by Frank Bill
Van Dorn looked to where the eruption of gunshot came. Off beside the opening of earth, an outline of domed skull with wiry thistles of hair poking from ears stood holding a rifle. Remington, Model 700, .22-250. Clay gray synthetic stock with five shots and a scope. Dorn knew the weapon and the man who lowered it. The ground gave and crunched as the shape stepped forward. Skin appearing bloodless except for the ink of red and black stars about his neck, the Celtic crosses, snakes, and words of scripture engraved about his limbs. Dorn’s heart was a menthol rush. Feeling the cold burn of every inhale. The man came into focus. Spoke to Van Dorn: “Be damned. Been trying to trap that son of a bitch since this rapture has crippled man, woman, and child.”
The dog lay panting. Van Dorn slid his pistol back into its holster. Eyed the man known as Bill Henning, though Dorn’s father called him Pickle Loaf Bill ’cause anytime he came to give him a hand he’d always be eating a sandwich of homemade pickle loaf. He was known as a leather smith. Had made the holder of brass that hung over Dorn’s torso. But he was also recognized by others around the area as Pentecost Bill. A born-again with an acidic tongue of religious rhetoric. Reading and studying everything from Methodist and Baptist ways, until he settled upon being a fire-and-brimstone Pentecostal. Was believed to lead an underground movement for the Church of God.
Bill donned a pair of worn navy-blue work trousers. A knife within a leather case was looped on his side. Stretched T-shirt over his torso. His beard was a bright shade of cherry, long and pointed like an upside-down cedar tree, thick and coarse.
“Came from nowhere,” Van Dorn told him.
“Hell you doing this far north without Horace or the Widow?”
Van Dorn stood quiet with the ache in his ankle climbing up from his shin to his thigh. The Sheldon girl’s image flashed in his mind, dirty and helpless. Unlike when they’d picked morel fungus together, walked the woods, canvassing the ground, soft tones of laughter, her knowledge of the land and her flowery scent of flesh, lengths of hair, hand encompassing his own, her holding it, his viewing the contours of a female that awakened the hormones of his adolescence. And suddenly the remembrance was darkened, wiped away by the shadows of men pouring down the basement stringer, the flint of a match that sent the old house into a blaze.
Dorn kept mute. Didn’t reply.
“Know it ain’t safe to be out in these retches.” Bill tromped to the boar. Brought a worn sole of boot down on the swine’s throat. Bending, he kept his weight upon the passage of air passed. Worked his Case XX across the swine’s throat.
The dog sat like a fawn. Unmoving, it began to growl at Bill, who leveled his eyes, told Van Dorn, “Your hound tries to break my hide, I’ll end his actions quick as they started.”
Van Dorn stood lost in memory, remembered the day Bill’d gotten the rifle. Had contacted Horace to help him sight it on an aluminum pie pan tacked to a maple tree. Taking three shots from a hundred yards. The first one was a few hairs to the left of center. Horace adjusted the sights. Handed it back to Henning. He shot. Hit dead center. Unbolted the gun’s action. Released an empty brass. Bolted another one in. Took the third shot, making sure the second wasn’t luck. It wasn’t.
“He’s feral,” said Van Dorn. “Saved him from dying, unlike the ones in your squared pit.”
“Giving the beast a second chance … let us hope he’d return the favor.”
“He tried. Why he’s tossed out as he is.”
“Hog is too weighted to carry back to the house. Gonna have to dress him like a deer. Walk back, fetch the Harvester.” He paused his work of the blade, twisted a glance at Dorn. “You look to have a limp. One of them hounds nip you?”
“Twisted my ankle jumping over your pit.”
Bill worked the blade through the boar’s thick coat. From chin to ass and said, “That would have been your end.” Clearing his throat, he said, “Never answered why you’s this far north alone, with all the hell that is being unleashed. You’s lucky to have not been taken in by the Methodist or the Baptist.”
