The Hunt Club (8 page)

But she went right on.

That was our first night away from Hungry Neck Hunt Club. Our first night living in North Charleston. Only a year after Unc’d moved into the trailer, nine months after Dad’d left us.

Our new life.

Now I had friends inside some of these houses, people a lot like me, which meant they didn’t really give a shit about everything you were supposed to give a shit about in high school. We weren’t in band or on any of the teams. We didn’t belong to any clubs, didn’t all sit together at lunch and smoke or toke out to the back fence.

Truth was we didn’t even like each other. More like a group that
didn’t belong to any group, even its own group. And if I wasn’t with them or out to Hungry Neck, I was in my room, reading.

Because I had a plan. I wanted to go to college. Duke, maybe. And I read. I read my way through the Harvard Classics, for one thing, Mom subscribing to that book club from about the time we got out here, though some of that stuff was so dull and dry getting through it was like trying to breathe sand. That’s what I thought of Milton, for one, Spenser for another. Shakespeare was fine, as was Chaucer. I’d read everything C. S. Lewis put out, everything by this guy Mircea Eliade, too. And there was
Moby-Dick
, which every clod in my English class threw up over but me, and which I even laughed at in places, it was so funny, like when Ahab is going over to the other ship for a little meeting, and he’s standing up in the rowboat, and everybody rowing is wishing the hell he’d just sit down so that they didn’t have to worry so much about timing their strokes with the waves so he wouldn’t fall down and embarrass himself.

At least
I
thought that was funny.

Sometimes we all hung out together out where the railroad tracks turned toward the paper mill on the other side of Storie Street, there under the Mark Clark Expressway. Just us: Matt, Jason, Rafael, Tyrone, Jessup. And the girls: Trina, Roberta, Polly, LaKeisha, Deevonne. We’d sit and pass around five or six bottles of Colt 45 somebody’d gotten, and talk about what shits everybody was. Even ourselves.

Blacks and whites. Good grades and bad grades. Stupid and smart. None of us had nipple rings or tattooed chains on our ankles. None of us was failing.

Just us. Just nothing. All the more reason to see Hungry Neck as my home, and not here. North Charleston was only where I slept, kept most of my clothes.

But as we turned left on Sumner and passed the C&S Grocerette and McTV Repair, then turned right onto our street, Marie, I was hoping I’d see somebody. Anybody.

There was nobody, everyone still in bed and asleep this Sunday morning, all of them oblivious to what I knew.

We moved along Marie, and I could see the Mark Clark Expressway down where the street dead-ended, high up on huge concrete pilings. Then we were home: pale yellow, brown trim, the awning brown too. The yard neat and trimmed—I mowed it every Wednesday—the oil stains the Luv left on the driveway.

We pulled in, the chain-link fence gate open, ready for us, and back to the garage. Mom put the car in park, and I started to open my door, go pull up the garage door.

But she put a hand to my arm, like she used to do when I was little and she slammed on the brakes for traffic or whatever. Protecting me.

“No,” she said, and I looked at her. “You have to take it easy.”

Her lips were together, her eyebrows knotted in the smallest way. She had on the makeup, the nice clothes, her hair done. Nothing any different from when she’d walked into the hospital room this morning.

But everything different.

We sat that way a few seconds, her hand on my arm, us looking at each other.

Then I climbed out, opened the door.

The kitchen table was set for one: an empty plate and juice glass, a knife and fork and spoon. On the stove was a half-empty bag of grits, a pan, and the skillet.

I sat down, watched Mom move around without looking at me. She hooked her purse over the back of her chair at the table, pushed the sleeves up on her blouse, pulled from inside the pantry door her yellow plaid apron. Then she went to the fridge, pulled out bacon and two eggs.

“How do you want your eggs?” she said. She didn’t look at me, only set the eggs and bacon on the counter, took the pan to the sink and filled it.

She finished with the water, headed for the stove.

“Well?” she said, started peeling off bacon into the skillet.

“Stop it,” I said.

She paused a second, held a strip over the others. Then she went right on, dropped a last piece in, tore a paper towel from the roll underneath the cupboard, wiped her hands.

“I said stop it.” I took a step toward her, put my hand to her shoulder like Unc did to me all the time.

But this was my mom. I’d never touched her that way before, in comfort.

She gave way, her shoulders heaving, and I turned her to me, put my arms around my mom, felt her face on my own shoulder. Slowly she put her arms around me, too, and for a second that first night here came back to me, us finally finding the source of that smell we’ve grown used to over all these years: the paper mill.

Don’t cry about it
, I’d said then. But I’d been wrong. Crying, I saw only now, was about the best thing anybody could have done.

“You cry,” I whispered. “You go ahead and cry.”

Slowly she nodded, her face still on my shoulder, and she cried, hard and long, the two of us alone in the kitchen.

I lay there in bed, thought I heard the tapping in a dream, but then heard it for real, right there at the window:
tap tap tap. Tap tap tap
.

I sat up, felt the cool of the room through my T-shirt; Mom turned the heat down at night to save money, and for a second there was in my head the idea of Mrs. Constance Dupree Simons floating into this room here, tonight, and I thought again of the paperweight, remembered it was in the pocket of my jeans, on the floor in front of my dresser.

Then,
tap tap tap
.

Matt or Tyrone or Jessup, I thought. Somebody’d seen something on the news, figured out maybe it was my uncle’s place all this was going on at and was over here to bug me about it. And my bed was next to the window, after all, for exactly this reason: easy out and easy back in whenever we felt like going over to the tracks.

I pulled back the curtains, gray in the dark.

It was a black person, just the head and shoulders at the sill, and for a second I thought, Tyrone. Then I saw the long hair down to
the shoulders, a white hairband holding it all back, and I thought, LaKeisha, or Deevonne.

