The Savage(37)
With a familiar tone, Van Dorn told August, “Wish I knew. Something I can do, I’ve no explanation.”
“Know what I wish, wish things was like they once was.”
He sounded like Dorn when he was fourteen. Dorn told August, “Things can never be like they was.”
“I just don’t understand what has happened.”
The next words that fell from Dorn’s mouth were that of his father and the Widow but also his own. They’d been fostered into his understanding over the years. Preached like a sermon by a preacher at Sunday worship. He told Au gust, “History, or so my father always told, is doomed to repetition. Persons can only be walked upon for so long. My father and me traveled the states. Lived by thieving the weight of metal from foreclosed homes. Saw what happened to those living beyond their means and those who lived below any means. Never thought much of what my father was showing me then. Was too damn young. But now I see he was teaching me of a future. How man thinks he’s building something new. When all he’s doing is creating waste. Leaving a trail or history of failures or irreverence. And the working pay for it. Our fathers and mothers and when we’s old enough to pay for it, they won’t be nothing left. That’s why what has happened, happened. Why people petitioned their states to secede the union, rioted, the dollar fell, too much unpaid debt of others. Wasn’t no more money to fund the juice.”
Van Dorn’s face kindled.
August kept his words silent. Rolling this wisdom around in his laggard brain before asking,
“Juice?”
“Power, of the people and what kept campfire light in your home. Leasts that’s how my father worded it.”
“What’d your father do, other than teach you thieving?”
“He was a man of all trades. Used to do carpentry work. Could build or fix damn near anything. He learned me of most what he know’d. How about yours?”
“Mom was a secretary for an insurance place. Dad, he run the insurance place. Was a good dad to me and my sisters, though Mother complained of his attention to other females till the power disappeared and that crazy-for-Jesus man came. Took us and—”
August went quiet with those last words, as did Dorn.
When they entered the darkness of trees on the other side, Dorn noticed the quiver in August and asked, “You can’t be cold, damn near eighty degrees or better.”
“My … my pills. Ain’t had them in a long while. I get the jitters. Mind gets foggy.”
“Kinda pills?”
“For my head. I’m what my father called a dull state of mind. Things rectangle rather than circle, nothing flows like it should.”
Nestled into the hillside, Dorn spotted a squared structure. Walking toward it, his pistol drawn, he saw it was a small trailer. They walked past shapes of a couch out in the weeds with metal chairs. The trailer’s door had been ripped from its hinges. The windows appeared split. Wooden steps strung to its opening. Inside, moonlight glowed from the outside. The metal structure reeked of things turned old, musty, and corroded. Pictures turned sideways. A bed in back with springs thorning through and cotton slobbering out like entrails. Crickets chirped, ants marched along walls, and spiders held their netting for them all. What appeared to be animal bones lay on the kitchen floor. Dorn and August spooked a nest of birds that went wild with sound. Caused their hearts to trade shock for beats.
Out back of the trailer sat a wooden shed. Opening the doors, with the peek of moonlight jousting down between the limbs and leaves of tree, Dorn made out shapes within, inhaled the smells of lubrication and fuel. An oxidized wheelbarrow and tiller sat side by side. In a corner, strands of hay lay spread about the floor. Upon the splintered walls hung a hammer, screwdrivers, hacksaw, rake, several shovels, and an axe. Dorn looked to August. “Seems abandoned. Let’s settle upon the hay for bedding. Sleep. Daylight can’t be far.”
Rest came like plunging into a warm void with the sound of quiet. Stinking and warm, the panting hound rested between Dorn and August, until Dorn woke from dreams of having his wrists bound. Of gunfire. Knives. The pulpy and bulbous facade of Bill chanting a sermon, dancing with snakes in one hand and a Bible in the other. His daughters with their eyes rolled into gum balls. Bodies writhing and jutting while speaking in tongues.
But it wasn’t the hound and his roadkill breath that woke Dorn so much as the poke of a bored-out barrel to the side of his jaw. Eyes twitched to the view of a familiar female, whose father had been a friend to Horace, a man whose funeral Dorn, the Widow, and Horace had attended; he’d seen this female, but with her now were two strange men training guns upon him and August. Towering over the two men, Dorn staggered up with the worn retention about his limbs from being woken. August sat, hugged the mongrel and his stink into his bony knees. Fear cast about his face. Dorn’s mind streamlined with what to do to these people who trained a gun upon them. Reach with his right, fake them, get their vision upon a hand that wasn’t doing the action, and when they didn’t see it coming, he’d show these men his left, which wielded a pistol.
Dorn started to reach behind his back for that pistol. The one man who’d pencil-sized holes through his ears speared the barrel of an AR-15 into Dorn’s chest. Shook his head and said, “No need to get tested ’fore we even get acquainted.”
Dorn positioned his left hand to jab the expanded-lobed man’s jaw just as his grandfather Claude had taught him to do on a military bag strung from a basement rafter. The other man, a stubbed brute with a cutoff 135 Auto T-shirt and a spongy face, went from fingering his stubble to eyeing the hound, which he then reached and patted, its tongue lapping at his hand with familiarity. He bubbled his hick words to Van Dorn: “Punch ’em and I punch ye back, boy.”