Dorn thought on Bill’s words, then spoke, “Killed a doe few days back, was field-dressing her when these men came. Forced my hand.” Dorn paused. Swallowed the knot in his throat. “I killed three of them. They’d a mess of folk caged up on a flatbed. Only females and boys, no men. One pleaded to me, the Sheldon girl and her mother. Said the men killed her daddy. Before I could try and free them, more men came. I ran and hid. Waited till they left. Headed to the house. They raided me next morning. I set the place aflame with them in it, fled but not before I seen the Sheldon girl, I believe she offered my juncture to them.”
Bill cut the large intestine at the ass, pulled it out warm and steaming. Severed the gullet, parted the intestines, and removed the heated weight of more entrails. Cut the liver and gallbladder free. With arms gored and slopped by hot crimson, Bill shook his head, looked up to Van Dorn. “Maybe she had to. You know, when this started I’s just outside the city of Louisville. Down in Portland, getting me some bibs and trousers when news of the dollar came over the radio. It was no longer worth the paper it was printed upon. Every folk in the store started looting. Chaos. White, black, poor, and struggling. Took what I had and ran. They’s people all out in the streets. Pushing on cars and choking one another. Guns being fired. Got in my truck and hauled ass. God as my copilot, as they say. Week later, power disappeared. Now they’s hordes, some working the cities while others work through the towns. They’s a man named Cotto Ramos taking people’s kids and wives. Slaughtering the males. Seems they getting cocky now, trying to overrun the rural. But folks out here has turned wild as the animals they hunt. They’s a few men, old-time preacher, the Methodist and the gunrunning racist Aryan Alcorn, they’ve they own clans. They enslave men to fight one another. To battle. Part empowerment, part entertainment, it’s an underbelly of the new ruling class.”
“I seen,” Van Dorn said, “seen a brother and sister who eat humans, but ain’t seen no preachers.”
Bill came to his feet. “Of the flesh, or anthropophagy, cannibalism, that’s ole Lucifer working his spell, so some say. The Carib people from the West Indies worked that into their religion. Course others say when man and woman feasts upon they own, it’s a sign of the end. Regardless, religion is thick in these woods.”
Limping toward the dog, Dorn kneeled down. The dog snarled and showed fangs. Dorn raised a palm. “It’s okay, boy. It’s okay.”
“You’s in the right state of thinking if you’d place a bullet in that hound’s pan.”
Van Dorn kept his tongue silent. Placed his palm down upon the hound. Caressed its prickly hide. Feeling what he’d not felt in months, the vibration of helping another. The warming bond of kinship.
“You’ve made no mention of your father, Horace, nor of the Widow as I’ve asked about them, only that you burnt the homestead and fled.”
Seeing them laid out in the bedroom of flies and empty beer bottles, Dorn fought his emotion to shed a tear for their passing and told Bill, “They’re no more. Found a sickness when the power went and never came back from it. And you, how is it you’ve knowledge of these religious clans, of this horde, their leader, and his men enslaving the rural?”
Bill chewed on quiet for a moment and said, “I’ve knowledge that is of no concern to you. But this sickness you speak of, was it fever flat-ironing their brains, and an ache and vomit that split they insides?”
“It was of the exact notes that fall from your tongue. But how did you befall such knowledge?”
THEN
The sickness came years after a gift of fudged glass bottles sealed in two waxy boxes had been delivered by Bellmont McGill. A peace offering, he’d said, from Dillard Alcorn, a man who now feared Horace. Unlike Bellmont, who paid a visit to Horace from time to time after their first meeting in the bar. Told Horace, “Longer you let the home brew sit, better taste it’ll yield. Give it leasts a year or better.”
And that’s what Horace and the Widow did. They let the boxes
of hoppy brew lie in the basement collecting dust and webs upon a plywood shelf. Waiting nearly two years after word had traveled around the counties that an unruly confrontation of mayhem at Bellmont McGill’s Donnybrook had ended his legacy with robbery and his demise.
