by Bret Lott
Unc looked from me to where Miss Dinah stood to me, puzzled. But it wasn’t enough to make him stop what he was working on in his head. He said, “I believe these boys we’re dealing with will play by their own rules. They told Huger last night we have forty-eight hours before they’re going to do whatever it is they’re going to do. I believe you have nothing to worry about.” He paused. “For another thirty-six hours or so, I guess.”
“You guess,” she said. “What happens then?”
Unc took in a breath, said, “We’ll burn that bridge when we get to it.”
He turned, went out onto the porch, and started down the cinder blocks, while I stood there in a shanty flooded with books, just watching him. Then he was off into the woods behind the house, on the trail back to the shed.
“You be careful, child,” Miss Dinah said from behind me, right there at my back. “That man dangerous if he want to be. But you the one he really counting on. You the only one can feel what he feel about what you both stand to lose in all this.” She patted me on the back. “You the one he counting on, but he be the last one to let you know.”
Then for some reason I looked up, above the door, and saw up there about the only other bit of wall not covered over with bookshelves.
Here was their picture of Jesus, but it was a picture like none I’d ever seen before. It wasn’t one of those prefab things, Him here with his robe open and heart bleeding, all wild and sharp colors made to make you wince. This one was just a penciled Jesus, pretty poorly drawn, looking down on us. No smile, no sorrow. Just a man in a robe looking down, watching, like all he had to do was wait and see what each of us chose to do with our lives. Like it was up to us what was going to happen, one way or the other.
It seemed about the truest painting of the man I’d ever seen.
“Benjamin drew that for us,” Miss Dinah said. “Bless his heart.”
“It’s beautiful, ma’am,” was all I could think to say, and I looked at it a moment longer before I stepped outside, started after Unc, already disappeared back inside the woods.
We made it to the Luv, buried there in the high weeds off the road, and once I was actually onto the blacktop, out here in the world again and in my own truck, it seemed that world was watching one more time, could see exactly what we were up to.
Even if I had no idea what we were up to.
“Is this a good idea?” I said. “Just hauling around in the truck so’s anybody could spot us?”
Unc looked straight ahead. “You told me Thigpen said nobody cares where we’re hiding. So we’re going to take him at his word. Testing the waters.” He nodded at the road. “So you just drive on over to the trailer. We need to shower, get some clean clothes on.”
“Unc,” I nearly shouted now, “we need to shower? Unc, there’s no time for this. We got to do something. We got to—”
“Drive,” he snapped. “Now. To the trailer.”
I looked at him a second longer, then jammed it into gear, hit the gas.
“You settle down now, boy, or you and I both will be dead,” he said. He turned to me, put his hand on my arm, gripped it until the pain started in on me too much, and I let my foot off the gas a bit.
“You got to know,” he said, “that unless we keep our heads on straight, we’ll both be dead. Do you understand this?” Still he hadn’t let go my arm, and finally I jerked it free of him.
“Do you understand?” he said again.
I could feel my eyes going hot, the back of my neck.
“Huger?” he said, calm now.
“Yes,” I said.
“We keep our heads on straight longer than they can, and we’ll win this thing.” He looked out his window, then back to me. “You blink, you lose. They already made one mistake. Cleve Ravenel did.”
I was quiet, knew he was waiting for me to ask after what that mistake might be. And of course I bit, but only once I’d let a full minute or so of silence go by.
I said, “What mistake was that?”
He held up his hand, the index finger. “Cleve Ravenel took too long coming back with Yandle and Thigpen Saturday. He comes back, says he got lost. But he’s been a member of the club over thirty years now. Since before I made sergeant on the force. He shoots turkey out here, knows every parcel near well as I do. I know this, so when he says he got lost, just for fun I let this finger drag along his front quarter panel.”
“And you come up with mud.”
He turned to me. He smiled. “You were paying attention. A boy after my own heart. Now if you were really paying attention, Huger, you’ll tell me the rest of what happened.”
