The Ravaged, page 2
“Uncle David?”
“Hunter? It’s about your dad.”
Jokingly, Hunter asks, “What’s the old man gone and done now?”
Since Hunter could remember, his father, Hank, had always found himself in these situations, immersed in someone else’s problems, always at the wrong place at the right time, and he always helped them figure shit out. A Samaritan or savior in many ways.
“He’s dead.” Long pause. “I’m sorry.”
“What happened?”
Hunter tells himself the old man has passed from the salesman existence on earth to the picket fences of life above.
“Mysterious house fire. Won’t know anything until the fire marshal finishes his investigation. Coroner gets an autopsy. Why I called you. You’re his beneficiary and executor of his will. How soon can you get to California?”
JACK
Blood forked from Jack’s nostrils and crusted on his bulbous upper lip. Dancing at the four-way stop like a Yaqui shaman hallucinating on peyote, he felt the music flowing like a lullaby through his brain as he stomped the rubber tread of his heels into the baked orange dust of unpaved road. Nearby, standing in front of a run-down stucco bodega the same shade as their skin, two men in life-stained T-shirts and ragged dungarees fingered an armadillo-shell guitar and a panpipe, with a battered lard can between them for donations. From doors and alleyways, bodies slowly appeared, pausing to view this mad, crazy gringo.
Jack held his phone up into the sky, capturing his moment. Videoing himself. Not wanting to lose it as he had lost everything else.
The beatdown had been delivered by two men with flesh the color of a high-dollar medium-roast coffee bean. That was what went through Jack’s mind when local number one, whose face was covered with acne scars and patches of steel-wool beard, asked if he had a smoke. Smiling, with his thumbs hooked beneath the straps of the worn black-gray Osprey pack that hugged his pudgy frame, Jack had said, “Sorry, young man, I do not smoke.” That was when local number two mashed Jack’s foot. Man number one stole his wind with a fist to the diaphragm, and Jack’s knees had discovered the heated ground with a thud. Doubled over, salt-and-pepper locks stuck to the creases of his forehead, he’d reeled backward as his nose was introduced to man number two’s right knee.
Still dancing. More locals came to view this crazed ritual, pointing and whispering among themselves, shaking their heads.
Replaying the actions in his mind, Jack remembered how his nose got smashed, how his blood tasted rich with iron. He remembered feeling like a child who has fallen from his bed. On all fours, dazed, huffing for air, he’d searched for a way to calm his breath, to center his panic.
Another hand had groped his right butt cheek, relieved him of the leather shape that was his wallet. And like that, he was left to view the pair of holey Chuck Taylors sprinting away.
In his peripheral vision, to the left and right, shapes were moving, approaching. All he could do was spit blood and cry. And he cried hard, bawled until it changed to loud laughter. Laughing at his weak, pathetic self.
He was discovering his center.
Backpacking through Argentina, hitchhiking from one fueling station to the next, devoid of conflict, of violence, in search of something more than what he once believed was an existence. Seeking the meaning of words spoken by his ailing mother. Getting mugged in a dirt street on the outskirts of Santiago de Chile. Rolled for two thousand, maybe three thousand, dollars. In America, it was enough to cover a middle-class household’s monthly mortgage. Groceries, car payment and utilities, maybe a few movies and dinner out with the wife on a weekend. Here, in this desert outpost of a struggling country, that was several months of cushion. How many simple pleasures of life had Jack missed in his pursuit of the almighty dollar? Reflecting back on his life, more than he could count.
His Rolex watch, ID, insurance card, all his money—gone, except for his passport in his pack, and what he’d hidden in his left sock, which he must now spend on nourishment.
Yellow corn, ground between stones and roasted over coals. Woman’s hands, callused and sun scorched, working the blade through peppers, onions, tomatoes, pushing back a strand of hair as she adds beans. Forearming sweat from her moist cheeks, she wraps the hash of vegetables and legumes up like a gift for the starved and scavenging, handing the fresh delicacy to Jack. The juices trickle down the stubbly beard, burning the scraped flesh, but the ripe taste triggers something he has not known since he was a kid: recognition of his own hunger. Of being fed. He has worked his life away so that he might never again know that feeling of want or need.
