The Hunt Club (26 page)

Here was Polaris, dancing.

I shivered, shivered hard and deep, shoulders to legs, through me some cold current, and I turned, walked toward where Unc knelt beside the log, his hand down inside, the sound of Mom’s crying up from beneath it.

Unc looked up at me.

I said, “We have to go,” and though I’d tried to hold it in, tried to make my words sound like they had some authority to them, they came out broken.

That was when she crawled out, quick breaths in and in, took Unc’s hand, struggled up, and stood.

She wiped at her eyes with the backs of her hands, still crying. “I’m sorry, Huger,” she managed, her words more broken than mine. She took a step toward me, and I could see her face crumpled up in the dark, her two arms out to me, her wanting to hold me.

I stepped away, turned from her, with my boot pushed through the weeds, toed at them. Then my foot hit it: the shotgun.

I leaned over, picked it up, cold in my hand, but nothing. There was no weight to it. Only that cold steel of the barrel.

I took in a deep breath, tried hard to settle myself and the tremble in my throat. I said, “This way,” and looked back up at the North Star.

And here was her hand taking up mine, the hand of a woman
who’d kept truth from me my entire life, the hand of a woman who called herself my mother. And I took it, through no choice of my own, only that there was a man with a gun on horseback, bent on killing us.

Next came Unc’s hand at the small of my back, and I felt him loop his fingers around my belt again. The man who’d kept the same truth from me my whole life.

I started off, running.

Mom wasn’t whimpering any longer, and Unc wasn’t pushing. It was me, leading, and running, holding tight her hand, Unc right there behind me and holding on, right there.

I didn’t ask him where we were going, because I knew it was best never to ask him or Mom anything ever again, seeing as how they would lie to me on it, too scared to tell the truth, however ugly it might be. The truth for them was me, I knew: this kid they’d made, this kid who’d thought it was his own life he was living.

And now I started to thinking on the fact maybe my father, that man I’d always thought of as my father, the one who’d left once Unc’d moved in to lick his wounds, hadn’t done any wrong. Maybe he’d known all along who this kid was in his house. Maybe he’d known all along his wife’d cheated on him, so that the day his brother came hobbling back to Hungry Neck to start on healing the wounds inflicted by a woman who’d finally dealt with the truth of her husband’s fucking his brother’s wife, maybe that was the day my father’d finally made the decision to go: here, in his own trailer, was his wife and her lover, his own brother.

Maybe this man I’d always thought of as my father deserved still to be thought of as my father, because he’d looked at the truth, taken it in, dealt with it.

I didn’t want her hand in mine, didn’t want it there as we splashed through a low spot, didn’t want her here beside me as we made it over another fallen tree, didn’t want her holding on through more wild blackberry, the dry sticks sharp and snagging our clothes, the shotgun in my hand still nothing. I didn’t want her here.

And I didn’t want Unc holding on from behind, because he was a liar, too, scared of the truth, scared of telling me what I was: his bastard son.

Unc. Even the name was a lie.

We came through the blackberry thicket, ducked beneath another low live-oak branch, and then the ground changed, rose up at a sharp incline before us, and I saw past and above it the tops of trees on the other side.

The railroad track bed.

We were on the other side of it from where we’d been yesterday, looking at Cleve Ravenel’s tire tracks, trying to figure where they’d gone once they disappeared.

He’d gone over the track bed, of course. Then down to this parcel of land on Hungry Neck, and now I knew where we were, my bearings turning and falling into line, and all of it hit me: Trestle Road was on the other side of the track bed, and we could make our way from there to Levee and to Lannear, and back to the trailer.

Two and a half miles.

“What is it?” Unc whispered, and I heard him behind me take a deep breath in through his nose, smelling.

“The track bed,” I said. Mom bent over, took in breaths, but kept her hand in mine.

I let it go.

“Now we know where we are,” Unc whispered, his hand still on my belt. He paused, breathed hard a couple times. “Let’s go on up.”

We made it to the top, a good thirty feet up, and here we were,
on the flat track, rails all gone. Just this strange piece of ground in the middle of the woods, no trees, no bushes. Only gravel, stretching away to either side of us.

