Breakheart Hill

Noreen glanced at me. “You getting out, too?”

“I guess I have to,” I answered a little irritably.

Kelli was almost halfway to the march when I caught up with her. “What are you going to do?” I asked as I trotted along beside her.

“I don’t know. Talk to them, maybe.”

I took her arm and turned her toward me. “You can’t do that,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Because it’s not something you should get involved in.”

She answered with a question that was absolutely firm. “Then what is, Ben?”

I had no answer for her, and so she pulled away from me and continued toward the marchers.

“Kelli,” I called. “Wait.”

She slowed her pace as she neared the marchers, then stopped before reaching them, the two of us standing stiffly in the cold, the nearly deserted lot behind us, and nothing but the slowly flowing line of march in front.

I glanced back toward the car. Noreen still sat in the front seat, but she had leaned forward to keep us in view, and I could see that she was staring at us intently, as if we might disappear at any moment.

“Someone has to be in charge,” Kelli said, clearly improvising a plan. “That’s who I’ll talk to first.” She looked at me evenly. “Are you coming with me?”

Even now, I’m not sure what my answer would have been. As it turned out, I had no time to think about it.

I first noticed the car as it turned into the shopping center lot from some distance away, the yellow beams of its headlights sweeping over the dark pavement like twin searchlights.

Six months later I described that moment to Mr. Bailey when he put the question directly to me in Judge Thompson’s packed courtroom.

And you say you saw a car pull into the shopping center, is that right, Ben?

Yes, sir.

Did that car come toward you and Miss Troy?

Yes, it did.

Could you see who was driving it?

When it came closer, I could.

Who was driving that car, Ben?

Lyle Gates.

I had seen his face even before the car came to a halt a few yards away, and when I think of it now, I see it as disembodied, a pale, ghostly face balanced on the rim of a dark green steering wheel, his eyes strangely dead and lightless, like two blue marbles.

“Oh, shit,” I said.

Kelli glanced at me hurriedly, then back to the line of marchers. “Who is it?”

“Lyle Gates,” I said grimly. “He’s probably down here to start trouble.”

“How do you know?”

“He talks about ‘the niggers.’ I heard him once at Cuffy’s.”

But Lyle was not alone. Eddie Smathers was sitting in the passenger seat, the short black stub of a cigar held firmly in his mouth, his eyes wide with surprise at seeing Kelli and me before him.

“What do you think they’re going to do?” Kelli asked.

“I don’t know.”

And so we simply stood in place and watched as the two of them got out of the car and began to come toward us.

Eddie was empty-handed, but Lyle had a baseball bat dangling from his right hand.

Kelli glanced at me silently, apprehensively, and for an instant I felt her fingers clutch my hand with unmistakable urgency. A few yards away, the marchers continued in their frigid rounds, but at that moment, they vanished from my mind. I saw only Lyle, and he suddenly seemed immensely tall and threatening, a figure capable of unimaginable destruction.

“Just don’t say anything about what we’re doing down here,” I whispered frantically to Kelli.

She nodded coolly as she released my hand, but I know she was afraid, and that everything about Eddie and Lyle heightened that fear. Their loose-limbed swaggers, the smoke that trailed behind Eddie, the physical power sheathed within their jeans and denim jackets, the unthinkable violence behind their boyish grins.

I heard her whisper, “Ben?”

I had no time to answer, for by then Lyle and Eddie had closed in on us.

“How ya’ll doing,” Eddie said. He flipped the cigar into the parking lot and smiled at Kelli. “Stinky old things. Right, Lyle?”

Lyle didn’t answer. Instead, his eyes swept over to Kelli, lingered there, then returned to me. “What ya’ll doing way down here?” he asked.

I gave Kelli a quick warning glance. “We just decided to take a ride.”

Lyle looked at Kelli, his eyes motionless as they gazed at her. “You from Choctaw?”

Eddie grinned, and answered for her. “Hell, no, Lyle. She’s that new girl I told you about. The one from up north.”

Lyle gave a short, oddly brittle laugh. “Well, in that case I take back what I said.”

What he’d said, of course, was that he would not “fuck a Yankee,” a remark that I found myself repeating in the crowded courtroom six months later.

Those were his exact words, Ben?

Yes, sir.

And he’d said that some weeks before, when you’d seen him in the parking lot at Choctaw High, is that right?

Yes.

So you might say that the night you met up with him at the shopping center, that at that particular time he indicated that he’d changed his mind, that he was willing to have sexual relations with Miss Troy, is that correct?

That is correct.

But Lyle had done no more than that, and for the next few minutes, as the four of us stood in the frigid parking lot, he looked at Kelli almost sweetly, and certainly from the great distance he knew separated them.

“Hi” was what he said to her, his voice soft, respectful, not at all in the tone that Mr. Bailey’s questions later suggested to the jury. There was no threat in his voice. He had not looked at her suggestively, and certainly not with that lustful, vaguely murderous gleam Mr. Bailey wanted the jury to see. Instead, he watched her quietly, politely, as if trying to assure her that he was not a crude redneck, but a young man who’d learned his manners, who knew how to behave in front of a teenage girl.

“Hi,” Kelli answered a little stiffly.

Suddenly the marchers began to sing, clapping softly to the words of an old hymn, their voices low and steady.

Eddie giggled. “Just like Ray Charles,” he said.

Lyle did not seem to hear him. His eyes remained on Kelli. “My name’s Lyle,” he said. “Lyle Gates.”

Kelli nodded. “Kelli Troy.”

“Are you really from up north, like Eddie says?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Whereabouts?”

“Baltimore.”

Lyle smiled. “Baltimore, huh?” Suddenly he lifted the bat and thrust it toward Kelli, a gesture that made her flinch.

“Look at that,” Lyle said. “See what it says just above the grip? ‘Baltimore Orioles.’ ” He laughed. “I bought it for my kid yesterday, and it cracked on the first hit.” He drew the bat away from her and returned it to his side. “So I’m bringing it back for another one.”

The voices of the marchers continued to drone on behind us, and from the corner of my eye, I saw them as a