The Hunt Club Read online

  Copyright © 1998 by Bret Lott

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Villard Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  VILLARD BOOKS is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lott, Bret.

  The hunt club / Bret Lott.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80481-5

  I. Title.

  PS3562.0784H8 1998

  813′.54—dc21 97-24181

  Random House website address: www.randomhouse.com

  Title page photograph © Paul Mason/Photonica

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Epilogue

  Dedication

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  The sins of some men are obvious,

  reaching the place of judgment ahead of them;

  the sins of others trail behind them.

  —I Timothy, 5:24

  My name is Huger Dillard. You say it YOU-gee, not like it’s spelled. It’s French, I heard.

  I’m fifteen years old, and my mom and dad are divorced, and I have my driver’s permit. I am telling you this because driving figures in to what happened, as does my mom. My dad, too, in a way, because it’s his brother, my Uncle Leland, this all happened to. Him and me both.

  It started with a body, the head of it pretty much gone, the hands skinned.

  We found it the Saturday after Thanksgiving, out to Hungry Neck Hunt Club. Uncle Leland owns the hunt club, which might make him sound important, or rich. But he’s not. The club is just what the family has had in its hands for the last seventy years or so, and is a tract of 2,200 acres, some of it trash land, good for nothing, some of it pretty, set on the Ashepoo. It’s forty miles south of Charleston, just past Jacksonboro. Live oak and pine, dogwood and palmetto and poison ivy and wild grapes and all else. Marsh grass down to the Ashepoo. That’s about it.

  But it’s where Uncle Leland lives, in a single-wide. Unc, I call him. For short.

  And it’s where we found this body.

  The body was between stand 17 and 18, twenty yards back off the road and fifty yards or so up from the Ashepoo. Saturday after Thanksgiving is a big day for deer season, most all the members there. The members: doctors and lawyers and what have you from Charleston, the sorts of people you see on the news for whatever reason each night, or in the paper, all of them getting honored or interviewed for one matter or the other.

  The body was there on the ground, not much of a head left on it for what I figured must have been a couple rounds off a shotgun. Its hands were skinned, too, from the wrists on down, the muscle dark red and glistening, the tendons all white. Two hands like skinned squirrels.

  I wanted to throw up for looking at it. I’ve seen deer skinned and gutted before a million times, done it a million times myself. I’ve seen even the fetus taken out of a doe a time or two. I’ve seen dead things all my life, seen the blood involved. I’ve seen it.

  But this. This.

  Unc stood next to me, behind us and beside us a good dozen or so of these doctors and lawyers, all of them decked out in their clean crisp camo hunter outfits, all of them shaking their heads.

  They had heads left.

  The body, too, had on its own set of crisp camo hunter fatigues, had on a hunter-orange vest.

  And in those hands was a shotgun, over-and-under twelve-gauge. Maybe the same one that did what it did to his head. It lay there in the weeds and grass just before the woods started up, where if he’d been one of the ones we’d dropped off, he would have been down on one knee, or maybe on a camp stool, waiting for Patrick and Reynold to let loose the dogs back on Cemetery Road, just this side of the levee. Then the howling’d start, and a buck might’ve skipped out from across the road, heading back into those woods and toward the deer trails down by the river.

  He’d have watched and waited for that howling, that bust loose in the brush, that deer.

  But this was a dead body.

  And here’s the thing. Here’s the thing:

  A piece of cardboard lay at its feet, one whole side of a toilet-paper box, like you can pick up out back of the Piggly Wiggly. And on the cardboard was written this:

  Here lies the dead son of a bitch

  Charles Middleton Simons, MD,

  killed and manicured by his loving wife.

  Busy hands can be the devil’s workshop as well.

  PS: Leland, can you blame me?

  It was all written in a girly curlicue, a black marker. And here was my uncle’s name, plain as day.

  Nobody’d yet said a thing, none of the dozen or so of us standing at the edge of these woods. It wasn’t even sunup yet, the sky still gray and yellow.

  “Talk to me, Huger,” Unc said, and I felt him put a hand on my shoulder. “What is it?” he said, though I knew he already knew. He’d been the one to tell me to stop the truck.

  But he couldn’t see it. He’d only smelled it, his head quick turning to my left, my window down. I’d been driving, like always him beside me in the cab, in the bed our load of men. There were three truckloads, us letting off a man at each stand. “Stop,” he’d said, too loud. “Stop here,” he’d said.

  “We aren’t even to eighteen yet,” I’d said. “Seventeen’s not but twenty yards—”

  “Stop,” he’d said again, his voice no different. Still too loud.

  Now here we were. And I could smell it, too. Blood smell, something like the metal smell off the deer when we butcher them back to the clubhouse. But sharper. It smelled dark red, and sharp, like metal in your mouth. That sounds crazy, but that’s the words that came to me: dark red, metal.

  “Tell me,” he said, almost a whisper in my ear now, his hand heavy on me. “What is it?”

  He couldn’t see it, because he’s blind.