To the left the track bed led off into woods, the bed a straight line shrouded by trees on either side and finally disappearing in the black.

I looked to the right. There a few yards away stood Mom, breathing hard, hands to her knees again. She didn’t look up at me, only breathed.

And not fifty yards past her was where the track bed ended at the bluff on the bank of the Ashepoo, the view from here like a window away from my life.

The bluff, where I’d ridden my bike when I was little, back when I’d believed myself to be somebody else. Somebody I wasn’t, and’d never been. The Ashepoo, where I’d stop, look both ways up and down the river bending away from me on both sides, the trees right up to this side of the river like giant men on horseback watching over all the marsh.

The bluff, where just yesterday Unc and I’d been, me somebody else.

Dead-man talk
, Thigpen’d called it, and I knew that was me, the dead man. Dead to who I thought I’d been, and dead to who I knew I was: Unc’s son, all along.

“Huger!” Unc whispered hard, and pulled at me, that hand on my belt. “Run!”

I heard next the sound Unc’d already heard, the distant crash through brush back to my left, where now Thigpen and the horse rose up from the woods maybe a hundred yards away. Here they were, the dark figure of that horse mounting the incline, on it the slumped figure of Thigpen, still with an arm out, that gun pointed toward us, and they were coming at us.

Run where? We were here, and I was dead already. I was dead.

So I turned to him, full on. I held up the shotgun, still nothing in my hands save for the cold of it, and I fired.

The sound and flash were nothing, too, nor was the slam against
my shoulder, the kick once fired. It was a pump-action .410, the kick at any other time in my life enough to jar my spine. But nothing happened. Only blast, light, kick, all in this instant.

Mom screamed, and Unc pulled hard at my belt, because still here came Thigpen, and I’d missed altogether.

I pumped it, felt the action only go halfway down, then stop. The gun jammed, the cartridge caught on its way out of the chamber.

Thigpen laughed. “Got the clutch way open,” he called out. “For targets close in!”

Unc pulled harder on my belt again, and now he was leading, me nearly stumbling for the angle he held me at, and now here was Mom running, too, running and running, and I was running, too, and only now did I figure it: we were running toward the bluff, and I dropped the shotgun, heard the clatter of it on the gravel, me through with it.

And now Mom was falling behind, and I saw her face in the moonlight out here, heard a cry on her heavy breaths, and I put my hand out to her.

Thigpen fired, a spit of gravel splashing up beside me.

I turned from Unc pulling harder at me, harder, trying to move forward. I slowed down, held out my hand, and Mom’s hand was up, and she was running, and I could hear in this dark her crying.

There they were, horse and rider at full gallop, Thigpen low, arm out, a solid black shape hurtling toward us, seventy-five yards now.

“Mom!”
I screamed, and held out my hand.

He fired again, another spray of gravel, this time beside Mom, the rocks flying up and hitting me and Mom.

She let out a startled yelp, stumbled, her arms going wild to keep her balance, but she didn’t fall, reached that hand out again.

Thigpen was fifty yards behind, the gun still up.

Then Mom’s hand was in mine, and I grabbed hold hard, pulled at her, Unc holding hard to me, pulling.

Here was the bluff, and the marsh.

We were running full blown now, faster than we’d run any time this night, Unc pushing hard from behind, Mom holding tight my
hand. But here was the edge, and the answer to the question I’d wondered a moment ago—
Run where?
—came to me.

The river. This was where Unc’d wanted us to go all along. If you went east off Polaris from anywhere you stood on Hungry Neck, I finally saw, you came to the Ashepoo.

I stopped as best I could, Unc still pushing from behind, Mom still holding tight, so that when we hit the edge of the bluff it was all I could do to keep us all from falling in.

Thigpen fired again, another bullet past us and above, and I looked back at him: thirty yards now.

“Jump,” Unc said.

I looked at him. He was facing the river, and I turned, looked at what he couldn’t see.

