The Savage

by Frank Bill

  Something itched within Dorn. An uneasiness that said he’d not seen the last of Bill.

  Dorn’d wondered about Bill’s wife. Where was she in all of this filth and barbaric humanizing? Always attired in a floral apron. Scented of homemade cherry cobbler, flour-dusted hands, she’d offer Horace coffee and Dorn sweet tea when they came to help Bill. He’d not seen, let alone heard mention of her from the Pentecost. Only his girls, appearing untamed and without speech, as though their cords’d been severed or removed until the snakes broke their skin. Of all the fence, roof, rafter, and floor Horace and Dorn had helped Bill work and repair, of his maddening appearances and ways, Dorn’d never caught a glimpse of the wooden boxes. Of what was kept inside them. Secrets, Van Dorn thought, they were in abundance within the rural areas of life. Hidden in dank cellars, unfinished basements, closets, between mattresses and boxed springs, flooring, studded walls, in coffee cans buried within one’s foundation, and in the recesses of people’s minds.

  Dorn and August came upon a patch of clearing. The moon made the field of clover and wildflower glow. Walking out in the open without camouflage brought on thoughts of alarm. The paranoia of wandering eyes from the edges of the dark, and Van Dorn wondered about coyotes. How they came in packs. Several’d run a deer from brush while another waited to attack. Then they took turns circling and nipping until the prey was wounded. Couldn’t fend nor protect. That’s when the coyotes came all at once. Feasted till nothing remained but the heated carcass.

  “Think they’s vampires out here?”

  The words of a child, Dorn thought. Ignorant. “No such thing,” Van Dorn said. “Is fiction, folklore from the eighteenth century of the Balkans.”

  “I don’t know. They seem awful real at this point.”

  “True, they’s people who want blood. Not for drinking and living for hundreds of years. What you speak of is make-believe. Out here only thing one needs to fear is the trespass of other humans.”

  “Never seen nothing like what happened back there. How’d you do that without getting bit? It’s like you were controlling them, like a video game.”

  Weeds crunched and broke with the weight of their footfalls, coming on like a locomotive storming down the rails of track. Dorn thought August spoke with a much younger mind than he appeared to have, childlike and slow.

  With a familiar tone, Van Dorn told August, “Wish I knew. Something I can do, I’ve no explanation.”

  “Know what I wish, wish things was like they once was.”

  He sounded like Dorn when he was fourteen. Dorn told August, “Things can never be like they was.”

  “I just don’t understand what has happened.”

  The next words that fell from Dorn’s mouth were that of his father and the Widow but also his own. They’d been fostered into his understanding over the years. Preached like a sermon by a preacher at Sunday worship. He told August, “History, or so my father always told, is doomed to repetition. Persons can only be walked upon for so long. My father and me traveled the states. Lived by thieving the weight of metal from foreclosed homes. Saw what happened to those living beyond their means and those who lived below any means. Never thought much of what my father was showing me then. Was too damn young. But now I see he was teaching me of a future. How man thinks he’s building something new. When all he’s doing is creating waste. Leaving a trail or history of failures or irreverence. And the working pay for it. Our fathers and mothers and when we’s old enough to pay for it, they won’t be nothing left. That’s why what has happened, happened. Why people petitioned their states to secede the union, rioted, the dollar fell, too much unpaid debt of others. Wasn’t no more money to fund the juice.”

  Van Dorn’s face kindled.

  August kept his words silent. Rolling this wisdom around in his laggard brain before asking,

  “Juice?”

  “Power, of the people and what kept campfire light in your home. Leasts that’s how my father worded it.”

  “What’d your father do, other than teach you thieving?”

  “He was a man of all trades. Used to do carpentry work. Could build or fix damn near anything. He learned me of most what he know’d. How about yours?”

  “Mom was a secretary for an insurance place. Dad, he run the insurance place. Was a good dad to me and my sisters, though Mother complained of his attention to other females till the power disappeared and that crazy-for-Jesus man came. Took us and—”

  August went quiet with those last words, as did Dorn.

  When they entered the darkness of trees on the other side, Dorn noticed the quiver in August and asked, “You can’t be cold, damn near eighty degrees or better.”