They, like most within the surrounding counties, had attended Bellmont’s funeral. But years later, evenings after the dollar had become useless, and the power had twitched and clasped like an eye, never to be opened back up, Horace, Dorn, and the Widow were seated in the kitchen with Johnny Cash trolling from the battery-powered eight-track about putting a vehicle together “one piece at a time” when the music went sideways in sound and the last of their battery’s supply had went dead. To ease their burden for their loss of music, Horace stood. Unable to take the creaks of the house. The sounds of inhaling and exhaling heartbeats. Went to the basement. Returned with the two wilted cardboard cases of clanging glass. Placed several in the freezer before it’d thawed to liquid. Removed two iced mugs. Laid two bottles upon the grain of wood. Pulled an opener from a cabinet drawer and pried one lid from a bottle and then another. Poured each into a mug. Watched them head with foam. Horace lifted one and the Widow lifted the other. “To Bellmont McGill, if they’s a God, rest his damn soul as we’re soon to follow.” And then each took swigs of the metallic-colored liquid while Dorn watched, as he’d never held a fondness, never acquired a palate for liquor. Never cared for the off-center feeling it delivered to the brain and body.
Drunkenness came in a stupor of stories. Family histories from each side. A great-grandmother whose father was shot after a card game over one side’s loss of funds. A bullet that missed a man’s heart by centimeters, nearly causing said man to not meet a female weeks later and seed the grandmother’s life. They spoke of prophecies. Of the world turning mad. Of surviving without power and Horace’s worry of whether he’d learned Van Dorn enough to be a man leaving twenty, heading for twenty-one.
By morning, Horace and the Widow lay in her bed, she at a loss for speech. Empty bottles lined the slats of scuffed floor. Beads dampened the two outlines. Eyes lay recessed. Lips blued. Chests rising stiff and lowering even stiffer. Paled and retched. They complained of their insides tightening. Something heating from within, cooking them to sunken shafts of flesh. When they rose, it was a searing pain. The matter that spewed from their insides came at first in oily chunks of regurgitation and the smell of demise. The room reeked of what one would believe wounded and fallen soldiers smelled like as they lay boiling within the torridity of self.
Van Dorn watched as hours turned from day to night and back to day. He was helpless, as he could do nothing. His father lipping his final words, “Of all I learned you, never showed you how to band a man or woman who feels as though they been wrung inside out.”
Dorn asked, “What is it that you are trying to tell me?”
“I’m not in the right state of mind, all I know is they ain’t no brew I ever tasted was so sweet you couldn’t quench your fill even whilst it twists one’s insides into a knot.”
And the Widow belched and said, “None that I tasted neither.” And she clasped Horace’s hand. And he clasped hers.
Days of silence piled up after. Days of hunting with no planes in the skies above. Few vehicles trespassing from roads to town. Of visiting neighbors who’d gone into hiding. More and more there was nothing. Though the flies came. Nesting and rooting, creating hollows of space. Sounding like hands digging in buckets of hardened beans, lifting and dropping them.
Dorn kept the Widow’s bedroom door closed. Unable to remove and bury either, always telling himself, They’re resting. While their reek filled the home.
As he walked the woods after sitting in that room, the inhale of death furrowed his nose.
Memory of squeezing his father’s hand with no return of his father’s clamp. Only the crunch of mortis.
Some days the silence was neither friendly nor unfriendly. It was just brainless moments without interaction.
But a month after the calm, he traveled through the wilderness to the steep overlook where below, years before, Horace and he had laid Gutt to rest. Taking the depression down to the bottom, he saw that the rock lay off to the side atop of the loose and piled soil. The earth had been disrupted. The deep hole dug but empty. Dorn couldn’t believe what he was seeing. And the sounds came as those of his father but from Dorn’s mouth instead. “Looks as though Gutt’s body has been dug up. His bones erected.”
Someone had trespassed. Dorn could only imagine as to who had done so.
NOW
Sweaty, Van Dorn limped behind the red and rusted International Harvester tractor that chugged and coughed, while muscling the hound, cradling him in his arms, the feeling of the dog’s eyes following his every step returning. Only this time, he felt as though they were whittling wormholes into his spine.
Knobbed tires trundled over the land, the engine popped. Bill had winched the swine’s hinds with a calcified log chain. Attached it to the hitch and dragged the weighted and hairy boar back to a shack built for the purpose of butchering.
