The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [89]
He looked past us again and stood in the boat, the tiller still in hand, but now he put the gun to Tabitha’s head, held it there as he looked forward.
Tabitha’s hard breaths came back, and that high-pitched shard of sound from deep inside her.
“By the way, Leland, I realize you are about to try and jump me, thereby sacrificing yourself in Jesus fashion, one death for all. But the gun is now at Little Eva’s head for the duration, the destination of our clandestine junket not far ahead. So don’t try.” He paused, turned the tiller. There behind him was another island, smaller, farther away. Or maybe it was the same one. “In a few moments all will be made clear. Unexpected gravy. Buried treasure. The pièce de résistance, as it were. The pièce d’Africain.” He laughed. “And though Miss Gaillard and the nubile nubian here are not on the original guest list, it seems most apropos they are with us nonetheless.”
Unc eased off, let his head drop, leaned back. He let out a breath.
And then the bow scratched bottom, a sound like sandpaper from beneath us, and we stopped.
“Everyone out,” Simons said.
I turned, looked forward. There sat Miss Gaillard and Mom, both turned, too, looking.
The bow was nosed into marsh grass, just beyond it an island, black trees and bushes, a single palmetto, all silhouetted against a black sky. One of those nameless ones, way off and small, you could see from Hungry Neck.
Buried treasure, I thought. Two trinkets.
One is sin, and the other is love. And I can’t tell the difference.
The paperweights.
But I was thinking, too, of Eugenie and Leland. My mother, and my father.
Pluff mud went to my shins, and I used the shovel to keep my balance.
Here was the same smell as that first night in North Charleston, and the same smell as had started up off the body between stands 17 and 18 the second time we went back there, Thigpen and Yandle with us.
Charles Middleton Simons, M.D., hadn’t been anywhere near. We’d stood at only a body with next to no head, the hands degloved, he called it. A body nameless as this island.
In front of me was Miss Dinah with the other shovel, Mom in the lead. We stepped through the mud, arms or shovels out for balance as the mud swallowed our feet, let them go, swallowed them.
“Huger,” Unc said from behind me.
“Leland, you have anything to say, you need to say it to me,” Simons said, and I turned, saw Unc reached toward me. Past him were Tabitha and Simons, the gun now to her neck, his other hand holding tight her arm.
“Don’t,” Simons said, and I knew it was to me, and I turned around, kept going.
Mom stepped up out of the mud and onto the island itself, put a hand to the palmetto, leaned on it, and now Miss Dinah stood beside her, and it was my turn to step up and onto ground.
It was ground. An island, maybe an acre or so, thick with growth, like all of them, so thick there was nothing to see into, only black, pieces of shadow here and there, all of it thicker than the woods we’d run through for half the night.
Unc struggled through the last two steps of mud, then fell forward. His hands hit the ground, and I watched those pale hands in the moonlight search for something to hold, to help him pull himself up onto ground.
There was nothing, only weeds, and he was on his knees now, his feet finally free of the mud. He touched the base of the palmetto, got to one knee, the other, and stood.
Tabitha still gave out that sound, the gun still to her neck, and the two of them stepped up, all of us crowded now at this piece-of-dirt landing, and I stepped toward the black of the growth, looked into it.
Something cold took my free hand, and I turned, saw Mom, holding mine in hers.
“Give your mother the shovel, Lord Huger,” Simons said. “Then lead us to the Promised Land.”
I looked at him. The canopy of growth above us, all I could see was a silhouette holding something to the neck of a silhouette, behind them both stars, gray marsh.
“I can’t see