The New and Improved Romie Futch (23 page)

And I could see Helen inside the house, drawn to the window, feasting her tired eyes on the carefree youth. I could see her world-weary smile, taste the bitterness in the back of her throat, the residue of a thousand disappointments—her derailed career as a marine biologist, her dismal sex life with a rich dullard, her host of lost children, a series of golden eggs dropping into a black void one by one and lapsing into slime.

Why the fuck not?
she'd think. Men have been doing this shit for centuries.

As Helen and Adam strode back toward us, enveloped in cozy banter, I imagined myself charging Adam, goring him in his lily-white flank with my right tusk. I imagined purple tears of blood weeping from his wound.

“Did you try the food?” Helen asked me. “The duck empanadas are amazing.”

“Not much for vegans on that buffet,” said Adam, shaking glitter from his hair.

“Like you need to get any skinnier.” Helen poked him in the ribs as though he were a toddler whose smile she wanted to spark. And behold: a grin and a blush broke like dawn upon the boy's wan face. Boykin mumbled something and glanced at me with harrowed eyes.

“Aw shit.” Adam fingered his phone. “I've got to take this.”

Gadget pressed to ear, Adam pushed through the dowdy crowd.

“Time for me to tank up,” said Boykin. “Can I get you something, Romie?”

I waved my half-empty Sierra Nevada. Sometimes it was easier not to speak. Sometimes it was easier to lapse into moody silence, to peer at your ex-wife through the eye slits of an animalistic mask.

“So, Romie,” said Helen, her voice suddenly grave. “How
are
you?”

I shrugged.

“Well,” she said. “I still worry about you. But I saw Lee last week and he said you're doing great.”

I nodded, gave her two thumbs-up, frowning behind my pig mask.

“Did Lee tell you I was going back to school?” she asked. “Just two online courses at USC, but it's a start.”

I put down my drink and clapped my hands to show my support.

“Now that I can afford to work part-time, I can manage it.”

She didn't say
how
she could afford to work part-time, but I knew. For years she'd fantasized about going back to school, but her forty-hour-a-week serfdom at Technomatic Quick Lab had kept her from her dreams. We used to fight about the relative flexibility of my job, especially during the bad years when, low on customers, I'd crack a beer at work, forget to eat lunch, piddle with the corpses of animals as my buzz came on. Then I'd wash my hands for an Internet fix, skip though YouPorn, Fleshbot, and VenusVille. I'd spend entire afternoons clicking through catalogs of sportive minxes and homemade fuckfests, zipping hither and thither like a frenzied bee until I found just the right flower to plunge into.

Afterward, I'd nurse my fourth beer while fussing with inventory, rearranging boxes of eyes and tongues, but never having the wherewithal to overhaul my supply room. I'd somehow make it to five thirty, when I'd trudge home and find Helen on the sofa, too tired to change out of her medical costume, which smelled of strawberry disinfectant spray.

“What do you want for dinner?” I'd ask, opening the fridge, casually plucking a beer as though it were my first.

“I don't care.”

“Monkey jerky?” Perhaps my voice sounded menacing, something vile beneath the false brightness.

“Whatever.”

She'd watch me move around the kitchen, opening random drawers, another dusk closing in, one of thousands we'd experienced together. Sometimes the windows were open. Sometimes the windows were closed. Sometimes you could hear a bird going at it, twitting with all its soul.

“Drunk already?” she'd ask. “It's not even six o'clock.”

I'd choke out a laugh. “What makes you think I'm drunk?”

“I know you, Romie Futch. I've known you for over twenty years.”

She'd look at me with pity and disgust. She could see through my skin. Could see my heart, a shriveled thing with a husk of discolored leather, sagging like a half-deflated football.

And then we'd claw idly at each other, waiting for something to catch. We'd bicker until a jazz of insults blared in the night air and we felt alive again, our dead blood oxygenated, pulsing brightly in our veins.

But now Helen seemed calm yet energized, self-possessed with yogic poise.

