The Savage(31)

“I seen,” Van Dorn said, “seen a brother and sister who eat humans, but ain’t seen no preachers.”

Bill came to his feet. “Of the flesh, or anthropophagy, cannibalism, that’s ole Lucifer working his spell, so some say. The Carib people from the West Indies worked that into their religion. Course others say when man and woman feasts upon they own, it’s a sign of the end. Regardless, religion is thick in these woods.”

Limping toward the dog, Dorn kneeled down. The dog snarled and showed fangs. Dorn raised a palm. “It’s okay, boy. It’s okay.”

“You’s in the right state of thinking if you’d place a bullet in that hound’s pan.”

Van Dorn kept his tongue silent. Placed his palm down upon the hound. Caressed its prickly hide. Feeling what he’d not felt in months, the vibration of helping another. The warming bond of kinship.

“You’ve made no mention of your father, Horace, nor of the Widow as I’ve asked about them, only that you burnt the homestead and fled.”

Seeing them laid out in the bedroom of flies and empty beer bottles, Dorn fought his emotion to shed a tear for their passing and told Bill, “They’re no more. Found a sickness when the power went and never came back from it. And you, how is it you’ve knowledge of these religious clans, of this horde, their leader, and his men enslaving the rural?”

Bill chewed on quiet for a moment and said, “I’ve knowledge that is of no concern to you. But this sickness you speak of, was it fever flat-ironing their brains, and an ache and vomit that split they insides?”

“It was of the exact notes that fall from your tongue. But how did you befall such knowledge?”





THEN

The sickness came years after a gift of fudged glass bottles sealed in two waxy boxes had been delivered by Bellmont McGill. A peace offering, he’d said, from Dillard Alcorn, a man who now feared Horace. Unlike Bellmont, who paid a visit to Horace from time to time after their first meeting in the bar. Told Horace, “Longer you let the home brew sit, better taste it’ll yield. Give it leasts a year or better.”

And that’s what Horace and the Widow did. They let the boxes of hoppy brew lie in the basement collecting dust and webs upon a plywood shelf. Waiting nearly two years after word had traveled around the counties that an unruly confrontation of mayhem at Bellmont McGill’s Donnybrook had ended his legacy with robbery and his demise.

They, like most within the surrounding counties, had attended Bellmont’s funeral. But years later, evenings after the dollar had become useless, and the power had twitched and clasped like an eye, never to be opened back up, Horace, Dorn, and the Widow were seated in the kitchen with Johnny Cash trolling from the battery-powered eight-track about putting a vehicle together “one piece at a time” when the music went sideways in sound and the last of their battery’s supply had went dead. To ease their burden for their loss of music, Horace stood. Unable to take the creaks of the house. The sounds of inhaling and exhaling heartbeats. Went to the basement. Returned with the two wilted cardboard cases of clanging glass. Placed several in the freezer before it’d thawed to liquid. Removed two iced mugs. Laid two bottles upon the grain of wood. Pulled an opener from a cabinet drawer and pried one lid from a bottle and then another. Poured each into a mug. Watched them head with foam. Horace lifted one and the Widow lifted the other. “To Bellmont McGill, if they’s a God, rest his damn soul as we’re soon to follow.” And then each took swigs of the metallic-colored liquid while Dorn watched, as he’d never held a fondness, never acquired a palate for liquor. Never cared for the off-center feeling it delivered to the brain and body.

Drunkenness came in a stupor of stories. Family histories from each side. A great-grandmother whose father was shot after a card game over one side’s loss of funds. A bullet that missed a man’s heart by centimeters, nearly causing said man to not meet a female weeks later and seed the grandmother’s life. They spoke of prophecies. Of the world turning mad. Of surviving without power and Horace’s worry of whether he’d learned Van Dorn enough to be a man leaving twenty, heading for twenty-one.

By morning, Horace and the Widow lay in her bed, she at a loss for speech. Empty bottles lined the slats of scuffed floor. Beads dampened the two outlines. Eyes lay recessed. Lips blued. Chests rising stiff and lowering even stiffer. Paled and retched. They complained of their insides tightening. Something heating from within, cooking them to sunken shafts of flesh. When they rose, it was a searing pain. The matter that spewed from their insides came at first in oily chunks of regurgitation and the smell of demise. The room reeked of what one would believe wounded and fallen soldiers smelled like as they lay boiling within the torridity of self.

Van Dorn watched as hours turned from day to night and back to day. He was helpless, as he could do nothing. His father lipping his final words, “Of all I learned you, never showed you how to band a man or woman who feels as though they been wrung inside out.”

Dorn asked, “What is it that you are trying to tell me?”

“I’m not in the right state of mind, all I know is they ain’t no brew I ever tasted was so sweet you couldn’t quench your fill even whilst it twists one’s insides into a knot.”

And the Widow belched and said, “None that I tasted neither.” And she clasped Horace’s hand. And he clasped hers.