The Hunt Club (17 page)

I said, “Unc. He’s not breathing.”

“Seems a personal problem to me,” Unc said.

“Unc,” I said. “This won’t get Mom here.”

Unc held him there, held him. Then, finally, he eased off, but only
a little, and Yandle drew in shallow breaths. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” he whispered.

“I’m talking about Eugenie,” Unc said, his voice all normal now, calm.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

Unc put the stick into his throat again, leaned again into it, maybe even a little harder. “Eugenie Dillard,” he hissed again. “Eugenie.”

And now Delbert Yandle was looking at me, and here came that red again. Only this time there wasn’t even any sound coming out of him, not even that sound past a gasp. Nothing, and the color was going to purple now, and then a kind of blue started in.

I don’t know, I don’t know
, he mouthed again and again.

“Unc,” I said, touched his shoulder.

Unc held him that way a second more, then let him go altogether, stood up, all in a second. He took the tip of the stick, put it straight to Yandle’s jaw, jammed it in the flesh beneath it.

Yandle only lay there, arms flat on the floor, his chest heaving in and out. He whispered, “All’s I want to do is buy your fucking property, Leland. I offered you a good deal more than it’s worth, and that offer still stands.” He grabbed another breath. “Even if you come in here and try to kill me over my own dickhead of a son. And I know a dozen Thigpens.”

“Where’d you get money?” I said, and Unc jerked a little toward me, surprised at my voice. But here was the man wanted to buy Hungry Neck, and Unc had him by the throat. How many more chances would I have?

“Where’d you get all this money,” I went on, “when all you sell is trailers?”

Delbert Yandle glanced at me, couldn’t move his head for the tip of the stick at his jaw.

He swallowed, or tried to. “Investors,” he said, and swallowed again. “Want to make it a preserve. Want to make it a wildlife refuge and a—”

Unc jammed the tip a little deeper.

“Want to make it another Hilton Head,” Yandle whispered. “Like what they’re doing to Daufuskee. Golf courses, condominiums.”

Unc looked at me over his shoulder. “Does anybody ever have a
new
idea about what to do with land, except pave it over?” He turned back to Yandle. “And who might these investors be?”

“I don’t know,” he whispered. “I get faxes from Nashville, Atlanta, Miami, Charlotte.” He pulled in a breath again, whispered again, “I don’t know,” then, “Ain’t you ever seen a patsy before?”

Unc leaned the tip a little harder into him. “One more time. Does your son have Eugenie, and where are they?”

“I disowned him three years ago,” he choked out.

Unc froze, eased off the stick.

I said, “Disowned him?”

Unc’d given up most all pressure on the man’s throat, lost on the news, and slowly Yandle reached up, took hold of the tip, pushed it away. He looked at me, then Unc. “Like I said, he’s a dipshit. Haven’t talked to him in five years. Still owes me over twenty-two thousand dollars, spent on what I have no clue.” He swallowed. “Look at his career decision. You yourself can testify what a losing proposition law enforcement is. And of the dozen or so Thigpens I know, not a one of them will speak to me or to my son. But if the one you’re after is any acquaintance of Doug’s, he’s got to be a dickhead too.”

He sat all the way up now, hands in his lap, his chest still going. “This is going to be the hardest six percent I ever come by,” he said, his eyes right on Unc. “But it’s coming, Leland Dillard. And when it comes, I’m going to be the signing agent, whether you give a damn or not.”

Unc turned to him, broken out of whatever thought it was going on in him with the news Yandle junior’d been disowned.

Unc whispered, “Over my dead body.”

Yandle chuckled, touched at his throat. The pink button-down collar’d lost a button, the tie all twisted and pulled. A suspender’d popped off his pants, too, for Unc on top of him.

He chuckled again, said, “You just never know, now, do you?”

The door burst open then, and in came the woman. “Oh,” she chirped again, and “Oh, oh, oh.” She knelt to Yandle, touched at his collar, his shoulder, his tie, then looked up at Unc, said, “Sue the bastard, Del. Just sue this cracker white-trash cripple. Assault and battery, Del. Sue him.”

