The New and Improved Romie Futch

by Julia Elliott

  EIGHT

  I sat in an obscure chamber of Hampton Regional’s emergency facility, my right hand resting in a plastic vat of antiseptic fluid pinked with my blood. I’d been waiting for nearly an hour as doctors and nurses bickered over whether or not to stitch up my finger, whether there might be nerve damage, whether or not to send me to an orthopedic surgeon. So I slumped in the freezing room, cursing myself. I’d been a fool.

  I should’ve known not to go galumphing into the woods that morning. Should’ve stayed in bed. Should’ve waited for a more auspicious day.

  After a night of fitful dreams, I’d woken with a headache—the kind of foggy pain that had a fifty-fifty chance of veering into skull-splitting migraine mode. Overcast mornings seemed to bring the agony on—constipated weather states that refused to erupt into rain. But I took three Excedrin and fingered my acupressure headache zones until the ache retreated to a deeper section of my brain. I cleansed my body with an alcohol bath to eliminate my human stench. Decked myself out in freshly laundered camo. Loaded my grandfather’s Savage .45 with safari-grade ammo, bullets that would pierce a rhino’s hide.

  I drove to the edge of a forest, hiked through second-growth pine until I reached the cypress swamp where I’d salvaged the remains of Hogzilla’s cannibalistic frenzy. Wearing a prophylactic latex glove, I spritzed various tree trunks with Feral Fire Sow-in-Heat spray. Upon removing said glove, I noted a hole in its pinkie finger. I’d forgotten my stash of SafeWipe disinfectant towelettes, so I dipped my hand into a stream, sniffed my finger, felt sure that no trace of pheromones lingered.

  But the sow musk had tainted my flesh. It whispered beguiling messages to the wind.

  Thinking myself odorless, thinking myself invisible, I hid behind a clump of buttonbush and waited. The heavens grumbled, but rain did not come.

  Into this tranquility rushed a drift of hogs, some thirty strong, sows and piglets and a handful of horny boars. Squealing, grunting, filling the air with the reek of tainted meat, the boars dashed around sniffing the trees I’d anointed with Feral Fire spray. They snuffled and tore up the ground, devouring roots and insects. And then the whole parcel charged onward into wetter zones of swamp.

  One boar and a sow dallied, however, with two piglets in orbit—soft, fuzzy creatures who veered in to nuzzle their mother’s flanks. Grunting, the boar sniffed the sow’s face. He nosed along her fatty rows of teats. He plunged his snout into her anogenital zone and took a deep, drunken whiff.

  Squealing, the sow butted the boar’s neck with her modest tusks. The old razorback mounted his lover backward and maneuvered himself clockwise into proper alignment, whereupon the white worm of his penis emerged from its furry sheath. Slithering, the corkscrew phallus lashed at its target. At last, the boar clambered atop his mate and grasped her flanks with his front hooves. Thrusting furiously, he rammed his pale pecker home.

  It took him awhile to hit his groove, and then he went strangely still. From my research I knew that his flailing phallus had finally wedged itself into the corkscrew-shaped aperture of the sow’s cervix. The lovers stood frozen, expressionless in their bliss, as piglets frolicked around them, dipping in for reassuring sniffs of their mother’s musk.

  But then the clambering of monstrous hooves shook the air. A deafening mastodon roar echoed as the biggest and freakiest hog I’d ever seen bounded into this idyllic scene: the fabled Hogzilla at last. His pop eyes pulsed in fury, emitting a hellish light. His cutters were at least two feet long. Random tufts of black bristle grew from his bald, hot-pink hide. Despite the overwhelming effect of the razorback’s visual presence, smell overpowered image: nose hair curling, supernaturally putrid, a chthonic funk beyond belief. A gray streak of stench flared behind the pig’s body like a comet tail. Whatever decadent pheromone receptors I possessed in my feeble human olfactory system worked overtime to process this assault. I understood, at the most primitive neurological level, the metaphoric significance of fiery dragon breath. I can’t imagine what the other pigs smelled, keen-snouted as they were.

  The piglets fled immediately. The mounted boar, struggling to detach his engorged prick as the sow squealed and squirmed, shrieked when his paramour finally ran off into the bracken. His penis bounced and retracted into its pouch. His hackles shot up. He assumed a stiff-legged fighting posture. But Hogzilla got right down to business. Refusing to engage in the usual shoulder-to-shoulder pushing match, the big beast rushed in and gored his rival in his flank. After plowing the little boar over, Hogzilla made an instant porridge of his belly, after which the monster relaxed, casually plunking down to slurp and smack.

