The Ravaged, page 10
“Cinnamon!”
“Where-all have you been? Dredd’s been wondering about you.”
“Was up north. West Virginia.”
“You’ve brought guests?”
“Meet Anne and Trot.”
A young woman comes forward with warm hugs for Anne and Trot. Her blond hair, brown at the roots, is braided with beads on the ends. A leather dog collar around her neck. Fingers like twigs. She’s milky-fleshed, wearing a Ramones T-shirt. Torn black knee-high socks and a raggedy scarf-like skirt. “I’m Canary. A friend of Cinnamon’s is a friend of mine. Welcome to the jungle.”
Anne is overwhelmed with emotion. She tells Canary, “Nice to meet you.”
“Let’s mingle, let you get acquainted and make yourselves at home,” Cinnamon says, pulling them away from Canary.
Home. This grubby, cluttery little clearing in the woods is the first place that ever felt like home. Her mind tingles with the thought. Just arrived among strangers, and she has already been hugged—offered more warmth from another human being than she encountered in her entire seventeen years with her blood kin.
Walking past more tents. Chairs. Rocks placed in a circle for a fire pit that is still smoldering. They step over scattered trash, trampled and mashed underfoot. And there it is: the smell of food—soup or stew, maybe. They follow their noses to a row of tents set up with vestibules and entry areas and spaced out like neighbors with yards. Some are orange, others green, blue, brown. Tarps stretch over tree limbs to wooden pallet walls bounding a large area like a kitchen and living room all in one. Milk crates abound, some for sitting, others stacked and used as bookshelves. Suitcases and backpacks lie about. Empty food cans litter a table built from scrap two-by-fours and a door. The ground is thick with beer bottles. Clothing hangs from a rope stretched between saplings. On a pink plush couch with no feet, two thin-faced teens sit reading.
From one of the tents, a man appears. He is older than the others in the encampment. Windblown hair parted on the side, matted and wavy, some of it braided. Tattoos on his cheek, silver hoop through his nose. His hands thick with crud. Stretched and stained T-shirt. He eyes Cinnamon and yells, “You’re back! Been gone too long, my dear. Still lovely, as always.”
Arms spread wide, she and Dredd embrace. She says, “Travel sometimes takes us back to our roots, only to return us to our real home.”
“And you’ve brought friends,” he says. “Introduce me.”
“This is Anne and Trot. They caught out from Tennessee.”
“Welcome,” Dredd tells them. “Make yourselves at home. Everyone is accepted here. We all chip in and earn our way. We’re one big family.”
“Billy the Kid has some rabbit stew over on the fire. Help yourselves.”
Making eye contact with Cinnamon, Anne says, “I’m fine right now.”
What Anne wants is rest. To sleep. But her body is rushing with excitement. Seeing the faces of people her age. Thinking of how she came here and what it took. Her home, her life—it suddenly seems a million miles away. Like a separate existence, another incarnation. She feels as if she has stepped into a time warp. An alternate universe.
Cinnamon walks over to the table. Trot follows. They grab used paper bowls and head toward a young man stirring a pot on a metal oven rack over glowing orange coals.
Anne starts to follow, when Dredd grabs her arms. He says, “Let’s talk.”
A bit startled, not knowing what to say, Anne nods her head. “Oh, okay.”
Pulling her over to the edge of the clearing, Dredd sits her down on a fallen log. His wild blond mane is shot through with gray. The silver circle through his nose reminds her of a bull’s nose ring. He’s thin. She looks down at the crud-caked fingernails resting on her knee. They migrate to her thigh. His T-shirt hangs lank from his bony shoulders. His eyes look as if he had on liner, but it’s just dirt from not bathing. He smells like onions and old sweat.
“Your name is Anne?”
“Yes.”
“You’re very lovely. We’ll have to create you a moniker.”
Anne says, “Thanks. What do you mean by a ‘moniker’?”
“Your freight-hopping name.” He pauses, then starts peppering her with questions. “Tennessee was home?”
