by Bret Lott
Tabitha held my arm, held it hard, her fingernails biting into my skin through the jacket. Her eyes were on the Plymouth, just sitting there, us moving closer to it and closer, until, finally, the engine died, and we stopped, my right wheels just off the pavement.
I could see the Ford from here, down at the bottom of the embankment. That single headlight was still on, and the taillights. But it was on its back. That’s all I could tell for the dark: it’d rolled, and it still had lights on. Nothing else, no movement.
Then the Plymouth’s reverse lights came on, and he started backing up, fast. My headlights were on still, and I tried to read his plate, but he’d caked mud over it. All I could see was the driver with his arm up over the seat, head turned back and looking at us, big dark sunglasses.
Here came the sound from Tabitha again, and I looked at her, felt my own breath going fast now. My heart’d slowed for a few seconds inside all this, the Plymouth taking care of the truck and that gun and all, but here was that adrenaline again, my arms heavy and light at once for it, my face hot and wet. Who was this guy, and what did he want with us? And the fact I couldn’t even come close to answering any of it made that sound she gave out seem about the best thing anybody could do. Here we were, shit out of gas.
I turned to Tabitha. There, on the seat beside her, lay the gun. Thick and shiny.
He came straight at us. I jammed the paperweight in my jacket pocket, quick reached across Tabitha for the gun, put it inside my jacket. She hadn’t even let go my arm.
Then he swerved, passed me on my side, just driving along backward, his arm still up, his head still turned, and he was gone, behind us now.
I looked in the rearview. He pulled right in behind us, edged up to my tail, just like the truck had done, and I turned to Tabitha, shook her with my arm. She looked at me, blinked.
I said, “He pushes us off the embankment, we jump out and roll.” I pulled out the gun, patted it. It was a .45 Smith & Wesson, I only now saw. I’d never fired one. But I figured I was ready as I’d ever be. I said, “Get ready.”
She nodded, and then he hit us.
Only a tap, contact.
I looked in the rearview. He rolled down his window, then leaned his head out, hollered, “Put it in neutral.” He paused, put his bare arm out the window, made the helicopter sign with his finger and hand: Let’s go. “I’ll push you on in,” he hollered.
I looked at Tabitha. She hadn’t heard a thing, only stared straight ahead.
I found the trigger, knew enough not to let my finger hang around there but still let it settle there a second.
He started pushing. I was still in gear, felt the car give, but only a little.
What would Unc do?
He’d get his finger the hell off a trigger, was the first thing came to mind.
“You need gas,” the man hollered. “Checked the gauge myself once the little girl left for you.”
And, too, Unc would tell me don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.
I looked in the rearview one more time. He made the helicopter sign again, nodded.
I let go the gun, shifted to neutral. I tried to make my hands stop shaking but gave it up, just let myself tremble, and then we were rolling down the Mark Clark, big and wide and empty save for a scab-roofed Plymouth and a ’73 Luv.
We made it to the Amoco on Savannah Highway, light from the canopy above the row of pumps too bright down on us. He gave me one last shove with the Plymouth, and I rolled to a stop beside the pump, him right behind me. He cut off his lights, and I did the same.
I could see the worker inside the booth, a black woman in a red smock, orange hair greased into a single big cowlick just above her forehead. She was reading a magazine, the booth only big enough for cigarettes and a register.
His car door slammed, and I put my hand to the gun, looked in my side-view mirror, saw him stretch. He was skinny, not too tall, and had on jeans and boots and a blue shirt, those sleeves still rolled up. The hat was a straw one, the sides folded up, the front end bent down. And those sunglasses.
He looked familiar.
He came toward us, and I found the trigger again, just touched it.
Then he was at my window. I didn’t look at him, only saw out the corner of my eye his belt buckle and belt, the blue shirt, his jeans. My window was still up, and he made the motion with his hand for me to roll it down.
I let go the wheel, hoped he wouldn’t see my hand shake as I rolled down the window.
