The Savage(35)

From the box a slivering rattle dispelled like that of a baby’s toy rattler began to tack the walls of the room. Behind Dorn, August clutched his arms around the mongrel, which held a nasal growl. Bill raised the serpent. Its head lay in his open palm like a diamond-shaped heart. Black electrical-tape tongue wishboning out while its scaling body of gold, onyx, and caramel hung down as though a lamp cord unplugged. Bill embraced a smile of foliage-marred teeth and said, “A blessing. Must receive the gifts to find salvation. My judgment and the Lord’s.” And Van Dorn hid a shit-eating grin, realizing that what was in the other boxes would be his and August’s escape.





THEN

The first time it’d happened, Dorn had been around nine or ten, standing silent within the tall silver oaks alongside Horace, who held a single-shot Mossberg 12-gauge, shushing him of speech. Watching overhead as the bushy-tailed red and gray squirrels pounced from limbs, shook and wrangled their way from tree to tree. Bored, Dorn worked his eyes over the ground, studied the movement of a chocolate-and-margarine-decorated reptile tapering through the leaves and twigs, halted at his boot. Flicked its tongue out and in. Waited. Dorn stared in amazement. Finding oddness in the cold-blooded animal’s actions. Horace turned. Eyes bugged in anger at the reptile, he raised his work boot to the muscled length. Dorn reacted, a second sense he remembered, offering a hand, and the snake coiled into his palm, weighted, cool, and scaled. Horace cursed Van Dorn. “Hell you doing, boy?” Tried to swat the snake from him.

Dorn distanced himself from his father. Ran an index over the serpent’s head. Gazed into its pointed oval of eyes. Horace looked upon his son as though he were mad, came at him. Watched Van Dorn as he kneeled and let the serpent slither out from his hand and back to the ground, where it disappeared into the blankets of leaves and musk of fallen timber.

Dropping the shotgun, Horace brought a hand to Dorn’s arm. Shook him with anger.

“Kinda heathen actions you pulling, could’ve been bit. Swell up like a tick from the venom.”

Neither thought much of it. Took it only as a moment of chance, a young boy fiddling with nature.

But other times came. When gathering eggs, the Sheldon girl met the lengthy outstretched fiber of a milk snake that’d wormed its way to Dorn’s feet. Sheldon watching with surprise but not fear. He treated it like a game of keep-away: step back and it’d follow. Sheldon shaking her head, saying, “You been demonized.” Dorn doing just as he’d done when hunting squirrel with his father. Bending down, Sheldon’s blue eyes full of amazement, Dorn offering a hand. The snake letting him lift it. Hold it as though it were a purring feline. Eyeing Sheldon, questioning, “Demonized?”

“What the old-time gospel said about those who tame the serpents. Daddy says it’s much iron in the blood. My belief is reptile, carnivore, vulture, regardless of creature, it’s in all’s nature to wanna be a pet in one form or another, and they sense the good in those that’s good and the bad in those that’s bad. Regardless, you’ve got a gift.”

Another time, as she was working the soil of the Widow’s ground, she unearthed a nest of garden snakes while digging potatoes. The limbless reptiles stretched, luminous, green, and slithering, about the length from shoulder to hand. Dorn came from working a hoe. Removing weeds from around bean plants. The serpents veered their course for him. Coiled at his feet. Waited and he’d done just as he’d always done. Kneeled. Let one glide into his palm. Held one, then another. Fingering their quarter-sized heads. Watching the tongues dart out like unbraided twines of rope. Then releasing them, watching them slither back to their holes.

It quickly became clear that Van Dorn possessed that gift Sheldon spoke of, or an iron of the blood, a connection of sorts to the serpents; they continued to follow up, gathering in wait, climbing into his open palms, but for what or why no one knew, Dorn least of all.





NOW

Lengths of muscled scales hung down from each of Bill’s hands like stiff shafts of rope. His daughters showed little fear.

Approaching Van Dorn, Bill was no bigger in height, only shape. Dorn was leaner and younger, and when Bill offered his right hand of two small serpents, each copperheads, Dorn did not cower, but came sure-footed. Offered his left hand. The snakes, black and gold, jutted their heads up and down, as though lying riverside, hypnotized by the wafting travel of current. Each slithered into his palm. One darted left, the other right as they parted and twined down and around his forearm.

Bill’s eyes burned fiery as a butane lighter’s flame, unable to fathom what he was seeing. The two snakes crossed at Dorn’s elbow. Lassoed up beneath his shirt, followed his bicep, over his shoulders, and around his neck, where they rested their heads from the inner collar. Tails flanking down. Their tongues forking from their mouths.

“What trickery do you hold within, boy?”

“None.”

Bill broke down another wooden box. Unhinged it. Pulled two thick hefts of elongated meat, patterned with scales of swarthy color and tarnished coins. Their ends like honeycomb, only rattling. Standing, he held them in their centers, their upper body the size and shape of flint spearheads. Dorn had never seen such specimens of snake. Dense and long, he figured them to be timber rattlers from Kentucky. Seeing as that’d be the closest one could find such a serpent. Placing the fear of God in any taker who’d near them, except the one who stood before them at this juncture.