The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [0]
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Villard Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
VILLARD BOOKS is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lott, Bret.
The hunt club / Bret Lott.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-80481-5
I. Title.
PS3562.0784H8 1998
813′.54—dc21 97-24181
Random House website address: www.randomhouse.com
Title page photograph © Paul Mason/Photonica
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Epilogue
Dedication
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
The sins of some men are obvious,
reaching the place of judgment ahead of them;
the sins of others trail behind them.
—I Timothy, 5:24
My name is Huger Dillard. You say it YOU-gee, not like it’s spelled. It’s French, I heard.
I’m fifteen years old, and my mom and dad are divorced, and I have my driver’s permit. I am telling you this because driving figures in to what happened, as does my mom. My dad, too, in a way, because it’s his brother, my Uncle Leland, this all happened to. Him and me both.
It started with a body, the head of it pretty much gone, the hands skinned.
We found it the Saturday after Thanksgiving, out to Hungry Neck Hunt Club. Uncle Leland owns the hunt club, which might make him sound important, or rich. But he’s not. The club is just what the family has had in its hands for the last seventy years or so, and is a tract of 2,200 acres, some of it trash land, good for nothing, some of it pretty, set on the Ashepoo. It’s forty miles south of Charleston, just past Jacksonboro. Live oak and pine, dogwood and palmetto and poison ivy and wild grapes and all else. Marsh grass down to the Ashepoo. That’s about it.
But it’s where Uncle Leland lives, in a single-wide. Unc, I call him. For short.
And it’s where we found this body.
The body was between stand 17 and 18, twenty yards back off the road and fifty yards or so up from the Ashepoo. Saturday after Thanksgiving is a big day for deer season, most all the members there. The members: doctors and lawyers and what have you from Charleston, the sorts of people you see on the news for whatever reason each night, or in the paper, all of them getting honored or interviewed for one matter or the other.
The body was there on the ground, not much of a head left on it for what I figured must have been a couple rounds off a shotgun. Its hands were skinned, too, from the wrists on down, the muscle dark red and glistening, the tendons all white. Two hands like skinned squirrels.
I wanted to throw up for looking at it. I’ve seen deer skinned and gutted before a million times, done it a million times myself. I’ve seen even the fetus taken out of a doe a time or two. I’ve seen dead things all my life, seen the blood involved. I’ve seen it.
But this. This.
Unc stood next to me, behind us and beside us a good dozen or so of these doctors and lawyers, all of them decked out in their clean crisp camo hunter outfits, all of them shaking their heads.
They had heads left.
The body, too, had on its own set of crisp camo hunter fatigues, had on a hunter-orange vest.
And in those hands was a shotgun, over-and-under twelve-gauge. Maybe the same one that did what it did to his head. It lay there in the weeds and grass just before the woods started up, where if he’d been one of the ones we’d dropped off, he would have been down on one knee, or maybe on a camp stool, waiting for Patrick and Reynold to let loose the dogs back on Cemetery Road, just this side of the levee. Then the howling’d start, and a buck might’ve skipped out from across the road, heading back into those woods and