The Hunt Club (22 page)

Where was Thigpen?

And marijuana. Stupid
shit
was all this was over. But crated up in popcorn and shipped on a container? The people Yandle knew were nothing more than the lost clods who lived out here in the woods. That black-and-white couple with the leg irons’d probably been his customers, the leg irons some sort of bartering deal. What were they shipping it
away
for? In popcorn?

And why would Yandle think he’d be in business for life, if the plan was to sell Hungry Neck and make it another Hilton Head?

I didn’t get it, didn’t get any of this: what looked like the tearing down of some kind of pot greenhouse out here in the middle of nowhere, right here on Hungry Neck; Cleve Ravenel taken out by his own man; Mom taken hostage because she’d seen something she ought not to have; and no mention of selling Hungry Neck at all.

I looked to Unc, Mom still pressed to my shoulder, Yandle, Patrick, and Reynold still at it. I whispered, “Unc?”

“Be quiet,” he whispered. His head was bowed now, forehead on his knees.

“But Unc,” I whispered, “what about selling off Hungry Neck?”

“Boy,” he whispered, and on that single word I knew he meant for me just to shut the hell up, that that was the most important thing I might could do at this particular moment.

But I went ahead, asked him what I asked, because I was scared, scared at not knowing a damned thing. I didn’t know. I didn’t know
anything
, and I knew Unc did, by the way he’d said nothing.

I whispered, “Where is Thigpen?”

Unc lifted his head toward me, and I saw only half his face now, him looking at me, the one half moving and moving in the firelight, the other dark, lost, and I wondered if finally he was going to answer me, even if he’d told me to shut up.

But there was something different about him looking at me, I saw, in the tilt of his head, the line of his chin. He wasn’t looking at me, but past me, above my shoulder, and I turned, even with Mom still pressed into my shoulder.

There sat Thigpen on a pale horse, hands on the pommel of the saddle.

“Right here,” he said, smiling down at me.

He had on a heavy coat, jeans, that straw cowboy hat with the sides folded up, the front end bent down. He had a holster and belt at his waist.

“Leland,” he said, and nodded.

I glanced to Unc, saw him nod back. We’d none of us heard him coming up for the noise of the fighting. Only Unc’d heard. Only Unc.

It was a strange moment, his being here, a moment jammed with too much feeling on my part: relief, because this was the man who’d shoved that truck off the road; and there was fear, too, his presence inside all this stuff happening in front of us, none of it I could figure out; and there was in me, too, the feeling this was logical, that all would be revealed to me in a moment, now that the last person in this parade was here. All that just in his smile down at me from up on that pale horse.

Yandle, Patrick, and Reynold stopped hollering, froze.

Mom stiffened up, scooted around to see who was behind her.

“What the fuck you doing with my horse?” Reynold said, and I
saw him out of the corner of my eye take a step away from Patrick and Yandle and toward Thigpen. “What the fuck you doing with my Jeb Stuart?”

Yandle said, “Glad you finally showed up, Tommy,” and put his free hand to Patrick’s chest, pushed him off, and drew his gun, held it on him. His arm was stiff in front of him, just like on TV and in the movies, and he glanced from Thigpen to Patrick, pointed the gun at Reynold, at Patrick, then Reynold. Firelight played off the barrel. “Caught these sons of bitches trying to dismantle a greenhouse back in here. Leland Dillard here and his nephew and the little lady here was in on it, too, and best I can figure they’ve committed at least a half dozen felonies.” His words still had that slur on them, but now his voice was bright, edged up and too quick.

Neither Patrick nor Reynold even looked at him, their eyes on Thigpen.

“Wasn’t sure how I was going to get backup in on this one,” Yandle went on, “but now you showed up, we can go ahead and—”

“Shut up, Doug,” Thigpen said. He was looking at Reynold, still a step closer to him than Yandle and Patrick.

Yandle’s gun moved down a bit. He looked at Thigpen. “But Tommy, we got us a 326 and a 372 on our—”

“So, this your horse?” Thigpen said to Reynold. He leaned a little forward, sat back again, the saddle creaking with it all.

