The Savage(98)

“All the more reason to work together.”

“No doing. Trust your cracker ass about as far as I can throw you, that ain’t too goddamn far.”

Angus came with the backs of his hands, knuckled Ali’s chest, knocked him backward. Ali coughed, swung a wild right hook. Angus rolled his elbow, came forward, drove a claw into Ali’s throat. Eyed Ali. Whispered, “If it’d redeem you, I’ll let you beat my ass. Just get the goddamn blade from above for scalping. That’s our tool for exiting the pit, you knucklehead motherfucker.”

Ali bared teeth. Raised his head back, flexed his throat. Brought his hand atop of Angus’s wrist. Applied pressure in a single motion. Angus rolled his elbow. Circled his hips and came with a backhand as if holding a teacup. Made Ali’s lips juice with blood. An explosion pierced the air. Stopped Ali and Angus dead in their tracks. Tense, each looked up. Caught a glimpse of what used to be Alcorn’s face. A smear of skull and organ painting the Methodist. Alcorn fell forward. Hit the podium, bounced to the floor. Everyone looked to where the shot rang from. Angus ran to the pit’s wall. Kneeled, laced the fingers of right and left hand, shouted at Ali, “Step your ass in, I’ll anchor you up. You can pull me out.”

Ali hesitated for a split second. Metered the situation. Ran. Placed his left foot into Angus’s hands. Angus lifted. Ali sprung. Grabbed a leg from above. Pulled himself out of the pit. Turned. Laid upon his stomach. Didn’t think twice. Returned the favor. Couldn’t reach Angus. Looked. Viewed the lumber used for a bridge. Grabbed it. Muscled its rough-cut heft down into the pit. Angus came up it. People were disheveled. Total chaos. Looking for where the carbine fire came from. The Methodist pointed to the fighters. Words never escaped his lips.

From the entrance came automatic gunfire. Limbs. Faces. Screams. Chests parted in a maddening explosion of reds. In the frame stood an outline of stubbled skull leading what appeared to be rural children, only their faces were covered by masks made of skin, hand stitched. The leader’d an archaic amount of ink about his face and arms. In his left grip he held the decapitated head of the man who’d guarded the entrance to the church. In his right a machete dripped the said man’s insides from the blade. He’d an automatic rifle strapped over his back.

Angus made eye contact with the man, a hint of famil iarity. The name Manny scissored in his mind, expanded into paper cutouts, and imploded his identity. The man tossed the head out into the church, where it ricocheted off kneeling and falling bodies, landed in the pit. His eyes scanned the room. Glazed over Angus. Came back and metered into him. The leader was Cotto and he smirked. Pointed his machete at Angus, offering the recognition of knowing he was the man he’d been hunting all these months. And from the pulpit the Methodist screamed, “It is he, the man bearing the crown of thorns. He’s the one who’s slaughtered fathers, whored our women, and took our children, enslaved them. Trained them to be killers!”

*

Sometime after Horace handed Manny’s ass to him in front of Alcorn, Horace told Van Dorn, “Taking a man’s life offers nothing for the soul. Pressures the psyche of the moral. Lifts the status of the immoral. Pushes the good-natured to cross that line of the criminal, the bad-natured, helps them to realize what they already believed, that the removing of another’s life holds the next tier on the status ladder, that’s how men become cold-blooded killers.”

And Van Dorn asked, “Think he’ll come back to kill you?”

And Horace told him, “Being belittled in front of another drives some men to think irrational, to commit vengeance. In the end, it’s less about retribution, more about ego than power. No, it’s not Manny that concerns me, it’s Alcorn.”

“But why?” Van Dorn asked.

“’Cause Alcorn saw himself through Manny, a reflection, not the other way around. Alcorn lost face.”

Now, all these years later, spent brass glanced off the pew to the carved and scratched floor, surrounding sound was crazed static and lost breaths hanging in lungs. A live round was chambered into the .30-30 with the pulse of hand on the lever and index on the trigger. Viewing the combustive spray of Alcorn’s profile. The slow slant of frame, the actions were reminiscent of Gutt long ago in the mom-and-pop mart with Horace and the Widow.

Dorn lowered the .30-30. Expanse of heart vined blood through his frame with the noise of his environment slowly arcing louder and louder with chaos. His ending the air that came from Alcorn’s lungs had to do with all that his father had taught and told him. Taking away the life of the good while the bad kept breathing was immoral, and how Dorn felt was neither good nor bad, only a rush of knowing he’d seared his father’s killer.

With the return of sound, the explosion of carbine rang in Van Dorn’s drums. Turning away, eyes of the shocked men and women looked to him, coming across the pew. Sheldon and the hound were waiting on Dorn while all around them bodies were bumping, elbowing, men and women shouting and reaching, and then more gunfire lit up the church.

Frames parted and poured to the slats. Others took cover. Looked upon the entrance where medium-and short-statured silhouettes stood. Some with faces painted black. Others red as the blood being drained from a rabbit hung by its rears. Then there were the taller ones, who bared masks that looked like folds of flesh stitched together with eyeholes and mouths. Crooked and parched. They were children. The young boys who’d given hunt to Van Dorn and the Sheldon girl, they stood savage, worn and doped up like their leader. Scratched and bruised with dirt about their lengths of arms and legs as though they’d lived within a mine shaft, laboring coal from dusk to dawn. Never bathed. Just heathen maniacs living on soot.