Born Savages Read online

  “Born Savages, featuring the descendants of the legendary Hollywood family, begins filming this week in a remote, undisclosed location.”

  I wait to see if the bubbly host will run a segment about it, but there is nothing else said and the show closes with a fish-faced selfie of some actress I’d never heard of who’d apparently appeared in a campy adaptation about teen werewolves living in Miami before she wound up in rehab.

  I shut the television off. If I want news about the Savages I know where to find it. If I want to get a glimpse of Ren I know where to find that too. There have been some weak moments over the past few years where I typed her name in to a search engine only to be cut to the bone by the fact that she grows more beautiful with each phase of the moon. I’ve sat there in front of a laptop, stupidly drinking in every graceful movement she makes as she’s unknowingly tailed by some weirdo who had slyly shadowed her around during her casino shift and then posted it to YouTube.

  Even in that short glimpse, Ren’s pride was written all over her. She moved with sure purpose and didn’t make time for distractions. She never was and never will be the kind of woman who craves the glare of the spotlight.

  So why this? Why now?

  Everything I’ve ever known about Loren Savage screams that something had to have veered terribly wrong for the proud, intelligent girl I once knew to agree to the cheap fucking sideshow that this thing is destined to be.

  Ren hates cameras. Ren hates attention. Money wouldn’t be enough of an incentive for her. I can’t make any sense out of it. But maybe that’s because I never really understood her as well as I thought I did.

  The lights cut off. Abruptly, as if they are candles snuffed by a cool breath.

  Now I hear it outside, the wind. It’s probably a chronic companion to the land here, more so than the desert and its variable moods. The brown valley that cradles Atlantis Star is full of almost tranquil stillness, where sometimes it seems even a loud exhale will disturb the scene too much. Other times the furies of nature threaten to lift every grain of sand from the desert floor.

  Strange that in the scope of my transient life I spent so little time there yet it somehow remains the centerpiece of my heart. It’s the place that lives in my dreams and keeps me company in the darkest, most forbidding of caves.

  There are heavy footsteps roaming the balcony outside my door. A man’s voice howls into the wind as the utter blackness of the stormy night prevails. He mutters a drunken slur and retreats.

  “I’m sure. I’m sure. I want this.”

  “Damn, I love you, Ren.”

  I go from being all cool and composed to being so hard I ache. I’ve got my pants down and my dick in my palm in a flash.

  Sure it eats at me a little, the knowledge that I’m getting off on the memory of a teenage girl, but we’re not kids anymore and if I had something better I’d use it. Every other female I’ve ever put it to before then and since then, they just all run together in my brain like they’re really all one pussy attached to replaceable heads.

  But I remember every second with Ren, the way she curled her fingers around the back of my neck and gasped when I pushed deep inside the tight place that hadn’t ever been breached before. I kissed her. I told her things I meant completely. I made her promises that should have come true. Once I was in there I never wanted to leave.

  It was more than that though. It was a soul-to-soul connection that I’d never known before, haven’t even glimpsed since.

  It was consuming.

  It was shattering.

  It was something that was forbidden in that time, and in that place.

  I stroke my own shaft and pretend it’s her soft hand on me. I close my eyes and make believe her hot mouth explores slowly, licking the sweet spot just south of the head. That’s how I come, hard and violent, with the vision of unleashing myself inside her mouth, my hands gripping her head and not letting go until she swallows it all.

  The wind grows stronger. The thin walls of the motel rub against one another and groan from the strain. It sounds like a strange sort of sex ritual, lacking rhythm or pleasure. I wonder how many of the other rooms are occupied, how many other errant travelers wait in the darkness. A town this close to tornado alley would have a storm siren but I hear nothing.

  Impatiently I smear my own essence on my bare thigh and listen. The wind begins to lighten just as my thudding heart starts to slow down. Eventually the sounds recede to a vague crackling of dry leaves and an occasional growl of thunder. There is a stirring of people as they resume their night. A few congregate on the balcony outside, murmuring and laughing over a private joke.

