The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [34]
I looked at the gun, held it there in front of me like it would say something. Suddenly it was cold, the dark and dead cold a gun takes on with being outdoors. I held it with both hands, my hands gray and small and just a kid’s, the cold off the gun feeling like it’d burn through my fingers any second now.
This was real. This was happening.
I heard the thin crack of weeds being walked through, saw Tabitha already on her way toward the trees.
I put the safety on, slipped it in the back of my pants, like an undercover cop on the same bad TV show.
We walked maybe a mile through the woods, Tabitha leading. There were times, too, when I thought maybe I’d gone deaf myself: she didn’t make a sound as we climbed over trunks, moved through dead leaves down from the hickory above us, wove between low spots where wetlands lay in black pools littered with more leaves.
The moonlight gave piecemeal shadows to everything, the palmetto and pine and dogwood moving, a thousand gray and black shapes changing shape, the only sure thing Tabitha ahead of me, and those white sneakers, her pale gray jacket. She didn’t look back, only moved, held back a wax-myrtle branch for a second before letting it go; it was up to me to make it to that branch before it slapped back, hit me in the face. And still she moved, around us all these shadows, above us the treetops moving, this big empty sound falling down on us, though Tabitha couldn’t know.
Then she stopped. I came around her, looked at her, into the woods.
Something sat not twenty yards ahead of us, no moonlight through it, no shadows inside it, no movement. Only a black shape, square, no bigger than the butcher shed over to the hunt club.
Benjamin’s shack.
We were here, Unc just that far away. But I didn’t move, couldn’t.
It had to do with what I’d know next about him, about my uncle, the one a fire had blinded, made him move from Mount Pleasant back here through no choice of his own nor mine neither.
I’d been the one to nurse him back as much as my mom’d been. And I’d been here with him every second I could, sat with him through breakfast, lunch, and dinner, helped wash his dishes, burn his trash, fold his clothes.
I’d walked the woods of Hungry Neck with him for more hours than I could count.
And I’d been the one, finally, who’d stood with him beside a dead body at Hungry Neck, and to talk to the next one to end up dead. I was the one carrying a message to him from her: Tell Leland I didn’t do it.
And tell him I loved him, she’d said.
I thought I knew him. But I didn’t.
Now I figured I’d know something about him I didn’t want to know.
Tabitha turned to me, nodded hard toward the shack. She wanted me to call for Unc.
I looked to the shed, tried hard to open my mouth. But nothing happened.
Then lights came on, flooded over us, the world lit with white so white I flinched, ducked to the ground, eyes squinted tight for it all.
“Huger?” Unc called, his voice flat, the word barely a question.
I was crouched on the ground, like I could hide from this light. Or my name.
Slowly I stood.
There on the shack porch—a door lying flat on cinder blocks—stood Unc, in his hand the walking stick, Braves cap and sunglasses on.
And next to him Miss Dinah Gaillard, Tabitha’s mom, a double-barrel shotgun pointed at us.
I said, “Sir?”
“You better be alone.”
Tabitha slowly stood, blinking and blinking.
“Just Tabitha with me, sir,” I said.
“You don’t be calling her by that demon name,” Miss Dinah said, and lowered the gun, let back both hammers. “It’s Dorcas. Dorcas only.”
She had on a powder-blue parka over a flowery purple dress down past her knees, duck boots on her feet. “That name you call her a demon name for that program Bewitched come on while back.” I glanced at Tabitha, her head down and shaking slow, eyes closed: she’d seen all these words before. “Them TV people take a godly girl’s name and give it to a witch. No Tabitha round here. None I know.”
Unc didn’t move.
She stepped down from