The Savage(90)

All sight bore down on Angus and Sadist Samhain, who stood nearly fifteen feet away from each other. Sadist was growling and running his tongue over his chinked lips, waiting for a word. A signal. Something to alert the two men that it was time to battle.

And it came from the man who stood over the pit. The same man who’d held a pistol to Angus’s head. Raising the gun to the ceiling, he fired. Pieces of discolored plaster crumbled and dropped from the roof and he yelled, “FIGHT!”

Angus stood with an ease of relaxation, followed the rhythm of his breath. Felt the earth thud beneath him with the Sadist’s footsteps. Angus raised his hands, palms facing himself, left foot and hand forward, upper body slumped back. His hands appeared as if he were holding small cups of tea, his arms hugging a barrel as he waited.

*

The first time Van Dorn had entered the cavern, smells of parched brain, cold, thick as animal fat and moldy, spewed from the opening of a cranium and laced deep within the the space’s air. The shape tilted upright with hieroglyphic tagging from a gun barrel that doubled as a brush, supported by the makeshift canvas that was a limestone wall, but nothing could be seen, as the outline of this suicide artist was hidden by dark.

The shape’s name was Clyde. He’d been missing since the loss of wages. Since the layoff from the car frame plant down over the hill below the old Burger King. A place that once carried a good bit of the county’s people with the promise of decent wages, providing a mortgage, a car, and groceries. A good middle-class job. But also the transference of drugs from one employee to another as the meth and oxy craze blistered the minds from one county to the next.

Those mouths that yearned for nourishment could not be filled as they once were. Even Clyde’s side gig with his guitar on the weekends, playing old bluegrass tunes and folk songs he’d written at coffee shops and bars, turned south. People’d no jobs. No money to be entertained. Disappointment turned to failure. A letdown of a father who no longer felt as if he was a man nor husband. He was a man defined by struggle.

Disappearing as he had, words traveled, eyes looked, phones were picked up, and fingers dialed numbers. Mouths asking if he’d been seen. Had stopped by. He’d went from running late to missing. County browns, the cops, were called. Lines were traced. Searches began. Where he’d last been seen. Whom he’d last visited or spoken with. What they’d discussed.

His vehicle was spotted some miles away, parked in an old pull-off of black dirt and beneath an acorn tree on the back side of ole man Bently’s property. Across the seat lay a box of opened .40-caliber shells. His uncased acoustic guitar. The trudge of path he’d taken, followed up the hollow, deep into the woods where he entered the opening hidden by trees. Found some weeks later within the cavern’s center by Van Dorn and Horace. Looking as others had for this man. By lantern light, they’d followed the sunken prints into the dark and found the man’s shape. Temperatures of cold had kept his freckled body intact. Pistol in hardened hand. Crust of explosion about forehead. Skin colored ruby, white, and waxy like a crayon. A flashlight lay beside him.

His body was tarped, Dorn and Horace carried the dead same as they’d done Alcorn’s brother. Carried him through the cavern and out the other side, as the terrain was easier to navigate behind the church. There were no ridges or hollows. It came out of a hillside onto flat forest.

And now Dorn and Sheldon ran and maneuvered toward the cavern, toward its opening not much farther. The spray of bullets stopped with the command of Cotto, screaming at the boy soldiers. Calling them dumb sons of bitches. Dorn not glancing over his shoulder. Only creating distance from this madman. Dorn’s heart raced. Taking the uprooted trees, climbing over the gray moss-coated rocks. The pang of hurt from his fall. Adrenaline spurring through his veins. The ache from the stick that parted and jabbed muscle.

With the mangy dog following, it was an obstacle course for the rural. Leaping upon and over tree and grabbing of limb and stone, the give of vegetation beneath foot until Dorn’s lungs were speared with burn, exhaling; his shoulder throbbed and he said, pointing, “There. Behind those windbreaks and vines.”

Sliding past the blinds of outgrowth, Dorn pointed to the beaded moist cavern wall where a mercury and rusted lantern hung. Below it a small can of fuel and a bread sack. “Hard to believe, ain’t it?” Dorn huffed, sweat immersing his apple-red face as he tried catching his breath, staying within the opening.

The Sheldon girl reached for the lantern. Shook it. The fuel splashed inside. She asked Dorn, “What’s hard to believe?”

Turning to her, he said, “That some uncivil son of a bitch ain’t found this hole and stole the matches and fuel.”

“Maybe they’s still a few like us left.”

“Maybe.”

Dorn leaned outside the cavern wall opposite the Sheldon girl, the hound sat looking. Watching. And Dorn told Sheldon, “Get a pack of them matches. Be sure that lantern is full. It’ll take a good thirty minutes to command light to the other side, ’less someone has holed up or sealed the opening and corked us in.”

“Why you standing out in sight of gunshot, wasting time?”

“So Cotto and his soldiers will view our direction.”

Dorn had made clear where the cavern was. Where Sheldon and he had disappeared to, by breaking limbs and stomping his feet into the soil. Moving loose stones about.