What he realizes in that moment is something he had forgotten: appreciation.
Before all this, the goal was money. Not to struggle like his mother, who had worked three jobs to keep a shingled roof over her and her boy’s heads. To keep fresh food on the table and a clean house and a warm bed. And she had.
On the day she died, lying on coarse hospital sheets amid the smell of disinfectant and the beep of monitors, her blue-veined hand cold in his warm palm, she spoke the last words she ever would to Jack: “Run. Run and never look back.”
He had wanted to laugh. Run? Run from what? After all he had amassed. A 6,500-square-foot house. Vacation home in Florida. Cars. A secure retirement. No want or need unfulfilled. But still he worked. Sixteen-hour days, sometimes eighteen.
That is what he remembered on all fours in the dust, watching those faded red Converse high-tops scampering away.
Jack had never understood what his mother’s words meant. After all he’d worked for, buying her a new home, getting her the best of whatever she wanted. But all she ever wanted was happiness for her son. For Jack. And then, on his knees, hearing those feet recede into the distance, Jack realized that they needed the money more than he.
Working his way up from his knees to his feet, he’d felt the crack and pop of his joints, felt all the years of expensive dinners, felt the age. And he felt the heat of the day, intensifying the weight of his pack. Placing one foot in front of the other, limping at first until the hurt leveled out into a walk. Eyes gawked and followed his every step. Feeling the pain in his gut from the punch. From hunger. Ignoring the faces. Twenty-four hours had passed since he last ate. Hitchhiking to San Pedro de Atacama. Wandering in a dazed and famished state to the crossroads. Lifting his face to the sun’s warmth. Images and sounds came in snapshots alternating between reflection and real time. The volume of reality was being turned up. Growing louder and louder. Stucco buildings the shade of smoked vanilla lined the dirt street. Men played music. His wallet stolen, his identity gone. All the actions came in a mad whirl.
The sun was turning Jack’s pale sixty-five-year-old flesh the color of Irish red ale as he began to lift and test his creaking limbs. Right leg first, then the left. Pins and needles and a jolt of electricity coursing through his marrow. Sweat darkened his olive-drab fatigue pants and stained navy-blue “Life Is Good” T-shirt. Dust kicked up from his booted feet as he stomped in time with every clap of his damp, doughy hands, creating a rhythm that had nothing to do with the men who strummed their charangos like marionettes on strings, singing their Chilean folk music. No, all that echoed through Jack’s mind was what his mother had said before accepting her own finality, her sclerotic lungs wheezing those words: Run. Run and never look back. Words he had never understood and always questioned.
All around him, people watching began to clap and stomp their feet. Jack pulled his phone from his pocket, held it high. The music he danced to wasn’t from the street musicians; it was in his head. A backdrop to the echo of her words. But then, it wasn’t just her words. It was the loss—of his daughter, his mother, then his wife—that had brought him here after everything he’d been through.
And now, covered in dust from his unplanned street dance, mouth full of vegetables and cornmeal bought with his last dollars, Jack reflects on how it all started. How it all haunts him. What he is in search of.
ANNE
Anne’s head throbbed from the pain of memories—her mother’s hard palm cutting the air and thudding her face, with the words little cunt attached to her whiskey-stained breath. Pale hands shook, remembering the time her father gripped her wrist at the circled burner glowing a skin-scalding orange, a fork pressed to it until it smoked, then branding her flesh until her eyes watered and she screamed, his beer breath spitting, That’ll remember you to be sure dishes is clean. Work all goddamned day and come home to this bullshit.
Today came a blitzkrieg of words exchanged in anger: “Little bitch, skipping school again, gonna turn into a goddamned retard!”
“Better than a drunk!” Anne retorted. Her words sharp. She had learned that in this house, when you got hit, you hit back even harder with whatever was handy.
