issue128pig

Pig

by Ben Drinen

Simeon and his brothers Pablo and Jeremiah could be found in the flood plain down the hill from their house on many an afternoon. Way out in the desert, outside of a little town somewhere between Phoenix and Vegas. Somewhere between here and there. Lighting firecrackers in ant holes, throwing rocks at neighbors, hitting each other with sticks, and trying to learn to smoke the cigarettes they found one day on the side of Vulture Mine Road. There were a lot of rules in those days, in the fundamentalist backwater of a town, on the Sunday morning excursions here and there from church to church. Four Square, Baptist, Presbyterian, Catholic, Methodist, Assembly of God, Calvary Chapel, every goddamn god-fearing House of God within 150 miles of their house. The wiry mustached men stomping back and forth across the red carpeted stage, potted plastic plants in the background, the mustached men shouting about the devil under the chair and the rail thin
pony-tailed blonde woman in the back speaking in the tongues of angels while her husband interpreted the babble into the true words of Jesus Christ Our Lord and Savior, his tie stained with ketchup and coffee. Lots of rules.   One rule of their Dad, a grungy old coot name C. Barton was not to point a gun at your brother, like Cain and Abel and all, and another rule that was heavily enforced was to never ever ride the pig.
    The pig was a big friendly bastard. Pink skin, wiry white hair, wet snout. Typical pig. By the time he was shot in the forehead and chopped into a freezer full of pork chops and well-seasoned sausage, he weighed about six hundred seventy five pounds. The state fair people were so damn impressed that they stuck a red ribbon on his head and declared him to be the second best fucking pig in the whole state of Arizona in 1985. Pig seemed happy and Jeremiah stood beside him in his softball style shirt, three quarter sleeves yellow, chest white, grinning from ear to ear, the switch in his hand.
    The rules of guns and pigs don’t make much sense. They don’t make much sense at all. So it was that on one occasion on a blue skied day with the jets of Litchfield Air Force Base zigging and zagging across the expanse, that the pig was being walked. Exercise was key to winning red ribbons. Can’t just go in there with a big fat pig. Gotta go in there with a big strong hog. So they were walking him through the mesquite and through the cholla and through the sand, and across the hard dirt of the desert floor. Jeremiah’s good friend Chet Mankins was along for the walk, and all four of them had air rifles over their shoulders. Like a band of robbers. Like a band of armed robbers led by a swine. They were following the pig, as it rooted its snout down into the dust smelling here and there. They came to the wash, in the shadow of their tree fort, they looked left and right, like they were crossing a highway. Looking for any signs of
marauding Mormons armed with rocks.
    Discovering no adversary, they followed the pig into the sand. Jeremiah had a gleam in his eye. The kind of gleam that says “Holy Shit, I’ll ride this fucking pig from here to wherever I fall off in the sand.” He crept up on the pig, and Chet Mankins had a gleam in his eye too. The kind of gleam that says “I’ll shoot Jeremiah as soon as the pig makes its first jump.” Jeremiah ran low to the ground, his high top sneakers making no sound in the sand, the pig sensed him too late, and Jeremiah sprang on to the pig’s back. The pig jumped forward with a squeal and Chet fired a single shot. Jeremiah screamed and fell on his side rolling in the sand. The pig squealed and ran a mile or two without stopping, a pink streak through the yellow of the sand. Simeon watched that pig run and his eyes got real wide. “Holy shit,” yelled Pablo, “Jeremiah’s fuckin shot.” The boys ran up to where Jeremiah was writhing in the sand holding
his cheek. Blood was streaming out between his fingers. Chet grinned.
    The brothers walked up the hill, a quiet dread hanging over their heads. Chet beat a path across the desert, hoping to make it home undiscovered by his own old man. Jeremiah was grunting and snorting and bleeding up a storm, and when they went into the kitchen and sat at the table, in the cool of the air conditioning, they sure looked glum. Down came the grungy old codger C. Barton, and he looked at his three sons at his dining room table, and he looked at the pool of blood that had dripped down on the table, and he followed the blood trail up to the side of Jeremiah’s face, and he cursed. “Dumbass kids,” he said. “Sit there and nobody move.”
    They heard the old man rooting around upstairs in his bedroom. He came back down with his old kit from his days as a medic in the Korean War. He looked around in the bag and took out a pocket knife and a pair of tweezers. “Now,” he said, “there’s two ways that this could go. If this was an accident, I would have used these.” He held up the tweezers, and they glinted in the light of the overhead lamp. “But I got a feeling from the looks on your face, that this wasn’t any accident at all. I got a feeling that you boys were shooting each other with BB guns on purpose.”
    “No we weren’t,” said Pablo.
    “You shut up,” the old man said. “You just shut up.”
    Jeremiah looked at the pocket knife, and his eyes sure got big.
    “So I’m going to have to use the other tool, here. Because the other tool will teach you boys to listen to me,” he said. He took out a lighter and ran the flame over each side of the blade to sterilize it. He took Jeremiah by the hair, and put him in a headlock to keep his head still. “Hold the table leg boy,” he said, “this ain’t going to feel real nice.”
    He took the blade and put it in the slit of a wound, and pushed. Jeremiah grimaced but made no sound. The old man pushed again, and Jeremiah breathed a grunt out through his nose, but said nothing. Finally, the old man pushed again, and Jeremiah spit out a mouth full of blood, and the BB click-click-clicked as it bounced through the blood, across the table, and on to the tile floor of the kitchen. Jeremiah sucked in a breath of air, and his teeth were covered in blood.
    “Now you boys get on down that hill and find that pig before he gets too far away,” the old man said turning on his heel and marching back into the living room to watch the end of a Perry Mason re-run.

***BIO*** My fiction has been published by 13E Note Editions in Paris and The Big Stupid Review. I was a finalist in the 2007 First Person Arts Storyteller of the Year Competition in Philadelphia and a participant in the Moth Storytelling Series in New York.

                                                    ZYGOTE IN MY COFFEE.COM

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Dec. 2009

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