The Savage(24)

Rolling to his feet, Van Dorn limped through the knee-high grass, kept his foot semi-stiff to not lose his boot again. Lungs flamed like glass being shaped in a kiln. Muscles ached. Worry was knowing he’d abandoned his ammunition, compass, and rifle. The .30-30 was an heirloom from his grandfather to his father and then to him. Now it was a relic to the lost and doomed.

Crossing over Rothrock Mill Road, reading the sun, he was headed northwest and was now unsure where he’d go, what he’d do.

Darting into the woods for shelter, placing distance between the house of horrors and himself, he saw the images replay and erupt in his mind, over and over with the sounds of pistol fire and bodies falling.

Wanting to break down, fall apart, blinking his eyes, Dorn felt a blistering pulse in his frontal lobe. He came to a mess of fallen hickory. Worked his way over the leaves, through the limbs, and sat as though in a makeshift deer or turkey blind, a form of camouflage. Fear and anxiety scourged him.

Fool, he told himself. His father’s words. He could hear them now. If any of those men survive, they’ll hunt you down and end you.

The pistol lay in his lap. Hands raised to his face. The shoestring was wrapped around his digits, rubbed against his skin. His body held a dampness, congealed with the odor of being unbathed. Quaking and twitching, Van Dorn wanted to omit the killing, the murdering of the savage and nomadic in order to endure and persist. The violence splashed images within his brain. Words came vehement and unflinching. With only a pistol, a blade strapped to his hip, he couldn’t navigate back to the Widow’s, not that there was anything worth going back for. What he had to do was continue forward. Find shelter. Rest. Decide later if he’d seek out the Sheldon girl, the others who’d been taken, and try to understand the purpose of those who hunted and enslaved the women and children.

Anger bit hard within Van Dorn. He reflected on his leaving the Widow’s as he had. Burning the shelter. Food. Accommodation. He could’ve stayed. Fought. But why? Organizing his actions, if he’d not done as he did, they could’ve murdered him or enslaved him just as they had the Sheldon girl. He wondered if maybe she was forced to lead them to the Widow’s, her family possibly threatened to be murdered like the men he’d watched die. Hold it together, he told himself. No time to be weak. Let everything unravel. Not after all you’ve endured thus far.

Smudging the salty tears from his face. Lowering his hands. Sliding his foot from the boot, Dorn threaded the lace through the eyelets of worn leather. Slipped his foot back in. Tied it. Checked his pockets, found several wooden blue-tip matches from the night before. A handful of unspent .45 cartridges for the pistol. Two clips on his belt. Toby and Ann had not taken them. Their ignorance of guns was as moronic as his was for not retrieving his own supplies, he imagined. Seemed they knew only of blades and how to part the hides of souls and eat them. What a grisly existence, Van Dorn thought. One part Old West, two parts rural apocalypse.

The cadence within his chest had quieted. Only to speed back up when the bark of hounds traveled through the forest around him. Swiveling his head left, he listened. Then swiveled to the right. The barks, some thick baying, others low, muffled, and throaty, sounded as though there were three, maybe four dogs. Van Dorn stood. Rooted through the blind of leaves and limbs. Studied his direction. The barks were coming from behind him. Feral, he imagined. He mashed over the leafed earth. Barks came in groans that pitched and bounced similar to that of an old engine, churning and chugging, the distance being lessened.

Dorn sped up his jaunt, anticipating the tick of enamel at his heels, knowing the damage a pack of canine could tread upon a person. Or so he was once told.





THEN

She’d wanted something more than Horace could offer, that bond of tenderness, not just warmth of companion. Something she once held with Alex. Something Van Dorn’s father never recognized since Dorn’s mother had run out on them.

Living with the Widow for more than three years, Van Dorn was now seventeen. And with all the numbers that’d fallen from the calendar, Horace and the Widow never held words of degradation, scalding each other with put-downs. The Widow would grow silent after hinting to Horace about that next step, of becoming more than what they were. More than offering a hand to her around her place and the land after she’d given him and Dorn a new life. Human emotion toward another was there, but not the commitment of vows; it wasn’t in him.

On those days or evenings when Horace turned her ideas away, of running off to Tennessee to be married, she’d retreat. Want time to herself. Held silence outside in the wooden swing held up by links of rusted chain, where she’d glide back and forth with the Maker’s, telling them to Go, just. Fucking. Go! Letting Horace and Van Dorn embark on their solitude elsewhere.

Traveling with Horace to the Leavenworth Tavern for a drink, Dorn would sit and they’d talk. Horace offering his philosophies of the female. Of his understanding of their wants and desires, but knowing the complications that came with bonding by paper. Physically was another issue, a new set of rules to govern. These father-son talks were more of a release for Horace than a learning for Van Dorn. A confiding.

“They get goddamned hormonal,” Horace told Dorn. “Wait one day, you’ll see what I speak of. They trap you with their tools, cooking, cuddling, and that warm between their nethers.”

Late evening was falling upon them at an outdoor table, looking over the Ohio River. High above its gray water they sat on the drab deck, a thick braid of rope running through the surrounding posts, connecting one to another. At a far table sat a man, hair slicked, not one strand out of place. Like the tint of a Hershey’s chocolate bar with hints of silver. Arms graffitied by silky red and orange flames. T-shirt. He was hard-looking like Horace. Appeared as not one to fuck with. He made eye contact with the two. Nodded his head, raised his glass of brew, took a swig, and said, “Not seen you and your sibling round here before.”