The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [53]
I shook my head. Even Unc missed the mark now and again. And, I knew, he was missing it with Yandle.
Walterboro to Mount Pleasant is a little over sixty miles one end to the other, and once we were through Parker’s Ferry and Rantowles and Red Top, houses and shops and car dealerships picking up and picking up, we were there, right there: stopped at a light beside the Amoco station where a black woman in a red smock with an orange wave in her hair hadn’t seen a thing.
Then we were at Citadel Mall, tooling right back up the Mark Clark in the opposite direction I’d come only last night, and I drove on up the ramp and onto the freeway north like it was my own, because in a way it was. I’d survived this, lived to tell the tale.
But it wasn’t over yet. No way.
And then, maybe a mile farther on, I slowed down, looked across the median for some sign of where that yellow Ford pickup’d been rolled by Thigpen in his scab-roofed Plymouth. Just last night.
But there was nothing. Nothing at all, no evidence of those two rednecked peasants.
Two of them. Pigboy and Fatback?
Unc said, “What is it?”
“This is where Thigpen rolled them off. Those two bubbas.”
“Maybe that’s Fatback and Pigboy.”
I turned to him, said, “There’s hope for you yet.”
He gave a small smile, nodded.
Then we crossed over I-26, and here we were, my neighborhood, just trees from up here, a glimpse now and again of asphalt shingles, a lawn, a car on blocks, all of it forty feet below and looking as simple and homey as can be.
But down there was Marie Street, and an empty house that smelled like dog shit when the wind blew right.
Marie Street, and my house. Mine and my mom’s, and now, for the first time I could ever remember, I thought of it for a second as my home.
Empty. Mom nowhere I knew. Me on my way somewhere else.
I didn’t even slow down. There were things to do.
We came down off the Mark Clark, there where it ended onto Old Georgetown Highway, and even me, a fifteen-year-old kid who had reason to be over here to Mount Pleasant maybe once or twice a year, remembered when Old Georgetown was a two-lane nothing, trees heavy down around it, dogs sitting on the shoulder and scratching.
Now.
Now there was a Super Lowe’s hardware warehouse, a Wal-Mart with a McDonald’s inside, a Piggly Wiggly the size of our high school, not to mention the Harris Teeter and Food Lion and Publix just as big. Art galleries, golf courses, a tenplex movie theater, twenty or thirty restaurants.
And Old Georgetown: five lanes, all those oaks taken down for it.
We turned off Old Georgetown at the first light and onto Bowman next to the big K mart, and here we were, where Unc’d led me with his directions: Imaging Network Services.
It was a low brick building, had a sign out front, IMAGING NETWORK SERVICES and the logo of a man lying on his back inside a circle, beneath that DR. JOE CRAY, M.D.
He hadn’t told me who we were going to see, and I hadn’t asked, only followed where he told me to go. But I knew who this guy was as soon as I saw his name: the fat radiologist with the unlit black cigar he was chewing on all the time. I knew his name because of how Unc picked on him and that cigar every deer-hunt Saturday morning, after breakfast was over, Miss Dinah and Tabitha cleaning up the paper plates and what have you, preparing already for fried-chicken lunch. That was when the men’d gather around the fire in a circle, then I’d usher Unc into the circle, and he’d ask for a count-off. Each time he came to Dr. Cray he’d say, “Now, don’t get any big ideas on lighting up that cigar out on the stand, you hear, Brother Cray?” and he’d answer, “Yes, Pappy,” or some such as this.
He was a good one, far as any of them went, in that if he talked to me he made eye contact, smiled. Most all the others I was lucky if I got a grunt out of when I helped haul in the deer they got.
I’d always wondered, too, if that cigar, even if he never lit it, ever gave off enough smell to scare a deer. But then he’d shot that fourteen-pointer New Year’s Day of this year. End