I thought about what I saw, then gave the steering wheel a slap. “Then you dragged it on the front quarter panel of Yandle’s cruiser. You wiped it off.”
“And?” he said.
“And he didn’t have any mud. So Cleve Ravenel went somewheres Yandle and Thigpen didn’t.”
“Who gives a damn about fifteen-twenty on the SAT when you figure out something like that?” he said, and put his hand down on his leg.
I didn’t say anything. It wasn’t that funny.
“So Cleve Ravenel slipped somehow,” he went on. “For some reason. He went somewhere he ought not to have gone, because if he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have been late. Mistake one. And hence why I figured to get Missy Dorcas to scour his garbage can. I never met a pompous ass who didn’t keep all proof of his pomposity. And now we know something about CMS and about Charleston Terminal and about goods.”
“And about LD,” I said.
“None other.”
I looked at him, his mouth straight, a thin line.
I said, “You think Pigboy and Fatback are Yandle and Thigpen?”
“Possibility,” he said. “We’ll find out once we hit mile thirteen on County Road 221. A detail out of the electronic trash heap: CR221, thirteen miles to Pigboy roost. Our first stop after we hit the showers. I don’t know where either of them live, Yandle or Thigpen. But we’ll find out.”
“Are goods drugs, you think?”
“Possibility, too. Whatever it is, it’s crated up in popcorn and sent out by container ship. Maersk Line.” He paused. “But why pack it in popcorn? Why crate it up? You want drugs out of here, you do like everybody else: hire a Puerto Rican out of Miami and load up his Pinto, send him on his way up I-95. Charleston Terminal.” He shrugged, slowly turned to me. “So what was this between you and Miss Dinah? What’s this about you losing an idea?”
I looked at him. “I thought nothing got past you.”
“What gave you that idea?”
“Past experience. But apparently a few things do get past you.”
“On occasion.” He shrugged again.
I looked back at the road. Here was coming the intersection with Ferry Road, Hungry Neck and the trailer only a couple minutes from here.
I said, “Then I’m keeping hold of this one. See how long it takes for you to figure this one out.”
There was Mom’s Stanza, parked out front of the trailer.
Shit. Mom.
I let off the gas a second too soon for seeing her car, and Unc said, “What’s wrong?”
“Mom’s here.”
“Dammit to hell,” he whispered, and I pulled up, parked beside the car.
We climbed out, the two of us too slow for the knowledge of what was about to come: Mom flying out the door and right at our throats.
And what were we going to tell her? To let us alone, to trust Unc to whatever plan he had of dealing with people named Pigboy and Fatback who, as far as we could tell, had voided Charles Middleton Simons? Was I supposed to tell her about Thigpen and being chased on the Mark Clark, about two assholes in a pickup truck rolled off the freeway? About a gun pointed inside the cab?
A gun.
I looked over the roof of the Luv at Unc, who was looking at the trailer. Then he leaned back into the cab, pulled his stick from beneath the bench seat, and stood straight again.
“Unc,” I said.
“We got to face her at one point or another,” he said. “You just let me talk.”
“Unc,” I said, and he turned to me. “I left the gun in the shed.” I paused. “I forgot it.”
Then he leaned the stick against the hood, undid the middle button on his shirt. He pulled open the shirt for me, and I could see the white of his T-shirt, and the gun, tucked into his pants.
“Only a few things get past me.” He pulled it out, moved around the hood. He handed the gun to me, even thicker, shinier than last night.
I tucked it in the front of my pants, inside the shirt. Just like Unc had, and buttoned up.
“But not much. Brought it with me when I left you in the shed this morning.” He nodded, moved back to the stick. “Now let’s go face the music.”
I pushed open the door, hollered, “Mom?”
I figured she’d meet us on the porch, but she hadn’t, and now here we were in the front room of the trailer.
No different from any other time I’d ever entered: the place spotless, the shag carpet vacuumed fresh so you could count the number of strokes it took, only a few footprints in it from us walking through it Saturday morning.
