Born Savages - Cora Brent Page 0,8
own words.
“Family matter? What the fuck?”
Old man Johnson seems startled by my grumbling. He swivels his egg-shaped body around to stare at me. He’s a sad, strange fellow who’s lived in this clapboard eyesore his entire life. He charges a cheap monthly rent and stays out of my face.
“Evening, Hal,” I say as my foot hits the bottom step.
Hal Johnson scowls and swivels back around in his chair to face the menace of the empty street. That’s fine because I’m not in the mood for a chat anyway.
It’s not until I reach the top of the staircase that I realize I have no desire to be inside, brooding and sweating in that empty apartment until I get tired. I hop back down the stairs and take off in the truck, leaving Hal Johnson to stare silently after me.
I gun the engine once and take off for the hills I left behind a little while ago. I don’t have anywhere specific in mind. I just want to be out there, on the loose.
By the time I reach a place that looks like it leads somewhere suitably wild and nameless, the sky is growing dark. I grab my pack out of the truck bed before heading into the darkening hills. Maybe I’ll just hang out in the woods all night. I’ve done it before.
The surroundings are familiar. I’ve been this way at least once. My sole bragging right in life is an uncanny talent for navigation. You could drop me anywhere on earth without a map and I’ll figure out how to get back to where I started.
After a few minutes of walking my foot knocks into a fallen tree. Abruptly I throw my pack down and sit on the trunk.
“A man named Oscar Savage.”
Quiet reigns all around me. Every living thing for a quarter mile radius has halted, breathless, awaiting the next action of this intruder, a man who sits on a hollow log in the coming darkness and stares at nothing.
Suddenly a battle for survival erupts somewhere in the brush off to my left and a small creature squeals in pain or fear. The nature of the conflict is savage, as wild things so often are.
Savage.
It’s a word that implies brutal ferocity.
It’s also a name.
But it’s not a name that can ever cross my mind without thinking of her. She’s bound to it as closely as she once was to my heart.
Five fucking years and I should be able to move on. I should accept that I’m not the same person anymore and it’s for certain she isn’t either. I should learn how to connect with someone else at this point. I should forget.
Of course I can do none of those things.
My cell phone reception is shitty this far into the woods. I’ll need to drive back to town in order to make a call. Which I have every intention of doing. Right now.
Because it’s a family matter.
And because I used to be Oscar Savage.
CHAPTER THREE
REN
Most people possess at least a few scraps of unique family lore.
Stories.
They filter down for several generations if they are interesting and are lost sooner if they are not. Usually they are not. Usually the only people who might raise an eyebrow and care about the dusty skeletons hanging out in the closet are the ones who share blood with either the old corpse or whoever stuffed it in there.
The Savages are different. Everyone knows everything about us. Since the explosion of the World Wide Web all you need to do is type our last name into the nearest search engine and you can learn more than you ever wanted to.
You can see that it started in the 1920s.
Charles and Mary Savage were Hollywood originals. She was a socialite from Minneapolis and he escaped a long line of cattle ranchers in the Nebraska Sand Hills. If they’d just stayed where they were they would have gone on to live quiet, ordinary lives and been long forgotten.
But they didn’t.
They landed in Hollywood at a fortunate time and became darlings of the silent film era. Their days of stardom were short-lived, ending with the popularity of sound in motion pictures. Mary had a high, reedy voice that grated like nails and Charles was a low talker with a chronic lisp. So instead they became powerful investors and iconic pillars of the film industry for the rest of their lives. They are widely credited as being among the early founders of the motion picture industry.
My great-grandparents weren’t happy