The New and Improved Romie Futch (29 page)

About fifteen years my senior, Scovel ran a U-Haul rental place. Tall, with a gaunt, quixotic face, sallow skin, and a fertile crop of moles that flourished just within the moist depths of his shirt collar, he made the most of these features by seldom cracking a smile. Years ago, when he'd been my family's neighbor, his wife had run off with a Jostens class-ring salesman—the jaunty rep who'd plagued my high school—a man with soap opera hair who
sputtered bons mots and spit-cleaned his lustrous shoes. After his wife left, Scovel'd joined my father in his crusade against the underbrush that crept up from the gorge into our yard. Occasionally, while enjoying a glass of tea on our patio, he'd talk solemnly about the enterprising species of vines that'd sprouted in his own yard, how their root systems were unconquerable.

He'd wanted to set up a double-wide on a dry windy hill, far away from town, with woods in view but not close enough to invade his property. And one day he did—moved to the boondocks of Yemassee. My father and I once drove out there to look at a riding mower he was selling. We sat on his back porch, a stark slab of concrete, watching lightning bugs sweep up from the woods.

Now Scovel nodded grimly, stepped into my shop with a wadded-up towel.

“Got a strange specimen for you,” he said. “Don't know if you've seen anything like this before.”

Scovel set his mysterious bundle on the counter and worked it open with long fingers to reveal, at last, a large bald rat with crinkled skin. He plucked a pen from his shirt pocket and used the instrument to turn the specimen over. Nestled into the creature's back was a large eyeball, human-looking, with a clouded iris and red-veined sclera. The eye, with its long lashes and voluptuous lid, looked vaguely feminine, with a delicate coquettish slant.

“Holy shit,” I said, thinking, at first, that the specimen was a mutant, of the same ilk as my one-eyed possum, bald squirrels, and albino frogs, but the humanoid aspects of the eye gave me pause. “Where in hell did you stumble upon this?”

“Down by the river behind my house in Yemassee. Near Jarvis Riddle's campsite. The government finally kicked him out of his last place, and last month he asked me if he could build a wigwam on my property.”

“What'd you say?”

“Told him he was welcome to it, so long as he kept the noise and trash level down, and though he did build a lean-to, haven't seen him since that day. Found an empty can of sardines yesterday, though, and a rat like this one lapping up what was left of the oil. Caught this specimen with a one-dollar trap this morning. Nothing to it. Thought I'd bring it over to see what you'd make of it. Wonder if it came from that bionics lab.”

“Bionics lab?”

“You know, GenEx or whatnot, which ain't but a few miles from my house. They do animal experiments, from what I hear.”

“Right,” I said. “Biotech research. Recombinant DNA.”

“And look here.”

Scovel pointed at the rat's scrunched-up left hind foot, where a bracelet of yellow plastic encircled its ankle. I had to get a magnifying glass to read the cryptic script—3583959T9NIMH6—which prompted a dark chuckle.

“What?” said Scovel.

“Ever heard of the rats of NIMH?”

“Don't reckon I have.”

“From a children's book. Probably an inside joke among the GenExcel geneticists. Ever met anybody who worked up there?”

“No. You?”

“Nope. Maybe they commute from someplace more urban—Charleston, Columbia?”

“I don't know.”

Scovel's harrowed eyes settled upon my maimed hand, which rested on the counter. “How'd you lose the finger?” Scovel Bough-knight did not beat around the bush.

“Double whammy: lawn mower accident combined with a bone infection.”

“Could've been worse. If I had to part with a finger, the pinkie would be my pick.”

“True. It's the thumb that makes us human.”

Scovel nodded grimly.

“So you want to mount this specimen for posterity?” I asked.

“Was thinking along those lines.”

“What'd you have in mind?”

“I want him just like I found him: head stuck in a can of sardines, lapping at the oil. You don't have to use real sardine oil. And leave the little tag on his leg.”

“That makes sense. What you want here is an ironically unnaturalistic naturalistic diorama: the Frankenrat in its habitat.”

“Sounds about right.”

When Scovel Boughknight smiled—an uncomfortable twitch that was over in seconds—he seemed twice as grim afterward, as though the effort had drained the last few drops of serotonin that percolated through his nervous system. While filling out his specifications form, he looked extra sallow, the yellow gray of old piano keys and stained teeth.

