The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [37]
I told him of Tommy Thigpen, to start off, and how it’d been him to call Miss Dinah, or must have been, because he was the only one saw us. Except, of course, for the two bubbas in the pickup who’d been rolled, and I told him of the way the driver’s arm’d hung in the window with that gun, and I told him of the gun, too, and stood, pulled it from my pants, handed it to him. In that dark I could see him, the barest figure of a ghost holding the gun, thinking on it. Then he held it out to me, and without a word I took it.
It was mine now.
I told him of how it hadn’t been me to strike out for this place on my own, told him of how Tabitha—“Dorcas,” he interrupted me, “is what her momma named her, so you make sure and observe that fact”—had tapped on my window, and I told him of the walk in the woods here, the quiet of it all, and how much the floodlights’d hurt my eyes.
But I didn’t tell him about kissing her.
Now and again I stopped, waited for him to say something. At times I thought maybe he’d gone on to sleep, and I listened for his deep, steady breaths in and out. But each time I stopped there’d be only a few moments before he’d let out, “Go on, Huger.”
I told him of the two SLED clods when we were on our way out of the hospital, and how they believed it was him to call in Constance Dupree’s suicide, and I told him of what I’d seen on the eleven o’clock news. I waited for something from him. But still nothing came, only “Go on, Huger.”
So I waited for last to tell him what seemed the biggest items to me. This would get him, I hoped, these words next:
I said, “Doug Yandle was outside the hospital when we left. He was looking at us, Mom and me, and he had his arm in a sling, and with his free hand he made like he was pointing a gun at me, and pulled the trigger.”
“He’s a pussy, plain and simple,” Unc said. He was quiet, then said, “Next?”
“Next what?”
“Next thing you want to tell me.”
I looked up, said, “Tommy Thigpen said to tell you the people who count don’t give a good flying fuck where you’re hiding.” I paused. I’d never talked like this in front of him. But I’d never carried news like this before, either. “He said the only way through this is for you to do what you’ve been asked to do. He said to tell you things’ll be fixed. All you have to do is what they’ve asked you to do.” I stopped. “He said you have forty-eight hours.”
I let that hang in the dark, waited, waited, then said, “What did they ask you to do?”
He said nothing.
I was quiet a little while longer, then said the one last piece I had, something I hoped might flush him out: “Constance Dupree Middleton came to my room last night. At the hospital. And she said to tell you she loved you.”
He moved. It was just the squeak of the wooden cot, but I heard him move.
I said, “And she told me to give this to you.” I stood again, crossed the shack to him, pulled out the paperweight.
In the dark it was nothing I could see, only the same warm glass thing Constance’d handed me last night, and for a moment I thought I might know a piece of what it was like to be Unc, and be blind. Here was the thing in my hand that all of this had come to, and I couldn’t see it.
I said, “It’s like a paperweight. It’s made of something like brown glass, but I’m not sure. But inside it is the center of a sweetgrass basket, a little coil of a sweetgrass basket.”
His fingers stopped dead. “Inside it? A sweetgrass coil?”
“Yes,” I said, then put to him what I was sure was a connection now. “A sweetgrass coil, just like the ones you were drawing in the dirt with your stick.” I paused. “After we found Simons.”
He moved his hand up and down, like he was weighing it. “I don’t know what this means,” he said. “When she called Wednesday night, she was crazy, crying and all. Threatening to kill him.” He gave it a small toss, caught it. “She said something about sweetgrass baskets. Something about graves and sweetgrass baskets. I took it to be crazy talk, her raving on about what a bastard her husband was.