The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [67]
Ravenel stopped shaking his head. “There you go, thinking again. That’s your first mistake.” He paused. “Big mistake.”
“You son of a bitch,” Yandle said, and before I could even think of what I was watching, Yandle brought the bottle up from beside him on the bed, and broke it against Ravenel’s head.
I jumped, like I’d been shocked, my stomach knotted up and tight, and Mom squeezed down tighter on me, squealed, all in that second.
“Hold on,” Unc said, his voice cut low, just for us.
Ravenel gave a sort of failed groan, just a sound like the air in him had no choice but to leave, and fell, back and away from the truck.
Yandle pushed himself off the tail of the Ram, looked down at him. He still had hold of the bottle neck, the broken end ready now for whatever else might piss him off. He put his boot toe to Ravenel’s leg, pushed at it. Ravenel moaned, the sound almost nothing.
“Fucking doctors,” Yandle said. “The whole reason this whole thing is coming down—doctors.”
He turned to us, pointed the broken bottle at Unc. “If it hadn’t been for your doctor’s wife coming along and blowing away her hubby’s head, we could of been set up and operating here from now till kingdom come. But no. Doctors. Fucking doctors.”
Mom held me tighter, took in quick breaths, her face to my shoulder, and I held her.
“Good idea,” Yandle said. “Just close your eyes and pray this all goes away.”
Now came footsteps, a rush of them, pounding through brush and stomping toward us, and Reynold came into the firelight, breathing hard, his bald head like an orange bulb in the light, flannel shirt and jeans on. He bent to Ravenel, took in a breath or two, looked up at Yandle. Patrick showed up behind him, chest moving for the distance they’d run from the greenhouse. He had on a down vest over long underwear, jeans. He gave a big sniff through his nose, rubbed at it, shook his head.
He cut his eyes to Yandle, who’d sat back on the tail.
“This,” Patrick said, and took in another breath, “is a fucking twisted way to try and cover our ass.”
Reynold stood. “What in the hell did you do that for?” he said, and took in a breath, another. “This is the man who knows the judge, Doug. This is the man who knows the fucking judge. And you go and break a bottle on the son of a bitch.”
“Just shut up,” Yandle said. “Just shut the fuck up and let me think a minute.”
He gave what was left of the bottle the same throw he’d given the other empty, the bottle making the same small rush of muffled sounds, then leaned his head down, rubbed at his eyes with his free hand. Patrick said, “But we wasn’t supposed to brang down this kind of shit, Doug, we wasn’t supposed to go on and smash the fucking moneyman’s head.”
Yandle shot him a look, and the three of them started to arguing and whining at one another, hollering and pointing back into the woods to that lit window, then at each other, fingers to chests and pounding and how it all wasn’t supposed to fall like this.
And yet even with what I’d just seen, a bottle broken on the side of a man’s head, a body gone limp, I was thinking on what Yandle’d said just then: We could of been set up and operating here from now till kingdom come.
What did that mean? Weren’t Cleve Ravenel and his pals supposed to buy Hungry Neck? Wasn’t that what this was supposed to be about, our being back at nine o’clock so we could meet up with Thigpen and tell him whatever he and the people he worked for, those men who counted, wanted to hear? That Unc’d sell them the place, then get Mom back, be left alone to try and live the rest of our lives with all that’d happened?
Where was Thigpen?
And marijuana. Stupid shit was all this was over. But crated up in popcorn and shipped on a container? The people Yandle knew were nothing more than the lost clods who lived out here in the woods. That black-and-white couple with the leg irons’d probably been his customers, the leg irons some sort of bartering deal. What were they shipping it away for? In popcorn?
And why would Yandle think he’d be in business for life, if the