Fifteen strokes is how many it took, to be exact. I’d vacuumed enough times.
To the right was the orange-and-brown plaid foldout sofa I slept on under the bay window at the end of the trailer, and the TV on its stand, and Unc’s brown La-Z-Boy, the coffee table with a stack of Field & Streams.
To the left was the kitchen counter. Ours had stools on this side of it, and for a second I thought of all those books, and wondered if Tabitha might loan me some of hers sometime. Past the counter was the kitchen, clean as ever, not even a coffee ring from when I’d poured our two cups Saturday morning.
Everything perfect, like nobody’d been here.
Unc stepped in behind me, called, “Eugenie?”
Nothing.
I started for the kitchen, wanted to head back to the bedrooms, see if maybe she’d fallen asleep or something.
But Unc took hold of my arm, stopped me.
“No,” he whispered. He was moving his head slowly, back and forth, chin up.
He was smelling the air.
I whispered, “What is it?”
He moved past me, let his hand touch the counter between the front room and the kitchen.
“Unc?”
He started for the back of the trailer, to the bedrooms.
“Unc, maybe I ought to go first,” I said, and now I could feel myself starting to sweat, my chest pinching down on me, and I felt too the sudden heft of the gun, and I thought of drawing it, and now I started to smell the air myself.
I was looking for dark red, for metal. But I got nothing.
We were in the hall now, dark for the cheap wood paneling all the walls in here had. He moved slowly, the stick in hand, the other hand to the wall, feeling it, feeling it, and then we were at my mom and dad’s old room, which I’d never slept in, even though there was a bed in there, waiting. It was the foldout bed I slept in. Not there.
We passed it, headed down the hall, maybe for Unc’s room, the one I’d had as a kid. He kept it as clean as the rest of the house, his bed always perfectly made, the clothes in his drawers neatly stacked. On his dresser sat photos of Aunt Sarah and him, and of me, and of Mom, and one of Dad, too. He had that antler I found for him on it, and that jay’s nest, the eagle feather.
But we passed that room as well, the only room left the bathroom at the end of the hall, the door partway open, the light on.
“Mom?” I called out, hoped one last time she might simply be in there, or maybe, I thought, outside, and I stopped, said, “I’m checking outside.”
Unc kept walking, his hand out in front of him, and then he pushed open the door. He paused in the doorway, stepped in.
I held my breath. I bit down on that tear in my cheek, just for the pain of it.
“Huger,” Unc said, my name low and solid. “Come in here.”
I didn’t move, pressed my back against the cheap wood paneling, closed my eyes, and felt that gun I had on me, bigger now.
“Huger,” he said. “I need you.”
I moved in, saw Unc at the sink, his hand up to the mirror on the medicine cabinet above it.
“What does it say?” he said, fingers to the glass.
There, in the mirror, was written in red lipstick:
BE HERE
AT 9:00
OR YOUR
FUCKED
Beneath it was taped a photograph. It was a Polaroid, and it was of my mother, just her face, behind her cheap wood paneling, the makeup from her eyes running in streaks down her cheeks, her mouth covered in silver duct tape.
I only looked at it, then reached past him, took the photo off.
Unc moved his fingers, smearing the message a little, the letters bleeding now.
“What does it say?” he said, and turned to me.
I sat on the toilet, the photo in both hands, looking at it. My mother. And I could see she was looking at me, that it was me she was thinking on when they’d taken it, whoever’d taken it.
Here were the tears, the hot feel of blood to my face, and I looked up, saw Unc, the stick leaned against the wall behind him, and he touched my shoulder.
He whispered, “What does it say?”
“ ‘Be here at nine o’clock or you’re fucked,’ ” I whispered back, the words choked down, tough in my throat, sharp as knives. I whispered, “They took a picture of her.”
He stood up straight, took his hand from my shoulder. He said, “Is she all right?” His lips barely moved, his teeth tight together.
I looked back at the picture. “She’s alive.”
