by Bret Lott
My mom, behind me, shivered too, us here and almost dead. Us, here.
“Y’all got to move sometime,” Thigpen shouted now. “You got to move sometime, might as well be now.” He put his boots to the horse, and the horse moved toward us again, now ten feet off, and I knew he could hear my heart pounding.
“But them two was out of the ordinary, them not squealing on me,” he said, and pulled hard on the cigar. He was close enough now to where I could see his eyes and nose when the tip flared, there above us, silhouetted by the night behind and around him, the pale light off that moon above us all. He brought down the cigar, let out the smoke. “Most of them go squealing away. Kind of like the sound a woman’ll make when you’re poking her good.” He put the cigar back up. “Now, ain’t that right, Leland?”
Unc still trembled, and Mom trembled, and my heart banged loud enough to be heard a mile away, and the horse brought down his head, held it low a moment: Jeb smelled us.
“Just like that sound a woman makes when you’re poking her good, and she’s wailing like it’s hurting her too much but there ain’t a chance in hell she wants you to stop.” He pulled on the cigar again, took it out. He put his hands to the pommel, leaned forward, the leather creaking.
Jeb shook his head.
“Maybe ol’ Constance used to give out that squeal I was hoping for, Leland, back when you was poking her for sport.” He settled himself back into the saddle. “Or maybe,” he said, and gave a short laugh, “that’s the kind of squeal Eugenie give out one night a long long time ago.”
Unc was breathing hard now, Mom still on the edge of whimpering, and now she pushed herself into me even closer than before, and I felt her chin on my shoulder, heard her breaths quick in and out, and felt the heat of her breath, too, right there at my ear.
She whispered, “Huger, no.”
They were next to nothing, words maybe I didn’t really hear.
“Hey, Huger!” Thigpen shouted now, “Huger, you know-it-all shit, I’ll wager I know something you don’t!”
“No, Huger, no,” Mom whispered.
Unc stopped breathing, stopped trembling. He reached with his hand up to my hand on his shoulder. It was cold, that hand.
But I was watching Thigpen, there in the dark.
Something was happening.
“Huger,” Thigpen said, no longer shouting. He gave Jeb a small kick, and he came even closer, Jeb’s front hooves almost close enough to touch.
“Huger Dillard,” he said, even quieter now, “this here news I’m going to let you in on is what you call dead-man talk. Words just between us, not meant for nobody else.” He paused. “Dead-man talk. You tell, you’re dead.” He chuckled again, stopped the horse. “But I guess that point is moot. You’re dead any way you cut it.” He stopped the horse, and I could hear in the quiet him draw in on the cigar, let it out.
He said, “Ain’t you ever wondered why your auntie burned herself alive, and why your daddy hauled ass out of Dodge not too long after?”
Here was Jeb’s head again, down at the ground. I couldn’t see Thigpen anymore for how close he was. Only Jeb’s hooves, his head, looking at us.
And now it was me trembling, me breathing hard, me falling deeper into this hole under a log, this hole of my life, because there was something happening here, Unc with a cold hand on mine, Mom pressed into me and whispering words I wasn’t sure were words at all, maybe dreams of words circling me, circling me like that buzzard’d circled the body of Charles Middleton Simons, M.D., good riddance to bad rubbish, that dead body leading me finally here to solve a problem I’d not wanted to solve my entire life: why my daddy left me and Mom and Unc here at Hungry Neck. Added now was the news my Aunt Sarah killed herself, the burning of Unc’s house never explained to me, a mystery neither my mom nor Unc ever thought to make clear to me. Only that she’d died, Unc injured for life.
She killed herself, my Sarah, Unc’d said at that house in Mount Pleasant. Their home.
It’s my own greed made her do it, he’d said. My own.
My mom and dad, howling at each other out to the kitchen.
Leland, Eugenie.
And me.
Something I’d known before I even knew. But something I never wanted to know.
“Huger,” Thigpen said, nearly in a whisper. Jeb’s head shot up, and I couldn’t see him at all anymore, just his legs, four stalks in the darkness, a darkness closing around me, closing and closing as tight around my heart as what I knew, finally, was coming next.
