Reub Hill is a rural landmark whose roads and wooded edges serve sharply different purposes in the novel: Sandy Henderson revisits a place tied to her earlier disappointments, while Carl Henderson uses its outskirts for target practice and Lee Bodecker uses its seclusion to kill a prisoner. The hill connects private memory, casual recreation, and corrupt law enforcement without making those uses equivalent.

Roads, Dump, and Local Setting

One route crosses the top of Reub Hill and descends on the other side, where a muddy lane leads to a trash dump. Sandy recognizes the dump as a place she visited before Carl entered her life. The route also includes a gravel road near the hilltop that Lee Bodecker uses to take a handcuffed prisoner away from town and into nearby woods. These details establish the area not as a single enclosed site but as a network of roads, a dump, and wooded ground, each offering a different degree of access and concealment.

Sandy’s Past and Shooting Practice

On a Sunday, Carl drives Sandy over Reub Hill and down to the dump. She remembers having spent nights there with boys who did not treat her as a girlfriend; some took her tip money and left her to walk home. Her recollection that she had never been to a dance gives the setting a personal history of thwarted hopes as well as exploitation. The dump is familiar to her for reasons quite different from Carl’s.

Carl uses the same dump as a makeshift shooting range, arranging rusty cans on a stained mattress. He fires six shots from about thirty feet, knocking over four cans, then shows Sandy how to load and fire the pistol. She initially closes her eyes and misses, but continues until she hits cans. The lesson turns a place associated in her memory with earlier disappointments into a setting where Carl teaches her a practical skill, though the scene also places a firearm within their relationship.

Their practice is interrupted by a middle-aged landowner arriving in a pickup. He challenges them for shooting on his property, and Carl answers that he had not asked permission. The confrontation makes clear that the dump is not simply an unclaimed wasteland: someone asserts ownership, while Carl treats its appearance and remoteness as grounds to use it without consent.

Lee Bodecker’s Killing

The hill’s wooded outskirts also become the site of Lee Bodecker’s paid violence. After using his badge to remove Coonrod from a shack near the Paint Creek bottoms, Bodecker drives him to a gravel road at the top of Reub Hill. He drags the handcuffed man about a hundred yards into the woods and shoots him. The setting provides distance from ordinary scrutiny, while Bodecker’s use of his official authority to secure the victim makes the killing an abuse of law enforcement rather than an exercise of it.

Bodecker’s payment is part of the scene’s criminal context: Tater Brown owes him five thousand dollars, a thousand more than he charged for the earlier job. Coonrod had badly assaulted a woman working at Tater’s club, but Bodecker’s intervention does not amount to accountable justice; the killing instead serves a paid arrangement from which Bodecker profits. Reub Hill’s significance lies in this contrast: the same local landscape holds Sandy’s remembered vulnerability, Carl and Sandy’s ordinary outing, and a homicide deliberately hidden among the trees.