  “My … my pills. Ain’t had them in a long while. I get the jitters. Mind gets foggy.”

  “Kinda pills?”

  “For my head. I’m what my father called a dull state of mind. Things rectangle rather than circle, nothing flows like it should.”

  Nestled into the hillside, Dorn spotted a squared structure. Walking toward it, his pistol drawn, he saw it was a small trailer. They walked past shapes of a couch out in the weeds with metal chairs. The trailer’s door had been ripped from its hinges. The windows appeared split. Wooden steps strung to its opening. Inside, moonlight glowed from the outside. The metal structure reeked of things turned old, musty, and corroded. Pictures turned sideways. A bed in back with springs thorning through and cotton slobbering out like entrails. Crickets chirped, ants marched along walls, and spiders held their netting for them all. What appeared to be animal bones lay on the kitchen floor. Dorn and August spooked a nest of birds that went wild with sound. Caused their hearts to trade shock for beats.

  Out back of the trailer sat a wooden shed. Opening the doors, with the peek of moonlight jousting down between the limbs and leaves of tree, Dorn made out shapes within, inhaled the smells of lubrication and fuel. An oxidized wheelbarrow and tiller sat side by side. In a corner, strands of hay lay spread about the floor. Upon the splintered walls hung a hammer, screwdrivers, hacksaw, rake, several shovels, and an axe. Dorn looked to August. “Seems abandoned. Let’s settle upon the hay for bedding. Sleep. Daylight can’t be far.”

  Rest came like plunging into a warm void with the sound of quiet. Stinking and warm, the panting hound rested between Dorn and August, until Dorn woke from dreams of having his wrists bound. Of gunfire. Knives. The pulpy and bulbous facade of Bill chanting a sermon, dancing with snakes in one hand and a Bible in the other. His daughters with their eyes rolled into gum balls. Bodies writhing and jutting while speaking in tongues.

  But it wasn’t the hound and his roadkill breath that woke Dorn so much as the poke of a bored-out barrel to the side of his jaw. Eyes twitched to the view of a familiar female, whose father had been a friend to Horace, a man whose funeral Dorn, the Widow, and Horace had attended; he’d seen this female, but with her now were two strange men training guns upon him and August. Towering over the two men, Dorn staggered up with the worn retention about his limbs from being woken. August sat, hugged the mongrel and his stink into his bony knees. Fear cast about his face. Dorn’s mind streamlined with what to do to these people who trained a gun upon them. Reach with his right, fake them, get their vision upon a hand that wasn’t doing the action, and when they didn’t see it coming, he’d show these men his left, which wielded a pistol.

  Dorn started to reach behind his back for that pistol. The one man who’d pencil-sized holes through his ears speared the barrel of an AR-15 into Dorn’s chest. Shook his head and said, “No need to get tested ’fore we even get acquainted.”

  Dorn positioned his left hand to jab the expanded-lobed man’s jaw just as his grandfather Claude had taught him to do on a military bag strung from a basement rafter. The other man, a stubbed brute with a cutoff 135 Auto T-shirt and a spongy face, went from fingering his stubble to eyeing the hound, which he then reached and patted, its tongue lapping at his hand with familiarity. He bubbled his hick words to Van Dorn: “Punch �
��em and I punch ye back, boy.”

  Dorn relaxed his left. Studied the old man who held the AR-15 on him. Skin was loose and mangy with faded ink about his arms. Smiling; his teeth were a decaying corn-oil tint with the ring of memory.

  Each man donned military pants. Wore skinning knives and holstered pistols while clutching the black metal of automatic weapons, except for the female, who was no longer blonde, she was cresol-headed and she held a Remington 870 Express Tactical pump-action 12-gauge and said, “Either you’re one lucky stud or you hold some skill for the land and how to survive about it.”

  Confused, Dorn wiped the crust of sleep from his eyes and said, “Can’t say I follow.”

  The two men chuckled and the female said, “Been eyeing you since you crossed our hunting dogs who was fresh on the scent of the wild boar.”

  Knowing his feelings of unease were correct, of watching eyes, Dorn took on a wisp of anger and said, “Been watchin’ me? Why’d you let that crazed Pentecost enslave me?”

