The New and Improved Romie Futch

by Julia Elliott

  “I don’t think the experiment’s over, Romie. I think they’re still dicking with us.”

  “Who, exactly?”

  “Dr. Jekyll. BioFutures. I don’t know.”

  “BioFutures—that rings a bell. Wait a minute.”

  “Daddy Warbucks behind the Center. Got a weird e-mail from Skeeter. Think he—”

  Trippy’s voice fizzled, our connection lost. When I rang him back, I was sent straight to voice mail. I remembered that Bio-Futures Incorporated was also, according to PigSlayer, the dark force behind GenExcel, that laboratory in Yemassee that was supposedly doing some unkosher shit with animal DNA. I wondered what kind of dark corporation was funding both GenExcel and the Center for Cybernetic Neuroscience. I envisioned a Darth Vaderesque CEO sitting at a twenty-thousand-dollar desk carved from a chunk of obsidian. I heard his inhuman laughter echoing down the labyrinthine hallways of his corporate aerie. Heard the click, click, click of his secretary’s noir stilettos on Italian marble tiles.

  Sir, the secretary of defense is on line one.

  Sir, the CEO of Eli Lilly will be a few minutes late for lunch.

  Sir, your wife called. She wants to know whether she should have the mansion in Costa Rica cleaned, or will you be staying on the yacht?

  I’d seen too many movies, as had Trippy. And we lived in the twenty-first century, a time when corporations were recombinant monsters dipping multiple tentacles into the private and public sectors, funding commercial enterprises and academic research, dabbling coercively in legislation. Everything was both evil and innocuous at the same time. And Trippy was a stoner with a taste for exotic hallucinogens.

  I remembered a story he’d told about the time his true love, Lady L, hanging with a gaggle of her college girlfriends, pretended he was invisible, kept it up all night no matter how much he carried on—reduced his ass to a bellowing mess. He’d almost lost his mind, found himself in the bathroom of Club Satin, strung out on fireballs and vitamin K, trying to touch his mirror image to reaffirm his existence. He was probably having a similar ontological freak-out this very night, fucked up in his sister’s basement.

  I went inside and shot him a text. Suggested that we get together soon. Told him he was welcome to crash at my place anytime and gave him my address.

  Collapsing onto the couch, I assumed the fetal position, fingering the scars where Josh had lasered the apertures together after my BC transmitters had supposedly been removed. I could no longer feel the edges of the wireless electrodes, but perhaps they’d inserted something less protrusive. Perhaps dark entities were sending messages to the submerged sections of my iceberg-shaped consciousness.

  I sighed. Rubbed my cranium. Sat staring at the wall, listening to the squirrels that infested my attic. The fact that I had one last frozen burrito in the freezer brought me a little comfort.

  NINE

  I heard a woman’s voice, warm and liquid, calling from some green place where a thousand bird species flourished. There the air smelled of crushed mint. There lambs and lions snuggled in patches of dappled shade.

  “Romie,” she crooned, “are you asleep?”

  The motherly voice washed over me, accompanied by warm, Big Red–scented breath. A damp palm caressed my brow. I opened my eyes, expecting to see Mom, but the face was too puffy, the hair too sticky and quirky. It was Robert Smith, the Cure’s lead singer, his eyes gouged out with dusky shadows. His mouth was a primal smear of purple.

  “Son,” a voice bleated. “You best wake up. It’s five past eleven in the morning.”

  Now my father’s sallow face drooped above me, neck flesh jiggling as he spoke.

  Dad. Marlene. In my bedroom. No, not my bedroom. The living room.

  I was sprawled on the couch, sunlight slashing through mini blinds. I took stock of the situation. Tried to sit up. Again experienced the sensation of lead balls rolling around in my skull, crushing delicate nerves.

  “We tried to call, but you didn’t pick up,” said Dad.

  “When you called the other night and didn’t say nothing, we got worried,” said Marlene.

  “I see you’ve been drinking.” Dad pointed solemnly at the empty pint of Jim Beam that lay on its side on my coffee table as though a lively game of spin the bottle had taken place. “I see you’ve hurt your hand.”

  “We thought we’d drop by to check on you,” Marlene added. “What in the world did you do to your hand, honey?”

  “We were driving down to Charleston anyway,” Dad said.

  “Fixing to do a little shopping.”

