The Hunt Club (11 page)

“Yessir,” I whispered.

He took a hand from a pocket, slapped hard the roof of the Luv, a sound so loud even Tabitha jumped. Then he turned, faced the Plymouth. Still I hadn’t seen his face. But I
knew
him.

“Now,” he said, and in just that one word here was all sun and blue skies. “Y’all got money for gas?”

I breathed out, looked to Tabitha. She hadn’t seen anything, so hadn’t heard anything, either. I said, “You have any money for gas?”

She tilted her head, her forehead wrinkled, mouth squinted up:
What kind of question is that?
She shook her head no.

“No sir,” I said, and turned back to him.

There on his arm, sneaking out from beneath the rolled-up sleeve, was the bottom edge of a homemade tattoo:
JUNIOR
.

Officer Tommy Thigpen, the second cruiser at the scene. Backup for Sergeant Doug Yandle.

The only one Unc would talk to.

They’d shaken hands. And he’d just run a truck off the road, pinned a man’s arm between a car and a truck. An officer of the sheriff’s department.

I faced forward, afraid he’d seen me see it, and the thought occurred to me, what if he wanted me to see it?

But he just pulled a roll of bills from his jeans pocket, peeled at it, dropped some in on me.

I looked down: five twenties.

He stuffed the roll back into his jeans, then turned one last time to me, knocked twice on the roof.

“Drive careful,” he said.

We reached the railroad tracks. There’d been next to nobody from the Amoco on out, though I’d breathed shallow the whole way here, afraid somebody’d pull out of the woods and ram into us or take a shot at us: anything seemed possible.

And as we’d gotten closer to the Rantowles Motel, just past Hollywood, I’d wondered for a few seconds if there’d still be cruisers parked out front, lights going, crime-scene banners up everywhere, everything still going on though it’d been six this morning Mrs. Constance Dupree Simons’s suicide was called in, and I thought of those two buzz-cut officers at the hospital just this morning, thought of them being the ones to tell me of her dying, and I wondered for a second whether SLED were in with Thigpen on this.

And Yandle? Was he with them too, every cop in the Lowcountry party to a murder and suicide, all of them part of the people who counted who could fix things, if only Unc would do what’d been asked?

Then here came the hotel: only a brick box of a building, six parking slots in front of six doors, six windows each with a room air conditioner
plugged into it. One lamppost sat to the far end of the little parking lot, everything gray in the wash of light it gave up.

There, making an
X
across the third door to the right, was the crime-scene banner.

Nothing else. There’d been no lights on anywhere, not even a single car.

The tracks banged beneath us, no closing gate this far from Charleston, as though people down here weren’t worth that kind of safeguard. Now we were on Hungry Neck, Tabitha’s time to take over. Though I’d been back here a million times, maybe more, the dark of it all seemed too dark now, too heavy, all of it full of something could happen: the moss off the live oak above us looked too much like that man’s arm out the window of the yellow pickup, or like a woman who’d hanged herself might look: gray and twisting in the low wind out there, the half-moon I could piece through the branches more dead and bright than any moon I’d ever seen before. Anything could happen now.

I slowed down, and I looked at her, shrugged:
What next?

She’d written me no notes the hour it’d taken to get here, only’d latched back on to my arm when I came back from paying for the gas. The black woman with the orange cowlick at the Amoco had only yawned as she slipped nine beat-up dollar bills into the metal drawer.

Now Tabitha let go, looked around for the pad and paper, reached down. I heard her paw through the broken glass on the floorboard. She came back up with the pen and pad again, wrote, and handed it to me.

2.2 miles to SR321, right. 3.5 miles to clear-cut on left
.

In the light from the dash I could see the printing was still shaky, watery. She was still scared.

I looked up at her. “You told me Unc was with you. You don’t go State Road 321 to get to your house.” I said it big, my mouth exaggerated for the dark.

She wrote.

