The crossroads hamlet of Preble, New York, sweltered in the afternoon sun. Dust devils gyred on the shoulders of the two-lane road bisecting the vast silent cornfield south of town. Puddled heat shimmered on the blistering tarmac. Nobody with any sense was outdoors. Almost nobody.

Across from the diner, standing alone beneath the only tree in sight, Dawn wondered why she hung on in this jerkwater shithole. Summers were a misery, winters relentless, spring and fall like an elevator fuck, done before you could get your knickers straight. Nightlife around here was a sweaty beer bar, jukebox cowboy music, and floundering car-park sex. And now, dammit all, she was pregnant, knocked up as last year’s prom queen. And broke.

Hearing a truck downshift for the intersection, Dawn stepped to the side of the road, rolling out her thumb and best smile. Even hitchhiking was too much work.

X X X

Delos was driving his semi-trailer livestock truck home from Syracuse. He’d taken the old highway and opened the cab windows to blow out the stockyard smell.  He planned to muck the trailer with a power washer when the afternoon cooled. Then he’d wash and wax the classic coffin-nosed Mack tractor, polishing all its brightwork to a mirror shine, a task he put off until last because he enjoyed it the most. He liked looking at his funny face reflected in the chrome.  Both his trucks were fire-engine red with luxury chrome package.

He was listening to Country Oldies Radio and thinking about frosty pitchers of beer. The Pine Grove was just a few miles down the road, and he could taste a thunderstorm in the air.  He’d watch it from the Grove’s covered beer garden. The downpour would start the cleaning of his truck.

Right then, Delos felt good in his life, like old Hush Puppies and an icy six-pack. He had a slug of cash in his pocket. Forgotten momentarily was the guilty triste he always felt after delivering pigs for slaughter. Pigs know love and betrayal. So did Delos.

As he rolled up to Preble Crossing, Delos saw a girl step to the edge of the pavement and put out her thumb. She had a pink Barbie day pack slung over one shoulder and a big smile. He signaled and brought his rig to a stop just past where she was standing.

Delos watched in his side mirror as Dawn trotted up to his idling truck. She was wearing Daisy-Mae cut-offs, a turquoise midriff tee shirt, and black high-top tennies. She had on a New York Yankees ball cap and mirror sunglasses. Her ginger hair was tied in a loose ponytail which tumbled between narrow shoulder blades. Delos could see firm teacup breasts through her perspiration-soaked top.  She looked about sixteen but had to be older. No parent would let their teenager out dressed like that. Delos made space in his beer garden fantasy for a second mug.

Dawn clambered up the step-bar and leaned through the passenger-side window, removing her sunglasses as she did so. ‘You going past the Manor Trailer Park in Homer Village, mister?’

Delos smiled, nodded yes, and said, ‘I ah … am now.’

Dawn opened the cab door and slid right next to him on the bench seat. ‘I’m Dawn,’ she said, still smiling, ‘thanks for the ride. It’s gonna rain like a motherfucker any minute now.’

Delos liked the girl, her wide mouth and full lips, the slight gap between her front teeth. She had sky blue eyes. Miss Roth, his Jew special ed teacher, had read The Lion King aloud once in high school and gave him a Lion King coloring book. Dawn made him think of Simba’s girlfriend Nala; a country kid and sassy, but now almost growed up. A scrap of truck-stop graffiti drifted into his mind:

                                    Roses are red and

                                    Ready for plucking

                                    You’re sixteen and

                                    Ready for high school.

His lips moved as he recalled the mysterious doggerel. He didn’t get it. Poems were supposed to rhyme. If Miss Roth were still around, he would ask her. She knew everything about books with words.

Dawn reached for the radio, changing the station to jazz. As she did so her thigh brushed Delos’ leg and his jug ears flushed at his arousal.

X X X

From the height of the truck’s cab, the young cornfield fanned away in geometric ranks and files, like headstones in a military graveyard. Looking down at it, Dawn said, ‘This farmer today told me he’s planting some new Monsanto GMO corn next year that glows in the dark. It’s supposed to make chopping corn fodder easier in the autumn when the days get shorter. Maybe he was just bullshitting me, but wouldn’t it be a wonderment, this whole field gleaming back at the night-time stars?’

