The New and Improved Romie Futch (28 page)

I succumbed to cozy alcoholism, steadily drinking a six-pack each night, wine upon occasion, ignoring the calls of Chip and Lee, warding off visits from Dad and Marlene, shooting a volley of unanswered texts at Trippy as wan winter settled in.

Santa Claus, that sinister glutton and surveillance king, was everywhere, the world strewn with tinselly trash. Demonic elves chanted from the television, urging me to
buy, buy, buy
. And every day I opened my mailbox to find a new medical bill hiding amid glossy Christmas junk mail hawking Oracle9s, fuzzy synthetic sweaters, and diamonds hacked from the dark satanic mines of Botswana.

But at least I was back in my studio, stuffing buck heads and wild turkeys, whatever business I could get. I was back to piddling with my Panopticon diorama, slowly filling each prison cell with mutant squirrels and frogs, trying to get the hang of molding and stitching without the convenience of a right-hand pinkie finger. I was back to e-mailing the Center for Cybernetic Neuroscience, describing my migraines and blackouts, alluding to my awareness
of the sinister presence of Dr. Morrow, evoking an imaginary lawyer and threatening lawsuits. When I got really drunk, I found myself trolling Helen's E-Live page, waiting for that moment when she'd announce her pregnancy to the world and her status update would grow like a tapeworm with a thousand congratulatory comments. But she'd been dead quiet. By now her fetus would be about two months old, I calculated, a bean-size neckless alien with gills, a mad scientist's big-ass forehead, those spooky button eyes.

On certain magical holiday nights, lulled by a bourbon buzz and the mellow glow of vintage Christmas cartoons, I'd get this gut feeling that the child was mine. I felt almost certain that Helen had used my sperm sample—why else would she have barged into my house that stormy evening to unburden herself?

When she gazed upon her newborn, she'd see my face blinking up at her. She'd see me, transformed into a helpless infant, snuffling for her teat. Flush with postnatal hormones, her body would soften. Her heart would turn to mush. She'd come slithering back to me like a boneless slug.

•  •

One drizzly, gray winter night, back on the hog-hunting message boards, I found my beloved PigSlayer again—I'd forgotten all about my brainy Amazon warrior. There she was on my computer screen, dropping a link about Hogzilla at 10:10 PM. The link was like a steaming pile of animal spoor, evidence of PigSlayer's warm biological existence. I smelled her scent on the wind. I caught flashes of her sleek body, dashing among the vibrant winter pines. I oiled my weaponry. I gave chase.

I stalked PigSlayer through an endless thread of comments (re: the rumor that Hogzilla had bitten off a Little League baseball
champion's arm). Right before my eyes, she posted a link to the
Varnville Heral
d
's article. My heart raced as I read:

The ten-year-old Varnville resident's arm was torn off at the shoulder. The child's thirty-two-year-old father, a refrigerator repairman, frightened the pig with gunshots, salvaged the arm, and rushed the brave boy to Columbia, where neurosurgeons reattached the limb. Despite the success of the operation, the child's future as a professional baseball player is not in the stars
.

The message board was enraged.

A thousand patriotic boar hunters were crawling out of the wirework of cyberspace to declare revenge upon the diabolical beast. Imagining hordes of angry hunters crowding local forests and fields, I felt panicky. I needed to get back out there, bag my beast before somebody else did. I contemplated my maimed hand. Yes, I felt petty vowing revenge over a lost little finger when a young athlete's arm had been ripped off. Nevertheless, recalling the burning words of Ahab, I swore I'd chase that motherfucking hog
over all sides of the earth, till he spouted black blood
. I'd do it for the Little League slugger. I'd do it for me and my pinkie finger. And also for PigSlayer, who'd be mighty impressed.

At 11:55 PM she dropped another link. This time the article was from an obscure permaculture site called CircleofLife.com. It described how corporate genetics laboratories were setting up shop in the backwoods towns of down-and-out Republican states like South Carolina and Alabama. After conducting backroom deals with sleazy governors, the companies performed unregulated, ethically questionable experiments with recombinant DNA, which involved the production of nightmarish farm animals.

It was no coincidence that in a backwater hole of Alabama a poultry farmer woke one night upon hearing a hullaballoo in his chicken house. Therein he found, attempting to rape his hens,
a featherless rooster with enormous pecs, four wings, and greenish skin
. This nightmare beast was part of the Incredible Hulk line produced by GenExcel, a subsidiary of Monsanto and BioFutures Incorporated.

