The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [49]
“There you go,” I said. “Tire tracks right on through.” I stood. Up ahead the trees started to thin, past them the river, I knew, and the marsh. “Here’s where he went through,” I said.
But then it came to me: What did this prove? Where was he headed?
Unc still hadn’t stood, only touched at the low spot with his hand, the stick beside him on the ground. “Tracks, you say.”
“Yessir,” I said. “Four tire tracks, two for each side, right and left, front and rear.” I paused. “But what does this prove? Where was he headed?”
“Damned if I know,” Unc whispered, and now he took hold of the stick and stood. “And you say there’s tracks, four of them.”
“Yessir.”
“Well, then,” he said, “what else do we not know?” He turned, seemed to look up to the track bed, then behind him, like he was hearing something.
“About what?” I said. “There’s a whole lot I don’t know.”
“About, for instance, these tracks.” He looked at me. “Think, Huger.”
I looked down, saw the tracks, four of them for four tires, leading on down into the low spot and back out the other side.
Four tracks. One for each tire.
There should have been eight. Four for on the way in, four for on the way out. Trestle Road dead-ended right up ahead.
I looked up at Unc, still with his head turning one way and the other, listening, smelling. I said, “He never came back through here.”
“You got that right,” he said. “There’s hope for you yet.”
We drove the quarter mile on to the end, climbed out, looked around. No tracks anywhere, the ground hard packed. The road widened into a cul-de-sac of sorts, a turnaround for after we’d dropped off men at the stands leading out here. The track bed was here right next to us, a good thirty feet high. There were only a few trees between us and the river, and I walked to it, stood there on the bank.
Here they were, those giants on horseback, watching, waiting.
And the marsh, all the colors of spartina and yellow grass, of salt-marsh hay and bulrushes: greens, yellows, browns, reds, all under an afternoon sky, cool and crisp.
My mom was gone.
I turned, went for the Luv, climbed in, saw only once I was settled in that Unc was halfway up the track bed, his hand feeling the ground, feeling it.
I hollered, “Only way he made it out of here was with his four-wheel-drive. I ain’t got that, so there’s no use, Unc.” I paused. “It’s almost two o’clock. We got places to go.”
Unc started down through the weeds straight to the Luv and climbed in. He said, “County Road 221 is on the way to Walter-boro. That’s handy.”
“Walterboro?” I said.
“Yandle Real Estate and Development, Delbert Yandle, Proprietor,” he said. “We’re going to pay a visit to a two-bit shitass with a son after his own heart.”
I wheeled the Luv around, started back.
“Forgive me,” he said, and I looked at him. Shadows in through his window flew across him, the afternoon sun in a November sky quick on its way down.
I said nothing, because there was no blaming him for all of this. I had my own to ask for as well, I knew, and I gave it the gas, gunned it even through that low spot, mud on our quarter panels now, too, I was certain. We had places to go.
Pigboy Roost turned out to be nothing, only a spot on a road that led out of Jacksonboro proper, the road between the fire station and the Road to Emmaeus AME Church. But it was thirteen miles we had to head back on it, for nothing. We got there, saw only wetlands, the upper end of Snuggedy Swamp. Not even a dead refrigerator or washing machine.
We cruised a mile beyond it, then a couple miles back toward Jacksonboro, just in case my odometer wasn’t working right, me the whole while looking, looking. But there was nothing. Only swamp.
“Should’ve known,” Unc said finally, and slapped hard his knee, shook his head. “Just a place to pick up goods. Just a drop site, nothing else.”
I drove.
I had no clue what it was had been big about Walterboro once, whether it was cotton or if there was a mill here or if it was some major lumbering operation, a depot for all the wood taken off Hungry Neck and everywhere else down