The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [22]
But she went right on.
That was our first night away from Hungry Neck Hunt Club. Our first night living in North Charleston. Only a year after Unc’d moved into the trailer, nine months after Dad’d left us.
Our new life.
Now I had friends inside some of these houses, people a lot like me, which meant they didn’t really give a shit about everything you were supposed to give a shit about in high school. We weren’t in band or on any of the teams. We didn’t belong to any clubs, didn’t all sit together at lunch and smoke or toke out to the back fence.
Truth was we didn’t even like each other. More like a group that didn’t belong to any group, even its own group. And if I wasn’t with them or out to Hungry Neck, I was in my room, reading.
Because I had a plan. I wanted to go to college. Duke, maybe. And I read. I read my way through the Harvard Classics, for one thing, Mom subscribing to that book club from about the time we got out here, though some of that stuff was so dull and dry getting through it was like trying to breathe sand. That’s what I thought of Milton, for one, Spenser for another. Shakespeare was fine, as was Chaucer. I’d read everything C. S. Lewis put out, everything by this guy Mircea Eliade, too. And there was Moby-Dick, which every clod in my English class threw up over but me, and which I even laughed at in places, it was so funny, like when Ahab is going over to the other ship for a little meeting, and he’s standing up in the rowboat, and everybody rowing is wishing the hell he’d just sit down so that they didn’t have to worry so much about timing their strokes with the waves so he wouldn’t fall down and embarrass himself.
At least I thought that was funny.
Sometimes we all hung out together out where the railroad tracks turned toward the paper mill on the other side of Storie Street, there under the Mark Clark Expressway. Just us: Matt, Jason, Rafael, Tyrone, Jessup. And the girls: Trina, Roberta, Polly, LaKeisha, Deevonne. We’d sit and pass around five or six bottles of Colt 45 somebody’d gotten, and talk about what shits everybody was. Even ourselves.
Blacks and whites. Good grades and bad grades. Stupid and smart. None of us had nipple rings or tattooed chains on our ankles. None of us was failing.
Just us. Just nothing. All the more reason to see Hungry Neck as my home, and not here. North Charleston was only where I slept, kept most of my clothes.
But as we turned left on Sumner and passed the C&S Grocerette and McTV Repair, then turned right onto our street, Marie, I was hoping I’d see somebody. Anybody.
There was nobody, everyone still in bed and asleep this Sunday morning, all of them oblivious to what I knew.
We moved along Marie, and I could see the Mark Clark Expressway down where the street dead-ended, high up on huge concrete pilings. Then we were home: pale yellow, brown trim, the awning brown too. The yard neat and trimmed—I mowed it every Wednesday—the oil stains the Luv left on the driveway.
We pulled in, the chain-link fence gate open, ready for us, and back to the garage. Mom put the car in park, and I started to open my door, go pull up the garage door.
But she put a hand to my arm, like she used to do when I was little and she slammed on the brakes for traffic or whatever. Protecting me.
“No,” she said, and I looked at her. “You have to take it easy.”
Her lips were together, her eyebrows knotted in the smallest way. She had on the makeup, the nice clothes, her hair done. Nothing any different from when she’d walked into the hospital room this morning.
But everything different.
We sat that way a few seconds, her hand on my arm, us looking at each other.
Then I climbed out, opened the door.
The kitchen table was set for one: an empty plate and juice glass, a knife and fork and spoon. On the stove was a half-empty bag of grits, a pan, and the skillet.
I sat down, watched Mom move around without looking at me. She hooked her purse over the back of her chair at the table,