The Jim Beam bottle missed her head and exploded like a rotten tomato against the faded-blue kitchen wall. The cider-colored liquid sprayed the dishes piled along the scuffed Formica countertop, soaking the crumbs of PB&J sandwiches that had been eaten down to the crust, Lay’s chips that had been crunched, Jack’s pizzas that had been pilfered of their toppings, sticky cups of Mountain Dew that had been spilled. From the unwashed clothing that lay on the cracked tile flooring, Anne grabbed shirts, pants, socks, bras, and panties.
Anne was done. Had been planning for months to pack what little she had and run. Run as far as she could from this shithole that had been her home since birth. She and Trot, her best friend, had talked and talked. Wanting to jettison themselves from their shit lives, from her abusive domestication and Trot’s longing to be understood. He had moved from El Paso, Texas, to Johnson City, Tennessee. Had been caught hopping trains off and on, had run with a group of dropouts who called themselves the Recon Rejects. Trot knew the ins and outs of freight hopping. How to hop one, when to hop one, and where to hop one. He knew where they would go: Louisiana, he’d said. There they would find a jungle where the hobos, dirty kids, and crust punks camped out. Earn their keep during the day: panhandling; flying a sign; dumpster diving; running trash cans for food, water cups, or clothing. Get accepted into a real family by people who understood them instead of abusing them with harsh words, trying to change who they were. No more dirty dishes, bloody fists, or flesh singed with eating utensils.
Hormones and rage feed her decision as she grabs her cell phone and charger and stuffs them, along with every garment she can, into the faded and dirt-smudged pink JanSport pack meant for schoolbooks, when she wasn’t skipping. Her mother did not understand how this wasn’t right, this way of living, only that her daughter had skipped school, not caring how the kids pointed and pranked and made Anne the butt of their jokes and puns about how she reeked of cigarette smoke and dressed in wrinkled clothing. But she was clean—always made sure to bathe, even if out of bath soap. If she had to, she would use dish or laundry detergent that dried and cracked her flesh. Always brushed her teeth. Sometimes with baking soda when her mother was on one of her benders and her father was on the road running a delivery with the big eighteen-wheeler that kept everything afloat—food on the table, the rotted roof overhead, and booze flowing through their veins.
Anne had withdrawn from others. Words cut like serrated edges. They hurt but not nearly as much as her family’s actions, their home, where she shared a single bedroom with two sisters. The other bedroom was her three brothers’, and the living room and dining room were her mother’s, where she collected ashtrays of cigarette butts, empty beer and whiskey bottles. The TV blaring with talk shows, cable movies, and forensic docuseries, window blinds pulled down. Sleeping off her hangover during daylight on the broken-down, cat-haired, cigarette-cherried brown vinyl couch, she was up by four every afternoon, starting with coffee, moving to bourbon, then chasing it with beer. Putting pizzas or boxed lasagna in the oven for her kids’ supper every evening.
Petite and pale, with a mop of strawberry-colored tangles on her head, Anne wore rock concert T-shirts, tattered denim, hippie-handmade bracelets, and chipped fingernail polish on chewed nails. Some would label her socially awkward, but hey, who wasn’t at seventeen, almost eighteen? Anne had had enough tough love. After the heated words and the near miss with the whiskey bottle, her mother had stepped out, cruised down the street and over to the liquor store at a shopping center, for a thirty-pack of Miller High Life, another ten-dollar bottle of Jim Beam, and a few packs of Camels.
Steve Earle’s “Copperhead Road” blares through the closed door of her brothers’ bedroom. Anne roots through her father’s hickory-stained dresser, knowing that the smaller piece of protection is somewhere buried beneath socks and boxers. Hefting its weight, she had forgotten how heavy the .38 revolver was. Her father had taken her and her sisters out to a trucking buddy’s farm. Let them shoot aluminum cans from a picnic table while he and his buddy Toad sipped brews and smoked reefer. Grabbing the box of cartridges, she sinks them into her pack along with the gun.
Back in the kitchen, Anne pulls a Folger’s can from the freezer. Takes from it a cold wad of twenties. Drops the roll in her JanSport pack.
“The fuck you doing with Dad’s coffee can?” Mitch, her brother, startles her.
“Nothing. Mind your own.”
