I draw in a long breath. “Todd’s good,” I say quietly, the first words I have said to her in days.
She turns toward me, her dark eyes dazzling in the reflected light from the stage. “Yes, he is,” she says.
I start to say something else, but suddenly her eyes dart away from me. She is staring over my shoulder, her eyes trained on something in the distance. There is a strange concentration in her face, a passion she seems barely able to control.
“I need to see Todd for a second,” she says quickly. “Can you take over for me?”
I have no time to answer. She starts to dash away, realizes that she still has the rope in her hand and quickly thrusts it toward me. “Here,” she says, “hold this.”
She says it casually, inadvertently, without a thought, not in the least realizing that in that one offhanded word and gesture she has reduced me to a bit player, utterly inconsequential, something smaller than anything I had ever dreamed of being.
I feel my fingers tighten around the rope as my eyes follow her. She bounds away from me and out the open door. Just beyond it, Todd is standing alone, and she slows as she nears him.
I turn away, focusing on the stage, the few actors who are scattered across it, hearing the final lines of Capulet:
As rich shall Romeo’s by his lady’s lie,
Poor sacrifices of our enmity.
I glance back toward the door. Kelli and Todd are facing each other silently. For a moment they seem as immortal as the characters they play. Then Kelli draws her hands together, and I see her slowly remove her grandmother’s ring, take Todd’s hand and press it onto his finger.
I close my eyes, my fingers still clinging to the rope. When I open them again, I see her draw Todd into her arms, kiss him deeply, lingeringly, then step away. I turn from them and stare out toward the stage. The prince is speaking:
Some shall be pardoned, and some punished.
I can hear Kelli walking toward me, but I am no longer thinking of her, but of her and Todd together, wrapped in each other’s arms, of that electrifying intimacy I know they have already shared and which I have dreamed of a thousand times but not yet known, nor would ever know, the splendor of that moment when love fuses absolutely with desire and for a single glittering instant our deepest longing retires into the past.
She grasps the rope, and I release it. “I’ll take over now,” she says. “Thanks, Ben.”
I nod, then turn and walk outside, passing through the side door just as Todd comes back through it, so close that I can see the wink of the ring on his finger.
For a time I stand in the darkness. I can hear Miss Carver assembling various members of the cast, dismissing others, but everything sounds hollow and faraway, and seems so for a long time.
Then I realize suddenly that I am not alone. Eddie Smathers slouches against the brick wall, his plaid short-sleeve shirt open to the waist. He pulls a cigarette from his shirt pocket and lights it. The small red flame is like a single mad eye shining in the darkness.
“Hi, Ben,” he says casually.
I nod dully, unable to speak.
He eases himself from the wall and comes over to me. “What are you doing out here?”
“Nothing.”
“Miss Carver said that everybody but Todd and Kelli could go home,” Eddie says. He grins. “But I wanted a smoke first.” He takes the pack from his pocket and presses it toward me. “Want one?”
I shake my head.
He returns the pack to his pocket and glances back toward the auditorium. “You got to hand it to Todd and Kelli, they’re really putting in the effort on this thing.”
I glance toward the door. I can see Todd and Kelli standing together, with Miss Carver in front of them.
“Probably wants to give them a few last-minute tips,” Eddie says. He takes a greedy draw on the cigarette, flips an ash and smiles. “Romeo, Romeo,” he adds mockingly. “What bullshit.” He laughs, then glances back through the door to where Todd and Kelli are still standing together on the stage. He shakes his head. “All the girls fall for Todd,” he says admiringly, “but I think this is the first time Todd ever really fell for anybody.” He chuckles at the thought of it. “But, man, he really has a thing for Kelli.”
My reply comes to me in a sudden, malignant insight, springs instantly out of me as if it were a snake that had been coiled up inside me for a long time, slimy, vile, a creature from my bowels. In a brief, blinding illumination, I see everything converge like the crosshairs on an assassin’s scope: Kelli’s mysterious past, the absent father whose very existence she so emphatically denied, her dark skin and black curly hair, the article about Gadsden, her obsession with Breakheart Hill, even Lyle Gates’s words howled at her from the back of Cuffy’s Grilclass="underline" Nigger-loving bitch, everything hardening into a sinister possibility. And I know that it does not need to be true, that no one will ever ask for proof, that in the charged and hateful atmosphere that surrounds her I need only plant the fatal seed. In an instant, I see all my earlier convictions dissolve, the thin layer of my earlier sympathy, my boldly proclaimed sense of justice, everything I had felt so powerfully as I’d stood at the edge of the Negro cemetery, then later on that frigid night in Gadsden, and finally with Kelli on Breakheart Hill, all of it now ground to dust beneath the wheel of my enmity.
My eyes dart toward Eddie, and I feel the words slide out of my mouth like small bits of stinking flesh. He wouldn’t, if he knew.
Eddie’s eyes shift over to me. “What?”
“Nothing,” I say with a quick shrug.
Eddie presses me as I know he will. “If who knew what?”
For the briefest of moments I cling to the ledge of heaven. Then I let go and tumble out of paradise.
“If Todd knew about Kelli’s daddy.”
“Kelli’s daddy?” Eddie asks. “What about him?”
I wave my hand, as if dismissing it. “Maybe it’s not true,” I tell him.
Eddie stares at me intently. “Maybe what’s not true?”
“You know, what people say.”
“What are you talking about, Ben?”
“You know,” I tell him, “that Kelli’s father is a—” I stop, a final thread of character holding tenuously for an instant before it snaps. Then the word drops from me like a body through a hangman’s scaffold. “… nigger.”
Eddie’s eyes widen in stunned and almost childlike disbelief. “Bullshit,” he blurts out. “You’re bullshitting me.”
I say nothing, but only stare at him evenly, daring him to doubt it.
He leans toward me, his voice now an edgy, conspiratorial whisper. “What are you saying, Ben? Did Kelli tell you that?”
I say nothing, allowing it to sink deeper and deeper, like a stain, in Eddie’s mind. I know he is recalling all the times he has seen Kelli and me alone together, the long drives to her house in the afternoon, the intimacy that he imagines must have grown between us during that time, the sort of friendship that permits nothing to be hidden, and at last that climactic moment when she reveals to me the single most unspeakable secret of her life.
His eyes widen in astonishment, but no longer in disbelief. “She told you that, Ben? Kelli told you that her father was a nigger?”
I do not answer.
I can see all of it gathering together in Eddie’s mind, all doubt dissolving, a mist solidifying, becoming fact.
“Don’t tell Todd, though,” I warn him, thinking absolutely that he will, and that after that it will be over, that Todd will never mention what he’s been told, never confront Kelli with any part of it, but simply walk away from a love that has become impossible. “I mean it, Eddie,” I say. “Don’t tell Todd.” I say it gravely, sincerely, but already envisioning the moment when Eddie will draw Todd aside and whisper the fatal word in his stricken ear. I imagine all that will inevitably happen after that: Todd’s sudden remoteness, Kelli’s bafflement, the wrenching moment when he will cast her aside once and for all and return, as he had so many times in the past, to Mary Diehl. I imagine everything except the possibility that Eddie might actually heed my warning to keep all that I have told him from Todd Jeffries … but tell Lyle Gates instead.