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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 mountainswho’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 hisshirtsleeve, 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