A teen girl came by selling T-shirts that read GODWEISER 300: THIS BLOOD’S FOR YOU KING OF KINGS. The shirt’s beer-can logos displayed a poorly drawn crucifixion scene plus a winged ATV flying through comic-book clouds.
Winking creepily at the maiden, Chip bought three tees, gifting me and Lee with showy bonhomie.
The girl puffed out her little sparrow chest and grinned. Her braces twinkled optimistically in the autumn sun.
“This will help pay for our trip to Six Flags!” she yelled, bending forward to place her sweet mouth close to Chip’s hoary old ear.
I felt ancient—brittle-boned and covered in malodorous barnacles—surrounded by swarms of shrieking youths. They writhed like larvae all around us, every cell in their bodies stoked and firing at full potential. They radiated idiocy and nubile promise. They wore shiny synthetic sports gear, corporate logos emblazoned on their garish caps. They pecked at their phones, tweeted and bleeped and updated their E-Live statuses a hundred times, while I slumped, crookbacked and slurping my spiked Coke.
I was a sick man. I was a spiteful man. An unattractive man. I thought that my liver hurt.
Dark and cirrhotic, it festered down in the hollow beneath my heart.
Did my eyes fail me or was the girl actually winking at Chip, testing the potency of her blossoming womanhood upon my bloated friend? Chip smirked like a constipated walrus, his face on fire with a hypertensive blush. Yes, indeed she was. Winking and duck-facing. And when she flounced off with a wriggle of her proto-ass, Chip yelped in triumph.
“Hot damn! Did you see that? Fuckin’ jailbait.”
“Not very godly of you!” I shouted, struggling to be heard above the din.
“You wouldn’t know godly if it crawled up your ass!” Chip screamed.
“Is that some kind of reverse transubstantiation?” I cried.
“What the hell you babbling about now?”
“Some kind of Eucharistic enema?”
Just as I screeched the words Eucharistic enema, the ATV thunder ceased. My strange phrase echoed in the awkward silence. Chip winced. Random teens snickered and gawked. Lee giggled, muttered, “Romie’s a trip,” and drew a phantom doobie to his lips.
My bladder was full. My left foot numb. I limped off to relieve myself as a dozen girls in red Godweiser shirts pranced out onto the field, where they began a lewd dance routine to a techno version of “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” The line to the porta-potty was insane. So I dipped down to a pine copse behind the bleachers.
The wind howled cryptic messages to my stoned brain as I spattered a stump with piss. Gazing into the heavens, I saw a dragon-shaped cloud slither over the sun. The wind had a nip. A cold front was sweeping in. I heard a bellow behind me, zipped up my pants, and turned.
From the shadowy realm beneath the bleachers, where cigarette butts and soft-drink cans littered the squalid dirt, a creature came creeping. His hair was clumped, his skin ageless in its patina of grime. Exuding scents of bowel and forest, the ancient man-beast lumbered toward me. I recognized his harrowed eyes.
It was Jarvis Riddle, the alcoholic woodsman who’d stumbled upon my LSD-fueled frolic in the woods with Crystal Flemming some twenty years ago. I could still recall Crystal, a naked dryad reclining against a tree, her ivory buttocks cushioned by a bed of moss. I could still see the rictus of her horror as she spotted Jarvis emerging from the forest gloom, trembling with DTs and roaring like a Sasquatch. According to local rumor, his long-suffering sister had finally kicked him out of her shed and he’d pitched a pup tent in the woods. We must’ve interrupted his afternoon nap.
Now he supposedly lived in a lean-to deep in the swamp—in the spooky limbo between R.V. Garland’s land and government property. As he crept toward me, I thought of all the poor misunderstood monsters from myth and legend—the Grendels and yetis, trolls and hunchbacks—gentle, red-eyed ogres with hoarse voices and broken hearts, each one a rover of the borders . . . who held the moors, fen and fastness.
“Can you spare a few bucks?” Jarvis stood at the edge of the bleachers’ shadow, his leathery right hand emerging into the light to take my cash.
I slipped him a five.
“How did you hurt yourself?” His watery eyes brimmed with concern as he scoped my maimed hand.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“Try me.”
