Wildlife- Reckoning

by Jeff Menapace

  Travis, who was now officially adding that fifth diagonal slash through the four verticals, set the needle aside and looked back at Cooper again.

  Cooper’s face was stone. All traces of the perverse joy that had been now gone. A silent threat.

  Travis shook his head. “I don’t bite the hand that feeds me,” he said.

  “Assuming our hands are fixing to feed you.”

  Travis said nothing. The two stared at one another. Noise from the porch had died some, but was still constant.

  Cooper said: “You stay here, you work.”

  “Of course.”

  “We work hard, but as you seen, we play hard too.” His smile returned. The smile of the man who’d just finished his turn.

  Travis forced a smile of his own. He wondered how it appeared to Cooper.

  “All right then.” Cooper brought his meaty hands together with one powerful clap. “Welcome, son.” He turned and joined the family on the porch. His deep voice echoed something inaudible to Travis, and the family erupted in laughter.

  Travis knew the laughter was at the expense of Harlon and didn’t have to force a smile this time. He picked up the needle and went back to work.

  Chapter 18

  With the exception of a mattress and a lamp with no lampshade on the floor, the room was barren. One window existed, opened now in case a stray breeze decided to show and fight the relentless humidity, if only for a moment.

  It was humid at Hattenworth—no chance in hell the place would ever spring for central air—but Travis never remembered it being this humid in south Florida. Perhaps it was because he was too busy being afraid.

  Now, sweating on a mattress in a shack out in the deepest recesses of the swamp, he was no longer afraid—of anything, really—but had grown as wary as they come. He had to be. It was not only a survival instinct that had been instilled in him at Hattenworth, but a necessary attribute to have with his newly adoptive family. Yes, they’d taken him in, showed him their loyalty by allowing him to seek retribution on Harlon, but afterwards, the celebration, the spontaneous “party” that had ensued at Harlon’s expense—the singing, the laughing, a little twelve-year-old girl carrying on with untamed glee on Harlon’s lap, prodding his new head-to-toe-useless body with his own severed finger?

  Such behavior, family or no, demanded wariness.

  And Travis would be wary. Likely until the day he died, regardless of where he ended up. He also suspected, as he’d surmised earlier, that he might be forever changed, that his thirst for wickedness remained unquenched and had moved beyond vengeance, the prospect of surrogates to quench that need growing in him like an itch. Surrogates acting as reborn effigies of those who’d wronged him until he was ready to embrace the truth that he needed no reason nor justification in inflicting pain on others, other than the mere fact that he enjoyed it.

  “Hell if you ain’t deep in thought.”

  Travis snapped to. His aunt Trudy was standing in the doorway.

  “What’s that?” he said.

  “Looked like you was in a trance or something. I been standing here a good couple of minutes. You was just lying there, staring at the ceiling. I reckon you never blinked once. You got troubles?”

  Travis rolled off the mattress and stood. “I’m all right.”

  Trudy scratched beneath the hole where her eye used to be.

  Travis, who’d seen more than any man should at his age, wondered whether he would ever grow accustomed to her missing eye, its hole. On a corpse, such a sight would deliver no initial shock to him. On a living person who went about carefree as though no such deformity existed, it was often like watching the corpse come to life. It felt like the kind of thing you could never quite get used to.

  “Wanna know how I lost it?” Trudy said.

  Travis dropped his head and looked away, angry that his thoughts had apparently trickled onto his face despite his attempt at indifference.

  A last, feeble attempt at indifference that instantly had him hating himself more than just seconds ago: “Lost what?”

  Trudy pursed her lips. “My shoe. Whatchu think, dummy?”

  Travis lifted his head and looked in her good eye. “How’d you lose it, then?”

