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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 asquickly 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