by Bret Lott
Right then Mrs. Quillie Izerd Grimball took in a breath that tangled up and warbled in her throat, a hard intake of air that made her shoulders seize up to her ears, and she fainted, dropped backward into the shadows like a deer shot through the neck.
Right then the Guatemalan nurse let out a screech pure and true, a long, high scrape of animal sound.
Right then Unc flinched there in the seat in front of me, put both hands to the gunwales, and jerked toward the sound; Jessup flinched too, dropped his radio and turned back to the nurse, his arm up to the sound as though it were a fist coming down and him ready to block it.
The nurse put her hands to her ears, backed away and into the house, then turned and disappeared, still screaming.
Everything broken, just like that.
The Cuthberts knelt in the shadows where Mrs. Q had fallen. Jessup bent over and picked up his radio, spoke into it again. The nurse’s scream broke into ragged shards somewhere inside the house, and Jessup went on in after her to try, I figured, to calm her down.
I let go the pole then, felt the lever of it lift in my hands like a slow seesaw until it stopped in the mud. I didn’t care that Unc wanted me to hold the body up. Let it settle into pluff mud again, where somebody’d stashed it thinking it was gone forever, and where soon enough cops and the sheriff and even the game warden’d be out here to fish it right back up.
“Knew what it was when I touched it,” Unc whispered. “Damn.”
I’d seen bodies before. In fact, if you wanted to trace the picture that way, you could say it was the bodies I’d seen that got us here to this one.
I don’t know how to get into it without getting into it, but some things happened back when I was fifteen and a sophomore in high school, things that involved Hungry Neck Hunt Club, 2200 acres of land down past Jacksonboro, a good forty miles down 17 from Charleston. The clientele for the club was and is and will evermore be the South of Broad lawyers and doctors you see on TV and read about in the paper for all their professional opinions and do-good parades. Most all of them fancy themselves hunters, too, part of the whole Bubba persona they cultivate, never mind they went to Duke and Yale and Harvard. Early Saturday mornings of deer season it’s still me and Unc driving around in my Toyota Tundra—the Range Rover we drive in town and to poker night is Unc’s—dropping them off in the woods at deer stands along the road. That’s where they’ll wait in their crisp clean camo outfits, guns at the ready, for some real men we hire—Doug Watkins and Oscar Porcher—to ride through on horseback, their dogs off in the woods and scaring up the deer from where they’re sleeping, so that the good doctors and lawyers can blast away in hopes of landing a buck.
Unc owns the club, just a tract of land the family’s had in its hands for going on a hundred years. Some of it trashland, good for nothing, some of it pretty, set on the Ashepoo. Live oak and pine, dogwood and palmetto and poison ivy and wild grapes and all else. Marsh grass down to the Ashepoo. That was about it.
Until somebody found, and tried to keep a secret, what amounted to a diamond mine down there: a tiny little island on the property that turned out to be a significant—and very illegally lucrative—historical treasure. I know this sounds like some NatGeo special or the History Channel or whatnot, but it’s true. And that’s when people started turning up dead on the property, Unc the one framed for it.
Long story short: this wasn’t the first body I’d seen. Longer story even shorter: I killed one of the sons of bitches tried to make it seem Unc was a murderer. Shot the fucker dead the same second he shot me.
I’ve seen bodies.
But the problem with seeing them, and especially with the way I have, is that people want you to go to therapy for it, when all I’d wanted was to talk with Tabitha, my then-girlfriend and now Stanford postdoc. She’d been there with me when I shot that bastard. As had Unc, and Mom, and even Miss Dinah Galliard, Tabitha’s mom. They all went on to deal with what’d happened in the predictable way, even Unc showing up for his shrink sessions twice a week the first few months.
But I wouldn’t do it. I had my own way to handle what I’d done, and knew it would work. Even with that whole herd urging me to carry on to a paid stranger in some carpeted office about how killing a man made me feel, I wouldn’t do it.
