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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—historicaltreasure. 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 thebathroom 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