Born Savages

by Cora Brent

  I cough. “Maybe.”

  I feel like that damn post-it is burning a hole in my back pocket.

  Brock bobs his head. “Just let me know by 6 a.m., okay Oz?”

  “You got it.”

  I try to calm myself while driving the five miles back to my apartment but my heart is hammering. I have the urge to peel rubber and be reckless on the winding country roads. Too many kids ride their bikes around here though.

  When I get home, old man Johnson is out on the sagging front porch with a shotgun in his lap. That’s his usual position so it doesn’t bother me. I throw the truck into park and stalk across the front lawn toward the narrow staircase that leads to the converted living space on the second floor. I start talking to myself without realizing it until I hear my own words.

  “Family matter? What the fuck?”

  Old man Johnson seems startled by my grumbling. He swivels his egg-shaped body around to stare at me. He’s a sad, strange fellow who’s lived in this clapboard eyesore his entire life. He charges a cheap monthly rent and stays out of my face.

  “Evening, Hal,” I say as my foot hits the bottom step.

  Hal Johnson scowls and swivels back around in his chair to face the menace of the empty street. That’s fine because I’m not in the mood for a chat anyway.

  It’s not until I reach the top of the staircase that I realize I have no desire to be inside, brooding and sweating in that empty apartment until I get tired. I hop back down the stairs and take off in the truck, leaving Hal Johnson to stare silently after me.

  I gun the engine once and take off for the hills I left behind a little while ago. I don’t have anywhere specific in mind. I just want to be out there, on the loose.

  By the time I reach a place that looks like it leads somewhere suitably wild and nameless, the sky is growing dark. I grab my pack out of the truck bed before heading into the darkening hills. Maybe I’ll just hang out in the woods all night. I’ve done it before.

  The surroundings are familiar. I’ve been this way at least once. My sole bragging right in life is an uncanny talent for navigation. You could drop me anywhere on earth without a map and I’ll figure out how to get back to where I started.

  After a few minutes of walking my foot knocks into a fallen tree. Abruptly I throw my pack down and sit on the trunk.

  “A man named Oscar Savage.”

  Quiet reigns all around me. Every living thing for a quarter mile radius has halted, breathless, awaiting the next action of this intruder, a man who sits on a hollow log in the coming darkness and stares at nothing.

  Suddenly a battle for survival erupts somewhere in the brush off to my left and a small creature squeals in pain or fear. The nature of the conflict is savage, as wild things so often are.

  Savage.

  It’s a word that implies brutal ferocity.

  It’s also a name.

  But it’s not a name that can ever cross my mind without thinking of her. She’s bound to it as closely as she once was to my heart.

  Five fucking years and I should be able to move on. I should accept that I’m not the same person anymore and it’s for certain she isn’t either. I should learn how to connect with someone else at this point. I should forget.

  Of course I can do none of those things.

  My cell phone reception is shitty this far into the woods. I’ll need to drive back to town in order to make a call. Which I have every intention of doing. Right now.

  Because it’s a family matter.

  And because I used to be Oscar Savage.

  CHAPTER THREE

  REN

  Most people possess at least a few scraps of unique family lore.

  Stories.

  They filter down for several generations if they are interesting and are lost sooner if they are not. Usually they are not. Usually the only people who might raise an eyebrow and care about the dusty skeletons hanging out in the closet are the ones who share blood with either the old corpse or whoever stuffed it in there.

  The Savages are different. Everyone knows everything about us. Since the explosion of the World Wide Web all you need to do is type our last name into the nearest search engine and you can learn more than you ever wanted to.

  You can see that it started in the 1920s.

  Charles and Mary Savage were Hollywood originals. She was a socialite from Minneapolis and he escaped a long line of cattle ranchers in the Nebraska Sand Hills. If they’d just stayed where they were they would have gone on to live quiet, ordinary lives and been long forgotten.

  But they didn’t.