Delos thought about his corn-fed pigs twinkling blue-white in their cozy outdoor piggery.
‘Ne … Neon pigs,’ said Delos.

Noticing the Gothic skull and swastika tattooed on his right bicep, Dawn said, ‘You ain’t some kind of Nazi jailbird or something are you?’

Still thinking about glowing pigs, Delos’ mind wandered, just ticking over like his rig’s idling diesel engine. He made no reply.

To gain his attention, Dawn said, ‘I might show you my tattoo. Might not. I’ll tell you right up front though that I don’t got nothin’ against niggers. They’re poor people doing the best they can just like the rest of us.’

Delos wiped the sweat off his bald pate with a shop rag, signaled, and eased his truck back onto the road. He’d been tattooed in Columbus, Georgia, twenty-five years ago after a black drill instructor cashiered him out of boot camp, telling him he was too stupid to be a soldier. Delos thought the D.I. might have been right. He had a lot of trouble listening to people, but he had excelled at the rifle range. He understood guns.

Delos hadn’t thought much about the drill instructor or black people since he was released from the stockade. Even now, that episode just drifted away in his mind along with neon pigs, Miss Roth, and Nala.

‘I’m Duh,.. Delos. People call me ‘Pig.’ It’s my nickname ’cause I like pigs. This here’s my stock truck. I got a new Ford 4-by-4 pick-up with A/C and ka… kick cab, too,’ he said, mostly suppressing the stutter which plagued him when he tried to talk to women.

‘I think I’ll just call you Delos. It sort of rhymes with Dawn, doesn’t it?’

Delos’ beer dream resumed, looking better by the minute. He fantasized about himself and Dawn in the back of his new pick-up.

X X X

Delos downshifted at the Route 81 overpass on Main Street Homer, decreasing speed and coasting his rig off the tarmac, the empty trailer rattling and banging as he reached the Pine Grove’s rutted dirt parking lot. Just as he was setting his brakes, a pair of teenage boys across the highway hollered out ‘Hey Porky Pig!’ and dropped their swimming trunks, mooning the truck.

People had called Delos Porky since grade school, but never to his face. His football teammates had dubbed him ‘Pig’ and that was usually okay. However, even back then he’d been big, mean, and unpredictable. People who knew Delos avoided him.

Dawn leaned over him quickly, middle fingering the boys, shouting ‘I know where you live, you little cocksuckers!’ Delos felt her breast brush his bicep as she pulled him back from the window. Looking at him, Dawn said, ‘That’s them pickaninny Snopes twins, trailer park rats. They’ll get a licking when I tell their mama what they done leaving the swimming hole. Don’t you worry about them now, Delos, just look at me.’

Delos had been unable to think of anything to say to Dawn after telling her about his new pick-up. Now angry and distracted, he wanted to whack the boys, but he also wanted to drink beer with Dawn.

So, after shutting down his rig, Delos sat in uncomfortable, restless silence looking out the cab’s side window after the fleeing Snopes boys; wondering how he should feel, what he could say to hang onto this pretty girl.

He knew he’d stutter; he always did when he tried to hook up, even with streetwalkers in Montreal. Once he clocked a whore who laughed at him and called him Porky Pig. She ran away and the other girls did too. That made him feel sad; he liked looking at the pretty, sexy girls. He wanted to keep looking at Dawn now.

Rain was beginning to spatter the dust. Thunder rumbled in the mountains west of the valley, but, unable to express himself, Delos was stuck, poleaxed like a gut-shot deer.

Then Dawn said, ‘Wouldn’t you like to buy a girl a beer, sailor? I was perishing hot out there. I’ve been covering for my girlfriend Rhoda at the diner. She had Family Court today with her asshole ex and if she didn’t show up, she’d get her welfare cut off. He don’t never pay his child support.’

Delos’ brow furrowed. He wondered why she had called him sailor, but Dawn prattled on, trailing his thoughts behind her.

