my face,
You, Ben. He thought she was going to meet you
.

But he didn’t do that. Instead, his eyes drifted back to me slowly, almost reluctantly. “I don’t know,” he said. He shook his head, as if trying to drive the mystery from it. “She was blooming, like the spring,” he added. “You could see it in her eyes.”

Her eyes appeared to me instantly, and I saw the same luminous energy that Luke had spoken of so clearly that for a moment I found myself unable to imagine them in any other way, and certainly not lightless and uncomprehending, floating without direction, vacant and disengaged, as they had been when they’d looked up at me for the last time.

But even more impressive than the immense energy that flowed from Kelli that spring were the varied uses she found for it. She helped Sheila Cameron begin work on
the prom, tutored Noreen in algebra and even submitted a few line drawings for the final issue of the
Wildcat
. “Just something I thought I’d try,” she explained as she handed them to me.

But most surprising of all, Kelli decided to heed Miss Carver’s request and go out for the part of Juliet in the upcoming school play.

The audition was held in the auditorium, and several girls, including Mary Diehl and Sheila Cameron, showed up to try out for the part. Earlier that morning, Kelli had rather pointedly asked me to go with her. “I’d like you to tell me how I did,” she explained. I didn’t want to do it, but I could find no way out that would not have ended in a frantic and probably tearful confession of wounded love, so I took a seat near the center of the auditorium and glumly watched as each girl recited various lines from the play.

Mary went first, her long, dark hair pouring over her shoulders as she recited Juliet’s balcony speech with an undiminished southern accent. Miss Carver had arranged to have a spotlight narrow in on each of the contenders, and I remember that Mary looked oddly imprisoned in it, a hoop of yellow light encircling her delicately, but confiningly as well, so that, had I been all-knowing, I might have glimpsed her future in an instant of foreshadowed doom.

Sheila Cameron came next. As she recited Juliet’s death scene, the same spotlight that had tightened around Mary like a noose appeared to hold her in a warm embrace. Her blond hair glowing in its light, she let her arms sweep out and reach for her imagined Romeo, calling to him softly but with the kind of inner strength that suggested those depths of character and endurance her later life would prove.

At last it was Kelli’s turn. I noticed that as she walked across the stage, Miss Carver leaned forward
slightly, watching her intently, and with a sense of anticipation she had not shown for the other girls.

Kelli stopped at the center of the stage, turned and looked out over the nearly empty theater. The spotlight opened around her, and for a moment she stood in silence, taking a single dramatic pause before she began.

As it turned out, she had not chosen one of the more famous of Juliet’s speeches, but a relatively obscure one, given to a friar, and which ended with a few words I have read a thousand times since then:

When she’d finished, I got up and eased myself into the center aisle. The auditorium was nearly empty, but as I glanced back toward the door I could see a single figure, seated in the far right corner of the room, slouched uncharacteristically low in his seat, his football jacket hung loosely over the chair in front of him. I nodded toward him, but he did not see me. His attention was focused on someone else entirely. At first I assumed that he’d come to see Mary do her recitation, but as I watched Todd’s eyes follow Kelli off the stage, then up the aisle toward where I stood waiting for her as patiently as ever, I was not so sure.

He got to his feet as Kelli and I moved up the aisle.

“You did great, Kelli,” he said.

“I think everybody did,” Kelli said.

Todd shrugged. “Well, I don’t know. I mean, Mary sort of made Juliet sound like she was from
Gone with the Wind
, don’t you think?”

Kelli laughed. “Well, maybe a southern Juliet would be interesting.”

Todd shook his head slowly. “No, it’s you, Kelli,” he said with that sense of absolute certainty that only one
who had lived such a life as he had lived could truly possess. “You’re the one who should play Juliet.”

I could tell that something in the quiet respect that Kelli could hear in Todd’s voice had moved her, but I could not have anticipated that it would move her to the offer she almost immediately made. “Well, if I play Juliet, why don’t you play Romeo?”

From the look on Todd’s face it was clear that he had never considered such a possibility. He shook his head. “No, I’m no actor,” he said shyly.

“But you’re perfect for it, Todd,” Kelli told him. She watched him for a moment, then added, “You’re the only boy at Choctaw High who is.”

Todd waved his hand dismissively. “No, I’m no actor,” he repeated. He might have said more, but Mary came sweeping up the aisle and took his arm. “We’re going to Cuffy’s,” she said to Kelli and me. “Ya’ll want to come with us?”

I shook my head. “No, I’ve got to go home,” I said.

Todd looked at Kelli. “What about you?”

Kelli hesitated a moment, then glanced over at me. “You can’t go for just a few minutes?”

“No,” I told her, then added an excuse that was a lie. “I have to help my father with something.”

She turned back to Todd. “Would you be able to give me a ride home after we left Cuffy’s?”

“Sure.”

Kelli looked toward me again. “I’ll just get a ride with Todd today,” she said.

I nodded quickly, betraying nothing. “Okay.”

