The Savage(95)

Taking in each shape, Van Dorn looked at complexions. Searched for the familiar. The bound man was of color. Skin dark as a walnut. Lean. Muscular. A fighter, Dorn thought. Then came rage. The pulse of anger infernoed his veins. Crystallized the arteries with a melding of hatred; twisting the knob on the magnification of glasses, he saw the dome of shaven scalp. Rounded shoulders, veiny arms of ink that cloned one racist symbol after another into a collage of shapes and braids. And Dorn whispered with disgust, “A murdering racist.”

“Who would that be?” the Sheldon girl asked.

“Alcorn.”

They treaded on by foot to the church’s door. People came one by one from campers. Fires. Outbuildings. Turning into a maddening crowd. That began to chant as Alcorn and his followers led their slave to the church’s entrance, where they stopped. Passed words with several men guarding the entrance. Then they entered. Moments passed. The ringing of the large bell housed within the church’s foyer rang loud and piles of people filed in. Dorn lowered his glasses and Sheldon asked, “And he is—”

Dorn pressed to standing. The hound sat looking up at Dorn. Waited. “The man I believe to have ended my father.”

*

Pain was nothing more than a word that would come and go like teeth being pliered from gums, filled back in with partials by a dentist, it was something that one could replace. Meaning each was temporary. Those final months of training, that’s all Angus could think, when will this end? When would he be replaced? When will one test after another be the final?

But it never ended. He was never replaced. Training became tougher. Demanded more mentally and physically. And the tests pushed him to dig deeper within his skill set. But he endured. Became a hardened human being.

Fu used liniment to soak Angus’s hands nightly, pulled from Fu’s refrigerator along with his needles that were submerged in alcohol. His fine-tuning of each, twisting the pin-needle lengths of steel into meridians about Angus’s hands. Offering the release of tension. Meditations and breathing were guided by Fu. The clearing of the mind. Keeping the positive flow of energy throughout the body. The mental aspects of strengthening Angus’s insides. Creating and building his iron palm training.

Angus sat with Fu in his kitchen one evening after training, sharing sips of black tea, and Fu explained, “As strength and confidence in one’s ability are built, they are tested, time and time again, to demonstrate the use of what they’ve built, created.”

Wanting a beer or some rice wine, Angus said, “Like your internal and external strengths?”

“Yes.”

“Have I not demonstrated that, over and over? Busting concrete blocks? Snapping dow rods and two-by-sixes?” Angus questioned.

“You have, but one must yearn to seek the highest levels of fighting. In feudal times great masters showed their mastery and power of internal strength upon animals that were ready for butchering in villages. Some directed their attack at the skull. Others at the heart. The lungs. The animal would collapse. When cut open, the organ that was attacked would be an explosion of shapes. Unrecognizable.”

“You wanting me to go out cow tipping?”

Fu shook his head. “The watching of a man who saved a life. A life that I want to be rid of, to erase my debt, as this man holds no good to anyone anymore, only pain. I am finding age now, I needn’t settle his payments for his saving of my life. He’s been repaid a thousand times over. I’m no longer indebted to him.”

“Why don’t you fucking do it?”

“One, he’d expect it from me. Two, it’s the next level you must attain, your mastery of your internal energy. And with a local, he’d never acknowledge it.”

At the time he’d not grasped what Fu was doing, but afterward he realized it was a test to his training. To pass on what he was being taught, he must master himself and all that he’d been taught. It was the next test of his progression of Fu’s teachings.

To hurt, maim, or wound another human being was simple. Hardest part was to strike someone, injure him internally without his knowing it, break down his organs, like passing a germ or infection to someone, he appears all right on the outside, the external, but as days pass, the infection slowly breaks down the immune system, his internal, and then all at once he just falters. Only this wasn’t a virus, this was a strike with one’s palm to a certain area of the body, the lungs, the heart, kidney, or liver. To damage it with internal energy.

Now smells of fresh kills sunk from the air. That of swine, venison, and hare branded by the inhale of flame from birch and cedar. The odors of unbathed flesh lingered. If Fu were still among the breathing, Angus believed it’d be a miracle. To have gone this long without the use of actual medicine to diminish the infection would be Godly, if such an entity existed.

Passing the shapes of men and women, all foreign to his sight, a slab of rough-cut timber declined into a gangplank to the pit. The rubbing of bindings about his wrists and neck were released. He stepped down into the lowered earth. Waited. Not even glancing above him. Inhaled deep and slow. Exhaled the same. Clearing his thoughts. Searching for an out.

From above he could hear the trample of feet. The rustling of men and women. The sounds of rural chaos in land once governed by rules that all had forgotten. Behind him the lumber was removed. Across from him, lumber was lowered. Booted feet came soft until they met the rugged soil of stink and human fluids. Working his sight up the outline’s mocha torso, Angus made eye contact. Sized the beastly man up. Found familiarity.