  “She’s the one that wants to go shopping, not me.” Dad aimed a gnarled finger at Marlene.

  “Shopping’s good for the economy,” Marlene opined. “I saw that on the Today show.”

  “Son.” Dad held up his portable thermohygrometer. “Were you aware that it’s almost sixty-five percent humidity in here? You definitely have a mold problem. I told you to run your air conditioner in the summer. I told you not to keep the windows open. We run ours right on up through October, then switch directly to heat. You ought to clear some of that brush around your yard. The jungle’s creeping in. It’ll be up to your door before you know it, eating you alive.”

  Dad frowned, his eyes wide with doomful foreboding.

  “Your gutters are clogged. You need a new roof. You’ve got a squirrel infestation in your attic.”

  “Leave the poor boy alone.” Marlene patted my arm.

  “Looks like your floors are slanting, son,” said Dad. “Once your foundation goes, that’s it. Ought to crawl up under the house and see what’s going on down there. You could use jacks to prop up the joists for now, but what you might want to do eventually is—”

  “He’s not in any condition to crawl up under the house,” snapped Marlene.

  “Looks like you’ve got water damage in the kitchen,” said Dad, “where your linoleum’s bubbling up around the sink. Bet you a hundred dollars you’ve got asbestos under there, but I wouldn’t pull it up yourself. That’s one case where I’d let professionals handle it, even if you have to pay an arm and a leg. I wouldn’t mess with asbestos.”

  “Why don’t we all go out to lunch?” Smiling, Marlene spread her kimono-sleeved arms like wings.

  “There’s no cure for asbestosis,” said Dad. “You might be fine for twenty years, and then bam—you wake up one day and you can’t breathe. Next thing you know, you’ve got lung cancer, interstitial fibrosis, your pulmonary sacs ate up with scar tissue.”

  “Good Lord.” Marlene flashed a clenched grin. “You see what I have to live with?”

  “I’m a realist is all, and she can’t handle it.”

  “He’s a pest-imist,” said Marlene, her voice lapsing into squawks, “while I like to look on the bright side. Let’s go out to lunch. Let’s have a picnic in the park. Let’s go on a balloon ride.”

  “Woman,” Dad said, “are you out of your mind?”

  “What’s wrong with having a little adventure? Though it would be pure hell to be trapped in a hot-air balloon with you.”

  “What?” Dad grinned. “A man would have to be crazy to set foot in a dirigible aircraft with a woman of your proportions; you’re liable to capsize it.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Marlene stood up and waved a fist. “Romie, did you hear what your father said to me?”

  “Didn’t mean nothing personal,” said Dad. “Calm down or your blood pressure will shoot sky-high. You’re just not at a healthy weight is all. You need to get more cardiovascular, lay off the sugar and refined carbohydrates.”

  “He wants to suck all the joy out of life,” Marlene cried. Her face sank into her hands. She fled to the porch with watery eyes. The door slammed.

  “Sometimes I wonder why I got married again,” Dad said. “All she does is spend my money.”

  “Marlene’s not so bad.” I forced myself to sit up—to hell with the balls in my head.

  “Son.” Dad gave me the once-over. “You look like shit.”


  “Rough patch.”

  “Let me guess.” He sighed. “Money problems.”

  “That’s only part of it. I wasn’t going to ask, but now that you bring it up. I was doing well with my clients until I hurt my hand, and now I’ve fallen behind. Don’t want to miss my mortgage. I’ll be good as new as soon as my hand heals.”

  The thought of parting with a chunk of cash sent my father into a five-minute sinus-clearing frenzy. He pinched his glabella, grunted and hawked. His eyes oozed. He fished a yellowed handkerchief from his pocket, unwadded the crunchy rag, and emitted several dark loogies into it: first from his nose, then from his mouth, and then from his nose again. He crumpled the cloth and stuffed it back into the pocket of his Rustlers.

  “When I was your age,” he said, “my house was paid for. My car was paid for. I’m a pay-as-you-go kind of guy.”

  “I know it, Dad.”

  “What did you do to your hand?”

  “Lawn mower.”

  “Vague answer.”

  “Sliced the tip of my pinkie finger off, okay. Are you happy now?”

  Dad’s mouth performed a strange hybrid of wince and grin.

  “How in the world?”

  “The blade was stuck.”

  “Did you cut the motor?”

  “I wasn’t thinking.”

