nightmare, numb and motionless. Then I see her hand move toward her mouth, her fingers trembling at her lips. “Please, run,” I implore her, my voice breaking. She nods, places the book she had been reading on the wooden bench and rises to her feet. She is wearing the same white dress she will wear on Breakheart Hill, and I can see a single curl of dark hair as it falls across her forehead. For a moment, she hesitates, so I tell her a final time, now very softly, in a tone of absolute farewell, “Go.”
Her lips part, then close. She moves to stretch her hand toward me, then draws it back. For a single luxurious instant she looks as I always wanted her to look, full of love for me. Then she turns and walks out of my life forever, disappearing into the green of the town park rather than the green of Breakheart Hill, and I know that the malevolent hand has been stayed.
But in real life, the dark hand struck, and after that never tired of striking. In real life, everything converged and Luke stopped his truck on the mountain road, then watched as Kelli got out and moved down the slope until her white dress was a mere point of light in the deepening forest. When that winked out, he drove away.
I have watched it many times through his eyes, seen her in the rearview mirror just as he did; each time her beauty returns to me so powerfully that I can hardly believe that when I first glimpsed her in the park that day, I took no particular notice. I remember seeing her in the corner of my eye as I walked toward the tennis court, but neither her dark eyes nor her black curly hair drew my attention from whatever it was Luke was saying to me, and certainly they did not call up the silent child I’d seen in my father’s store so many years before.
Luke and I worked at playing tennis for nearly an hour that afternoon. Luke lobbed ball after ball in my general direction, but I rarely managed to return his serve. During all that time, Kelli continued to sit on the bench, her eyes only occasionally lifting toward us, sometimes for no more time than it took for her to follow the flight of the ball from one side of the court to the other. She never spoke, or gave any deep indication of interest in either one of us, but even as those first minutes passed, I remember becoming more and more aware of her presence, feeling it like a steadily building charge. After an hour, my eyes seemed to drift toward her of their own accord, without my willing it, but always surreptitiously, not wanting her to notice my interest. I had begun to alter my behavior slightly, trying to play better, be less awkward, and once, when I spun around too quickly and my glasses went flying across the court, I felt a fierce pang of embarrassment until I glanced toward her and saw that she remained immersed in her book, unaware of my humiliation.
Then, abruptly, as the game was ending, she put on her shoes, rose and headed out of the park. As she strolled up the small hill that led past the tall granite monument to the Confederate dead, she glanced back, her face oddly concentrated, as if she were about to ask me some important question.
I remember it was enough to stop me, to hold my gaze, so that Luke’s final ball whisked by me, a small white blur against the emerald background of the park, and which seemed to dissect her at the exact point where her white blouse met the rising blue of her skirt.
“Who’s she?” Luke asked once she was out of sight.
“I don’t know,” I said, pretending indifference.
“Sure not from around here,” Luke added.
I have often wondered how he could have been so sure of that. There was nothing in Kelli’s dress to suggest it, and he had never heard her voice, so her northern accent was unknown to us. From all appearances, she could have been one of the mountain girls who sometimes drifted down to Choctaw for a day of shopping or to go to the town’s one ornately decorated movie theater.
Except that she was alone. More than any single factor, I have come to believe that it was the solitariness in which we found her, sitting alone, reading to herself, that gave both Luke and me the firm impression that day that Kelli Troy was “not from around here.”
A girl from Choctaw, or from one of its surrounding communities, would have been with another girl, possibly several other girls. She would have been part of a group, a member of what the boys always referred to as a “gaggle” of other girls of similar age and dress and attitude. She would have been chatting with them in that lively, somewhat self-conscious way young girls had in those days, giggling, but covering their mouths when they giggled. Aspects of her girlhood would still have clung to her as visibly as small pink ribbons fluttering in her hair.
So, in the end, I think that what made Kelli look as if she were from somewhere else that afternoon was the slow, steady lift of her eyes, the unhurried way she rose from the bench, the surefooted stride that took her from the park.