  “We was all bored one day, liquored up. A canoe come drifting past our place, and you know if they made it out this far, they just had to be lost.” A wicked little smile appeared on the corner of her mouth. “And they was. Really lost. Yuppie family from Naples—Wayne checked their ID after—thinking it’d be a good idea to rent a canoe and paddle themselves around the swamp for the day.” She started a chuckle that periodically seesawed between laughter. “So these folks, they go and bank their canoe right out front. Husband starts making his way towards the house with this big stupid smile on his face, all friendly like, asking for help while his wife and boy stay in the boat. Well, Wayne and me, we just couldn’t help it; we turn and look at each other and start laughing so hard we damn near piss ourselves.”

  She paused there a minute, head down and to the side, grinning, blissfully lost in recall. She came to a moment later and instantly continued, as though unaware of her time away.

  “So this halfwit, he finally starts to grow a brain, what with us laughing in his face like we were. His smile fades some, and he starts backing away with his hands up, apologizing, saying they didn’t need no help after all. But you know by then it was too late for them. I mean, two idiots like this getting lost our way was like winning the sweepstakes. You don’t give back no winning sweepstakes ticket now, do you?”

  “No,” Travis said.

  “Right. So Wayne goes for the guy, gets him with a knife—but nothing immediate like, just to slow him down; we wanted to get them inside and start the fun, after all—and the wife, she starts screaming, of course. So I go for her, but their little boy—I guess he was around eleven or twelve; no ID on him—he comes up with a BB gun rifle, the little bastard.” She shrugged. “Gotta give him his due, though; little bastard got me smack in the eye, first shot. Hurt like a son of a bitch, I can tell you.”

  Travis found himself frowning without effort. He did not want to hear about anything happening to the boy. His urges for atrocity were growing, needed releasing soon, but he would never release them on a child. And not just because of the torment he suffered as a boy at Hattenworth, but because…well, he wasn’t sure why. Because it felt wrong. It was an odd sort of exception to the relationship between predator and prey.

  Even the most apex predators in the animal kingdom sought the weakest prey. Sharks bumped before they attacked to see whether the prey would fight back. Lions went for the slowest and smallest member of the herd. Such prolific hunters could easily take down bigger prey, but their instinct told them, in a nutshell, why trouble yourself? Take the easier meal. And children certainly fit the bill as the easier meal to indulge his urges.

  Except the blooming desires inside Travis could not be granted such exemptions given to those of a wild animal—nor did he want them. Animals killed for survival, be it food or territory or a host of other pardoned reasons respective to their species. Man, as has been said, was the only animal that killed just to kill.

  Travis wanted to kill just to kill, and it had nothing to do with survival of his species. Therefore, he could never allow himself to stoop to children. To snatch the easier prey for his own amusement. If he did, he would be no better than the guards and teachers who had violated him.

  Perhaps, he mused without joy in the realization, it did have more to do with his time at Hattenworth, after all.

  “Something wrong?” Trudy said, breaking Travis’s daze. His frowning daze.

  Travis felt no need to mince words. “I don’t want to hear about what you did to the boy. If that’s part of your story, please leave it out.”

  Trudy cocked her head to one side and considered him for a moment. “Huh,” was all she said at first. Then: “Would you rather I tell you we took his mom and dad, and then sent him on his way further d
own the swamp? All by his lonesome?”

  Travis said nothing.

  “What if I told you Wayne and I never laid a finger on the boy, if for nothing else but to drag him out of the boat?” she said. “Some could argue I’d have been in the right inflicting a little pain on him after what he done to my eye…but I didn’t.”

  “So you let him live?”

  “We gave him that option.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Darla gets lonesome. It’s hard to meet friends her age out here.”

  “Why not send her to school?”

  Trudy laughed. “You seen my baby girl carry on the way she does. You reckon she’d handle school all right, do you?”

  “So Darla got a friend out of the ordeal, did she?”

  “Well, it’s like they say: When God closes a door, He opens a window.” She then splayed a hand and offered up a helpless little shrug. “Except that boy, he—I guess you could say he kept trying to go out that window. Kept trying to escape. He didn’t wanna be Darla’s friend.”