His freckled skin is like uncooked bratwurst, clashing with cinnamon hair and a woolly-worm unibrow. Fifteen and a half with a naturally muscular build, he is bullheaded and cocky. “I don’t think so. You’re fucking stealing from Dad.”
He starts coming at her, but they are separated by the table. “Fuck off!” she hollers. Flinging her pack over left shoulder, she grabs a bacon-greased plate and Frisbees it at his head. Missing him, it smashes on the tile floor, adding its shards to those of the Jim Beam bottle.
“You’re so fucking dead!” he growls through gritted teeth. Anne turns to run; Mitch grabs at her, catches her pack, and spins her violently around. She spits in his face. Now Mitch is possessed. Gripping Anne’s arms, he drives his forehead between her eyes. Her head and everything in it vibrates. Her eyes tear up. Released, she stumbles backward, vision blurry, head spinning. Her left hand stabilizes her against the counter. Mitch comes at her as an unfocused outline. Anne fumbles for a skillet handle, wraps her hand around it, and parts the air. Before Mitch knows what happened, Anne gashes his temple with a thud of cast iron.
Anne doesn’t know what hits the ceramic floor tiles first: Mitch or the skillet. But next thing, Anne bangs her palm against the aluminum door to open it before she cuts to the side yard of dead grass. Her mother pulls up beneath the rusted carport. Running, Anne jumps over the charcoal grill that lay on its side. Ashes and half-burnt briquettes lay clumped like gray vomit. The car door slams. Chest heaving, she glances back at their home: siding stained the color of nicotine, missing shingles, rusted swing set, windows with torn screens. She had spent many hot summers, icy winters, and tornadic springs in that house. Anne just wanted a family—parents who didn’t replace affection with abuse, who didn’t drink and swear and scream and break shit as a means of bonding. And siblings who didn’t accept this lower level of existence as normal. She is the eldest daughter, the one who wants something more. Then come her mother’s screams from the house. Anne turns away, her feet digging into the ground. Hoping she didn’t kill Mitch, the middle son, she zigzags from one neighbor’s yard to the next. Screams become distant as she lengthens her stride, putting distance between the life she had always known and the one she wanted, whatever and wherever that was.
Anne’s heart still pounds. She hopes that Mitch is breathing. Hopes his head hurts, though. The sun had dropped from the blue sky to hide behind the trees. Shaky, she pulls her pack off. Unzips it. Still walking, she reaches in for her cell, shrugs the pack back on. Several missed calls from her mother. Anne texts Trot.
Pack a bag. Meet at the shack. Blowout with mom. I might’ve killed Mitch. Ready to forget this town.
A dog barks somewhere. Voices converse from porches. Smells of food being grilled. Barbecued. People tilting back their evening swigs of booze. Sounds. Words. Muffled laughter, music playing, vehicles traveling from other streets, motors revving, everything rising in pitch and volume, vibrating Anne’s eardrums. What if she has killed Mitch? She will go to jail. They will be hunting her down. It will be on the news. People will be looking for her. She will be a fugitive. An outlaw.
Then comes the pinch and clamp of teeth. The growl and tug. Jeans rip in the animal’s slobbering mouth.
Her muscles and tendons exude sudden alarm. “Shit!” she yells, and starts to run. The weight of her life, crammed into her pack, slows her movement over the ground. She cuts over streets, through more yards. Shapes, sounds, and objects blur. The dog pants on her heels. Must be old, or she would have felt the teeth again by now. Anne huffs for air. Her heart punches and punches against the bones surrounding it. Running hard through a field. Finally, in the distance, the condemned lot. Boneyard of cars, all makes and models scattered over the acres. Rusting chain-link fence. Anne runs the perimeter to the back of the property, to what looks like a small barn, its wood grayed with age. The dog huffs and barks behind her as she leaps onto the fence. One foot planted in the wire, hands grasping the top course of rusted links, she swings her free leg up and over. The other leg follows suit, until something latches on—the dog. It had jumped and now has her ankle and a fold of her jeans locked between its jaws, its weight hanging and jerking. She would swear that ligaments and tendons were ripping apart like putty. The dog uses the fence, its paws climbing and bracing, its thick neck jerking. Tugging.