  They landed in Hollywood at a fortunate time and became darlings of the silent film era. Their days of stardom were short-lived, ending with the popularity of sound in motion pictures. Mary had a high, reedy voice that grated like nails and Charles was a low talker with a chronic lisp. So instead they became powerful investors and iconic pillars of the film industry for the rest of their lives. They are widely credited as being among the early founders of the motion picture industry.

  My great-grandparents weren’t happy people. They suffered a turbulent marriage punctuated by infidelity, alcoholism and the birth of three children. Maybe that’s why they never smiled for photographs.

  Charles was hit by a taxi in 1952 while jaywalking. He died in the gutter of Hollywood Boulevard amid a throng of curious onlookers. He might not have minded. Reportedly Charles loved nothing more than a rapt audience.

  Mary on the other hand hung around for more years than most human beings do, long enough to meet her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. My parents dragged us to the nursing home in Pasadena a few times to pay homage. I remember her as a miniature ancient woman who wore a wig of absurd blond ringlets. She yelled all the time, screeching “Get off my stage!” if you walked too close. I was nine when she finally died. A series of reporters came around to talk about her but no one was sad. After all, she was ridiculously old and her mind had been gone for decades.

  My grandfather, Rex, was among the next generation of Savages. His older sisters, Anne and Joan, were more celebrated for their lifetime feud with one another than for their films. They traded husbands and lovers and publicly ridiculed each other, much to the delight of the fledgling tabloid industry.

  Joan inherited her mother’s longevity and is still alive – broke and reclusive and living somewhere off the rocky coast of Oregon. Every once in a while her name will be trending on the search engines when a bored reporter seeks her out for an interview about places long gone and people long dead. Even in the twilight of her life she’s still obsessed with her dead (“That pasty witch was ALWAYS jealous of me!”) older sister.

  Rex Savage, my grandfather, was the golden boy of his era. Tall, dark-haired and powerfully built, he was full of testosterone and charisma. An incorrigible ladies’ man who starred in a long line of pictures with names like Desperado Gunslinger and Cowboys on the Horizon, he was the archetypal Hollywood movie star and Hollywood was more than happy to have him. Sometimes when I catch a glimpse of one of his film stills I can’t help but do a double take because he looks so much like my brother Montgomery, right down to the curled-lip sneer. It’s fucking uncanny.

  Rex met his match in a fiery Irish starlet named Margaret O’Leary. She was his costar in the 1951 hit western Desert Honor. It’s a rather ho-hum movie about a reformed desperado who shoots a bunch of leather-faced bad guys, adopts two orphans and marries the local schoolteacher. It wound up being the only project they ever worked on together but it was enough.

  There was a bad kind of chemistry between the two of them. For a decade they married and fought and split and reconciled over and over, somehow creating two troubled children and a legacy of dysfunction. They had just remarried for the fourth time in 1961 when Margaret was killed in a plane crash during a blizzard in the Sierra Nevada mountains.

  Rex was inconsolable. In fact he kind of pitched off the deep end. I guess it’s possible he would have turned into a blithering joke anyway, b
ut to hear it told, the tragic loss of his wife and the upheaval of his film career had a lot to do with the downward spiral. His later interviews show a baffled old man with tangled nose hair droning on about how in the year 1965 he’d been abducted by aliens while stargazing at the Griffith Observatory.

  Then came a morning when Rex decided it was a good idea wander around his wealthy neighborhood drunk as a frat pledge. He fell into a swimming pool and drowned, wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts and a crucifix.

  It was rather an ignoble end for a leading man. Everyone says so.

  Margaret’s films are the only ones I’ll sit down and watch if I happen to be flipping channels and catch a glimpse of her brilliant red hair in a midcentury Technicolor world. My two sisters won the genetic lottery that gave them the same coloring, although Ava has been dying hers blonde since she was a teenager.

  Not me though. Like my two brothers I inherited the wavy dark hair and near olive skin of Rex Savage.

