The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [27]
I shrugged.
And a truck shot out from a side street, stopped dead in front of us. I hit the brakes hard, sent Tabitha forward, her shoulder rolling into the dashboard, the big yellow Ford pickup not two feet from the hood.
Two men sat in the cab, the one closest to me, on the passenger side, with a hand up to block the shine from my headlights. He had a beer in the other, and waved it in a sort of salute. He had his baseball cap on backward, a face that needed a shave a few days ago. The driver had his cap on straight, faced forward. He was grinning and chewing on something at the same time, his mouth working away.
“Sorry, y’all!” the one with the beer hollered out, then, “Happy Thanksgiving!” and the truck slowly moved on across the street, back into the neighborhood.
We sat there a few seconds, Tabitha with a hand to the dash and breathing hard, her mouth open wide. She looked at me, then at the taillights of the truck.
We were only one more block from Dorchester, where we’d turn left. Then we’d finally be on the Mark Clark, headed over the Ashley River, then on to 17 South, the Savannah Highway. And maybe, if we were lucky, Hungry Neck, sometime tonight.
I pulled up to the intersection with Dorchester, the street we were on dead-ending into it. Across from us was the Piggly Wiggly, and a Phar-Mor Drugs, and a Piece Goods store, a video store, a dry cleaner’s. Everything was dark but for the Piggly Wiggly. It was a twenty-four-hour job, the inside still lit up and sparkling, a couple cars in the parking lot.
And there at the curb right in front of the automatic doors, its lights off, was the Plymouth with the scab roof.
I took in a breath. Maybe he knew a shortcut to the Pig. Or maybe it just looked like the same car from here. Maybe it meant nothing at all.
Tabitha tapped me hard on the leg, and I turned to her and in the same second felt the hard crack and lurch of the truck, us bumped from behind.
She was turned in her seat, looking out the back, and I turned, too, saw the yellow Ford, the headlights right up against the bed of the Luv, above and behind the lights those two shits.
They backed up a few inches, hit the bed again, that same crack and lurch.
She looked at me, her breath going faster. They hit us again, only this time kept going, pushed us three or four feet into the crosswalk.
They were pushing us out into the intersection, wanted us broad-sided all on our own.
They pushed, and I jammed on the brake hard as I could, put it in neutral so I could let off the clutch, then mashed down on the emergency brake. If they were going to push on us, I’d make them work for it.
I heard their engine going harder behind us, and now my tires were sliding, and that was it: the light, still red, didn’t matter, nor the few cars out on Dorchester, headed toward us from both directions. None of it mattered. I sat with my foot on the brake one last second, watched for these cars coming, watched, watched—there were three of them, two on the right, one on the left—and then, when it seemed all things might work together for us in the next second, I reached down and released the emergency brake, popped it into first, and stomped on the gas.
We shot out between the oncoming cars, and I turned left hard. The Luv went sideways, hit the curb across the street, and the cars coming at us all screeched at once, all three squirming to stay straight and stop, even though we were already through.
And of course the pickup behind us shot out, too, his gas gunned for trying to push us.
The two cars on our side of the intersection hit him, one at the rear panel, the other at the front fender, and the truck jumped up off the pavement a good foot or so, landed hard on its left two wheels, sort of hung there a second, balanced like it had an idea to just go right on over. But it didn’t, and with a slow pitch fell back onto all four tires.
It was a good sound, loud and stiff, metal bitten and chewed and spit out all in a half