‘Waitin’ tables is hard work and my dawgs are howlin’. I need a massage and a cold beer.’ She paused, then when Delos said nothing, continued, ‘Unless I miss my mark, you might be good for both. I like a man with big hands. What do you say to a beer and a foot rub?’ Dawn tilted her head and smiled, leaning forward to force Delos to turn away from the window and look her in the face. He looked at her breasts instead and wondered what dogs she was talking about, the Snopes twins dissolving into a mist and then nothingness.

Dawn was a good talker, Delos thought, talked enough for both of them. He liked that and the way she said his name and didn’t hit him when he looked at her teats.

Delos dropped out of his cab and came around to catch Dawn who was waiting on the step-bar. She jumped down, her hands on his shoulders, and slithered to the ground. Delos grinned. She was soft as a fawn. He had a boner as big as Cayuga Lake.

Delos’ guilty hard-on made him think about his Mama, furrowing his smooth forehead. Mama Schuyler’s people had always been Pentecostals, and, by God, she’d say his impure thoughts were damning him straight to perdition. Mama’d say he was hanging by a thread over the fiery pit, Jesus Lord’s everlasting barbecue. However, the fiery pit didn’t never seemed so bad because if he fell in he’d get shed of Mama.

Mama was deaf and mean as stomped rattlesnakes, but nowadays arthritis mostly kept her from whacking him with her cane. Delos hoped Mama would be happy in heaven with God Almighty and the Holy Ghost, but he’d rather go anyplace else when he died. He hoped he’d go where his pigs went to farrow, to a piggery in the sky with a stream, shade trees, and plenty of acorns to eat. Piglets, beer, and Dawn – all thought of Mama floated downriver.

Delos shambled happily into The Pine Grove a step behind Dawn. She had nice hams for a skinny girl and treated him good. Maybe he was in love.

X X X

A few weeks later, Mama Schuyler was watching ‘Honey From Heaven’ on The Christian Channel when she heard the screen door slam. She was in the back parlor, an electric fan ballooning her floral house dress and whipping her hair, giving her a windswept zombie look.

‘Take off your dirty boots in the mud room,’ she shouted over the roaring television without turning her head from its screen.

A reformed Jezebel from Hollywood, California, was testifying in considerable detail about her wickedness before she was saved by Reverend Joe-Al Jaggers, her interviewer. Just then she was telling the Reverend Joe-Al she’d performed ‘phil-audio’ on the mayor of Arcadia, California, in the back seat of a limousine at Santa Anita racetrack. Mama was wondering what that foreign-sounding word meant. She wished the fallen woman would just stop beating around the bush and speak plain English. God Almighty wasn’t fooled by her fancy Frenchified palaver and neither was Mama. She knew that some sinning more loathsome to the Lord than gambling on horses was being confessed just from the rapt look on the Reverend’s face.

Mama didn’t turn when Delos came into the parlor in his stocking feet.

‘Fornicator, repent!’ she shouted at Delos. ‘The Day of the Lord cometh! You stink of the flesh of that Whore of Babylon you’ve been laying with. Woe and damnation.

‘You thought I was too old and too stupid to know about your sinning, didn’t you? Well, I’m not. My church friends see you and they call me on the telephone. To my shame and mortification. Dear Jesus Christ, the whole congregation knows your lustful ways. Lightning will strike you dead and burn your body to kizzled bacon. Sodom and Gomorrah!

‘You’ll come to meeting this Sunday. Confess, repent, and testify or you’ll roast in hell. There ain’t no freeway to the Promised Land, only the old stony path. Beware the fiery pit.’

‘Ma… mama, the only thing I st… stink of is baby pig. I’ve been down by the creek helping my Mary Pig farrow. It was her first farrowing, and she needed me, but she’s doing okay now. She’s a good little mother. All her piglets are healthy and strong. She had thirteen of them.’

‘The devil’s number! Don’t whisper boy, speak up! And don’t think you can distract me with talk about pigs. It’s sinful naming them. Mary ain’t no pig’s name, it belongs to Jesus’ mama. Cloven feet are the mark of Lucifer’s own spawn. You’ve no truck giving them Christian names like they was children of the Lord. They ain’t room for no pigs in heaven.

