The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [45]
“On occasion.” He shrugged again.
I looked back at the road. Here was coming the intersection with Ferry Road, Hungry Neck and the trailer only a couple minutes from here.
I said, “Then I’m keeping hold of this one. See how long it takes for you to figure this one out.”
There was Mom’s Stanza, parked out front of the trailer.
Shit. Mom.
I let off the gas a second too soon for seeing her car, and Unc said, “What’s wrong?”
“Mom’s here.”
“Dammit to hell,” he whispered, and I pulled up, parked beside the car.
We climbed out, the two of us too slow for the knowledge of what was about to come: Mom flying out the door and right at our throats.
And what were we going to tell her? To let us alone, to trust Unc to whatever plan he had of dealing with people named Pigboy and Fatback who, as far as we could tell, had voided Charles Middleton Simons? Was I supposed to tell her about Thigpen and being chased on the Mark Clark, about two assholes in a pickup truck rolled off the freeway? About a gun pointed inside the cab?
A gun.
I looked over the roof of the Luv at Unc, who was looking at the trailer. Then he leaned back into the cab, pulled his stick from beneath the bench seat, and stood straight again.
“Unc,” I said.
“We got to face her at one point or another,” he said. “You just let me talk.”
“Unc,” I said, and he turned to me. “I left the gun in the shed.” I paused. “I forgot it.”
Then he leaned the stick against the hood, undid the middle button on his shirt. He pulled open the shirt for me, and I could see the white of his T-shirt, and the gun, tucked into his pants.
“Only a few things get past me.” He pulled it out, moved around the hood. He handed the gun to me, even thicker, shinier than last night.
I tucked it in the front of my pants, inside the shirt. Just like Unc had, and buttoned up.
“But not much. Brought it with me when I left you in the shed this morning.” He nodded, moved back to the stick. “Now let’s go face the music.”
I pushed open the door, hollered, “Mom?”
I figured she’d meet us on the porch, but she hadn’t, and now here we were in the front room of the trailer.
No different from any other time I’d ever entered: the place spotless, the shag carpet vacuumed fresh so you could count the number of strokes it took, only a few footprints in it from us walking through it Saturday morning.
Fifteen strokes is how many it took, to be exact. I’d vacuumed enough times.
To the right was the orange-and-brown plaid foldout sofa I slept on under the bay window at the end of the trailer, and the TV on its stand, and Unc’s brown La-Z-Boy, the coffee table with a stack of Field & Streams.
To the left was the kitchen counter. Ours had stools on this side of it, and for a second I thought of all those books, and wondered if Tabitha might loan me some of hers sometime. Past the counter was the kitchen, clean as ever, not even a coffee ring from when I’d poured our two cups Saturday morning.
Everything perfect, like nobody’d been here.
Unc stepped in behind me, called, “Eugenie?”
Nothing.
I started for the kitchen, wanted to head back to the bedrooms, see if maybe she’d fallen asleep or something.
But Unc took hold of my arm, stopped me.
“No,” he whispered. He was moving his head slowly, back and forth, chin up.
He was smelling the air.
I whispered, “What is it?”
He moved past me, let his hand touch the counter between the front room and the kitchen.
“Unc?”
He started for the back of the trailer, to the bedrooms.
“Unc, maybe I ought to go first,” I said, and now I could feel myself starting to sweat, my chest pinching down on me, and I felt too the sudden heft of the gun, and I thought of drawing it, and now I started to smell the air myself.
I was looking for dark red, for metal. But I got nothing.
We were in the hall now, dark for the cheap wood paneling all the walls in here had. He moved slowly, the stick in hand, the other hand to the wall, feeling it, feeling it, and then we were at my mom and dad’s old room, which I’d never slept in, even though there was a bed