“I best hit the road.” He handed over his form. “Left my shop closed up. Somebody might need them a U-Haul.”

“Let me ask you something,” I said. “Would you mind if I checked out Jarvis Riddle's lean-to? I've been trying to track him down. Had a few questions for the old woodsman. And I wouldn't mind seeing one of these critters in its natural habitat.”

I was after Hogzilla lore but also thinking I might bag me a few GM rats for my Panopticon diorama, the perfect guards for my bald squirrels and albino frogs.

“Be my guest,” said Scovel. “If I see you creeping around on my property, I promise I won't shoot.”

There it was again, the rare spasm of smile that sucked brightness from the air—which broke the world record for per diem
Scovel Boughknight smiles. When it was gone, Scovel resembled a tortured hero from an Ingmar Bergman film, or maybe Abraham Lincoln in his last photograph, when the war had just ended and he was haunted by a dream of his own funeral, days before Booth shot him in the head.

Scovel wrote me a check and walked out into the winter light. With an air of infinite world-weariness, he climbed into his Toyota truck. He cranked his motor and sat there idling for a minute, staring off at the roof of his old house, where he and his wife had lived for three golden years before she ran off with the Jostens dandy. And then he drove away, leaving me with his monster rat, wondering if I too would find myself alone in my midfifties, my personal misery imploded, condensed, throbbing mysteriously like a pulsar.

•  •

I found Jarvis Riddle's campsite with little trouble—a lean-to with a fire wall nestled into a creek bend that ran through Scovel's property, which was set smack-dab between the Combahee River and GenExcel, not too far from a medical dump called Prima Pure. The ashes in Jarvis's fire pit were at least a week old. All he'd left behind was an Old Crow bottle, a few sardine tins, a plastic Hello Kitty comb, and a faint whiff of ursine despair. As I unpacked my gear, I wondered if the GM rats had anything to do with his relocation. I wondered where he'd made his new woodland den. I set out two small-mammal cage traps with spring-loaded doors and baited them with rancid turkey bacon. And then I walked an old Indian trail, which, according to Scovel, ran right up to the GenExcel security fence.

When I reached the fence—a ten-foot, we-mean-business electric with warning signs featuring an electrified skull-and-crossbones motif—I couldn't get a glimpse of the GenExcel
complex. Scovel claimed it was buffered by about a hundred acres of old-growth forest. So I turned around and took my time on the trail back, pausing to inspect a Skoal tobacco tin that might've been abandoned by Jarvis Riddle.

When I got back to the campsite, I was surprised to see that I'd snared two rats already, one per cage, and that the rodents were indeed of the same bald modified variety that Scovel had brought me the day before. While both had humanesque eyes nestled into their backs (with a trace of downy eyebrow running along the spine), only one of the eyes seemed “alive.” The organ gazed unnervingly into space, its white fraught with red veins, its iris the murky gray of a shark's skin. And I could have sworn its lashes were touched with mascara. The other rat's eye looked dead, shrunk down to a scabby knot—hardly recognizable as an eyeball at all.

As cold wind whipped through the trees, I studied the rats. Having given up on finding a way out, each animal sat licking its paws, oblivious, it appeared, to the ocular enhancement wedged into its dorsal physiology.

I toted them to my truck, which was parked in Scovel's driveway. I planned to euthanize them humanely with carbon dioxide to preserve the delicate structural integrity of their oddity. I'd tossed some extra bacon into each cage to make sure they didn't die hungry, and I covered the cages with a tarp so they wouldn't freak on the ride home.

Scovel, who was in his prefab shed sorting screws into empty Metamucil jars, walked out to my truck to check out my specimens.

“Funny,” he said. “They're always the exact same size. At least that's what Jarvis Riddle said.”

“Jarvis Riddle? When?”

“Gave him a ride to Gators just this morning. He was walking down Strom Thurmond Freeway, heading back from the scrap-metal recycling place, where he'd unloaded a shopping cart of copper wiring.”

“Did he mention where he was camping?”

“Nope.”