The only light out there was the same old dull gray cloud up above the blinking smokestack of the paper mill, and I saw it wasn’t LaKeisha or Deevonne.

It was Dorcas. Miss Dinah Gaillard’s daughter, Benjamin’s sister, looking in at me.

I’d seen her last just yesterday morning, when she and her momma’d cooked up breakfast at the hunt club. I’d known her all my life, this black girl who couldn’t talk or hear, but I’d only known her out to Hungry Neck.

Now here she was in North Charleston and looking in my window, and it made me inch back and away.

She looked behind her, like maybe there was somebody watching her, then lifted a hand up, and I could see something in it, white and square.

She pressed it to the glass: a piece of paper, writing on it, but it was too dark to read.

She moved the paper up and down, quick:
Read this
.

I finally stood from the bed, held the quilt around me like a cape for the cold and the fact, too, I was just in my underwear, and I went to the dresser, pulled on my jeans, and found in the top drawer the pocket flashlight I kept in there. I looked at the alarm clock on the dresser, saw by the pale hands it was a little after one.

I went to the window, cupped my hand over the flashlight, held it just below the piece of paper against the glass, and clicked it on.

Leland is with us
, it read.
He isn’t aware of my being here to get you, but I can tell he needs your help, whether he likes it or not. But we need to go, now
.

It was printed, the letters perfect, and I clicked off the light, let my eyes adjust for a few seconds. The paper was gone now, only Dorcas there, looking at me.

I nodded, the decision made just like that.

She took a step away from the window, then crouched, made her way across the backyard to the trees at the fence.

This was what I’d been waiting for.

But Mom was in the next room, asleep.

What would happen when she got up tomorrow morning, found my bed empty? She’d know I was out looking for Unc, and she’d kill me whether I found him or not, but first she’d break down worse than this morning. She’d break, then get royally pissed at me, maybe burn my clothes out in the yard for all I knew, and then there’d be even more hell whenever I came back.

But it was Unc I was after.

I went to the closet, dug in my bookbag for some notebook paper, tore out a sheet quiet as I could, then found a pencil at the bottom of the bag.

School tomorrow. Monday, the day after Thanksgiving vacation. The least of my worries.

I went to the dresser, wrote as best I could in the dark,
I love you, Mom. But I’m going to Unc and help him out. Don’t worry
. I stopped, wondered what else I could put. That I knew where he was? What?

But I only wrote,
I love you, Mom
again.

I threw the quilt back on the bed, tried to straighten it out, and set the paper on the pillow. I pulled out a flannel shirt from the closet, and my Levi’s jacket, slipped on a pair of wool socks and my duck boots, then I was out the window. I dropped to the ground and pulled the window closed.

It was colder than I’d thought it would be, my breath an empty pale cloud, and I squatted, afraid even that cloud of breath might give me away.

And I smelled it: the paper mill. A smell, it only occurred to me then, a lot like the smell of that body once we’d come back to it, flies on it, the sun starting to work it over.

I heard a finger snap at the back fence, and I ran.

She was crouched behind the row of redtips back there, and had on a jacket, white tennis shoes, and jeans. She lifted a finger to her lips, made the
shh
sign.

My hands were already freezing, and I rubbed them together, made to blow in them, but then she was up and over the five-foot
chain-link fence that separated our yard from the house behind us. She hadn’t made a sound.

I was just to follow her. Just shut up and follow.

So I climbed the fence and fell flat on my ass on the other side, gave out a grunt I thought you could hear for a mile around, and then I was up and running through the Pinckneys’ backyard, headed for the sidewalk at the foot of their drive where Dorcas now stood, a hand on her hip and waiting.

I made it to the sidewalk, and Dorcas turned, started away, me expected just to keep up.

We were headed now down Pennsylvania Drive, toward where it dead-ended at Storie, past that the tracks beneath the Mark Clark. These were houses just like ours, the street just the same.

We walked, walked like it was all we’d ever done: taken a stroll at one in the morning, and then all the questions started coming to me: How did she know where I lived, if Unc didn’t send her? How could she know which window was mine? How did she get here, and where were we going?

Then, up at the corner, I saw light on the pavement and against the green weeds across Storie: a car coming.

Dorcas looped her arm in mine, pulled me close to her. She was a little shorter than me, leaned her head against my shoulder, kept walking.

The car started around the corner toward us, and Dorcas quick turned me so my back was to the headlights, put her arms around me, brought her face right up next to mine.

Then she kissed me, full on.

The car went by us before I could even get my arms around her for my part of this disguise. They didn’t even slow down.

Her lips were warm, her arms tight around me warm, too, though I knew I couldn’t really feel anything through my jacket.

Dorcas, kissing me.

Soon as the car passed, her arms were down, and now she was running up the street.

We crossed Storie into the weeds, then came the crunch of our
feet on the gravel beds that lined the track, the only other sound the whine of tires from the Mark Clark forty feet above us. I had a hard time keeping up with her, now already into the trees on the other side of the overpass, headed off toward the neighborhood over there, Lancaster Park.

All this was going on in the dark, and I was still feeling that kiss, and feeling the pinch of this cold air in my lungs, me running in the middle of the night through woods, hoping this would all end up with Unc.

I saw her jump a few yards ahead of me, and I wondered what that was all about in the same second I fell into the ditch, maybe three feet deep.

I landed on my knees, felt cold and wet weeds right in my face and beneath my hands. I struggled up, climbed out of the ditch, the front of my pants soaked through.

I ran, crashed through and crashed through weeds, until I was out in Lancaster Park, standing on a street no different from Storie, no different from any of the houses that trailed along the freeway in this part of North Charleston.