The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [83]
And now Mom was falling behind, and I saw her face in the moonlight out here, heard a cry on her heavy breaths, and I put my hand out to her.
Thigpen fired, a spit of gravel splashing up beside me.
I turned from Unc pulling harder at me, harder, trying to move forward. I slowed down, held out my hand, and Mom’s hand was up, and she was running, and I could hear in this dark her crying.
There they were, horse and rider at full gallop, Thigpen low, arm out, a solid black shape hurtling toward us, seventy-five yards now.
“Mom!” I screamed, and held out my hand.
He fired again, another spray of gravel, this time beside Mom, the rocks flying up and hitting me and Mom.
She let out a startled yelp, stumbled, her arms going wild to keep her balance, but she didn’t fall, reached that hand out again.
Thigpen was fifty yards behind, the gun still up.
Then Mom’s hand was in mine, and I grabbed hold hard, pulled at her, Unc holding hard to me, pulling.
Here was the bluff, and the marsh.
We were running full blown now, faster than we’d run any time this night, Unc pushing hard from behind, Mom holding tight my hand. But here was the edge, and the answer to the question I’d wondered a moment ago—Run where?—came to me.
The river. This was where Unc’d wanted us to go all along. If you went east off Polaris from anywhere you stood on Hungry Neck, I finally saw, you came to the Ashepoo.
I stopped as best I could, Unc still pushing from behind, Mom still holding tight, so that when we hit the edge of the bluff it was all I could do to keep us all from falling in.
Thigpen fired again, another bullet past us and above, and I looked back at him: thirty yards now.
“Jump,” Unc said.
I looked at him. He was facing the river, and I turned, looked at what he couldn’t see.
The Ashepoo at high tide, black water thirty feet or so below us and fifty feet wide, on the other side of it the marsh all the way to Edisto, in a straight line across it the black tips of those empty pylons more than ever like the spine of some huge dead animal. And spread across it all those tiny nameless islands.
Above it all these stars, the moon.
“Jump!” Unc shouted, and now he pushed at me, and in the last second I laced the fingers of my hand in Mom’s, held it tight, and jumped, because there was nothing else to do, and no one else to die with.
Huger Dillard, I thought on our way down toward that black water, and still the words were new, and meant nothing.
It was a cold I couldn’t prepare for, a cold so black and cold it seemed to split me open, the wind knocked out of me, and I let go Mom’s hand to get to the air above me, everything black and cold.
I kicked my legs, the water thick with the cold, my eyes open to black and stinging, and I reached up, hoped my hand would break the surface, but it didn’t, and for an instant I thought maybe I’d twisted upside down somehow, that I was reaching down and away from what I needed.
But then an arm had hold around me, beneath my own arm, and I was being pulled up, and still I was kicking.
Here was air, and I pulled it in, pulled at it like I could swallow down all the air there ever was, and I knew it was Unc’s arm around me, knew that touch even here in this cold and black.
“Huger,” he whispered, “Huger, stay still, and just float.”
I took in more breaths, more breaths, and finally opened my eyes, saw the bluff, the dark shape up there of a man on horseback, stopped, slumped forward, an arm out toward us.
We were moving, the tide on its way out, him growing smaller, and then he fired, a sharp shard of light out at us.
Where was Mom?
I turned, Unc’s arm still around me, and looked for her, saw a shape on the water only a few feet downriver, a head just floating, beside us on the right the Hungry Neck side of the Ashepoo, those trees right up to the bank, to the left the wall of grasses where the marsh began.
I