by A. E. Kaplan
“I love that this fact is the only useful piece of information you got out of four years at NYU,” I said.
“It’s not the only one,” she said. “It’s just the only one that’s handy at the moment.” She pulled a long, blond wig out of the grocery bag at her feet.
“That’s the fakest-looking wig I’ve ever seen,” Ed said.
“All it has to do is disguise me from a bunch of drunk people for five minutes,” she said. “It’ll be fine.” She opened her door. “My job is parts one and two. Yours is part three.”
I glanced at Ed. “What’s part three?”
“Tom. Focus. Take the pigs through the woods. Meet me at the back of the Rothgars’ yard, at the edge of the lawn, in five minutes.” She grabbed one of the grocery bags and shoved the other toward Ed. “Do not run out of chips, or we’re screwed.”
Ed and I took the chips and lingered for a second in front of the trailer door.
“Does it strike you,” I said, “that she gave us the hard part?”
“She did. On the other hand, if Rex and Wolf see you tonight, you’re gonna die.”
“Good point,” I said.
“Give me a bag.” He tossed me one, and I tore it open. “Ready?”
He nodded.
“Let’s do this thing.”
He pulled the door open, whereupon we were confronted with a sea of pig butts, as they were still all facing the wrong direction. I waved the bag of chips, but none of the pigs turned around.
“Do they seem kind of out of it to you?” Ed asked.
“Maybe they’re stressed or something.” I waved the bag some more, then threw a handful of chips into the trailer. The ones in the back started to turn around, but it took us two bags of chips just to get them all out.
“I’m thinking this is a bad sign,” I said.
“We have to do something with them.”
“All right. Let’s go.”
We led nine reluctant pigs along Mrs. Lee’s back fence and into the woods.
That was when our pigs saw the lake. And decided they were thirsty.
“No no no,” Ed called. “Do not let them go that way!”
I ran between the pigs and the water. “Go back!” I shouted. “Bad pigs!” One of them bumped into me and I bounced into a bush.
Ed hauled me out and we surveyed the damage. Three of the pigs were drinking. The rest were wallowing in the mud around the lake. Some were rolling over with their feet in the air. Others appeared to be napping.
“It’s been way more than five minutes,” Ed said. “Zip’s got to be waiting.”
I looked into the grocery bag. “We only have one bag of chips left.”
“Use it.”
I pulled it open and waved it around. Nothing. I threw a handful to the nearest pigs, the ones who were lying in the mud. They didn’t even look up.
“Damn it,” I said. “They’re bored with the chips.”
“Maybe we need something else. What do you have in the house?”
“Um. Um. Not much. Maybe a pack of Oreos?”
“Go get it. We have to try something.”
I sprinted for the house, where I found exactly twenty Oreos left. I grabbed the package and a jar of peanut butter, and ran back to the lake.
“Well?” Ed said. Even more of the pigs were lying down. This was a problem.
“I’ve got a few,” I said. “And peanut butter.”
“What are you going to do with that? Smear it all over your body and get them to chase you?”
“I thought I’d put it on the cookies,” I said. “It has a strong smell, right?”
“Whatever. We have to get them moving.”
I unscrewed the jar, dipped one of the Oreos into the peanut butter, and waved it near the face of the nearest pig. His ears perked and he struggled to get up.
“That’s right,” I coaxed. “Smell the hydrogenated goodness. Mmmm. Refined fats and sugar.”
I fed the Oreo to the nearest pig, and by then the rest of them were all on their feet. I took another cookie and threw it in the direction of the Rothgars’ house. One pig staggered three feet before collapsing again. Two took off like bats out of hell toward the yard, but the rest seemed to be smart enough to realize that I had thrown one cookie but was in possession of several others.
In other words, they stampeded.
Stampeding pigs are hard to describe. Pigs are not as fast as greyhounds or jaguars, but, as Ed would later tell me (courtesy of Wikipedia), they can run faster than ten miles an hour. Which works out to a six-minute mile.