He exploded then, screamed out louder than I’d ever heard before, just shouted, his head back, mouth open wide, and he turned, took the stick in his hands, held it like a club, and smashed the mirror with it.
I sat there, watched, the photo in my hands.
Then he headed into the hallway, ducked into his room, where he started banging away at everything, and in the sounds of glass—he’d hit the windows in there, busted them out—I heard mixed in the sounds of everything on his dresser cleared off, the stick smashing everything. Then he was in the hallway, and I heard him slam along the walls and on into the kitchen, screaming the whole way.
There were no words, only his screams, up from his gut and heart, while I only sat there, in my hands some ugly proof: my mom gone, kidnapped.
He smashed at the cabinets in there, the sound of the stick a hollow thud against the wood, and then I heard plates, heard glasses breaking and things falling. Then came more glass, the heavy shatter of the window above the sink in there, and I stood from the toilet, looked out into the hallway, saw him stagger into the front room, saw him swing at the TV, saw the thing explode with a clap of sound something like thunder.
And then he started in on the bay window, swung and swung and swung, glass exploding out, and now I ran for him down that hall and into the front room, him still swinging, breaking, screaming, and I tackled him into the sofa.
I knocked the wind from him, Unc down, the stick still tight in his hands, the two of us there on the sofa, above us cold air coming in, cold November air at Hungry Neck, while somewhere my mom was being held, her mouth taped over.
Unc’s mouth moved, gasping for air, but I didn’t move off him, only held him, pinned to the sofa. I’d knocked his sunglasses and hat off, saw his marble eyes, the lids, gnarled and flat, moving open and closed, open and closed, like some near-dead deer gutshot, unable to move.
That was when I sat up off him, and finally, finally, he took in a breath, took it in big, those gnarled lids closing while Unc breathed again.
He let go the stick, and it fell to the carpet, then put his hands to his face, covered his eyes, and cried.
It was a strange sound, as strange as the screams he’d made, and came from the same heart and gut. It was a broken sound, too, an old man’s sob, cl
uttered up with more pain than I’d known this far in my life, and I wondered for a second if he wasn’t crying somehow for Aunt Sarah.
And I heard then my own crying, crying for Mom, and I took in a breath, another one, and another, as though it’d been me tackled, the wind knocked out of, and I looked at the picture of Mom in my hand, crumpled now for the fists I’d made running down the hall toward Unc, and I saw in those same eyes, the ones looking at me, that in fact we were all she had. Unc and me.
She needed us.
I said, “You told me this was no field trip. This is the real thing.” I stopped, breathed in and out, looked again at the picture. “You make a mistake, you die. You blink, you lose.” I felt the air down on my shoulders, felt myself shiver. The room was a wreck, the kitchen cupboards emptied, everything on the floor. Smoke rose from the broken TV.
I said, “Don’t blink.” I took in a breath. “We have to hold on.”
He took in quick breaths, tried to catch up with his own breathing. Slowly he sat up, his hands still to his eyes. He whispered, “I didn’t want Eugenie in on this. Nor you. I didn’t want any of this to happen.” He took more quick breaths, wheezed with them in. “None of it,” he whispered.
I turned to him. There was more, I knew, to all this than just a call from Constance Dupree Simons on Wednesday night. There was more. I said, “How long has this been coming?”
He said, “They been on me for almost two years now.”
“Who?”
He took his hand down, those lids still closed. This was my uncle, a blind man, face deformed for a fire he’d been in.
“Delbert Yandle,” he said. “Doug’s daddy. Over to Walterboro. Yandle Development. He’s two-bit, a shitass to boot. But somehow he’s come up with a wad of money.” Unc just sat there, hand in his lap, shirt all pulled out, his right suspender off his shoulder. “Two years,” he said. “Almost.”
“But what does Cleve Ravenel have to do with any of this?” I said. “And Simons? And Miss Constance? And why do they want Mom?”
He turned to me. He opened his eyes: those white marbles. And it seemed he saw me, seemed to me those marbles were the real thing. He took in another breath, this one a big one.