“A giant hog bit the tip of my pinkie finger off.” I grinned. “How about that?”
“Ah.” Jarvis Riddle shook his head. “I can believe you. Hogzilla strikes again.”
“How did you know?”
“I’ve had truck with that beast. The woods haven’t been the same since he came. Unnatural monster. Sign of the end-time.”
Jarvis Riddle stared off at a dark cluster of clouds that hovered over the fiberglass steeple of Hampton First Baptist.
“Where have you seen him?”
Jarvis smiled cryptically. “Here and there.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“Not without compensation.” Jarvis shrugged apologetically.
I had no more cash on my person. As I regarded Jarvis’s embarrassed smile, I wondered if it was true that he’d scored a full scholarship to Vanderbilt eons ago. That upon flunking out, he’d been drafted to Vietnam. That in the green steamy jungle, he’d become obsessed with the Book of Revelation and lost a few of his marbles.
“Where can I find you?”
“Out and about.” Jarvis smirked like Merlin and scratched his hoary head. “Where the albino gators slink.”
And then he retreated back into the shadows, his cryptic nature poetry drowned by the surge of revving engines.
“The Ten Commandments,” Pastor Logan’s voice boomed over the PA, “a set of whoops bound to separate a rider from his quad: five jumps followed by a monster jump and a set of step-up doubles. Are you godly enough to handle it? Onward, Christian soldiers!”
By the time I’d reclaimed my bleacher seat, the twelve-to-fifteens were tearing ass over the Wilderness: swerving around orange construction cones, leaping over sandbags, flying up ramps to monster-jump over picturesque man-made gorges worthy of a dystopian film set.
Youths shrieked like locusts. Teen girls writhed in ecstasy. Chip Watts bellowed like a bull, his face the color of liver pudding. Two of the drivers had been flung into the mud. Three were still lollygagging on the log obstacle. Chip’s nephew Hunter was neck and neck with some other lad, flying toward the most monstrous jump of all.
“There they go,” Pastor Logan yelled, “a forty-foot whooped-out uphill climb, flattening out for a tabletop, then rounded with a step-down landing for one hundred and fifty feet of I-dare-you-to-try-it obstacle.”
Lee clapped politely. Chip Watts roared and waved his meaty fists.
“I told you Hunter could drive,” he screamed.
“Looks like Hunter Bledsoe’s in the lead again,” the youth pastor boomed. “Talk about an adrenaline junky. Watch how he shoots up the side, speed-skates over that tabletop, and just flies over the step-down like a torpedo.”
And that was that: Hunter Bledsoe swerved to a halt, killed his engine, hopped from his quad, and strode onto the podium to join the pastor.
“How do you feel right now, Hunter?” Pastor Logan shoved his mic into the boy’s face.
“I feel awesome.”
“Are you a righteous dude?”
“I am a righteous dude.”
“We all know Hunter’s got high octane in his blood and a liquid-cooled four-stroke single-cylinder heart with four valves,” joked Pastor Logan.
The crowd shrieked. Hunter nodded modestly as three teen girls in cocktail dresses stepped onto the stage in high heels, each gal wielding a two-foot gilded trophy.
“Trophy time,” the pastor announced.
We had to sit there for another fifteen minutes as Pastor Logan plied the crowd with inspirational speeches. He reminded us that we were all Christian warriors battling Satan in the wilderness. He urged
us not to get discouraged when thrown facedown into the mud pits of life. He advised us to climb back onto our chariots of fire and dart back into the fray.
“Keep on fighting evil.” He brandished a fist. “Fast and furious and bold.”
Cold wind swept in from the north. Tumultuous clouds hovered. I thought I spotted Jarvis Riddle slinking out to the parking lot, weaving through the glittering desert of SUVs.
“What y’all say we hit Bojangles on the way home?” said Chip. “Unless Professor Romie prefers a salad bar.”
“I could go for some chicken ’n’ biscuits,” said Lee.
“Bojangles is cool,” I said. “I’m jonesing for some triglycerides and hydrogenated oil.”
