by Bret Lott
“Son of a fucking bitch!” Thigpen said, not a whisper, not a shout, but like it’d taken every bit of his air to say it.
I turned, saw him fast crabwalking backward in the weeds, his hands scrambling on the ground behind him, his feet moving fast, too, though it seemed in the second I took it all in that he wasn’t getting anywhere, instead was falling and getting up, falling and getting up.
He was looking at the body.
“What?” Unc said. “What?”
That was when I saw it, too: those skinned hands, red muscles, white tendons holding that gun, an over-and-under twelve-gauge, were moving, starting up, slow and stiff.
It was a body.
It was a body without much of a head.
The arms were moving up, slowly, like he was taking aim at some bird might fly off if it saw him move, and now Yandle’s hand was off me, and we were moving back too, my feet heavy in the weeds, and now my throat collapsed, and though I tried to answer Unc, tried to tell him It’s a body, and it’s lifting up that gun, I couldn’t get anything out.
“Holy shit,” Yandle whispered beside me, and still we two stumbled back, the weeds like ropes.
“What?” Unc said again. “What the hell is going on?”
He turned toward us, and I could see the puzzlement on his face, the way he was trying to figure why he got no answer, but still nothing came.
And then I saw what it was there in the weeds, saw it in the way that gun rose, those hands ready to shoot: it wasn’t a body, but a man, dead.
It was a dead man.
Then the world out here, the trees, this light, the weeds and Thigpen and Yandle and Unc—“Somebody tell me what’s going on!” he shouted now, him pitiful and alone not five feet away from me, and not five feet from a dead man lifting his gun to aim—all of it started to swirl in front of me, and I started falling back, the blue morning sky above me filling my eyes now, and in the last instant before everything went white I saw the bird this dead man was aiming at: a buzzard circled way up there, brought here by a smell old and red and metal, and I couldn’t blame Charles Middleton Simons, M.D., for trying to take him out with that twelve-gauge, no matter the son of a bitch everybody here said he was.
Mom.
She was leaned over me, her face close. The first thing I felt was her smell: the same thick flowery perfume as every day, but on top of that another smell, like the bathroom after I’d cleaned it Monday afternoons at our house in Liberty Hills. Lysol, maybe. But I couldn’t make out her face, like I was looking through water at her, so I blinked.
That’s when I felt it: the pain in my head.
“Honey,” she whispered. “Sugar.”
For a second everything seemed like it hadn’t happened: no dead man, no police, no hunting.
Then I heard the scrape of a chair on the floor, steps toward me.
“Huger,” Unc said, and I knew.
“Stay out of this,” Mom said, her voice just like it was when she didn’t want to hear my side of whatever. Like Unc was a kid with no sense at all.
Like she talked to him most all the time, really.
And here was my mom: her red hair in soft curls, her white skin, and those thin freckles across her nose, her green eyes. My petite, beautiful mom.
The same one who could rip me in half for coming in past curfew or getting a B on a test, and who seemed an inch from tearing Unc apart, too, if she hadn’t already.
She had on her white nurse’s outfit, the ID card clipped to the collar. We were in a room, me in bed, and I saw steel rails beside me: in the hospital.
Mom was trying to smile at me, her chin shaking.
“Everything’ll be fine,” she said. “Just fine.” She touched my cheek.
“Unc,” I said, and the word was like a brick on my head.
“You fell,” he said. He stood back behind Mom, hat off, no stick. “You fainted, and you fell. Hit your head on—”
“Leland,” she said, her eyes moving like she might see him beside her. “You keep quiet.”
“What happened?” I whispered.
“You got a concussion,” she said, smiling again. Just that quick, like Unc never existed. “You been out a couple hours now. Officer Thigpen and Dr. Morrison brought you in with that other officer.” She paused. “And your uncle.” She shook her head.
I looked past her to Unc. On the wall behind him was a painting in a brass frame: six black Lab puppies chewing on a duck boot. The footboard was shiny oak, against the wall a huge piece of oak furniture, eight foot tall and with a mirror.
