“Same Road Runner? I always thought that ride was the bomb.”
Connor grins. “Brother, you got no idea.”
13.
The sow has had piglets, and in the afternoons Jack likes to go out and throw scraps to them, to watch them dance on their little trotters. More than once he has dozed off in the sweet grass outside their enclosure, their shrill, girlish shrieks following him into sleep, a sound like children being skinned alive. He feels a bit sleepy now, leaning over the fence, feeding them pork rinds out of a bag, and doesn’t notice for several minutes that they are one piglet short. There are four hopping beneath his feet, grinning their hobgoblin smiles, when there should be five. Their mother, all 630 pounds of her, snores on the far side of the pen. One ear twitches at flies.
He hops the fence and ducks into the hog house, a long, open-faced shed. The interior is ripe with the green smell of pig shit. He kicks at the hay the sow uses for her bed, wondering if he will find a dead piglet with a black face. It wouldn’t be the first time the sow has accidentally sat on one of her young and suffocated it. But no.
Jack steps back out into the bright glare of the day. He has a crowd of piglets underfoot, hopping at his ankles, grunting for attention and hoping he will drop more rinds. He ignores them and walks the length of the fence. As he approaches the far southwestern corner of the enclosure, the piglets fall away behind him, let him go on alone.
The pigs have trampled their pen to a floor of churned, sun-baked mud, except in the corners, where there are tufts of weeds and pale grass. As he approaches the nearest corner, he sees what looks like a fat pink lump of sausage, tangled in the grass. He slows. He smells something bad, like offal, like a warm split intestine in the sunshine. He shades his eyes with his hand.
The missing piglet is tangled in roots and weeds. There are tough wiry roots wrapped around and around its throat. Each little leg is bound up in more loops of weed. Roots twist around to fill its open mouth and cram deep into its throat.
As Jack stares, the roots seem to tighten. A fresh tendril squirms like a grass snake and pushes itself into the piglet’s half-open right eye with a faintly audible splort!
Jack doesn’t know he’s dropped the pork rinds until he finds himself on the other side of the pen, gasping for air, bent over and clutching his knees.
The piglets creep carefully toward the dropped bag, nervously monitoring that mass of squirming roots in the corner of the pen. The bravest of them grabs the bag by one flap and runs away with it, squealing triumphantly, while the others give chase.
14.
Jack McCourt has never felt less like going to sleep. He has a digital clock beside the bed, but he hardly looks at it. Instead he watches a rectangle of silver moonlight rise on the wall. It climbs higher and higher, moving from right to left across the room, raking the ceiling. Then it falls toward his bureau, dropping ever lower, until it vanishes. When he does peek at the time, it is almost 3:00 A.M.
His mother believed in astral spirits, and maybe there’s something to it. He is so quiet, slipping down the back stairs, he might be a ghost of himself. He lets himself into the greenhouse—the air is so steamy and warm it’s like stepping into a bathroom after someone has had a long, hot shower—and finds a trowel. Jack takes it with him to the graveyard.
He will tear up the mums, he thinks, when he gets to his mother’s plot, and he will see they are only plants. Something has come loose in his mind, like a nut slipping on a pipe, and bad-dream ideas are leaking out. He can’t be surprised. It runs in the family. Not for nothing did his mother want the clozapine.
Only when he arrives at her pink marble gravestone, he understands he isn’t going to find ordinary plants with hairy, dirty roots.
The head of the slaughtered piglet is here, balanced carefully on the top of her marker. Its eyes are gone, and the sockets have been filled with white and yellow daisies. It smiles idiotically.
The mums beneath her gravestone are three feet high and obscure everything chiseled into the