The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [8]
“We would’ve heard the shot, too, if it’d been back here,” Unc said, ignoring Yandle. He tapped the boot of the man with his stick. “He’s been dead a good five hours or so. Me and Huger been here all night, and we would’ve heard it at the trailer if they’d shot him back here.”
“How you know how long he’s been dead?” Yandle put in.
“The smell, first off,” Unc said, his voice quiet. “It’s old. Next how stiff this boy is going. Tap his boot. You can feel rigor mortis already settling in. Quite a while ago.”
“Maybe you ought simply to be quiet about anything, Mr. Dillard,” Yandle said. He slipped the pad and pen into his shirt pocket. “You might ought to remain silent, seeing as how you are implicated here, on a cardboard sign no less.” He paused. “Sir.”
I wanted to answer him, wanted to turn to this turd and tell him off, sick of Yandle already and what he was saying here: my uncle was involved. Even though I wasn’t sure of anything myself.
But there was nothing I knew to say. It was a body here, going ripe, the hands skinned like dead squirrels.
“Let’s go,” Yandle said, and started for me. “I’m moving you two out of here and putting up a banner on the perimeter.” He put a hand to my arm, started to pull me back toward the road.
But I shook him off. “The hell you are,” I said finally, and I could hear my voice gone loud, heard it quivering, too. “This is our property,” I said. “You’re not kicking us out of here.”
This time he took hold of my arm tighter, pinched the muscle there. “Let’s go,” he said.
“Now the two of you,” Unc said, his voice low and solid and sharp enough to make Yandle stop a second. “Just cut this out altogether.”
Yandle, teeth clenched, said, “Unless proper order can be maintained at the crime scene, then all offenders will be—”
“Son of a fucking bitch!” Thigpen said, not a whisper, not a shout, but like it’d taken every bit of his air to say it.
I turned, saw him fast crabwalking backward in the weeds, his hands scrambling on the ground behind him, his feet moving fast, too, though it seemed in the second I took it all in that he wasn’t getting anywhere, instead was falling and getting up, falling and getting up.
He was looking at the body.
“What?” Unc said. “What?”
That was when I saw it, too: those skinned hands, red muscles, white tendons holding that gun, an over-and-under twelve-gauge, were moving, starting up, slow and stiff.
It was a body.
It was a body without much of a head.
The arms were moving up, slowly, like he was taking aim at some bird might fly off if it saw him move, and now Yandle’s hand was off me, and we were moving back too, my feet heavy in the weeds, and now my throat collapsed, and though I tried to answer Unc, tried to tell him It’s a body, and it’s lifting up that gun, I couldn’t get anything out.
“Holy shit,” Yandle whispered beside me, and still we two stumbled back, the weeds like ropes.
“What?” Unc said again. “What the hell is going on?”
He turned toward us, and I could see the puzzlement on his face, the way he was trying to figure why he got no answer, but still nothing came.
And then I saw what it was there in the weeds, saw it in the way that gun rose, those hands ready to shoot: it wasn’t a body, but a man, dead.
It was a dead man.
Then the world out here, the trees, this light, the weeds and Thigpen and Yandle and Unc—“Somebody tell me what’s going on!” he shouted now, him pitiful and alone not five feet away from me, and not five feet from a dead man lifting his gun to aim—all of it started to swirl in front of me, and I started falling back, the blue morning sky above me filling my eyes now, and in the last instant before everything went white I saw the bird this dead man was aiming at: a buzzard circled way up there, brought here by a smell old and red and metal, and I couldn’t blame Charles Middleton Simons, M.D., for trying to take him out with that twelve-gauge, no matter the son