I'd noted Gators on the way in, a cinder-block watering hole with a crude mural of an alligator in a top hat painted on its front wall. I decided to drop in on the way home to see if I might find Jarvis therein, huddled over a glass of lip-loosening spirits and brimming with foresty know-how. Jarvis knew which berries were safe to eat. He could point out the streams that ran foul with pesticide runoff. I bet that plied with enough drink, he'd wax poetic on the ocular rats from GenExcel. And hopefully he'd hold forth on Hogzilla—telling me where the pig ran off his rut rage and bedded down for the night.

•  •

I stepped into the dark bar, which smelled of reptiles and cigarette smoke and obscure molds dating back to the Eisenhower administration. The walls, lined with gator pelts, seemed to undulate with slick life. Men hunched like troglodytes in a sacred cave, drinking ceremonial elixirs concocted by a half-alligator shaman so old he could remember that time when the first scaly beasts slid from the waters to creep upon the earth. And sure enough, at a table in the dimmest corner of the bar slumped Jarvis Riddle.

Red bugs crawled in his mossy hair. Mushrooms grew from his skin. His breath smelled of leaf mold and river sludge. It took him a minute to recognize me, and then he cracked an earthy smile.

“Sit down, son,” he said, “and buy an old man a drink.”

“I'll have two Millers,” I said to the lizard proprietor, who leaned over the bar to catch my words in his enormous, gnarled ears.

Beers in hand, I sat down.

“This is Lizzy.” Jarvis pointed at a blow-up she-gator that hung over his head, the only feminine presence in the room. “The missing link between humans and reptiles.”

A man stumbled by, a bald, fat fellow in a Carhartt onesie who resembled a huge, corroded toddler.

“How's the ticker?” Jarvis asked him.

“Clean as a whistle.” The man licked at the foamy head of his beer. “I feel like going jogging.”

“This gentleman goes by the name of Ned.” Jarvis pointed. “And it's interesting to note that he possesses the heart of a twenty-one-year-old prize athlete.”

“After I suffered coronary thrombosis,” Ned explained, “doctors cut me open and installed a state-of-the-art prize runner's heart. Boy was twenty-one years of age, healthy as a horse when he crashed his car. Sorry to say that his brain was mashed. But his perfect heart suffered no damage whatsoever. I thank Jesus every day this boy was an organ donor.”

“Tell him what you did when you got out of the hospital.” Jarvis chuckled.

“Well, after a month of taking it easy and making sure the new heart took, I celebrated by eating a pound of bacon. Went to Winn-Dixie and bought the finest thick-cut pork bacon they had. None of that turkey shit. And know what I did? Fried those suckers up and ate every last one.”

A guy turned on his barstool, said his name was Bill, said he had a blood glucose sensor in his pancreas. Stepping from the shadows, a man who introduced himself as Everett piped up about his polyethylene kneecap. A little geezer called Dink described the
silicon chip in his once-blind eye and the electrodes wired to his optic nerve. Thereupon it came to light that Jarvis Riddle's entire lower skeleton was bolted together with cannulated surgical screws that gave him hell in humid weather. The lizard shaman working the bar spoke at length about his titanium jawbone, how chaw had rotted half his face away.

Other men had hip replacements and cochlear implants, bones made of hydroxyapatite polymers, polydioxanone blood vessels snaking through their livers and hearts. And I myself was a hybrid creature, my brain rigged up with newfangled thoughts.

I chose not to share this information, however, especially since I'd picked my lot voluntarily, while the men surrounding me had fought battles against tobacco and diabetes, the Southern diet and alcoholism, carcinogenic pollutants and Vietnam-era hand grenades, not to mention the inevitable entropy of the mortal body—
the slow smokeless burning of decay
. Yet we all dragged our cyborgian carcasses across the trashed planet day after day. We all chased various forms of intoxication, hoping to soothe our savage souls. I could see myself some twenty years hence, a gray-haired troll slumped on a barstool, my nose a bulbous mess of clotted capillaries.

“Good brew,” said Jarvis as he took the last swig of his watery lager. “But beer tends to produce a bloating effect on me. You think maybe we could switch to something with sharper teeth?”

“Depends,” I said. “On what you might be able to tell me about GenExcel.”

“So that's what you're after.” Jarvis spat out a rasp of laughter and eyed my maimed hand. “Had a funny feeling you had an agenda.”

“As do you. Isn't it wonderful how the two happen to coincide? What kind of beverage did you have in mind?”