Authors: Bret Lott
“Quillie,” Mrs. Cuthbert said, her arms crossed, and I could see her shake her head, that hair of hers at odd angles. “That’s enough.”
“I’ve already called your momma, Huger,” Mrs. Q said. “She’s on her way as we speak.”
“Perfect,” Unc whispered. He let out a hard breath, called out, “Jessup, just get the DNR boys on down here too.”
“Yessir,” Jessup said.
“You bag that son of a bitch,” Mr. Cuthbert called, “and we’ll cook us up some steaks tonight, you want to, Leland. We’ll barbecue us some fauna, I tell you what.”
He let out a laugh, a loud one that seemed more forced than anything else. And even though it was a kind of innocent laugh, meant only to poke both at that old bag Mrs. Q and at the fact he knew Unc was out here golfing in the middle of the night again, still that laugh echoed cold and easy across the marsh, and very very wrong.
There was a dead body right here with us. A dead woman right here at the end of this pole I was pushing down on to hold it up. A laugh out of Mr. Cuthbert was the wrong thing to happen out here, just as an idiot joke about the trailer trash element we’d brought here was wrong too.
There was no joke to any of this.
But there was still in me this pressure in my chest I knew wasn’t going to leave any time soon. Still in me, too, that rifle-scope view of the body, my line of sight filled with those teeth, that flesh, and whatever had happened—whatever had been done to—her face, and the glow and glisten of water runneling off a body, and I had no choice in that second of Mr. Cuthbert’s laugh echoing back across the marsh but to bark out sharp, “It’s a body.”
I said it loud, and heard my own echo come back to me, same as that laugh.
Nothing happened for a moment, everyone in the Dupont backyard just standing there, frozen. The only thing alive seemed that echo back at us, hanging right here in the air around us.
Mr. Cuthbert, hands still on his hips, took another step forward, said, “What you mean, ‘a body’?”
“He means a body, Grange,” Unc said, the words quiet. “A woman’s body. Now we need to just wait until the authorities get here before we can—”
Right then Mrs. Quillie Izerd Grimball took in a breath that tangled up and warbled in her throat, a hard intake of air that made her shoulders seize up to her ears, and she fainted, dropped backward into the shadows like a deer shot through the neck.
Right then the Guatemalan nurse let out a screech pure and true, a long, high scrape of animal sound.
Right then Unc flinched there in the seat in front of me, put both hands to the gunwales, and jerked toward the sound; Jessup flinched too, dropped his radio and turned back to the nurse, his arm up to the sound as though it were a fist coming down and him ready to block it.
The nurse put her hands to her ears, backed away and into the house, then turned and disappeared, still screaming.
Everything broken, just like that.
The Cuthberts knelt in the shadows where Mrs. Q had fallen. Jessup bent over and picked up his radio, spoke into it again. The nurse’s scream broke into ragged shards somewhere inside the house, and Jessup went on in after her to try, I figured, to calm her down.
I let go the pole then, felt the lever of it lift in my hands like a slow seesaw until it stopped in the mud. I didn’t care that Unc wanted me to hold the body up. Let it settle into pluff mud again, where somebody’d stashed it thinking it was gone forever, and where soon
enough cops and the sheriff and even the game warden’d be out here to fish it right back up.
“Knew what it was when I touched it,” Unc whispered. “Damn.”
I
’d seen bodies before. In fact, if you wanted to trace the picture that way, you could say it was the bodies I’d seen that got us here to this one.
I don’t know how to get into it without getting into it, but some things happened back when I was fifteen and a sophomore in high school, things that involved Hungry Neck Hunt Club, 2200 acres of land down past Jacksonboro, a good forty miles down 17 from Charleston. The clientele for the club was and is and will evermore be the South of Broad lawyers and doctors you see on TV and read about in the paper for all their professional opinions and do-good parades. Most all of them fancy themselves hunters, too, part of the whole Bubba persona they cultivate, never mind they went to Duke and Yale and Harvard. Early Saturday mornings of deer season it’s still me and Unc driving around in my Toyota Tundra—the Range Rover we drive in town and to poker night is Unc’s—dropping them off in the woods at deer stands along the road. That’s where they’ll wait in their crisp clean camo outfits, guns at the ready, for some real men we hire—Doug Watkins and Oscar Porcher—to ride through on horseback, their dogs off in the woods and scaring up the deer from where they’re sleeping, so that the good doctors and lawyers can blast away in hopes of landing a buck.
