Free The Hunt Club by Bret Lott

printed, the letters perfect, and I clicked off the light, let my eyes adjust for a few seconds. The paper was gone now, only Dorcas there, looking at me.
    I nodded, the decision made just like that.
    She took a step away from the window, then crouched, made her way across the backyard to the trees at the fence.
    This was what I’d been waiting for.
    But Mom was in the next room, asleep.
    What would happen when she got up tomorrow morning, found my bed empty? She’d know I was out looking for Unc, and she’d kill me whether I found him or not, but first she’d break down worse than this morning. She’d break, then get royally pissed at me, maybe burn my clothes out in the yard for all I knew, and then there’d be even more hell whenever I came back.
    But it was Unc I was after.
    I went to the closet, dug in my bookbag for some notebook paper, tore out a sheet quiet as I could, then found a pencil at the bottom of the bag.
    School tomorrow. Monday, the day after Thanksgiving vacation. The least of my worries.
    I went to the dresser, wrote as best I could in the dark,
I love you, Mom. But I’m going to Unc and help him out. Don’t worry
. I stopped, wondered what else I could put. That I knew where he was? What?
    But I only wrote,
I love you, Mom
again.
    I threw the quilt back on the bed, tried to straighten it out, and set the paper on the pillow. I pulled out a flannel shirt from the closet, and my Levi’s jacket, slipped on a pair of wool socks and my duck boots, then I was out the window. I dropped to the ground and pulled the window closed.
    It was colder than I’d thought it would be, my breath an empty pale cloud, and I squatted, afraid even that cloud of breath might give me away.
    And I smelled it: the paper mill. A smell, it only occurred to me then, a lot like the smell of that body once we’d come back to it, flies on it, the sun starting to work it over.
    I heard a finger snap at the back fence, and I ran.
    She was crouched behind the row of redtips back there, and had on a jacket, white tennis shoes, and jeans. She lifted a finger to her lips, made the
shh
sign.
    My hands were already freezing, and I rubbed them together, made to blow in them, but then she was up and over the five-footchain-link fence that separated our yard from the house behind us. She hadn’t made a sound.
    I was just to follow her. Just shut up and follow.
    So I climbed the fence and fell flat on my ass on the other side, gave out a grunt I thought you could hear for a mile around, and then I was up and running through the Pinckneys’ backyard, headed for the sidewalk at the foot of their drive where Dorcas now stood, a hand on her hip and waiting.
    I made it to the sidewalk, and Dorcas turned, started away, me expected just to keep up.
    We were headed now down Pennsylvania Drive, toward where it dead-ended at Storie, past that the tracks beneath the Mark Clark. These were houses just like ours, the street just the same.
    We walked, walked like it was all we’d ever done: taken a stroll at one in the morning, and then all the questions started coming to me: How did she know where I lived, if Unc didn’t send her? How could she know which window was mine? How did she get here, and where were we going?
    Then, up at the corner, I saw light on the pavement and against the green weeds across Storie: a car coming.
    Dorcas looped her arm in mine, pulled me close to her. She was a little shorter than me, leaned her head against my shoulder, kept walking.
    The car started around the corner toward us, and Dorcas quick turned me so my back was to the headlights, put her arms around me, brought her face right up next to mine.
    Then she kissed me, full on.
    The car went by us before I could even get my arms around her for my part of this disguise. They didn’t even slow down.
    Her lips were warm, her arms tight around me warm, too, though I knew I couldn’t really feel anything through my jacket.
    Dorcas, kissing me.
    Soon as the car