‘Your stink of woman flesh is more rank than pig manure. Your pappy, Mr. Schuyler, died and left you a perfectly good factory piggery where you can raise pigs like Henry Ford makes cars. In Mr. Schuyler’s barns, you don’t hardly have to touch no pig from farrow to frying pan. Mr. Schuyler didn’t come into my house stinking of whoredom and pig pooty, no siree!

‘You choose to let pigs wander and treat them special, like people. Why don’t you move your trailer-trash hussy in with them? Then you could have your whole Charles Manson Satan family together and never worry one care in the world about the mother who raised you. I know your whore’s name too. She’s one of them filthy Tompkinses. They’re so inbred even they dogs got harelips and webbly feet.’

‘Mama, I’m making Shake & Bake chicken for dinner with mash potatoes and Gravy Quik. Would you like a soda pop while I’m fixing it?’

‘I said stop whispering, boy! I want Ranch Pringles and a Pepsi Cola. I’ve been parched all day while you’ve been playing house with your pig family. God knows, you’ll be running away as soon as it’s dark to rut with that … that harlot.’    

‘Mama, you should meet Dawn. You might like her. We could have her come for supper ….’

‘Slut! She’ll never darken my door while I’m alive! Slut!!!’ Mama choked and spluttered; her supply of invective momentarily exhausted.

Mama returned her full attention to the Reverend Joe-Al Jaggers and his born-again Jezebel. Delos retreated to the kitchen.

‘Delos! I’ve dropped my remote. Get back in here and pick it up. Chop, chop!’

Back in the kitchen Delos took a gallon jug of Prestone Anti-Freeze from under the sink and carefully measured one finger’s worth in a large water glass to which he added ice cubes. He then filled the remaining space with Pepsi from a bottle in the refrigerator. 

Mama was seventy-seven years old and crippled by gout. Her digestion wasn’t good. She was incontinent and refused the services of a county health aide, making Delos change her soiled diapers. ‘Turnabout’s fair play,’ Mama would shout. ‘I changed enough of your boy filth in my time.’

Did angels in the heavenly choir wear Depends? If Mama went to heaven, she’d be happy. And Dawn could farrow right here in Schuyler’s Mountain Meadows Farm.

X X X

On Sunday Delos washed and waxed his pick-up truck first thing after breakfast, then used his shop vacuum to clean the cab interior to showroom standard. He treated all the rubber and vinyl trim with Armor-All so that it too was spotless. As he did so, he hummed atonal fragments of country music and spoke aloud, addressing the truck.

‘You’ve got to look your best, Red, because today I’m gonna ask Dawn to marry me. She’s having my baby.’

Red was silent, coy on the subject, but what do trucks know about family life? Red almost never spoke to Delos, preferring to demonstrate his affection in other ways. Delos had previously discussed matters with Mary Pig and she agreed fully, only raising the issue of what would happen to Delos’ Mama when Dawn moved in. Delos told Mary Pig he was working on a plan. Pigs are clever and sly. Mary knew where things stood.

Finished with the truck’s grooming, Delos returned his deer rifle, a Ruger semi-automatic with 20-round banana clip, to its place of pride in a rack in the truck’s rear window. As Papa Schuyler had taught him, no rounds were chambered. He kept his ammunition in a locked steel box in the center console. Handling the rifle made Delos happy. Maybe he wasn’t smart enough to be a soldier, but his rifle shooting had only improved in the years since his discharge. Delos got his buck every season.

‘We’re going hunting soon,’ Delos told Gun, caressing its barrel.

X X X

Dawn waited for Delos on a plastic lawn chair outside The Pine Grove’s screened front door. From inside she could hear Johnny Rodriguez groaning out ‘Faded Love’ in two languages. Darleen, the day barmaid, sang along in full voice while swabbing the gents’ toilet with Clorox. The bar and parking lot stank of stale beer, piss, and vomit, leftovers from Saturday night’s ‘Boot Scootin’ Old Tyme Boogie.’ Dear God, she hated country music!

Meeting Delos here was safer. The Manor residents were nosy and mean spirited, gossiping about everything. The less they knew about her business the better.  Additionally, if somebody taunted Delos, the consequences could be catastrophic. Everybody knew this, but some were just too stupid to care, like those inbred Snopes twins who mooned Delos the day he gave her a lift in from Preble. If she hadn’t acted quickly, he might have run them down. He still might if the thought breezed back into his drafty mind. She’d enjoy watching that payback, but it could derail something else she was thinking about.