  Hogzilla pulled bright red gut strings from the gory cavity. Chewed through the spongy rinds of organs. Crunched cartilage and snapped bones.

  I dared not move. I’ll admit that I pissed myself. Fretting over the fear message my pee smell was broadcasting into the wind, I clutched my rifle with crimped fingers. I attempted to move my frenetic mind through the seven coordinations of shichid to become one with my heirloom gun. But every nerve in my body was raging. Every hair standing on end, all follicles raised into bumps. I still had the presence of mind to notice a pile of fox scat beside my left boot, its stringy texture studded with berries—strikingly beautiful berries—shining in the sun.

  The last berries I will ever lay eyes upon, I thought, as tears rolled down my cheeks.

  When Hogzilla finished his lunch, he unleashed a brontosauran bellow and romped around the glade sniffing tree trunks. The poor fool thought a fertile sow was in the area. As he dashed around with increasing desperation, his roaring became mournful, full of plaintive notes. In a small, warm corner of my frozen heart, I understood where he was coming from. There we were, two solitary bachelors, too weird to find mates, plying our frustrations in the empty forest. But then Hogzilla turned, sniffed the air, emitted a queer whinny, and trotted right up to me.

  I trembled in the vast shadow of the beast. I gazed into his crazy bulbous eyes. Braced my rifle against my shoulders and fired. The razorback snorted with annoyance as the bullet bounced off his leathery chest, his shield fortified with cartilage and scar tissue, tough as a triple-alloy tank. The monster stepped around my buttonbush cover and grinned at me. The great Hogzilla loomed, blotting out the sun. The animal leered with red, protuberant eyes, his pupils shrunk to pinpricks.

  I regarded his mammoth cutters, razor sharp and blood crusted. I beheld his gaping mouth, the teeth jagged and yellow and bedaubed with tidbits of gore. His head was bald, the color of Bazooka gum, adorned with haphazard clumps of black bristle. A crop of whiskers grew about his black, smiling lips.

  The monster wheezed into my face, his breath evoking primordial slime, some fertile sludge from which newts might hatch. The creature snorted, and I opened myself up to death. Closed my eyes. Waited for the gouge of Hogzilla’s tusks.

  Instead, I felt the warm tickle of a hog snout against my belly. I opened my eyes. The pig was sniffing me over, huffing and puffing, snuffling under my shirt. Hogzilla sniffed my armpits. My elbows. The fingers of my left and right hands. The animal licked my right pinkie and emitted a sultry grunt. The sky split open with a thousand red shrieks as the bastard nibbled nearly an inch off the smallest finger of my right hand.

  I heard the sick crunch of bone. The air went splotchy. I thought I saw Hogzilla extend a pair of dark, fleshy wings and bound off into the clouds.

  I fainted, I suppose—possibly from candy-assed fear, possibly from some neurological dysfunction bequeathed by the Center for Cybernetic Neuroscience—but I woke up five minutes later. I gazed with surprising calm at the carnage, ripped off the hem of my T-shirt, applied a makeshift tourniquet, and drove straight to Hampton Regional.

  • •

  My finger had been bitten off just between the knuckle and the distal phalanx. The harried authorities at Hampton Regional sent me home with my maimed digit gauze-wrapped and encased in iced plastic. Fearing nerve damage and lawsuits, the emergency room doctors referred me t
o an orthopedic surgeon. Armed with a Demerol prescription, some free antibiotic samples, and the name of said surgeon scrawled onto my release form, I drove groggily home. When I called the specialist who would supposedly take care of me on the spot, his office informed me that they did not treat uninsured patients. They provided the names of several doctors who might.

  I slumped on the couch, cradling my ruined finger in my lap, wondering if I ought to call Dad, expert on the medical industry’s dark shenanigans, wise to the horrors awaiting an uninsured man in my condition. But no, I could not bear to hear his grim I told you so, could not stand the thought of Marlene flitting around me in a perfumed panic, dispensing advice from women’s magazines and self-help blogs.

  “Fuck the medical-industrial complex,” I hissed.

