The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [9]
Mom.
She was leaned over me, her face close. The first thing I felt was her smell: the same thick flowery perfume as every day, but on top of that another smell, like the bathroom after I’d cleaned it Monday afternoons at our house in Liberty Hills. Lysol, maybe. But I couldn’t make out her face, like I was looking through water at her, so I blinked.
That’s when I felt it: the pain in my head.
“Honey,” she whispered. “Sugar.”
For a second everything seemed like it hadn’t happened: no dead man, no police, no hunting.
Then I heard the scrape of a chair on the floor, steps toward me.
“Huger,” Unc said, and I knew.
“Stay out of this,” Mom said, her voice just like it was when she didn’t want to hear my side of whatever. Like Unc was a kid with no sense at all.
Like she talked to him most all the time, really.
And here was my mom: her red hair in soft curls, her white skin, and those thin freckles across her nose, her green eyes. My petite, beautiful mom.
The same one who could rip me in half for coming in past curfew or getting a B on a test, and who seemed an inch from tearing Unc apart, too, if she hadn’t already.
She had on her white nurse’s outfit, the ID card clipped to the collar. We were in a room, me in bed, and I saw steel rails beside me: in the hospital.
Mom was trying to smile at me, her chin shaking.
“Everything’ll be fine,” she said. “Just fine.” She touched my cheek.
“Unc,” I said, and the word was like a brick on my head.
“You fell,” he said. He stood back behind Mom, hat off, no stick. “You fainted, and you fell. Hit your head on—”
“Leland,” she said, her eyes moving like she might see him beside her. “You keep quiet.”
“What happened?” I whispered.
“You got a concussion,” she said, smiling again. Just that quick, like Unc never existed. “You been out a couple hours now. Officer Thigpen and Dr. Morrison brought you in with that other officer.” She paused. “And your uncle.” She shook her head.
I looked past her to Unc. On the wall behind him was a painting in a brass frame: six black Lab puppies chewing on a duck boot. The footboard was shiny oak, against the wall a huge piece of oak furniture, eight foot tall and with a mirror.
Mom said, “This is the Palmetto Pavilion. We’re here at the university.” She looked around, smiling. “When they saw you being escorted in by Dr. Morrison, they put you up here on the VIP floor. Pretty sharp, huh?”
But I was looking at Unc again.
“You got quite a bump on the back of your head,” Mom said. “You’ll have to stay overnight. Dr. Morrison is taking good care of you.” Mom reached to the little group of buttons on the rail, pressed one of them. “We’ll get one of the nurses to tell Dr. Morrison you’re awake.”
She was in her scared-mother mode: just keep talking and everything will be all right. When all I wanted was to know from Unc what happened: that dead man’s arms.
“Yes?” came a voice from a speaker somewhere above and behind me.
“Eugenie Dillard here,” Mom said. “He’s awake. Can we get Dr. Morrison in here?”
“Okay.”
Mom smiled down at me. “Imagine my surprise to get a call down in X Ray that my baby boy is being brought into Emergency by the sheriff’s office. And imagine my surprise that he’s unconscious.” She shook her head, and now the smile was gone. “Imagine I find out there’s been a murder out to Hungry Neck, and my son hasn’t called or had sense enough to get the hell out of there, and now here he is being wheeled in on a stretcher through Emergency, and a deputy behind him crying and carrying on about his broke shoulder, and it’s me and the girls down there in X Ray who get to shoot pictures of you and your head all banged to hell and then get to shoot that crybaby deputy—”
“Yandle broke your fall,” Unc said. “To a degree.”
“Leland,” she said again, but this time she turned to him, started in with her finger, shook it in his face, like he could see it and maybe fear her for it. “You just shut the hell up. You ought to know better than to let a boy out there in amongst all this grisly murder and whatnot,