True enough, Delos was a violent simpleton, but she could handle him. If spoken to softly, he was an angel, a St. Bernard puppy who wanted his belly scratched. Why, he’d stop in his tracks if she called his name. When she told Delos she was pregnant, he’d taken that on board as easily as if she’d said he’d given her a hickey on one of her boobs; didn’t even ask if he were the baby’s father. God only knew what he understood about human reproduction.   He understood pigs well enough.

Also, unlike every other man she knew, Delos worked for a living. Dawn thought maybe he had some money too. He told her his Mama didn’t believe in ‘Jew banks’ and kept cash in her breadbox at the farmhouse.  Dawn wondered how much cash that God-crazy old bitch Lurleen Schuyler had squirreled away. That piqued Dawn’s interest.

Seeing Delos’ enormous red pick-up truck, Dawn stood and waved. Delos grinned. He brought his truck to a careful halt and got out, running around to help her into the cab, like she was some old lady going down the courthouse steps.
            ‘I got us a six-pack and picnic bucket from Colonel Sanders,’ Delos said. ‘I got somebody I want to in … introduce you to.’

They drove south down Main, turning right on Cayuga Street, just past the village green. A gang of boys was swarming around the sidewalks on their bikes under the watchful supervision of the porch sitters at the Brewster House on the other side of Main Street. The boys all stopped to stare at Delos’ truck, and he obliged them by revving its engine and honking the old time Ah-ooga horn he’d installed. Dawn crouched low in the passenger seat. Delos never felt prouder.

They arrived at Mountain Meadows Pig Farm and Delos drove past the farmhouse, through a gate, and across an untilled field toward a grove of trees beside a chilly-looking, fast-moving stream. An impromptu river-rock dam provided a pond where Dawn could see a drift of young pigs playing in the shade, water, and mud. They reminded her of the kids they’d just seen on the Homer village green. There were mature pigs deeper in the woods, some of whom looked up at the arrival of Delos’ truck. One trotted in their direction, surrounded by a comical litter of piglets.

‘Mary, this here’s Dawn, my girlfriend,’ Delos said to the young sow who greeted him. The pig grunted, nuzzled Delos’ leg, and looked straight at Dawn. She then walked forward, sniffed Dawn’s belly, and made brief eye contact, nodding, it seemed, at Dawn. Delos gave Mary an apple from his pocket.

Dawn said, ‘Hello, Mary,’ but drew no response from the Pig. Mary sauntered to her previous place in the bower, slowly settled to the ground, and began nursing her yammering piglets.

‘Mary’s litter is just two weeks old now. They’re all strong and healthy. I bring her special fodder. She’s a great little mama and careful about all of her little ones.’

Delos carried two plastic chairs and a matching folding table from the back of his truck to a spot underneath a tree overlooking the pond. There he set out his fried chicken, French fries, and beer. Sitting down with Dawn, he ate his lunch and drank two bottles of beer in silence.

‘Whatcha thinking about, big guy?’ Dawn asked. Delos squirmed and wiped his bald head with a rag, gestures Dawn now recognized as indicating his inability to assemble his thoughts into speech, nothing else. ‘Do you want to ask me something, Delos? I can wait until you’re ready. There ain’t no hurry-up between you and me.’

‘Mama’s dead and in heaven with Papa, baby Arnold, and the Holy Ghost.’

Dawn gulped, taken aback, then said, ‘Oh honey, I’m so sorry for your loss.’

‘I ain’t sorry. Mama’s on her way to heaven where she always wanted to go. I fa … found her on the floor in her bedroom yesterday morning. Sh … she was powerful sick and didn’t even holler at me. She said she could see the heavenly gates and Lord Jesus standing there holding the door open for her.’

‘Didn’t you telephone the hospital or cops or anybody, Delos?’