“Yeah.”
“Why’d you run away?” He speaks as if he were speed dating. A rush of sentences.
“It was a shitbox. Mom’s a drunk. Dad was abusive. And school was loaded with dedicated half-wit assholes.”
His hands constantly shift. Touching her arm, her leg, as if she were an instrument he was tuning.
“I hear that a lot. Everyone here has a storied past. Running from something. From someone. Leaving something behind. But here you’ll find no judgment. We’re all about family. Freedom. We’re a mix of hippies and what folks call millennials. We are the revolution. We follow the DIY way of life.”
“DIY?”
“Do it yourself.”
He reaches up, fingers the strap of Anne’s backpack. “You can take your pack off. Get comfortable. Make yourself at home.”
Sliding her arms through the straps, she lays the pack on the ground between her feet. “How long’s this place been here?” she asks.
“Quite a while. We catch out not far from here. Get a lot of traffic coming and going, see new faces and old.”
“Yeah, we came from the yard. Fell asleep. Had a wild encounter.”
“I bet. Those yard guys are overfed and underexercised. Cinnamon’s smart. She can maneuver. She’s killed, you know.”
“That she can. Took good care of us.” Anne hesitates. “Killed?”
“Yeah, ask her about it sometime. I’m rambling—not my place to tell you.” Dredd pauses, reaches over, rubs Anne’s cheek. “You got black eyes. Your folks get cross with you?”
Feeling uncomfortable at his touch, she senses something forced and slimy about Dredd. She had forgotten about her eyes. “My brother. We had a fight before I left.”
“Siblings. Older?”
“Yes.”
“Well, there’s no attitudes around here.”
Is this guy for real? Anne muses. He is kind. Warm. But fidgety. Too touchy. Too hands-on for her. Her upbringing has made her cautious of people. She keeps a barrier up. A shield.
“Cool,” Anne tells him.
“Do you like to read?”
“Depends. Wasn’t much time for books in my house.” Escape was the mall—that and booze at the shack where she met Trot.
“We gotta fix that. Get you caught up on Kerouac. Tully. Bukowski. They’re the greats. They have a way with words. Back then it was so free. Unique and new. Real freedom in their day. All they had was time. How about comics?”
“What about comics?”
“You ever read them?”
“No.”
Anne’s emotions, overwhelmed at first by the newness, are slowly shifting from feeling welcomed and warm to a sense of pause and caution. Feeling like an object, a rare piece of meat. And not knowing what is in store for her.
Dredd points to the youngsters on the couch. “They all read. No television to poison their thoughts, guiding them to an agenda of fear. No ‘buy this,’ ‘gotta have that,’ slaving for the man at a job you don’t want.” Pausing, he points to the stacks on the ground, next to a softly billowing partition that looks like parachute material. “Those are just a few of the books we have. All bought from libraries. Brought here by folks who travel all across the country.”
Touching her thigh, he gently rubs it. His breath is warm on her face. His hand is searching, working toward her hip and abs. Anne tightens with revulsion. Looking around, she doesn’t see Cinnamon or Trot. Wonders where they’ve disappeared, when a hand warms her shoulder. She turns around, looks up.
“Come on, I got my tent pitched. You can rest. Trot’s already sawing a forest’s worth of logs.”
Relieved, Anne grabs her pack, stands up.
“Aw, we were just getting to know each other,” Dredd says.
“I’m sure you were,” Cinnamon tells him. “But she’s had a long, crazy journey.”
“Nice to meet you,” Anne tells Dredd.
“We’ll talk again soon, Anne. Rest up.”
Out of eye- and earshot, Cinnamon wraps her arm around Anne’s shoulders and says, “Sorry, didn’t mean to vanish on you. I’m guessing you got his spew about books, freedom, and the like.”
Chuckling, Anne says, “Oh, yeah.”
“Always keep another person around when in his presence. My fault—wasn’t thinking. He ain’t what he presents himself to be. All that talk is bait.”
“Bait for what?”
“Nothing good.”
