by Bret Lott
But I had nothing more, only nodded at the bartender, said, “Thanks.” I turned, headed back out the door and onto the driveway to the same warm summer night Unc and I’d left out here only a couple minutes before. Tree frogs droned, cicadas whirred, the moon shone.
I walked back to the Range Rover, turned it on, sat with the AC on me, then listened to a few different programs on XM. Eventually I plugged in Durham on the Maps app. Eventually, too, the phone buzzed: Unc, calling to tell me he was waiting for me to come get him.
I’d seen Five for Short only a few times after that, bumped into him as I was ushering Unc into the orange palace now and again. Sometimes I’d hang around inside for a while, if I knew school was going on and he wouldn’t be around.
And Unc won at cards. Usually around a grand a night.
Thus began, with only the break that fall of my last pathetic semester of college, the routine of Thursday nights.
“I was thinking,” Unc said now, “maybe I’ve been playing cards too long even to ponder the man behind the man I was playing.” He paused, took another pull on the cigar. The sun was low now, almost touching the trees out at the point, the marsh everywhere even sharper in its colors. “I’ve been playing cards and only thinking about the man there at the table with me, what he’s going to do with the hand he’s got.”
He tapped the cigar on the end of the lawn chair arm, on the dock board directly beneath it a tidy heap of ashes. He had only about three inches or so left on the cigar, almost time to give it up. “Works well enough to win money,” he said. “But you tend to forget there’s a man behind the man at the table. Prendergast, for example. I know from playing him he’s a little desperate at times. He goes bust, then waves around a set of goggles to cover a bet.” He paused. “Gives up something ain’t his in order to get what he wants. I know when he’s got a hot hand his voice tends to go lower, him trying to stay cool but trying to stay cool the signal he’s hot. I know when his voice goes high and tight he’s got nothing better than a pair, because he wants you to think he’s all excited about a good set of cards. But—”
He stopped. His hand with the cigar was still on the chair arm, and he sat there, quiet.
I said, “But.”
“But what does any of that matter when you’re at a table with someone you know is fundamentally bad?” He shook his head again, this time even slower. “What does that say about the man you are, sitting there at the table?”
Still he didn’t move the hand with the cigar.
I put my hand up to my forehead, squinted hard across the marsh to the Navy tract over there. Like I could see anyone at all.
“I feel like we got a good hand,” he said, quieter now. “There’s no bluff involved in our having that set of goggles and his wanting it. He knows what we have.” He tapped the cigar again. Nothing came off it. “But I can’t help but wonder what the man behind the man at the table wants them so bad for. All he’s got to do is write the missing pair up as a Field Loss, and they disappear. Can’t help but figure, actually, that that was what he’d done after I won them off him in the first place. Mark a piece of equipment off as a Field Loss, and all questions cease. Equipment destroyed in the field of action. End of story. Don’t even matter what happened. And he’s got plenty of access to the kind of paperwork all that involves.” He paused. “But what I’m wondering is what does it say about me, that I’ve been playing him every Thursday night all these years?” He shook his head again. “That it’s been me winning what I could off him, and your momma here at home and …”
“And what?” I said. “What happened between him and Mom? And what do you and Tyler have to do with it?” I blurted it out, no better word for it: the question.
He started to bring up the cigar, but stopped halfway, slowly looked over his shoulder at me, as though he might could see me sitting behind him. Then he turned back to the sun, touching the trees now.
“Another day,” he said. “I’ll tell you that another day.”
Finally he drew in on the cigar, let out the smoke. With the sun just touching the trees on the point, the smoke out of him was in shadow, dark gray and thick, and now I knew I wasn’t going to get an answer from him about Mom, or about Prendergast and Tyler and him either. At least not with asking point-blank the question I did. So I decided to let him in on what I did know, and throw in all I had.
I said, “Did you know she has a gun?”
He gave out a small laugh. “Thinks it’s her big secret,” he said, and shook his head again. “But I used to smell it on her every time she came home from the shooting range.”