  I opened my mouth. I wanted to say that the body had no head to speak of. I wanted to say the hands’d been skinned. I wanted to say it had on crisp camo fatigues, and those squirrel hands were holding an over-and-under twelve-gauge. I wanted to say it had on a hunter-orange vest, and that there was a cardboard sign at its feet, right there in the grass just below his newly oiled duck boots.

  And I wanted to ask Unc why his name was on that sign.

  My uncle is blind, and it’s been left to me to be his eyes, my job here at the hunt club. Why I spent every weekend out here with him in his single-wide. Why my learner’s permit figures in here.

  I’d never seen a dead body before. That’s what I wanted to tell him.

  I turned to him, the sky above us, it felt, going a brighter yellow even in the second it took to turn.

  He was looking at me, him a couple inches taller than me. He had on his sunglasses, that Braves cap he wears. He had on the same khaki shirt and pants as always, the same green suspenders.

  And in his free hand was that walking stick he carries everywhere.

 
; I found that stick when I was seven, not but a quarter mile from the trailer. Back when he’d just lost his sight. Back after the fire at his house in Mount Pleasant, in which his wife, my Aunt Sarah, died.

  Back when my dad and mom were together, and we three lived here at Hungry Neck in that single-wide, my dad the proprietor of the hunt club.

  They brought Unc here from the medical university, where he’d been for two months, his house and wife gone.

  He lay in bed for six months in what had been my room, me in a sleeping bag on the couch in the front room. But I didn’t mind. I talked to him each day, too. I told him about where I’d been on Hungry Neck, about the turkey I’d seen back past Baldwin Road or about the dove up from the clear-cut on past Lannear Road. I talked to him. And I read to him: the Hardy Boys, The Chronicles of Narnia, Field & Stream.

  And I brought him things: a jay’s nest once; a single antler, three points; an eagle feather. He took each thing in his hands, felt it.

  Sometimes he smiled, other times he didn’t. His eyes were bandaged, and he said next to nothing.

  But he was what I had: someone who’d listen, while my mom and dad howled at each other out to the kitchen.

  Then came that stick, a stick so straight and perfect I knew it’d been dropped off that hickory only for him. And for me. I brought it to him, and I remember he’d smiled at it, and’d sat up, turned in my bed, and stood.

  “Huger?” Unc said now, his hand still on my shoulder. “You okay?” he whispered.

  “Unc,” I said. I said, “It’s a body.”

  I turned back to it. I tried again to line up words that would give Unc what he couldn’t see.

  This was my job. Nothing I could have figured on when I’d handed him that stick when I was seven.

  I swallowed, looked away from the body, from those hands, but all I did was look at my own, there at the end of my pale, skinny arms.

  I’m only a kid, was what I saw. Fifteen years old. Thin brown hair just like Unc’s, ears too big to the point where I can remember my daddy, before he left us, calling me Wingnut for fun. But though I’m too skinny, have these ears, I can knock shit out of most anybody in the sophomore class. There’s nothing much I’m scared of.

  But now.

  I took in a breath. “It’s a body,” I said again, “and it doesn’t have hardly any head to speak of. And the hands’ve been skinned.”

  His hand was still on my shoulder, but he turned, faced where that smell he’d found came from. He whispered, “Son of a bitch.”

  “And your name’s involved here, too, Unc,” I said.

  He was quiet a moment. Still nobody’d said a thing.

  His hand went tight on my shoulder a second, then relaxed. He said, “It’s Charlie Simons, ain’t it.” Not a question, but a fact.

  I looked at him, saw he had his upper lip between his teeth, biting down hard: what he’ll do.

  He turned then, started off on his own toward the truck, that stick out in front of him, leading him on.

  That was when the dogs started up, way off to the levee, their howling not unlike the sounds of my mom and dad. Just howling in the hopes of turning something up.

  “I got my bag phone in my daypack,” one of the men said from behind me. “I’ll call it in.”

  “Good idea,” somebody said.

  “Charlie Simons,” somebody else said. “God.”

  “Ol’ Charlie Simons,” somebody else said. Then, almost too low to hear, “Head and hands. Not the prettiest job of degloving I’ve seen. The irony here’s pretty thick.”

  Then somebody else whispered loud enough for everybody to hear, “She got that son-of-a-bitch part right.”

  Some of the men gave out a quiet laugh.

  I didn’t say anything, only turned from the body, my eyes down, and started back through the brush for Unc.

  He knew all these men. He knew them because they’ve been a part of the whole thing out here long as he’s been alive: professional men from South of Broad entertaining themselves with the notion they were hunters. When what they did every Saturday all deer season long was just show up here, have breakfast—grits, eggs, bacon, and biscuits all cooked up before dawn by Miss Dinah Gaillard, the black woman who lived five miles out County Road 112, and her deaf-and-dumb daughter, Dorcas, a girl a year older than me—at the clubhouse.