“Whatever,” said Chip. “I don’t care if the chicken’s fried by third-world toddlers with third-degree burns. I don’t care if I gain twenty pounds with every bite. I don’t care if my esophagus dissolves from acid reflux and I get the runs for a year. I’m gonna eat my fucking chicken and biscuits and I’m gonna enjoy it. How ’bout that race, Lee?”
“It was awesome. Your nephew sure can drive.”
“Hell yes, he can.”
We walked to the parking lot. Chip was about to climb into the pilot’s seat when Jarvis Riddle popped up from behind the Escalade’s hood like a mangy Muppet. Chip winced, slipped a pair of aviators over his eyes.
“Thought I might have a word with you, Chip,” said Jarvis.
“Just a minute, y’all.” Chip grinned, shut the door of his SUV, walked off with Jarvis until they were almost out of earshot.
The two men stood negotiating in the shadow of an enormous Ram truck. I thought I saw Chip slip Jarvis some cash. Thought I heard the word Hogzilla emerge raspily from the vet’s ancient, oracular mouth. After Jarvis Riddle staggered off across the parking lot, Chip came toward us, whistling with ostentatious aloofness.
“What was that all about?” I asked when we’d all climbed into the SUV.
“Oh, nothing.” Chip removed his sunglasses and pretended to adjust his rearview mirror. “Just a bum hitting me up for a handout.”
But I saw the flicker of fever in his eyes. I saw the veins of obsession. I saw dark pouches gathering beneath the windows to his soul.
Cold, calculating eyes of a hunter.
Crazy, monomaniacal Ahab eyes.
Sleep-deprived and bottomless, sneaky as a chimp’s, constantly on the lookout for that mythic beast that existed in some twilight wood, just at the edge of human consciousness.
Hogzilla the mutant, winged and bald, nightmare beast of the future.
My Hogzilla.
TEN
A windy storm swept in and stripped the last leaves from the trees, killed the lingering crickets, put those lovely autumnal butterflies out of business. I had a bad cough, sipped from a bottle of Robitussin DM, and fell into the throes of a psychedelic fever. Cocooned in a comforter that still held traces of Helen’s waterproof sunscreen (it would not wash out), I lay on the couch, falling in and out of dreams. Sometimes I’d wake convulsed with chills. Other times I’d come to sweating, my skin on fire, figments of dreams still bustling around the room. Dr. Morrow haunted this latest round of dreams, a disembodied presence who occasionally offered commentary in his midnight-radio baritone: Subject 48FRD only vaguely responding to phase-five stimuli—whatever the fuck that meant.
Was I hearing voices? Or was this the stuff of dreams? Dream stuff, I decided—definitely dream stuff.
But then one night, after chasing Hogzilla over a barren arctic landscape in an ATV, I woke to find Dr. Morrow seated at the foot of my couch, dressed in a lab coat. When I reached out to touch his strangely puffy left leg, my hand passed through his marshmallow flesh. Subject 48FRD has responded to an intraneurological stage-five facsimile, said Dr. Morrow, though I must say, my legs need work.
Tittering, he scattered into luminous pixels.
I had to admit that this definitely qualified not only as a voice in the head but also as a bona fide hallucination, though I did have a fever. I had consumed excessive quantities of dextromethorphan. I sat up. I tried to remember where I’d left my phone. I had to text Trippy immediately. Maybe he’d break his latest round of icy silence if I admitted that okay, I was hearing something that might qualify as a voice. Talking. Inside my lunatic head. I wondered if Trippy was seeing things too (he’d said nothing about hallucinations during our brief phone conversation). But I couldn’t find my phone. Plus, I was distracted by a more pressing problem: my throbbing finger, sharp pain shooting from the tip down into the bone. I didn’t peek under my bandage. I dared not gaze upon my maimed digit just yet.
I threw back another shot of Robitussin. I was saving my last few Demerols for some deeper crisis. I’d stashed them in a vitamin bottle, the bottle encased in a balled-up sock, the sock stuffed into an old suitcase, the suitcase buried under a pile of hunting equipment.
I sipped at a medicinal tumbler of bourbon until my finger went numb and the room pulsed with womb-like warmth. Deep in the pocket of my cargo pants, I felt the hopeful vibration of my phone. Ah, there it was, in the most obvious place.