He held the cigar in front of him sideways now, like he could see it. Like he was reading that gold and brown Hoyo cigar band, thinking on it.
I’d tried. Of course he knew everything. Of course.
“You never smelled her coming through the door once she’d been over there?” he said, and there seemed on his words a kind of reproach, and a kind of surprise. I’d smelled gunpowder plenty before. But just not on my mom.
“She used to go to the range up at ATP Gun Shop on College Park. Back in the day, right after she bought the thing. Started maybe only a month after what all happened out to Hungry Neck.” He stopped, took in a deep breath, shook his head again. “Knew a couple boys used to work up there. Used to give me a call whenever she was out there.” He gave a kind of shrug, that cigar still in front of him. “Told me she was a pretty good shot, too. But this was all a long time ago. She ain’t shot for years now, far as I can tell. Be surprised if she ever even—”
He stopped, put his hand with the cigar back on the arm of the lawn chair. He sat that way a few seconds, quiet, then turned to me again, said, “Why are you asking? And what is it you know I don’t?”
“She had it on her last night,” I said. “When Prendergast showed up. Had it when you and Tyler were talking to her, too.” I paused, and found in me a kind of strange pride somehow: I’d known something Unc didn’t.
“A Beretta subcompact,” I went on, bent now on exhausting the secret stash of facts I owned. “It’s her third one. And she still goes to the training. Which means she’s still shooting.” I paused again, the sun behind the trees now, and in the miracle way they always had, the colors out in the marsh—the green and brown, the gray and yellow—all seemed to flare open, all seemed more alive and genuine than at any time of the day. “Which means maybe you’ve been missing a step or two,” I said. Then, a moment later, “Old man.”
He said nothing, only lifted up the cigar, took one long last pull. He let out the smoke, pinched the butt between his thumb and middle finger, shot the stub out off the dock a good ten feet, a quick arc that ended with a sharp spit of sound when it hit the creek.
He stood then, crossed in front of me to his walking stick leaning against the boathouse pylon to my right. He took it, turned, started off across the dock. “Fold up these chairs and put them away,” he said, the words not gruff but short all the same, and I wondered if I’d made him mad. A part of me in just that instant was sorry if I had, but another part of me thought, Too bad if I did.
But he was already halfway up the dock, me with the chairs folded and marine locker lid open, stowing them away, before it finally came to me what I’d wanted to ask all along, this whole time we’d been out here. What had been inside and under and through me the whole while we’d been talking, but that’d disappeared somehow, like that smoke off the end of his cigar: there, and gone.
“What about the woman?” I called out to him.
“Let’s watch TV,” Unc called back over his shoulder, him tapping out the boards with that stick, headed for the house.
The lead story was about a tractor-trailer wreck up on I-95 that shut down the freeway for four hours. The video showed a line of cars as far as you could see, then the steaming hulk of the jackknifed truck on its side, the cab off the edge of the roadway and bent at an ugly angle, like some giant animal with its neck broken.
Next came word of
a former teacher for the Charleston County school district who’d been found not guilty of molesting a student thirty years ago, the white-haired man and his wife crying into each other’s arms inside the courtroom right after the verdict was read, and comment then from his attorney about how justice had been served.
Then came the happy news that tourism was up in Charleston, the mayor delighted at the upswing, and file footage of a horse and carriage making its way along some oak-lined street south of Broad, and lines of tourons out front of Hyman’s Seafood on Meeting Street.
And then, finally, came word about the body.
No video. Only the anchor, a guy with slicked-back hair and a too-bright tie, reading off the teleprompter about an unidentified body found in Hanahan early this morning. Behind him was the stock graphic of a white outline of a body on a bright red background, what they used when they had nothing else. There wasn’t even mention of Landgrave Hall, or a marsh. “Authorities are investigating” were the last words on the issue from the anchor, the same old sign-off that meant the station didn’t know a thing.
That was it.
