The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [1]
He’d have watched and waited for that howling, that bust loose in the brush, that deer.
But this was a dead body.
And here’s the thing. Here’s the thing:
A piece of cardboard lay at its feet, one whole side of a toilet-paper box, like you can pick up out back of the Piggly Wiggly. And on the cardboard was written this:
Here lies the dead son of a bitch
Charles Middleton Simons, MD,
killed and manicured by his loving wife.
Busy hands can be the devil’s workshop as well.
PS: Leland, can you blame me?
It was all written in a girly curlicue, a black marker. And here was my uncle’s name, plain as day.
Nobody’d yet said a thing, none of the dozen or so of us standing at the edge of these woods. It wasn’t even sunup yet, the sky still gray and yellow.
“Talk to me, Huger,” Unc said, and I felt him put a hand on my shoulder. “What is it?” he said, though I knew he already knew. He’d been the one to tell me to stop the truck.
But he couldn’t see it. He’d only smelled it, his head quick turning to my left, my window down. I’d been driving, like always him beside me in the cab, in the bed our load of men. There were three truckloads, us letting off a man at each stand. “Stop,” he’d said, too loud. “Stop here,” he’d said.
“We aren’t even to eighteen yet,” I’d said. “Seventeen’s not but twenty yards—”
“Stop,” he’d said again, his voice no different. Still too loud.
Now here we were. And I could smell it, too. Blood smell, something like the metal smell off the deer when we butcher them back to the clubhouse. But sharper. It smelled dark red, and sharp, like metal in your mouth. That sounds crazy, but that’s the words that came to me: dark red, metal.
“Tell me,” he said, almost a whisper in my ear now, his hand heavy on me. “What is it?”
He couldn’t see it, because he’s blind.
I opened my mouth. I wanted to say that the body had no head to speak of. I wanted to say the hands’d been skinned. I wanted to say it had on crisp camo fatigues, and those squirrel hands were holding an over-and-under twelve-gauge. I wanted to say it had on a hunter-orange vest, and that there was a cardboard sign at its feet, right there in the grass just below his newly oiled duck boots.
And I wanted to ask Unc why his name was on that sign.
My uncle is blind, and it’s been left to me to be his eyes, my job here at the hunt club. Why I spent every weekend out here with him in his single-wide. Why my learner’s permit figures in here.
I’d never seen a dead body before. That’s what I wanted to tell him.
I turned to him, the sky above us, it felt, going a brighter yellow even in the second it took to turn.
He was looking at me, him a couple inches taller than me. He had on his sunglasses, that Braves cap he wears. He had on the same khaki shirt and pants as always, the same green suspenders.
And in his free hand was that walking stick he carries everywhere.
I found that stick when I was seven, not but a quarter mile from the trailer. Back when he’d just lost his sight. Back after the fire at his house in Mount Pleasant, in which his wife, my Aunt Sarah, died.
Back when my dad and mom were together, and we three lived here at Hungry Neck in that single-wide, my dad the proprietor of the hunt club.
They brought Unc here from the medical university, where he’d been for two months, his house and wife gone.
He lay in bed for six months in what had been my room, me in a sleeping bag on the couch in the front room. But I didn’t mind. I talked to him each day, too. I told him about where I’d been on Hungry Neck, about the turkey I’d seen back past Baldwin Road or about the dove up from the clear-cut on past Lannear Road. I talked to him. And I read to him: the Hardy Boys, The Chronicles of Narnia, Field & Stream.
And I brought him things: a jay’s nest once; a single antler, three points; an eagle feather. He took each thing in his hands, felt it.
Sometimes he smiled, other times he didn’t. His eyes were bandaged, and he said next to nothing.
But he was what I had: someone who’d listen, while my mom