The New and Improved Romie Futch (19 page)

“Here you go.” Kenny slid his hunting license and Visa across the counter. “Tina says she's got depression, even though she takes happy pills.”

I stabbed pointedly at the contract with my index finger.

“I tell her we all get depressed. It's part of life.”

Kenny finally picked a pen from my cup and scrawled his name.

“Want to help me haul this carcass back to the workshop?” I said.

Kenny hoisted the head while I took care of the butt end, and he talked between grunts as we relocated his kill, rattling on about the
time Tina's doctor took her off Xanax and put her on Nepenthe, whereupon she suffered nightmares in which her daddy turned into Freddy Krueger and chased her through abandoned strip malls.

“Thanks,” I said, closing my eyes to fight off the spins and leaning against the wall. “Now if you don't mind, I think I'll get down to business.”

“All right,” said Kenny. “Can't wait to see that buck head. It's gonna freak Tina out.”

When he left, the air pulsing with delicious silence in his wake, I flipped my shop sign to CLOSED and took three more Excedrin. Out of habit I clicked on E-Live and saw a flashing notification from Helen. I was surprised to see one of those mass evites for some kind of party, figuring she'd forgotten all about the ex-husband lurking on her friends list, his heart a ball of boiling bile.

Apparently, she and Boykin were throwing a masquerade ball at the Dogwood Gallery, Hampton's hippest avant-garde showroom, on Halloween.

Ha! I am Ironic Man.

The place was basically a twee lunch spot that hung paintings, run by a class-action lawyer's wife who dabbled in the arts. Her name was Annabelle Tewksbury DeBris, a cheerleader from my high school days, though I barely recognized her now. Judging by the E-Live photo streams she was tagged in, her face was an evolving taxidermic masterpiece. Her overprocessed skin stretched over the finest Aryan cheekbones money could buy. Brow Botoxed into eerie blankness, lips puffed up into pornified pillows and glazed with purple lube, she smiled the chimp fear grin of a B-list celeb. She was a postnatural specimen, a fembot Stepford in three-hundred-dollar shoes. And now she'd opened a
musée des beaux arts
with the cutting-edge name of Dogwood Gallery, a salon where Hampton's finest dabblers could indulge in lofty chatter.

This was the hot spot Boykin had invested in. This was the crowd Helen now ran with, my girl who used to rag rabidly on all her faux foes—those high school plastics, debs, and cheerleaders who dwelled in the flossy Candy Land of fakery. Helen used to call Annabelle Tewksbury DeBris the Cuntessa of Cunterberry. Pretending to be a fashion critic, she'd describe Annabelle's idiotic getups, imitate her affected Charleston accent, ridicule the doggerel she wrote for the AP English Poetry Read-a-thon. Helen's riffs used to be so entertaining that I'd pop a beer and groove on her vitriol. But now my feisty girl was sleeping with the enemy. Now my Hell on Wheels was hanging up her flaming skates, and, in an oddly comforting way, this made her seem less appealing.

The invitation was mock genteel, hackishly employing Victorian diction scripted in Corsiva font:
We request your presence on All Hallows' Eve
. Their soiree was a costume ball, which meant that I could attend masked, which meant that I could skulk anonymously like the stranger in “The Masque of the Red Death,” infecting the rich revelers with a feeling of nameless dread.

But what to wear? What costume would best convey my jaunty misanthropy?

I dwelled on this as I rough-fleshed Kenny Bickle's buck. As I cut around the eyes and split the nose, I thought about going as the oedipal taxidermist Norman Bates. As I got the deer's ears turned out, I changed my mind, thinking Nosferatu would be creepier. As I scraped just enough fat from the cape so that an overnight salt would wipe out the rest of it, I toyed with the idea of something conceptual: the Imp of the Perverse, British Imperialism, maybe the Black Death.