I paused in my reading, stared at the word
BioFutures
, remembering that this was the corporation that had stoked the Center for Cybernetic Neuroscience with cash. Googling
BioFutures
, I located its optimistic website, which featured smiling scientists saving the world: staving off starvation with GM crops, rewiring the brains of stroke victims, enhancing the intelligence of a chimpanzee named Hal, who at this very moment was zooming through space in a satellite called Prometheus 6, its Ku-band transponders pointed toward the darkness of Eastern Europe. On an obscure link I found some whitewashed info on BioFutures' dalliance with Monsanto. According to its own website, it was perfecting a variety of
enhanced
livestock, including Incredible Hulk chickens, which boasted
a spinach gene for high vitamin content, plus a salmon gene for omega-3 oil production and cold tolerance
. The world wanted bigger, healthier chicken breasts, bursting with savory grease. And because chicken wings were all the rage in this land of chain sports bars and alehouses, the more wings per organism the better.

On the HogWild message board, PigSlayer posted another comment, pointing out that it was
no coincidence
that BioFutures had also set up a biotech lab called GenExcel on the outskirts of Yemassee.
In a godforsaken zone between a medical waste dump and a juvenile correctional facility
, she said,
a place that, ironically, was once a sacred hunting ground of the Yemassee Indian tribe
. In PigSlayer's humble opinion, Hogzilla was a GM monster who'd busted out of the GenExcel lab. This explained not only his enormous size but also his half
baldness and freaky color, his elusive wings and strangely corrosive saliva. And for all we knew, this genetically engineered beast might be knocking up wild sows all over the county, impregnating them with his demon seed. Our feral-hog problem might soon veer into overdrive as hundreds of little Hogzillas hit puberty and began their own cycles of destruction, humping their way into a twenty-first century that would, quoth PigSlayer,
make The Island of Dr. Moreau look like a petting zoo
.

My heart melted over the
Island of Dr. Moreau
reference. I imagined teaming up with PigSlayer in a postapocalyptic wasteland, some swamp beyond the Thunderdome where monster hogs bounded across the earth like herds of mastodon. In a fox-fur bikini and suede thigh-highs, PigSlayer resembled Raquel Welch in
One Million Years B.C
.

I took a slug of Beam to put some fire into my beer buzz. Heart pounding, I clicked on PigSlayer's profile pic (stock image of an Anza knife) and hit HogWild.com's instant message feature. In the lower left corner of my screen, the little box appeared, pulsing with ominous emptiness, brandishing my dumb username: PorkDork.

—
Hi
, I wrote (a lame beginning).
Thanks for the link on the Little League guy who lost his poor arm
.

My heart beat fast as I eyed the box, rereading my idiotic words with an acute sense of shame.

—
No prob
, she finally replied.

—
You think it's weird that HogZ was frightened by gunshot? Thought that SOB was pretty fearless
.

—
Did cross my mind, esp since ordinary ferals have been known to rip off limbs
.

—
And that stuff on GenExcel—good Gd—I live twenty miles from that shit
.

—
I think GenExcel just had that article removed from The V Herald's site, BTW. Trying to keep HogZ hush-hush
.

—
It's gone?

—
Just vanished. You a hunter?

—
Amateur. But I've seen the beast. Agree he might be a Frankenhog. Swear the creature has wings, but I think retractable or something, possibly from dorsal cavity
.

I felt giddy.

—
I'm Romie, BTW
.

—
Nice to meet you, Romie. Call me Vic
.

—
Short for Victoria?

—
Maybe
.

A strange sensation swept over me as I imagined a nerdy adolescent named Victor cowering in his dark bedroom. I could smell his boy cave—the fermented testosterone and greasy Taco Bell wrappers, the stale sadness of his crusty sheets. I could see the gaming posters on his wall, featuring Amazonian babes from the digital world, voluptuous butts and boobs popping out of futuristic body armor. I saw the boy's zitty face grinning with self-congratulatory pleasure as he chose his elusive, gender-ambiguous alias. I sensed the boredom and longing that oozed from his pores, filling his room like a fug.

—
Are you from Hampton County?
I asked.

—
Sorta kinda
.

—
A hunter, right?

—
I dabble in lots of different hobbies
.

