The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [11]
“But Unc,” I said, and swallowed, my mouth dry now too. “What—”
“Rigor mortis,” he said. “I seen it happen before.”
He stopped, slowly looked to the window, like maybe he’d see something out there could help him. “For whatever reason, the muscles just go taut sometimes, start pulling against the bone.” He paused. “You’d be amazed, Huger, what I seen. But I’m sorry you had to see that. Just like I said to your momma. I am sorry.”
He let go the rail and reached to me, his hand moving along the white of the sheet, looking for me.
I took hold of it, and he squeezed down hard.
It felt good, that pain.
“But your momma is right,” he said.
“About what?” I swallowed again.
“What she’s saying is you ought not to be out there anymore. You ought to stay home for a while. Till things get settled.”
I let go his hand. “No way.”
He shook his head. “I told you. This is no field trip. There’s no way I want you or your momma involved in any of this.”
I tried to sit up then, pushed my elbows down, scooted my butt up. But the pain in my head nearly knocked me down, and I only lay back, closed my eyes.
“What’s this?” I whispered. “What do you know, Unc?” I opened my eyes to him. “You said she called you.”
“Saturday after Thanksgiving, I imagine there’s a couple dozen ball games to choose from,” he said, his voice whole and solid. “Now, where the heck’s the TV in here?” He put his hand to the rail, found the buttons. “Which one for the TV?”
“Unc,” I said, “you can’t do this.” I was quiet a second, not certain if what I wanted to say was right or not. If he’d take it the way I meant it: that he needed me.
And I needed him.
“Unc,” I said. “You’re a blind man.”
“Damn straight,” he whispered hard and looked at me, his lips tight. He forgot the buttons on the rail and quick reached up with his hand, pulled off the sunglasses, like he’d been waiting for this all along.
There they were: his marble eyes, white and fake, held in by the gnarled and shiny skin of his eyelids, the skin melted from where his eyebrows might have been down to his cheekbones, where he’d been burned, and where the glass from the bedroom window exploded out at him, hot shards of it shooting into his eyes and into his chest and arms. It was then he’d fallen back, away from the house, and then the eaves above that window had collapsed, him screaming on the ground.
It’d been my Aunt Sarah inside the bedroom, asleep, Unc just home from a shift at the department, him an investigator, home at midnight every night.
But this time his house was on fire, and he’d run around to their bedroom window, and it’d exploded.
I knew all this only from what my mom told me once, years back and just before we moved to North Charleston. It’d never occurred to me to ask before that, to ask what happened, Unc’s presence in our trailer only a given, what other uncles did when they were hurt. I’d known it was a fire he’d been in, known Aunt Sarah was dead.
But in the hush of his moving in, and the moving out of my daddy not much later, it’d always seemed something not to ask after, and so I hadn’t. Even when I did venture that one time, the trailer choked with boxes, Unc like a stone on the couch in the front room, Mom folding my clothes up and into yet another box, her answer had been short, quick: just the fact of a fire, Unc home after his shift, that explosion, all of it whispered to me so Unc wouldn’t hear talk of it, I imagined.
And Unc himself had never ventured a word on it to me, and I knew, always knew, not to ask.
“Damn straight,” he said again. “I’m a blind man. And if I can’t handle something like this on my own, then I might as well up and die. Because—”
“Because why?” I said, my voice finally gone loud. The pain didn’t matter. “You think you can walk into whatever it is you know about and work it out yourself, when it’s me to drive you to the Piggly Wiggly, and me to write your bills for you, and me to rewash