  Speaking of me, it’s a good thing Rex and Margaret paused their marital wars long enough to produce a daughter, Mina, and a son, August.

  An unauthorized biography written shortly before his death three years ago described August Savage as ‘gloomy and morbidly disturbed’ throughout his childhood. He would collect dead birds from the corners of the family’s decaying Hollywood estate and leave them in various cupboards throughout the home. Supposedly he even stowed some in his pillowcase and slept on them. I have no idea if that’s true or not. Regardless of his strange fetishes, in his day my father had the ruggedly striking Savage profile and he happened to be a decent actor. In the late 1970s he starred in a series of critically acclaimed small budget films that were considered provocative, groundbreaking. In fact he was nominated for an Academy Award for Fist, a harrowing story about a young man who develops a disturbing obsession with his elderly neighbor. It’s the kind of movie you see once and never want to see again because by the time the credits roll you feel vaguely ill. He didn’t win. But it’s an honor to be nominated. Or whatever.

  My father’s career came to a crushing halt in 1984 when a young photographer died of a heroin overdose in his bed. Although there was never enough evidence to charge him with a crime, he was tried in the media. According to their one-sided verdict, the strange, intense actor with a legendary family name had injected the drug into the woman’s veins while she slept. There were even whispers that he ah, abused the dead body afterwards.

  Of all the rumors and bullshit that surrounds our family, that’s the one thing I don’t really believe. My father was far too confused about everyday life to be capable of harming anyone else. He never talked about any of it but the trial-by-media apparently devastated him and he lived like a recluse for a while. He was probably so lonely and vulnerable by his early forties that when a twenty-year-old radiology student encountered him at a local diner she had no trouble sinking her talons into his bewildered flesh and becoming a permanent appendage.

  Here’s where we join the story.

  It would be rather pointless, though maybe therapeutic, to sit here and count all the ways my mother, Lita Cohan Savage, was a heinous bitch. But I have a habit of not thinking about her any more than I have to. She left my father shortly before his sudden death but she and I were on the outs long before that.

  About a year ago I was thumbing through a magazine while I waited for a flu shot and paused at a paragraph describing how Lita Savage, once married to the late August Savage, was remarrying.

  “Lita is presently estranged from her children and they will not be on the guest list.”

  Estranged. It’s always struck me as an odd word. As if one day the parties in question blinked and didn’t recognize one another. The truth is liable to be a bit more ugly and complicated. Like her.

  Lita already had one foot out the door when August lost the crumbling deco-style mansion, among the oldest estates in Hollywood. She demanded something better. She demanded blood from a stone.

  For once he stood up to her and moved us all out to the desert to the only piece of real estate his meager assets were capable of saving.

  My father had always hated California anyway.

  I have to believe that when he towed the lot of us out to the old western film set in the heart of the Arizona outback he had good intentions. He said he wanted to remove his children from the cold scrutiny of stardom and give us a chance to live somewhere we weren’t known, weren’t sneered at.

  But at the time all I knew was that I was sixteen and outraged. It was really a bad plan. Eventually he learned that when you take a bunch of bratty teens out of their comfortable lives and deposited them in a dusty oven, miles from the nearest traffic light, something is bound to go wrong.

  The place was called Atlantis Star but in a sarcastic twist, Monty and I rechristened it Atlantis Slum. It was run down and isolated, a vague whisper of the bustling studio that existed in the 1950s when Rex Savage (pre-alien abduction) filmed a half dozen movies in the area. Rex had been so taken with the backdrop he bought the entire make believe town when it went up for auction a few years later, after the old western film trend was finished.

  These days my brother Spencer is the only one living there, ever since August closed himself in his study and was found dead three days later. An autopsy confirmed cause of death was an untreated rattlesnake bite.