Unc nodded at her. “Ma’am,” he said, and headed for the door.

But there was something about the two of them, there on the floor, and in the way she’d talked to Unc that made me want to finish this. It was a temptation, I knew, but I gave in to it.

I looked at them, shook my head. “Won’t look good in the papers,” I said. “You having Unc arrested.
TRAILER SALESMAN WITH HELMET HAIR BEAT UP BY BLIND MAN
.” I shrugged. “It just won’t look good.”

Yandle chuckled again. “You ain’t as stupid as everybody says you are,” he said, and rubbed at his throat again.

Then Unc had hold of my sleeve, pulled me through the doorway, and we were gone.

“Disowned the boy,” Unc said. He took a sip off his drink, set it between his feet on the floorboard, then found the burger where he’d set it on the dash, took a bite. “I wonder if he even has anything to do with this.”

We were on 64 headed out of town, had stopped at a Hardee’s, where a black girl took our order: a Frisco Burger, a small fries, and two Mr. Pibbs.

I wasn’t eating, though Unc’d told me I needed to. My stomach was gone, Mom somewhere. Somewhere. And I wondered what that Hardee’s girl would think of the story I could tell her: murder, kidnapping, suicide.

And now Unc was thinking maybe Yandle wasn’t a part of the story we couldn’t tell anybody.

I said, “But Unc, he was there at the hospital.” I took a sip of my Mr. Pibb, set it in the cup holder hanging from the window well. “Pointed at me like he was shooting me.”

“So he’s an idiot. So what? Thinks he’s Chuck Connors as the Rifleman.” He took a few fries from the box wedged between his legs.
“Likes to hang out with the big dogs, hoping someday they’ll throw him a bone. Maybe let him wear one of their windbreakers.”

He chewed, said, “These need salt,” and slapped open the glove box. He reached in, moved around napkins, a map, an old history paper I’d gotten an F on and didn’t want to show to Mom.

Mom.

I looked at my watch: three-thirty.

“Gotcha,” Unc said, and pulled out one of those salt packets they give you when you ask for them. He held it between his thumb and second finger, carefully broke it open by bending the top down with his first finger, then tipped it over, shook it out.

But he missed the fries, instead salted the seat above the box.

The packet empty, he dropped it in the empty Hardee’s bag on the floorboard, then took up another couple of fries.

“Much better,” he said. “On to Beverly Hills South: Mount Pleasant.”

I shook my head. Even Unc missed the mark now and again. And, I knew, he was missing it with Yandle.

Walterboro to Mount Pleasant is a little over sixty miles one end to the other, and once we were through Parker’s Ferry and Rantowles and Red Top, houses and shops and car dealerships picking up and picking up, we were there, right there: stopped at a light beside the Amoco station where a black woman in a red smock with an orange wave in her hair hadn’t seen a thing.

Then we were at Citadel Mall, tooling right back up the Mark Clark in the opposite direction I’d come only last night, and I drove on up the ramp and onto the freeway north like it was my own, because in a way it was. I’d survived this, lived to tell the tale.

But it wasn’t over yet. No way.

And then, maybe a mile farther on, I slowed down, looked across the median for some sign of where that yellow Ford pickup’d been rolled by Thigpen in his scab-roofed Plymouth. Just last night.

But there was nothing. Nothing at all, no evidence of those two rednecked peasants.

Two of them. Pigboy and Fatback?

Unc said, “What is it?”

“This is where Thigpen rolled them off. Those two bubbas.”

“Maybe that’s Fatback and Pigboy.”

I turned to him, said, “There’s hope for you yet.”

He gave a small smile, nodded.

Then we crossed over I-26, and here we were, my neighborhood, just trees from up here, a glimpse now and again of asphalt shingles, a lawn, a car on blocks, all of it forty feet below and looking as simple and homey as can be.

But down there was Marie Street, and an empty house that smelled like dog shit when the wind blew right.

Marie Street, and my house. Mine and my mom’s, and now, for the first time I could ever remember, I thought of it for a second as my home.

Empty. Mom nowhere I knew. Me on my way somewhere else.