Mom said, “This is the Palmetto Pavilion. We’re here at the university.” She looked around, smiling. “When they saw you being escorted in by Dr. Morrison, they put you up here on the VIP floor. Pretty sharp, huh?”
But I was looking at Unc again.
“You got quite a bump on the back of your head,” Mom said. “You’ll have to stay overnight. Dr. Morrison is taking good care of you.” Mom reached to the little group of buttons on the rail, pressed one of them. “We’ll get one of the nurses to tell Dr. Morrison you’re awake.”
She was in her scared-mother mode: just keep talking and everything will be all right. When all I wanted was to know from Unc what happened: that dead man’s arms.
“Yes?” came a voice from a speaker somewhere above and behind me.
“Eugenie Dillard here,” Mom said. “He’s awake. Can we get Dr. Morrison in here?”
“Okay.”
Mom smiled down at me. “Imagine my surprise to get a call down in X Ray that my baby boy is being brought into Emergency by the sheriff’s office. And imagine my surprise that he’s unconscious.” She shook her head, and now the smile was gone. “Imagine I find out there’s been a murder out to Hungry Neck, and my son hasn’t called or had sense enough to get the hell out of there, and now here he is being wheeled in on a stretcher through Emergency, and a deputy behind him crying and carrying on about his broke shoulder, and it’s me and the girls down there in X Ray who get to shoot pictures of you and your head all banged to hell and then get to shoot that crybaby deputy—”
“Yandle broke your fall,” Unc said. “To a degree.”
“Leland,” she said again, but this time she turned to him, started in with her finger, shook it in his face, like he could see it and maybe fear her for it. “You just shut the hell up. You ought to know better than to let a boy out there in amongst all this grisly murder and whatnot, you sorry excuse for an uncle. As if I don’t have enough problems with this child and all he’s got going against him back home and over to school, plus everything I have to train out of him every Sunday night when he gets back from that godforsaken broken-down hunt club. The smartest thing I ever did was get us the hell out of there and into Charleston—”
“Mom,” I whispered. “I told him I called you. I told him—”
“And now you’ve gone and give him a dead body to look at like it was some sort of manly man thing to do,” Mom kept on. “I’m working my damnedest at providing for him a loving and virtuous home to live in, no small feat I figured you’d know by now, a single mom and the way the world is crouching at my door ready to take my precious love, my baby boy, any second now. But no. You give him this. This looking at a dead man.”
“Eugenie,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?” she said. “Sorry? Sorry don’t even begin to do it. Sorry don’t even—”
“Mom,” I said, and the word hurt.
She turned to me, her eyebrows up, mouth open, like she’d forgotten me altogether with what she was handing out to Unc.
Then she cried, her shoulders falling in on her, her mouth crumpling up, eyes squeezing shut. She was holding back, the sound only hisses, quick breaths.
Unc went to her, turned her to him. “Now, Eugenie,” he said. “Everything’s fine. It’s fine.”
Mom gave up then, leaned into him, cried into his shoulder.
It was something I hadn’t seen before, her giving up to him.
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br /> But it only lasted a couple seconds. She quick tensed up, took a step back from him. She put the back of a hand to her eye, looked at me, tried that smile again. She said, “I’m a mess,” and sniffed, touched at a run of mascara down one cheek.
“Now let’s not hear any more talk like that,” somebody said at the door, and I looked past them to a man in a white coat, stethoscope draped over his shoulders.
Silverado short-bed, teal blue. Adam’s apple big as a fist.
Buck, the name on his personalized license plate.
“Dr. Morrison,” Mom said, and quick touched at her eye again, smiled big for him.
Unc turned, and here came Buck, smiling at me. “How you doing?” he said, and pulled a penlight from the jacket pocket.
I said nothing.
“Now, don’t you worry none. I washed my hands since holding back them hounds at the club,” he said.
He was a member, a definite South-of-Broader, handing me redneck talk, like what he’d expect I might want to hear out of him. Like he thought that’s what might comfort us hayseeds.