HUNTER
Long, curving stretches of US 25E provide scenic, wooded solitude, with the quiet rumble of three Harley engines for a soundtrack. Gliding over new blacktop, it feels like flying low to the ground. Then, all too soon, they merge onto Interstate 75 North, which they have to share with commuter traffic, vacationers, and tractor-trailers moving everything from loads of pipe to live chickens. Traffic is thick all the way to their exit in Berea, where they pull into Walnut Meadow RV Park to camp for the night. With its green-roofed office, worn wood siding, and six-by-six pillars in the front, the office reminds Hunter of a run-down gas station from the late seventies or early eighties.
After paying the cute pigtailed attendant in a washed-out black Lucas Oil T-shirt, they follow a gravel lane that splits off into different clusters of campsites. It takes them to a flat area with a few shade trees, the nearest neighbor a gold and tan RV opposite them.
They throttle their bikes down, come to a stop, heel their kickstands. In the abrupt calm, they can hear shouting kids and raucous birdsong along with the crack and pop of their engines and exhaust pipes cooling.
No one seems ready to disrupt the mood of quiet. Itch eyes Hunter and Nugget, then finally speaks his first words since getting his bike back. “Really appreciate you guys helping me out.”
“Anything for a brother,” Hunter says, bumping fists.
“Yeah,” Nugget says. “Just don’t do no more dumb shit, all right?”
“Right. I know.” Itch pauses. “Anyone want cold water and some jerky?”
“You buying?”
“Of course! Think I’d ask the guys who helped me out to pay for it?” Itch chuckles. “Get settled in. I think there’s a Shell station up the road. I’ll run up and grab us some.”
“Ten-four, good buddy,” Nugget tells him.
Itch’s bike rumbles away as Hunter and Nugget remove their helmets.
“He’s about the craziest son of a bitch I know,” Nugget mutters.
“Would you expect him to be any other way?”
“Nah, I s’pose not.”
They unstrap their mats and sleeping bags from the rears of their bikes, rolling everything out onto the manicured grass, where Hunter smooths his marshmallow-looking mummy bag. After shucking off his leather jacket, he wads it up and sticks it behind his head as he flops down on the bag. Ankles crossed, fingers laced behind his head, he hears the soft crunch of gravel from a black Silverado pulling an old-school twenty-eight-foot Airstream.
Across the way, in front of the long, glossy gold-and-tan RV, a father and son lay shapes on a picnic table.
Hunter hears a snort and gag from Nugget, who has sprawled out on his sleeping pad and begun snoring, all in the space of about ten seconds. Continuing to watch the father and son, who stand over a circle of stones, Hunter notices the quartered splits of firewood, piled according to no particular scheme. The father kneeling down, trying to light what looks like wads of paper beneath the wood. The sight takes Hunter back to another campground, when he was around fourteen and his father took him fishing one Saturday. They had unloaded everything from his father’s 1978 short-bed Ford Ranger with a topper and had set up their two-man tent, an old olive-drab pyramid, piled up splits of wood from the campground office, then gathered a double handful of twigs and pine straw. Once they got the twigs crackling, they stacked larger sticks on the flames, in a log-cabin structure. After the larger sticks caught, they stacked on the small quartered logs. Meanwhile, from the neighboring campsite of another father and son came a constant stream of complaining. Hank had told young Hunter in a low tone, “Can read it all over that guy’s every action.”
“What’s that?”
“Man’s got some skills, but he’s never taken his son camping before.”
Hunter and his father walked over. The father and son had on white Fruit of the Loom T-shirts and cutoff jean shorts. Opening a big nylon drawstring bag, the father shook out a new tent. The directions were spread out on a barn-red picnic table where a tackle box and fishing rods also lay.
The father muttered, “This damn shit can’t never be easy.”
Hank told the father, “Look like you could use an extra set of hands.”
Looking up from the instructions, the guy said, “You’d think after all the shit I seen and done over the years, I’d be able to outsmart a fucking tent. You ever set one of these up?”
