The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [39]
Which is what I had before my father left us, and Mom decided to move us out. Back then it was Hungry Neck, every moment I breathed.
Mom.
I stopped. She’d have found the note hours ago, when she went into my room and tried to wake me up for the first day back to school after Thanksgiving. And now the woods went cold on me, the wind up in the treetops sharp and loud, the dead leaves everywhere making more noise than I could take in. Mom would most likely have called the police on me by now and would be crying there at our kitchen table over where I was.
That, or she’d be at the trailer this very second, the Stanza pulled up out front, waiting for us. Like that was where we’d be.
I looked up to the treetops, saw them sway in the wind, saw the bitter blue sky up there above it all, a midday sky in November. Somewhere deer were feeding, chomping on acorns, living like they had nothing to fear, because, it seemed to me, they didn’t. Sure, they heard something, they got spooked, took off. But what did they know of what they heard? It was only sound, and if it was a hunter, and if that hunter got what he’d come looking for, then one of those deer was just gone, and the next morning these same deer would be out there in that same field, chomping on the same acorns, walking the same trails, settling down in the high grass for night, and that life gone, the one taken by that hunter, whether he was a South-of-Broad surgeon or me, a fifteen-year-old kid who didn’t know shit about how the world worked, those same deer would just take a look around, maybe, and see one of them was gone, and everything would just start over again, like that deer’d never existed, like he’d just been some dumb dream all those deer’d been having together.
And I wanted, I guess, to be one of those deer right then. Then nothing would worry me, a sound out in the woods only something to duck away from and run for cover. And then next day I could just pick up again.
Because now I knew there were things out there, things that weren’t going to be reconciled and tossed away with just going to sleep at night. Somebody was out there, waiting for something to happen from Unc. For him to sell off the land in order just to let Unc live.
Tell him the people who count don’t give a good flying fuck where he’s hid out. The only way through this all is for him to do what he’s been asked to do.
Sell Hungry Neck.
I jammed my hands into my pockets deep as they could go, shoulders up, that bitter blue sky too big, too wide, me too small against this all.
I felt stuff in my pockets: in the right, the money, that wad of bills Tommy Thigpen’d given me.
And in the other, the paperweight, there at the bottom of my pocket.
You tell him he’s got forty-eight hours, and it’s over and done with.
I ran.
There stood Miss Dinah Gaillard’s place, half trailer, half shanty, the whole of it painted haint purple.
I’d been here a few times before, driving Unc over to deliver a ham at Christmas and Easter, flowers on Miss Dinah’s and Tabitha’s birthdays, and every time we pulled up in the Luv I sort of shook my head at the place, at the way these people thought painting a house a hideous color might actually scare off ghosts and demons and all. I was in the backyard, if you could call it that, and like in the front yard there were those tires painted white and split up to make planters, pansies in them. There was a clothesline strung up out here, an old dead refrigerator, next to it a dead washing machine, the two of them side by side beneath a live oak.
Same as always.
But as I went up the cinder blocks and onto the back porch, reached for the screen door, pulled it open to knock, I thought for a second this color