I do not run a six-minute mile.
But I can, as it turns out, sprint pretty fast while being chased by a hungry herd of swine. (Note: Ed would also later inform me that a group of pigs is called a drift. However, when said pigs are being moved, they are called a drove.)
So the drove of pigs ran and I ran, with their muddy, wet snouts on the backs of my legs, up the hill, through the woods, to the edge of the Rothgars’ grassy, drunk-infested yard.
Zip was nowhere in sight.
Ed was running on my left and somewhat ahead of me, since he was, after all, on the track team. “Throw me the cookies,” he said. “Throw them!”
I am not nearly coordinated enough to sprint and throw at the same time, which is why I am not on the track team, but the hot potato that was the half pack of Oreos sailed out of my hands and into Ed’s. Unfortunately, pigs do not see all that well, and this cleverly executed exchange went, both literally and figuratively, over their heads.
I didn’t dare keep running into the Rothgars’ yard, but if I doubled back, the pigs were likely to follow me. So I unscrewed the jar of peanut butter and threw that to Ed, too.
I overshot, and it sailed into the middle of the yard, where it bounced off the grass and rolled toward the house. The pigs, smelling that the peanut butter was now someplace else, parted like the Red Sea and ran around me, which was good because I was totally out of breath. Ed, still running like I’d never seen him run, grabbed the peanut butter and kept going.
While a hundred half-drunk and fully drunk teenagers gaped in horror, Ed blasted through the yard, past Lauren and Adrienne Shaffer, who stared at him in total shock while he spiked the peanut butter into the DJ table, where it was immediately set upon by the first four pigs. Then, casting Oreos behind him like Hansel and Gretel, he ran into the basement, followed by the fastest swine this side of wherever Babe comes from.
The music stopped, and was replaced by the shrieks of people being set upon by muddy, smelly pigs. There was running. There was screaming. It was amazing.
Then there was a thunk kind of sound, and beer started spurting out of the keg. Zip, her wig now sideways, was rolling it toward the pigs, who’d had their fill of peanut butter and were happy to move on to something else. I wasn’t sure how she was going to get the beer to the ones inside with Ed.
Ed, speak of the devil, was racing down the side of the house, having run out the front door and come back around. While he sprinted toward me, I saw Wolf and Rex trying desperately—and futilely—to get the pigs away from the sound equipment. Wolf, filthy from pig wrestling, was beet-red, a tendon standing out of his neck like a rope, and screaming, “DAMN PIGS! DAMN PIGS!” and seemed too overcome to manage anything more articulate.
It was, perhaps, the crowning moment of my life.
Ed hit the edge of the trees. “Go go go,” he said.
“Where’s Zip?”
“She went out the front, I think. We have to go, like, now.” And indeed, Wolf and Rex were giving up their fight with the pigs, some of which had already lain down, and were looking back and forth between the woods…and my house.
We ran back around through Mrs. Lee’s yard. Zip was already in the RAV4, wigless and resting her feet on the dashboard.
“I love the smell of livestock in the morning,” she said.
Ed clapped my shoulder and sniffed the air. “What is that, Tom? What does that smell like to you? Smells like
what? Like what, now?”
I bumped my fist against his. “Smells like victory,” I said. And we peeled out of the neighborhood with all the speed that Bob Shultz’s pig trailer would allow.
Zip and Ed drove back to Shultz’s to return the trailer, dropping me off at the local movie theater, where I’d left my car earlier.
I bought my ticket and arrived five minutes before the end of the eleven o’clock showing of Odin’s Revenge, the poster of which featured lots of glistening, half-naked men. Which, for some reason, was supposed to appeal to straight guys in a way that never made sense to me.
I found Willow half asleep in the fourth row of the mostly empty theater and climbed into a seat right behind her. I tapped her on the shoulder and she jumped.
