The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [12]
“Enough!” Mom shouted, and here she was, moving fast for Unc and me. She pushed him aside while he quick put his sunglasses back on. She looked at me, her face gone red. “I don’t know what the hell’s going on between the two of you, but you better both of you shut up. We could hear you all the way out to the hallway, like two kids. It’s embarrassing.” Now she was straightening out the sheet at my chest, looking at it like it was the only important thing in the world.
I looked at Unc. His back was to us, his head up.
“Unc,” I said. “You got to tell me.”
“Now you just settle down,” Mom said, still picking at the sheet, but I pulled it back, tried again to sit up. “Unc,” I said, “listen.”
He pulled his Braves cap from his back pocket, slapped it on. “Eugenie,” he said, and made his way toward the door, found the knob. He reached behind the door, pulled out the stick. “I’m sorry for what-all happened. Take better care of that boy than I have.”
“You sure don’t ask for much,” she said, and put her hand to my chest, eased me back down.
He was leaving me.
I lay back then, felt like I was out of breath, like I’d run ten miles, my mom’s hand on me some kind of comfort in it all. But not the sort I wanted.
He stood in the doorway, out there in the hall bright white light. He looked one way, then the other, and put out his stick.
“Unc!” I shouted, and felt like I’d split my head clean open with the word, with how it echoed in this VIP room with brass and oak, when all I wanted was to be curling up to sleep on the couch in the front room of the single-wide, in me the good knowledge Unc was there, back in his room, my old bedroom, snoring quiet like he does.
“Now you shush,” Mom said.
I heard that stick in the hallway out there, tapping, Unc walking away.
I tried to stay awake.
Mom talked beside me, now and again stood from the chair she’d pulled up beside the bed, put her hand to my face in a kind of gentle slap, and I’d open my eyes, say, “I heard you.”
She’d gone to that big piece of furniture down past the footboard, opened up the mirrored doors to reveal a TV, then came back to the rails, pushed a button.
The TV came on, a football game.
I closed my eyes to that, too. I hated football.
But the speaker was up by my ear and turned way low, me too tired even to tell Mom to turn the thing off, so that while I was sleeping and staying awake there were two stories going on: announcers and players and coaches all after something, and Mom talking.
Mom and I live in North Charleston, which might as well be another planet from Charleston. North Charleston is like a joke to people who live downtown, because that’s where all the Navy people live, and all the fired shipyard workers are, and where people get shot in the BP minimarts or where some kid will bring a gun to school and start shooting, like what happened at my school last year.
There was a body after that, too. One of the football team, a black kid who everybody said was going to Clemson or USC to play on a scholarship, maybe. They said these things, of course, only after the kid was dead. And he wasn’t even a part of the fight that happened, was just like everybody else who ever gets killed in school: one of those Innocent Bystanders.
But I didn’t see that body, that black kid. And I remember school after that happened, the counselors they had lined up in the office wanting to talk to anybody who was cracked about that kid getting killed. Like we don’t need anybody to talk to until one of us gets killed?
I didn’t see that body, but I do remember feeling like death was there with us, like it’d been walking the halls, and maybe I just missed it, just walked into my first-period class a second or so before he turned the corner, headed along the lockers toward me. I just hadn’t seen him.
But I saw him today.
And Mom thinks my staying with Unc is a necessary evil: she makes me stay down there, and Unc cuts her a check each month off his insurance from the fire.
She thinks I don’t know about the money, but I do. And she