The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [13]
It takes close to an hour to get to Hungry Neck from where we live in North Charleston, a neighborhood called Liberty Hills. There’s no hills there, of course. Just houses, square ones like ours.
I lay there in the hospital bed, listening to my mom talk and the TV playing on and on, and thought of the drive there, that hour, saw myself climb in the Luv parked in our driveway of a Friday afternoon, school over, then heading out to Hungry Neck Hunt Club: the clubhouse, next to it the butcher shed, where we haul the deer in and dress them, past the clubhouse and shed the single-wide, beige with a brown racing stripe all the way around, cinder blocks leading up to the front door.
Hungry Neck Hunt Club. Where my mom lived with my dad for eight years, me there for seven of them. And with Unc for one more year after that, Mom nursing him and taking care of me. That whole year, I saw my dad talk to Unc maybe twice, their words never much more than sharp knives meant to cut out the heart of one or the other of them. Nothing like when Unc and Aunt Sarah used to come out for Easter and Christmas, when there’d be laughter and stories, usually about Hungry Neck and wild pigs they’d snared, or the secret deer stands they used to put up just for watching the woods, the river. Back when I used to envy them being brothers, me having none, not even a sister.
Not a week after Unc took that stick from me, sat up in bed for the first time, my daddy was gone.
Which is why sometimes I blame myself for the whole thing. If I hadn’t found that stick.
I’ve driven this route so many times I don’t even have to think about it, a drive I’ve been doing one way or the other every Friday night since I was eight and we moved to that square house in Liberty Hills, when we’d come back to take care of Unc over the weekend, heading home late Sunday night.
Then, when I turned ten, she took to just dropping me off Friday nights, and going home, me here to tend to him.
But in April, when I got my learner’s permit, Unc bought me the Luv from Miss Dinah Gaillard. Now I drive out there myself.
The Friday he gave it to me, Mom just dropped me off, Unc sitting like always on the cinder-block steps up. He waved at her like always, then she was gone.
He’d said, “Let’s go,” and stood, started around the back end of the trailer.
I followed him around back, saw him standing next to the Luv, navy blue and rust, his hand on the hood like one of those bubba car salesmen we make jokes about when we stay up late Friday and Saturday night in front of the television. He was smiling.
“It’s yours,” he said. He pulled a key chain from his front shirt pocket, tossed it to me. The keys hit my chest, and I hadn’t said a word, not yet able to figure this out.
“This was Benjamin Gaillard’s. Miss Dinah’s son,” he said, and opened the driver’s-side door. “Been sitting out to her place since he died. She told me she knew she could trust it to you, knows you’re a responsible young man.” He paused, grinned. “Not like me on deer-hunt Saturdays, sitting in the kitchen and shooting the breeze with her and Dorcas. She says she’s seen you making certain to get that fire going, and saying thank you for the coffee. Guess good manners and following orders sometimes pays off.” He nodded. “So take good care of it.”
“Yessir,” I said. He didn’t have to say anything after that. I knew who Benjamin was. Everyone did. He died in Desert Storm, one of those people in the cafeteria when the SCUD missile hit. The Luv had 218,143 miles on it when I climbed in, and I remember pulling closed the door, the hard screech of metal on metal in the door hinges.
Sounded good to me.
I leaned out the window, said, “Unc, let’s go.”
He stepped back from the truck, started swinging his arm like a traffic cop for me to get going. “She’s yours,” he said. “You go try her out. Report back to me.”
I sat there a second or so, not certain what to do. It was a small truck, the cab tiny compared to the old fenderless GMC pickup he’d let me drive