The Savage(23)
Meeting in town at Lisa’s, a local watering hole, he’d bought her a drink. Conversation ensued. She lived with her parents on a farm around Crandall, Indiana. Where her father raised a small number of cows and hogs. Farmed feed corn and hay. Her mother was a black Baptist, her father a white Methodist, spiritual and hardworking, each appreciative of the land.
Alex helped his father, who worked for Olin Chemical in Brandenburg, Kentucky, farmed several hundred acres of corn and soy, but he also ran his parents’ minimart in Marengo.
Numbers were exchanged.
The Widow and Alex’s courtship lasted a year. They traded vows at Fountain United Methodist church. Mortgaged the place in which they now sat. Alex’s parents gave the mart to them as a wedding gift. Something neither Dillard nor Gutt ever accepted. They were the seeds that spawned an alternate direction. She and Alex lived simple. Never had a phone or TV, only a radio and the eight-track her father had given her.
She ran the store, sometimes with Alex. Ordering what was needed. Keeping the books straight with part-time help. Dealt with the brothers. Their snide slurs that funneled beneath their breath. She and Alex lived in this way for ten years until he’d gone to cut some fallen timber for Warner Stokes, one of his father’s friends. A leafy-faced man with a pear-shaped build and yellowed chewing-tobacco teeth. He’d stopped by their home. Told he’d seen a hickory tree that’d been blown down after a storm. Said he’d no use for it, that it was Alex’s to keep, use for firewood if he wanted to cut and haul it without help.
“Being a hard wood, it was best for winter fires, lasts a good long while,” the Widow told Van Dorn and Horace. “Alex being as he was, always thinking he needed plenty for the following winter to cut, pile, and let dry till the next summer. Use what he cut from the previous year. The man was always thinking ahead. Figured it was too good to pass up. So he made the early-morning trek, worked on it all day.”
The Widow went silent for a moment. Quit her breaking of fiber lengths. Then came the crack of her voice, as though it were a test of strength to speak. “Thing was, I drove the beat Ford every day to work. It was mine. Alex always drove his Chevy. But he’d not wanted to haul the ricks in his truck as it were newer, less beat-up. Was coming home that evening on Rothrock Mill Road, coming down them gravel drops and curves. Parts of the road had been washed out and ridged from some rainstorms we’d been dealt recently. Police surmised he was tired, the shoes had gotten too damp. Dozing off, he took one of the drops too quick, fishtailed, pressed the brake, slammed into a tree. All that weight in the bed came through the cab. Mashed him six ways to Sunday. Sheriff Elmo Sig later said the brakes had went out.”
Coming up on the wreck that night after closing the mart, road blocked off by the tan cruisers, the white-and-orange ambulance, their strobes of red and blue marbling the surrounding wilderness, the Widow nearly lost it when she saw the bed of her Ford truck. The cab full of lumber.
Seeing him in that morgue, swelled contusions. Purples casting to darker shades like a vegetable finding rot. Bulbous swells of pulp, the Widow told Dorn and Horace, she never seen such a sight. Couldn’t help but wonder if it was Dillard who messed with the brakes. Bled them of fluid, hoping it’d be she that come across her ending that night after work, not his brother.
NOW
The gun jerked Dorn’s wrist. The mallet-wielding man’s left thigh spit like an eruption of sap from a tree with the ooze of fragment, caused the man to shift in surprise as though his leg had been stung by a hornet, and he screamed, “Goddamn son of a bitch!”
Ann’s outline wilted onto the books that’d fallen and piled. Patting at his wound, the mallet wielder focused his view at Van Dorn with rage that heightened the pigment of his face. He’d not noticed Dorn on the floor before. Dorn now looked to the door opening. Then back down at his supplies strewn about the tile. Get out the door, he thought, and to the woods or risk a fight you may not win, supplies you’ll sacrifice to salvage your life, live another day.
On his feet, Dorn was stopped oak stiff by the cane-cutter wielder. Eyes leveled on each other, Dorn offered the opening of his .45 and the man kept his feelers raised, questioned, “What heathen are you, son?”
Van Dorn glanced down at Toby, who appeared put together all wrong by his Maker, his complexion a wad of gashed and battered flesh. Ann lay down beside her spewing blend of a brother. Feeble and slow, she worked her hands together like a puppet’s crossed and knotted strings in an expression of grief and confusion.
Van Dorn stared through the man. Shoot or be swiped by this idolater’s blade, he thought, holding his boot string in his left, shuffling his feet sideways toward the door opening. Keeping the pistol leveled on the man. Heart flicking in his ears. Hands felt weighted, similar to two sponges fully absorbed of liquid. The open door a foot away, Dorn lowered the pistol and ran to the daylight and the front of the home. Leapt over the female, the dead mother. From the corner of his eye he saw a massive blur. Knew it was Red. Heard the buzz saw of fly that swarmed about the sawed hide. Entrails and wasted meat. Landing, he stumbled over the one man he’d shot in the neck. Regained his balance. His boot came off. Twisting, he sat on his ass, slid his foot back into the boot. Behind him came the blade wielder. Knowing his hand was being forced in order to survive, he brought his hands together and cupped the pistol, and an explosion clipped sound. The man’s paunch opened to the size of an apple. A mash of cotton, skin, and muscle sketched the air. His abdomen appeared as though several paintballs had burst in succession. Dropping the blade, he patted the fresh wound, hands pasted with the discharge of his organs.