hands groping at her dress, ripping at her clothes. She was squirming beneath him, scratching at his eyes, but it was hopeless, and she finally gave up and simply lay on her back and let him finish, and prayed that he wouldn’t kill her when it was done. It was a melodramatic rendering, of course, something conjured up from old movie scenes, but despite that fact, I felt oddly certain that it had happened exactly as I imagined it, and the more I thought of it, the more it seemed to explain certain aspects of Kelli’s behavior, her reluctance to talk about her life up north, her general lack of interest in boys, perhaps even the physical distance she maintained toward me. It was preposterous, of course, and as it turned out, not in the least bit true. And yet I became fixed upon it as we drove toward Cuffy’s that night, seeing it again and again, though never for a moment thinking that in re-creating such a scene I might unconsciously be acting out my own dark urge to possess her physically, even if, in the end, it was against her will and done by force.
None of this came out in court, of course, and by the time I sat in the witness box, describing what happened later that evening, I barely recalled even having dreamed up such a “solution” to the riddle of Kelli Troy. Mr. Bailey would not have been interested anyway. He was tracking something far more ominous than a teenage boy’s feverish imaginings about a teenage girl’s mysterious past, and I can still hear his voice tighten as he moved toward the center of his concern:
Even as I gave testimony that day, and despite all the distractions of the courtroom, the people watching me, the oddly empty stare of Miss Carver, the bowed head of Shirley Troy, I could still see it all before me just as it had happened several months before.
We had gone to a booth in the far corner of the room. Kelli was still talking about Breakheart Hill, probing various ways of finding out more about it. Mrs. Phillips had directed her to a man named Taylor Prewett, who, she said, had collected a great deal of material on Choctaw’s past.
“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.
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.
