The New and Improved Romie Futch

by Julia Elliott

  The feral hog population in South Carolina, somewhere around two hundred thousand, was just beginning to become a nuisance. According to the Clemson Extension, which had started conducting hog-management workshops, the worldwide swine menace must be nipped in the bud. In addition to declaring open season with no bag limit, the Department of Natural Resources now sponsored special hog hunts twice a year. I discovered that my old rival Baines Botworth had cornered the market on trophy boar heads, featuring a tusked monster with a mouthful of fake foam on his taxidermy website. And all this time I’d been oblivious, puttering in a dream of self-obsession and heartbreak. I hadn’t updated my website in four years.

  But no more. Adrenaline gushed through my veins. I sat at my desk, clutching my grandfather’s old Savage rifle, surfing the hinterlands of the Internet, my bloodshot eyes glimmering like Ahab’s when he scanned the sea for a telltale spume. At last, I stumbled upon the message board of HogWild.com, a regional pig-hunting website where full-fledged Hogzilla obsession had broken out. Hiding behind monikers like PigMan and BoaredtoDeath, hunters voiced their mania. They spread half-truths and trafficked in myth mongering. They dropped helpful tips and red herrings. Many of them posted in the wee hours, a dead giveaway of obsessive tendencies. I could see them, dressed in muddy camo, hunched over their computer screens. I could hear the click of their calloused fingers on plastic keys. Could smell their whiskey breath, their unwashed hair, the hog-attracting scents they wore like rare perfumes: Swine Wine, Apple Delight, Feral Fire Sow-in-Heat spray.

  Though they caught glimpses of the legendary pig all over the county, Hogzilla always managed to elude them just when they crept near—disappearing into brush, melting into mist, leaping into oblivion with a waft of ruttish scent. The creature taunted them with his massive glistening turds, encrusted with seeds and bones. It left tracks deep enough for birds to bathe in. Hogzilla’s wallows—those muddy spots where the swine was fond of floundering—always seemed to brim with fresh spicy piss and steaming stools, though the hog himself was almost never in sight.

  Hunters obsessively charted Hogzilla’s rooting trails and wallows. They studied tree bases ringed with the mud he wiped off his colossal flanks. They posted photos of tracks, spore, trails, wallows, and rubs, and, on rare occasions, the hog himself, always captured in a blur, an out-of-focus streak of greased lightning.

  —Spotted that sumbitch on the edge of the landfill, HighOnThe Hog posted, just standing there under the full moon like something from Jurassic Park.

  —Tracked Hogzilla through Twelve Oaks Mobile Home Park, said Pigwig. Saw him swallow a cocker spaniel whole, like it wasn’t nothing, a popcorn shrimp or a donut hole.

  —Got close enough to Hogzilla to blast him twice with my 44 mag Super Redhawk, said HogHeaven. My semi-wadcutter points bounced right off his hide. Might as well be shooting an iron tank.

  There was much debate over the methodology of feral-hog killing. Though the DNR had legalized picking them off from pickup trucks, many pig hunters preferred the freewheeling badassery of ATVs. Enthusiasts mounted bow racks and gun mounts onto their quads, hitches to haul kill, exhaust silencers that reduced engine noise up to eighty percent. But there were purists out there who felt that any vehicle was an abomination, men who eschewed technology, primitivists who worked with arrows and spears.

  —Shooting from trucks ain’t hog hunting, said Porkfiend22. That’s what real woodsmen call vermin control.

  —Took out a 400 lb feral with a boar spear, boasted HellHog. Don’t mess with a spear unless you got a long handle with a crosspiece to keep that fucker from charging up the blade. My brother found out the hard way: 18 stitches on his forearm and rabies shots into the bargain. Wild hogs take a heap of killing.

  —Check out my new quad y’all, bragged HogLoverForever, who’d posted a pic of his Yamaha Big Bear ATV, his toddler son at the wheel, his Hitch Haul nonchalantly loaded up with a half-ton boar carcass.

  According to BossHawg, who lived in a lean-to and enjoyed displaying his tusk wounds in high-resolution pics, nothing matched the thrill of chasing down a pig with dogs, leaping upon its hot, reeking body and dispatching it with a knife. To wit, the adrenaline rush of sinking a custom-built high-chromium blade into the throbbing jugular of a razorback takes you back to the caveman days.

  But there were men who went hog wild over technology too, night hunters who installed remote-operated corn feeders and rifle-mounted target illuminators. These stealthy technicians used magnetic tracking lights to mark blood trails. They kept up with the latest boar hunting software. Calibrated their own digital topo maps.

