The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [35]
The light. I turned, looked around, still squinting: floodlights twenty feet up in a couple trees behind us, in a few trees on either side of us, and at the top of two poles, one at each end of the shack. It might as well have been noon.
Here came Miss Dinah, shotgun crooked in her arm as natural as a shopping bag, heading for Tabitha.
“Certainly weren’t any surprise, you two loud as elephants coming in,” she said. “No surprise, too, when I find Missy Dorcas bed empty as the tomb Easter morning. Truck gone, too. No surprise whatsoever.”
She was to us now and took hold of Tabitha’s arm.
Tabitha jerked her arm up and around at her mother’s touch. Her eyes shot open, her chin up. She looked out into the woods past the shed, mouth shut tight.
It was the first I’d seen her in light this whole time: that white hairband holding back a big, full turn of straight black hair, her skin smooth and brown, that jaw set hard as concrete.
She was beautiful. It was something I’d never seen before, this beauty. Tabitha. Before this, she’d only been the girl I’d looked at after being told stories about the Mothers and Fathers, the Gray Ghost, the girl I’d shivered with.
But now.
“We got a mile and a half walk now, Missy Dorcas, breakfast to make up for these two not three hours from now, too,” Miss Dinah said, making certain to be in Tabitha’s line of sight so she could see her mouth the words. “I be surprised if the Mothers and Fathers don’t haint us on home,” she went on, “chase us through the woods, they green eyes a-glittering, a moon like this and that far to go.”
I cut my eyes to Tabitha one last time, saw her roll her eyes at her mother’s words: as though the old ghost story were all we had to worry over.
They started away then, to the left and toward the black out past the ring of daylight the floods gave, Tabitha out in front, Miss Dinah talking to the back of her deaf daughter: “You be safe out to here,” Miss Dinah called from nowhere. “You got nothing to worry over out to here.”
I knew these words were meant for me and Unc, not Tabitha.
“Six-thirty, Miss Dinah,” Unc said, his voice still flat. “We’ll be there.”
They passed the post at the left end of the shed, and the dark swallowed them up.
He let the stick hang off the edge of the porch, touch the ground. He leaned on it and stepped off.
He said, “Come here, boy.”
Between us lay thirty feet or so of dry leaves. I thought of Tabitha with her eyes closed, her mom headed straight for her. But Unc was going nowhere, was waiting for me to head to him, so he could give me whatever hell he thought I was owed.
Thirty feet of ground. I swallowed, started for him.
He held the stick above the ground now, his hand holding on tight, knuckles white, the other at his side, in a fist.
Then I was in front of him, all this light around us, light so clear and sharp I could see myself in his sunglasses, just like I’d been able to see myself in them Saturday morning, two of me reflected there, still just as small and far away as I’d felt there on the tail end of the Luv.
Then he slapped me, the hand up from his side so quick I couldn’t have flinched if I’d wanted to, the pain of it white and sharp, a blast of cutting light through my jaw and teeth and tongue.
But I didn’t move.
The stick fell to the ground, lost for the force of his other hand across my cheek.
He said, “You don’t have a clue, do you?”
It wasn’t a question at all, I knew, and now I could taste blood in my mouth, the inside of my cheek cut.
“Miss Dinah comes out here about two o’clock,” Unc said, his mouth barely moving. “Walked a mile and a half through the woods to tell me she just got a call from somebody won’t give his name but who tells her he knows where I am. Tells her, too, her daughter and you are on your way here.” He paused. His voice hadn’t changed at all from when he’d called out my name: just there, and knowing everything. “Says