I didn’t even slow down. There were things to do.

We came down off the Mark Clark, there where it ended onto Old Georgetown Highway, and even me, a fifteen-year-old kid who had reason to be over here to Mount Pleasant maybe once or twice a year, remembered when Old Georgetown was a two-lane nothing, trees heavy down around it, dogs sitting on the shoulder and scratching.

Now.

Now there was a Super Lowe’s hardware warehouse, a Wal-Mart with a McDonald’s inside, a Piggly Wiggly the size of our high school, not to mention the Harris Teeter and Food Lion and Publix just as big. Art galleries, golf courses, a tenplex movie theater, twenty or thirty restaurants.

And Old Georgetown: five lanes, all those oaks taken down for it.

We turned off Old Georgetown at the first light and onto Bowman next to the big K mart, and here we were, where Unc’d led me with his directions: Imaging Network Services.

It was a low brick building, had a sign out front,
IMAGING NETWORK SERVICES
and the logo of a man lying on his back inside a circle, beneath that
DR. JOE CRAY, M.D
.

He hadn’t told me who we were going to see, and I hadn’t asked, only followed where he told me to go. But I knew who this guy was as soon as I saw his name: the fat radiologist with the unlit black cigar he was chewing on all the time. I knew his name because of how Unc picked on him and that cigar every deer-hunt Saturday morning, after breakfast was over, Miss Dinah and Tabitha cleaning up the paper plates and what have you, preparing already for fried-chicken lunch. That was when the men’d gather around the fire in a circle, then I’d usher Unc into the circle, and he’d ask for a count-off. Each time he came to Dr. Cray he’d say, “Now, don’t get any big ideas on lighting up that cigar out on the stand, you hear, Brother Cray?” and he’d answer, “Yes, Pappy,” or some such as this.

He was a good one, far as any of them went, in that if he talked to me he made eye contact, smiled. Most all the others I was lucky if I got a grunt out of when I helped haul in the deer they got.

I’d always wondered, too, if that cigar, even if he never lit it, ever gave off enough smell to scare a deer. But then he’d shot that fourteen-pointer New Year’s Day of this year. End of that concern.

And then he’d quit the club.

“This one know we’re coming in?” I asked. “Because it seems like you caught Mr. Yandle back there a little off guard.” I cut the engine. “And that was a nice job, too, of getting him to volunteer what he didn’t think he was volunteering. A stick to the throat. Who would suspect a thing?”

“Called Dr. Cray this morning,” Unc said, and climbed out. “When I was at Miss Dinah’s. While you were off sleeping and dreaming on a sweet little black girl.”

He knew.

How? What had Tabitha told him?

I climbed out, slammed shut my door. “There a problem with that?”

“Not if you don’t get a skillet to the head by her momma. And don’t think for a minute she won’t try.” He reached in, got the stick. “No momma wants her daughter to marry beneath her. So get to studying for that SAT, Huger.” He nodded, smiled.

“Married!” I said, too loud. “All I did was kiss her!”

“You did?” he said. He stood across the hood from me, looking at me. “I didn’t know that.”

“But you said—”

“I floated an idea at you. Run it up the flagpole, see if someone salutes. Damned if you didn’t salute. In full dress uniform, no less.” He paused, turned for the building. “Thanks for volunteering.”

I watched him start up the steps of the place, tap out the ground with the stick. The steps were a couple feet deep, only rose the width of a brick on each one. He was having trouble, his steps small, a little fearful.

I wanted to make him do it himself, but I quick walked up to him, took his arm.

“Don’t be expecting any tip,” he said, and we started up.

“Brother Cray?” Unc hollered out. He’d pulled open the frosted glass panel, the waiting room empty, nobody in the reception area.

“Back here, you old fart,” came Cray’s answer.

I brought Unc into the office space back there, the walls on either side lined with color-coded files. At the end of the hall was a door standing open, the room it led into dark.

“Keep going,” he called, and I could hear he was chomping down on a cigar, his words squeezed down tight. “Geez, you’d think you were blind or something,” he said, and Unc laughed.