“Damn fucking straight it is,” Reynold said, and took another step. “Now get the fuck off him right now, before I knock shit out of you, you cocksucking—”

“This the one you take on your drives over to Leland’s deer hunts?” Thigpen cut in. He was smiling.

“Who you think you are, you son of a bitch?” Reynold said. “You think ’cause you wear a fucking badge you can go on ahead and steal somebody’s horse?” He started around the fire then, his bald head glittering with sweat, his hands in fists.

Pigboy and Fatback. Yandle and Thigpen, showing up at the same time to the club, the two of them back there with us and looking at the body. They were together.

But, no.

No, they weren’t.

It was there, in front of me the whole time:
set up and operating till kingdom come
.

And Thigpen’s words:
The only way through this all is for him to do what he’s been asked to do. You tell him things’ll be fixed. All’s he got to do is what’s been asked
.

Two different stories.

And only now did I understand why Unc just wanted me to shut up: if I opened my mouth, Yandle might figure out something he didn’t yet know, namely, that there were other things at stake: the fact Constance Dupree Simons hadn’t murdered her husband, that somebody named Pigboy and Fatback had been ordered to void Middleton, that all of Hungry Neck itself was about to be sold off.

Cleve Ravenel, it occurred to me, was just feeding off both sides of the fence.

Greedy.

If it hadn’t been for your doctor’s wife coming along and blowing away her hubby’s head
, Yandle said. He didn’t know Constance didn’t do it.

Reynold stepped past Mom and me, his smell as thick and nasty as the floor of his horse trailer, and moved toward Thigpen, and then, like it wasn’t even happening, Thigpen drew the gun from his holster, said, “That’s good, because if old Jeb here is the one you take on your deer drives, I don’t imagine he’s much gun-shy.” He pointed the gun at Reynold and fired on him, three shots quick in a row.

I’d heard pistols before. I’d fired them. I’d fired at cans, into trees, into woods I couldn’t know were empty. I’d shot squirrels before with a pistol, even shot a crow once for no good reason other than that I had a pistol and here was a crow.

But the sound back then was nothing next to the roar and flash off the barrel of this pistol, the flash reaching like thick red daggers to Reynold, with each dagger the sick thump of a bullet into his chest, the clean, quick whistle of them right on out his back. All
three bullets hit the fire, where a nearly burnt-through log split in two, rolled a few inches, sent up sparks.

I saw all this, in just this instant.

He hit ground only a couple feet from Mom and me, his face turned to us, his bald head orange for the light from the fire. He blinked five or six times in a row, his arms still at his side. He was stiff, tensed over, eyes blinking away, and the hand I could see wasn’t in a fist anymore, but the fingers were spread wide, wide as they could get. He let go a deep breath from all the way down in him, a sound far away and heavy, like he was drowning in mud.

His hands went limp, his eyes closed, and I saw in the firelight steam up from his mouth, where that breath had let out, and steam up, too, from there in his chest, those holes.

“How old are you, Huger Dillard?” Thigpen said.

I turned. There sat Thigpen, one hand still to the pommel, the gun pointed at the ground.

I opened my mouth. I blinked, felt my throat go dry. I hadn’t breathed yet.

“How old?” Thigpen said.

“Leave the boy alone,” Unc said. He hadn’t moved, his arms around his legs, his face toward Thigpen.

“I said, how old?” Thigpen adjusted himself in the saddle. The saddle creaked, the horse twitched one ear.

I swallowed hard, whispered, “Fifteen.”

“Damn,” Thigpen said. “I didn’t see my first murder till I was twenty-one.” He slowly shook his head, smiled. “Must be true what they’re saying about how fast kids grow up these days.”

“Leave him alone, Tommy,” Unc said.

Then Mom screamed.

It started with a rasping breath in, long and hard, and for a second I thought maybe Reynold wasn’t dead after all, that here he was trying to breathe in all the air there was to breathe. But then the scream itself came, pierced me and shocked me all at once, Mom finally reacting to what’d happened. Here was a dead man, shot in front of our eyes, fallen at our feet.