We all walked out of the auditorium together, Todd and Mary in the lead, with Kelli and me walking together behind them.

“What do you have to help your father with?” Kelli asked lightly.

“Something in the store,” I answered.

At the parking lot, we separated, with Kelli walking off toward Todd’s car at the far end of the lot.

“Bye, Ben” was all she said.

For a few seconds, I stood and watched her move away from me, walking cheerfully toward Todd’s waiting car. When she reached it, Todd swept around her, opened the door and let Mary and Kelli slide into the front seat. Then he walked around the front of the car and pulled himself in behind the wheel.

Within a moment, they were gone, and I was left alone in the gray Chevrolet. It had never seemed more dull and dusty, nor more empty.

On the way home, I passed Cuffy’s. Todd’s car was parked out front, and inside I could see Todd and Mary sitting together in a front booth. Kelli sat opposite them, and next to her, Eddie Smathers. Someone must have said something funny just as I passed, because I could see Eddie’s head tossed back in a wide laugh. Although I could not see it, I knew that Kelli must be laughing, too.

When I got home, I found the house empty, my father not yet home from the grocery. I sat in the living room for a time, staring at the dull green eye of the television. Then I walked to my room and eased myself onto the bed, lying on my back, facing the blank ceiling. I could feel a slight tremor in my legs. It moved upward, growing stronger as it moved until I could feel my stomach quake, my chest tighten, my throat finally close in the iron grip of all that I still so desperately wanted to hold back. Then suddenly it released me, and to my immense surprise, I began to cry.

Even now I cannot name all the things I cried for that afternoon. I do know that it was not only for the loss of Kelli, but for all that she had come to represent for me, the promise she’d held out for so long, and then so quickly withdrawn. I cried for a life that seemed beyond me, a love I would never know, a vision of happiness, of growing up and growing old in the steady embrace of
something fierce and true. I cried out of pity for myself, for my terrible inadequacy, for the fact that I was locked in a sensual wasteland from which I could see no escape. I cried because I was small and physically inept, because I wore glasses, because the bolder experiences of manhood seemed always to slip beyond my grasp. I cried because I was pathetic and ridiculous.

And it is there that the story might have ended, with an inexperienced boy weeping in a melodramatic moment of romantic grief, but with the promise that he would soon rise from his bed, wipe away his tears, move steadily toward adulthood, find a life that suited him and from there go on to love a woman he could not have then imagined, raise children he could not have then imagined, achieve the quiet dignity of a good and gracious life and finally, perhaps, even recall from time to time the afternoon he’d cried so bitterly, and smile with the comforting wisdom of all that he had learned since then.

And so it might have ended.

But it did not.

N
OT LONG AGO NOREEN AND AMY AND I WENT TO SEE
one of Luke’s sons perform in his senior play. We sat together near the front of the sleek new theater that had recently been added to the high school. A vast array of fancy theater lighting hung above us, and from our seats we faced a beautiful red curtain.

“It’s not like the old auditorium we used at Choctaw High, is it?” Noreen said lightly.

“No, it’s not.”

Noreen and Amy sat beside me, Noreen needing glasses now on such occasions, and just to the right I could see Betty Ann shifting restlessly in seats that had become too narrow for her middle-age spread. Only Luke appeared more or less unchanged from our youth, still tall and lean, his face grown more handsome and full of character. His hair was thinner, of course, and almost completely gray, but his eyes were still piercingly blue, his skin still tanned and youthful.

The play was a modern contrivance, fractured and remote, and all of us were weary by the time it ended. It was a hazy spring night, and after the play we all took a
drive up the mountain road, passing the deserted ruin of Choctaw High, its crumbling brick façade shrouded in a ghostly mist. I could see the old parking lot, now weedy and untended, the wide, cracked stairs that led to the front door, the silent, unlighted gymnasium, and beyond it, the auditorium that had doubled as our school theater in those days, and from whose row of wooden seats I’d watched Kelli Troy try out for Juliet.

“That’s what we had to use as a theater,” Luke told my daughter, pointing to the auditorium. “It didn’t have any of the professional lighting and sound equipment you have now.” He laughed at the primitiveness of it. “And those rickety old plywood seats, remember that, Ben?”

I glanced over toward the old auditorium. It was dark except for the single naked light bulb that still hung above its side door, shining mistily as we swept by, illuminating nothing more than a small patch of ground. And I thought,
There is where it happened, not on Breakheart Hill at all
.

T
HE FINAL ISSUE OF THE
W
ILDCAT WENT TO THE PRINTER
only a few days after Kelli auditioned for Juliet. She’d gotten the part, of course. That had not surprised me. But it
had
surprised me that Todd had gone out for Romeo, and gotten the part almost as easily as Kelli had gotten Juliet. Eddie Smathers, still trailing after Todd, had also tried out for the play, and had been given the role of Friar Laurence. Sheila Cameron had landed the role of Lady Capulet, and Noreen the role of Nurse. Mary Diehl had been offered Lady Montague, but had turned it down, deciding to be the production’s costume designer instead.