The New and Improved Romie Futch (34 page)

Chip was already holding out his hand. And, what the hell, I too found myself gobbling another mysterious pill. This one was lilac, the color of summer dusks, with a Zorroesque
Z
cryptically etched
onto its surface. Right after I swallowed it, sunlight gushed into the tree house to warm our jaded bones. We all perked up. Forgot about the mangled corpse in the wallow below. Forgot about the dystopian hog up to no good in the gloom of the forest. Forgot about the acidic seethings of our stomachs, our dwindling water supply, even the buzzards that now circled overhead.

Jarvis and I pulled out our flasks, offered Chip an occasional warming swig (I had Beam, Jarvis Old Crow). As we finished the last of our booze, we discussed various subjects close to our hearts: ATV racing, taxidermic dioramas, the glories of the Rapture.

“When Jesus returns,” said Jarvis, “he'll arrive in a crystalline spaceship so vast it'll drench seven cities with healing light. One by one, the chosen will be beamed up and whisked off to paradise—a green planet with shining skyscrapers and endless gardens.”

Upon finishing his vision, Jarvis Riddle fell into a nap, an infantile smile upon his face.

“Romie,” Chip whispered, turning from the window. “Motherfucker's still as a statue. Check it out.”

I peered down at the beast, saw him poised in the clearing, glaring at the sun.

In a flurry, I took two shots, aiming at the darkish dorsal section in which his wings were presumably encased. The first shot bounced off Hogzilla's leathern rump. Though the second one popped his hide two inches from my intended target and prompted a deafening squawk, it didn't seem to faze the animal much. Hogzilla jumped and licked his left flank. Then he went right back to the business of hauling brush.

“Why don't you let me give it a try?” Chip Watts reached for my gun.

“That's okay,” I said.

Chip scowled, shook his head, and went to sulk in his corner. Crossing his arms defensively, he curled up for an afternoon nap.

•  •

It was getting on toward four o'clock. Buzzards flitted back and forth from the trees to the ground, pecking at Hogzilla's leftovers, nibbling foul tidbits of Mutt. The day was warm enough to hatch a single mosquito, which kept an orbit around Chip Watts's hypertensive head, dipping in to suck his thick, sluggish blood every time my old friend let down his guard. Chip would start with a glint of fury in his eyes. He'd swat at air, slap his own face, punch the tree house's rain-warped wall. Jarvis, who took small grimacing sips from his urine bottle, was lost in a reverie. Racked with thirst, he could not stop talking about various soft drinks.

“I'd give my left testicle for a Mountain Dew,” he said. “What a poetic name for a soda.”

“Shut the fuck up,” growled Chip.

Chip looked like he was about to excrete his own bloodshot eyes. And I wasn't feeling so hot myself. The back of my throat was swollen from thirst and my stomach had long since resorted to cannibalizing its own tissues.

“Dr. Pepper,” said Jarvis. “On ice. In a paper cup so wet it's half-dissolved.”

“No more bullshit,” said Chip.

“Pepsi-Cola,” said Jarvis. “Black cherry Kool-Aid. Sprite.”

“I mean it.”

“Or how 'bout a goddamn slushie? Half-melted, guzzled while chilling under the cool cascade of a waterfall. Water, water everywhere. A thousand drops to drink.”

As Jarvis licked his parched lips for emphasis, Chip leapt from his corner and backhanded the old man across his grizzled jaw. Groaning, Jarvis wormed away from Chip. Cowering in a rickety area of the deer stand where the wood was starting to rot, he held his hurt jaw and sniveled.

I pointed my gun at Chip. “Touch him again, and I'll blow your head off,” I said.

“You wouldn't waste your precious last magazine.”

“Got two left.”

“Bullshit.”

“And I won't hesitate to shoot you in the crotch if you mess with him again.”

“Speaking of my crotch,” said Chip, “there's something I've been meaning to share with you, I mean, for the sake of our friendship.”

“What?” I said.

“Oh, nothing. Just that I fucked your ex-wife last October.”

Chip Watts grinned like a jackal and licked his chops.

This doozy knocked the wind out of me. But when I saw Chip turn away from me and rub his nose, I knew he was bluffing.

“A lie,” I said, lifting my firearm to aim at Chip's belly.

