The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [2]
Then came that stick, a stick so straight and perfect I knew it’d been dropped off that hickory only for him. And for me. I brought it to him, and I remember he’d smiled at it, and’d sat up, turned in my bed, and stood.
“Huger?” Unc said now, his hand still on my shoulder. “You okay?” he whispered.
“Unc,” I said. I said, “It’s a body.”
I turned back to it. I tried again to line up words that would give Unc what he couldn’t see.
This was my job. Nothing I could have figured on when I’d handed him that stick when I was seven.
I swallowed, looked away from the body, from those hands, but all I did was look at my own, there at the end of my pale, skinny arms.
I’m only a kid, was what I saw. Fifteen years old. Thin brown hair just like Unc’s, ears too big to the point where I can remember my daddy, before he left us, calling me Wingnut for fun. But though I’m too skinny, have these ears, I can knock shit out of most anybody in the sophomore class. There’s nothing much I’m scared of.
But now.
I took in a breath. “It’s a body,” I said again, “and it doesn’t have hardly any head to speak of. And the hands’ve been skinned.”
His hand was still on my shoulder, but he turned, faced where that smell he’d found came from. He whispered, “Son of a bitch.”
“And your name’s involved here, too, Unc,” I said.
He was quiet a moment. Still nobody’d said a thing.
His hand went tight on my shoulder a second, then relaxed. He said, “It’s Charlie Simons, ain’t it.” Not a question, but a fact.
I looked at him, saw he had his upper lip between his teeth, biting down hard: what he’ll do.
He turned then, started off on his own toward the truck, that stick out in front of him, leading him on.
That was when the dogs started up, way off to the levee, their howling not unlike the sounds of my mom and dad. Just howling in the hopes of turning something up.
“I got my bag phone in my daypack,” one of the men said from behind me. “I’ll call it in.”
“Good idea,” somebody said.
“Charlie Simons,” somebody else said. “God.”
“Ol’ Charlie Simons,” somebody else said. Then, almost too low to hear, “Head and hands. Not the prettiest job of degloving I’ve seen. The irony here’s pretty thick.”
Then somebody else whispered loud enough for everybody to hear, “She got that son-of-a-bitch part right.”
Some of the men gave out a quiet laugh.
I didn’t say anything, only turned from the body, my eyes down, and started back through the brush for Unc.
He knew all these men. He knew them because they’ve been a part of the whole thing out here long as he’s been alive: professional men from South of Broad entertaining themselves with the notion they were hunters. When what they did every Saturday all deer season long was just show up here, have breakfast—grits, eggs, bacon, and biscuits all cooked up before dawn by Miss Dinah Gaillard, the black woman who lived five miles out County Road 112, and her deaf-and-dumb daughter, Dorcas, a girl a year older than me—at the clubhouse.
The kitchen where they cook it all up is just a big old iron stove and a sink set up at one end of the long, low white dining cabin we called the clubhouse, the rest of it picnic tables, screened windows, the rafters all open. Miss Dinah and Dorcas show up around 4:00 A.M. to get things started, and Unc is always in there with them, too, laughing and talking, carrying on when I stumble in, me trying to sleep as late as I can before the members arrive. Over the years he’s learned some sign language he tries to use on Dorcas, who stops from stirring the grits or working the bacon and goes to him, puts her hands in his and slowly spells out a word or some such, the three of them laughing again for whatever it is they’re messing about, me never a part of things, only looking for coffee and heading out to build the campfire.
Then, after breakfast, Miss Dinah and Dorcas washing things up and readying for fried-chicken lunch, the members’d stand at the fire, bellies full of good food they didn’t have to make, while Unc parceled them out.