Instead, all I did the rest of high school was to spend every Saturday and Sunday I could out to Hungry Neck sitting in the cab of my beat-up ’72 Chevy LUV pickup, alone or with Tabitha out on that land I’d loved so much my whole life. The land I’d grown up on before my parents split and my mom moved us to Marie Street in North Charleston and into the shadow of the Mark Clark Expressway.
Mom wanted me home. She loved me, longed for me to show up whole soon as I could, and tried to make it happen by cooking for me what I wanted, mowing for me what little lawn we had out back, letting me stay up late to play video games out in the front room of the house, where she’d look at me with long stares she thought I couldn’t see out the corner of my eye. She made sure I knew when my appointments were with the shrink, left little Post-it notes on the bathroom mirror and on the fridge and on the steering wheel of the Chevy LUV. And when I blew them all off, she’d bitch at me for a minute or so, and I’d see her with her teeth clenched at me, her head shaking slow. And then she’d cry, and I knew what harm I was doing to her. I knew, because she loved me.
But Hungry Neck was where I did my therapy, me sitting in my truck and looking out onto the wide cold blue of the Ashepoo, and the spartina and cordgrass and salt-marsh hay, the all of it a green I couldn’t name, mixed down in it reds and browns and a color like bone.
I got through it. I’m not going to lie: I could have done a better, maybe quicker job of it if I’d listened to everyone who had an opinion about how I was supposed to deal with killing someone. Eventually I stopped sitting bolt upright in my bed four and five nights a week to see the ceiling fan turning above me, me screaming about how it was a shovel coming down hard for my throat. I got over it.
But here it was again, all of it coming right back at me: another body. Me barking at people and angry for it, and this pressure in my chest and on it at the same time—what I had no choice but to understand was flat-out plain old cold and ugly fear. Fear here one more time, like a piece of shit I thought I’d scraped off the heel of my shoe, only to climb in the cab of my truck and still smell it, find the heel of the other covered with even more, and ground into the floorboard.
We waited. The nurse’s shrieks had died down now, Jessup in there with her and probably talking to her. There was still no sign of ol’ Dupont anywhere, and the thought occurred to me he might’ve gone on and had a heart attack and died himself, what with all that screaming going on inside his house.
And still no sign of Mom.
Mrs. Q had come out of her faint only a few seconds after she’d fallen, sat up with the help of both Cuthberts, her looking quick from one to the other like she’d never seen them before. Then she shivered, looked straight out at me standing here in the boat, and struggled up, stood. She didn’t say a word as the Cuthberts touched her, talked to her, tried to coax her to let Priscilla walk her on back home—Grange wouldn’t be leaving this adventure, no way—but it was obvious she wasn’t budging, this violation of the sacred ground of Landgrave Hall so egregious, and Unc and me the agents of its debasement. She wasn’t going anywhere.
And still we waited, no one talking at all out here, not Unc to me, or the Cuthberts to Mrs. Q or each other. The only sound was the creep of the tide on its way, filling in the marsh inch by inch with its quiet wet clicks and pops, the calm of it a kind of empty reverence suddenly upon us: here was a dead body, and here was the natural world without a pause over it.
Maybe Mom wouldn’t even come out here, I was thinking. Maybe—lucky for her—this would be the night she’d finally given us up to ourselves, and the stupidity of Unc’s big idea to learn how to golf.
Then, slowly, Unc took hold of the gunwales with both hands, sat up straight, and
stood, all of it before I’d even heard the pop of a single pebble under the tires of whatever vehicle it was pulling up out front of the Dupont house. And now, even from here on the water, pushed off the edge of the world and out onto this finger creek, I could hear the crunch of gravel from the drive that Unc’d already taken in, the sound sudden and quiet, followed by the slam shut of one door, then another.
Unc turned from me to face the house, as though he’d be able to make out who it was coming up out of the dark, and I caught the jittered-up shards of a flashlight beam in the trees and on the ground, closer now and closer, until finally the Cuthberts turned and Mrs. Q too, stepped aside like a curtain parting, as though whatever first responders it was coming up on this all—Hanahan Police, County Sheriff, maybe even those Department of Natural Resources boys already—were the stars of some screwed-up game show.
