The Savage Read online

  Two men got on the discarded ATVs. Another opened the abandoned truck’s door, sat in the driver’s seat, the caged humans attached to its rear. The Sheldon girl screamed, “Dorn! Dorn! Come back!” Until an older female’s hand smothered her speech.

  The man with the HK studied her. Walked toward the cage and questioned her. Moments passed with an exchange of words. Then the man walked to his ATV. Engines roared. Others got back into their soil-specked vehicles. Drove down the road slow. Gazing and examining the hillside. Van Dorn worked his eyes open and closed. Trying to place the men’s tattoos as he ran back to where he’d tied his mule.

  * * *

  Van Dorn’s arm ached as he swatted the flies from the bedroom’s doorway. Rot hung in the air like manure spread upon a field to treat the soil. Two bodies of bone lay in the bed. Resting, he told himself. The Widow’s skin appeared ashen and sunken. Eyes no longer soft like her touch, warming him with comfort, but now full with the decomposition of sunken burrows.

  Horace, Dorn’s father, lay thick boned, hair once the color of raven now fine as thread for sewing, his muscles deteriorated beneath his decaying cotton shirt and denim pants. Empty brown beer bottles lined the floor next to the bed. Home brew from the Widow’s brother-in-law.

  Backing up from the room, Van Dorn pulled the heavily grained door closed. Walked back through the old farmhouse with the insignia branded upon those men haunting his mind. A black widow with a red dot in its center. Strobing over and over in his memory. Where had he seen it?

  In the kitchen, sun bleached through the panes of window. Vibrations pulsed through Van Dorn’s spine, arms, and legs. He dropped into a wooden chair. His .30-30 flung upon the table. Hands pressed into his face. He’d killed those men. Their hides roasted brown like a duck’s skin. Who were they? Where had they come from? Why’d they have the females and children caged like livestock being transported to their butchering?

  Where were the fathers, the brothers, the uncles, the men?

  They’d loaded up their dead. Tossed Van Dorn’s deer into the truck with them. As he raised his head from his hands, the thought that he’d ignored for far too long came: How long before he was discovered again?

  Van Dorn remembered his father telling him, “You’re a survivor. A pioneer. You know the ways of the land. You’ll have to search out similar folk. Educate those that have no learning to what you know. Won’t be safe to hole up here forever.”

  Van Dorn’s sockets pained and squeezed in his skull, remembering everything he’d tried to forget but couldn’t: His and Horace’s return to southern Indiana. The squatters. Stopping for gas. Gutt. The Widow. Gunshots. Stains to the slats of floor. Tarp. Digging a deep depression within the earth. His father’s slow unraveling over the years spent with the Widow. The crazed words that fell from his tongue as time passed with a bottle in tow. Saying, “Men will cripple the weak quick as an unexpected winter frost in 1816. Know who’ll survive? Ones that’ve been taught how to nurture and live from the land.”

  Standing, Van Dorn removed the meat from his pouch. Hands quivered, his mind replayed the actions that had been cast upon him without notice. Sketching those caged people’s faces from memory. Worn. Crusted but familiar; the Sheldon girl. He wondered if she’d tried to fight back. Knowing her father would have. He was a hunter, trapper, labored in the blood of life. He was not weak. And Van Dorn wanted to be the same.

  Placing the beet-colored loin on the cutting board. Pulling his blade from its sheath, he parted the dark meat. Cut with the muscle’s grain. As was true with his father, Horace, violent actions came when his hand was forced. If there’d been a test to take a life, he’d have passed it. He thought of how easily the men dropped to the ground. Everything within them evaporated with a single gunshot. They became weightless. Their beings exhausted. Just like when his father and he met the Widow. Even before that. When they’d left Harrison County. Abandoned the working world. Lived on the road, thieving scrap tin, aluminum, steel, and copper from foreclosed homes.

  * * *

  Horace always warned Van Dorn, someday it would come to this. Kill or be killed.

  But it haunted Van Dorn, leaving all those others behind; seeing their lost complexions saddened him. He’d viewed the dismantling of others, but never so close. He told himself he’d no time to free them. He was one against many.

