The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [99]
She winced, her eyes on me, leaned hard away, and Simons took another step.
I’d seen what I would do. I’d seen it. But I hadn’t seen him with the gun at her. Only on me. That’s what I’d seen with my eyes closed, with that gift of sight I’d been given by my uncle.
My father.
Yet I’d seen the gun on me, the one to shoot or be shot.
“But of course,” Simons said, and now swung the gun to Unc, there in front of him, twenty feet away. “It will have to be Leland. Unc.” He paused, took another step. “Daddy. Of course it will have to be him, because he’s the only one I fear.” He took another step, another. “A wild card. He’s willing to die, willing to kill or be killed. All because of this land, this place.” He took another step, now stood only a few feet from Mom and Miss Dinah, huddled into each other. “And because he carries with him some guilt over the life he’s led, from squiring you to the suicide of his wife to the bum deal lost eyesight can be.” He took another step, leveled the gun at Unc sitting there on the ground. “And logic would dictate I would kill him first for Constance, for the fact that she loved him more than me.”
Still he looked at me. “As I said, Leland, all of this is horribly predictable. For money, yes. And unrequited love. Predictable.” He paused. “And so you ought to die first, for predictability’s sake, for the symmetry of it.”
He held his arm even straighter, angled it level with Unc’s head.
Then he swung it to me.
I fired, and felt fire inside me, saw the flash and smoke from off his gun.
It was the deer that came to me in this instant, their settling into woods for the night, one of them gone—me—and none of them knowing the difference, my absence among them no absence at all, me nothing, and in this instant I felt the rush of night sky through me, felt all the ghosts of all the dead on Hungry Neck there’d ever been, and I knew them each, knew them black and white, old and newborn, these people what made the land this land, made a nameless island where I would die more than nameless, made it something to keep, to cherish, I knew, and I knew only then the difference between sin and love, knew only then both could be one and the same at any given moment, as life and death become the same in the moment between high tide and its beginning to wane, that moment when all the world holds its breath for the next thing to come, and then it comes, the tide letting out, the sea edging away to leave its debris behind. Sin and love could be the same, I knew, a fact maybe only knowable in the moment you stepped off the edge of a tub, a cord around your neck for the way your life had unwound before you, or maybe only knowable in the moment of the middle of your first night in a new town, the smell of death and decay summoning you from sleep, only to find here it is outside your back door, that smell of decay swallowing you whole, while here at your leg stands your only child, the hem of your nightgown bunched in his fist, him comforting you, telling you not to cry. Sin and love could be the same, a fact maybe only knowable in seeing your burning wife in her bed just before the explosion of hot glass, searing into your eyes the image for the rest of your life. Burned there, like the burning in me the instant he fired on me, the moment between sin and love as distant and close as a mother and father hidden from you your whole life, and yet present beside you every moment you breathed.
It was the deer that came to me, and these ghosts, and this land, all of it swept into me and around me and through me, the way my blood swept through me with each heartbeat, blood mine and in the same moment my mother’s and father’s both, me a part of them but only and always me, and then slowly, slowly, I fell away, and I disappeared into the black night above me, and into the ground beneath me, my blood carried out to sea, I knew, on this tide, beneath this moon, me the debris of this day, dead.
I saw things.
I saw a buzzard above a dawn sky, a jay’s nest, a hickory stick. I saw deer tracks, saw