The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [33]
2.2 miles to SR321, right. 3.5 miles to clear-cut on left.
In the light from the dash I could see the printing was still shaky, watery. She was still scared.
I looked up at her. “You told me Unc was with you. You don’t go State Road 321 to get to your house.” I said it big, my mouth exaggerated for the dark.
She wrote.
That’s not where we’re going.
“But you told me Unc was with you.” I felt my jaw go tight. “Just what the hell are you pulling on me?”
She held her hand out in front of her. She crossed her fingers, quick brought them to her chest: that same move. She tried a smile, but it came out as shaky as her printing.
“You got that right,” I said. “You’re a liar.”
I looked out the windshield, my jaw still clenched tight. Moss still hung like dead arms from the trees out there, the road still shrouded as heavy as it would ever be.
As dark and heavy as it’d always been, too.
This was Hungry Neck. My place as well as hers. That tract of land, the Hunt Club, and all those acres belonged to my family, all the way back to my great-grampa, who bought it off the lumber company back in the twenties for next to nothing, the land shaved clean. It wasn’t worth much now, either, but it was our family’s land, all we had.
Hungry Neck. Where I wanted to be, even if my mom loved me and might’ve been crying over me gone this very minute. Even if my uncle was tied up into the ugly something I didn’t know just as tight as anybody else. This was where I wanted to be.
I turned to Tabitha. “You just get me there, now. Do it. And don’t lead me on.” I paused. “Just tell me the truth.”
She let her shoulders fall some, slowly nodded, and wrote again.
Just don’t treat me like I’m some idiot. You haven’t yet, but people act like I’m retarded. I know a thing or two.
Then she reached to the floorboard and pulled something flat from beneath her seat, big as a shoe-box lid.
KKF 428, between the F and 4 what was supposed to be a Carolina wren parked on a jessamine branch, though it wasn’t a wren at all, just somebody’s idea of a bird: my license plate, off the back of the Luv. She’d taken it off before all this.
Nobody at the wreck back on Dorchester would be able to name us now.
I held the plate in both hands, looked up at her.
She put her index and middle fingers together, brought them to her chest, then pointed them at me. She did it again, just as when she’d taught me how to call myself a liar.
But now the fingers were together, not crossed.
“I trust you,” I said.
She nodded hard, smiled, did the move again.
I put my fingers together, touched my chest, pointed at her.
She wrote: He’s in Benjamin’s old shotgun shack. Nobody knows about that place except us. At the end of the clear-cut, pull off left. Park in the weeds. We walk.
I drove off the road, the weeds white in my headlights, the truck bucking with the uneven ground as we plowed through. Then I cut off the lights and the engine, and the cab filled with a silence that rang in my ears.
I pushed open my door, stepped into the weeds, Tabitha doing the same. Here was that moon, banging down on the field and trees, on us and the whole world. I had the pocket flashlight I’d gotten from my dresser, felt it in my left pocket once we were out of the truck. But we didn’t need it. The moon was enough.
And I felt, too, the deadweight of the gun in my Levi’s jacket, just loose where I’d buttoned the jacket up.
I pulled it out, held it there in the moonlight.
Thick and shiny. Heavy, still warm from where it’d been inside my jacket.
Tabitha looked at me from across the hood. Past her was the end of the clear-cut, where the woods picked back up, a thick black wall, the wind moving the tops of pine and oak and birch.
She couldn’t hear the sound of that wind, a sound I’d fallen asleep to most every night I’d been at Hungry Neck, and I swallowed at how strange all of this was, unfolding in front of my eyes and in my ears: a deaf-and-dumb black girl I’d kissed full on the lips, a car chase, a pistol in my hand bright with the moon. I couldn’t help but think none of it all was