I could see her out on a patio with her micropad, brain cells revitalized. I could see her glancing up from her homework to feast her eyes upon optimally fertilized flowers maintained by a landscaping crew, not one weed visible in the perfectly spread cypress mulch. I could see Adam in the background, just out of focus, his platinum hair catching the sun. Boykin was at the office, of course, making three hundred dollars an hour.

“But seriously.” Helen put her hand on my arm. “I hope you're doing well, Romie.”

“I'm fine,” I finally said. “I'm making art again.”

“Now we're talking.” Helen smiled. “What? Sculptures?”

“Postnatural taxidermic dioramas,” I said. “Mounted mutant scenarios; working with my own kill. It's taken me forever to deconstruct the taxidermy-art binary that's always hindered me, but now that I have, I feel a small sense of deceptive liberation.”

Helen blinked, peered at me. “I'm not sure what that means exactly—maybe Adam would know—but it sounds really creative.” There was that word again. (Was it my imagination, or did she seem less clever than she used to be?) “You are so creative. That's one thing I love about you. And your pig costume. I really like the way you—”

“I doubt Adam would get it,” I interrupted, “though he'd no doubt declare it
epic
before clicking on the latest viral YouTube video.”

Helen bit her lip, removed her hand from my arm.

“You ought to talk to Annabelle about a show here,” she said. “She's into things that are different.”

“Like anal bleaching?” I sniggered. “Annabelle Tewksbury DeBris might be too avant-garde for my stuff.”

“Oh no. I think she'd like it.”

“I am Ironic Man,” I said. “Do you really take that synthetic creature seriously?”

“Believe me, I know,” said Helen. “But I'm trying to stay positive, you know?”

In my ex-wife's forced smile, I saw some of the old sadness welling up, which made me feel connected to her again.

“Helen,” I whispered.

The word sounded ancient, archetypal, like some tender appellation emerging from a caveman's lips—the name of a newly discovered flower.

“Helen, I . . .”

She waved me off.

Now Boykin was at her elbow with drinks. Adam was moving sulkily through the throng of dowdy revelers, many of whom had reached the staggering, bellowing stages of drunkenness, costumes askew. But I was painfully sober. Painfully alone. Painfully alert to some not-quite-rightness, a general drooping of the spirit.

“I've got to go,” I said to Boykin when he offered me a beer.

“It's early,” Helen said.

“I'm going hunting tomorrow morning,” I said.

“For real?” She raised an eyebrow.

“Totally,” I said, imitating Adam.

As I walked away, I saw her turning toward the boy to peer at some trifle he'd pulled up on his little screen.

“Wow,” she said. “That's amazing.”

And I wondered what magical image he'd bewitched her with—a short art film, an E-Live photo stream, some oft-tweeted meme that offered just the right political commentary in six words or less.

As I strolled toward my truck, I thought of the Calydonian Boar, that beast from antiquity who tore ass through the Greek countryside, snorting Stygian smoke. I thought of old Beowulf, the first dragon slayer in literature, gray haired with shrunken sinews, slumping into the wilderness in heavy mail. I imagined Hogzilla, asleep in his musky swamp nest, dreaming mysterious hoggish dreams.

I'd rise with the sun. I'd smear my body with sacred mud to deface my decadent human stink. I'd become an animal, fleet-footed, keen-snouted, my mind in tune with the intricately shifting wind.

EIGHT

I sat in an obscure chamber of Hampton Regional's emergency facility, my right hand resting in a plastic vat of antiseptic fluid pinked with my blood. I'd been waiting for nearly an hour as doctors and nurses bickered over whether or not to stitch up my finger, whether there might be nerve damage, whether or not to send me to an orthopedic surgeon. So I slumped in the freezing room, cursing myself. I'd been a fool.

I should've known not to go galumphing into the woods that morning. Should've stayed in bed. Should've waited for a more auspicious day.

After a night of fitful dreams, I'd woken with a headache—the kind of foggy pain that had a fifty-fifty chance of veering into skull-splitting migraine mode. Overcast mornings seemed to bring the agony on—constipated weather states that refused to erupt into rain. But I took three Excedrin and fingered my acupressure headache zones until the ache retreated to a deeper section of my brain. I cleansed my body with an alcohol bath to eliminate my human stench. Decked myself out in freshly laundered camo. Loaded my grandfather's Savage .45 with safari-grade ammo, bullets that would pierce a rhino's hide.