“God!” she hissed. “What is…Is that dirt? You’re—oh—oh—oh my God, you stink.” Her hand flew up to cover her nose and mouth. “What is that? You smell like the monkey house at the zoo.”
“Oh,” I said. “Sorry about that.”
“Do I even want to know what you did?”
I smiled.
“Oh God, I don’t, do I? Listen, if you did anything to my room, I’m selling you out to Wolf.”
“Your room is fine,” I said, hoping it was true.
“Why are you here? You said you wouldn’t be here.”
“We finished early, and I didn’t die.”
She turned back around to the screen, where several sweaty, shirtless guys were hacking at each other with swords. It seemed to bear little resemblance to any of the battles my father had fought, where you barely knew who you were fighting and death was a random thing that occurred when a body attempted to occupy the same space as a bullet.
She said, “Are you actually going to sit here for the end of this? You don’t even know what’s going on.”
“Good guys hacking at bad guys,” I said. “It doesn’t look very complicated.”
“Yes,” she said. “But they’re so shiny.”
I laughed.
“You don’t really want to stay for the rest of this.”
“I do,” I said. Then: “You could kiss me.”
She fanned the air in front of her face. “Not likely.”
“Think of me as earthy.”
“I’ll think of you as putrid. Seriously, I think whatever that is may be cutting off the oxygen to your brain. What did you say you stank of again?”
“I didn’t. Better if it’s a surprise.”
She groaned. “Will this surprise at least mean I’ll be able to sleep in my own bed before five in the morning?”
“We can only hope.”
She looked forward again, just as the screen faded to black. “Damn it,” she said. “I missed the end. Now I’ll never know who won.”
“I think the good guys.”
“Yeah, but I wanted to see it.”
“Sorry,” I said.
She got up and slung her bag over her shoulder. It was made of patches of old T-shirts sewn together. “It’s fine,” she said. “Are you coming?”
I followed her out. “You know,” I said. “This was almost like a date.”
“Except for the part where we arrived separately, left separately, and only sat together for five minutes, you may be right.”
“I have a low standard,” I said, “for what constitutes a successful date.”
“If you show up to all your dates smelling like a pig, that might explain why. Oh God. Is that it? Is it pigs?”
I smiled and offered my hand, which she made a big show of not taking. “I’ll walk you to your car.”
I got a text from her about half an hour later: You suck there are sleeping pigs everywhere my house stinks oh my god.
I texted back: Yes, but you can sleep in silence before 5 am.
Willow: NO I CAN NOT WOLF AND REX ARE STILL TRYING TO GET THE PIGS OUT OF THE HOUSE AND THEY ARE SCREAMING.
Me: Sorry.
Willow: You should be.
Me: Want to come over?
There was a long pause.
Willow: OK.
She arrived fifteen minutes later, in a pair of pajama pants and a tank top. “This isn’t a booty call,” she said. “So if you’re thinking this is a booty call, it’s not.”
“I wasn’t thinking that,” I said. “I was being polite. You can sleep on my couch, if you want. Zip’s already in bed.”
She flopped down on the couch. “I see you showered.”
“Yes, well, I was told I reeked like a monkey house.”
“Did it have to be pigs, Tom? Really?”
“Would you want to go to a party at your house tomorrow night?”
“Um, no. Is someone, like, going to come and get them at some point?”
“Farmer Shultz should be by first thing, once he realizes they’re gone. We left him a very nice note. And we bought him dinner.”
“What makes you think he won’t call the cops on you?”
“Because,” I said. “He’s in possession of rather a lot of a controlled substance, and we mentioned in the letter that if he kept his pigs’ escapades under his hat, we would kindly not mention the drugs to anyone.” I smiled. “Also, we left no evidence and we don’t have his pigs. Your cousin does.”
“Ah,” she said. “Bravo.”
“Indeed. Have you heard from your mom?”
“Oh sure. She calls every afternoon. She’s in South Carolina or something. She’s interviewing people who are rebuilding their houses after the hurricane. I don’t think she’s in much of a hurry to get back.”