  The man in the 135 Auto T-shirt quit rubbing the hound’s head, clasped his hand into a fist, shook it, and said, “Remove the hostile from your tongue ’fore I beat you into surrender, it’s our way, how we work.”

  Dorn wrinkled his eyes and said, “Work?”

  The female said, “Same as the government we once paid taxes to. You know, like letting criminals buy guns, kill, and traffic them so they can track the guns while the bodies pile up, hope to net a bigger bust. It’s our test of natural selection. You survived it. Anyone escape Pentecost Bill and his harem of daughters that loot families, trade they skin to Cotto Ramos, has some skill for survival.” She motioned to the man with the holes through his ears. “This is Poe.” And it came to Dorn where he’d seen the man. The bartender from the Leavenworth Tavern when he and his father sat with Bellmont McGill. The female gave reference to the stubbed man. “He’s Wolf Cookie Mike. You can call me—”

  And Van Dorn cut her off. Said, “Scar, Scar McGill. Me, my father, and the Widow met you when offering respects at your father’s funeral.”

  “One question has gone unanswered. Who the shit might you be?”

  “Van Dorn Riesing.”

  Scar chewed on Dorn’s name. Squinted her view as though his name held a deeper meaning that he was unaware of and told him, “You’d be the one whose father shacked up with the Widow.”

  “Horace, my father, yes.”

  Looking down on August, Scar said to him, “And you’re the skin that’s left of those that have been traded.”

  Dorn questioned Scar, “What is it that you know of this trading?”

  “What the Pentecost does. Working his way through the rural areas and even some on the outskirts of other counties. Studying homes. Neighborhoods. Killing the fathers. Taking the wives and children. Trading with Cotto for time.”

  “Time?”

  “Cotto’s taking territory, he’s a gang leader. A captain, it’s how gangs work. The son of a Guatemalan commando type. But he needs leverage from those who know the counties. The land, the people, and its ways.”

  “That don’t make sense.”

  “It’s what we know. Cotto holds the Pentecost’s wife hostage, along with others, in order to get his bidding done. And it keeps him from the daughters. Each human he brings is payment, buys more time for Bill and the image that he’ll get her back and his girls won’t be taken, whored out. It’s the part of how Cotto is administering vengeance upon the land. Upon the people.”

  “Vengeance for what?”

  “For the murder of his father, Manny. He worked with my father, supplying dogs for fighting when needed at the Donnybrook and other places in what my father called the hound round.”

  “That don’t make sense. None of these people killed his father.”

  Hair black as a rotted avocado, pulled tight to a leathery baseball complexion, Scar told him, “It was a working-class type that killed Manny, and now all who held faith in my father, who followed the Donnybrook, whether they’re black, yellow, white, or red, if they live here, they’ll pay for his father’s life with their own fathers’ lives.”

  Dorn’s nerves eased, listening to the intel from Scar and the evil that trespassed.

  “Only thing he don’t get, man who killed his father is the same that fed mine to rabid hound dogs.” Scar’s arms held lean tissue, veins protruded from biceps and forearms beneath the weight of the firearm within her grip. “Cotto is taking children, the boys, uses the drugs he can no longer sell to dope them up, get them hooked, train them to be soldiers, which ain’t much more than giving them a gun, showing them how to shoot it and load it, keep ’em fucked up, and the mothers who birthed them he enslaves, possibly for whoring or maybe they’re already dead.”

  Van Dorn nodded, his hand reached at the hound, worked between its ears. Rubbing its head.

  “We have word of where he lays his head. He has his horde of men from the south. Men who’ve lived amongst us for some time illegally. Brought here by our government. By a man they ran drugs for in the CIA. They stashed their dope. Stockpiled it. Broke it down for selling. Now Cotto’s plan involves territory and blood, lots of blood.”

  Dorn thought of the Sheldon girl. Her mother and the others with their complexions of ruin. Eyes stamped by the death of their husbands and fathers. Maybe she led Cotto to the Widow’s in order to spare her life. Dorn could forgive her for that and he told Scar, “I seen these mothers, daughters, and sons caged up on a flatbed. Starved of hope. And the men that enslaved them. I killed three of ’em.”