  The lights are still off. I hop off the bed naked and turn all the switches off so the lights won’t blind me when the electricity resumes. After a quick shower in the pitch darkness, I return to the narrow bed, strip off the towel and sink into the lumpy, well-used mattress.

  I’ll see her tomorrow. Every cell in my body vibrates with that certainty.

  I don’t know what she’s done since I’ve seen her last and I don’t care. Right now I can barely remember the details of my own life these past five years.

  They are irrelevant.

  All that matters is getting to her even if I have no clear plan for what comes next. It doesn’t matter if every fucking camera-toting gossip in the country wants to watch it happen or if she screams at the sight of me and tries to run in the opposite direction.

  It’s happening anyway.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  REN

  Monty isn’t in a friendly mood when I find him. That’s not surprising. My older brother has been sunk too long in his own bad temper to shed it on a whim or for a camera.

  He greets me with a weary nod as if we see each other far too often for his taste. Then he gestures that I ought to follow him inside and shoots a warning glance toward a skulking cameraman in the background.

  “Fuck you,” he sneers at the man. “Told Gary I’m not fucking with that shit until tomorrow.”

  He slams the door at my back and looks me up and down with his arms crossed. “They got a piece on you?”

  His voice is even more gruff than I remember, as if life has scratched it up a bit and added a few pounds of gravel. There’s a tattoo on his neck. Not a good one. It’s a stark tribal shape that might as easily mean something as it means nothing.

  “What?” I answer, a little startled because it sounds like my brother is asking if I’m carrying a gun.

  Monty raises his eyebrows. They are roguishly sculpted things that have a mood all their own. Anyone would assume a little manscaping is to thank.

  But Monty doesn’t cultivate his looks. He doesn’t have to. Whatever advantages he has are a Savage legacy. His looks, among other things.

  “A mic, Ren. They fit you with a microphone?”

  “Oh.” My brother averts his eyes as I reach fumbling fingers into my blouse and extract the device taped to my skin. I’m holding it in my hand and wondering how to mute it when Monty hisses between his teeth, grabs it, and severs the wire with a prompt snap between two fists. He lets it fall to the scruffy old parquet floor and we stand there staring down at the pieces.

  “That was violent,” I comment and look up, surprised to see Montgomery Savage grinning. If I wasn’t so stunned at the sight I would probably applaud.

  “How the hell are ya, Loren?”

  “I may have misplaced my mind but that’s probably a good idea considering what’s about to go down.” I pause, looking my brother over more carefully. He’s bulked up but not in a soft way at all. He is a bristling wall of muscle and scarcely bottled wrath.

  If I weren’t his sister I would run across the street to avoid him.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” I say with honesty because after all, I am his sister and right now we are a family in sore need of allies.

  Monty clears his throat with a small nod and I know that’s the best acknowledgement I’ll get.

  We don’t hug. Ava and Brigi
tte are huggers. The rest of us are aloof nodders.

  He starts walking toward a portable fridge in the corner of the room and seems to expect I’ll follow him. He fishes out a few Blue Moon beers and hands one over. He sucks back his whole bottle before I can even twist the cap off and take a sip.

  My brother stares moodily out the window with a frown. The barren valley at the foothills of the Harquehala stare back. At least the cameramen are warily distant at the moment. Instead of pressing a lens against the glass panes they are nowhere in sight.

  Monty seems to know my thoughts. He shoots me a wry glance. “Guess we should enjoy our last few moments of obscurity.”

  I snort. “Is that what you call this?”

  “What do you call it?”

  “Popular indifference. We are noteworthy when we do something violent or indecent.”

  Monty rolls his eyes. “That sounds like a shot if there ever was one.”