The Ashepoo at high tide, black water thirty feet or so below us and fifty feet wide, on the other side of it the marsh all the way to Edisto, in a straight line across it the black tips of those empty pylons more than ever like the spine of some huge dead animal. And spread across it all those tiny nameless islands.

Above it all these stars, the moon.

“Jump!” Unc shouted, and now he pushed at me, and in the last second I laced the fingers of my hand in Mom’s, held it tight, and jumped, because there was nothing else to do, and no one else to die with.

Huger Dillard
, I thought on our way down toward that black water, and still the words were new, and meant nothing.

It was a cold I couldn’t prepare for, a cold so black and cold it seemed to split me open, the wind knocked out of me, and I let go Mom’s hand to get to the air above me, everything black and cold.

I kicked my legs, the water thick with the cold, my eyes open to black and stinging, and I reached up, hoped my hand would break the surface, but it didn’t, and for an instant I thought maybe I’d twisted upside down somehow, that I was reaching down and away from what I needed.

But then an arm had hold around me, beneath my own arm, and I was being pulled up, and still I was kicking.

Here was air, and I pulled it in, pulled at it like I could swallow down all the air there ever was, and I knew it was Unc’s arm around me, knew that touch even here in this cold and black.

“Huger,” he whispered, “Huger, stay still, and just float.”

I took in more breaths, more breaths, and finally opened my eyes, saw the bluff, the dark shape up there of a man on horseback, stopped, slumped forward, an arm out toward us.

We were moving, the tide on its way out, him growing smaller, and then he fired, a sharp shard of light out at us.

Where was Mom?

I turned, Unc’s arm still around me, and looked for her, saw a shape on the water only a few feet downriver, a head just floating, beside us on the right the Hungry Neck side of the Ashepoo, those trees right up to the bank, to the left the wall of grasses where the marsh began.

I tried to make my breaths go small, tried to keep from shivering into a ball and sinking. Unc still had his hand beneath my arm, and I could feel his legs treading water, the small whip of cold water around my legs as his moved and moved beside me, and then I started treading, started kicking.

Thigpen fired again, our backs to him so I couldn’t see the flash off the barrel, but I heard in the instant he fired the swallowed
snap
the bullet made into the water between Mom and us, and Mom yelped, kicked hard her legs, her arms out of the water, I could see, and she was whimpering again, splashing and kicking, and he fired again.

Then Unc let go of me, slapped the water hard with his hand, shouted out, “Right here! Over here!” and kicked his legs at the surface, slapped again.

He was turned to the bluff and was kicking back toward Thigpen, away from me and away from Mom.

He wanted to draw Thigpen’s fire.

He wanted to save us.

I saw that arm up off Thigpen, saw Unc splashing, saw that piece of moon above them both, saw it all moving away from me, the tide
working to carry me out and away from this: the place and time—the Ashepoo, tide turning—Unc had in mind since he’d had me turn him to Polaris, put him in the line of sight of that star, in him the knowledge of tides and time and placement of constellations in the sky. He knew this was where we’d end up, knew the tide would carry us away. He knew.

Thigpen had his gun up, Unc slapped the water.

And then because I was no one, because my name carried on it no meaning, me no one I knew, I shouted, too. “Hey, Thigpen!” I shouted. “Hey, Thigpen!” I slapped at the water.

Thigpen’s silhouette moved, that arm jumping up, lining up with me now, me floating away from Unc, downriver.

Here came light skittering across the water from behind me, the quick and perfect sweep of it there on the water, in that sweep the surface of the river and the Hungry Neck bank of the Ashepoo, its branches casting twisted shadows that moved with the light moving, then came the back of Unc’s head lit up, his arm moving, the light illuminating for an instant bits of water like broken white glass falling from his arm as he raised it and lowered it again, splashing, the light nothing to him, invisible as the rest of his world, and now this piece of light slipped past him and up to the bluff, and to Thigpen to light him up, give detail where none had been the entire night so far: the bright figure of a man in blue jeans and an army fatigue jacket sitting on a gray horse, one arm limp, the spot where he’d been hit by Patrick and where I’d punched him dark with blood, his other arm up, the gun pointed now at the light, ready to fire.