“Didn't know what the fuss was about.” Chip sneered. “Thought I'd have a crack at it myself. Still don't know why you've made such a brouhaha over Helen all these years.”

“She wouldn't touch you with a ten-foot pole.”

“Perhaps not, but I did touch her with my ten-inch pole.”

Chip sniggered, his throat rich with pasty mucus. His overripe eyes quivered in his skull like the orbs of a decrepit Chihuahua. He was lying. He had to be. Not only about his dalliance with Helen but also about his penis size. He was, after all, an unctuous reptile of an ATV salesman who displayed his high school football trophies in a fake mahogany case in his living room. Lying was part of his business.

And besides, hadn't Helen expressed contempt for Chip's womanizing on a number of occasions? Hadn't she tittered over his ridiculous hairdo? Hadn't she opined that his cologne smelled like pesticides? That the hair on his chest reminded her of orangutan fur? Was my lady protesting too much? Did she nurse a secret attraction to this troglodyte? And where, exactly, had she seen his chest hair? Spilling coyly from an unbuttoned poly-blend dress shirt? Or had she beheld it in its full glory, a crispy nimbus encasing his naked, sunburned torso, vestigial high school muscles flexing beneath layers of middle-aged flab?

I recalled an article I'd read, which asserted that otherwise reasonable women, upon ovulating, might find themselves suddenly attracted to what Richard Dawkins called
he-men
. Impelled by a genetic compulsion to procreate with a swaggering fool, such a woman might, at her moment of maximum fertility, step out on her kind, sensitive boyfriend or husband, who could be counted on to dote idiotically on any bastard children produced by sexcapades with chest-pounding Neanderthals.

A win-win situation, from a Darwinist perspective.

“I like my women young.” Chip made a gross lusty gurgling sound, which was punctuated by a stray whimper of pain from Jarvis. “And hairless, if you get my drift.”

It was true that Helen had always expressed contempt for the infantile pudenda of pornified women, the aesthetic of which she described as
pedophiliac
and
pitiful like a plucked chicken
. It was true that she, back when I enjoyed the fruits of her body, kept genital grooming to a minimum—trimming her nether wisps into a neat triangle, which she'd edge with brisk swipes of her plastic Daisy razor. I could see her, soaping up in the shower, chatting with me as I brushed my teeth or, on special days, slipped into the mildewy stall with her.

I imagined, however, that many women of a certain age declined to shave their snatches. This logical assumption was not beyond even Chip's compromised powers of reason, I figured.

But then, as Jarvis Riddle fell into a wheezy doze, Chip described the secret moles on Helen's body. The moist moles that squatted like small brown toads upon her upper back. The twin blemishes that orbited her navel like dark moons. The plump, brown protuberance that nestled within the sweet, sweaty nook of her cleavage. And most sickening of all, he spoke of her birthmark, which resembled a dusky banana slice, and which marked the creamy flesh of her inner thigh. Perhaps he'd seen her in swimwear, innocently napping in the sun as he ogled every square inch of her exposed body.

“Her nipples are too large,” said Chip.

“Too large for what?” I gripped the handle of my rifle.

“For my tastes.”

When he yawned like a libertine up to his eyeballs in poontang, I released my safety. And who knows, I may have blasted his head off, reveled in the sight of his limited brain matter spurting modestly as his skull shattered. But right at that moment, the unmistakable sound of a rampaging beast filled the afternoon hush.

It was Hogzilla, bounding toward our tree like a fucking T. rex, bounding with the glint of hell in his eyes, a filthy beard of foam dangling from his jaws. His tusks gleamed with gore in the anemic winter light. He spread his wings.

Right before my naked eyes was a thousand-pound pig gliding three feet above the ground on two flimsy pieces of membrane. But what was even scarier, I realized, was that this monster had built himself a runway—I could see that now as I observed the area he'd spent the day clearing—which meant the fucker could reason, which meant he was using his smarts to plot our deaths. Every hair
on my body stood stiff as a needle. In silence, we watched Hogzilla bob bee-style above the ground, strike it with his belly, and finally tumble into a mass of blackberry scrub.

“
Before me was another beast
,” Jarvis murmured. “
And on its back it had four wings like those of a bird
.”

The deer stand creaked. Jarvis whimpered and rubbed his chin. Chip settled back into his corner and soberly eyed my gun.