“First thing is,” he said, his voice light and sunny, like we were talking fish and how many crappie we’d caught today. He leaned against the truck, his forearms against the roof just above the window.
I knew this man. I’d heard this voice before. I knew him.
“Yessir?” I said, my hand back to the wheel, the other still inside the jacket.
“First thing is, I figure that badass pistolero either ended up in your cab or onto the road somewheres.” He paused. “If you got it, keep it. You might could use it.”
He tapped the roof twice, let out a breath.
“Yessir,” I said, and glanced at the woman in the booth. She turned a page in the magazine.
“Second thing is,” he said, and I made my eyes go straight ahead, “calm that girl down. Sounds like a stuck pig.”
Tabitha’d been scratching out that sound all this while, though I hadn’t heard it since we’d started past that rolled Ford. I just hadn’t listened.
“Yessir,” I said, and finally let go the gun. He’d told me to keep it, he’d pushed us here, he’d taken out the Ford.
A gift horse.
I put my hand out in front of Tabitha, sort of pushed down on the air a few times. She looked at me, and I mouthed the words Calm down.
Her eyes moved from me to the man at the window. Then she looked at me a long moment, gave a short, sharp nod, and the sound stopped.
“Next on our agenda,” he said, “is the fact Leland’s sinking in seven kinds of shit, and he thinks he knows how to swim.” He paused. “Problem is, he don’t. Thinks he can figure it all out, come up smelling like a rose. But he can’t.”
He took his hands from the roof, pushed them deep into his pockets.
“You tell Leland,” he said, all that air and light in his voice gone, in its place a black gravel whisper. “You tell your uncle we don’t care where he’s hid. It don’t matter. Those two fuckhead shits back there don’t matter, neither.” He paused. “You tell him the people who count don’t give a good flying fuck where he’s hid out. 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. We’re on his side. All’s he got to do is what’s been asked.” He stopped. “You tell him he’s got forty-eight hours, and it’s over and done with.”
“Yessir,” I whispered.
He took a hand from a pocket, slapped hard the roof of the Luv, a sound so loud even Tabitha jumped. Then he turned, faced the Plymouth. Still I hadn’t seen his face. But I knew him.
“Now,” he said, and in just that one word here was all sun and blue skies. “Y’all got money for gas?”
I breathed out, looked to Tabitha. She hadn’t seen anything, so hadn’t heard anything, either. I said, “You have any money for gas?”
She tilted her head, her forehead wrinkled, mouth squinted up: What kind of question is that? She shook her head no.
“No sir,” I said, and turned back to him.
There on his arm, sneaking out from beneath the rolled-up sleeve, was the bottom edge of a homemade tattoo: JUNIOR.
Officer Tommy Thigpen, the second cruiser at the scene. Backup for Sergeant Doug Yandle.
The only one Unc would talk to.
They’d shaken hands. And he’d just run a truck off the road, pinned a man’s arm between a car and a truck. An officer of the sheriff’s department.
I faced forward, afraid he’d seen me see it, and the thought occurred to me, what if he wanted me to see it?
But he just p
ulled a roll of bills from his jeans pocket, peeled at it, dropped some in on me.
I looked down: five twenties.
He stuffed the roll back into his jeans, then turned one last time to me, knocked twice on the roof.
“Drive careful,” he said.
We reached the railroad tracks. There’d been next to nobody from the Amoco on out, though I’d breathed shallow the whole way here, afraid somebody’d pull out of the woods and ram into us or take a shot at us: anything seemed possible.
And as we’d gotten closer to the Rantowles Motel, just past Hollywood, I’d wondered for a few seconds if there’d still be cruisers parked out front, lights going, crime-scene banners up everywhere, everything still going on though it’d been six this morning Mrs. Constance Dupree Simons’s suicide was called in, and I thought of those two buzz-cut officers at the hospital just this morning, thought of them being the ones to tell me of her dying, and I wondered for a second whether SLED were in with Thigpen on this.