We were in Unc’s bedroom, him in his recliner—he had one in here too—me on the edge of his bed, watching the wall-mounted television he had in there. We’d come straight here from out on the dock and’d turned it on just as the opening shots of the evening news began: video of the Morris Island lighthouse, waves at the beach, Fort Sumter with that huge American flag flying over it, inside it all a cheerful and serious voice announcing, “Live from the Lowcountry, it’s News Four!”
It’d been halfway through the story about tourism before I finally pieced out how he knew exactly when to shut down on the dock and come up here for the news. He’d known to the minute what time sunset was, checked it on the weather radio he had on his nightstand first thing when he woke up every morning, then kept close the whole day long everything the station had given him: weather forecast, winds, temperatures, tides, sunrise and sunset. His own sort of predawn survey of the world, all handed to him in that slightly jerky machine voice of NOAA. He’d only had to figure how long before true sunset the sun would touch the tops of those trees out on the point of the creek, then sit in a lawn chair and feel the light disappear on him inch by inch until the shadow cast by those trees told him what time it was: Let’s go watch TV.
Now, the non-news item about the body over, he sat looking up at the set, mouth a little open like he was a kid and this was cartoons. He had the remote in his front shirt pocket, where he always kept it when he was watching in here.
I said, “Not much to go—”
“Quiet,” he cut in, the words a hard whisper, and lifted a finger from the armchair to signal me to wait.
I turned back to the TV. A white car sat up on the back of a flatbed tow truck with its yellow and orange lights flashing, then the truck pulled away into the dark outside the camera’s light. I’d missed the first couple of words, but heard now “in the trunk of a 2002 white Toyota Corolla recovered from Wambaw Creek near Echaw Bridge in Francis Marion National Forest early this morning.”
I blinked. That was Major Tyler’s call. Where he’d had to head off to last night.
“Investigators from the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division have identified the victim as Robert Mazyck of Goose Creek,” the anchor went on, while here now was video of a low concrete bridge over water, still only seeable from the light off the camera, then a shot of crime scene tape across a wide gap in a line of trees, beyond it nothing but black. “Authorities have determined that Mazyck, a 2005 graduate of Georgia Tech with a degree in chemical engineering, has no surviving family. News Four has also found that, according to state records, Mazyck was born in Iraq in 1983 and moved here with his mother, father, and sister as refugees during the first Iraq war in 1991. The family changed its name when they moved to the United States.”
Off to the right of the shot of the row of trees, at the very edge of the picture and standing in front of the tape, were two men in uniform, hands on hips, looking away from the camera and out into that black.
One of them turned a little, crossed his arms.
Tyler.
“They’re showing Tyler,” I said. “Up on the riverbank, where they must’ve driven the thing off into the water. Showed them towing a car away too.”
Now came a quick clip of an EMS without its lights going—the coroner’s vehicle, toting off a body—then a shot too close up of a good ol’ boy with three or four chins, a ball cap pushed high up on his forehead, his face washed too white for the camera lights on him. “We’s up here fishing off the bridge for striped bass other side from the landing,” the man said, “and my boy Tick snags on something wasn’t there last night. We shine the flashlight down there and seen two-three feet down to a big ol’ white something, and I says ‘That got to be a car down there,’ and so Tick gets on his cell and calls up the nine one one.” He reached up to his ball cap, pushed it even higher on his head, let out a deep breath. “This is a certain tragedy, I tell you what, no matter who it is in the trunk of that Toyoter.”
Here was the anchor again, and that same stock graphic of the body outline. “Investigators from the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, the Department of Natural Resources, and Charleston County Sheriff’s Office are continuing their investigation of the case,” he said. He made a quarter turn at his desk, looked to another camera, though the one he’d been talking at stayed on him, the body outline still behind him. “The annual Blessing of the Fleet and Seafood Festival on Shem Creek in Mount Pleasant happens this weekend,” he happily read, and here came footage of a shrimp trawler cruising past Crab Island out in the harbor.
