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, slammed him to the ground and knocked him unconscious before his fellow teammates had been able to pull him off. After that, he’d been cut from the team and suspended from school, which he quit entirely several weeks later. It was even rumored that he might have gone to jail had the other player decided to press charges against him.
After that, there’d been trouble with his wife, calls to the police, overnight incarcerations. Once he’d tried to kidnap his daughter, and in the process threatened his wife with a shotgun. The police had arrived again, and this time Lyle had spent a week in the county jail.
But for all the tales of violence that surrounded him, Lyle Gates did not look particularly sinister at Cuffy’s that afternoon. Ringed by smoke from his cigarette, his clothes covered in a chalky orange dust, he looked rather like a human husk, something cast aside. Even his hairstyle, slicked back in a blond ducktail, located him at the fringes of a fading era, an artifact at twenty-three.
He didn’t see Luke and me until he got up and headed for the door. Then he hung back slightly, let the other, older men leave the diner and sauntered over to us.
“How ya’ll doing?” he asked.
“Just fine, I guess,” Luke answered a little tensely, aware as he was of Lyle’s reputation.
Lyle grinned, though something in his eyes remained distant and perhaps even a bit unsure as to whether he should have spoken to us at all. “Gettin’ any?”
Luke shrugged but didn’t answer.
Lyle’s eyes shifted over to me. “You look familiar,” he said.
“Ben Wade,” I told him.
He looked at me a moment, as if trying to think of something else to say. “You ever try the Frito Pie?” he asked finally.
“No.”
“You ought to,” Lyle said. “It’s Cuffy’s special.” His eyes moved from mine to Luke’s, then back to mine. “Ya’ll were still in junior high when I played ball for Choctaw High, right?”
We nodded.
“What grade are you in now?”
“I’m going to be a senior,” Luke answered. “Ben’s going to be a junior.”
Lyle gave a quick nod. “I didn’t quite make it out of old Choctaw High. I guess ya’ll heard about that.”
Neither of us answered him.
His face seemed to darken momentarily with the memory of that cataclysmic failure, then brighten just as quickly as he tried to shrug it off. “Well, is the old school still about the same?”
“I guess,” Luke told him.
Lyle’s grin took a cruel twist. “They let any niggers in yet?”
Luke and I exchanged glances, then Luke said, “Not yet.”
“I hear they’re going to,” Lyle said.
Luke shook his head. “I haven’t heard anything about it.”
“Well, good,” Lyle said softly. He glanced outside. The other men had boarded the back of the truck. “I gotta go now,” he said as he turned back to us. Then he gave Luke a gentle pat on the shoulder. “Ya’ll be good,” he said.
With that, he strode out of Cuffy’s and hopped into the back of the truck. He was pulling the pack of Chesterfields from his shirt as it pulled away.
“You think Lyle’s right?” Luke asked.
I looked at him soberly, certain that he was referring to Lyle’s remark about “niggers” being admitted to Choctaw High.
“About the Frito Pie,” Luke added before I could answer. “You think it’s any good?”
I don’t remember my answer to that far less serious question, but I do recall that Luke tried the Frito Pie that afternoon, and that shortly after he’d finished it, he drove me to my house on Morgan Street.
My father came home around seven that evening, and we ate dinner together. After that, he took his place in the chair by the window, reading the paper silently while I watched television.
On those days when the past is like a movie endlessly playing in my head, I often think of him as he appeared on such evenings. I see him by the window, easing himself into the old chair, removing the rubber band that held the paper in a tight roll, then going through it page by page, concentrating, as he always did, on the darker side of things, stories about atrocious acts of violence, as if struggling to discover the single, irreducible source of such cruelty and murderousness in the way the ancient Greeks futilely searched for the single element from which, they supposed, all of earth’s variety had sprung. At last, he would shake his head, and say only, “There’s something missing in people who do things like that.”
Was it the dread of this “something missing” that lay at the center of whatever moral teaching my father offered me? Fearing it, he often encouraged me to “know myself” and “be true to my convictions.” To have a firm identity, to fill the inner void with character, that was the goal of every life, the most it could achieve. If you did not achieve it, you were lost, and in your lostness, capable of something dreadful. When he spoke of some rapist or murderer he’d just read about in the newspaper, it was this “something missing” that always hovered mysteriously around the outrages they had committed.
And so by the time I’d reached my sophomore year of high school, I was at least dimly aware that life could prove treacherous, that people might live well for a long time and then suddenly be swallowed up by the hole that had always secretly dwelled inside them.
But that night, after I’d come home from Cuffy’s, my father didn’t speak to me about such things. Instead, he read silently for a while, then let the newspaper slip from his hands, pulled himself to his feet and headed down the hallway to his bedroom. On the way, he ruffled my hair a little and gave me his usual “Don’t stay up too late, now.”
I went to bed a few hours after that, and I’m sure that during the interval before I fell asleep I must have thought of Kelli Troy, since something in the way she’d looked in the park that afternoon had already begun to attract me to her. With the same assurance, I can also say that I did not give Lyle Gates a single, fleeting thought.
But I think of him often now. I see him move slowly down the courthouse steps with Sheriff Stone walking massively at his side. It is raining, and Lyle’s shoulders are covered by the translucent plastic raincoat someone has draped around his slumped shoulders. My father stands next to me. He is wearing a gray hat, and I can see raindrops splattering onto its wide felt brim. I can see him clearly despite the slender watery trails that drift down the lenses of my glasses. The two of us stand side by side, part of a hushed crowd that has gathered on the courthouse steps. Lyle does not glance toward me as he passes, but merely continues on, his head lowered slightly, his hair drenched with rain as he is led down the stairs toward the waiting car. I look over toward my father. His eyes are still on Lyle, following his figure silently. I can see complicated things stirring in his head, unanswered questions, ideas he cannot voice, so that “There’s something missing in that boy” is all he says.