And Yandle? Was he with them too, every cop in the Lowcountry party to a murder and suicide, all of them part of the people who counted who could fix things, if only Unc would do what’d been asked?
Then here came the hotel: only a brick box of a building, six parking slots in front of six doors, six windows each with a room air conditioner plugged into it. One lamppost sat to the far end of the little parking lot, everything gray in the wash of light it gave up.
There, making an X across the third door to the right, was the crime-scene banner.
Nothing else. There’d been no lights on anywhere, not even a single car.
The tracks banged beneath us, no closing gate this far from Charleston, as though people down here weren’t worth that kind of safeguard. Now we were on Hungry Neck, Tabitha’s time to take over. Though I’d been back here a million times, maybe more, the dark of it all seemed too dark now, too heavy, all of it full of something could happen: the moss off the live oak above us looked too much like that man’s arm out the window of the yellow pickup, or like a woman who’d hanged herself might look: gray and twisting in the low wind out there, the half-moon I could piece through the branches more dead and bright than any moon I’d ever seen before. Anything could happen now.
I slowed down, and I looked at her, shrugged: What next?
She’d written me no notes the hour it’d taken to get here, only’d latched back on to my arm when I came back from paying for the gas. The black woman with the orange cowlick at the Amoco had only yawned as she slipped nine beat-up dollar bills into the metal drawer.
Now Tabitha let go, looked around for the pad and paper, reached down. I heard her paw through the broken glass on the floorboard. She came back up with the pen and pad again, wrote, and handed it to me.
2.2 miles to SR321, right. 3.5 miles to clear-cut on left.
In the light from the dash I could see the printing was still shaky, watery. She was still scared.
I looked up at her. “You told me Unc was with you. You don’t go State Road 321 to get to your house.” I said it big, my mouth exaggerated for the dark.
She wrote.
That’s not where we’re going.
“But you told me Unc was with you.” I felt my jaw go tight. “Just what the hell are you pulling on me?”
She held her hand out in front of her. She crossed her fingers, quick brought them to her chest: that same move. She tried a smile, but it came out as shaky as her printing.
“You got that right,” I said. “You’re a liar.”
I looked out the windshield, my jaw still clenched tight. Moss still hung like dead arms from the trees out there, the road still shrouded as heavy as it would ever be.
As dark and heavy as it’d always been, too.
This was Hungry Neck. My place as well as hers. That tract of land, the Hunt Club, and all those acres belonged to my family, all the way back to my great-grampa, who bought it off the lumber company back in the twenties for next to nothing, the land shaved clean. It wasn’t worth much now, either, but it was our family’s land, all we had.
Hungry Neck. Where I wanted to be, even if my mom loved me and might’ve been crying over me gone this very minute. Even if my uncle was tied up into the ugly something I didn’t know just as tight as anybody else. This was where I wanted to be.
I turned to Tabitha. “You just get me there, now. Do it. And don’t lead me on.” I paused. “Just tell me the truth.”
She let her shoulders fall some, slowly nodded, and wrote again.
Just don’t treat me like I’m some idiot. You haven’t yet, but people act like I’m retarded. I know a thing or two.
Then she reached to the floorboard and pulled something flat from beneath her seat, big as a shoe-box lid.
KKF 428, between the F and 4 what was supposed to be a Carolina wren parked on a jessamine branch, though it wasn’t a wren at all, just somebody’s idea of a bird: my license plate, off the back of the Luv. She’d taken it off before all this.
Nobody at the wreck back on Dorchester would be able to name us now.
I held the plate in both hands, looked up at her.
She put her index and middle fingers together, brought them to her chest, then pointed them at me. She did it again, just as when she’d taught me how to call myself a liar.
But now the fingers were together, not crossed.
“I trust you,” I said.
She nodded hard, smiled, did the move again.
I put my fingers together, touched my chest, pointed at her.
She wrote: He’s in Benjamin’s old shotgun shack. Nobody knows about that place except us. At the end of the clear-cut, pull off left. Park in the weeds. We walk.
