The Savage(87)

“To what, my fuckin’ burial?”

“Angus, you may be clean of toxins, but your mouth is as filthy as your fighting.”

Leaves crunched like withered bones beneath a maul with the memory of training. Of knowing when and where to step. Of sweat stinging into cuts and scrapes of flesh, burning tissue, sun beating down on a man’s hide for another day of learning.

With Angus’s pistol butt rimming the hem of the Aryan’s pants, he was led by the men with lantern light. Shadow suffused with dark, making each man’s jaunt appear hunched. The air about them was earthen, rotted wood and sooty smoke pollinating everyone’s intake of breath.

Choosing his steps carefully, Angus stayed near weightless. Walked in the center with his hands bound behind him. Hershal had a single bolt-action rifle with a clip strapped over his back; he tugged on the chain attached to the collar around Angus’s neck. Angus clasped his eyes with each tug, breathed deep through his nostrils, into his belly, taking in the woods and its musky scents that mingled with the odor in front of him, spreading its human nature within his body, creating a watermark to his memory; he’d know each of these men by their odor if he were ever to lose his sight. Withers walked beside Hershal, carrying an axe in one hand and a machete in the other.

Having pressed the buttons of each ash-assed shitheel, Angus hadn’t broken their strides. Hadn’t caused them to lose their focus, offer him an open invitation to rid the world of their trespass and free himself. Ignorant and foolish is what he’d been. Should’ve left well enough alone. That he knew now. He needed to be free of these men for the sake of Fu, who would be or could only be measured by the withered pattern of skin and bone he’d leave behind if not treated with medicine. Some form of antibiotics, Angus thought as they walked about the hoofed-out path of dirt, an old horse trail. After all that Fu had done for Angus. This was how Angus repaid the man. What a sorry son of a bitch he’d attained to.

Through the dark, along the trail’s flanks, trees lay uprooted. Left to rot. The call of a bird rang out every so often with feet throwing the echo of smashing steps over the tough soil. Alcorn broke the rhythm of feet marching over the land and spoke to Angus. “Do you have people, ’loper?”

Angus found humor in the man’s words. “That’s a helluva question to announce at a man you’ve enslaved and marked as the devil.” Angus paused, let the man chew on his words before finishing with “My people are beneath the ground.”

Behind Angus, Withers said to him, “You’re lucky we’ve not skinned you and placed you upon a spit.”

Angus laughed. “For a Christian man, you talk awfully vehement.”

“Fuck you, ’loper.”

“You’d find pleasure in that, wouldn’t you, heathen?”

Hershal jerked the chain, reared Angus’s head back. “Watch that serpent tongue.”

And Alcorn told Withers, “Careful with him, we need food and territory. From that we yield respect. Know it’s how these woods are now run. The weak perish. The strong are given privilege, why we need his skills, case you’ve forgotten.”

Angus shook his head. “Sounds like a helluva congregation you’re gathering with.”

“You’ll see, ’loper, you’ll see.”

They dredged from the horse path. Made their way over the land of fallen limbs, where the leaf floor crunched beneath their footing. Crossed over a shallow point of the Blue River. Took to a road that ran into farmland with the fluorescent burn of the full moon overhead until they came upon a small blur of light that grew in depiction, until everything was sketched and carved and shapes became separate from the dark. Angus made out the sanction of campers, some beat, rusted, and dented, lining each side of a back road but surrounding an old white chipped and flaking church that climbed high into the navy-blue sky. In front of the church burned a monstrous bonfire of rotted logs and limbs.

Men, women, and children stood within the area, those who’d not been discovered by Cotto, armed with tools for gardening and hunting. Hoes, shovels, shotguns, axes, rifles, and revolvers. Scruff faced, bruised, pale, and ragged were these run-down people who eyed Angus and the fallacy of males he traveled with as a slave. He felt as though he’d entered another dimension. Stepped back into a time of traveling carnivals with Gypsies, barbarians, and Vikings. The only value was skin, and these people’s entertainment depended upon the blood and fists of two men.

Alcorn stopped before the concrete steps that led up the double hardwood entrance doors of the church, where two armed men of long hair braided with faces nettled by whisker stood, clothed by dirty white cottas over their postures, golden crosses stitched into the center of their chests, eyeing him.

“Tell the Methodist Aryan Alcorn awaits with a ’loper for the meat cellar.”

“Refresh my recollection with what ye are?”

“Me and my men are uplanders, migrated from down around White Cloud some years back before the government milked our souls and tossed us to the coyotes to be picked raw.”

Winking one eye bold, the other thin, the one man told Alcorn, “You’d a familiar way about you, couldn’t recall it. Been here many nights but never have you walked away with territory. But your fighter, what is his namesake?”

Alcorn’s face stiffened. “Chainsaw Angus.”