And so I refused to step away from the plate.
Because of that, the pitcher hesitated, staring confusedly while Carter crouched over the plate, the bat held high above his head.
“Get out of the way, runt,” Carter bawled at me. “Right now, or I’ll stomp your ass.”
I remained in place. “You’ll have to,” I told him.
Carter Dillbeck was big and mean and very angry, and for the next forty-five seconds he tried his best to kill me, slamming me to the ground and pounding me into the dust until Coach Sanders rushed up, jerked him off me and marched him to the principal’s office, where, as I found out later, he was soundly paddled.
It was Luke Duchamp who offered his hand and helped me to my feet. “You’re pretty tough for a little guy,” he said.
I was anything but graceful in defeat. Hunched and enraged, dust caked in my mouth, I stormed back into the school.
To my astonishment, Luke followed me all the way to my locker. “You okay?” he asked.
I nodded sullenly.
His next question completely surprised me. “You like to play tennis?”
I shrugged, angrily tossed my geology book into my locker’s cluttered interior and pulled out the math text I’d need for my next class. “I’ve never played it,” I told him.
“You want to try?”
“I don’t know,” I answered dully, trying to appear more or less indifferent to his invitation.
It was an act, of course, for I in no way wanted to refuse Luke’s offer. Almost without knowing it, I had always wanted to have a friend exactly like him, tall, self-confident, in command of those physical skills that eluded me, the sort of boy even Carter Dillbeck would stay clear of. By then I had surrounded myself with “friends” very different from what I supposed Luke to be, boys like Jerry Peoples, who hungered after each issue of Mad magazine and wanted to be a taxidermist, or Bradley Sims, a ham radio zombie. In Choctaw, Jerry and Bradley were the intellectual types, as I well knew, but they were also freakish and unattractive, with big ears and goofy smiles, and I had always felt a secret embarrassment at being associated with them. Luke seemed to offer a way out of such entanglements, but I still didn’t want to appear too eager.
And so I stalled a moment longer. “Why me? I mean, you don’t know me.”
Luke shifted slightly, then leaned against the wall of green metal lockers. “It doesn’t seem like anybody knows you, Ben,” he replied.
The line pierced me to the quick. For until that moment I’d felt sure that my fellow classmates regarded me as a mysterious figure, quiet, inward, somewhat superior, a boy who lived contentedly in his own world and who was perhaps even a bit disdainful of the one they lived in. But the fact that this might add up to being thought of as featureless and inconsequential had never occurred to me, and I found it disturbing.
“Anyway,” Luke added, “I just thought I’d ask.” He pulled himself away from the locker and started to walk away.
“Well, I guess I’d like to try it,” I said quickly, blurting out the words in order to draw him back.
Luke looked back at me, now hesitant himself, as if I’d refused a gift he wasn’t sure he wanted to offer a second time. “Okay, I’ll call you sometime,” he said finally, but without enthusiasm, so that as he walked away, I assumed he never would.
But he did. He called the next weekend, and the two of us headed to the only public court in Choctaw. After that, we saw a lot of each other. We went on long drives along the mountain roads, hunted in the woods behind his house, swam and fished in the nearby creek, and on those humid Saturday nights when Luke didn’t have a date, we would sit on my front porch, talking quietly about what might lay ahead of us.
Although I was already thinking about medicine, I hadn’t really decided on any future course at that point. The only thing I knew for sure was that I wanted to leave Choctaw, that in some way I felt myself too big for its limited confines. Even now I don’t know exactly why I had always been so determined to leave. And yet, from my earliest years, I had dreamed of the day when I would put Choctaw behind me, strike off into a wider world, become something larger than anything or anyone I saw around me.
But I knew nothing of that larger world I hungered for. In terms of those things one learns in school, I had some understanding of both European and American history, enough mathematics “to cipher,” as the old people used to say, and a rudimentary grasp of science.
Geographically, I was no less limited. I had traveled only as far east as Chattanooga, as far west as Mississippi, as far north as Nashville and as far south as Birmingham. I had never met anyone who might describe himself as something other than an American.
I knew about friendship, however, and the love one may feel for one’s father. Because my mother had died when I was four, I also knew a little about grief, perhaps even a bit about loneliness. But I knew very little about regret, and nothing at all about passion. All that awaited Kelli Troy.
SHE WAS SITTING ON A WOODEN BENCH IN A PATCH OF SUN, dressed in a white blouse and a blue skirt, her legs pulled up under her. She had slipped off her shoes, and her bare feet rested casually on the bench. She was reading, and did not look up as Luke and I strolled by.
Since that time, the image of a young woman in such a pose, reading silently, concentrated and self-contained, has always returned me to that instant before it all began. Not to relive it as it actually was, however, but as I would have it be, knowing all that I have since come to know. It is a dream of reaching back into the past and erasing some circumstance or making some small adjustment that will alter the course of our lives forever, and as time moves forward and mistake piles upon mistake, it becomes the deepest longing that we know.
In my particular vision, I am walking cheerfully toward the tennis court. I am hopeful and optimistic. I know myself, and am serene, perhaps even happy, in that knowledge. Luke is at my side, his face quite open and carefree, utterly untroubled by those questions that now haunt him. He is talking to me. I can see his lips moving. But in my vision the world is silent, and so I cannot hear his voice. We walk on a few paces, my eyes drifting downward idly, glimpsing first the shaded ground, then Luke’s white tennis shoes and finally lifting slowly upward until I catch sight of something terrible, wrenching in its unexpected suddenness, a glistening red stain on Luke’s otherwise spotless jeans. I know instantly that it is blood, and it is at that moment I hear a rustle of leaves, the sound of birds taking flight, animals scurrying through the undergrowth. I feel my skin tighten as a fierce heat sweeps over me. The rustling subsides, replaced by angry voices, then a dull thud, and after that a swirl of disconnected sounds, the whimpering of a little boy, the hollow thump of a child’s body as it slams against a cement curb, the whir of a pickax slicing through the air. My eyes widen in the horror of complete understanding, and I wheel around to face Kelli.
She is still seated on the bench, still reading obliviously, her face utterly serene. I call to her, she glances up, and I can see my own stricken face in her uncomprehending eyes. Almost in a whisper I say, “Run.” She looks at me, puzzled, not knowing what to do. “Run,” I repeat, this time more insistently. “Run. Run.” I can hear the desperation building in my voice, the tense, nearly shrill alarm. “Run!” She stares at me, suddenly frightened. My voice is high now, keening, vehement, and I can see that she is both baffled and alarmed by the terror she can hear locked within it. “Run!” I shout again, as if trying to drive her from a blazing house. Her face turns very grave, and I know that the whole dreadful story has suddenly unfolded before her. For an instant, she seems suspended in that 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.”