The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [96]
Thigpen stood straight, his free hand holding his side. He was winded with the effort, grimaced with the pain. Unc lay twisted on the ground, his back to the flashlight so that his face was in shadow, lost. He groaned, coughed out a breath.
“And talk, dear Leland, of items missing will do nothing to stop work here. Though a child’s knickknacks proved the undoing of barren, sterile Constance, they have no genuine discernible consequence this evening. The king’s ransom we are about to unearth will make each cache of African memorabilia thus far sold pale in comparison. Each coffin is filled to the brim, each item fetching prices one might not believe, were it not for the fact of the vogue value these items seem to carry. Carved wooden pomegranates at two hundred thousand a set, a quiver of arrows for two hundred fifty, a cowhide shield for five hundred, a full-sized sweetgrass rice basket for eight hundred thousand dollars. And imagine, these sums multiplied by twelve! So much disposable income, so many buyers: Hollywood types, dignitaries, foreign statesmen like our potentate. Why, one of the busts, the Daughter herself, is owned by a former Grand Dragon and failed gubernatorial candidate from a sister state of ours, which will go unnamed here, for obvious embarrassing reasons. He keeps it, I am told, in the foyer of his summer home on the Gulf. A kind of slave ownership, I imagine, without all the fuss of civil rights and its attendant—”
“Will you just shut the fuck up?” Thigpen said, and looked at Simons. He took in a quick breath, grimaced for it again. “Fucking doctors. Every one of you thinks he knows everything, and thinks people really want to hear it.” He looked back at Unc. “So just shut up.”
Simons quick looked at Mom, at me, at Unc on the ground. “You are correct, in that this is a waste of time. Daylight will be upon us in a matter of two hours.” He let the hammer back, brought the gun down.
Unc got to his knees now, coughed again, slowly stood.
He said, “Tommy, you know all about Charlie’s money in Grand Cayman? About his insurance?” He was trying to stand up straight again. He wouldn’t give up.
“Don’t even try,” Thigpen said, and I thought I could see him smile. “I know what he’s making, and what he’s paying me. I’ve got things on him, he’s got things on me.” He shook his head, then squinted hard, held his breath a moment. “I don’t get my money, or I disappear, I’ve got things rigged, and the world knows about him. And I let on what I know about him, I’m sure he’s got things rigged to take care of me. Right, doc?” He looked back to Simons.
“As rain, my fellow malefactor. Honor among thieves, this sort of thing.”
“So you just shut the fuck up, too, Leland,” Thigpen said, trying at the smile again. “Just shut the fuck up, and know you’ll be dead before the sun’s up.”
“To business,” Simons said, and shone the beam on Tabitha and me. “Dig?” he said, and laughed.
There were things I thought of while we worked, the ground like everywhere down at the water, more clay than sand, heavy. But with each turn of the shovel, each lift of it out and onto the ground to my right, things came to me: the months Unc lay in bed in the trailer, and the nest, the antler, the feather I’d brought him. I thought of the way his hand’d wrapped itself around the paperweight in the warm dark of Benjamin Gaillard’s shack, and how he’d then given it up to me, and I thought of a minivan out front of a house with two oaks, and of the smell of that dead body. I thought of my mother curled up on a cot beside my bed, and the way the sun set just this evening on Charleston Harbor as we drove over the bridge from Mount Pleasant, and the light on the water, the red in the sky, the last sunset I’d see.
And of course I still hadn’t yet thought it was true, any of this: our being killed.
It had to do, maybe, with the way Tabitha worked at shoveling, like this was what, finally, we’d been born to do, our only job: dig up a coffin, lay ourselves to rest in the hole we’d made. We faced each