  Scrolling down the message board, I felt overwhelmed. I longed for a BAIT download that would magically impart a lump sum of knowledge into my head: the evolution of Sus scrofa, pigs in myth and legend, the history of swine hunting, and the cantankerous dialectic of countless contemporary hog-hunting camps.

  Yes, I was intimidated. Right here in Hampton County lived a man who concocted his own hog-attractant scents. He downed sows with tranquilizer darts and siphoned their urine with catheters. Another fellow did his butchery on-site, hauling a portable table, saws, knives, and blood buckets around in a gore-spattered ATV. Others posted recipes, tusk-mounting techniques, instructions on how to tan boar hides for moccasins and Mojave loincloths.

  There was a woman called PigSlayer, whom I imagined as a six-foot goddess in Amazonian armor, a babe with a crossbow and flowing hair. She’d slain hogs with pistols, arrows, spears, and knives. Knew her way around a forest. Boldly anointed her wrists with boar urine. She had a flair for adjectives. Liked to describe dusk treks through primeval forest. And she was the first hunter to opine that Hogzilla might be a mutant. That his leaping capacity exceeded the realms of normal. That what we were possibly dealing with was a postnatural species with something freaky going down in its genes. A kind of ÜberPig, she actually said, which made my heart wobble.

  I swallowed the last of my beer. Dragged my radiation-bathed carcass away from the evil magnetism of the computer screen. It was time to slumber, perchance to dream. I brushed my teeth. Stripped down to my BVDs. Crawled into the fake rustic bed that Helen had scored on clearance from the Pottery Barn.

  I fell into fitful dreaming.

  I was on my grandfather’s front porch in McClellanville, staring at the marsh. Out beyond the cordgrass, the ocean shone like pounded brass. A creature came flapping over the horizon, did a few twirls around the sun, and glided down into the atmosphere. Lucifer, I thought as the beast flew toward me. It bobbed into view—by all appearances a hog with wings—and belly flopped into my grandmother’s okra patch. It was Hogzilla, equipped with buzzard wings. Standing upright, he strolled up to the edge of the porch.

  Hogzilla stared into my soul with the hungry, phosphorescent eyes of a fallen angel. “Hogs are demonic beasts,” he grunted, his voice deep and thick with wheezes. Hogzilla told me everything I needed to know—wondrous hog lore, sacred ancient hunting rituals, a thousand clever tracking tricks. But when I woke to the bellow of my neighbor’s coon dog, the knowledge drained from me. I couldn’t remember jack.

  FOUR

  I tapped at my laptop, Kenny Bickle talking at me, a field-dressed deer carcass heaped at his feet. The shop’s old landline, still bearing the ancient number from my father’s days, was ringing off the hook—that twenty percent coupon I’d circulated in August was still working its magic one week into October.

  But I was keeping up with the work, putting in eight-hour days, sticking to my two-beer policy while toiling away on my Panopticon diorama until midnight each night, cleansing body and mind for the heroic feat of legendary feral-hog slaying—unless I was laid out with a migraine, which was happening about once a week. I could feel one coming on now, raw red pain radiating from the site of my BC transmitters, creeping over my scalp. And the sound of Kenny Bickle’s reedy voice plodding on wasn’t helping.

  “Think I’ll go with the Bio-Optix II rotators,” said Kenny, a small
freckled man with graying red hair and a trace of down for eyebrows. “They’ll spook the hell outta my wife.”

  “Good choice for an animatronic eye,” I said, massaging my skull. “Subtle movement. Light-sensitive pupil dilation and intermittent blink mechanism.”

  “Good.” Kenny patted his cell-phone pocket. “That’s Tina now. Robocop ringtone. Wants to remind me to pick up one of them jumbo dog food bags at Walmart, like I need five reminders in the last hour.”

  “If I’m gonna do a wet tanning on that buck, I’d best get busy. What kind of tongue you thinking about—licking, relaxed, or chewing?”

  Kenny squinted at my laptop screen. “You got something more vicious than that? Like maybe we could put in a boar tongue or something?”

  “I can do that. I take it you want the Easy Crank snarling mechanism?”

  “Hell yeah.”

  “I think we’re set.” I closed my eyes. When I opened them, Kenny’s face looked blurred. As he came into focus, sparks shot off his chapped red cheeks.

  “Look at this here text message,” said Kenny, “Don’t forget to pick up that dog food, low-carb Science Diet with green tea. Have you ever heard of that? Green tea for dogs?”

  I felt a swirl of nausea in my stomach. “Okay, I need your WIN card.” I groaned. “Tag number, wildlife certificate number, and credit card.”

  “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.