  “I wasn’t talking about you. Come on, Monty. You know I don’t cut you down that way. I’m not Lita.” I take a swallow of beer. It’s warm. Only the bottle was cool. “We’re not here to produce some down home family feel good show. We were given this shot because we’re-“

  “Fuckups,” my brother finishes and holds his bottle up in a mock toast before draining the last drop and tossing it across the room into an empty cardboard box that seems to be serving as a trash can. “At least some of us, anyway. You’ve managed to keep your nose clean. Me? Not so much.”

  I pause. I haven’t talked to Monty much over the past few years. Whatever communication we’ve had tends to skirt carefully away from subjects like prison and fortysomething sugar mamas. I can see the change in him though. Monty was never full of sunshine and delight. But now there’s a steeliness to him that’s sharp and a little frightening. He stews in his own skin like a large angry animal. Suddenly my heart hurts for him, for Monty, my big brother, even though he would be the last man on the planet to ask for pity.

  “I’m sorry,” I mumble miserably. I’m confronted by my own selfishness. I’ve removed myself from my siblings, remaining at an emotional and physical distance all because I was nursing a hurt that I’ve never been able to face.

  It seemed like the only way to heal my soul was to stay away from the things, the places, the people, that reminded me of what I’d lost.

  Anything reminiscent of Oscar.

  “Hey, Ren,” says Monty with some gentle concern. He’s peering at me and I don’t realize I’m crying until dueling tears spill down my cheeks. My brother sighs and plucks the beer out of my hand, setting it carefully on the counter.

  Monty coughs into one hand and sighs again. “It’s not your fault. You’ve always done the thing where you try to carry all the family’s shit on your shoulders so we don’t have to. I know it’s fucked up for you to be back here. And I know why.”

  “Do you?” I’m surprised. We’ve never talked about him. The day he left was the last day any of us spoke his name out loud. “It’s just history. All of it. It only messes us up if we let it.”

  A crooked grin crosses his face. “Who’s messed up? I’m fucking spectacular.”

  I grin back. “Sure you are.”

  He shrugs. “Easy confirmation. Just ask anything on the west coast with a set of tits.”

  “That’s a lot of tits, Montgomery.”

  “I could stand to meet some more. As soon as we wrap up this circus I plan on working my way east until I hit an ocean or something.”

  “That’ll keep you busy for a little while.”

  “Maybe.”

  A shadow of pain pulses beneath my left eyebrow. An old enemy, prologue to a migraine. My hand goes to my forehead, pressing the spot. If I take two Excedrin within the next fifteen minutes I might be able to head it off in time.

  Monty opens a narrow cabinet beside the kitchen sink. After knocking a few other things aside, he finds what he’s looking for. He tosses a bottle to me and I’m glad to pop it open and swallow two of the pills that rattle around inside as my brother watches.

  “It’ll be okay, Ren,” he says quietly and touches my shoulder in a rare gesture of brotherly affection.

  And that’s Monty; impenetrable, solitary, but capable of rare flashes of gallantry. I remember once when I was nine and he was ten. We were in the middle of a childhood war. Usually such conflicts were Monty vs. Spence or Monty vs. Lita or Monty vs. Everyone. But we battled one-on-one every now and then.

  Monty had been pissed for weeks because I’d accidentally left the water on when filling the tub in the hallway bathroom beside his bedroom. Water spilled over the top of the old claw foot tub, flowed across the threshold and found a shoebox full of the vintage video game cartridges he’d left on the floor just inside his room. They might have been salvageable if Monty had the patience to consider such a thing. Instead he screamed and ranted and set the box afire in the backyard barbecue pit. If it was Spencer’s fault he would have clobbered him without mercy but even when in a rage Monty would never hit us girls. He glared and brooded, held his nose whenever I walked into the room, ignored me more than usual at school where we were in the same class because he’d been held back in second grade. I shrugged it all off irritably because I understood my brother well enough to know that sooner or later he would move on to a different grievance.

