Gris-Gris Daughter [on hold]

Gris-Gris Daughter: chapter six

They had found him crushed to death; the soft parts of the face were already gone, maggots in full form.  The tops of his feet where stripped of the meat and the bone of his kneecaps had been polished into thin splinters by the road’s surface.  His hands had been chewed nearly off by his own logging chain.  But after all of it, they figured he had still been alive, able to cover his face with his arms, just before the truck came back to finish him off – hit him in the chest with the grill as he crouched on the slack joints that used to be his knees.  The impact must have bent him over backwards, bounced the back of his head against the pavement a few times as the drive shaft, the catalytic converter and finally the muffler took a piece of his chest and chin with them.  Limp and finally nothing left for this world, the body listed and rolled into the ditch where they found it.

Even as a middle-aged man, his skin had been like sweet-gum bark, cavernous and constantly sticky with sweat.  He always wore stubble on his face.  And to his dying day he had been a man of the forest, and of the bottle.  R.C. could still hear his gruff voice describing to him how to pick the wild mustang grape from the vines that had co-opted the forgotten fence running along the gravel road in front of the old home place.  How to judge its peak ripeness for making another batch of home-crafted wine.  It was almost two years ago, the last time R.C. had seen his father alive.

That evening, after they lowered his body into the forest floor just behind the family cabin, was also the last time he had uncorked a bottle of the pungent wine he and his father had made together — two bottles actually.  One had been for him to drink, sitting there in the dirt drive in a folding metal chair.  He took the other, after he had finished the first, and poured it out at his feet, watched it gurgle and foam through the layers of dirt, pine needles and used chainsaw oil.  It was the last drink he had with his father.  It was a libation to whatever god would help him find revenge.  It was a vow to kill the son of a bitch that had grated his father’s body up and down Hwy 69 like a brick of old cheese.

Something then snapped in his mind like a dry bone as the buzzards guzzled at the memory, tore at his own flesh.  He rolled it over, just once, to look the thought in the eye in order to test it for truth.  But he knew it was true.  It was the only thing that made sense.  As he pulled into the hospital parking lot closest to the back door he made great efforts to lock the thought away, not forever, but until it would serve him and the oath he had made.

Just as King started to jostle Scrivener in order to wake him, R.C. had a second thought and pulled around the hospital to park out front.  He slammed his door, left the other two still in the cab and strode toward the front doors grinning wildly.  Just as the automatic doors slid open he happened upon a startled candy striper who looked physically shaken by his presence.  She tried to bark something in protest but choked on her words.  Her expression was the perfect way R.C. wanted to remember this moment.  “Shit,” he growled to himself, bubbling over with self-righteous rage.

If it would have been an ugly man with eyes full of hate rather than the startled and apologetic eyes of a young girl new to her job R.C. would have buried his knuckles into flesh and bone.  As it was, he just smiled and kept on going.