Unc owns the club, just a tract of land the family’s had in its hands for going on a hundred years. Some of it trashland, good for nothing, some of it pretty, set on the Ashepoo. Live oak and pine, dogwood and palmetto and poison ivy and wild grapes and all else. Marsh grass down to the Ashepoo. That was about it.
Until somebody found, and tried to keep a secret, what amounted to a diamond mine down there: a tiny little island on the property that turned out to be a significant—and very illegally lucrative—historical
treasure. I know this sounds like some NatGeo special or the History Channel or whatnot, but it’s true. And that’s when people started turning up dead on the property, Unc the one framed for it.
Long story short: this wasn’t the first body I’d seen. Longer story even shorter: I killed one of the sons of bitches tried to make it seem Unc was a murderer. Shot the fucker dead the same second he shot me.
I’ve seen bodies.
But the problem with seeing them, and especially with the way I have, is that people want you to go to therapy for it, when all I’d wanted was to talk with Tabitha, my then-girlfriend and now Stanford postdoc. She’d been there with me when I shot that bastard. As had Unc, and Mom, and even Miss Dinah Galliard, Tabitha’s mom. They all went on to deal with what’d happened in the predictable way, even Unc showing up for his shrink sessions twice a week the first few months.
But I wouldn’t do it. I had my own way to handle what I’d done, and knew it would work. Even with that whole herd urging me to carry on to a paid stranger in some carpeted office about how killing a man made me
feel
, I wouldn’t do it.
Instead, all I did the rest of high school was to spend every Saturday and Sunday I could out to Hungry Neck sitting in the cab of my beat-up ’72 Chevy LUV pickup, alone or with Tabitha out on that land I’d loved so much my whole life. The land I’d grown up on before my parents split and my mom moved us to Marie Street in North Charleston and into the shadow of the Mark Clark Expressway.
Mom wanted me home. She loved me, longed for me to show up whole soon as I could, and tried to make it happen by cooking for me what I wanted, mowing for me what little lawn we had out back, letting me stay up late to play video games out in the front room of the house, where she’d look at me with long stares she thought I couldn’t see out the corner of my eye. She made sure I knew when my appointments were with the shrink, left little Post-it notes on the
bathroom mirror and on the fridge and on the steering wheel of the Chevy LUV. And when I blew them all off, she’d bitch at me for a minute or so, and I’d see her with her teeth clenched at me, her head shaking slow. And then she’d cry, and I knew what harm I was doing to her. I knew, because she loved me.
But Hungry Neck was where I did my therapy, me sitting in my truck and looking out onto the wide cold blue of the Ashepoo, and the spartina and cordgrass and salt-marsh hay, the all of it a green I couldn’t name, mixed down in it reds and browns and a color like bone.
I got through it. I’m not going to lie: I could have done a better, maybe quicker job of it if I’d listened to everyone who had an opinion about how I was supposed to deal with killing someone. Eventually I stopped sitting bolt upright in my bed four and five nights a week to see the ceiling fan turning above me, me screaming about how it was a shovel coming down hard for my throat. I got over it.
But here it was again, all of it coming right back at me: another body. Me barking at people and angry for it, and this pressure in my chest and on it at the same time—what I had no choice but to understand was flat-out plain old cold and ugly fear. Fear here one more time, like a piece of shit I thought I’d scraped off the heel of my shoe, only to climb in the cab of my truck and still smell it, find the heel of the other covered with even more, and ground into the floorboard.
W
e waited. The nurse’s shrieks had died down now, Jessup in there with her and probably talking to her. There was still no sign of ol’ Dupont anywhere, and the thought occurred to me he might’ve gone on and had a heart attack and died himself, what with all that screaming going on inside his house.
And still no sign of Mom.
Mrs. Q had come out of her faint only a few seconds after she’d fallen, sat up with the help of both Cuthberts, her looking quick from one to the other like she’d never seen them before. Then she shivered,
looked straight out at me standing here in the boat, and struggled up, stood. She didn’t say a word as the Cuthberts touched her, talked to her, tried to coax her to let Priscilla walk her on back home—Grange wouldn’t be leaving this adventure, no way—but it was obvious she wasn’t budging, this violation of the sacred ground of Landgrave Hall so egregious, and Unc and me the agents of its debasement. She wasn’t going anywhere.