The TV shut off, and I turned. Unc was looking at the floor in front of him, the remote pointed at the set for a moment before he slipped it back into his front shirt pocket.
He said, “Front gate wouldn’t let anybody in here with a camera is what that’s all about. Why they got no video of anything.” He paused, pinched up his mouth a second, considering. “Segundo up at the gate’s just doing his job not letting in film crews and reporters and whatnot. No law says a news crew’s got a right to come on in here and start to filming. So, no video, no story, far as the station goes.” He turned his head a little toward the window beside him, the blinds down and closed like he kept them. “We can watch channel five at six, two at seven, see if there’s any other word.” He stopped again, turned a little more toward the window. “But I doubt there’ll be anything.”
“So,” I said, “the difference between news about one person getting murdered and another is a piece of footage. They can haul ass all the way up past McClellanville, fifty miles for a bubba and his boy who get a hook on a wiper blade, and the world knows the life story of a dead body when there’s a woman whose face has been mutilated and anchored into the mud like she was a—”
“Listen,” Unc said, that finger up again, him turned full to the window.
“Most likely nothing but some sort of meth lab turf war out there,” I kept on. “Wambaw Creek’s out in the middle of BFE. Who knows if My Boy Tick isn’t some compatriot of whoever’s in the trunk and just wanted the body of his fellow chemist turned up quick so’s SLED would start making arrests, shut his competition down fair and square.”
Unc quick looked at me, said, “You watch your mouth, son.”
I could see by the set of his jaw I’d made him mad with that BFE crack. I’d never been up Wambaw Creek before, only knew it for being off the South Santee River on the way to Georgetown, Wambaw a sizable branch that wandered up past Hampton Plantation. I’d gone there on yet another field trip when I was in fifth or sixth grade, the old plantation house about as classic a one as you could get, perfect white columns and clapboard, an avenue of live oaks. Yet one more place, too, where Washington stayed when he made the tour down south. But what I most remembered about the whole thing was riding in a sweaty school bus for what seemed like days up there and back, kids screwing around making paper ai
rplanes and throwing pencils and nodding off in the heat only to be shoved awake by a bump in the road. Wambaw Creek really was the middle of nowhere.
And inside just that sliver of memory, the one time I’d been up to that plantation all those years ago, I saw Jessup three or four rows in front me on that bus, him just sitting there, no havoc out of him whatsoever. Just a kid sitting still on the same bus I was on, and behaving. A kid—a friend of mine—years before 9/11, and his quitting high school to serve his country, only to come back a security guard standing out front of my house at four this morning in his black ball cap and windbreaker and pants, and I saw again how stunned Prendergast and Harmon were at seeing him there just past the landscape lighting.
Thought I’d tag along, just in case, he’d called out.
And now I heard it, what Unc wanted me to listen to: the crunch of gravel on our drive. Unc turned back to the window again, and I stood from the bed, crossed to the blinds, lifted up one of them to see outside. Maybe it would be SLED come back to ask us something else. Maybe it would be Tyler.
Maybe, I thought, somebody gave a shit about a dead woman.
But it was Mom’s BMW—Moonstone Metallic was the color, though it’d always looked nothing other than a shiny beige to me—and for an instant I wondered who the heck had taken her car out on a jaunt and was bringing it back, the garage door opening right now to let in whoever it was.
Mom was supposed to be in her room, asleep.
“Is that Eugenie?” Unc asked, and I glanced down at him in the recliner beside me. He had an improbable look on his face, one I didn’t often get to see from a person who could judge time by the tilt of the earth, the touch of a shadow: he looked stunned, what eyebrows he had high on his forehead, mouth open even wider. He, too, had thought she was here and sleeping.
I looked back out the window. “It’s her,” I said, “unless some joyrider’s putting her car back where he found it.” She was almost in the garage all the way, the rear tire and trunk all I could see, Mom inching it in like she always did, even with that tennis ball hanging from the ceiling to signal her exactly where to stop. The brake lights flared again and again, the vehicle twitching more the farther in she got.