But then, as I dabbed at gore clots with Rittel's Blood Eater, it came to me in a vision: I saw myself moving through the crowd in a velvet frock coat, a Victorian dandy with the body of a man
and the elegant tusked head of a boar—an homage to Hogzilla. It wouldn't be that hard to make a lightweight taxidermied boar head with a hollow interior, eyeholes, and breathable nostrils, a gaping mouth for easy beverage consumption. The main hurdle would be bagging the boar, but I was already gearing up for my first hog hunt. Already planning some preliminary excursions to prepare my wimpy ass for epic battle with Hogzilla.

I'd loaded up my rifles. Ordered my Cold Steel spear as a backup. Purchased a bottle of fine sow urine.

A hint of smoky nip was in the air. Wild boars would soon be in autumn rut, ready to fly ass-over-teakettle toward the intoxicating aroma of estrous sow. Ready to leap right into the arc of my bullet. Ready to go out in a blaze of glorious, squealing lust.

FIVE

On a dry afternoon in mid-October, I'd been squatting in R.V. Garland's boar blind for fifteen minutes when I spotted the first hog of the day, trotting from a wallow toward Garland's crop of bait corn. It was a sow, alas, followed by three other females with piglets in tow—good eating, as they say. But I wasn't after meat. I had two weeks to bag a boar and fashion its head into a killer mask. I'd already ordered a velvet frock coat from OtherVictorians.com, which'd set me back a pretty penny. I'd bought a ruffled blouse and a paisley ascot. And I'd spent five consecutive afternoons waiting in R.V.'s boar blind after knocking off work early. I'd seen my share of hogs, mostly on the small side (so-called defensives) but hadn't made a kill yet. And I was getting desperate, thinking about buying an infrared feed light and switching to night hunting.

Mr. R.V. had planted corn to attract boars, but now he was laid up at Hampton Regional with a nasty case of bacterial prostatitis. The boar blind had been his last hurrah, a simple square structure nestled in pines and splotched with camo paint. Its plywood walls were already warped from rain. It smelled of mildewed lumber, a tree-house scent, redolent of boyhood adventure.

But I was bored up there, kept checking my phone, scrolling down the guest list for Helen's masquerade ball, recognizing the occasional douche bag or bitch from high school. I was about to flip through my ex's photos for the umpteenth time when I heard a rustling in the bracken. Behold: a decent-size tusker was dashing about in the clearing below, sniffing with all his soul at the spots I'd spritzed with Feral Fire Sow-in-Heat spray.

I put down my gadget and picked up my grandfather's Savage .45. Banished all venomous thoughts from my head. Casting the shroud of self-consciousness, I enveloped my being in Zen-like calm. I had about five seconds to go through the seven coordinations of
shichid
, melding body and gun into one articulate force of nature. By the time I took aim at the oinker, my target was already nosing down a side trail. But I fired, catching him on the flank, and leapt from the stand to give chase.

My calves tingled from the jump. I needed a motherfucking dog. I doubted that the pig was gravely wounded. But I dashed into the woods anyway, scrambling after what I thought was the crackle of a hog in flight through crisp foliage. And sure enough, I saw him, limping down a creek bed, his right ham dribbling gore. I splashed through the creek and chased the boar through second-growth pine forest, right on into a spooky dome swamp.

A white ibis, poised on a cypress stump, burst into harried flight. Another creature, tucked away in the gloom, moaned. The wind was in my face, casting my scent behind me. The boar, a two-hundred-pounder with greasy black hackles and half-foot tusks, paused to lick his wound. I lifted my rifle, felt the fusion of my arms with weaponry, envisioned the bullet as an emanation of my own being, a flame bursting from my heart chakra, sizzling down the barrel and flying through the singing air.
Bam!
I made a hit near the back of its right shoulder. Felt that surge of guilt-tainted
triumph as the animal flinched, shrieked, and lurched forward into brush.

I was about to pop from my cover when a deafening screech rent the air. I heard the
boom, boom, boom
of a great beast bounding. I saw branches and leaves flying into the air beyond the copse where my wounded target had taken cover. Some enormous creature let rip a dragon roar.

