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.
He left them where they fell, and other hogs ate them. This was just one of the many ways in which it all began to seem futile. Hogs ate everything, including other hogs. Grazing animals would eat grass but leave the roots in the ground; hogs tore up the ground and ate the roots. Erosion followed. Only ants could live in what the hogs left behind. Rufus couldn’t kill these things fast enough, and the ones he did kill only became food for the ones he didn’t. They forbade Adele feeding Snout or any other wild pig, but by then Snout had already got the head start he needed; he’d come to associate humans with food, and Rufus began to suspect that he was drawn to the sound of rifle shots in the night, as he’d worked out that it usually meant a dead cousin lying on the ground, free for the eating. So Rufus’s nocturnal shooting only led to Snout’s getting bigger.
A lot of that was hindsight, after what had happened had happened. Just Rufus torturing himself. He should have marked out Snout as a special threat. Should have killed one hog as bait and then lain in wait for Snout to show up. Years later he was haunted
almost every night by the possibility that he might once, back in those days when he still had a daughter, have had Snout in his infrared sights, one white silhouette among many, and refrained from pulling the trigger, just because Adele had a soft spot for him and he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to look her in the eye over breakfast.
More recently he had learned the trick of sticking out his tongue when the bad self-torturing thoughts began to creep into his mind. He would open his mouth wide and stick out his tongue as far as it would go, almost as if he were gagging the bad thought out, refusing to let it in, and somehow this worked and got his mind back on the track it should follow. It made people look at him funny, but he didn’t spend that much time around people.
His only consolation, and a very meager consolation it was, was that the incident—which took place while he was in town picking up a load of drainpipe—had been a sudden invasion of the property by two dozen or more feral hogs. Snout was the ringleader, but he had so many accomplices that even if Rufus had been at home standing there with a loaded gun he might not have been able to save Adele.
He and Mariel broke up, and she wandered back down south to live with family. Rufus devoted his life to killing feral hogs. He literally made it his business.
Business, by that point in his life—he was forty-four—was a thing he was finally coming to grips with. In the army he’d never had to think about profit and loss. He’d assumed that duty on the farm because Mariel was so manifestly hopeless at it. Over those years he had watched, staring into his QuickBooks late at night, as the numbers had gotten worse and worse and more and more of his army pension had been siphoned off to cover the shortfalls. In all honesty it had become a hobby farm. But it was all neither here nor there since these financial signals were drowned out by the emotional side of things: the story that he and Mariel were telling themselves, and increasingly telling Adele, about why they were living here.