Breakheart Hill Read Free

year must have seemed to explode before her eyes.
    Within an instant, she was gone.
    I remained on the porch, my hands still in my pockets, toying with one of the assortment of dime-store clickers I’d collected over the years. I was always clicking them, using them, as I realize now, to click away boredom, loneliness, fear. At night I clicked away the darkness. Alone in my backyard I clicked up imaginary friends. I suppose that as I stood on the store’s front porch that afternoon, I half believed that with a single innocent and fantastic click I could bring Kelli Troy back to me.
    Such a wonder does not exist, of course. Only memory does, the standing miracle of life. And so, despitethe passage of over thirty years, the slightest thing can still return her to me. Sometimes, for example, I will glance out my office window, fix my eyes upon the gray upper slope of Breakheart Hill, and recall the many times I’d wanted to take her up that same hill and lie down with her. I had dreamed of it quite often during the time I knew her, and it was always the same dream, delicate enough, and tender, but unmistakably sensual as well. I would take her to the crest of Breakheart Hill, lower her upon a dark red blanket, and as the music swelled to a thrilling height, we would come together in that passionate embrace I’d seen in countless movies, a touch I had never felt, though many times imagined.
    But nothing like that ever happened on Breakheart Hill. Something else did. Something that continually weaves through my consciousness, slithering into my mind from this corner or that, but always returning me to the past with a terrible immediacy, as if it had all happened yesterday and I was still reeling from the shock.
    At times it begins with Sheriff Stone standing before me, his eyes slowly scanning the bare concrete walls of the little office where I worked on the high school newspaper. At other occasions it has begun with the sound of my father calling to me from the mountain road, his tall figure veiled in thick gray lines of rain. It has begun with my being ushered into a musty, cluttered room, an old woman’s voice coming from behind, ancient, gravelly, and unspeakably ironic in what she says to me.
Thank you, Ben, for doing this
.
    At still other times it comes to me in a dream of that last day. It is midafternoon, and a breeze is rustling through the grass of my front yard. Across the way, my neighbor’s son blows a dandelion into the shimmering air, and suddenly in my mind I see Luke’s old truck come to a stop on the mountainside. He takes off his blue baseball cap and wipes his brow. He says, “You sure?” She says, “Don’t worry, Luke.” Then she smiles at him and getsout of the truck. He lingers a moment, reluctant to leave her. “Go on, Luke,” she tells him. He nods, jerks into gear, then pulls away, the old truck lumbering down the hill toward town, a puff of blue smoke streaming from its dusty tailpipe. She watches him from her place at the edge of the mountain road, her hand lifted in a final wave, her bare arm weaving like a brown reed against the green wall of the mountain. She smiles slightly, as if to reassure him that she is safe from harm. Then she turns away and heads down the slope toward Breakheart Hill, disappearing finally into a web of trees.
    Sometimes the dream ends there, too, with a faint smile still lingering on her lips. At other times, however, it goes on irrevocably, step by step, all the way to the instant when I see her body as it crashes through the dense forest growth, her legs torn by briar and shrubs, her face slapped mercilessly by low-slung branches. She runs desperately, dazed and terrified, her body bent forward as she rushes back up the steep grade of Breakheart Hill. At times she stumbles, her fingers clawing madly at the rocky ground until she pulls herself to her feet again and struggles forward, staggering up the slope, toward the point where the high ridge levels off at