“Ah.”
“What about your dad?” she asked.
“Um. He called, once.”
“Once? Hasn’t he been gone for a week or something?”
“Something like that.”
She crossed her legs under her, so that her knee rested near mine. “What’s his deal? He was in the navy or something, right?”
“The army, yeah.”
“So he’s got PTSD?”
I swallowed some air. “I don’t know if he ever got a real diagnosis or anything. But yeah, it’s something like that.”
“That sounds bad. I mean. I mean, I guess I don’t know that much about it.”
I leaned back and looked at the side of her face in the semidarkness of my living room. “Did you ever read any Salinger?”
“Yeah, we read The Catcher in the Rye in English last year.” She smirked. “Tell me you aren’t trying to be Holden Caulfield.”
I laughed. “Yeah, no. Did you ever read any of his short stories? That’s what I was talking about. The ‘Bananafish’ one?”
“What’s a bananafish?”
“Nothing. It’s about this guy who comes home from World War II, and he’s a complete wreck, and then he has this wonderful, beautiful, perfect afternoon with some random bratty four-year-old on the beach and then he goes back to his hotel room and shoots himself in the head.”
“Jesus.”
“I didn’t sleep for a week after we read that. I was convinced that if my dad had a really good day, he’d come home and off himself.”
“Oh God. But, Tom, that was just a story.”
“Yeah, and it wasn’t even really much of a story; the moral is either ‘Don’t leave your preschooler alone while you go drink martinis’ or ‘Don’t marry a woman who won’t answer the phone.’ But it was based on Salinger himself. You know, he was in combat for the better part of a year after D-day. He was one of the guys who liberated Dachau. He never really got over it. So this story was kind of. I don’t know. A confessional? About how he felt like he couldn’t ever really be normal again after the war.”
“Yeah, but Salinger didn’t kill himself. He was really old when he died.”
“No, but he thought about it. And the stuff he saw, it made a wall between him and everyone else.”
“So what you’re saying is your dad has a wall.”
“My dad has a wall. But it’s a wall with a hornets’ nest in it, and when you try to poke at it, t
hey freak out.”
“They sting you? The proverbial hornets?”
“It’s more like they sting him. I don’t know how to describe it. But that’s why I don’t really know if my dad’s in therapy, or what’s going on with him, because asking makes everything worse.”
“Ah. And Rex and Wolf beat the hell out of that nest with a baseball bat.”
“They pretty much did.”
There was a pause, and then she sort of leaned halfway against the couch and halfway against me.
“Sorry my brother’s being awful about it.”
“Yeah, well. Me too. But that’s kind of par for the course, you know?”
“Awful behavior on the part of my brother?”
“Well, that. But also, just, you know, life. Dad came home and it was like, Thank you for your service, fair hero. Now sit down and shut the hell up.”
“So how long has he…he…”
“He got back from his last deployment about four years ago.”
“And, um, your mom?”
“Died about eight years ago.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Oh.” I didn’t go on to explain that these were the two defining moments in my life and were the foundation of the way I measured time inside my head. My life had exactly three phases: before Mom, after Mom but before Dad/Iraq, and my current post–Dad/Iraq period. Frankly, I hoped this phase would go on for a while. I wasn’t really up for many more defining moments.
“No,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m not real great at, um, expressing sympathy. It just seems fake, you know?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Most of it is. People do social conventions, and the really, really nice people bring a casserole. And that’s about all you can hope for.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
We sat in the dark, staring at the black TV screen. I was very aware of her on the couch, and how I could feel her shifting against the cushions. I wondered what she was thinking, and if she could feel all my little movements, too.
“Willow?” I said, turning toward her. “Would you tell me something? Something nobody else knows?”
“I have…no idea what you mean by that. Tell you what?”
“Just something about you. Something real. Tell me what you meant when you said you wanted options.”