Because of that, as I watched her leave, I think I felt, and certainly for the first time, not the quick edge of desire that almost any teenage girl could call forth in almost any teenage boy, but the deep allure, richer, and surely more troubling and mysterious, that can be summoned only by a woman.
“She’s very pretty,” I remember Luke saying as we headed out of the park.
“Pretty” seemed entirely inadequate to me, but I added only, “Yeah, she is.”
We got into Luke’s truck, an old blue one that he’d chosen for the day, and the same one, as it turned out, that he would later use to take Kelli to the upper slope of Breakheart Hill.
“Want to go to Cuffy’s?” he asked as he hit the ignition.
“Yeah, okay.”
He gave me a devilish grin, then stomped the accelerator, and we hurled out of the lot, throwing arcs of dust and small stones behind the spinning wheels.
We drove nearly the whole length of Choctaw that afternoon, moving from the park on the north side to Cuffy’s Grill at its southern limits. In those days, it was a pretty town, mostly brick, and as Sherman’s march had veered farther south as it advanced upon Atlanta, some of its buildings, notably the Opera House and the old railway station, actually dated back to before the Civil War. It was a town of small shops, mostly clothing, jewelry and hardware stores, and on Saturday its one main thoroughfare was filled with people from the surrounding mountains who’d come down to pay their farm loans at the local bank and buy their weekly supplies. The sleek new air-conditioned mall that later emptied the downtown area, turning it into a desolate wasteland of storefront churches and used furniture stores, had yet to be built, and so as Luke and I drove toward Cuffy’s Grill that afternoon late in August of 1961, it was possible for us to believe that Choctaw would remain as fixed and changeless as the mountains that rose on either side.
Cuffy’s was nearly deserted when we got there, with no more than a scattering of road workers at its booths and tables, men who were building the area’s first interstate highway a few miles to the east. They were dressed in flannel work clothes, their shirts and trousers covered with the chalky, red dust of the clay hills they were leveling to prepare the roadbed for the four-lane highway that was to come. I remember only that Lyle Gates was among them. He was tall and lanky, with sharp, angular features and moist, red-lined eyes. Even so, there was a certain intelligence in his face, along with an odd woundedness, the sense that something had been unjustly taken from him, or never given in the first place, though he could not exactly grasp what it was.
The other men were older, with thinning hair and drooping bellies, and I have often thought that as Lyle sat among them that day, he must have seen them as grim images of his own destiny, men who had come to little, as he would come to little, though unlike them, he had had a moment of supreme possibility.
Though I had few details, I knew that Lyle had very nearly clawed his way out of the smoldering redneck world he’d been born into, and that he’d thrown that golden chance away in a sudden act of violence.
But that afternoon, Lyle Gates didn’t look violent at all as he sat calmly with the other road workers, talking quietly and sipping at the paper cup he held in his hand. He had a pack of Chesterfield cigarettes rolled up in his shirtsleeve, and a red baseball cap cocked playfully to the right, and from the ease and casualness of his manner it would have been hard to imagine that anything dark lurked in him, a personal history that had stripped him to the bone.
And yet it was precisely that history that separated Lyle from the other men. It was a violent history, raw and edgy and impulsive, and as a result of it, various court orders had separated him from his young wife and infant daughter, so that he now lived with his aging mother in a part of Choctaw that was perilously close to Douglas, the Negro section, a part of town that even the most respectable white people often referred to as “Niggertown,” using the word as casually as New Yorkers might speak of Little Italy or San Franciscans of Chinatown.
Lyle had been a senior at Choctaw High when Luke and I were still in junior high school, but we had heard a great deal about him nonetheless. For a brief, shining moment, Lyle had been famous in Choctaw, a star football quarterback who had very nearly taken his team to the state finals. As a player, he’d been smart and aggressive, and there’d been much talk of the various college football scholarships that were certain to be offered to him. But all of that had been abruptly swept away one night in November when Lyle had jumped another player from behind,