‘Cops don’t have nothing to do with heaven, Dawn. They put people in jail. I put Mama where little Arnold went to heaven when he died. My Pappy and Mama both said he went to heaven when he fell in the slurry pit. So, I carried Mama out there yesterday morning first thing and just eased her in. She’ll probably be all the way to heaven by now.’

Dawn thought this might be the longest coherent narrative Delos had ever uttered. For once, she couldn’t think of a thing to say.

‘Da… Dawn, I want us to get married and live here with Mary and her family. Now that Mama’s gone to the Promised Land, I got the farm, and I want you to farrow here.’

‘Delos, honey, that’s sweet, but I’ll need to look around the place. A woman’s life is in the home and I ain’t even been in yours.’

‘Mary likes you,’ Delos said, ‘I’ll show you the house right now.’

Delos collected the picnic table and chairs, separating the trash from uneaten food which he left for his pigs, hand feeding a second apple to his friend Mary. Then he and Dawn got back in his pick-up truck and drove to the farmhouse, a solid, two-story wood frame with a gallery porch wrapping around the front and east side. Unlike most of its vintage, the house was recently painted, yellow with brown shutters. The roof looked new, and the back garden was well-tended and fruitful.

‘This is a beautiful spread, Delos. You must be proud,’ Dawn said.

Delos grinned and took her arm, guiding her to the back door. They took off their shoes in a tidy mud room and then entered the large, country kitchen. It too was neatly arranged and comfortable looking, a cook’s kitchen and family social center.

In the kitchen, Delos showed Dawn Mama’s ‘breadbox,’ two sturdy wooden whiskey crates on the floor of the closet-sized cupboard, each full of stacked and banded one hundred-dollar notes. He said, ‘The bread box money is yours now, Dawn. I can’t reckon sums, Mama did that. I hope you don’t mind doing the job for us.’

Dawn had never seen so much cash except in the movies and didn’t pause to count it. She told Delos she’d bring her calculator the next time she visited, and they could do the job together.

‘I’ll take you home so you can pack your things and move in,’ Delos said.

‘Slow down now, Delos. I can’t move in until after we’re married. That ain’t proper, but we can go to the village hall tomorrow and get our marriage license.’

When Delos dropped Dawn off in front of the Manor, Dawn said, ‘I’ll meet you at one o’clock tomorrow afternoon in the Walmart parking lot. My girlfriend Rhona and I are going shopping for girl things. I’ll meet you outside and we can have lunch at Applebee’s. Don’t you forget now and be on time! I don’t like my fella to keep me waiting. After that, we’ll go get our hitchin’-up paperwork done in the village hall.

‘I’m so happy about us getting married.’

Delos leaned over to kiss Dawn, their lips just brushing, then drove away. He was humming a snippet of the Johnny Cash megahit oldie, ‘Ring of Fire.’

X X X

Delos’ childhood had been brutal. Slow-witted, he was unusually gentle and trusting. He had a gift with animals. Old timers called him ‘touched,’ meaning not right in the head, but somehow blessed by God. His schoolmates, however, taunted him for his gullibility, clumsiness, and, later, stuttering. Occasionally, other boys would pretend friendship to play mean pranks on him. Among the more memorable of these were the time he was tricked into urinating on a ‘magical’ (electrified) fence and, later, his near death when he sought to retrieve a false friend’s ‘missing lunch money’ from inside a wasps’ nest.

Papa Schuyler, believing his son needed to ‘mean up’, responded to Delos’ victimization by caning him after school. Papa made Delos fetch a thumb-size whip from the bamboo patch, sometimes rejecting Delos’ choice as too puny. Stick approved, Delos lowered his trousers and received his father’s enthusiastic lashing of his legs and bottom.

The boy’s life became a tapestry of pain without sanctuary. His only safe companions were the doomed pigs imprisoned in Old Schuyler’s assembly-line piggery.

Over time, Papa Schuyler’s methods worked after a fashion. Delos learned to intimidate schoolmates with slaps and punches. He pummeled boys indiscriminately at the merest provocation, reporting and exaggerating these incidents to his father in the forlorn hope of avoiding his own beatings. The taunting and victimization ceased. Other children became silent in his presence and avoided him. Delos sat alone every school day.

