El Castrator

By Thomas Head

The beast oinked, and it was a ruinous oink. The devil's oink. Then it charged. I shat myself, then leapt out of the way.

The Pork Menace came to be.

My father had warned over and over about the dangers of pigs getting loose. "That's more than lost bacon," he'd say. But then he'd leave it at that. And being twelve I wasn't interested enough to press the issue.

Until Clarence escaped.

Turns out, what's more than lost bacon is this: Pigs are the closest things to werewolves in the animal kingdom. Give the wild bastards a few months and their snouts elongate, they become blanketed in fur, and their tusks come to resemble jutting middle fingers.

It's odd, but I swear: They even start going for the crotch. Don't ask me why — something to do with an instinct to disembowel.

So the winter after he scared me and escaped, the townsfolk decided Clarence wasn't a suitably alarming moniker for anything with teeth like that, not when it's going for your wiener. They took to calling him El Castrator.

Spanglish?

By townsfolk I mean the residents of Kelly County, Florida. Hefty as a bull, they said. Swift as a deer. He could turn over a tractor with its snout, and the eyes glowed ginger as it stalked the town's crotches.

Most of which was bullpooey. But Clarence was a goddamn menace. He wrecked me. I mean, people are mean. You let a porcine monster loose, you'll know. They look at you like you summoned Satan's nephew.

"Better get that fucking thing, ya horse's ass!" they said.

"Okay," I always responded.

I couldn't really, I knew. Nor could I deal with it because my father had taken himself from a drunk to a miserable drunk. Which meant a lot of arm wrestling and apologizing.

So my little life was a rambling stream of telling my father everything was okay and pretending to be hunting the beast, as this allowed for both dodging malicious stares and retreating from all the arm wrestling. It also provided the privacy needed for my newfound, self-medicating hobby that I thought should not be discussed.

Until the afternoon the beast sought me out.

* * *

A shard of light pierced my mind's eye as I thought about the Ms. Martin's bare bottom. Wicked, wayward Ms. Martin. You are... so beautiful... to mee-eeeee.

Slut.

Was that a grunt?

No, calm down.

This day would be the same as ever, so relax—the darkened image of the pig, ever elusive, clad in sheets of thickly hair, silhouetted against the swamp's cypress stumps or the streaming greens of a willow—only to be a shrub.

The damned inescapable aggravation of it all escaped for those exquisite minutes.

Back to the matter at hand, radiant flashes of bulbous, pale buttock streaked across my imagination, or, at least, what little of it I could muster. My mouth tasted like mushrooms.

My God, that was a grunt.

That time, yes. It was a grunt.

And 20 more strokes didn't change the facts.

Sitting on the edge of stump, I felt a certain omnipresent sort of quiver that usually comes later. I was giddy, scared. One of my hands trembled.

"Goddamn."

There was a beast to be shot.

"Whew."

There was still a taste like mushrooms. A gun in one hand. Myself in the other.

"What is this feeling?"

While my eyes readjusted to the dimming light of the cypress forest, birds and more sinister things of my imagination scuttled and huddled under the canopy. The grass became a black carpet. A few breaths fluttered.

The grunts became closer.

Wild stirrings traced along my spine, the curious exhilaration of sitting still and naked. At vision's edge, something squeezed its way through a pair of trees.

A creak reverberated across the roof of trees.

Just the world settling.

A few snips of twig sent up a crisp, odd feeling. Rational parts of my mind stepped forward. I grabbed them. They pulled back out of spite until I had them in a chokehold under my mind.

The beast, there. I can see him looking now, stepping to me. Terribly cautious.

I worked the foreskin, tracing the spine from head to base, machine-like, back and forth down either side until the something dropped in a single, musty lump.

Just a few minute's work. I smiled. Forcibly.

I gave the britches a reach, but El Castrator skipped over his hiding place.

I froze, bent. The eyes glowed a little too ginger. Silver bars of hair stretched along his head. Tusks.

Its growl returned, independent of the mouth.

There was no way it was a growl, because my pants were not up, and that meant it couldn't be happening. I pretended I wasn't in the dark swamp. The rest of my brain screamed to run away.

El Castrator curled his lip, and out of it came a noise so low and throaty that growl hardly described it.

I huddled against the tree, peeing all over myself, trying to dissolve into the tree.

El Castrator, too close. He leapt at me, growling, wearing the grimace and snarl of a growling thing, but in the odd slowness of the air its posture was otherwise calm, sedate, and before I knew it, I felt a cool wall of tongue on my face, and I held him in my arms, lifting his friendly old girth onto the stump.

His curly tail wagging like a dog, El Castrator kept growling, a sign of porcine affection.

Where was that damn devil I kept hearing about? Right under me, looking at me with docile eyes that did not go with its growling mouth.

"Easy now, Clarence. Let's take it easy..."

My hands broke free of his affectionate, rooty nuzzling long enough to pull on my trousers.

In all his happy excitement, his forelimbs fell through the wooden ledge of the stump, rotten and hollow wood two inches thick, and soon, on my back, I held fistfuls of cheerful pig cheek, looking up at the growling beast against a ceiling of spiraling stars.

El Castrator stopped. Silent, he looked down at me.

I had an awful thought, which splashed on my brain slowly and with great coldness.

Then the son of a bitch butted me right on the forehead.

And ran off.

* * *

The mean old bastard and his entourage are in pious form as they come prancing toward the trailer. They play up the neighbors' stares and get even fancier because they carry the weight and bearing of the state seal on the side of their truck.

Dad stands his ground behind the trailer's curtain, has to hold himself steady against a stereo speaker.

He's got every right to refuse admittance to whoever the hell wants to refuse it to, and that state seal might keep fists from your nose, but it ain't going to guarantee you entry, not without a warrant. But Dad kinda melts when they get close enough. Opens the door.

"Sir, we need an audience with the boy. Where is he?"

"Ah, yup," he says, pointing me out.

I never look at Fat Bill as Dad after that, sending the men in without hesitation.

And here I am with this big empty table for them to just come and sit at—which they do, without so much as a nod or curtsy.

I have seen all sorts of men in my day, dark ones, light ones, and all the colors between. This man is clean like an angel, and the home they send me to is like heaven.

Sober people.

A private bathroom.

Ms. Martin and I...

And I think more and more about that pig. It might have been easier just to say I killed it. To let Fat Bill get back in his head enough to start pretending to be a father. But this way, something in it all is more attractive, more befitting that I brought it on myself.

Like I escaped. Like I am El Castrator, the werewolf pig.

I wish I could call him or something.

© Thomas Head 2007

• << TEX Home