That’s not where we’re going
.

“But you
told
me Unc was with you.” I felt my jaw go tight. “Just what the hell are you pulling on me?”

She held her hand out in front of her. She crossed her fingers, quick brought them to her chest: that same move. She tried a smile, but it came out as shaky as her printing.

“You got that right,” I said. “You’re a liar.”

I looked out the windshield, my jaw still clenched tight. Moss still hung like dead arms from the trees out there, the road still shrouded as heavy as it would ever be.

As dark and heavy as it’d always
been
, too.

This was Hungry Neck. My place as well as hers. That tract of land, the Hunt Club, and all those acres belonged to my family, all the way back to my great-grampa, who bought it off the lumber company back in the twenties for next to nothing, the land shaved clean. It wasn’t worth much now, either, but it was our family’s land, all we had.

Hungry Neck. Where I wanted to be, even if my mom loved me and might’ve been crying over me gone this very minute. Even if my uncle was tied up into the ugly something I didn’t know just as tight as anybody else. This was where I wanted to be.

I turned to Tabitha. “You just get me there, now. Do it. And don’t lead me on.” I paused. “Just tell me the truth.”

She let her shoulders fall some, slowly nodded, and wrote again.

Just don’t treat me like I’m some idiot. You haven’t yet, but people act like I’m retarded. I know a thing or two
.

Then she reached to the floorboard and pulled something flat from beneath her seat, big as a shoe-box lid.

KKF 428
, between the
F
and
4
what was supposed to be a Carolina wren parked on a jessamine branch, though it wasn’t a wren at all, just somebody’s idea of a bird: my license plate, off the back of the Luv. She’d taken it off before all this.

Nobody at the wreck back on Dorchester would be able to name us now.

I held the plate in both hands, looked up at her.

She put her index and middle fingers together, brought them to
her chest, then pointed them at me. She did it again, just as when she’d taught me how to call myself a liar.

But now the fingers were together, not crossed.

“I trust you,” I said.

She nodded hard, smiled, did the move again.

I put my fingers together, touched my chest, pointed at her.

She wrote:
He’s in Benjamin’s old shotgun shack. Nobody knows about that place except us. At the end of the clear-cut, pull off left. Park in the weeds. We walk
.

I drove off the road, the weeds white in my headlights, the truck bucking with the uneven ground as we plowed through. Then I cut off the lights and the engine, and the cab filled with a silence that rang in my ears.

I pushed open my door, stepped into the weeds, Tabitha doing the same. Here was that moon, banging down on the field and trees, on us and the whole world. I had the pocket flashlight I’d gotten from my dresser, felt it in my left pocket once we were out of the truck. But we didn’t need it. The moon was enough.

And I felt, too, the deadweight of the gun in my Levi’s jacket, just loose where I’d buttoned the jacket up.

I pulled it out, held it there in the moonlight.

Thick and shiny. Heavy, still warm from where it’d been inside my jacket.

Tabitha looked at me from across the hood. Past her was the end of the clear-cut, where the woods picked back up, a thick black wall, the wind moving the tops of pine and oak and birch.

She couldn’t hear the sound of that wind, a sound I’d fallen asleep to most every night I’d been at Hungry Neck, and I swallowed at how strange all of this was, unfolding in front of my eyes and in my ears: a deaf-and-dumb black girl I’d kissed full on the lips, a car chase, a pistol in my hand bright with the moon. I couldn’t help but think none of it all was happening, that just like in some bad TV show this was all a dream meant for me to wake from.

I looked at the gun, held it there in front of me like it would say
something. Suddenly it was cold, the dark and dead cold a gun takes on with being outdoors. I held it with both hands, my hands gray and small and just a kid’s, the cold off the gun feeling like it’d burn through my fingers any second now.

This was real. This was happening.

I heard the thin crack of weeds being walked through, saw Tabitha already on her way toward the trees.