I drove off the road, the weeds white in my headlights, the truck bucking with the uneven ground as we plowed through. Then I cut off the lights and the engine, and the cab filled with a silence that rang in my ears.
I pushed open my door, stepped into the weeds, Tabitha doing the same. Here was that moon, banging down on the field and trees, on us and the whole world. I had the pocket flashlight I’d gotten from my dresser, felt it in my left pocket once we were out of the truck. But we didn’t need it. The moon was enough.
And I felt, too, the deadweight of the gun in my Levi’s jacket, just loose where I’d buttoned the jacket up.
I pulled it out, held it there in the moonlight.
Thick and shiny. Heavy, still warm from where it’d been inside my jacket.
Tabitha looked at me from across the hood. Past her was the end of the clear-cut, where the woods picked back up, a thick black wall, the wind moving the tops of pine and oak and birch.
She couldn’t hear the sound of that wind, a sound I’d fallen asleep to most every night I’d been at Hungry Neck, and I swallowed at how strange all of this was, unfolding in front of my eyes and in my ears: a deaf-and-dumb black girl I’d kissed full on the lips, a car chase, a pistol in my hand bright with the moon. I couldn’t help but think none of it all was happening, that just like in some bad TV show this was all a dream meant for me to wake from.
I looked at the gun, held it there in front of me like it would say something. Suddenly it was cold, the dark and dead cold a gun takes on with being outdoors. I held it with both hands, my hands gray and small and just a kid’s, the cold off the gun feeling like it’d burn through my fingers any second now.
This was real. This was happening.
I heard the thin crack of weeds being walked through, saw Tabitha already on her way toward the trees.
I put the safety on, slipped it in the back of my pants, like an undercover cop on the same bad TV show.
We walked maybe a mile through the woods, Tabitha leading. There were times, too, when I thought maybe I’d gone deaf myself: she didn’t make a sound as we climbed over trunks, moved through dead leaves down from the hickory above us, wove between low spots where wetlands lay in black pools littered with more leaves.
The moonlight gave piecemeal shadows to every
thing, the palmetto and pine and dogwood moving, a thousand gray and black shapes changing shape, the only sure thing Tabitha ahead of me, and those white sneakers, her pale gray jacket. She didn’t look back, only moved, held back a wax-myrtle branch for a second before letting it go; it was up to me to make it to that branch before it slapped back, hit me in the face. And still she moved, around us all these shadows, above us the treetops moving, this big empty sound falling down on us, though Tabitha couldn’t know.
Then she stopped. I came around her, looked at her, into the woods.
Something sat not twenty yards ahead of us, no moonlight through it, no shadows inside it, no movement. Only a black shape, square, no bigger than the butcher shed over to the hunt club.
Benjamin’s shack.
We were here, Unc just that far away. But I didn’t move, couldn’t.
It had to do with what I’d know next about him, about my uncle, the one a fire had blinded, made him move from Mount Pleasant back here through no choice of his own nor mine neither.
I’d been the one to nurse him back as much as my mom’d been. And I’d been here with him every second I could, sat with him through breakfast, lunch, and dinner, helped wash his dishes, burn his trash, fold his clothes.
I’d walked the woods of Hungry Neck with him for more hours than I could count.
And I’d been the one, finally, who’d stood with him beside a dead body at Hungry Neck, and to talk to the next one to end up dead. I was the one carrying a message to him from her: Tell Leland I didn’t do it.
And tell him I loved him, she’d said.
I thought I knew him. But I didn’t.
Now I figured I’d know something about him I didn’t want to know.
Tabitha turned to me, nodded hard toward the shack. She wanted me to call for Unc.
I looked to the shed, tried hard to open my mouth. But nothing happened.
Then lights came on, flooded over us, the world lit with white so white I flinched, ducked to the ground, eyes squinted tight for it all.
“Huger?” Unc called, his voice flat, the word barely a question.
I was crouched on the ground, like I could hide from this light. Or my name.