What was happening, and had already happened.
Who I was. No news at all.
“Huger, if your momma’s at all like most every fuck I ever had, the night Leland give it to her she squealed like a rabbit in a trap.”
“Huger,” Mom whispered again, then cried, air out of her like knives into my back, my neck.
“Imagine that, Huger: your momma and your uncle fucking to beat the band, making what turned out to be you, you little shit. A love child. Kind of makes you think twice on that word bastard now, don’t it?”
Unc clutched my hand in his.
The world went tighter, the hole I could see out of, this thin slip of night, going smaller and smaller.
“Huger Dillard,” Thigpen said. “Bastard child of Eugenie and her husband’s brother, Leland Dillard.”
What I’d known, and never knew.
I broke my hand free of Unc’s, pushed at him and pushed over him and to that hole closing down over me now, before me only the legs of this horse, and then the horse reared, and I was out of that hole, my own legs kicking against Unc behind me, and I could taste my heart pounding in my throat, the source of all the dark red metal on earth in my throat and pounding, and the horse reared higher, whinnied, and now I was standing, above me this horse, Tommy Thigpen falling back in the saddle, startled, one hand with the reins, the other with the shotgun, and I saw his eyes as clear as any day, saw him looking down at me, saw the cigar fall from his lips, saw that mouth turn into a smile, all this while the horse reared up, all of this in the dark, all of this surrounded by trees and stars and this night, and I jumped at him, grabbed his arm, the one Patrick’d shot, and pulled at him, pulled at him, because I wanted to kill him.
He screamed out when I pulled that arm, lost his balance a moment while the horse came down for the first time, and he dropped the shotgun.
“Huger!” Mom cried out from behind me, and even in this instant of all things happening I didn’t recognize the word as meaning anything I could know.
And the horse reared again, this time higher, and I held hard Thigpen’s arm, pulled at him, pulled at him, while he still tried to hold on to the saddle, and I could feel my feet off the ground, me hanging on to only that arm, him hanging on to the pommel and trying to stay on, the horse turning and turning, and then I reached high as I could, and punched his arm, punched it again and again, felt the bone through the flesh of his arm, felt the wet cloth of the jacket, felt this all, and heard, too, his own scream, a low-pitched growl, and I heard only then, too, the sound I made: my mouth was open wide, screaming out of me all the air my lungs could hold.
Finally he pulled that arm free of me, and I fell to the ground, my feet gone from beneath me, and I was on my back, Jeb reared up above me, above him those stars, and then he came down, Thigpen now with a hand to the inside of his coat and fumbling, Jeb’s hooves an inch from my legs, and here was the glint of moonlight off the steel of another gun, him leaning toward me, his good arm raised, the one I pulled slack at his side like a man’s arm hanging from a pickup window: dead, hanging.
He brought the gun up, the horse still scared, jangled up and dancing, aware of his hooves too close to me, Thigpen jostled and trying to get a bead.
It didn’t matter. The gun, these stars, the ground beneath me.
Huger Dillard. Bastard son of a blind uncle and a mother who figured she could run from whatever truth of her life the trailer at Hungry Neck reminded her of every day.
&n
bsp; Me. The truth of what I reminded her of every day.
Me. Nobody.
“Go ahead,” I said up to Thigpen, and I meant it.
“My pleasure,” Thigpen said, and smiled again, the gun out at me hard and straight.
“Yah!” Unc shouted from the other side of him, and I heard a hard slap, saw Jeb rear up again, Thigpen lose his balance again, then Jeb charge off and away.
“Yah!” Unc shouted again there in the dark, his head turned to the sound of hoofbeats away from us, and I turned, saw Thigpen in his saddle, facing us, the gun up, the dead arm still slack at his side, the reins given up for him bent on killing us rather than gain control of the horse.
He was aiming at Unc.
And Unc had to know this, had to know Thigpen would go first for him, no matter the horse was at a full gallop away from us, and no matter Unc was blind.
But Unc only stood there, hands to his hips, like he was waiting to get hit. Like there was nothing left for him but this.