I took hold of her and tried to push us away, tried to scramble away from this body, only to find the leg irons were still there on my ankles, that Mom was still tied to her own spike, and we had nowhere to go except here, spiked to the ground. Still Mom screamed.

Then Thigpen fired again, and I turned, saw he’d shot this one off into the air.

I felt my breaths in and in too quick, Mom doing the same. She held on to me, her arms around me too hard, though they were exactly what I wanted: Mom holding me.

“Tommy?” Yandle said.

His gun was down now, his mouth open. He stared up at Thigpen.

Patrick was gone.

“Unlock them,” Thigpen said.

“But Tommy,” Yandle whispered, “why’d you shoot—”

“Do it,” Thigpen said, and cocked the hammer.

Yandle quick shook his head, like he’d been slapped awake. Mom whimpered beside me. Unc looked at Thigpen.

Yandle put his gun back in the holster, reached into the front pocket of his fatigue jacket, pulled out a key chain, all with his eyes on Thigpen.

“We was just running a pot farm back here,” Yandle said as he started around the fire, his steps slow, his hand with the keys trying to find the right one without the use of that arm in a sling. His voice had emptied itself of that police-boy pitch, now just a Walterboro nothing. “Cleve Ravenel come to me one afternoon looking to make some money, told me he could bankroll a little operation back here.” He nodded toward Unc, still without taking his eyes off Thigpen. “Figured Hungry Neck’d be the smartest place, what with a blind man watching over the place.” He paused. “And a snot-nose runt his only helper.” He tried a laugh. Still his hand fumbled with the keys. “This parcel back here’s tough as hell to get into, so we set up in here.”

He stopped altogether, forgot the keys, like something had occurred
to him, a big idea. “Then the fucking doctor’s wife come in and killed the son of a bitch, which of course makes this land hotter’n shit, what with SLED crawling around, looking for whatever the hell it is they may want to find, chief among it all maybe, we’re thinking, our little operation. I hear tell from Mitch over to the office SLED is coming in here tomorrow morning, going to give Hungry Neck a comb-through.”

He was just jabbering now, talking and talking, trying to reach something in Thigpen.

“So we’re liquidating. Getting the hell out of Atlanta before it burns to the ground.” He tried the same laugh again.

“Unlock them,” Thigpen said.

Yandle stood there a second longer, then looked down at the key chain in his hand, shook his head, finally found the right one.

He went to Unc first, knelt in front of him, slipped the key into the clamp on Unc’s left foot, and the clamp fell open. He pulled the key out, opened the other, his eyes always on Thigpen.

Now both Unc’s feet were free, but he didn’t move, only held his legs with his arms.

Yandle stood. He was coming toward us and had to step over Reynold’s body, there between us and the fire.

He knelt at Mom’s feet, took the rope her ankles were tied with, and started working the knot at the spike with his one hand until Mom’s left ankle was free. He was looking up at Thigpen, scared shitless, his hand shaking, his face wet with sweat that glistened in the firelight. Mom pulled her foot away from him hard, jammed herself into me deeper to get away from that body there and at the same time trying to hold on to me, like she might be able to protect me from something.

“Tommy, you can’t arrest me,” Yandle said. “You can’t.”

“Finish up,” Thigpen said.

“Tommy,” Yandle said, “Tommy, we can work this together. We can figure out how to make it look like Reynold and—”

“Finish,” he said, and now the saddle creaked again, the horse’s ear twitched.

Yandle turned to my leg irons, put the key in. He fished it one way and another, and then mine fell open, and I pushed back and away from him, Mom with me, the two of us scooting hard and fast and away.

Yandle stood, faced Thigpen. His good hand was out to his side, palm up, the key chain hanging from a finger. He said, “You can’t arrest me, Tommy. I got enough shit on you to sink a ship. Now.” He lifted his hand up a little higher. “Either we work this together and figure out a way through this that’s going to be mutually beneficial to the both of us, or—”