The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [59]
He faced forward, put that hand to the dash. “Let’s go,” he said. “Twenty-six East Battery.”
“Unc,” I said.
I wanted to tell him I cared for Aunt Sarah, cared about her dying. I wanted to tell him, too, I cared about Hungry Neck, but that selling it, finally, seemed the best way through this all, the best way out. The best way to get back my mom.
I wanted to tell him all this. But I only said, “Unc,” again, and nothing came after.
“Let’s go,” he said, and reached over, touched one of my hands at the wheel. “We have things to do.”
I could see a couple stars by the time we made it to the top of the first bridge over the Cooper River. We were on the old one, only two lanes wide, the railing so close out my window I could have reached out, touched it.
But the stars. Only two or three of them, the sky to the west a dark orange, to the east already a blue so deep you almost couldn’t tell where the Atlantic stopped and the sky picked up.
And there lay Charleston, to my left and below as we drove down from the first bridge, crossed over Drum Island, the flat piece of land the city used to dump its dredge mud on, then on up the second bridge.
Charleston. Below us now was the wharf, a couple tugboats, a small freighter. Next to that was the railyard, where somewhere a container’d been loaded with goods, whatever that meant.
And past all that were the lights of Charleston, all of them starting up, the spires on the churches lit so that it seemed for a second all that romance and what have you you hear about this place, the charm of the Old South and all, might for a few seconds actually be true.
From up here.
But they lived down there, the members of the club. The sons of bitches, cowards all, trying to buy out Hungry Neck from under Unc in order to bring in the next Hilton Head. The next Myrtle Beach.
Then we started down from the top of the second bridge and into the projects just to the right, those two-story brick rows of apartments with laundry lines strung up between them, to the left the old gray houses about to collapse on themselves.
The best way to East Battery was by going to East Bay Street, the street that paralleled the railyard and then made a straight shot for the Market, and so I turned to the right, followed streets that doubled back, past the projects and the elementary school, and we were on East Bay, above us the bridge we’d just come down.
We drove south, passed the post office and a couple restaurants, then hit the traffic at the Market.
People milled about down here, hanging out, heading into restaurants, buying trash at the open-air stalls all set up and selling varnished seashells glued together to make a palmetto tree, and T-shirts with pictures of sunsets, baseball caps with little fans that blew air in your face. This sort of thing. Gone were the dead buildings now, in their place an Applebee’s, a Häagen Dazs, a Smithfield Ham shop, all of it.
And sweetgrass baskets.
On the corners, even in this growing dark, sat the black women in their folding chairs, spread out at their feet the sweetgrass baskets, and sweetgrass trays and cup holders and platters.
Sweetgrass baskets, coiled sweetgrass and bulrushes.
There they sat, in these black women’s hands the coils they worked, coils the exact same as the one in my pocket, and it hit me.
There was something else to all this, other than just the greed of doctors ticked they wouldn’t be making a million a year much longer, doctors who wanted to go as far around Unc as they could in order to buy him out. There was something more.
Because why would Constance Simons come to me, there in the middle of a hospital, just to hand me this sweetgrass paperweight, a gift to Unc?
I said, “There’s something else going on, Unc. Not just selling Hungry Neck. There’s something else.”
We were past the Market now, beside us more shops—a bookstore,