But just before that flashlight beam made it around the corner of the house and blew full bore into my eyes—because that’s what happened—Unc whispered, “I don’t know who this is,” the words astonished at themselves, pinned down by the surprise of what he didn’t know, and whoever it was coming in.
Because he always knew what was going on. He knew. He’d know from the crunch of the gravel the sort of cruiser it was out there, whether it was one of those Dodge Chargers the Hanahan police drove or the heavy Crown Vics the sheriff’s office still used or the big Chevy Silverado pickups the DNR tooled around in. And if not from the sound of the tires on gravel, then he’d know from the slam shut of those doors exactly who it was.
But not this time.
The flashlight beam busted into my eyes, and I put a hand up. I should’ve known better than to be looking right where they’d have to be.
“Command Master Chief Petty Officer Stanhope” boomed out deep from behind the light. “Master-at-arms, U.S. Navy.”
“You got to be kidding me,” Unc let out hard. He didn’t move there in the front of the boat, the flashlight beam no challenge to him. “The Shore Patrol?”
“Master-at-arms, sir,” the voice boomed out again, the last word a broad and flat ahhhms: he wasn’t from around here. “I am placing you under arrest. Do not move.”
I took my hand down, squinted toward the voice, and the flashlight beam fell away.
There were two of them, moving toward us: the one with the flashlight, his other hand at the holster on his hip; beside him a man holding what looked from here for all the world like an M4, the short barrel pointed down, the butt against his biceps. The one with the flashlight—Stanhope—was white, the other one black, and they were both big, over six foot, both in digital camo BDUs and billed caps. But the fatigues weren’t that desert brown and beige, I could see in the porch light. From here they looked almost blue and black and gray.
They stopped, the flashlight down, Stanhope’s hand still at his hip, the M4 down but ready. They’d passed the Cuthberts and Mrs. Q, the three of them backed away and against the low brick fence, their eyes open wide. Mrs. Q had a hand at her throat holding tight the neck of her sweater, Grange Cuthbert with his hands at his sides, Priscilla leaning into him.
What the hell was a master-at-arms?
“On what charge?” Unc said, and I could hear the steel in his jaw, the set of his teeth and bright tough edge of his voice that signaled this was a load of shit he wasn’t about to be putting up with, and whoever was shoveling it was about to get his ass kicked. It was a sound I’d heard only a few times—one of which was when we were about to be killed out on an island at Hungry Neck, just before it was me who’d done the killing—and I wondered for an instant if either of these two sailors had a clue what they were up against.
But they had the guns, and they were the Navy. And of course I knew what this was about: two infrared illuminators on us from across the marsh. At the Naval Weapons Station.
“Leland Osborne Dillard and Huger Simpson Dillard, you were observed trespassing on property owned by the United States Navy. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and—”
“What in the hell!” Unc roared out. “We got the body of a dead girl here in this godforsaken muck and you come over here and treat us like we’re a couple terrorists just busted out the Navy brig—”
“Trespassing?” I said out loud, me too stunned at the all of this—how’d they know who we were, us a half mile away across marsh when they’d seen us, and us in the backyard of someone else’s house?—to even understand what he was talking about. All I’d done was see them over there in the tract, me with my own night-vision goggles on. How was that trespassing?
“If you want these—” I started, and bent down, reached for the book bag at my feet. If it was the goggles they were after—these things some commander had sweated over losing at poker, and that nobody anywhere was supposed to have, goggles valuable enough and unlawful enough to dispatch sailors with guns to get them back—then they could have them, because there was a body here, a dead woman who needed to get out of here and be taken wherever she was going to be taken.
It was the woman I was thinking of. Just give them the goggles and maybe they’d let go this stupid idea that even looking over there was trespassing.
I bent to the bag, but before I’d even touched it or started in to finish my sentence—then take the damned things!—I heard “Freeze!” boom out even deeper.
I looked up, saw Stanhope with his gun out of the holster and on me, that M4 barrel staring right at me, the second sailor’s head cocked to the sight on it.