  And then came the Faberge egg incident. It was the most valuable object in the crumbling mansion where chandeliers hadn’t operated for decades, fixtures were cracked and ants marched in dogged lines along the ivory-colored stucco walls. The egg was an emerald green, encrusted with exquisite pink roses, a gift bestowed on our screen goddess grandmother by some minor European royalty. It used to sit in its own display case in the center of the second floor library, one of the few remaining treasures that hadn’t yet been sold off.

  By that time our father, August, had pretty much given up on most things; his career, personal hygiene, and fighting with his bat shit crazy wife. He was forever retreating to the moldy attic room where he could pet his vinyl record collection and write sprawling incoherent memoirs about his life. He would have one more battle left in him – the Battle of Atlantis Star - but it was years from surfacing. Maybe he was storing up the energy for it.

  In the meantime, Lita was free to practice her brand of roughshod parenting, which involved nightmarish casting calls (don’t improvise, why the fuck did you improvise?? NEXT!), chronic body shaming (my god, suck in that baby fat, you look like a pregnant fourth grader!) and scattered episodes where she would howl that we were all disgusting brats before running off to places unknown for a few days or a few weeks at a time.

  Anyway, I had a habit of dawdling in the library and staring trance-like at the glittering antique. You can’t appreciate a thing like that unless you get close. Close enough to understand the intricate artistry that was spent on its creation.

  I would stand there, chewing on my thumbnail, and imagining that I was really the resident of a dazzling realm with no ants crawling the walls or dirty floors beneath my feet, no confusing legacies to grapple with or cruel mothers to avoid.

  In that world I was Loren the Beloved, twirling in pink tulle, eating as much ice cream as I pleased and tiptoeing around a gleaming castle. The egg winked at me from its golden pedestal, beckoning, promising.

  I needed to get closer.

  If I got close enough to touch its surface then the magic was possible.

  Typically I wasn’t a dreamy child and at age nine I was old enough to know magic was a false promise. But I placed my hands around the glass dome of the display case, surprised when it lifted easily, and watched my finger move to the nearest embellished rose with the same hypnotic power that a certain fairy tale princess would understand when she touched a sharp spindle.

  I didn’t mean any harm. I would have gladly tossed my greatest treasures into the old fire pit behind Monty’s video games before I would have willingly damaged that egg. My mind took a moment to catch up to the horror of the priz
e object rolling from its perch, sliding across the narrow table and hitting the floor, shattering in several places. I stared in disbelieving shock as broken slivers of pink roses spun out in several directions.

  “You are in such deep shit,” said a voice and I whirled around to see Monty standing there with a knowing smirk on his face. His laughter followed me as I sprinted back to my room, where there was nothing to do but crawl beneath the bed and cry until nightfall.

  One of the other kids happened to walk past the library and raised the alarm about the shattered egg. It would have been a big deal under the best of circumstances but my mother was feeling especially wronged because Ava had been cut from the casting of a prime time family drama.

  And so misfortune became catastrophe. Lita might have blamed the staff if there was any staff remaining to blame. I cowered at the shrill, familiar sound of her voice. She was accusing Ava. Ava was crying. Balling my fists and gritting my teeth, I crawled out from beneath the bed. Let her slap me or withhold dinner for a week, let her perversely grin at the other kids and say in her false sugar voice, “Let’s play a game. Let’s pretend Loren is invisible!”

  I’d suffered through all of that before. I could take it again.

  My feet were cold on the bare floor and I wished I’d put on shoes. Somehow that made it worse, facing my mother in bare feet. She was shrieking my name from the library.

  People would always say Lita Savage was an attractive woman. If I’d I’d been able to separate her character from her face I might have thought so too. Her blonde hair wasn’t natural and her features were a smudge too pointed but she turned heads even in a city stuffed with hopeful, plastic beauty. There was nothing beautiful about her face as she turned on me. My siblings were clotted together in the corner of the library, August was blasting an Elvis record from his attic hideaway and I was on the verge of being eviscerated by Lita Savage’s fire breathing madness.