The Savage(36)

Offering his right hand in the same manner as the left, Dorn eyed Bill and waited. Confident and unblinking.

Bill’s retinas were charred by rage as he approached. Snakes went lax in his grip as they prepared to move toward Dorn. Bill squeezed them in anger. Baring teeth in his disgust. Dorn smirked into a smile. Watched the tails of each snake corkscrew around Bill’s scarred arm of print, twist and fang into the knotted muscle of his limb.

“Son of a bitch!” Bill screamed. His girls turned to their father’s pain.

All Dorn could think was to move his hide, and he reached for the copperheads around his neck. Held them out like an offering before tossing them at the girls. Turning to August and the hound, he hollered, “Run!” Then turned back, came at the girls and Bill. Corralled them together. Giving passage to August and the hound. The girls had dropped their weapons, screamed and swatted. Two had been bit by the copperheads. The third tried to help, reaching at the serpents. Bill shook, trying to loosen the rattlers that had bitten and fanged into the meat of his forearm. Reaching at the snakes. Screaming, “Have lost the spirit. Arm has found the flare of heat. Oh, how it burns!”

Dorn stepped toward him, their eyes met. Madness surrounded them and he reached for the pistol tucked in Bill’s waist. There was no fight. Only the body-writhe from the snakes.

Dorn watched the rattlers introduce Bill’s knees to the ground. Release their jaws only to bite him once more and he said, “Been bitten ten times. And each time I’ve lost sight of the Lord!”

With the .45 leveled at Bill’s face, Van Dorn fingered the trigger, thought of taking his breath. Giving him the martyrdom he longed to have. But Dorn was no killer of any man unless forced. Backing to the shack’s opening, he slid the pistol down into the hem around his waist. Went out into the night. Separating himself from the voices of plead and ache. Closed the wood-slatted door and fastened the lock. Saw August and the mongrel in the distance. The haze of darkness hugging them hysterical, as August begged, “Where do we go, where do we go?”

Adrenaline rifling through his body, Van Dorn spoke as the sounds of Bill and his daughters rang out behind them. “Far from this juncture of hell.”

*

Treading over land within the maddening darkness of night, Dorn’s ankle no longer ached, only a slight stiffness, while hearts drummed, calves and hamstrings burned, and stomachs groaned for food. Buried within the heated dark was the paranoia of eyes surveying Dorn’s and August’s movements. While the sounds and images of Bill and the venomous lengths of scaled fiber haunted the boy. Glancing left and right, he’d tried to hold pace with Van Dorn and the hound. Trekking up hills and down through hollows. Carrying with them the lug of survival.

Dorn feared stopping. Imagining that Bill, his girls, or all of them would free themselves. Come bloated by poison, savage and tracking August and him. Baring their tools for splitting timber and skinning wild game. They’d come without discernment for sparing their lives as Dorn had theirs; by not rearing their brains with a single tug from his .45.

Something itched within Dorn. An uneasiness that said he’d not seen the last of Bill.

Dorn’d wondered about Bill’s wife. Where was she in all of this filth and barbaric humanizing? Always attired in a floral apron. Scented of homemade cherry cobbler, flour-dusted hands, she’d offer Horace coffee and Dorn sweet tea when they came to help Bill. He’d not seen, let alone heard mention of her from the Pentecost. Only his girls, appearing untamed and without speech, as though their cords’d been severed or removed until the snakes broke their skin. Of all the fence, roof, rafter, and floor Horace and Dorn had helped Bill work and repair, of his maddening appearances and ways, Dorn’d never caught a glimpse of the wooden boxes. Of what was kept inside them. Secrets, Van Dorn thought, they were in abundance within the rural areas of life. Hidden in dank cellars, unfinished basements, closets, between mattresses and boxed springs, flooring, studded walls, in coffee cans buried within one’s foundation, and in the recesses of people’s minds.

Dorn and August came upon a patch of clearing. The moon made the field of clover and wildflower glow. Walking out in the open without camouflage brought on thoughts of alarm. The paranoia of wandering eyes from the edges of the dark, and Van Dorn wondered about coyotes. How they came in packs. Several’d run a deer from brush while another waited to attack. Then they took turns circling and nipping until the prey was wounded. Couldn’t fend nor protect. That’s when the coyotes came all at once. Feasted till nothing remained but the heated carcass.

“Think they’s vampires out here?”

The words of a child, Dorn thought. Ignorant. “No such thing,” Van Dorn said. “Is fiction, folklore from the eighteenth century of the Balkans.”

“I don’t know. They seem awful real at this point.”

“True, they’s people who want blood. Not for drinking and living for hundreds of years. What you speak of is make-believe. Out here only thing one needs to fear is the trespass of other humans.”

“Never seen nothing like what happened back there. How’d you do that without getting bit? It’s like you were controlling them, like a video game.”

Weeds crunched and broke with the weight of their footfalls, coming on like a locomotive storming down the rails of track. Dorn thought August spoke with a much younger mind than he appeared to have, childlike and slow.