He leaned over me, held the light to one eye, then the other. The room filled up with a white so bright my head hurt for it.
“Tommy Thigpen and Jervey Morrison here brought you in in Tommy’s cruiser,” Unc said. “And Yandle and me. Lucky we had a neurosurgeon out in the wilds with us.”
“Dr. Morrison’s on the faculty,” Mom said, her voice all candy. “He’s dean of Neurosurgery,” she said, “so I’d say it’s more like divine intervention than luck.”
He looked at my eyes a second time: white, pain. Then he was away, still smiling.
“Just out for the hunt,” he said. “Glad I could be there to help y’all.” He turned to Unc, crossed his arms. “Luck is that deputy being there to break his fall. Otherwise he might have hit that stump full on, cracked his skull open like an old muskmelon.”
Unc only nodded.
Buck looked at me. “We’ll need for you to stay the night. Just to make sure you’re all right. Then you can head on home tomorrow, if you’re feeling at all like it. In the meantime, we need for you to stay awake for long as you can. Watch some TV, football games.”
He turned to Mom, smiling, then back to me. “Divine intervention is having a momma as pretty as she is,” he said, “and working at the hospital we end up bringing you into.”
He glanced at Unc. “Leland, we be seeing you.” He turned to Mom, nodded at her to follow him.
She smiled at me, then Buck headed out the door, and she was gone.
Unc already had his hands to the railing. He grinned. “You should have heard Yandle pissing and moaning about his arm all the way down here,” he said, his voice down low, like we’d get in trouble if somebody heard us talking. “He was crying the whole way. But it’s a good thing he was there, breaking your fall, like the good doctor said.”
“But Unc,” I said, and swallowed, my mouth dry now too. “What—”
“Rigor mortis,” he said. “I seen it happen before.”
He stopped, slowly looked to the window, like maybe he’d see something out there could help him. “For whatever reason, the muscles just go taut sometimes, start pulling against the bone.” He paused. “You’d be amazed, Huger, what I seen. But I’m sorry you had to see that. Just like I said to your momma. I am sorry.”
He let go the rail and reached to me, his hand moving along the white of the sheet, looking for me.
I took hold of it, and he squeezed down hard.
It felt good, that pain.
“But your momma is right,” he said.
“About what?” I swallowed again.
“What she’s saying is you ought not to be out there anymore. You ought to stay home for a while. Till things get settled.”
I let go his hand. “No way.”
He shook his head. “I told you. This is no field trip. There’s no way I want you or your momma involved in any of this.”
I tried to sit up then, pushed my elbows down, scooted my butt up. But the pain in my head nearly knocked me down, and I only lay back, closed my eyes.
“What’s this?” I whispered. “What do you know, Unc?” I opened my eyes to him. “You said she called you.”
“Saturday after Thanksgiving, I imagine there’s a couple dozen ball games to choose from,” he said, his voice whole and solid. “Now, where the heck’s the TV in here?” He put his hand to the rail, found the buttons. “Which one for the TV?”
“Unc,” I said, “you can’t do this.” I was quiet a second, not certain if what I wanted to say was right or not. If he’d take it the way I meant it: that he needed me.
And I needed him.
“Unc,” I said. “You’re a blind man.”
“Damn straight,” he whispered hard and looked at me, his lips tight. He forgot the buttons on the rail and quick reached up with his hand, pulled off the sunglasses, like he’d been waiting for this all along.
There they were: his marble eyes, white and fake, held in by the gnarled and shiny skin of his eyelids, the skin melted from where his eyebrows might have been down to his cheekbones, where he’d been burned, and where the glass from the bedroom window exploded out at him, hot shards of it shooting into his eyes and into his chest and arms. It was then he’d fallen back, away from the house, and then the eaves above that window had collapsed, him screaming on the ground.
It’d been my Aunt Sarah inside the bedroom, asleep, Unc just home from a shift at the department, him an investigator, home at midnight every night.
But this time his house was on fire, and he’d run around to their bedroom window, and it’d exploded.
