Tusks

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FICTION Tusks Stephen March At their twentieth high school reunion, held at the Holiday Inn in Roscoe, Tennessee, Vic Braxton invited Tim Driscoll to go boar hunting with him the following Sunday, and Tim agreed. It seemed like a great idea at the time. He pictured himself and Vic sitting under a tree somewhere way up the Smokies, listening to the baying hounds and talking of the days when gas was thirty-two cents a gallon and virgins were as plentiful as pigeons. Picturing the hunting trip the way he did, Tim was surprised by his wife Phyllis's vehement reaction against it when he mentioned it to her a few evenings later at dinner. "Hunting? With Vic Braxton? Are you having some kind of midlife crisis?" "Give me a break, Phyllis." "You don't even own a gun." "I'm sure Vic has an extra one." "What are you hunting, Daddy?" asked Tim's daughter, Sue Ellen. "Boars." "Those big ugly things with long tusks?" "That's right." Sue Ellen rolled her eyes. Although barely fourteen, she was already wearing lipstick and painting her eyelids purple. Recendy, Tim had overheard her talking on the phone to one of her girlfriends about sex slaves and orgies, both subjects she had learned about from TV. When he had mentioned this to Phyllis, she seemed unconcerned. "What are you going to do," she had asked, "take the TV away from her? Do you want to turn her into a social misfit?" Phyllis had been his high school sweetheart, and Tim still loved her after sixteen years of marriage. Lately, however, he had been having these spells where he would look at her and see a stranger. It was as if Stephen March is assistant professor of English at Elizabeth City State University in North Carolina. He has been published in variousjournals and literary magazines . 37 all the things they had experienced together had been obliterated, and she was somebody he had never seen before—sitting in a doctor's office, or on a bench in a train station. Tim found this feeling deeply disturbing . It made him wonder if he was losing his mind. Early Saturday morning, Tim was waiting for Vic on his front porch when Vic pulled into the driveway in a pick-up truck. Vic's cousin, Ed Horner, was with him. Tim had Phyllis's fanny pack around his waist; the pack contained sandwiches, Granóla bars, insect repellent, a compass, and a first aid kit. He also had a thermos of coffee, and a canteen of Gatorade. Vic had told him to bring his supplies in the fanny pack, explaining that a knapsack would "be murder in the slicks." Slicks were the dense tiiickets of rhododendron. Tim sat in the middle between Vic and Ed; tlie boar hounds were in cages in the back. Vic drove up into the Smokies while Hank Williams, Jr., sang about rowdy nights and lost love on the tape player. They drank coffee from their thermoses and watched the sky turn light. "Hunting razorbacks is a pure thrill, Tim," Vic said, "especially the way me and Ed hunt 'em. We don't shoot 'em with a rifle. That's the chickenshit way to hunt. We get right down in the dirt and slicks and fight it out with 'em, using one of the most timeless and basic weapons there is—the hunting spear." "You don't use a gun?" Tim asked. "Hell no. That would take most of the fun out of it. Tell him, Ed. An't boar hunting with a spear the biggest thrill you've ever experienced ?" "Ain't nothing else like it," Ed said. "A boar has got heart," Vic said. "He's meaner than a pit bull when you get him cornered and he'll fight like one, too. If you don't believe me, look at this." Vic pulled up his shirt to show Tim a star-shaped scar on his stomach. "Old boar did that to me last summer. I was going to spear him and slipped in the mud, and he took a chunk out of me." "That was one mean boar," Ed said...

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