Those Terrifying, Terrible, Transylvanian Troglodytes

Those brothers — Theo, Tobias, and Titus — were the strangest bunch of humanoids in the Mississippi Delta. It was rumored that they migrated from Transylvania and perhaps were the progeny of Count Dracula himself. Antisocial, they lived, fought, drank, and worked together sunup to sundown, exerting Goliath-size bodies overflowing with strength and energy unmatched by any ordinary man or set of men. Of fear and women, they had no use, which didn’t matter because women steered clear of them, as did most men. They were the source of children’s nightmares. Their abode, a barn-sized house, was surrounded by rows of wrecked automobiles, engines, transmissions, and tires crisscrossing a huge junkyard, so far out in the boondocks that a step in any direction was closer to civilization.

They were tall, monstrous clones of each other, with deep-set, pale blue eyes that glared — stone cold, and pitiless — from beneath granite brow ridges protruding from nearly nonexistent foreheads. Scissors, razors, and combs could do little with their tangled, matted, yellowish hair and black, grizzly beards. Their tobacco-stained teeth resembled dot-less dominos, and their necks were virtually nonexistent, requiring that they swivel their massive torsos to look sideways. Despite their diet — mostly baseball-sized wads of chewing tobacco and a homemade alcoholic concoction such as Viking’s mead — so potent that mere mortals would just as soon drink arsenic, they were marvelous specimens of health. The only doctor who ever attended them was the one who initiated their journey from womb to tomb. The junkyard, unnamed and unadvertised, was accessible only by a winding gravel road and by the same railroad that passed through my father’s farm. When an automobile part could not be found anywhere else, they had it. Year-round, the brothers worked outdoors, bare-chested and greasy, oblivious to the hottest, rainiest, or coldest days, dismantling wrecked vehicles and salvaging every usable part. One morning, several of Dad’s employees and I gathered around an overturned convertible alongside the railroad. Apparently unhurt, the driver abandoned the wreck, which the brothers promptly claimed. After measuring the distance between tires and determining that it matched the space between the railroad’s rails, the four hulking titans crouched at the car’s corners, and with no apparent strain, lifted it, and flipped it onto the rails. After lowering the tires’ air pressure until they sagged on either side of the rails, they tossed mirrors, bumpers, windshield and other parts that had become dislodged into the car’s trunk. After nodding to the spectators and grunting approvingly to each other, they filled gallon-sized tankards with mead, stepped over the car’s sides, cranked it, wedged a brick on the accelerator, put it in gear, and rattled off down the tracks, with the doors flapping in the breeze, and the rear fender dragging along, flinging sparks when it banged against the rails. Watching them fade into the distance, clanking mugs together in a toast, I thought to myself … the likes of them are not to be found on this earth: those terrifying, terrible, Transylvanian troglodytes.

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