And still we waited, no one talking at all out here, not Unc to me, or the Cuthberts to Mrs. Q or each other. The only sound was the creep of the tide on its way, filling in the marsh inch by inch with its quiet wet clicks and pops, the calm of it a kind of empty reverence suddenly upon us: here was a dead body, and here was the natural world without a pause over it.
Maybe Mom wouldn’t even come out here, I was thinking. Maybe—lucky for her—this would be the night she’d finally given us up to ourselves, and the stupidity of Unc’s big idea to learn how to golf.
Then, slowly, Unc took hold of the gunwales with both hands, sat up straight, and stood, all of it before I’d even heard the pop of a single pebble under the tires of whatever vehicle it was pulling up out front of the Dupont house. And now, even from here on the water, pushed off the edge of the world and out onto this finger creek, I could hear the crunch of gravel from the drive that Unc’d already taken in, the sound sudden and quiet, followed by the slam shut of one door, then another.
Unc turned from me to face the house, as though he’d be able to make out who it was coming up out of the dark, and I caught the jittered-up shards of a flashlight beam in the trees and on the ground, closer now and closer, until finally the Cuthberts turned and Mrs. Q too, stepped aside like a curtain parting, as though whatever first responders it was coming up on this all—Hanahan Police, County Sheriff, maybe even those Department of Natural Resources boys already—were the stars of some screwed-up game show.
But just before that flashlight beam made it around the corner of the house and blew full bore into my eyes—because that’s what happened—Unc whispered, “I don’t know who this is,” the words astonished at themselves, pinned down by the surprise of what he didn’t know, and whoever it was coming in.
Because he always knew what was going on. He knew. He’d know from the crunch of the gravel the sort of cruiser it was out there, whether it was one of those Dodge Chargers the Hanahan police drove or the heavy Crown Vics the sheriff’s office still used or the big Chevy Silverado pickups the DNR tooled around in. And if not from the sound of the tires on gravel, then he’d know from the slam shut of those doors exactly who it was.
But not this time.
The flashlight beam busted into my eyes, and I put a hand up. I should’ve known better than to be looking right where they’d have to be.
“Command Master Chief Petty Officer Stanhope” boomed out deep from behind the light. “Master-at-arms, U.S. Navy.”
“You got to be kidding me,” Unc let out hard. He didn’t move there in the front of the boat, the flashlight beam no challenge to him. “The Shore Patrol?”
“Master-at-arms, sir,” the voice boomed out again, the last word a broad and flat
ahhhms:
he wasn’t from around here. “I am placing you under arrest. Do not move.”
I took my hand down, squinted toward the voice, and the flashlight beam fell away.
There were two of them, moving toward us: the one with the flashlight, his other hand at the holster on his hip; beside him a man holding what looked from here for all the world like an M4, the short barrel pointed down, the butt against his biceps. The one with the flashlight—Stanhope—was white, the other one black, and they were both big, over six foot, both in digital camo BDUs and billed caps. But the fatigues weren’t that desert brown and beige, I could see in
the porch light. From here they looked almost blue and black and gray.
They stopped, the flashlight down, Stanhope’s hand still at his hip, the M4 down but ready. They’d passed the Cuthberts and Mrs. Q, the three of them backed away and against the low brick fence, their eyes open wide. Mrs. Q had a hand at her throat holding tight the neck of her sweater, Grange Cuthbert with his hands at his sides, Priscilla leaning into him.
What the hell was a
master-at-arms
?
“On what charge?” Unc said, and I could hear the steel in his jaw, the set of his teeth and bright tough edge of his voice that signaled this was a load of shit he wasn’t about to be putting up with, and whoever was shoveling it was about to get his ass kicked. It was a sound I’d heard only a few times—one of which was when we were about to be killed out on an island at Hungry Neck, just before it was me who’d done the killing—and I wondered for an instant if either of these two sailors had a clue what they were up against.
But they had the guns, and they were the Navy. And of course I knew what this was about: two infrared illuminators on us from across the marsh. At the Naval Weapons Station.