The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [74]
But now I’d seen bone, seen it splintered up and through a man’s arm, seen the fingers twitch, the eyes flutter, the head snap back.
I ran, and Unc pushed at me and Mom pulled at me, and here now were branches low off a live oak, and I ducked down, whispered hard, “Look out,” and dipped down, half turned to Mom, and put my hand to her head, pushed her down so she wouldn’t hit, Unc ducking too, and we made it, and started to running again.
And here was my job with my mother as well: protector of some sort, the boy meant to shepherd his mom through a night of the shit smell off a paper mill, through an empty Sunday after Thanksgiving, through a life trying to find another life, away from the one she’d left back here at Hungry Neck.
Hungry Neck. It all came back to here.
I heard a gunshot, far behind us, and Unc yanked hard on my jacket, stopped. I almost fell, my feet headed away from here, but I caught my balance, Mom going a little ahead with me.
The echo off the shot still hung in the air, a whisper of sound next to nothing, dying just as quick.
I thought Unc’d been hit.
“Unc,” I whispered, “you okay?”
He nodded, I could see in the shadows and moonlight. We were all breathing hard, Mom with her hands to her knees, bent over, Unc half turned from us, listening, the only sound now all of us breathing in and out, in and out.
We were in a clearing of sorts, big as the trailer, live oaks lying low all around. A screen of growth surrounded us, this empty piece of land where the wetlands surged up, the ground soft and spongy, puddles now and again, and I wondered if we were off to the north, anywhere near Cemetery Road, or Baldwin, or Lannear.
“We have to go,” I whispered, and heard how it was me that’d made this decision, not Unc pushing from behind, not Mom pulling because she couldn’t keep up.
It was me. Huger Dillard.
I took a deep breath, grabbed up Mom’s hand, Unc’s arm, and I started off across the clearing.
They said nothing, and we splashed through water as we crossed, then ducked beneath more limbs, Unc’s hand back on the tail of my jacket, me a divining rod of some kind, telling him exactly which way to turn as we came to a palmetto and rounded it, then a fallen log, the three of us up and over it and going again in a second, all of it in the best way I could gauge as being in the opposite direction of that gunshot.
We ran, the screen of trees not a screen at all, but just growth without end, a wall as deep as the woods with only a moment or three now and again of clear woods, of tree trunks around us like the twisted skeletons of animals too big to believe, then came the growth again, mixed-in rotted stumps and more dead branches, all of it only slowing us down and slowing us down so that, though it seemed we’d run for miles, I knew that gunshot a few minutes before was just a hundred yards or so away.
It was Mom this time to stop. She let go my hand, just let it go, and stopped.
She had her hands to her knees again, her shoulders up and down for the breaths she was trying to grab. Slowly she shook her head.
“We can’t stop,” I whispered, and put a hand to her back, saw in the dark only the blurred image of my mother’s face: her mouth, her nose, her eyes.
“All y’all!” came Thigpen’s voice, far off and muffled for the woods it had to travel through to find us. “Ollie ollie oxen in come free!”
Mom let out a single, small sob. Just a cry, nearly silent, but here with us.
I whispered, “Let’s go,” and took her hand, turned to find Unc.
He was right there, his face as close to mine as when he’d told me to run.
He whispered, “Find the North Star,” his whisper next to nothing, even less than Mom’s cry. But I’d heard him.
“What?” I whispered.
“Got some business with y’all,” Thigpen called out.
He was out there, on horseback, with a gun.
“I woke up when the truck stopped back there,” Unc whispered. “When we got here.” He paused. “I don’t know where we are. But you find Polaris, we might have a clue.”
Mom was