The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [90]
“Sounds like something Leland might say,” Simons said, and laughed. He moved an arm to his side, brought it up. Then here was light: sharp, white, pointed at me.
He let the beam go to the ground, reached toward me with it, a circle of light moving over our feet, weeds. “Take this,” he said, “and do not imagine there is room here for heroics. Simply follow the trail.”
I stood there a moment, still. Light was with us, and I could see things, and I could feel my heart beat, and I could smell this mud, and I could feel the cold of my legs and feet, my arms, my mother’s cold hand in my cold hand.
This was all there was, I saw. Only this.
I let go her hand, gave her the shovel, then took the flashlight.
But before I turned away, I let the beam fall below Tabitha a moment, enough light to let me see her face full on. She was looking at me and breathing hard, the dull glint of gun at her throat.
Then she nodded. It was small, near nothing. But she’d nodded.
I brought the flashlight down, and it seemed she was the only one in the world who might know me.
I turned, started away.
The flashlight filled up the world after all this time in so much dark, a world lit only with moonlight and black, the fingers of branches and feathers of weeds and lines and angles and all those black shadows the only thing I knew all night long. Before this night I thought I knew about darkness, thought I knew how to make my way through it, whether it was climbing out my bedroom window into a dark in which waited Jessup or Tyrone or Deevonne, or if it was only driving the Luv before dawn back on Cemetery and dropping off men at the next stand and the next, my headlights off the whole time because I just wanted to see the gray and black world of Hungry Neck, and thought maybe it helped somehow to keep the deer down and at ease not to have all this light cutting up the place. I thought I knew how to make my way through dark.
But I didn’t. All I knew this night was a moon, Polaris, and that Mom and Unc had together betrayed me. Now here I was with a flashlight, the ugly power of it—with its light all those stars were gone now, all those shadows built on their own shadows disappeared—and now even the place I wanted to grow old on and die, Hungry Neck, seemed to betray me, too, that land a half mile away and standing alone, empty.
Land. Just land.
The flashlight seemed to ignite the vines and crepe myrtle and all else, the browns and greens all washed clean of most color for the light, like a body drained of blood. But Simons was right: here was a trail, and I followed it.
Growth hung over us, the trail almost a tunnel, and we walked slowly, the flashlight first on the ground at my feet, then on the ground ahead, at my feet again. I turned around a time or two, shone it on the ground behind me for the others, Mom next, Miss Dinah, Unc, then Tabitha and Simons.
Mom teetered for a moment, the shovel in her hand, Miss Dinah’s jacket on; Miss Dinah put out her hand to Mom’s shoulder a moment when it seemed she might fall forward, the other with the shovel; Unc took one step, paused, took another, with each measured step a hand reaching hard for the next hold on a branch or vine.
Then there was Tabitha, her arm still held by Simons, and I saw she had on only a long-sleeve T-shirt.
I stopped, held the flashlight in one hand while I slipped off the sleeve, then swapped hands with the light, the jungle suddenly flying with light, quick sharpened shadows here and gone as it moved, and then the jacket was off, and I stepped back among them, held it out to her.
“Those noble Dillards,” Simons said, the gun down from Tabitha’s neck, pointed now at me. She glanced up at Simons, then took the jacket, carefully shrugged it on, her eyes cutting from him to me to him.
“Move,” he said. “Deputy Thigpen will be here soon, and the festivities will continue. But there’s work to be done first.” He put the gun back to her neck.
I turned, started through the growth.
But this time it was me to teeter forward, my right foot caught for a second in