Snap! Crack!
Orlando screamed and thrashed.
In one final, fluid motion, Milo reached behind him, picked up a nine-pound sledgehammer, and smashed the pig’s jaw.
Again, the hammer whirled and smashed. When Milo backed away, chest heaving, eyes dead, there was nothing left of the pig’s head. It looked like rags and Jell-O.
“Jesus, Milo,” said Sweeney, in a tiny little voice.
—
At home in his apartment later, Milo shook as if he’d been in an accident.
You should feel something, whispered his old soul.
Milo tried to cry. His breath shuddered. He sat there for an hour, shaking, trying to be normal.
—
He would go to college for engineering, he decided. After a month’s research, he found a program that would cost four thousand dollars a year. Five years at the slaughterhouse might give him what he needed to start, without having to bury himself in debt.
That’s good, said the wise voice. More!
Milo put his plans in writing, complete with a timetable. He contacted the college about financial aid, about meeting with an admissions officer. He felt more like a person than ever.
To celebrate, he spent his college savings on an air rifle.
—
He began going for walks in the woods at night, sitting for hours in the trees along Route 41.
It seemed as if the only time he could ever get his mind to spin down and be still was when he crouched among the insect noises of the night woods with his rifle to his shoulder, lazily tracking cars as they passed.
Breathe in. Breathe out. The rest was silence.
For his birthday, he bought himself a telescopic scope and an insulated set of winter camos.
In midsummer, he did something that surprised him.
Hidden fifty yards from the road, he fired a shot that cracked the windshield of a passing Toyota 4Runner. The truck swerved, then sped up and vanished toward Springfield.
Aw, shit! That was dumb. That was serious. It was the kind of thing that drew attention.
Milo checked the papers the next day. Nothing.
Was he disappointed? Relieved? He didn’t know.
—
That same day, Milo went down to Zwiebel’s Market for baloney and horseradish sauce and ran into Jodi Putterbaugh.
He stared at her over a pyramid of Miller beer twelve-packs. He knew she was familiar, but couldn’t quite…
“Do I know you?” asked Jodi.
She was cute, in an off sort of way. Dressed in sweats.
“Not sure. I’m Milo Wood.”
“Oh, my God, Milo! Milo, I’m Jodi Putterbaugh. From fifth grade!”
Sometimes our memories make us do strange things, especially if we are strange people. Milo said, “Hey, Jodi,” marched around the beer pyramid, grasped her by the arms, and planted a huge kiss on her lips. Not just a friendly kiss, either.
Obviously that long-ago dusk, with the kiss and the fireflies, had been lurking around in his head.
Woo-hoo! crowed the ancient souls.
“Okay,” said Jodi. And they put their arms around each other and stood there by the beer for a time.
—
Where had she gone?
Iowa. Then she was in the hospital for years, having hallucinations and, finally, brain surgery. She was dumber now; did it show?
Her parents?
Dead.
“Shit, Jodi. I’m sorry.”
He was sorry. It got past the switch.
Jodi said, “Thanks. I’m going to be driving a school bus, when school starts up in the fall.”
—
Meeting Jodi Putterbaugh at the store and then having grilled cheese and Cokes with her at K’s made Milo have to get his thoughts in order. For that, he needed quiet.
Night found him in the shadows by the highway. Thinking. Breathing.
Waiting. Pulling the trigger and—crack!—starring the driver’s-side window on a little blue Mercury Lynx. The driver kept his nerve, didn’t swerve, but sped up.
That shooting made the paper. The cops also mentioned a previous report, a Toyota. Someone called him “the Route 41 BB Sniper.”
Why’d they have to go and put “BB” in there? Made him sound like a little kid.
He went and got a real rifle and real rifle bullets. He threw all the bullets but one out the car window. That one bullet, he kept in his pocket.
—
They had dinner at the Brewery, looking out over the Miami River.
Man, she looked nice. Not just cute, like that first day at Zwiebel’s. Now she’d had time to grow in his mind, and he’d made room for her there. She made it hard for him to breathe, that’s how beautiful she looked, wearing a blue dress and an enormous mum in her hair. The mum looked like a second head.
He had gone out and bought a tie.
“Do you miss living on a farm?” he asked her, over salads.
Jodi nodded. “Yeah,” she said, “except for the work. I miss the animals, but you have to work really hard to live on a farm. Does that make me lazy?”
“Nah,” Milo answered. “There’s different kinds of work, is all. Different kinds of energy.”
She gave him a nice kind of look then. He’d said the right thing. For a minute, spearing the last of his lettuce off his plate, he felt the rightness of his life like a boat sailing on clear water. But it made him nervous, too, because he had to tell her sooner or later where he worked.
They talked about college. They were both saving up.
“Maybe we could take a class together over at Edison,” Jodi suggested. “To try it out. A class about poems. I know you probably don’t want to take a class about poems, especially, but it can be interesting sometimes if you look at the way we put words together in regular life. Like last week I made a grocery list. It said—you want to hear what it said?”
“Yes.”
“?‘Red lettuce and shoestrings.’?”
“So that’s like a poem?” asked Milo.
“No. It’s just some things that wouldn’t come together anywhere else but on a list.”
Milo shrugged. “Who says that’s not a poem?” he said. “Just because it came together at random?”
Jodi’s face brightened. She leaned forward.
“You actually get it,” she said, reaching out, touching his forearm. “I thought you might get it, and you do.”
“I work at the Dinner Bell plant,” he told her.
Their entrées came.
“Jeez, Milo.”
“Gotta put food on the table,” he murmured. It was just like when she caught him squishing the worms.
“You know what they do with baby pigs they can’t use?” she asked. “I read about this slaughterhouse in Pittsburgh. They just pick them up by their hind legs and bash their heads on the floor. They have contests to see who can get the brains to splatter the farthest.”
A single table candle burned between them. It was too tall, and unless he peered around the side, it left a bright halo in the middle of her head, and all he could see was the mum sticking out.