Termination Shock

Things might have turned out differently if Rufus had been able to shelter Adele from juvenile pig-related content during that formative year when she had learned her ABCs and Snout had grown from a newborn piglet—basically an exposed fetus—to a monstrous boar weighing twice as much as Rufus, who had once played linebacker. Sometimes at breakfast Adele would complain that in the middle of the night she had been awakened by gunshots in the neighborhood. Rufus would lock eyes with Mariel across the table and Mariel would say “It must have been hunters,” which was not technically a lie. It had been Rufus, out at three in the morning with an infrared scope, blowing away feral hogs. And if it wasn’t Rufus, it was one of the neighbors doing the same thing for the same reason.

These pigs were an unstoppable plague, to the point where they were actually taking back Texas from the human race. It was sparsely populated territory to begin with; you could only wrest so many dollars out of an acre of Texas ranchland no matter how hard you worked. Anything that reduced your income made the whole proposition that much more sketchy. Rufus and Mariel had put off having a second child for money reasons, so that, in a way, was already a reduction of the human population of their fifty acres by one.

They had decided they would try to make a go of it after Rufus had got out of the service at Fort Sill, up north across the Oklahoma border, and decided that greener pastures might be found elsewhere. He had grown up in Lawton, which was the town adjoining Fort Sill, and the surrounding mosaic of 160-acre land allotments that were largely owned by Comanches. Despite having an ancestry that included Black, white, Mexican, Osage, Korean, and Comanche, he had an ID card identifying him as an official member of the Comanche tribe. For Indians in general and Comanches in particular were a lot less interested in chromosomes and such than mainstream Americans with their 23andMe.

Rufus had met Mariel when he was in the service, doing a stint at Fort Sam Houston, where she had been working as a civilian. Turned out there was this patch of land in her family, this fifty-acre plot a few hours’ drive north of San Antonio, and no one was doing anything with it. The proverbial greener pasture, or so they supposed. Her uncle let them live on it provided they kept the place up and paid him enough rent to cover the taxes and such. They pulled a mobile home onto the property and began to live. There was an old infested house that Rufus tore down for the lumber, and from that he knocked together outbuildings: a tool shed, a chicken coop, later a shelter for goats.

Until then Rufus’s life had followed a trajectory that was run-of-the-mill in that part of the world: grew up in a broken home, played some football in high school but not at a level that would get him a college scholarship or a wrecked brain. Joined the army. Became a mechanic. Fixed elaborate weaponry in some of the less good parts of the world. Ended up close to home at Fort Sill. Was surprised to discover that twenty years had gone by. Honorably discharged. Had a vague plan to get a college degree on the GI Bill, which was the usual way up in the world for people like him. Put that on hold to embark on this Texas ranch project with Mariel. Her family was from farther south, a classic Texas blend of German and Mexican. Various uncles and cousins and whatnot drove up from time to time to help them get started and, he suspected, to evaluate Rufus’s fitness as a man. He did not in any way resent it. For all they knew, he might have been beating her. They needed to satisfy themselves that this wasn’t the case. He respected them for their diligence in the matter.

There was an odd bending around in back at the extreme limits of culture and politics where back-to-the-land hippies and radical survivalists ended up being the same people, since they spent 99 percent of their lives doing the same stuff. You had to have a story you could tell yourself about why living this way made more sense than moving to the suburbs of Dallas and getting a job at Walmart. The hippies and the preppers had different stories, but in practice it didn’t come up very often. Mariel tended more toward hippie but Rufus had never picked sides.

In trying to make the ranch add up as a financial proposition, he over and over found situations where putting in a heinous amount of brute physical labor might, luck permitting, increase the productivity of the land by a tiny amount. Rufus found himself, as years went by, asking whether it was worth it. Even setting aside the whole GI Bill option, he could simply get a job fixing cars anywhere but here. The cost of living would go up but at least he’d be able to get a good night’s sleep instead of setting his alarm for 2:30 A.M. so that he could go out shooting feral hogs.