The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [5]
“Then Wednesday night she gives me a call,” Unc said. He was still looking at me. “I haven’t heard from her in twenty-one years, not since the last night I ever saw her. The night I told her she was the one I was going to marry, like it or not.” He smiled, slowly shook his head. “Wednesday night she’s crying, and she tells me she’s going to kill the son of a bitch Charles Middleton Simons, M.D.”
He let out a slow whistle. He looked to the ground before him, and I was gone, my reflection. “Twenty-one years,” he whispered.
I watched him. His job with the police was something we didn’t talk about. He never said word one of it to me, not since before the fire, when he and Aunt Sarah used to come out for Christmas and Easter and he’d talk about things.
But since the fire he hadn’t said a word.
He moved his hand again, working the stick, and looked at the ground. He’d already gotten one whole spiral done, this one even clearer than the rest, steadier.
He finished the thing, said, “Better get hold of one of them bag phones. Give your momma a call.”
Then he put his boot to the shape, moved his toe back and forth in the dirt, and it was gone.
If I called my mom, she’d make me come home. And if I told her I wouldn’t—I wouldn’t—she’d haul ass down here and drag me back.
Which is why I didn’t call her, like Unc told me to. I didn’t want her to come screaming in here in that old Stanza she drives, didn’t want her making a scene in front of everyone here.
So I left Unc there at the Luv, made like I was going over to use the bag phone off the man who’d called the sheriff. But I only went to the edge of the weeds across the road, and I turned, watched him.
He’d held back a piece of truth from me, this woman Constance calling him this week. I’d hold a piece from him: the fact Mom wasn’t on her way here to get me.
A minute later I went back to the Luv, leaned on it.
He said, “What’d she say?”
“She shit bricks.”
“Such talk,” he said. “Clean up your mouth.”
“Yessir,” I said. I was quiet, then said, “She told me to come home soon as I can.”
“You’re lying.”
“I am,” I said. Mom wouldn’t have said that. “She said come home now. But I told her I couldn’t, because I might have to talk to the sheriff, seeing as how I’m a witness.”
He didn’t move. His head was down, the bill of the Braves cap covering his face, the stick still against the ground. The light was coming up around us now. We had the whole day left, a day I was certain wasn’t going to be like any other I’d known.
Then he looked up, called out, “Boys, party’s over. Come on back to the road now. Single file. Bring them dogs with you, too.” He paused, took a breath, as though he were tired already. “Then just take a seat in the weeds or back in the trucks.”
“Yessir,” came a few voices again.
Here came the orange hats.
He turned to me. “And where in hell do you think Patrick and Reynold are?”
Patrick and Reynold: the horsemen, their job to let out war whoops while they rode through the woods, the dogs in front of them, scaring up deer from where they hid. Both of them carried rifles in their saddles and were given the right to shoot anything they startled up, this their form of payment. Unc could count on the two of them to run the dogs exactly where he wanted, though past that he couldn’t count on them for much.
Last I’d seen of them was just after Unc’d parceled out the men at the campfire, then we both walked like every Saturday deer hunt to where they waited at the front of the line of trucks. Patrick and Reynold sat in their black and rusted Dodge pickup, in the bed the dog cages, all of the dogs moving, yelping, behind it all their horse trailer.
“Drunk again,” Unc’d whispered as we came up to the driver’s-side