  In case anyone’s wondering, being slowly overtaken by snake venom is a painful, ghastly way to die. There’s no way to know what was going through his mind when he sat there, staring at dark wood paneling, refusing to seek help. About all he had left at that point was the skeleton of Atlantis, and even before he was gone, Spence had pretty much taken over the care of the place, though he’d barely graduated from high school. The rest of us don’t see much reason to set foot within a hundred miles of it.

  Until now, that is.

  Today there is a producer sitting across from me over a pair of wedge salads at the Bellagio. He is smiling. He probably smiles in his sleep.

  “So Loren, how do you feel about returning to Atlantis Star?”

  Gary Vogel is on the well-preserved side of sixty and has flown to Las Vegas just to take me to lunch. It isn’t necessary; I already signed the papers just like I promised Brigitte I would. I get the feeling he’s trying me out. He wants to see how tough it’s going to be to get me to bare my soul. I squeeze a lemon slice into my water glass and avoid an answer.

  “Will you be there when filming begins?” I ask, coyly turning the tables with a question of my own.

  Gary Vogel commands a half dozen of the most popular celebrity reality television shows. To him, this is just another one, a typical project. He hails the waitress for the check and offers me an artificial grin that he must practice ten thousand times a day.

  “No, I’m afraid that’s impossible, Loren” he says smoothly pronouncing my name incorrectly as Lo-REN, like Sofia Loren.

  But I am LAW-ren or just plain Ren. No need to be pretentious. I’m not Brigitte.

  Gary gives me his best charming executive smile. “But my wonderful assistant, Cate Camp, will be there. You’ve talked to Cate. Cate is incredible. Cate is my proverbial right hand. Cate will make sure everything goes off without a hitch.”

  I merely nod at his answer. I decide not to let him know that I’m glad he won’t be around when the cameras start rolling, which they will be doing exactly one week from today.

  I haven’t packed. I don’t know what to bring. Production for this season will last for eight weeks. My sisters are already there. I haven’t talked to Spencer but he’s probably working hard to deal with the intrusion. Monty, like me, is waiting until the last minute.

  How long has it been since we were all in the same place for more than a few hours? Four years? No, five years. Five years since that wonderful and terrible summer when the ground shifted and opened a wide, permanent fissure in my heart. Monty was the first of us to leave, abandoning August’s strange desert utopia.

 
; No. That’s wrong. Someone else left before him.

  Gary Vogel is a busy man. He brusquely thanks me for a productive meeting and regrets that he must reach the airport within an hour to return to Los Angeles for a vague but crucial reason. I get the feeling he just wanted to see me for himself. He wanted to see if I was under control, if the infamous Savage volatility applied to me.

  A little drama will be good for ratings. Too much chaos will be disastrous for the show. Gary has worried himself unnecessarily, at least on my account. I shake his hand and nod mechanically.

  “Thank you for lunch. It was nice to meet you too.”

  I don’t mean it at all.

  But I can do this. I can do it for my brothers and sisters.

  I can be the backbone they sorely need right now.

  If I bend, even slightly, no one will ever see it.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  OZ

  “I don’t want your damn money,” I keep telling them, but the words don’t seem to be ones they understand.

  They just ignore me and carry on about funds being wire transferred at the end of production. The big cheese is a gold plated dick named Gary who forces his long-suffering assistant to call and/or text about every twelve hours to ensure I haven’t fled to Madagascar. Apparently the earth’s ability to rotate on its axis depends upon me showing up for my five minutes of exploitation.

  In our first conversation Gary seemed slightly ruffled that I didn’t know who the fuck he was but he recovered nicely and even stopped calling me ‘Oscar’ when I said it would be healthier for him to take the suggestion.

  “Yeah,” I always answer robotically whenever they call for the guarantee that I will somehow materialize in the desert a hundred miles outside Phoenix the day filming is set to begin.

  For a while they bugged me about flying to L.A. first. They would really much rather have me land among the Arizona greasewood in a Lear jet or something, but screw that. I will drive there on my own time in my own wheels and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.