  Van Dorn’s stomach groaned. He couldn’t eat till dark. Fearing someone or something would see the smoke from a fire.

  Running a forearm below his nose, he sponged mucus. Justified his choice of morals. He did what he had to do.

  Grabbing a ceramic bowl from the cabinet, he placed the slices of meat inside. Turned and walked into the dining area, to the basement door on the far side of the room. Opened it, descended the old wooden steps. Outside light opened the darkness from small windows within the four corners overhead. Carved shadows down the rock walls that were lined with plywood shelves and weighted by jars and jars of canned vegetables. Green beans. Peas. Potatoes and carrots. Pickles, sliced to quarters or speared, and corn that’d been cut from the cob. A stain graphed around the rust-speckled freezer that had held dead game. Nourishment that’d been wrapped and stored till it went too long without power. He’d eaten and salvaged what he could, but most of the meat within it had expired.

  For Van Dorn, vegetables served little purpose without meat. He longed for eggs and their thick cholesterol centers. He’d killed his remaining hens when too many weeks had passed without deer, rabbit, or squirrel.

  The smell of mildewed earth and rotted meat rose all around him. He stepped to the wooden box that covered a hole within the floor. Where a whiskey barrel had been lowered into the ground. Gravel lined the outside of it, insulating it with cool. Creating a makeshift fridge built by his father and him.

  Like his father, the Widow had learned him about the old ways. Gardening, hunting, fishing, and trapping. Loading ammo. Dynamite. Sharpening of a blade. Knowing one’s direction by the rising and lowering of the sun. And now it was being used.

  Opening the barrel, he laid the meat inside. Wishing he had enough room to save what had been in the freezer.

  He grabbed a jar of beans, pinkie-sized chunks layered the liquid within. Laying them on top of the wooden lid, he slid a walnut chair from beneath a matching table. Sat down. Glanced at the radio that offered no sound.

  Beneath the table and in the corners, coils of boneless muscle lay. Skin patterns golden brown with black slithering their way toward his booted feet. As he reached down, one of the coils came cold into his palm. Screwed up and around his forearm. Raising it to the tabletop, he let the serpent slither from him and lie facing him. And her memory wrangled within. Droplets of moisture slid from her tight cheeks where eyes the shade of sky smiled. Her hands soft, working the blade, peeling potatoes, shedding their jackets, quartering them into a liquid that steamed. Blue flames heating the pot upon the gas stove. “You’re Van Dorn?” she asked.

  “I am.”

  “Your father, he speaks highly of you and your labors.”

  It was Dorn’s first visit to the Sheldon girl’s home. His father and he had come looking to size up the property for running fence line. Dorn had stepped into the home for a swig of water.

  “Does he, that’s his offering of kindness, I suppose.”

  Dorn was hesitant. Nervous. Shy around a female near his age. But also of beauty.

  She smiled, her teeth were of pearl, lips smooth, and she asked, “And you, how would you speak of your father?”

  “Strong and of great knowledge. A man who fights many demons.”

  “Demons? Awful colorful words, dramatic even.”

  “Not when one’s viewed all the broken pieces of the world of which we’ve traveled.”

  Running a forearm to blot the damp about her forehead, Sheldon shook her head. “You’re a traveler. Not from here. Where all have you seen?”

  “I’s born here. Father took me to the road when my mother abandoned us. Too
k to Kentucky. Tennessee. Ohio. Seen those that’ve been relieved of their worth.”

  “And now you’re gonna help my daddy construct a fence.”

  “What my father told me. Think I could trouble you for a glass of water?”

  Laughing, Sheldon told him, “That’s why you’ve stepped into our home. Not to see and flirt with the daughter. How about iced tea, is that suitable for a traveler such as yourself?”

  Taking to the wonder within her bright eyes, the elegance of her pale pigment, Van Dorn smiled and replied, “Please, it’s of no trouble.”

  Now, cat eyes watched him within the shadowed basement. Black tongue forked, jutting in and out. Van Dorn rubbed a pointer over the scaly head, whispering, “Know what I must do. Leave here. Find those faces I left behind.”