  Travis held up a hand. “I told you, I don’t wanna hear nothing about what you did to that boy—”

  “And you won’t,” Trudy broke in. “I already told you; with the exception of us dragging him from the boat and then dragging him back home after every time he tried running free, me, Wayne, and Daddy never laid a hand on that boy.”

  It didn’t take long to click. “But Darla did,” Travis said.

  Trudy started to beam. She spoke now like a parent going on about her child’s accolades in the classroom. “Wayne and I come in her bedroom one afternoon. We hadn’t seen her all day and was starting to wonder what was what. Girl like Darla makes her presence known from the moment she wakes.”

  “I noticed.”

  “So, her bedroom door’s shut,” Trudy continued. “And me and Wayne exchange a look before going in. A kinda roll of the eyes and a smile as if saying ‘just what the hell is that girl of ours up to now?’ Wayne was figuring it was a little of the old ‘I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours.’ You know the way kids do. And I wasn’t inclined to disagree. We thought it would be a damn good laugh if we caught them in the act.”

  “But?”

  “But they was having a tea party,” Trudy said matter-of-factly. “Even when we burst in, expecting to catch them with their trousers down, Darla and the boy was sitting at her little table, calm as can be, having a tea party.”

  Travis’s chin retracted. “Really?”

  Trudy started beaming again. “Well, Darla was calm as can be. The boy, he seemed calm, but that was just on account of him being dead.”

  Travis’s mouth fell open a crack. “Huh?”

  Still beaming, Trudy offered up another helpless shrug. “Said she got tired of him trying to run. And there’s me and Wayne standing there in the doorway looking like you are right about now, all stunned like, and you know what she says to us?” Trudy stopped, turned, laughed, turned back, and, fighting more laughter, said: “She points to the boy propped up across from her at that little table of hers and says—bright and cheery as sunshine itself—‘Ain’t he better this way, Mama?’”

  Trudy bent forward at the waist, hands on her knees, and began laughing hysterically, unable to fight it any longer.

  Travis found himself placating her with a smile, though he didn’t know why. The devil you know, perhaps.

  “And your eye?” he eventually said.

  Trudy straightened herself up and waited until the last of her laughter was gone. “Infection set in. Got to be a point where Wayne had no choice but to give me some whiskey, lick his knife and…” She acted out the rest: in goes the knife, a twist, a pop (sound effects on the pop), out comes the eye.

  “Tough woman,” Travis said.

  “I’m a Roy,” she said.

  Travis flashed on his youth, how soft he’d been despite carrying the name himself. And yet still he’d wound up at the same finish line in the end. His path was different, was all.

  And such irony was not lost on Travis. Had he never told the lie about unfairly losing the fight to Noah, thus setting off the horrific chain of events that would see him at Hattenworth, would he not still be back with his family—the infamous Roys—and still be the fearful child he was? It took leaving his family to become the man he was today.

  Two paths: one born, one made; the finish line—a place for those who delight in the suffering of others—happily welcoming both.

  “So now you know how I lost my eye,” she said.

  “Now I know.”

  She looked over her shoulder, out towards the river, and then back at Travis. “Wayne and Daddy are going fishing. Wanted to know if you wanted to come along.”

  “They going now?”

  “You never gone fishing at night?”

  Travis thought of the guard he’d left inverted on the cypress tree, likely in the belly of that gator by now. His head at least.

  “Matter of fact, I have.”

  Chapter 19

  “Daddy, I’m telling you; this is a bad idea. We ain’t never been this far up the river before.”

  Donny Lee took his eyes off the river for a moment and glared back at his son. “I swear to God if you’re not more and more faggot every day, boy.”

  Toby Lee dropped his head. “I ain’t being faggot, Daddy, I’m just saying we ain’t never been this far up the river before. Even if we do get him, it’s gonna be hell dragging him back.”

