The New and Improved Romie Futch (18 page)

“Hogzilla,” I said. “Do tell.”

Hogzilla had been ravaging farmland, destroying rose gardens, goring poodles with his mammoth tusks. And all the while, I'd been farting about in a state of ignorance. When the beast made its first appearances, I was at the Center, intentionally cut off from the outside world.

“They say that SOB weighs over a thousand pounds,” said Lee. “That he's a mutant, that his breath will knock a man out. Plus, he can jump twenty feet in the air.”

“Bullshit,” spat Chip. “Just another urban legend.”

“Jarvis Riddle spotted him running through Miles Hammond's soybean field,” said Lee. “Looked like the boar was flying.”

“Jarvis Riddle has a problem with substance abuse,” said Chip, who usually reveled in a good convo about outsize wildlife. But now he had diddly to say on the subject. Now he peeled the label from his beer bottle.

“Don't we all,” said Lee.

“Not like Jarvis,” said Chip. “I think it's ordinary feral boars doing the damage.”

“Jarvis said the hoofprints he saw spanned a good nine inches. What you think, Romie?”

I was staring off at the jungle that seethed in the gulch beyond my house, remembering the expression my father got when he suited up to do battle against scrub brush and vines. Fierceness had tensed in his jaw muscles. His eyes had swum with strange fevers.

I'll be back before supper
, he'd always said.

I envisioned Hogzilla, the fire-breathing boar, tearing ass through some blighted strip of industrial farmland. His eyes glowed as he performed a twenty-foot leap over a triple-wheeled tractor with tillage equipment attached.

“Earth to Romie,” said Lee. “You still there?”

“Yep.” I turned away from the jungle. “Just a little stoned is all. Good stuff, Chip.”

We changed the subject, talked about our high school hesher days, those sweet years back at the butt end of another century, before the Human Genome Project geared up and nanotechnology took off, back before the Internet had colonized our minds,
back when we all flaunted leonine mullets and the future shimmered bewitchingly in the distance like a fata morgana mirage.

•  •

I stayed up all night Googling feral hogs. Whereas domesticated swine were sweet Wilburs bred for docility, all it took was a few weeks in the wild to transform these corn-fed fatsos into snorting, murderous monsters. Their regression to wild beast was almost instantaneous. Bristly black hair burst from their tender skins. Razor-sharp tusks shot from their foaming jaws. Add to this a high IQ and an all-consuming food obsession, and you've got a wily fiend ready to rip up whatever landscape it happens to rage through, ready to tear its cutters into whatever warm body it stumbles upon, nostrils on high alert for the scent of estrous sow.

All across the South, these porcine demons were raising hell. “Thousand-Pound Monster Tusker Bagged near Cartoosa, Georgia,” read one headline. “Pig Foot Downed in Asheboro, North Carolina,” said another. In Texas the feral hog population was off the charts, well into the range of epidemic. An article titled “Texas Succumbs to Pig Plague” waxed poetic while slyly alluding to a Guns N' Roses LP:

Feral hogs spawn like rabbits, producing up to two litters per year. Droves of fierce tuskers not only tear up farmland but also trot boldly through suburbs in groups more than twenty strong. They snuffle through trash, root up sprinkler systems, devour all small animals in their path. Their appetite for destruction is bottomless
.

The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department had declared open season, going so far as to legalize helicopter hunting, allowing
gung-ho Rambos to take out swine from the air. There were documented cases of people being bitten, a handful of dismemberments, a few deaths. “Nine-Year-Old Boy in Roxie, Mississippi, Torn Apart by Razorback,” proclaimed one paper. According to the article,
the boy's bones were picked clean by a frenzied group of sows
.
The Mullet Rapper
described the brutal end of a hunter in the Everglades
who was pounded to pulp by a herd [sic] of apocalyptic porkers
.

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.”