The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [47]
Unc’s mouth moved, gasping for air, but I didn’t move off him, only held him, pinned to the sofa. I’d knocked his sunglasses and hat off, saw his marble eyes, the lids, gnarled and flat, moving open and closed, open and closed, like some near-dead deer gutshot, unable to move.
That was when I sat up off him, and finally, finally, he took in a breath, took it in big, those gnarled lids closing while Unc breathed again.
He let go the stick, and it fell to the carpet, then put his hands to his face, covered his eyes, and cried.
It was a strange sound, as strange as the screams he’d made, and came from the same heart and gut. It was a broken sound, too, an old man’s sob, cluttered up with more pain than I’d known this far in my life, and I wondered for a second if he wasn’t crying somehow for Aunt Sarah.
And I heard then my own crying, crying for Mom, and I took in a breath, another one, and another, as though it’d been me tackled, the wind knocked out of, and I looked at the picture of Mom in my hand, crumpled now for the fists I’d made running down the hall toward Unc, and I saw in those same eyes, the ones looking at me, that in fact we were all she had. Unc and me.
She needed us.
I said, “You told me this was no field trip. This is the real thing.” I stopped, breathed in and out, looked again at the picture. “You make a mistake, you die. You blink, you lose.” I felt the air down on my shoulders, felt myself shiver. The room was a wreck, the kitchen cupboards emptied, everything on the floor. Smoke rose from the broken TV.
I said, “Don’t blink.” I took in a breath. “We have to hold on.”
He took in quick breaths, tried to catch up with his own breathing. Slowly he sat up, his hands still to his eyes. He whispered, “I didn’t want Eugenie in on this. Nor you. I didn’t want any of this to happen.” He took more quick breaths, wheezed with them in. “None of it,” he whispered.
I turned to him. There was more, I knew, to all this than just a call from Constance Dupree Simons on Wednesday night. There was more. I said, “How long has this been coming?”
He said, “They been on me for almost two years now.”
“Who?”
He took his hand down, those lids still closed. This was my uncle, a blind man, face deformed for a fire he’d been in.
“Delbert Yandle,” he said. “Doug’s daddy. Over to Walterboro. Yandle Development. He’s two-bit, a shitass to boot. But somehow he’s come up with a wad of money.” Unc just sat there, hand in his lap, shirt all pulled out, his right suspender off his shoulder. “Two years,” he said. “Almost.”
“But what does Cleve Ravenel have to do with any of this?” I said. “And Simons? And Miss Constance? And why do they want Mom?”
He turned to me. He opened his eyes: those white marbles. And it seemed he saw me, seemed to me those marbles were the real thing. He took in another breath, this one a big one.
“That’s what we got to figure out.” He paused. “That, and why these boys aren’t playing by their own rules.”
“What do you mean?”
“You said Thigpen give us forty-eight hours. Now they shaved it down to nine o’clock tonight.” He stopped, swallowed, took in a breath. “That gives us eight hours.”
I looked at him, looked at him, tried as hard as I could to remember back before the fire, to what he’d looked like then, to what his eyes were like, his face. I tried to remember him before.
But all I could see was Mom, her face, the tape, her eyes speaking to me, and my own eyes filled, my breath gone again, on my chest a weight I could feel trying to kill me.
“Thank you,” he said. “For taking me down.” He paused. “For making sure neither of us blink.”
I tried at breathing in, tried at it again, then felt, finally, his hand on my shoulder, him holding me, and then the breath came, and I swallowed, whispered, “It’s because I need you,” the words as broken as the window behind us, the air out of me just as cold.
“Likewise,” he whispered.
It wasn’t County Road 221 we went for first at all.
It was Hungry