Close call!
What did he mean by “you or Michelle”?
The next day I woke early to beat the farm hands to the shed. By the time I got there the pigs were awake and I could tell they were ravenous – I was going nowhere near that pen. And I didn’t want anyone else in there either. Travis and the boys would be here in an hour and if any of them went into the pen, the pigs would attack. The last thing I needed was an accident on site and the cops going through the place – even Bart who would only be doing it to complete the paperwork anyway.
I took the pieces of Gene out of the freezer and carried them over to the pen. They were frozen solid – frozen flesh treats for the piggies – meat icy poles. Even frozen, the pigs could smell it and they knew what was coming. They snorted and squealed in anticipation – I needed to be quick. I threw in a leg (the left one I think – it was dark and I didn’t take time to look) and a feeding frenzy began. Teeth and tusks tore at the frozen meat and bone; they bit each other in the melee for meat. Before it got out of hand entirely I threw in the rest and stood back as the swine devoured the slowly defrosting meaty treats.
In ten minutes there was no trace of Gene. In about 12 hours, bits of him would be expelled as feces and methane, but by then, no one would be able to tell. No one would be sifting through pig shit for a DNA sample for someone no one missed.
Only the head left. And the fingers.
I took out the bucket and took off the lid – not much of a smell. I then filled the bucket with hydrochloric acid. I kept a reasonable quantity of HCl to clean out the banks of water filters I have for the pigs. We get a lot of “hard” water here that leaves heavy calcium deposits on the filters – the HCl dissolves those deposits.
Now it’s dissolved Gene’s identity.
I filled the bucket, put the lid on tightly and taped it up again. Then I put the bucket on the floor of the 4WD. I had a plan for that bucket.
By the time the farm hands arrived, I had started feeding the pigs more slop (which I get as left-overs from the local pubs) and a commercial mix swine feed. The pigs had settled down by the time Travis and the lads arrived and I told them to go and finish the fencing across the front paddock.
So far…so good.
Then I drove to the rear of my land where I had a few hundred acres of saltbush country – land that had become too salty to farm – not even native animals foraged there. I dug a hole one metre wide and about a metre deep, put in the bucket/golf-club/secateurs/lino/hack-saw, and then filled in the hole. No one around, no one saw anything.
Chopped up body of my wife’s lover devoured by starving pigs? Check!
His head, teeth and fingers dissolving in an airtight bucket of acid one metre below the ground? Check!
On the way back to the house I thought to myself: “It’s over.”
Famous last words.
Michelle moped around the house for a few days and I knew why she was depressed – her young stud was missing. She knew Gene had never left town weeks ago, but she couldn’t tell Bart. That would give everything away. I knew why she was upset, but I asked anyway, interested in what lie she would give me.
“Oh, just thinking about Dad, that’s all,” she replied (her father passed away a year ago).
Bullshit! My face screamed, but it came out like: “It’s okay, sweetie” and I gave her a hug. For the briefest of seconds I felt her shudder under my touch, like she was being caressed by a leper.
The next time I saw Gene was in the shed where I cut him up – three days later.
It was late in the day, the sun had set and Michelle had called me on the 2-way to come in for dinner. I was finishing up with an old diesel generator I bought second hand from the Cassidy farm when Gene walked in all casual like. His arms and legs were sewn on like a cartoon scarecrow. His head was stitched on like Frankenstein’s monster. The secateurs were thrust into his neck, the blades digging into each side of his neck. A golf club stuck out of the back of his head, a hacksaw was buried deep into his left shoulder.
“Ya fuckin’ got me good and proper, didn’t ya?” he said as he leered over me.
I jumped so high I nearly hit the roof. Air escaped me. I couldn’t breathe/speak.
“It’s okay, I’m not here to hurt you,” he said and he looked at the engine. “Looks like you have some serious carbon build up on this – gunna take a while to clean that out. You’ll need to re-bore the cylinders”
“Yeah,” I replied. “Probably going to need to machine new honing marks as well,” I added which I thought might come out like “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING HERE?”
“You might want to know what the fuck I’m doing here, huh?”
Gene looked at me, his eyes melted with the effect of the acid. I could see burned and eviscerated skin all over his face, the smooth surface of his frontal bone gleamed through the thinning skin on his forehead.
“That did cross my mind…you are dead, aren’t you?”
“Shit yeah! You fucking made well sure of that! I was dead before you shoved these secateurs into me – but I understand you wanted to make sure. After all, I was boning your wife.”
Boning – sleeping-with/seeing/fucking…
His eyes may have been pus-filled mush, but he saw my reaction. “Oh, don’t be like that. It was just sex.”
“Why?” I asked – in retrospect, a stupid fucking question.
“Why? Why was she fucking me? Why was I fucking her? Why you?”
Yes, all of those, I thought – which came out as “………….”
“Okay, well…
“She was fucking me because she needed to feel something sensual and passionate again. She told me sex with you – as infrequent as it was – was dull, monotonous and predictable. I was exciting, strong, forceful. I made her do things she never knew she wanted to do – and she loved it! It was her escape – clandestine rebellion from the monotony of life
“Why was I fucking her? Because I wanted to. She’s attractive, great tits (even after two kids) and I could feel all that pent up sensuality just screaming to get out. I knew that there was a hidden slut in there and I was right.
“Why you? It had absolutely nothing to do with you.”
I was stunned – but I kind of expected it. He was right – all of it was right. It was all my fault – I drove her to him. And then I have killed him, dismembered him, melted him – and now I’m having a conversation about it with him.
“Look, I gotta go,” Gene said. “But I will be back – we have unfinished business you and me”. And he left me.