Downwind of the animal, I could smell the shit-cheese reek of its musk, ruttish and enraged and doing something funky to my neurochemicals, shrinking my testicles into fetal gerbils. My hair indeed stood on end. My teeth actually chattered. I swear I experienced icy sweat and other clichés. Found myself appealing to a higher power for protection, some nebulous entity beyond my present dimension, part god, part alien, part spiritual essence. I didn't know what it was—whether it lived above the sky or percolated through my own veins—but I begged it to spare my life. My prayer went into overdrive when I heard the puny boar I'd been chasing wail. The pig squealed in agony for a solid five minutes, sending flurries of birds into the apathetic sky.

At last, the racket stopped. I sat there for another thirty minutes, pricking my ears for signs of life. Just as the sun started to sink behind the tree line, I crept, still shivering in a fever of fear, over to the spot where the commotion had gone down. First off, I noticed a chaotic series of enormous hoofprints with three-inch indentations. Secondly, the reek that'd made my hair stand on end was definitely of the male porcine variety. By all appearances, a monstrous hog had devoured the hapless boar I'd lured, shot, and chased through the forest. There wasn't much left beyond a couple of hooves, some intestinal confetti, and scattered splinters of bone. But then I spotted the head, magically unmolested, resting upon sprigs of cypress like some garnished centerpiece at a medieval feast.

When the clouds parted and anointed the boar head with rosy light, I wondered what the universe was trying to tell me.

I wrapped the head up in plastic BI-LO bags, stuffed it into my backpack, and toted it home.

•  •

It was Saturday night, the radio playing dreamy oldies, 1950s lust sublimated into crooning, the music of my parents' repressed and ethereal adolescence. I'd broken code and was sipping beer number three, working on my Lord Tusky mask. I'd made a lightweight form by molding the boar skull with Smooth-Cast 300, a plastic resin. I'd worked the boar cape from the bone without tearing the delicate skin around the eyes and lips. I'd fleshed it, given it two pickle baths, and tanned it with a Rittel's kit. Now, after taking a swig of Miller Lite, I slipped the cape onto my homemade form with little angst. I trimmed the eye skin, pinned the lips, and tucked in the tear ducts. After reinstalling the original tusks with Apoxie Sculpt, I popped in a snarling jaw set. For final touches, I sprayed some QuickSpittle Rabid-Boar Froth around the mouth and enhanced the beast's facial fur with violet highlights.

Just when I stood back to reap the reward of my creation, Miller in hand, beer buzz taking the edges off reality and clouding my brain with smugness, I felt another headache flaring in the vicinity of my BC transmitters, which formed a Devil's Triangle in the seascape of my mind, sucking up thoughts and time. I rushed home, cursing myself for forgetting my headache meds, heaping verbal damnation upon the Center for ignoring my increasingly desperate e-mails.

When I opened my medicine cabinet, I discovered one measly capsule in my Excedrin bottle. Like a cartoon doofus, I slapped
my own skull. I clawed through outdated prescriptions, crusted bottles of Pepto-Bismol, and jumbo jars of TUMS, knocking plastic canisters onto the floor. All I came up with was a foil pack of Advil Extra Strength Liqui-Gels, three left, which I gobbled before sinking to the floor. Curling up on a bath mat, I marveled at the hair that had collected over the past few weeks—mostly mine, though with a sick heart I spotted a strand of chestnut from Helen's final days. I vowed to give the bathroom a fierce vacuuming when my brain was once again restored to order.

But now the headache was sending out nervy shoots, vines snaking along axons, dark red blossoms blooming in deeper neural tissues.

I tried to sit up.

“Frack,” I hissed, attempting to spit out a decent cuss, but my mouth was not cooperating.

“Frack, frack, frack!” I said. “Wit did frack?”

I thought of Al, lapsing into garbled bleeps at the Center, though he'd seemed to be unconscious of this. I tried speaking slowly—“Wud duf frahck?”—but my tongue was crimped, my mouth insufficiently salivated. While my brain felt enormous, fraught with throbbing nerves and veins, bloated and inflamed as though boiled, my body felt stunted and boneless. I had no strength to crawl to bed or couch. I breathed. I suffered. Through blurred vision, I spotted a prescription bottle of Clomid tucked behind the toilet, a cruel blast from the past. A whirl of memories came flooding back as I lay squirming on the floor.