Delos home beatings stopped when he was fifteen and already unusually large for his age. He shattered his father’s elbow with an axe handle, permanently crippling him.

He was expelled from high school two years later after a cafeteria incident in which he dumped five classmates from their table and threw it on top of them. Delos had not been enraged; he was dispassionately, almost robotically, punishing a careless snigger.

X X X

Delos arrived outside Walmart twenty minutes before one o’clock but kept his engine idling to preserve the cab’s air conditioning for Dawn, his ‘little mother’. She deserved every comfort, including a refrigerated truck.

Delos’ mind, like his truck’s interior, was cool and drifty as ever. He was entertaining himself with a kaleidoscope of happy domestic fantasies, Dawn breast feeding a new-born, a planned nursery at the farm, and Auntie Mary Pig kissing his infant son. These images were interspersed randomly with recent sexual intimacies with Dawn, frosty beer, and deer hunting in the fall. He thought of a puppy to raise now that Mama didn’t rule the house. He dreamed about Mama, finally resident in heaven with Jesus and His crew of holy angels, singers, and dead Christians, her friends at the Brewster House. He saw Mama walking without her cane and wearing lily white, never soiled Depends. There were no pigs in Mama’s heaven he knew, but he dreamed of Pig Heaven. Some of the pigs he loved were already there waiting for him. Delos was a happy man at last.

At one-thirty, Delos shut down his truck, cracked both windows so that heat wouldn’t collect in the cab, and went into the superstore to find Dawn. Perhaps he’d gotten the time wrong, or Dawn was having some woman problem. He searched the aisles systematically, pausing only at the gun counter to purchase one hundred rounds of .308 Winchester ammunition. A house security officer watched him on closed-circuit television, but Delos touched nothing, just trundled along looking left and right, nervously running a rag over his bald head.

Back in his pick-up, Delos drove first to the Pine Grove then through the Manor but found neither Dawn nor anyone who had seen her since just after noon. Her neighbor saw a taxi come into the trailer park and call for Dawn at about twelve-thirty. It looked like she was going grocery shopping because she left with two or three large shopping bags.

Delos returned to the Pine Grove where he found Dawn’s girlfriend Rhona behind the bar.

‘Hi Delos,’ said Rhona, ‘hot ain’t it?’

‘Wh… where’s Du… Dawn,’ said Delos.

‘I don’t know, hon, I haven’t seen her all day.’

‘You was with her at Walmart today.’

Delos loomed toward Rhona making her feel menaced even with the bar between them.

‘Honest, Delos honey, she ain’t been here all day. I been working ever since ten o’clock when the folks start drifting in to get out of the heat. I don’t have time for no shopping. I got two jobs.’

Delos grunted, turned and walked back to his truck.

Rhona drifted over to Charlie Smith, a regular who was palming a cigarette at the far end of the bar. She lowered her voice, ‘This ain’t good, Smitty,’ she said. ‘Porky makes me nervous just to be in the same room with him and he’s got a tick in his jockey shorts today.

‘I hope that Dangerous Dawn ain’t putting some hustle on him with me in the middle. She could get us both killed by that crazy asshole.

‘He’s yard dog mean and dumb as dirt. I wish he’d find some other bar to infest. He scares the livin’ shit outa me ever’ time I see him.’

Smitty nodded, adding ‘Crazy as a shithouse rat.’ Without looking, he flicked his cigarette butt out the open door behind him to join three others just outside. Then he took a long, meditative pull on his beer.

X X X

Delos found himself back in the Walmart parking lot standing alone beside his pick-up. Late afternoon heat radiated from the asphalt blacktop.  Without a whisper of breeze, it was the time of day when people said you could fry an egg on the hood of your car.

There were four empty beer bottles on the cab floor. His rifle lay across the front seat locked and loaded, its magazine in the receiver. Delos had no recollection of driving there or of loading the gun. His bare head was pounding.

He must have been to the farm because he knew the breadbox money was gone. Had Mama come back from heaven for it? Maybe Dawn was bringing it to him so they could count it at Applebee’s. Dawn.  Where was Dawn? 