“Ahms up, hands behind your head,” Stanhope said. “Both of you. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be held against you. You have the right to an attorney—”
And heard from behind me, out on the creek and just a few yards off, a voice: “Major Tyler, Department of Natural Resources here. Y’all need to calm down a little bit.”
The words were even and solid, a deep surprise inside all this surprise of trespassing and guns drawn, and before I could turn around two things happened at once: first came a sudden and huge sweep of bright light—the searchlight this Major Tyler must’ve had on his boat—across the back of a white stucco cottage, and across camo BDUs of sailors with their guns up, and across Grange and Priscilla Cuthbert kneeling now to the once-more-fainted Mrs. Q, the whole crew squinting for that light; and next came the cold hard ratchet of a shotgun pumped: Major Tyler geared up and ready to go.
“Let’s all of us,” the major said, his words somehow even calmer now, “just put our toys away and square up what’s going on here.”
“Snuck up on me, Alton,” Unc said, him turned back toward me but still standing, Tyler’s flood full on his face and those sunglasses. “You DNR boys going to have fun with this one.”
“What’s this I heard about a body?” the major said, and I made to turn and see who this man was Unc seemed to know, and how he’d pulled in so quiet even Unc hadn’t caught it. Of course he’d have switched to an electric outboard before he ever entered the creek for how shallow it was, but he had to be crowded in for how narrow it was back here.
But before I even made it around to him, I saw her.
She was right here next to our boat, a pale gray sheen just beneath the surface, like some ghost moored beside us. The pluff mud we’d roiled up had settled for how long we’d been waiting, the water between her and the surface clear, the mud on her washed away even more, her lit like all the rest of us with the floodlight from this DNR boat behind us.
I could see the cleft between her legs, and her breasts. I could see those two points of her shoulders, her arms and legs anchored, fading off beneath her.
And I could see now her face, unaided by the goggles: a grimace of teeth, raw pink flesh, the smeared place where her eyes should have been. All of it only a couple inches beneath the surface.
From somewhere off to my left and a thousand miles away, Stanhope called out “Stand down!” like he was on the bow of a battleship, the whole U.S. Navy waiting for word o
nly from him. Somewhere to my right and just as far away I heard Major Alton Tyler break open the shotgun, then the smallest scratch of sound: him drawing out the two shells in the barrel.
Then, like a further curse on whoever this woman had been, here came up her shoulder and onto her neck a big blue crab, right there under the water. It paused a moment just below her chin before it reached a tentative claw up, delicately snipped at the ragged flesh of her jaw, and snipped again.
“Well now,” the major said off to my left, the words quiet. “Well, well, well.”
I closed my eyes, sat down on the seat here at the transom of the jon boat. Then the push pole, still leaned against the gunwale, gave way, and I heard it slide slowly down the length of the boat, drop into the water.
And for a moment I wished somehow I could be just like Unc: blind, disburdened of the visible world.
Major Tyler got on his radio, and I heard that solid voice call in an officer in boat, another in vehicle. He paused, then told the dispatcher to get hold of the dive team.
The single word “Rescue?” cracked out of the speaker.
He was quiet a second, said, “No. Recovery.”
I still had my eyes closed.
“We’re here on a trespassing charge,” Stanhope called out. “If there’s a body involved, we need to get my commanding officer to—”
“Your jurisdiction as regards civilians not on U.S. Navy property don’t even exist, comrade,” Tyler said. I heard him step forward on his boat, move toward us, felt the smallest rock of the jon boat for that movement in his own.
“Well put, Alton!” Unc said loud, on the words a kind of tight glee. “And we wasn’t over on the base. Period.”
“You were observed,” Stanhope started up, and Unc cut in, “We never set foot—”
And in the midst of the bitchfest the two of them started up, I heard suddenly down closer than I’d imagined he might be, me still here at the transom and still with my eyes closed, Tyler’s voice yet again, quiet and calm: “Huger, you going to be all right. But you need to move so I can help.”