Kill and dispose of wife’s lover’s body? Check!
Dispose of all the evidence of the crime? Check!
Conversation with a dead man? Check!
So far, so…
Since Gene’s last visit I barely slept – since I killed him I barely slept. Maybe it was conscience? Maybe it was guilt? But mostly it was fear. Not fear of getting caught, but fear Gene would come back.
And he did come back – again late in the evening when I was alone in the rear shed, still fussing over that generator. He didn’t introduce himself, just wandered in like a mate helping me with the engine. “Have you machined it yet?”
I jumped a little, but not as much as two nights previous – I was starting to get used to it. Getting used to talking with the dismembered corpse of my wife’s lover.
“No, I’ll do it tomorrow.” I said absent-mindedly and then realized whom I was talking to. His face had decomposed further, strips of opaque skin hung off the bones in his face. His hair had fallen out; I could see the Coronal Suture, the Squamosal Suture – the cranial jigsaw slowly moving apart. His eyes were gone entirely, lips vanished. A few teeth had fallen out – his voice was a whisper.
“Enough of the small talk,” he whispered, his “s” a “th” in his speech. “Thanks to your excessive use of acid, I don’t have much time left. This will be my last visit to you.”
I wasn’t sure what that meant – good news or bad? I simp
ly stayed mute.
“I’m not here for revenge, Joe,” said Gene. “That’s not my style. You had your reasons and they were good enough. Maybe the punishment for shagging your missus was a bit harsh, but that’s not for me to judge – only you. But I want you to know that the thing with my old man was definitely an accident.”
His old man? Curtis? What the? This came out like “Oh…right…” but I wasn’t fooling anyone.
“Oh, you don’t know?” His grotesquely decaying mouth widened into what I believe was a smile – hard to tell without any lips though. I could hear guttural yelps from what was left of his throat as he chuckled hoarsely. “You didn’t know! Your wife and I were planning to leave – together. She was going to leave you, the kids, the farm and ‘those fucking swine’ – her words not mine, Joe – for me. But the old man didn’t want me to leave. He knew he was going the same way as Mum – he had his moments of clarity and then moments when he wasn’t himself at all. That’s Alzheimer’s for you! We had a row – the three of us. He called Michelle a slut, a whore, and a lot worse. She didn’t mean to hit him when she threw the ashtray at him.
“She didn’t know he’d hit his head on the concrete
“She didn’t know his skull was so soft.”
Michelle – she killed Curtis!
“When did this happen?” I asked, trying to piece it together.
“The day before you killed me. I buried him under the wooden shed in the yard. I don’t have a pig farm to dispose of the body now, do I? Wish I’d thought of the acid though.”
It came slotting into place. Her affection towards me, the distance in the last week or so. Not only was she pining for her lover – the man she wanted to run away with – but she was bearing the guilt of killing an old man. She must have felt terrible. She didn’t suspect that I knew anything, so didn’t suspect foul play with Gene’s disappearance – she must think he simply left her.
Because of what she did to his father.
I could sense the pain and anguish she must have been feeling – I wanted so bad to take it away from her and tell her it would all be okay. She was keeping it bottled up inside so well, but she must be ready to burst.
“Anyway, that’s why I came back to see you,” Gene concluded. “Now you know everything. She has her secrets, I have mine and you have yours. We all have our own little mysteries don’t we?”
And then I heard her, Michelle, at the shed door calling my name. I looked back for Gene, but he had vanished. A second later Michelle entered.
“I’ve been calling on the 2-way for ten minutes – I thought something was wrong. Dinner’s ready.” In the past she’d have been upset – but today she just looked tired.
“Sorry love, just busy in here that’s all.”
“Whom were you talking to?” she asked
What? I thought - which came out like: “What?” A totally different “What”, though.
“I heard you talking – thought it was just to yourself – but the other voice was soft. A whisper.”
“I WAS talking to myself,” I tried…
“It didn’t sound like it,” she looked confused and tired now.
“What did it say?” I asked, wondering what she really heard.
“I heard it say – ‘we all have our little secrets don’t we’.”
Three years later Curtis’ body revealed itself. Stuart and Caryn Davis bought his old place at auction and when they went to install a new shed, they knocked over the old tumbled down wooden one – white ants had rotted it away from the inside anyway and it mostly disappeared into splinters and dust. Then they noticed the sunken floor, which didn’t quite look right.
The police dug around and, sure enough, Curtis showed up. Decayed, mostly bone, but certainly him.
Bart didn’t come to ask me about Curtis. He came to ask me about Michelle, though. Michelle overdosed on sleeping pills a month after I last saw Gene, and I had been bringing the kids up ever since all by myself. I met a new lady, Kate, and she moved in six months ago. We met on-line and she wanted out of the city – I wanted a partner.
Bart didn’t ask me much about Michelle at that time though…the time when she killed herself. She had already left me and died in a motel in Sydney. But, when Curtis’ body showed up, he asked me about her.
“Did Michelle ever talk about Curtis? Did she ever mention his son? Gene?”
I wanted so bad to tell him that I knew all about her and Gene, about the fact that I was certain she killed Curtis in a terrible accident. But it came out like: “No.”
And “Not that I can recall”.
And I think he bought it. He looked at me and in that look he said: “I know she was sleeping with Gene. I know they were planning to leave. I know Gene’s disappeared, Curtis has shown up dead and your wife overdosed thousands of miles from you.” But it came out like: “Okay then.”
His eyes said: “I know you’re involved somehow.” But nothing came out at all.
Wife’s lover dead and gone? Check!
Wife killed herself, my alibi watertight? Check!
So far…so good.
Pig Farm Page 2