It was Helen.
I pressed the phone to my ear. Waited. Breathed.
“It’s me,” she finally said. “I’m in the neighborhood. Do you have a minute?”
“I have a fever,” I said. “But also a minute. Endless minutes. Not on my phone, but in person. And yes, I’m a little tipsy.” I tamped down the bouncing elation in my heart, sent it plummeting to my stomach, where it bobbed hopefully before plunging into nausea.
“That’s okay,” said Helen. “Do you mind if I stop by? I’ve got to talk to you about something.”
I needed to brush my teeth. I needed to smear some deodorant into the musky hollows of my armpits in case she took me into her arms in a sudden rush of emotion, ready to try again. But I had no time. The room smelled of my sickness, but I couldn’t get up from the couch. And then she waltzed right into our old living room as though she still lived here (did she still have a key?). She paced around in a pair of expensive-looking riding boots that gave her the air of a miniseries aristocrat.
My dust would hear her and beat, had I lain for a century dead.
I sat up on the couch, keening toward her.
She would not sit down, kept fidgeting, inspecting various iconic objects from our mutual past.
“Poor Romie,” she said. “What did you do to your finger?”
“Lawn mower accident. Just a nick. Nothing serious.”
“Well, that’s good.”
“What brings you to this neck of the woods?”
“Oh, Romie. I hate to come to you like this, but I didn’t want you to hear it from somebody else and think that you . . .”
“That I?”
She sat down on the edge of the couch. Her entire body convulsed with emotion. She looked into me with her X-ray eyes, saw my heart, repulsive and swollen as a bullfrog in its lust, and looked away. She whimpered. Nibbled her thumbnail. Shivered. And then finally came out with it.
“I’m pregnant,” she said. “Can you believe it after all these . . .” She bit her tongue. She blushed. “And I didn’t want you to think . . .”
“Think what?”
“That it was you.”
“Me? What the fuck? How?”
I’d seen Helen only twice in the last year, had not even touched her, much less . . .
“Your material, I mean.”
“My material?”
“Your sample.” She released a long, slow hiss of air.
Remembering the sample I’d spurted into a cup at Live Oak Fertility Clinic, I imagined a swarm of my hopeful swimmers frozen, the iced chunk of my genetic legacy stashed in some capsule at the bottom of a cryogenic storage tank with hundreds of others, emblazoned with identification numbers linking it to me, Romie Morrison Futch, 251-87-9087-SC-2348576-DNA-55748FRD.
“Why would I think that?”
Helen avoided the intense gaze I’d attempted
to muster.
“I don’t even know what the legalities would be,” she muttered. “Were I to use it,” she added hastily, which made me wonder.
“Use it?”
“God, not that I would. I mean, not that there’s anything wrong with . . . But the thing is, I just didn’t want you to hear about this from somebody else and start thinking that, you know.”
She turned away so that I could not read her face, could not see what I imagined as a subtly gloating expression letting me know that she was fertile after all, that our childless marriage was not her fault.
“I shouldn’t have come here.” She stood up. “I’m an idiot. I should go.”
She walked over to the stuffed bass that hung over our old television. I’d caught the fish as a boy. Under the micromanaging eye of my father, I’d stuffed it myself. My first project, it looked too cylindrical, like a sausage. And its left eyeball had fallen out.
She touched the fish and turned to look at me.
“I’m sorry, Romie. I made a mistake. I see that now.”
I felt like the blood in my body had been replaced with cherry slushie, but it could’ve been the fever. My fingertips felt numb. All moisture had vacated my mouth. I wanted to burrow deep into my blanket and pupate into some other kind of creature. Something winged and bright that could hightail it out of this shit-hole town, flit down to South America, find some patch of rain forest that hadn’t been chainsawed down to a desolate moonscape, and feast on opiate flowers until every last human memory I had was obliterated.
“Boykin?” I managed to say, my voice a hideous croak.
“What?” She turned with a sudden jerk. “That’s none of your fucking business.”
“But you’re the one who came over here. You’re the one who . . .”
The New and Improved Romie Futch Page 20