He was my father.
I stood and rushed him, tackled him flat out and heard the pistol fire, heard the split of sound the bullet made into the log, heard another shot and another, me rolling with Unc and rolling in the brush of this clearing.
Then came a hard and heavy chunk of sound, sharp and cold, with it and inside it a cry out of Thigpen, a shriek of pain, and I looked up, saw the horse already swallowed by the woods, saw, too, the live-oak branch he must’ve passed under, that sharp piece of sound Thigpen slamming into it, turned in his saddle and firing on us.
I lay back down, still holding Unc, him and me both breathing hard. All I could hear now was a horse galloping away from us.
I pushed him away, pushed him, heard him whisper, “Huger,” and then I was on my knees, looking back where Jeb’s sounds grew fainter and fainter.
Only then did I feel the wet on my face, feel the tears coming out of me and streaming now, my breaths too quick in and out, and I knew I was crying, and that I needed to kill this man, Tommy Thigpen, and that I had to get away from Unc and away from Mom.
Unc was beside me, breathing hard. He took my arm, whispered, “We have to go. We have to get Eugenie and go.”
I shook him off, swallowed down a breath and turned, stepped away from him.
He looked for me, his head weaving like it did when he wasn’t sure what might happen next, or who it was coming near to him.
Here were those white marble eyes, small pieces of moonlight in his face and in the dark.
Who was he?
He put his hand up, whispered, “Huger?”
What did this word father mean?
The horse’s gallop was gone now, the night sounds back: treetops moving in the wind up there.
But then, beneath that sound, came Mom’s crying, and I looked to the log, saw she hadn’t come out.
Unc turned to the sound, too, looked back to me. He said, “You got to get her, Huger. We got to go.” He took in a breath, let it out. “I’m sorry, Huger.”
“You get her,” I said, and took another step back.
“Huger, we have to—”
“You get her!” I shouted. “You get her!” and I took another step away.
Unc stood there a moment, that hand out to me, the air between us filled with the muffled cries of my mother, and then that hand dropped, and he turned, made his way toward the log, felt along the trunk a few feet, then squatted, reached in.
“Come on, Eugenie,” he whispered. “It’ll be all right, girl. Come on.”
I turned from them, felt my jaw tight, felt the wet on my face, my heart still pounding but that pounding now a hollow sound, nothing in me, and I looked up, saw shimmer in my tears the thin stars up there, that moon, saw it dance in a way I had no control over. Just dancing, shimmering.
“He’ll be back,” Unc whispered to Mom. “Just give me your hand, Eugenie. Give me your hand.”
Still she cried, a sound as soft as the wind in these trees, but sharp enough to cut through them in the same moment. My mom, crying, and I turned, my eyes to the sky, searching.
Here was Polaris, dancing.
I shivered, shivered hard and deep, shoulders to legs, through me some cold current, and I turned, walked toward where Unc knelt beside the log, his hand down inside, the sound of Mom’s crying up from beneath it.
Unc looked up at me.
I said, “We have to go,” and though I’d tried to hold it in, tried to make my words sound like they had some authority to them, they came out broken.
That was when she crawled out, quick breaths in and in, took Unc’s hand, struggled up, and stood.
She wiped at her eyes with the backs of her hands, still crying. “I’m sorry, Huger,” she managed, her words more broken than mine. She took a step toward me, and I could see her face crumpled up in the dark, her two arms out to me, her wanting to hold me.
I stepped away, turned from her, with my boot pushed through the weeds, toed at them. Then my foot hit it: the shotgun.
I leaned over, picked it up, cold in my hand, but nothing. There was no weight to it. Only that cold steel of the barrel.
I took in a deep breath, tried hard to settle myself and the tremble in my throat. I said, “This way,” and looked back up at the North Star.
And here was her hand taking up mine, the hand of a woman who’d kept truth from me my entire life, the hand of a woman who called herself my mother. And I took it, through no choice of my own, only that there was a man with a gun on horseback, bent on killing us.
