Breakheart Hill

as if, behind the black curtain, the sun had taken a single menacing step toward me. For a long time I remained in place, silent, almost immobile, like a naked man locked in a furiously steaming room, waiting patiently, as if for some unknowable next move.

The wave passed after a few minutes, leaving me in the throes of so penetrating an exhaustion that I felt as if every muscle within me had been exercised to its limit. I drew in a long, restorative breath, and felt the slow recuperation begin again, a cyclical process that has continued through the years, and which as it goes forward always leaves some part of me behind, a portion of my suit of armor rusting in the field.

And suddenly I was young again. All of us were young. I saw us splashing about in the nearby river, Luke swinging from a rope that dangled over the nearly motionless water while Betty Ann clapped loudly from the adjoining bank. I saw Todd carried off the playing field upon the shoulders of his teammates, Mary watching breathlessly from the wooden bleachers a few yards away. A hundred separate scenes flashed through my mind: Eddie hungering after Todd’s attention, eager to follow his every command, Sheila chatting happily about the college man she would later marry, a circle of admiring girls gathered around her, listening enviously. I saw Luke and Betty Ann stealing kisses in the dark space behind the front stairs, eyes open, glancing about for some patrolling teacher they feared might spot them there. And though I understood that what we had not known of life at that time could have filled a thousand volumes, it still seemed good that we had known so little, that for a brief hour we had lived in the grip of nothing more threatening than the coming dawn. Then suddenly I saw Kelli, her face wreathed in the same trouble Luke had glimpsed that day as he’d driven her up toward Breakheart Hill. I saw everything that had led up to that moment, and everything that had followed from it. And I thought, No, youth is more illusion than we need.

THE FIRST ISSUE OF THE WILDCAT WAS PUBLISHED ONLY A week or so after Kelli handed me her poem. In appearance it was almost identical to the paper Allison Cryer had headed during the preceding two years, the same crude drawing of a growling wildcat festooned across the top of the page, the Alabama state motto, Audemos ius defendere, “We Dare Defend Our Rights,” inscribed on an equally crude banner at its paws.

The content was pretty much the same as well, except for Kelli’s poem. It was on the third page of the paper, nestled between a sports story and a “blind item” gossip column which a girl named Louise Davenport had volunteered to provide for each issue.

I remember being somewhat excited when the first issue arrived from the local printer, and I know that the only reason for that excitement was the fact that Kelli’s poem was in it. It was not only the first poem ever printed in the Wildcat, it was also, as I had no doubt, the most interesting thing that had ever been in it.

Because of that, I expected the verses to create a little stir at Choctaw High, bringing attention both to Kelli, as the poem’s author, and to me, as the paper’s innovative new editor.

In fact, nothing at all happened. The paper arrived and was distributed. For the next two days I would see students perusing it idly as they sat on the steps or leaned against their lockers, and each time I would look to see if they were reading Kelli’s poem. They never were. Even Luke never read it, or at least not until I shoved it under his nose and forced him to, and after which he merely handed the paper back to me with a quick “Yeah, that’s nice.”

Kelli also seemed to take the poem’s publication without excitement. The day after the paper was distributed, she came up to me in the hall, thanked me politely for including it, then quickly darted up the central stairs to her next class.

A week passed, and during that time I waited for some reaction, but beyond Luke’s “nice” and Kelli’s hurried “thank you,” there was nothing.

Then, late one afternoon, I turned from my small table in the Wildcat office and saw Miss Carver standing in the door, a copy of the issue in her hand.

“I read Kelli Troy’s poem in the Wildcat,” she said. “The rest of the issue …”

“Doesn’t live up to it,” I said, finishing what I knew to be her thought.

“But maybe it could,” Miss Carver said, nodding. She stepped inside the office. “I’ve already talked to Kelli, and she’s willing to take a more active interest in the paper.” She stopped again, cautious, as if she feared offending me. “I think you two might make a good team,” she concluded.

I said nothing.

“As coeditors, I mean,” Miss Carver added.

She appeared to expect me to resist the idea, perhaps even be offended by it in some way, but I leaped to it instead.

“Well, just tell her to come down here as soon as she gets a chance,” I said.

Kelli came the next afternoon, pausing at the door a moment, just as she had the first time, then uttering her quick “Hi.”

I stood up and walked out into the corridor, the two of us facing each other in the deserted hallway.

“Miss Carver said you were interested in working with me on the Wildcat. I think that’s great. You could add something to it, you know? Something different.”

She smiled for the first time, genuinely smiled, as if she found me amusing.

“Something new,” I sputtered. “Like a perspective. On Choctaw, I mean. A different point of view. Northern.”

Something in what I’d said seemed to strike her. She studied me silently, as if trying to decide if I could be taken seriously. Then she appeared to reach some sort of conclusion. “Do you have a car?” she asked.

“Just an old Chevy,” I told her, “but it runs okay.”

“Do you have time to take a drive?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay,” Kelli said. “I’ll show you something that might be interesting.”

I felt the whole school watching as Kelli and I made our way down the long walkway and headed into the parking lot. That was not the case, of course, although I did see Eddie Smathers do a double take when he glimpsed us, his eyes following us until we disappeared into the old gray Chevy.

“Where are we going?” I asked as I hit the ignition.

“All the way out of town,” Kelli said. “Turn right on Main Street.”

I did as she told me, guiding the car down the street that led directly from the school to the center of Choctaw, then to the right and along a wide boulevard bordered first by dime stores and clothing shops, then by filling stations and used-car lots and eventually by nothing but fields and scattered farmhouses, the town disappearing behind us.

“There’s a place out here,” Kelli said, her eyes now much more intense as she scanned the broad flat land that spread out to the right until it finally lifted toward the mountain. “It’s in the woods, off an unpaved road.”

“We call them dirt roads down here,” I told her cautiously. “I think I know the one you mean.”

We turned onto it a few minutes later, a strip of dry road that moved like a red scar through the pastureland on either side. A film of orange dust had gathered on my glasses by the time we stopped at the end of it. I pulled a handkerchief from my pocket and began to wipe them.

“What are we looking for?” I asked as I put them on again.

“A big rock.” Kelli was peering into the deep woods that rose at the edge of the mountain. “It must be up there somewhere.”

She got out of the car and stared out toward the base of the mountain. “There’s the small stream I read about,” she said, pointing to a narrow trench that cut its way in a crooked pattern from the mountain to the distant road.

I risked a smile. “We call them creeks down here,” I said.

Kelli smiled back, then turned and walked around to the front of the car. I joined her there, watching as she scanned the distant slopes. “It must be just beyond that group of trees,” she said as she started up the road.

I followed behind her, my eyes fixed on the flowing shape of her body as it moved ahead of me, the sway of her hips beneath the dark skirt, the soft, rhythmic seesaw of her shoulders as she made her way toward the end of the road, the thick ebony tangle of her hair. Of the landscape that surrounded her, I remember the mountain as a dappled wall of red and orange, the creek as a dark thread, the road as a deep red cut through motionless fields of