  Donny Lee, cheek bulging with tobacco, spit a hearty glob over the side of the boat and brought his eyes back on the river, methodically waving his flashlight over the black water before him, desperate to spot the giant red eyes that continued to elude him, had eluded him for what seemed like a lifetime. “You let me worry about that, boy. Heaven forbid we get those panties of yours in more of a bunch.”

  Toby said nothing in return. His father, old and broken from time and labor, was no physical threat to him anymore, yet he didn’t need to be. The psychological abuse he’d wielded on Toby over the years carried far more impact than a fist ever could. It had conditioned Toby like an abused dog that cowers at the mere sight of its brutal owner, despite its capability to take out his throat in a blink.

  “You keep that flashlight going behind us, boy,” Donny said over his shoulder. “Son of a bitch hasn’t avoided my harpoon all these years by being dumb. He sees us coming straight ahead, and he’s diving. Probably come up the back of us and flash a big ugly grin our way as we drift on past, the son of a bitch.” He chortled at his own wit.

  Toby worked the tiller handle of the outboard motor through some tricky vegetation. “It ain’t easy steering and keeping the light going at the same time, Daddy.”

  Donny glanced back at his son again, face a mask of disgust. “How ’bout you just do it anyway before I’m fixing to make me some faggot bait?”

  “I’m telling you, we’re in too deep,” Toby insisted, his fear for their predicament overriding that of his father. “We’re gonna get hung up. Then what?”

  “I’ll tell you ‘then what.’ You get us hung up, and you’ll be getting your dumb ass in the water and cutting us free.”

  Toby threw up his hands. “Dammit, Daddy, this obsession of yours…it don’t make no sense.”

  For a moment, Donny could only stare at his son with an incredulous rage. Then: “What the hell did you just say to me, boy?”

  “Daddy, there’s thousands of big gators out here. You thinking you’re seeing the same one every night just don’t add up.”

  “What don’t add up is you thinking you can talk to me like that without me sticking my harpoon clear up your ass.”

  Toby threw up his hands again. “Fine.”

  Donny spit tobacco again, this time at his son’s feet. “Fuckin-A right it’s fine.”

  A splash in the distance. Donny’s head spun fast enough to wrench it. He waved the flashlight into the dark beyond.

  “The hell is that?” Toby murmured b
ehind him. “Is that—?”

  “A boat,” Donny said.

  “Who the hell else would be crazy enough to be out here?” Toby said.

  “Gimme your light,” Donny said.

  Toby did. Donny flashed both lights on the small boat in the distance. It was a tiny thing, a rowboat, floating unattended on the water. He handed one of the lights back to his son.

  “Get us closer, boy.”

  “Who would be out this far in such a boat?”

  “No idea. Just get us closer.”

  “You’re thinking a gator got them, aren’t you? That’s why you wanna get close. You’re thinking this is like a…like a justification for us being out this far.”

  “Dammit, boy, just get us closer!”

  Again Toby obeyed. They drifted closer, Toby soon killing the engine and paddling the rest of the way so as not to overshoot anything.

  They edged closer. Inched close enough alongside the little boat to get a look inside.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” Donny whispered.

  A little girl lay curled into a fetal ball on the boat’s floor.

  Donny shined the flashlight on her face. Her eyes, impossibly wide with fear, did not even seem to register the light.

  “Hey!” Donny said. “Hey you, girl! You all right?”

  “Of course she ain’t all right, Daddy! Look at her, for God’s sake!”

  Donny turned back to Toby. “Get us closer.”

  The edges of both boats were touching now. Toby shined his light on her. Again the girl didn’t budge, just remained tucked into her protective ball, arms hugging her knees, eyes forever wide and unblinking.

  “We got to get her on board, Daddy. We got to help this little girl.”

  Donny Lee seemed preoccupied with something more immediate. He shined his light onto the hull of the small boat, onto its bow, onto the stern. Everywhere but back on the girl.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Toby asked.

  Donny didn’t reply, only continued his inspection.

  “Oh, for the love—you’re looking for signs of a gator attack, ain’t ya!”