The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [65]
He shook his head, and Mom turned to him, said, “Just shut the hell up, would you, please? Won’t you just shut the hell up? Has anybody ever told you you’re just an asshole?” She touched my forehead, said, “Excuse my language, but I’ve been having to listen to this all day long, him and his police-boy stories. And I’m getting sick of it.”
“That was a comedy,” he went on, “that videotape, which we confiscated too, her with her fat turkey legs chained up and wrapped around his skinny nigger butt.” He was just talking, happy at the sound of his voice. “But it turns out they had a fight,” he said, “right in the middle of this Mandingo thing they got going, and he up and swallows her key. Took two days before that brother let loose of what he was holding, and I’m not the one went pawing through it, I tell you what. No sir. It was the brother himself we made do it.” He laughed again. “Now, they were losers. But you all.” He took another long swallow, emptied it, then pointed the bottle at me. “You all are one fucking loser family. The Dillards.” He burped again. “A blind man, a snot-nosed runt, and a cracker bitch to boot. One flicking loser family.”
“Don’t say a word, Huger,” Unc said again.
But I wasn’t sure if I even could. My tongue had swollen up, the whole left side of my face a sandbag, heavy and fat, and I reached up, touched it.
Nothing. It hadn’t swollen, far as I could tell. Just cold flesh, my cheek, my jaw.
“Don’t go to moving around,” Mom said. “Don’t try moving around or anything at all, Huger.” Then her chin started to quiver again, all this just like two days before.
But where were we? And why weren’t they just letting us go? Hadn’t Unc told them they could have the land?
“Unc?” I said, turning to him, my hand still to my dead jaw, the word out of me more a grunt for how big my tongue’d gone.
“Be quiet, boy,” Unc said again.
“Might ought to listen to that bad boy Leland Dillard,” Yandle said, and burped again. “He’s been around the block a time or two.” He laughed, pointed the empty bottle at him this time. “Looks like somebody done backed over him a time or two, too.” He cocked back his arm, and for a second I thought he meant to throw the bottle at Unc, just for fun.
But he didn’t, only shot it out into the woods behind us, and I heard the rush of small sounds through thick branches, the bottle caught a moment or two in the brush before the sounds stopped.
I sat up, though Mom didn’t want me to, and pulled myself to my knees, just like Unc. Mom didn’t have leg irons on but had a piece of rope tied to her ankle, the other end knotted into a spike, just like what Patrick and Reynold did with the dogs out in their yard.
And I could see way off into the woods behind the truck what looked like a lighted window, the barest glow of a lamp through a window the size of a postage stamp from where I was.
“So once the aforementioned cracker bitch little miss mother of the year here discovered my associates on the premises of Hungry Neck Hunt Club HQ”—Yandle laughed again, shook his head—“namely your fucking trailer, Leland, we had no choice but to apprehend the suspect rather than allow her to escape.” His words were sliding together now, a sound I knew was the first slip into being drunk from all those times we’d sat around and drank Colt 45 under the Mark Clark back home. Boxes were piled up in the bed of Ravenel’s truck, the boxes catching light now and again from the fire. Yandle reached behind him, pulled up another bottle from an ice chest there. He held it with the arm in the sling, screwed off the cap with his free hand.