  Van Dorn fell silent, watching the serpent. The others gathered around his feet. He sat waiting for dark. His memory drifting to a time before the silence. A time when he questioned how much longer he could live in an existence of hand to mouth with his father. Scavenging through the rural areas of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Ohio. Where in the wee hours of night they ripped and cut bronzed wiring and piping from the walls and floors of foreclosed homes. Traded the weight for tender at salvage yards.

  THEN

  After more than a year of travel, their frames sketched into the truck’s seat like two skeletons from a discerning past with no future. Abandoned vehicles scattered roadside from town to town. Out of gas. Broke down. Men and women out of work. Out of money. Maps lined the busted dash with Horace and Van Dorn’s routes highlighted. Addresses of houses seized by banks they’d written down from the county sheriff’s bulletin boards in the towns they’d visited.

  Van Dorn longed for a life with kids his own age to fish with. Talk about books and girls. Something more than the wiring of a home or the best price of copper per pound. He ran a hand through the reams of hair that hid his forehead, tickled his upper lip and the rim of his neck, unable to restrain his thoughts from Horace, and he said, “Tired of this bullshit. Wanna go back home.”

  When the economy began to swirl into snuff, Van Dorn was fourteen. He remembered stepping from the Ritalin shouts of children who lined the green vinyl seating of the school bus. Walked the long stretch of gravel to a heat-bleached trailer and the pole barn Horace worked from, a stretch of land they’d resided upon since the boy’s birth.

  Van Dorn’s mother had run off with another man when he was nine on what his father called the chemical path, rumor was she got clasped into a world of trading skin in truck-stop diners to afford her and her new fellow’s next fix. Tap of the vein. Taking a ride down addiction.

  Van Dorn had found his father sunk into the couch that day while lipping a bottle of black-label Evan Williams, two backpacks expanded and laid out on the wooden coffee table, and he questioned, “Where we going?”

  Horace swallowed hard and capped the bottle, knowing that other than the one hundred dollars in his wallet, he was flat broke. Employment had dried up, no one was spending. The furniture restoration and handyman business where he’d strip and restore antique dressers and hutches, remodel a room, build a new deck or rewire a home, had sunk. He was left with nothing but splinters, tools collecting dust, and a mouth to feed. He’d procured an idea from a regular down at the tavern who’d lipped and yammered about homes being built quicker than they could be inhabited. Their worth imploded. Now they were unable to be afforded, the materials that constructed them lay in rot. A person would be better off looting the metallic conductors from the structures and setting the rest to flame. He knew what he could do and how he could do it; the wheels of survival churned ideas in Horace’s mind.

  Planting his palms on his knees, Horace stood up, leveled his singed red eyes on Van Dorn, and said, “Into the wilds of life, my son.”

  “What about school? Our home?”

  Van Dorn sensed his father’s tension as he grabbed one of the packs, handed it to him like an uppercut to the gut.

  “The road will provide your schooling and a place to rest your eyes.”

  And without contemplating consequence for his words, Van Dorn asked, “What if I don’t wanna go?”

  It was the first time his father had laid hands to him. Bringing the calluses of his right palm to his face, telling him, “You have no say in the tutelage I’m demanding of you. You’re going.”

  They left that day with the clothes on their backs, a tent, a gun, some tools, fishing rods, and a few books the father and the boy favored.

  For Whom the Bell Tolls. The Old Man and the Sea. Tobacco Road. Wise Blood. The Sound and the Fury.

  But Van Dorn’s words brought the lurch of guilt for this way of life to his father. He’d questioned Van Dorn’s quietness during their travels. His rolling of the eyes when talking scrap prices. Distant stares at other kids hanging out in the mom-and-pop groceries when gathering provisions. One thing Horace would not show was weakness. To him it meant failure as a provider and a father. He replaced it with anger. Feeling as if he was being tested and ridiculed by Dorn. One day he couldn’t take no more. Coaled the remaining tobacco from his cigarette. Flicked the butt out the window where dark passed warm and rashy as a wool blanket. Took the steering with his left. Launched his right fist into the peak of Van Dorn’s left jaw. “Dammit!” he yelled. The truck swerved off then back onto the road. Pointed out the insect-gut-sprayed windshield. Horace said, “All this here is your home. Your education. Can you not see what I’m learning you?”

