The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [73]
I stood.
Mom came up with me, still holding tight to my arm, still whimpering, and Unc grabbed up my other arm, and I turned, ran, the three of us heading off into a darkness I couldn’t see into, the thin blanket of light cast from the fire gone in a matter of four or five strides.
But we were running, away from all this.
“Catch up to you in a few!” Thigpen called out, and coughed, then laughed, coughed again.
And though I know I shouldn’t have, know it only slowed us down a moment or three, I turned, looked back. Already the woods were folding in on us, my feet ripping through growth, the trees and vines and all else pulling closed like a curtain between us and the fire.
There stood Thigpen, Yandle back to rocking. Thigpen pushed in a bullet, then snapped shut the chamber. He took a step up, only a silhouette now for the fire behind him, and stood over Yandle, who stopped rocking, lifted his head, as though he might be able to sit up. He was crying now, giving out this small, high-pitched sound.
Thigpen said something to him, something I couldn’t hear, then fired, one shot to Yandle’s head.
His head slammed back, and for a second in the silence there came the echo of that shot.
Thigpen looked up, still only a silhouette.
“On my way!” he called out.
Unc pushed me from behind.
“Run,” he whispered, “or we die.”
We ran.
Mom held my right hand with both hers, still took in quick breaths, whimpering. Unc had hold of the back of my jeans jacket, held on, and we ran.
It was black, all of it, the ground and sky and trees, my eyes not yet adjusted to whatever light that same half-moon’d given out last night when Tabitha and I had walked back to Benjamin’s shack, and now it wasn’t just Unc was blind anymore. It was me, blind to everything that’d been going on at Hungry Neck, this place like some sort of ugly cancer of a sudden, filled with shit and death, when all these years of my life I’d thought it perfect, a place to get away from all the shit of North Charleston, shit that was right there where you could see it, the carjackings and BP minimart shootings and innocent-bystander kids shot down in the high school parking lot. Shit right there on the surface, I’d always known. But only now, tonight, did I finally realize there was shit even in the most perfect places you could imagine.
Hungry Neck.
My heart pounded for the running, branches brushing against my face and legs, weeds and palmetto fronds and saplings and dead branches at my feet all taking a piece of time with having to make our way through, no trails anywhere, not even a deer path I might find and follow.
Then slowly the shadows started making their way into my eyes, light and dark giving in to let me see, while still Mom whimpered, stumbled, pulled at me, and while Unc pushed, him right behind me like I was some battering ram through it all, and I realized in this growing light of shadows and night that this was what my life had always been: the pull of Mom to some life she’d seen might be better for us close in to Charleston proper, and Unc pushing me deeper into Hungry Neck, deeper and deeper, so that with the stump my foot hit then, me losing balance a second or so but still staying up and still running, I saw that even Unc’s tossing me those keys last April, the gift of a beat-up Luv once owned by a man killed in a cafeteria half the world away, was just another way to get me deeper into this life, and into whatever it was he wanted me in it for: chauffeur, errand boy.
His eyes.
And though that afternoon I’d gotten the Luv I drove this land for hours, drove it like I’d known the land better than my own bedroom, then parked it out on Cemetery, where the road goes close to the Ashepoo, and where I’d looked out over the marsh and all those nameless squat islands scattered around, I didn’t know any of it.
I’d watched the sun set that night, the marsh going that green you couldn’t name, mixed in and down inside it browns and reds and a color like bone, and I’d believed that night I knew