—
Renaissance woman
.

I thought of those Renaissance plays in which preadolescent boys played maidens disguised as men. As I recalled, the heroine of
Victor Victoria
was a woman playing a male female impersonator.

—
What's your weapon of choice for FHs over 500?
I asked.

—
We talking poundage or yrs old?

—
Ha. How would you go about killing a 500 yr old feral?

—
Like if I traveled to the future via wormhole and encountered an escaped lab hog that'd been used in life-extension experiments?

My heart sank. The quirky dorkiness of this hypothetical indicated that I was dealing with a nerdboy.

—
Exactly
.

I could almost hear the hobbledehoy sniggering. Could see him feeding from a bag of Doritos, smearing his keyboard with grease and crumbs as he launched his snide answer.

—
Aw shit, Romie. Got to skedaddle. Nice chatting
.

—
OK. Later
.

What kind of teen boy used words like
skedaddle
? I wondered as I gazed at the box.

Our strange conversation floated there in cyberspace, a small blinking star among endless constellations. I spent the next hour scrolling through it over and over, analyzing my interlocutor's text for telltale signs of age and gender. I popped my sixth beer. I pondered the theory of Judith Butler. Cyberspace was the perfect venue for gender performance, I thought, imagining Victor hobbling though a dystopian cityscape in a pair of broken stripper's heels.

After cornering him in an alley littered with rusty robot parts, I peeled off his flimsy cocktail dress—a scrap of polyester gossamer as thin as a dream—and gazed upon the mystery of his body. I saw a thing of molded plastic, only vaguely flared at the hips, a blank nub between the legs. I saw the incipient swells of nippleless breasts. I saw cheekbones enhanced with swipes of blusher, erotically flaring nostrils, a luxurious '80s hair-band mane. I felt the stirrings of arousal, like an undertow, seething in the silty depths of my unconscious.

•  •

I woke up with my pants down, head hanging off the couch, the upside-down view of my laptop screen offering me an unspeakable image from the hinterlands of Internet porn. I did not remember accessing this taboo-busting monstrosity the night before. As I back-scrolled my browsing history, I meandered through at least two hours' worth of freaky shit, none of which looked the slightest bit familiar to me, and some of which had required a credit card number to access.

I had a migraine, as I often did after a night of particularly dense sleep. I wondered if last night's lost time could be classified as a blackout or if it was just old-fashioned drunkenness. I vaguely remembered a night tainted by staticky mirth, some kind of distorted laugh track blaring randomly inside my head. I sat up. Massaged my skull.

“Jebus Chris,” I said.

I wriggled my tongue, which felt heavy in my parched mouth.

“Jeshus Chrise,” I said again. “Frick.”

“Jesus Christ.” At last, my tongue found its groove. “Fuck.”

I lurched to the cold bathroom, where I splashed my face and vowed, once and for all, to drive to Atlanta to confront Dr. Morrow in person, maybe try to track down Trippy, see how he was holding together.

Instead, I rattled off another fuming e-mail to the Center, a useless gesture that was becoming compulsive. I even dropped Boykin's name, calling him my
ruthless lawyer
and threatening a lawsuit that would
crush your verminous little operation like a cyborgian cockroach
. Again, I received an automated reply, promising to route my inquiry through the proper channels, linking me to the official complaint form, a ten-page PDF with size ten font.

By then it was 10:45. I had to get a move on, splitting skull notwithstanding.

It was Saturday, that day when Hampton's hardworking hunters spent their cold, misty mornings crouched in forests and fields, shaking off the drudgery of office or plant by blowing away woodland creatures. And Noah's Ark Taxidermy was already officially open.

TWELVE

I slipped into the side door of my shop at 11:10, stooping to pick up the crushed beer cans that were scattered over the faux-cobblestone linoleum my father had picked out in 1978. The HVAC system smelled faintly of rats. The fluorescent lights lit up every tear in the vinyl furniture Dad had bought from a liquidated podiatrist's office in 1982. I'd planned to put in oak laminate flooring and purchase a Victorian sofa to go with the marble-topped table on which I displayed my mini dioramas, but, like most of my dreams, this had not come to pass. Lord Tusky the Second stared down at me in disgusted disappointment, his furrowed brow coated in dust. I was about to spruce the old guy up with a feather duster, but there was Scovel Boughknight, tapping on the plate-glass door.