“I have. Just get one of the poles extended and locked in, and we’ll start working it through the sleeves.”
The father, a short, fit-looking man, said, “Roger that. I just gotta find them first.”
“They’re in the parachute-looking pouch there about a foot and a half long.”
Hank pointed, and the dad’s eyes lit up. “Ah, I see. If it was a snake, it woulda’ bit me.” Untying the pouch, he handed one of the little bundles of wands to Hank, who shook it loose and watched the elastic shock cord pull the wands together into a single tent pole. Hunter and the guy’s son spread the tent out on the ground and staked down the corners while Hank and the father assembled the other two fiberglass poles. The father said to Hank, “Thanks for walking over.”
Hank told him, “Don’t mention it.”
As Hank worked a pole through the sleeves from one side of the tent to the other, he told the father, “We’ll do this with all of them. They’ll cross over the top, create a frame of support—surprisingly strong, even in a windstorm.”
“Makes sense,” the dad replied. “Did something similar years ago in boot camp. But we was a company of soldiers. Had less complications to worry about—just the DI, really.”
Hank said, “Sorry to interrupt your camping. Never introduced myself.” He stuck out his hand. “I’m Hank, and this is my son, Hunter.”
The father smiled, shook his hand. “I encourage the interruption. Name’s Sid, and this is my boy, Travis. I really appreciate the gesture. My dad never did anything with me when I’s growing up, and I thought I should start taking Travis camping and fishing. Get him out of the house. Thought it’d be good for both of us. I work so damn much, ain’t enough hours in the day.”
“I hear that. Nothing wrong with exposing your boy to the outdoors. Better late than never is what I say. Let’s get the other poles in, and you’ll be set.”
As they threaded the other two tent poles through their sleeves, Hank said, “So you from around the area?”
“Yeah, I’m a car mechanic down at Kitterman’s garage. You?”
“Sales. I’m on the road all week, travel all over the country. I try to get some time in with Hunter when I can.”
“That’s good. So, a real outdoorsman, I’m guessing?”
“Not as much as I’d like, but mostly, yeah. My father owns a farm not far from here. You ever hunt?”
Punching the pole into the end grommet, Sid said, “When I was a kid, my grandfather hunted everything that walked, crawled, or flew. That’s next on the list. You’d think, if I served my country and worked on cars, I’d be better at stuff like this.”
“You probably are, but you weren’t born a soldier or a mechanic, either. I’m sure you had to learn those skill sets.”
Sid told Hank, “Never thought of it that way, but you’re right. I did have to learn everything. My granddaddy was a mechanic. I learned a lot from him growing up. Then, when I joined the Army out of high school, Corps of Engineers, got shipped off to Vietnam for the war.”
“A vet?”
“Yeah. I was over there for two years. Dozed down a lot of jungle. Built base camps and laid steel for C-130 runways. Came back stateside, did another year, and when I got out, I moved back here and found a job working on cars.”
“I wanted to join the military, but it wasn’t in the cards for me,” said Hank. There was a lull in the conversation as the two men threw the rain fly over the newly constructed tent. “At any rate, I’ll let you and Travis get back to it. You need anything, don’t hesitate to give me or Hunter a shout.”
Sid and Hank shook hands again, “I really appreciate that.”
Hunter’s father had a way with people. He just knew how to talk to them. How to relate to whatever problem they were wrestling with at that moment. Always seemed to be at the right place at the right time. Always knew how to help. There was no second-guessing the situation. He just reacted. That next day, they all went fishing. Hank and Sid became good friends, kept in contact.
Now, twenty years later, watching the father struggle, Hunter gets to his feet, starts walking, crossing over the grass, then the loose gravel of the driveway, and back onto the grass. He approaches the father, who looks up at him.
“Need a hand?” Hunter asks him.
Dubious eyes take in the long hair, the biker garb, and all that ink. Apparently deciding that this stranger is no threat, the father says, “Unless you got a gallon of gas, might not be any use at all.”