  “Where are these victims of tyrant?”

  “Couldn’t save them. They was more men coming. I’d no choice but to flee. They tracked me, attacked my home. I burned it with them in it. But that’s part of why I’m out here. The images have marred and haunted me ever since. I’m in search of others like myself. Survivors. To regroup and find this horde of men. Want to free a girl known as Sheldon, free her and the others.”

  Scar laughed and asked, “What makes this girl so special that you’d venture into the wild for her?”

  “I knew her and her family. She’s like me. Was raised in the old ways. Understands the land. How to live from it. And I believe no person deserves to be caged and treated ill.”

  “A girlfriend,” Scar teased.

  Van Dorn felt the pulse of red kindle his dirt-smudged cheeks and said, “Never thought of it in such a way. Regardless of definition, I aim to free her and the others.”

  Poe and Wolf Cookie pursed their lips. Nodded their heads. Scar smirked, cleared her throat. Said, “And then what?”

  “Haven’t thought that far. Maybe rebuild what’s been squandered?”

  “Well, we got a jaunt before getting back to camp, been out hunting, scouring for intel. You fall in with us, but don’t question our actions.”

  Believing there was a bond to be formed, Dorn offered a hand to August, helped him to standing. But he didn’t know how much credence he could lay within any of them just yet. All trust had to be earned.

  Following Scar, Poe, Mike, and the hound through the woods, taking more hills and flat land. Making passage above broke-down trailers, furniture gutted and thrown out into the dirt that passed as yards. Vehicles lay abandoned on back roads. Vinyl, brick, and wood-sided homes sat devoid of presence. After they had walked more than two hours, the hint of something charred lingered in the air. With each footstep, the smell grew thicker until the reek banded everyone’s inhale with woodsmoke and something similar to meat, only it was not the loin of animal. Camouflaged by weeds and trees, Dorn, August, the hound, Scar, and her men kneeled, viewing a house offset from a yard where two men, pale and thin, were barbed to cedar posts. Several worn truck tires had been dropped over their hides. On the ground sat a pit of flaming lumber. A piece of rusted iron that glowed orange on one end, used to sear and bubble one of the men. Foam dribbled from the branded man’s mangled lips. He looked barely alive. Favored the other man who was tactile and jerking. Coughing up
words. “Motherfucker, I kill you. Hear me, I kill you, you lay that heat to him again!”

  A steel pan was lifted over the branded man’s head of wool strands by a third man whose frame looked combed by a steel rake. Skin carved and nicked, indented by bruise. He’d a bandana of black with dirty white skulls all about his head. Stood shirtless, sweating and laughing as he turned the pan upside down. Drained a thick ooze of motor oil over the man. Said, “Where’s your nest of nourishment? Ain’t your baby brother suffered enough?”

  Wiggling and jerking, the man’s mouth frothed with rage. His complexion appeared almost rubbery and slick. From the house, two more men joined, flaking and peeling with the wear of being rotted and unbathed, grabbing their nether regions and pig snorting.

  One held a small blue propane cylinder, its brass wand flamed orange and blue as he stood in front of the vinyl-sided home, with a roof of ribbed tin and a large covered porch. Placing the torch on the ground, he ripped pieces of a shirt, wrapped them around a thick piece of tree limb about arm’s length. Laid it on the ground. Wrapped another limb with more shirt strips. Then dipped the clothed ends into a bucket of used tractor oil.

  The man who’d poured the oil told the tactile and jerking man, “Last time I’m asking, Lucas, your family’s ’bout tuh get smoked, then wrung of dignity. The food, where you keep it.”

  A gob of lung butter darted from Lucas’s mouth. Juiced warm over his torturer’s face as he mustered language. “I … look like I … got a stash of food, youuuu … fuck? I’s no more than bone and skin.”

  Wiping the phlegm from his face, the man told Lucas, “Keep on spitting lies. Have it your way.” Then he turned to the torch wielder and nodded. Kneeling, the man grabbed the propane canister in one hand. Picked up one of the pieces of lumber. Lit its oil-soaked cotton end. Walked up the porch steps, tossed it into the home. Curtains and carpet ignited.