The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [21]
I didn’t look at Mom the whole way home, didn’t say a word.
Instead I looked at the same old buildings along I–26: the redbrick high-rise, everyone in there government-assisted; the dead mall and its empty parking lot off Montague; at the concrete barrier between us and southbound traffic, a barrier it wouldn’t be all that hard for a car to flip over, kill us right here.
There was a blue sky, too, what pieces of the Ashley River I could see off to my left a dull green, rimmed on either edge in brown salt-marsh hay and spartina and yellow grass.
A sweetgrass paperweight.
Suicide. She’d hanged herself.
The Rantowles Motel was a nothing place on 17 South, where couples from my classes at North Charleston went for a few hours on Friday nights, when they’d told Mama and Papa they’d be at the football game.
She hanged herself.
This made two of them. Husband and wife, and I’d seen both of them.
And if I told Mom anything, she’d become a part of it all, the this Unc wanted us out of. What I was already a partner in, though I couldn’t say why or how. Only that I had a piece of what was going on.
If I opened my mouth to Mom, even let her see my face, I’d have to tell her about Yandle, too. What was he out here for, him just an idiot droid deputy? If things worked like I thought they did, SLED was in charge of the whole thing, wouldn’t have him tagging along. Unless him being there fell under all that first-officer-at-the-scene shit he’d tried to hand Unc when he first pulled up.
I’d keep this all to myself, just go home, sit in the front room with the TV going, watch with her whatever it was she watched here, alone, on Sunday mornings.
Sunday morning. I hadn’t been here on a Sunday morning in years.
I’d just sit with her and watch. And wait.
But for what?
We headed down Remount and through that hellhole of an intersection at Rivers, eight or nine lanes plus the freeway off-ramp converging on one set of lights; next we passed the Aquarius Social Club, a cinder-block building with no windows, painted a dull turquoise, next the New Life Congregational Church. Then we turned right onto Attaway, went down the rows of houses just like ours: a short concrete driveway that led to a separate garage at the rear of the lot, concrete steps up to the front door, metal awnings over the porch and the two windows out front. They were all painted pale colors, all of them different shades of green and yellow and blue. Some of the yards were overgrown, some too neat. All of them just there, along with a couple of bushes, oil stains on the driveway, room air conditioners plugged into the windows.
Where we lived.
The first night we moved out here to Liberty Hills, Mom and I set up in that square house, the few things we had still in the boxes, she came into my bedroom and woke me up in the middle of the night, wanting to know if I’d messed in my pants. Me, eight years old. But she was right: the place smelled like maybe something had shit somewhere.
We looked all over the house, all the lights on, searched for where maybe some animal’d snuck in, laid a pile maybe in the corner of a closet or in the cabinets. But I remember thinking it didn’t smell exactly like shit. Something else, but close enough.
Finally she opened the back door, and the smell jumped at us. I remember standing next to her, Mom in a thin white nightgown, the same one she’d worn my whole life so far, and looking out to the fence, and seeing above it and above the rooftops of all these houses the dull gray glow of lights way off, like a gray cloud sitting way off in the black. And poked up into the middle of it a smokestack with blinking white lights on it, a cloud of white coming up off it.
“It’s the paper mill,” Mom whispered.
I looked up at her. She was still a moment, then her shoulders started moving up and down, quick and hard. The kitchen light was on behind her, and I couldn’t see her face, but I could tell she was crying. She breathed in quick breaths all in a row, let out these hisses, afraid to cry in front of her kid.
I was only eight,