•  •

Just after dusk, a cold front swept in from the north. Once again, Jarvis pulled forth a bottle of rattling pills, this time from a pocket so obscure that he had to shed his coat to retrieve it. He called it Moly, said it tamed the raging beast that dwelled within contemporary man, quieting the riotous caveman heart that thumped upon hearing the crack of a twig.

“But it won't knock you out,” he said, looking at me and ignoring Chip. “That's the beauty of it.”

The capsule—small, black—resembled an insect's egg.

I took my medicine dry, saving my last ounce of water for later. As I listened to Chip grunt in his sleep, I imagined him atop Helen, hairy buttocks dimpling as he plied her with his sluggish sperm. I saw a half-dozen swimmers making their slow way toward her uterus, the leader of the bunch burrowing sleepily into one of her last viable eggs.

A miracle.

Behold: the zygote sprung of aged spunk. Behold: the cells dividing as Chip's cretinous genetics intertwined with Helen's lovely code. Behold: an amphibious jock cutting a caper in her belly. Once again, I imagined Chip's head exploding with a blast of my Savage .270. Once again, I toyed with the idea of forcing him to
jump from the safety of the tree house into Hogzilla's wallow. Chip seemed to have no idea of his potential fatherhood, and I wondered if Helen would enlighten him as to the origins of her infant. Or would she let that old cuckold Boykin dote upon her nursling in ignorant tenderness?

A frigid blast of wind shook the tree house. My mind would not quiet down. It raced on, haunted by images of Chip and Helen. And I could not still my trembling hands.

SIXTEEN

I woke to sounds of scuffling and the sick sensation of an empty rifle sling. The mystery was solved when my firearm exploded in the cold night, sending an owl squawking into the sky. It didn't take a genius to figure out that Chip had snatched my gun and Jarvis was trying to wrest it from him.

Now I could see them in the pink light—two worn-out men rolling over each other like lovers, wrestling for the power of a Savage Winchester. Chip had it, then Jarvis. Jarvis dropped it; Chip grabbed it. Jarvis snatched the muzzle; Chip palmed the butt. Chip kicked poor Jarvis and the gun flew south and slid across the floor, right toward the entryway, where it teetered for a nanosecond before Chip secured it with his hairy monkey hand.

He threw his head back and barked like an alpha baboon.

There he stood, smiling his acid-reflux smile, in firm possession of the Lacanian phallus, lording it over Jarvis, who squirmed like a maggot at his feet.

“First of all,” said Chip, “I want you both to hand over your canteens and flasks. Place all belongings on the floor in front of you.”

“Go ahead and shoot me,” said Jarvis.

“I mean it,” said Chip.

“Consider it euthanasia,” said Jarvis.

“Speak English,” said Chip. “Or I'll feed you to Hogzilla.”

Chip kicked Jarvis in his soft flank. After the old man stopped howling, I heard Hogzilla grunting below. A ripe waft of hog musk rose from the creature and enveloped us in its nauseating miasma.

“You're an idiot, Chip,” I said.

Chip held the gun, butt down, over my head. He raised the weapon a notch higher. His face hardened into a savage sneer, but just when he was about to bash my skull in, the rotted wood beneath his feet gave. Chip dropped my gun as he fell waist-deep into the abyss, catching himself by his arms so that his lower body dangled beneath the deer stand. I grabbed my gun and stepped back.

Chip blinked and pouted. Finally, he screamed, straining every muscle in his arms to keep from falling through. Every time he squirmed, the deer stand creaked.

“Get me out of this fix, goddamn it!” he roared.

“Let the fucker hang.” Jarvis grinned.

“You got to be still,” I told Chip, “or you're gonna fall through and bring the whole stand down with you.”

Dangling a loogie the ominous color of a smoked oyster, Jarvis crouched over Chip. He slurped it back into his ancient mouth and lowered it again. Finally, the old man spat this dark fruit right into Chip's left eye. Chip screamed as though he'd been scalded. A flock of juncos took flight from a live oak, filling the air with whistles. The boiling red sun peeked furiously over the tree line.

Chip's bloodshot eyes oozed and his purple face was splotched white, but he couldn't do shit. His neck tendons bulged. When the sound of a galloping hog thundered in the dawn, he started blubbering.

“You grab one arm; I'll grab the other,” I yelled at Jarvis.

“Like fuck I will,” said Jarvis. “That bastard tried to kill me.”