  I popped two Demerol, downed a beer, and slathered my pinkie in antimicrobial goop. I walked over to my shop, retrieved the needle and super-thin nylon taxidermy thread I used for small game animals, and stitched up my own torn flesh. I was pretty handy with a needle—even with my left hand—especially since my final BAIT downloads had endowed me with meticulous fine motor skills. Plus, I’d recently had lots of practice with tiny specimens, which require intricate stitching. So I managed to seal off the wound with a fairly neat seam. I applied a glop of SilvaSorb gel, a swaddling of white gauze, and returned to the house. I downed another Demerol, collapsed onto my bed, and fell into psychedelic dreams.

  • •

  The next morning I woke up with a morphine hangover and a raging fingertip, which sent me spiraling into a synthetic opioid binge, fueled with splashes of Jim Beam.

  In a lawn chair on my back patio, I lolled in a narcotic haze, gazing down into the gorge, watching the sun creep over the algae-infested roof of my boyhood home. Observing the breathtaking exfoliation of the leaves, drowsed with the fume of poppies, I marveled at the paradox of festive festering.

  My errant fingertip, a floating signifier detached from its original context, had already dissolved in the burbling cauldron of Hogzilla’s belly. I envisioned a small sliver of bone wedged like a splinter in one of the monster’s steaming turds. I thought of Ahab in his bitterness, Moby-Dick rising from the watery abyss to chomp off the sea captain’s leg. I saw the half-crazed Ahab staring down at his bleeding stump. I pulled out my phone. I surfed the web for fake fingers.

  Would I go with a lifelike silicone finger prosthesis? Would I flaunt my disability with a clip-on robotic digit made of steel and futuristic plastic? Or would I simply carry on with a nub? Fake fingers were expensive, especially the high-functioning units with bionic flex joints and nerve-sensitive wiring. Calculating how many deer heads I’d have to stuff to pay for a mock pinkie, I panicked about getting back to work, but I couldn’t bring my wounded hand anywhere near an animal carcass, pickle bath, or tanning chemicals anytime soon.

  I sighed, popped another pill, enjoyed another swig of bourbon.

  When I hit an invincible Demerol groove, I couldn’t resist the perverse urge to pull off my stiffened bandage and gaze at the sight of blood-crusted stitches oozing at the seams. I worried about infection. I worried about gangrene and deep bone rot. But I slipped the bandage back on, had another drink, and hoped for the best.

  I sent a drunken group e-mail to my clients explaining delays in product turnaround. I lobbed another furious electronic message at the Center regarding my headaches and blackouts. Receiving an instant automatic reply, I vowed to drive to Atlanta right then and there. I even looked around for my keys, planning to burst into Morrow’s inner sanctum. I’d slam the asshole against the wall cowboy-style. Punch him in his bland face. See if the mannequin had human blood in his veins or some creepy android fluid like the milky stuff that Ash leaked in Alien.

  I could barely walk, much less drive, and by the time I got there the business end of the Center would be void of humans, humming on autopilot. So I texted Trippy, again and again, too wasted to be disheartened by the sight of multiple one-sided speech bubbles going on and on, a madman talking to himself.

  Just after dark, when I finally stumbled inside, I called my father. He bleated like a cryptic goat before uttering my name. But I couldn’t bring myself to speak. When I heard the archetypal sound of his sinus-clearing maneuver, I breathed like a serial killer and hung up. The walls were melting from Demerol and Beam. But I still felt the urge to express myself, to volley some poignant message into the cold, mute universe. And so, minutes before I passed out, I removed my crusted bandage, snapped a pic of my castrated pinkie, and posted the gory, Freudian image on Helen’s E-Live Wall.

  It sat there for a solid week—outcast as a leper among happier images of birthday parties and karaoke jaunts—inciting no comments whatsoever. At last, Helen private-messaged me.

  What the hell’s going on, Romie? Are you drinking again? I’m worried about you.

  I chose to remain aloof in sulky silence. I chose to retreat deeper into pills and booze, nothing to entertain me but the gratuitous stunts of my own cyborgian brain.

  • •

  One week later, I was still in self-medication mode, ignoring impatient customers, trashing late notices sent by the shady mortgage company that owned my house, surfing the hog-hunting message boards, exploring the hinterlands of obsession until my eyeballs throbbed. Ahab-style, I vowed revenge against the stinking monster who had casually nibbled my finger off. Vowed to up my game when my wound healed. Vowed to purchase a gun-mounted kill light and blow that motherfucker to pulled pork while he was sleeping.