Delos’ thoughts swirled like rubbish on the interstate, rising and falling, never resting, going faster and faster, hotter and hotter. His mind was a flying carousel of painful memory: love and betrayal, failure, rejection, cruel laughter, jeering.  He saw the hornets’ nest, a chair pulled from under him as he sat down, other children running away. Hurt. Loneliness. Was Dawn laughing too? The dark was coming. Delos felt it like a towering dust storm rolling down the valley.

‘Hey, Porky Pig,’ the Snopes twins yelled at him.

Then, just when he thought his head would explode, Delos heard Mary Pig’s sweet, rich voice, but he knew it wasn’t just her speaking. She spoke for all the pigs he’d loved and betrayed. Mama had made him kill them, but Mary absolved him, understood he had no choice. The pigs loved Delos and were waiting for him in Pig Heaven. Mary told Delos to open his eyes and see the world she’d made for him.

‘Hey!! Porky Pig.’

Something happened when Mary spoke. Delos’ painful carousel slowed and stopped. He felt cool and happy and alive, suffused with radiant joy. He raised his head and looked at the world through new eyes, as if scales had fallen away. He was still in the Walmart parking lot, but the colors were vibrant, clean and bright. There was a stained-glass quality to the light and shadows. Delos was holy.

Mary Pig had touched him with magic, transporting him into the animated world of The Lion King, his favorite movie. He saw faraway shoppers coming and going, gliding by in lazy parade, like herds of chubby zebra and antelope grazing across a faraway savannah. Delos’ own movements were fluid and graceful. He was beautiful, proud, and brave.

‘Hey!! Porky Fucking Pig.’

Delos’ eyes tracked left slowly, in the direction of the transformed, newly radiant outdoor garden department. The Snopes brothers, were gesticulating in his direction, trying to get his attention from a cluster of potted palms offered for sale. They were holding their jeans up with their hands, apparently in preparation for another ‘Two Moons Over Delos’ event. Alas for them, it was not to be.

‘Bad baboons,’ Delos said.

He pirouetted and snapped two quick shots. The twins subsided to the pavement, trousers around their ankles and brains on the sidewalk.

‘Circle of Life,’ Delos muttered.

Delos was suffused with joy. He had a holy purpose. He eased out his breath, inhaled deeply, and squeezed off five more rounds watching five more baboons pitch and fall. He heard each perfect shot echo so slowly he could feel it; almost see it. He was a killer angel in heavenly glory, moving with balletic grace.

‘Armageddon,’ Delos shouted out, ‘I am the Lion Pig.’

What more is there to tell? Delos was a natural marksman and he systematically, methodically, discharged his twenty rounds without wasting one. He recalled his drill instructor’s adage from long, long ago, ‘A bullet is a terrible thing to waste.’

The parking lot became a carnival of blood and panic. Tires squealed, people screamed, cars ran over barriers and into one another.  Cars ran down people. Glowing in his own numinous bubble at the center, Delos reloaded and then drove his truck through it all, out to the highway and back to Mountain Meadows Farm. Mission completed, he had cleansed the savannah of an entire troop, a Congress of evil baboons.

At home, Delos opened the all the pens and gates, setting free the pigs. Then he spread gasoline around the farmhouse and factory piggery. After igniting these, he drove across the field to be with his family.

He saw Mary glowing neon blue in the twilight of her shady bower. She floated just above the ground, surrounded by her adoring piglets. Delos joined them, leaning in to accept a welcoming kiss from Mary. Together, they waited for the Sheriff to come. Mary said maybe the Sheriff would help them go to Pig Heaven. Delos hoped she was right, but didn’t think cops put people in heaven, only jail.

X X X

Dawn took the Lake Shore Limited to Chicago and transferred there for the Southwest Chief, the Silver Dollar Special to Las Vegas. She booked a large sleeping compartment the whole way and spent two nights in the deepest slumber.

She arrived in Las Vegas just before sunup. The desert was still cool and welcoming. Dawn thought she’d start her new life at the Flamingo Hotel, where Bugsy Siegel once dreamed of a desert gambling empire. She had dreams too.

Las Vegas is even hotter than Preble, New York, but the gaming floors are air-conditioned and with a little luck you won’t have to listen to country music. 

If virtue is its own reward, how about vice?

END