I knew all this only from what my mom told me once, years back and just before we moved to North Charleston. It’d never occurred to me to ask before that, to ask what happened, Unc’s presence in our trailer only a given, what other uncles did when they were hurt. I’d known it was a fire he’d been in, known Aunt Sarah was dead.
But in the hush of his moving in, and the moving out of my daddy not much later, it’d always seemed something not to ask after, and so I hadn’t. Even when I did venture that one time, the trailer choked with boxes, Unc like a stone on the couch in the front room, Mom folding my clothes up and into yet another box, her answer had been short, quick: just the fact of a fire, Unc home after his shift, that explosion, all of it whispered to me so Unc wouldn’t hear talk of it, I imagined.
And Unc himself had never ventured a word on it to me, and I knew, always knew, not to ask.
“Damn straight,” he said again. “I’m a blind man. And if I can’t handle something like this on my own, then I might as well up and die. Because—”
“Because why?” I said, my voice finally gone loud. The pain didn’t matter. “You think you can walk into whatever it is you know about and work it out yourself, when it’s me to drive you to the Piggly Wiggly, and me to write your bills for you, and me to rewash the dishes in the sink because you’re—”
“Enough!” Mom shouted, and here she was, moving fast for Unc and me. She pushed him aside while he quick put his sunglasses back on. She looked at me, her face gone red. “I don’t know what the hell’s going on between the two of you, but you better both of you shut up. We could hear you all the way out to the hallway, like two kids. It’s embarrassing.” Now she was straightening out the sheet at my chest, looking at it like it was the only important thing in the world.
I looked at Unc. His back was to us, his head up.
“Unc,” I said. “You got to tell me.”
“Now you just settle down,” Mom said, still picking at the sheet, but I pulled it back, tried again to sit up. “Unc,” I said, “listen.”
He pulled his Braves cap from his back pocket, slapped it on. “Eugenie,” he said, and made his way toward the door, found the knob. He reached behind the door, pulled out the stick. “I’m sorry for what-all happened. Take better care of that boy than I have.”
“You sure don’t ask for much,”
she said, and put her hand to my chest, eased me back down.
He was leaving me.
I lay back then, felt like I was out of breath, like I’d run ten miles, my mom’s hand on me some kind of comfort in it all. But not the sort I wanted.
He stood in the doorway, out there in the hall bright white light. He looked one way, then the other, and put out his stick.
“Unc!” I shouted, and felt like I’d split my head clean open with the word, with how it echoed in this VIP room with brass and oak, when all I wanted was to be curling up to sleep on the couch in the front room of the single-wide, in me the good knowledge Unc was there, back in his room, my old bedroom, snoring quiet like he does.
“Now you shush,” Mom said.
I heard that stick in the hallway out there, tapping, Unc walking away.
I tried to stay awake.
Mom talked beside me, now and again stood from the chair she’d pulled up beside the bed, put her hand to my face in a kind of gentle slap, and I’d open my eyes, say, “I heard you.”
She’d gone to that big piece of furniture down past the footboard, opened up the mirrored doors to reveal a TV, then came back to the rails, pushed a button.
The TV came on, a football game.
I closed my eyes to that, too. I hated football.
But the speaker was up by my ear and turned way low, me too tired even to tell Mom to turn the thing off, so that while I was sleeping and staying awake there were two stories going on: announcers and players and coaches all after something, and Mom talking.
Mom and I live in North Charleston, which might as well be another planet from Charleston. North Charleston is like a joke to people who live downtown, because that’s where all the Navy people live, and all the fired shipyard workers are, and where people get shot in the BP minimarts or where some kid will bring a gun to school and start shooting, like what happened at my school last year.
There was a body after that, too. One of the football team, a black kid who everybody said was going to Clemson or USC to play on a scholarship, maybe. They said these things, of course, only after the kid was dead. And he wasn’t even a part of the fight that happened, was just like everybody else who ever gets killed in school: one of those Innocent Bystanders.