I drove to the edge of a forest, hiked through second-growth pine until I reached the cypress swamp where I'd salvaged the remains of Hogzilla's cannibalistic frenzy. Wearing a prophylactic latex glove, I spritzed various tree trunks with Feral Fire Sow-in-Heat spray. Upon removing said glove, I noted a hole in its pinkie finger. I'd forgotten my stash of SafeWipe disinfectant towelettes, so I dipped my hand into a stream, sniffed my finger, felt sure that no trace of pheromones lingered.

But the sow musk had tainted my flesh. It whispered beguiling messages to the wind.

Thinking myself odorless, thinking myself invisible, I hid behind a clump of buttonbush and waited. The heavens grumbled, but rain did not come.

Into this tranquility rushed a drift of hogs, some thirty strong, sows and piglets and a handful of horny boars. Squealing, grunting, filling the air with the reek of tainted meat, the boars dashed around sniffing the trees I'd anointed with Feral Fire spray. They snuffled and tore up the ground, devouring roots and insects. And then the whole parcel charged onward into wetter zones of swamp.

One boar and a sow dallied, however, with two piglets in orbit—soft, fuzzy creatures who veered in to nuzzle their mother's flanks. Grunting, the boar sniffed the sow's face. He nosed along her fatty rows of teats. He plunged his snout into her anogenital zone and took a deep, drunken whiff.

Squealing, the sow butted the boar's neck with her modest tusks. The old razorback mounted his lover backward and maneuvered himself clockwise into proper alignment, whereupon the white worm of his penis emerged from its furry sheath. Slithering, the corkscrew phallus lashed at its target. At last, the boar clambered atop his mate and grasped her flanks with his front hooves. Thrusting furiously, he rammed his pale pecker home.

It took him awhile to hit his groove, and then he went strangely still. From my research I knew that his flailing phallus had finally wedged itself into the corkscrew-shaped aperture of the sow's cervix. The lovers stood frozen, expressionless in their bliss, as piglets frolicked around them, dipping in for reassuring sniffs of their mother's musk.

But then the clambering of monstrous hooves shook the air. A deafening mastodon roar echoed as the biggest and freakiest hog I'd ever seen bounded into this idyllic scene: the fabled Hogzilla at last. His pop eyes pulsed in fury, emitting a hellish light. His cutters were at least two feet long. Random tufts of black bristle grew from his bald, hot-pink hide. Despite the overwhelming effect of the razorback's visual presence, smell overpowered image: nose hair curling, supernaturally putrid, a chthonic funk beyond belief. A gray streak of stench flared behind the pig's body like a comet tail. Whatever decadent pheromone receptors I possessed in my feeble human olfactory system worked overtime to process this assault. I understood, at the most primitive neurological level, the metaphoric significance of fiery dragon breath. I can't imagine what the other pigs smelled, keen-snouted as they were.

The piglets fled immediately. The mounted boar, struggling to detach his engorged prick as the sow squealed and squirmed, shrieked when his paramour finally ran off into the bracken. His penis bounced and retracted into its pouch. His hackles shot up. He assumed a stiff-legged fighting posture. But Hogzilla got right down to business. Refusing to engage in the usual shoulder-to-shoulder pushing match, the big beast rushed in and gored his rival in his flank. After plowing the little boar over, Hogzilla made an instant porridge of his belly, after which the monster relaxed, casually plunking down to slurp and smack.

Hogzilla pulled bright red gut strings from the gory cavity. Chewed through the spongy rinds of organs. Crunched cartilage and snapped bones.

I dared not move. I'll admit that I pissed myself. Fretting over the fear message my pee smell was broadcasting into the wind, I clutched my rifle with crimped fingers. I attempted to move my frenetic mind through the seven coordinations of
shichid
to become one with my heirloom gun. But every nerve in my body was raging. Every hair standing on end, all follicles raised into bumps. I still had the presence of mind to notice a pile of fox scat beside my left boot, its stringy texture studded with berries—strikingly beautiful berries—shining in the sun.