  According to the fanatics on HogWild.com, Hogzilla was still fading in and out of dimensions, melting into air, flying off into the clouds as bullets ricocheted off his pachydermic hide. According to one anonymous poster, that hell hog gobbled up a toddler in Yemassee. SquealinGroovey claimed that the boar ate off a man’s leg and left the rest of him to set there and suffer. PigglyWiggly69 attested that the evil razorback had ruint a whole kennel of prize coon pups, biting off pieces and leaving the poor things alive. Though newspapers never confirmed these suburban legends, I could easily see the nasty pig gulping down babies like tender hors d’oeuvres, torturing innocent fawns, milk-plumped puppies, and downy baby rabbits.

  As usual, PigSlayer stepped into the debate and offered a more cynical perspective: I have reason to believe that Hogzilla is a mutant, she wrote, a transgenic monster escaped from GenExcel, that genetics lab on the outskirts of Yemassee that’s funded by BioFutures Inc. This would explain Hogzilla’s baldness, his weird skin color, his quasi-mythical wings.

  Who was this woman who used words like quasi-mythical and knew how to slay a boar with a bow and arrow and field dress it with a T-handle saw? Was she real or was she some cynical nerd, holed up in a big city apartment, chuckling as she created fake identities to toy with yokels on backwoods message boards? For all I knew, PigSlayer could be an adolescent boy, indulging his fantasies with a sexy female avatar.

  Nevertheless, I sat there, fingers poised over the keyboard, ready to rattle off a clever message to this mysterious woman, converse about the mutant nature of our beloved Hogzilla, discuss the shenanigans of corporate entities like BioFutures Incorporated, a name that rang a bell but which I couldn’t quite place. I felt tongue-tied and dull-witted and was, per usual, wasted. I vowed to write a clever bit the next morning—sometime between my first coffee and my second shot of bourbon. But I didn’t even have a username, a fantasy identity that would allow me to cut a witty swath through the dense brush of hog-hunting discourse. I was just a voyeuristic creep spying on a spectral woman.

  But then, deep in the night, it came to me: I was PorkDork—badass yet nerdy, cerebral yet self-effacing, playful and language drunk, with an affinity for rhyme, consonance, and alliteration, just the kind of man a woman like PigSlayer would be drawn to. With a pounding heart, I typed in my username. I created a password that I’d probably forget. And then I rested my ravaged head upon my keyboard and fell asleep.

  • •

  One unseaso
nably warm night, crickets still screaming in November, I felt a headache blooming in my skull, a blood-dark flower swelling up from the stem of my brain. I was out on my front porch, gawking at the mist-blurred moon, when my cell buzzed. It was an unfamiliar number, but I felt lonely enough to pick up.

  “Romie, man, it’s me.” The familiar voice was nestled in static.

  “Trippy? Shit, it’s about fucking time. Didn’t you get my texts?”

  “Shhhhh,” he hissed. “They’ll hear you.”

  “Who will?”

  “Dr. Jekyll and his evil posse.”

  “What you talking ’bout, Willis?”

  “I think they’re watching, listening. Feels like they’re in my motherfucking head.”

  “Where are you, man?”

  “Can’t say.”

  “You mean you can’t tell me or you don’t know?”

  “Look, I’ll get right to the meat. Have you been suffering any blackouts?”

  “Actually, a couple. Didn’t you get my texts?”

  “Some bastard pinched that phone.”

  “Well, good. That explains why you—”

  “Listen, I don’t have much time. You been waking up with a sense of lost time?”

  “Once or twice, but I figured it was just a side effect, along with retinal hemorrhaging and elephantiasis of the testicles, all covered by section 3, clause 9.5 of contract 2.”

  I forced out a laugh, but Trippy didn’t join me in my merriment.

  “Have you heard any voices, Romie?”

  “It depends.”

  “Depends? What the hell does that mean? You either have or you haven’t.”

  I thought of the time I’d passed out in the bathroom after that monster migraine and bout of garbled speech. Yes, I had heard a voice, but it might’ve been part of the dream I’d lapsed into, the one about Helen. Voices in the head were the signature lunatic trait, and I wasn’t ready to fess up yet.

  “Trippy”—I forced out a brutal chuckle—“have you, perchance, been indulging in some substance abuse?”