Four cresol-covered planks of wall with a slanted tin roof sat surrounded by a graveyard of beat and wrecked automobiles. Chevy trucks. Ford Mustangs. Toyotas and Hondas. Hoods raised, engines removed. Transmissions dropped. Interiors rotted. Windshields split and webbed. Things that had not been here upon prior visits with his father. In the center of the rural salvage yard sat a stone home the color of a vanilla wafer. Its shingled roof faded and sunken in places. In others tar paper showed like a worn-out punching bag, its leather flaking and creased with rips.
Bill killed the tractor’s engine. Stepped down. Walked to the shack and slid open a door attached to a track. Romex wire rained from the rafters with pull strings and dusty bulbs. The foundation was particles of solid, with drainage holes cut that led out the rear. Muddied the earth with whatever slop or fluid was diverted from feral or farm-raised animals killed for sustenance. And the smell that wafted from the interior was demise.
Holding the hound, Dorn asked, “Where can I let him be?”
Bill studied Dorn, offering an eerie quiet, then pointed. “Over about that mess of hay.”
Stringy and matted, three females came as though sprouted from the earth. Each stood facing separate directions. They were scavenger-like and rough, their clothing was denim pants, work boots, and wifebeaters. There were no curls of hair or makeup. Nails painted by grime and dirt. One carried a butcher’s cleaver, the other a hatchet, and a third carried an axe. Farm-raised like the meat and vegetables they ate, they were Bill’s daughters. Martha was fifteen, Myra was sixteen, and Mary was seventeen. Each had hair the shade and texture of spent bearing grease. Their lids lay blackened as though they never slept.
Dorn laid the dog in the hay. The three daughters watched his movements, studying his footfalls. Forgetting how his father always told him to never turn his spine on no one, Dorn turned his back. Fear sketched the scene of an axe lifting, a hatchet chopping, and a cleaver cleaving.
Skin drew tight and erect as Dorn walked to the boar, helping Bill remove the chain as he motioned at Martha: “Get me my gambrel stick.”
Martha disappeared inside the shack, came back with a thick length of barked wood, little more than shoulder width in length, its ends pared to points and bloodstained. Handed it to her father, who worked the lumber into the rear tendons of the boar’s hinds.
“Get the kettle for the leaf lard,” Bill ordered Myra. He eyed Dorn. “Let’s drag ’em inside the shack. Hang ’em up, ready him for scraping the hair from his hide.”
Side by side, each gripped the gambrel stick. Hefted the swine over the ground. Walked backward into the shack. With the girls’ help they lifted the hog to the ceiling, where a large tarnished meat hook was lodged into a rafter. Mary had leaned her axe against a wall. Came with a boiling bucket of water in her gloved hands, began dumping steaming water over the boar’s hide. Loosening the hair for scraping. Bill turned to a diminuti
ve table constructed from walnut, grabbed two knives. Handed one to Dorn and they began abrading the skin of its fibrous tresses.
“Seeing as your people found they end, I’m to believe you’s up this far north ’cause of what? Boredom?”
Dorn hesitated and said, “Partly … to find the Sheldon girl, but also to help those taken prisoner, to find others like myself.”
Bill held something in his tone, the change of sounds rolling from his mouth, through his lips, something akin to deceit. Working the cordite-colored blade back and forth over the rough hide, he questioned with “You’re speaking of those who’s encaged?”
“Yes. I aim to save Sheldon and the others from whatever it is these men are doing.”
A fit of words spilled from Bill’s tongue. “Have you lost your mind? You find her, you find death. Did you not tell that she navigated the hordes to the Widow’s?” Bill shook his head and continued with “Believe you me. What needs finding is the Lord. Is the only saving any of us is getting in this hell we’ve dealt ourselves into.”
Working the knife, knowing the Pentecost was one step away from the asylum’s gates, Dorn still held suspicion; from the look of the man’s stature, it seemed as though Bill’d not missed any meals as of late.
Bill’s girls were only three in number but stood statue-like as if guardians or protectors, awaiting his commands or maybe something else.
Each blade gathered more and more hair and Bill spoke with tension, told Mary, “Fetch another bucket of boil.”
And she did. Came back and began pouring it over the hide. Dorn chose his words carefully, held a sense of distrust, felt as if Bill were hiding something, and he asked, “You spoke of hearing a rumor about the pockets of hordes, the rural clans. From who did you hear this, you’ve yet to answer.”