Next came Unc’s hand at the small of my back, and I felt him loop his fingers around my belt again. The man who’d kept the same truth from me my whole life.
I started off, running.
Mom wasn’t whimpering any longer, and Unc wasn’t pushing. It was me, leading, and running, holding tight her hand, Unc right there behind me and holding on, right there.
I didn’t ask him where we were going, because I knew it was best never to ask him or Mom anything ever again, seeing as how they would lie to me on it, too scared to tell the truth, however ugly it might be. The truth for them was me, I knew: this kid they’d made, this kid who’d thought it was his own life he was living.
And now I started to thinking on the fact maybe my father, that man I’d always thought of as my father, the one who’d left once Unc’d moved in to lick his wounds, hadn’t done any wrong. Maybe he’d known all along who this kid was in his house. Maybe he’d known all along his wife’d cheated on him, so that the day his brother came hobbling back to Hungry Neck to start on healing the wounds inflicted by a woman who’d finally dealt with the truth of her husband’s fucking his brother’s wife, maybe that was the day my father’d finally made the decision to go: here, in his own trailer, was his wife and her lover, his own brother.
Maybe this man I’d always thought of as my father deserved still to be thought of as my father, because he’d looked at the truth, taken it in, dealt with it.
I didn’t want her hand in mine, didn’t want it there as we splashed through a low spot, didn’t want her here beside me as we made it over another fallen tree, didn’t want her holding on through more wild blackberry, the dry sticks sharp and snagging our clothes, the shotgun in my hand still nothing. I didn’t want her here.
And I didn’t want Unc holding on from behind, because he was a liar, too, scared of the truth, scared of telling me what I was: his bastard son.
Unc. Even the name was a lie.
We came through the blackberry thicket, ducked beneath another low live-oak branch, and then the ground changed, rose up at a sharp incline before us, and I saw past and above it the tops of trees on the other side.
The railroad track bed.
We were on the other side of it from where we’d been yesterday, looking at Cleve Ravenel’s tire tracks, trying to figure where they’d gone once they disappeared.
He’d gone over the track bed, of course. Then down to this parcel of land on Hungry Neck, and now I knew where we were
, my bearings turning and falling into line, and all of it hit me: Trestle Road was on the other side of the track bed, and we could make our way from there to Levee and to Lannear, and back to the trailer.
Two and a half miles.
“What is it?” Unc whispered, and I heard him behind me take a deep breath in through his nose, smelling.
“The track bed,” I said. Mom bent over, took in breaths, but kept her hand in mine.
I let it go.
“Now we know where we are,” Unc whispered, his hand still on my belt. He paused, breathed hard a couple times. “Let’s go on up.”
We made it to the top, a good thirty feet up, and here we were, on the flat track, rails all gone. Just this strange piece of ground in the middle of the woods, no trees, no bushes. Only gravel, stretching away to either side of us.
To the left the track bed led off into woods, the bed a straight line shrouded by trees on either side and finally disappearing in the black.
I looked to the right. There a few yards away stood Mom, breathing hard, hands to her knees again. She didn’t look up at me, only breathed.
And not fifty yards past her was where the track bed ended at the bluff on the bank of the Ashepoo, the view from here like a window away from my life.
The bluff, where I’d ridden my bike when I was little, back when I’d believed myself to be somebody else. Somebody I wasn’t, and’d never been. The Ashepoo, where I’d stop, look both ways up and down the river bending away from me on both sides, the trees right up to this side of the river like giant men on horseback watching over all the marsh.
The bluff, where just yesterday Unc and I’d been, me somebody else.
Dead-man talk, Thigpen’d called it, and I knew that was me, the dead man. Dead to who I thought I’d been, and dead to who I knew I was: Unc’s son, all along.
“Huger!” Unc whispered hard, and pulled at me, that hand on my belt. “Run!”
I heard next the sound Unc’d already heard, the distant crash through brush back to my left, where now Thigpen and the horse rose up from the woods maybe a hundred yards away. Here they were, the dark figure of that horse mounting the incline, on it the slumped figure of Thigpen, still with an arm out, that gun pointed toward us, and they were coming at us.
