The Savage(4)

With a matte black HK33 assault rifle draped across his front, one man studied the brain and bone fragmented upon the pavement. Blood thick and drying from the midday heat. The man shook his head. Motioned to the other men who walked the road with hand signals, no words. Some with heads burred. Others with oily tresses. Inked-up arms wielding AK-47s, some pointed, others surveyed. Van Dorn knew what they were doing, looking for the one who’d slaughtered their own like an Old West showdown from the films he’d watched with his father.

Pale Rider. High Plains Drifter. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The Outlaw Josey Wales.

The men picked up their dead. Flung them into the bed of a rusted Chevy as though they were sacks of feed. Then they dragged the deer, hefted it up onto the pile of bodies.

The one man with the HK33 stood out. He wore an ink of thorns around his sand-stubbled head. Several teardrops fell down his cheek. Mossy-bearded. Arms covered in smears of blanched ink and wolf spiders upon each hand. Studying the hillside, he listened for something more than silence. He and two others walked toward the mess of leaves along the road’s edge. Looked back to where the deer had lain. Pointed. Motioned index and middle fingers like an upside-down peace sign into his left palm, as if legs walking up the hill, then lifted his right hand into the air and circled his index overhead.

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.