The Trinity Viper

I leaned my head against the car window, allowing my skull to sway and bump against the glass with every minor adjustment in my father’s driving.

            “The thing is,” he said, pausing after each clause. “If you want more freedom, you need to be willing to take on more responsibility. It’s like I tell my kids.”

            I wondered like I often did why he referred to his students as his kids and to my brother and me by name. A fire truck came speeding across a corner of the treacherous road causing my father, who was driving in the middle of the road, to slam on his brakes and dramatically change the position of the car.

            “Motherfucker!” he shouted, as if that would aid the audibility of his observation. My head slid an inch down the glass, causing a squeak that drew my father’s attention back to the conversation.

            “If you want a raise in your allowance and a later curfew, you’re going to have to show me that you’re ready. You have to be more adult.”

            I had heard this before. Uninterested in the subject, I asked him if we were there yet. He muttered something I didn’t hear and we drove the rest of the way in silence.

            Rocking from side to side, I nestled my nine year-old chin into my mother’s shoulder, letting the wind gently move us in the hammock. She read aloud, and even though the story was far beyond my comprehension, I focused on her serene voice and drifted in and out of consciousness, with the occasional bird call and leaf falling letting me know that now, on our third day of vacation, I could finally relax…

            “Get inside your cabin!”

            The shoulder was removed from my face. Startled, my mother bolted upright and dangled her feet in over the edge of the hammock, stretching her neck towards the river where the voice had come from.

            “What?” my mother called, confused and teary eyed from yawning.

            The only thing I remember about this man is the black rifle he was holding.

            “You need… to get… inside… the cabin!”

            My mother grabbed my hand and led me inside my grandfather’s cabin, my father, brother, and uncle already inside.

            “What was that?” my father asked, blinking from his afternoon nap.

            “I don’t know,” my mother said as she let go of my hand. “There was some man, a forest ranger, I think, on the bank across the river. He told me that we needed to get inside the cabin.”

            My father paused, narrowing his eyes. “Why?”

            “I don’t know.”

            “What do you mean ‘you don’t know?’”

            “I mean I don’t know, he didn’t tell me.”

            “What do you mean ‘he didn’t tell you?’”

            “Michael, all he told me is that we’re supposed to get inside, so let’s stay inside.”

            And we did. My parents argued the whole time, my mother saying we needed to be safe and my father saying we can’t spend the whole goddamned trip inside the one room cabin. It took forty-five minutes to hear from anybody, because our cabin had no phone. A ranger, a different one than the one we saw earlier, eventually knocked on the door. My brother and I played the whole ten minutes he was at our cabin, and so we had to get the story from my mother later. I would soon learn that there was a murderer loose in the forest. He had killed three people while his girlfriend was in his truck. With plenty of witnesses saying that she had not objected, the police were calling her an accomplice. Their truck had been found near a small town called Hayfork, and they were within a mile in any direction of my cabin. We were to lock all our doors and windows, keep protection by our sides at all times, and wait for further instructions. My uncle would also soon remind us that we had a gaggle of family friends coming that night, and we had no way of getting in contact with them.

My father bent down to my brother’s height and said to him “If there’s any problem tonight, I want you to break the screen and jump out of the window. Do you know which cabin is Reagan’s?”

            My brother nodded, on the verge of tears.

            “Good boy,” my father said. “We and the boys will be sleeping in the loft tonight. If anything happens, don’t think. Just kick in the screen and jump, then you run your ass off ‘til you get to Reagan’s. Can you do that?”

            My brother nodded again. I of course was not meant to hear any of this, although the severity of what was being said to my twelve year-old brother did not really occur to me until several years later, when I was replaying the situation in my head.  At the time, I was sticking my head between the blinds and the window, waiting for a pair of headlights to appear in the darkness that was our driveway. At eight-o-clock they finally did.

            “They’re here!” I shouted. My mother went outside and greeted our guests. Dale got out of the car first, the father of this three-member family. Then his wife, Elenia, and his son, Nico, followed. They all stretched and yawned from the trip. As my mother went outside to quickly get them, I took my head away from the window. Though I always imagined what she said was “You need… to get… inside… the cabin!”