  The kitchen where they cook it all up is just a big old iron stove and a sink set up at one end of the long, low white dining cabin we called the clubhouse, the rest of it picnic tables, screened windows, the rafters all open. Miss Dinah and Dorcas show up around 4:00 A.M. to get things started, and Unc is always in there with them, too, laughing and talking, carrying on when I stumble in, me trying to sleep as late as I can before the members arrive. Over the years he’s learned some sign language he tries to use on Dorcas, who stops from stirring the grits or working the bacon and goes to him, puts her hands in his and slowly spells out a word or some such, the three of them laughing again for whatever it is they’re messing about, me never a part of things, only looking for coffee and heading out to build the campfire.

  Then, after breakfast, Miss Dinah and Dorcas washing things up and readying for fried-chicken lunch, the members’d stand at the fire, bellies full of good food they didn’t have to make, while Unc parceled them out.

  Unc knew all these South-of-Broaders. And knew it was Charles Middleton Simons, M.D.

  I knew them, too, but only by the shiny Range Rovers and Suburbans and Grand Cherokees they drove, each one polished, detailed. I could size up the parking area next to the clubhouse while they were all in there eating, and know if the six-and-a-half-foot-tall ear, nose, and throat doctor was here, or the lawyer with the wireframe aviator glasses and goatee, or the fat radiologist who was always chewing on an unlit black cigar.

  But I didn’t know their names because I just didn’t want to commit to memory the names of adult men who thought piling into the back of a beat-up Luv like mine and then hopping out at a stretch of dirt road was hunting. Why, too, I kept my eyes down. I just didn’t want to look any of them in the eye.

  ——

  He was already at the truck. The Luv didn’t have a tailgate or bumper, and he was leaned against the bed.

  I sat next to him. He held the top of the stick in his lap, the tip on the ground a few feet in front of him. He was moving the stick, making small shapes in the dirt, like he was thinking about writing something but wouldn’t.

  He said, “One of them call sheriff’s office yet?”

  I put my hands on the tops of my legs, moved them back and forth. I said, “Yep.” I waited a second, said, “You smelled it.”

  “You got that right.” He stopped a second with the stick, held it still to the ground.

  “And?” I said, though I knew he didn’t like that, didn’t like anybody making him give up what he didn’t want to give up.

  “And what, boy?” he said. “How’d I smell it? Because I got no choice.” He stood, took a step away toward the woods on the other side of the road.

  “Listen,” he said, his back to me. “Just listen.”

  All I could hear was the dogs, coming closer. His back to me, he could have been anybody out here.

  “Listen,” he said again, and now he turned to me: those sunglasses, the stick. It was my uncle. Nobody else.

  “What I hear is all I got,” he said. “And what I can touch and what I can taste. And—” He stopped. “And all I got is what I can smell.” His shoulders fell, and he took a step toward me. “I can’t see.”

  I said, “Unc, we got to talk.” I paused. “The police are on the way. You got to talk to me.”

  “Listen,” he said one more time, as though I hadn’t yet said word one to him.

  But this time I listened. There were a few squirrels barking. And there were the dogs working their way here. A mourning dove.

  And past all this, beneath it and behind me, was the low sound of the men talking amongst themselves.

&nb
sp; I turned. There they stood, all of them, back in the brush and looking down, a batch of hunter-orange hats at the edge of woods, between us a dirt road and twenty yards of weeds.

  “They’re talking,” Unc said, “about what a son of a bitch Charlie Simons was, because he was. A son of a bitch if there ever was one.” He sat beside me again. He started with the stick in the ground again, too, still like he was almost writing.

  I said, “Somebody made a joke. Said something about the irony is heavy-handed.”

  He let out a breath, and I saw a smile come up on him, though I could tell he didn’t want any part of it. But it came.

  “Charlie was a plastic surgeon,” Unc said. “And shot in the head.” He paused. “Hands skinned.” He took in a breath. “I imagine it was Cleve Ravenel made the joke. Him, or Buddy Rose.” He paused, moved that stick again. “Neither of them cared for that bastard much. But truth is no one give much of a damn for him.” He took in a breath. “And they’re talking about me,” he whispered, his voice gone so low I could hardly hear him for those dogs, still a good couple hundred yards off. “Because there was a time when I would have killed the man, too.”

  I looked at him. Here was my uncle, somebody I thought I knew. Somebody I knew I loved.

  Then I looked back to the men. Now and again one of those hunter-orange caps turned our way. I couldn’t see faces for the high weeds, only those hats turning.

  “Yep,” he said. “They’re watching us.”

  I quick looked at him, amazed for the millionth time at what he could figure out.

  He started moving the stick again, and now, finally, I could see some kind of pattern to what he was doing: he was making a row of spiral shapes in the dirt there, like coils, each one about a foot or so across. He’d made five so far.

  They were strange there on the ground, these shapes, and I wondered what he’d meant with it. But even stranger was the fact he could do it without looking: the coils were shaky but there; no line touched itself as it grew bigger. He knew what he was doing.

  I said, “There was a sign with it. With the body.”

  He stopped with the stick. “No doubt that’s where my name came in.”