  Parting the hair from his eyes, Van Dorn rubbed his cheek. Felt the balm of heat. Held back the moisture that weighted his sight.

  “I seen enough of this home. Of this learning. I want to go back to school, have friends. I want it to be like it once was.”

  Since being on the road, they’d taken shelter amongst the dilapidated houses within the valleys of shunned vehicles on cinder blocks. Where dry-rotted tires hung from limbs and unraked leaves piled to the shade of bourbon and replaced the grass. They’d back down rutted driveways that held no hint of movement, hoping for a few hours of shut-eye. Sometimes they were met by half-mongrel hounds barking, then Horace would shift from reverse to drive and speed away as the mixed breeds gave chase. Other times they’d find a stream, set up a camp where they could bathe and fish. Cat hit at night, while bluegill or bass struck at the break of morning. They’d scale, gut, and then seer the opal meat in a cast-iron pan over an open flame. Fingering and eating the oily meat.

  In Horace’s eyes, he’d educated and provided for Van Dorn the only way he knew. Passing on his skills of how a house was blueprinted, where the wiring and piping ran, and knowing where to begin cutting the bronze-colored metal. Then loading and hauling their wares to a place where they could burn the insulation from the Romex to trade weight for coin. To Horace, these learnings were an apprenticeship for persisting in a world that was becoming less and less kind to those like themselves who were skilled in a trade.

  Slowing the truck as they rounded a lake, Horace noted how a few houses were plotted across what looked to have once been untrespassed acreage, more than likely willed to a family member after kin had died, then sold and sectioned off for new construction. At least that’s what Horace believed.

  “Friends?” Horace questioned. “You got me. What used to be has been banked into lies. Squandered at the price of persons like us, the working. Tell me this, how else we supposed to earn our keep?”

  When money was flowing well, Horace’d splurge on a hotel, buy Van Dorn a book from a grocery, offer a good night of comfort, cable TV, and lamplight to read by. While he swam in a twenty- or thirty-dollar bottle of whiskey and their battery-powered tools charged.

  “Couldn’t we get us jobs somewheres, move back into our trailer?”

  Horace chuckled. “Your mouth plies my ears with ignorance, boy. You know they’s no such foolishness being offered. And we rent our skin for no man.”

  “What about joining up with a militia? Mend with like-minded
people, put our skills to good use?”

  They’d heard the stories when fueling up the Ford and grabbing a local paper. Jobs had become scarce. Even getting part-time work washing down the lot at a McDonald’s was competitive. They’d spoken with families like them who’d become homeless and camped beneath overpasses in cities or within parks. Or joined up with rogue groups of working-class men and women, those who’d set their sights upon anarchy. Plotting to make statements all across the United States against their failed government at the right moment.

  “How we know if we don’t look?”

  They were closer to home than they’d ever been. Had crossed the Ohio River from Kentucky to Indiana two days ago. Paid a visit to the justice center in Corydon. Scribbled down some residences and pitched their tent at the Stage Stop Campgrounds. Mapped out their path. They’d been driving somewhere between Laconia and Elizabeth. Had entered a private area of housing, one road in and the same road out. Maybe this return to familiarity has brought on the boy’s discourse, the father thought as he fought back with his trail-worn wisdom.

  “I’ve taught you better’n that, Van Dorn. I’ve never let you starve nor freeze. And I’m not about to join ranks with a group of martyrs on a pilgrimage to dismantle and shun the powers that be.”

  “No, we’ll just lurk among the streams of decay, take company with human crustaceans.”

  The father hung a right, and Van Dorn imagined Horace stomping the brake, laying a tread of knuckles upside his hard head, but his father had taught him to have a venomous tongue. To argue his point of view with strategy and facts. Hoping he’d grow sharper than he’d ever be. And for this Horace was proud.