  “I taught you better than that.” He shook his head. “Hope you at least had the sense to have it sewn up.”

  “I did.”

  “You taking antibiotics?”

  “I’m no idiot.”

  “You could still get an infection.”

  By the time Marlene breezed back in with a manic twinkle in her eye, Dad was deep into the pathological quirks of infectious organisms. Eyes ablaze, he spoke cryptically of fungal infections, intercellular bacteria, and subperiosteal abscesses. Marlene pulled a compact from her purse and glossed her lips with a goop-laden wand. She puckered at herself. Blew herself a rascally air kiss.

  “Don’t listen to a word he says.” She smooched a Kleenex and set the tissue down on my coffee table. “Or he’ll send you over the edge.”

  “Always expect the worst,” Dad said. “And then you might be pleasantly surprised.”

  “Anybody want to try that new pumpkin cheesecake over at the Olive Garden?” said Marlene.

  Dad rolled his eyes. “Hand me the checkbook, woman,” he said.

  It took my father ten minutes to write a check. During the procedure he hawked and wheezed from sinus torments and compulsively licked his chapped lips. With the stern, ashen face of a war-crimes tribunal judge, he placed the check facedown on my coffee table, securing it under my Jim Beam bottle, perhaps with didactic intent.

  “We’ve got to hit the road.” Dad snapped his suspenders. He patted his tweedy newsboy cap. Once again, it struck me how odd it was that my father, the voice of doom, could be such a sharp dresser, even though most of his clothes derived from Walmart.

  We walked to the porch, stared out at the damp, milky day. Wet leaves decoupaged the asphalt. Birdcalls sounded muffled and blurred. I felt a knot in my stomach. My belly released a surly groan as I watched my father and stepmother drive away. I tried to recall when I’d last eaten. I wondered if I had any sandwich stuff left in the fridge. I thought I had a pint of Old Crow stashed in a kitchen cabinet behind a box of roach poison. Remembering my Demerol cache, remembering the check under the empty whiskey bottle, I hurried into the house.

  • •

  The check was for a thousand dollars. I found the hidden pint of whiskey. The sun rose and melted the dank morning away. There I was again, living from minute to minute like a dog, trying to engineer a decent mood.

  I ate my last breakfast burrito. I popped a holy trinity (Advil, Demerol, multivitamin). And I began my afternoon tippling out in the yard beneath the shade of a flame-hued maple tree. The birds were loud, the butterflies plentiful in the blooming gorge. Though I could feel darkness licking at the edges of my sunny yard, I kept my face turned toward the sun.

  Just when my headache had melted away, the boys came swaggering over my lawn like a couple of smirking pirates, intent on hijacking my day.

  There stood Lee Decker in a windbreaker that matched the sky. There stood Chip Watts, his thinning bangs molded into an optimistic swoop with futuristic styling products. He cranked his smile wide-open, displaying bright white veneers. His paunch had shrunk to a modest mound. But his cheeks sagged. A proto-wattle was developing under his chin. He’d turned a strange color since I’d seen him last, the prosthetic pink of Vienna sausage, and I wondered if he’d been experimenting with tanning creams.

  “What’s up?” said Lee.

  “Gonna keep it real and say up front that we came to kidnap you,” said Chip.

  “Get you out the house,” said Lee.

  “I am out of the house,” I said.

  “Out your yard,” said Lee. “Out your neighborhood. Out your comfort zone.”

  “Out your mind.” Chip grinned.

  “What happened to your finger?” asked Lee.

  “Lawn mower blade nicked it. Nothing serious.”

  “If the machine was running,” said Chip, “you were a fool to fiddle with the blade”

  “I know it,” I said.

  “You’re not a fool,” said Lee. “Just an absentminded professor.”

  Chip rolled his eyes. “Thought we’d cruise down to First Baptist to check out the LastCar Rapture Series,” he said. “They got an ATV park for the youth group set up down there. Been giving me lots of business of late. Thought I should drop in to see the glory firsthand. Plus, my nephew Hunter will be trying out his new Yamaha Grizzly 660. That boy can drive.”

  “We got extra incentives.” Lee nudged Chip with his elbow.

  Chip pulled a monster joint from the pocket of his black leather jacket and waved it in the air like a wizard’s wand.

  “This stuff will kick your ass up your own butthole,” said Chip, lighting the twisted cigarette. “But in a good way.” He took a long draw.