            “Wow,” was all they could say after we told them why they were inside and not enjoying the deck, and why they couldn’t bring anything in from their car, and why everyone would be sharing a one room cabin for how long we didn’t know.

            “Hell of a way to start a vacation.” Dale said. Nobody smiled.

            Dale and Elenia shared the bed, a kitchen knife on the nightstand. My uncle slept on the floor with a root remover, and my mother took the couch and a walking stick. Nico and I slept on one side of the loft, my brother on the other, and my father in the middle with the hatchet.

            Five out of the eight people in the cabin snored, all of them choosing to do so with particular audibility. I sat awake, watching the moonlight pass over my father’s glistening balding head to the hatchet on the dresser.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the killer. I repeated that word over and over in my head. Killer. I sounded so sinister to me, so real. I pictured him in the forest, dragging some dead animal back to his campsite, his girlfriend waiting ravenously for the flesh her man would provide. His brim was pulled down low over his face, exposing only his young bearded face below the nose and a mouth full of rotting crooked face. In one hand he dragged his kill by the feet, in the other he held his still-bloody knife. He plopped the animal in front of his seething mate, knelt down, and shoved the knife back into the flesh, splitting the stomach open so he could have his pick of the best parts. He then shoved his hand in the wound, searching around, and I felt it. I felt his reaching in and clawing around for God knows what. Then I realized it was indeed me he was reaching into. I has lying split open on the ground with the drooling couple leaning over me. The man pulled something out of me, something I was guessing was vital, when I bolted upright, back in the loft, back next to my father and the hatchet.

            Light was streaming in through the window now, and I was wondering how and when I had gotten to sleep. My brother was sitting up as well, just as panicked-looking as I was. I looked over at him, asking with my eyes what the problem was. He was about to tell me when I heard it for myself.

            Bang!

            Half the people in the cabin sat up, including me. My brother threw the covers off of himself and walked to the edge of the loft. I crawled over and did the same. My mother looked up at us with confusion, her eyes red from sleep.

            Bang! Bang!

            Everyone else was up and loud. “Was that a gunshot? What should we do? What about breakfast?”

            We all ran around the cabin like idiots, deciding what to do. And like it was synchronized, we all stopped at the same time.

            Knock knock knock.

            Those three knocks rang through the cabin as everyone stared at one another, waiting for someone to do something.

            Knock knock knock.   

            Eventually it was deciding with no words that my father, in his underwear, was to make the decision. He moved to the door slowly, hatchet in hand.

            “Hello?”

            “It’s Reagan.”

            Reagan lived in a cabin across the river. He had been deemed by the population of Glen County as the honorary mayor, and news traveled through him to all of the other cabins. Everyone trusted his word, including us, so we opened the door.

            Reagan informed us that the killer had been caught. We never learned his actually name, so we referred to him as the Trinity Viper. He had been caught on the beach of Hell Gate, a local swimming hole we were quite fond of. He had been spotted by some hicks at the campground above the river. The cops held out all night half a mile up the road from Hell Gate, waiting to catch the Viper in a trap, which they did with ease, no guns fired. It would take us a year to figure out that the supposed gunshots we heard were pinecones falling on the tin-roofed carport next door.

            Later that day, after everyone had moved in to his or her tents, the cabin, or wherever they chose to sleep, I saw my father was clearing a path to the river, like we have to every year, by himself. I walked uneasily down the path, my little legs strained by the large steps I was forced to take. It took him a second to notice me behind him. He saw the pile of weeds I was creating and turned to look at me. He put a hand on my shoulder and smiled, something he hadn’t done with sincerity since years before.

“You don’t have to help, I’m fine.”

            “I can do it,” I said as I grabbed a shovel and shoved it into the ground, put my weight on it, pushed the handle to the ground, and ripped a clod of soil out of the Earth. I though back to what he had said in the car four days ago: “If you want to have more freedom, you need to take on more responsibility.” I stuck the shovel into the ground again and my father took his hand off of my shoulder.