I put the safety on, slipped it in the back of my pants, like an undercover cop on the same bad TV show.

We walked maybe a mile through the woods, Tabitha leading. There were times, too, when I thought maybe I’d gone deaf myself: she didn’t make a sound as we climbed over trunks, moved through dead leaves down from the hickory above us, wove between low spots where wetlands lay in black pools littered with more leaves.

The moonlight gave piecemeal shadows to everything, the palmetto and pine and dogwood moving, a thousand gray and black shapes changing shape, the only sure thing Tabitha ahead of me, and those white sneakers, her pale gray jacket. She didn’t look back, only moved, held back a wax-myrtle branch for a second before letting it go; it was up to me to make it to that branch before it slapped back, hit me in the face. And still she moved, around us all these shadows, above us the treetops moving, this big empty sound falling down on us, though Tabitha couldn’t know.

Then she stopped. I came around her, looked at her, into the woods.

Something sat not twenty yards ahead of us, no moonlight through it, no shadows inside it, no movement. Only a black shape, square, no bigger than the butcher shed over to the hunt club.

Benjamin’s shack.

We were here, Unc just that far away. But I didn’t move, couldn’t.

It had to do with what I’d know next about him, about my uncle, the one a fire had blinded, made him move from Mount Pleasant back here through no choice of his own nor mine neither.

I’d been the one to nurse him back as much as my mom’d been.
And I’d been here with him every second I could, sat with him through breakfast, lunch, and dinner, helped wash his dishes, burn his trash, fold his clothes.

I’d walked the woods of Hungry Neck with him for more hours than I could count.

And I’d been the one, finally, who’d stood with him beside a dead body at Hungry Neck, and to talk to the next one to end up dead. I was the one carrying a message to him from her:
Tell Leland I didn’t do it
.

And tell him I loved him
, she’d said.

I thought I knew him. But I didn’t.

Now I figured I’d know something about him I didn’t want to know.

Tabitha turned to me, nodded hard toward the shack. She wanted me to call for Unc.

I looked to the shed, tried hard to open my mouth. But nothing happened.

Then lights came on, flooded over us, the world lit with white so white I flinched, ducked to the ground, eyes squinted tight for it all.

“Huger?” Unc called, his voice flat, the word barely a question.

I was crouched on the ground, like I could hide from this light. Or my name.

Slowly I stood.

There on the shack porch—a door lying flat on cinder blocks—stood Unc, in his hand the walking stick, Braves cap and sunglasses on.

And next to him Miss Dinah Gaillard, Tabitha’s mom, a double-barrel shotgun pointed at us.

I said, “Sir?”

“You better be alone.”

Tabitha slowly stood, blinking and blinking.

“Just Tabitha with me, sir,” I said.

“You don’t be calling her by that demon name,” Miss Dinah said, and lowered the gun, let back both hammers. “It’s Dorcas. Dorcas only.”

She had on a powder-blue parka over a flowery purple dress down past her knees, duck boots on her feet. “That name you call her a demon name for that program
Bewitched
come on while back.” I glanced at Tabitha, her head down and shaking slow, eyes closed: she’d seen all these words before. “Them TV people take a godly girl’s name and give it to a witch. No Tabitha round here. None I know.”

Unc didn’t move.

She stepped down from the porch. The shack was only gray boards, one window, a rusted tin roof. A stovepipe came out at the peak, smoke snaking up out of it, white in the light everywhere.

The light. I turned, looked around, still squinting: floodlights twenty feet up in a couple trees behind us, in a few trees on either side of us, and at the top of two poles, one at each end of the shack. It might as well have been noon.

Here came Miss Dinah, shotgun crooked in her arm as natural as a shopping bag, heading for Tabitha.

“Certainly weren’t any surprise, you two loud as elephants coming in,” she said. “No surprise, too, when I find Missy Dorcas bed empty as the tomb Easter morning. Truck gone, too. No surprise whatsoever.”