  I thought I heard sirens calling from the wilder depths of the gorge, down where blackberry brambles tangled. Half locust, half maiden, they stridulated in the blighted leaves. It was one of those days, sun-drenched yet poised on the edge of winter’s oblivion, and I couldn’t resist the joint. I couldn’t resist the pseudo-warmth of male companionship, the surrender to cannabis haze, even though I knew that terror lurked in the deceptive dreaminess of it all.

  I took the doobie from Chip, drew skunky smoke deep into the jelly of my lungs. I closed my eyes and felt blood thrumming in my head. I smoked until my brain was hazed in ethereal webbing, a silkworm squirming in an airy cocoon. Childlike, I followed the boys to Chip’s giant SUV and climbed up into its high backseat. I pulled my flask from a cargo-pants pocket and sucked at the bottle of golden juice.

  • •

  Hackneyed as the metaphor was, I kept thinking we were trapped in hell.

  Infernal, lung-curdling smoke? Check.

  Eardrum-bursting, satanic thunder? Check.

  Multitudes of shrieking imps? Check.

  I kept inspecting my ears for oozing blood. Kept fingering my sunburned scalp. There was no shade to speak of. The fiberglass bleacher seats were not easy on the ass. I had the gut feeling I was trapped there eternally, back behind First Baptist’s aluminum-sided temple, where a vast, chemical-green lawn rolled down to a pasture that’d been converted into a rough-terrain ATV park called the Wilderness.

  The heats of the LastCar Rapture Series had been divided by age, and we’d just watched a bunch of six- to eight-year-olds compete on Titan 110 mini quads. Nine-to-elevens were up next. But the youth minister had to deliver a sermon between heats, in which he compared the young drivers to Christian warriors slaying heathens in the wilderness. Using terms like “kick butt,” “awesome,” “score,” and “sweet,” he asked God to protect them on their mission and reminded them that Jesus was their copilot.

  Pastor Logan was an athletic thi
rtysomething with a tatt of Jesus on his right tricep. He had a forward-sweeping flurry of emo hair, plus a greasy feather of a mustache that had yet to reach its manly potential. After his sermon, he walked over to shake our hands. Thanked Chip for the righteous thirty percent discount he’d bestowed upon the church, whereupon it became obvious that Chip had been dabbling in organized religion.

  “Wipe that grin off your face,” Chip said when the boy of God was out of earshot.

  “You actually go to church?” I said.

  “Look,” he said, “I’m no atheist.”

  “I’m not either,” I said, “more like an agnostic relativist if you want to mince hairs, but organized religion? As the good book sayeth, The Most High dwelleth not in temples made by human hands. Christians are some of the most unchristian people I know. And Baptists? Jesus motherfucking Christ.”

  Chip frowned. “Don’t talk shit about Jesus.”

  “If Jesus is God and God impregnated Mary, then . . .”

  “Damn it, Romie. I was raised Baptist. The Baptists in this town do well for themselves. Church is awesome for networking. I’m not going to be crass and mention a number or anything, but do you know how many ATVs I’ve sold since I started attending services back in May?”

  “How many?” said Lee.

  “An ass-ton,” said Chip. “Put it this way: I’ve moved more quads in the last few months than I had in the whole ten years before that. I’m not naming any figures or nothing, but if I keep going at this rate, I’ll be able to retire when I hit fifty, with a swimming pool and the latest Hummer in the garage of my four-bedroom home, in a neighborhood that’s not going black.”

  “I love the smell of racism in the morning,” I said.

  “Why in the world would you need four bedrooms?” said Lee.

  “Not to mention a gas-guzzling military tank,” I added.

  “Who knows?” Chip winked. “At this rate, I might score me a sweet young thing to marry, have some rug rats.”

  Chip followed this boast with a display of conspicuous consumption, swaggering over to the food stand to blow a twenty on a round of corn dogs and Cokes for the three of us. The corn dogs—golden-battered, deep-fried tubes of pure-T gastronomical bliss—smelled like paradise. But after the first bite, my stomach convulsed. I placed my tricked-out wiener onto its paper tray and set it aside on the bleacher. I doused my jumbo Coke with Beam. Gazed out at the inferno where the nine-to-elevens had started whirling around in pointless circles, an apocalyptic smoke cloud forming above the ruckus.