The Boar (11 page)

Even while I noticed this at a glance I was lifting my rifle. As my finger tightened on the trigger, Old Satan moved.

All this in less than a heartbeat. And I tell you, the bullet I fired couldn’t have been moving faster than that devil-eyed monster. We were about twenty feet apart, and it was like he took one chest-high bound and was on me, leaping right down the barrel. His chest struck the rifle, jammed it back against me, and sent me reeling into the briars.

Only thing I could think of was what Uncle Pharaoh had said would happen if I missed or didn’t kill him. And the two things he said to do were out. It was too late to climb a tree and I couldn’t toss myself on the ground because I was hung up in the briars. Hung up like a fly in a spider’s web.

A black blur hit against my hip, and then I was flying up. Being tossed nearly four feet off the ground. I landed smack dab on top of that tight circle of briars, and then painfully slipped down inside them. They cushioned my fall some, but the barbs tore me up something awful. But not as bad as Old Satan’s tusks had. My hip felt as if someone were trying to plow a furrow through me.

Out of the tangle of vines I could see Old Satan. He came at me again, hit the brush and vines. I felt the impact of the blow, but there was just enough undergrowth around me so that he couldn’t get in a good lick or hook those tusks in me. It was close though. One of them grazed my shirt and slit it from mid-chest to collar, popping the buttons like popcorn. Had I been breathing out instead of in, I’d have been ripped open like poor Old Bounder.

I heard a rifle crack. A spurt of dust jumped off Old Satan’s rear, right flank. “Hey, hey, hey,” Abraham said, starting up a line of chatter. “
Sooooie, soooie,
come and get it.
Sooooie, soooooie,
you ole ugly thing.”

The shot and the noise turned Old Satan’s head. He looked at Abraham. Abraham was in the clearing hopping around like a horse on locoweed. He had his spear stuck up in the ground beside him now, and his shield lay against that. When he stopped hopping he was looking down the barrel of the Winchester at Old Satan.

The dogs had gotten back into the act again, but Old Satan wasn’t paying them any never mind. He wanted boy blood, and the boy he wanted now was Abraham. I could wait. I was that fly in his web and he’d come for me in his own good time.

Old Satan charged. Just a little grunt and he was off like a bullet. I heard the shot smack into Old Satan, but I didn’t see him slow. I saw Abraham drop the rifle, stoop and take hold of the spear and shield. He had one knee on the ground, the spear lifted. The sharp head of it glittered in the sunlight. Abraham’s tight face looked out from behind the shield.

Four hundred pounds of killer hog came down on him.

The spear hit Old Satan right, but it must not have gone deep enough.

It went right through the snout and into the chest, but when that hog came down that spear cracked like my Uncle Jack’s rheumatic elbow, and Old Satan was standing on top of the shield with Abraham stretched out beneath it. The shield was just long enough to cover Abraham—except for a little place near the top he hadn’t finished. His eyes and the bridge of his nose showed there.

Old Satan was standing on top of the shield trying his dangedest to hook his tusks in there and get to Abraham. Each time Old Satan’s head dipped down and came up, those tusks were streaming with dried hog hide from the shield. Another minute or two and there wouldn’t even be a stick frame left. Just Abraham. Lying out there in the open with a four-hundred-pound boar on his chest.

It hurt like the dickens, but I began to thrash my way out of the brush. My shirt and hair ripped out in patches as the sharp briars took hold of them. It didn’t do my hide any good either, but the pain from that was nothing compared to the pain that was growing in my hip. The numbness from the blow was getting less numb by the moment. Where it felt as if I was having a furrow plowed in me, it now felt as if I was having an irrigation ditch dug. There were little black spots swimming in front of my eyes like tadpoles.

The thorny vines ripped, and I fell out into the open. I began to crawl for the Winchester. It couldn’t have been but a few feet away, but the way I felt, it might as well have been in the next county.

The dogs were still nipping at Old Satan’s legs, but he wouldn’t come off the shield. They circled and snapped, but he stayed where he was, jumping up and down on the shield like a big spiteful kid. Every time that hog came down on the shield you could hear it crack and Abraham groan. If it hadn’t been so serious, it would have been funny.

I had the Winchester now. There was a wad of dirt and leaves in the end where I had dropped it. I pinched the stuff out, propped myself up on my side and an elbow, got a bead on Old Satan.

The hog was trying to get to Abraham’s face again when I fired. My aim was off. I missed the eye and hit the shoulder. I think it just made him madder.

Old Satan let out a squeal. He jumped off the shield and came for me as I cocked another round into the chamber. He came with his snout ducked, and where Abraham’s spear had gore in was a little blossom of blood and I aimed at that and fired. Then I dropped the gun, put my hands over my head and buried my face in the dirt.

His stink hit me before he did. I could hear him skidding up, I felt his weight slam into the top of my head… and nothing happened.

Slowly I took my hands down and raised my head. I was nose to nose with the varmint. His tusks were sticking up on either side of my face. My shot had killed him and he had fallen and belly slid right up to me.

I looked into his eyes. They were open. They were still the same color, but different now. The devil had gone out of them, and all that was left was a big dead hog.

Strange. That’s how I felt. Strange.

Abraham tossed his shield off and came over. He let out a whoop and hopped around the clearing. “You got him, Ricky, you got him.”

I felt bad enough without Abraham hopping around. It was making me sick to watch him. I managed to sit up, my hands between my legs, half slumped over.

“We got him,” I said. “You and me, Abraham. Just like we said we would.”

“Every hunter in East Texas been after this old hog,” Abraham said. “And we got him, Ricky. Me and you.”

I looked at Old Satan. Up close I could see that he was covered in scars and there were fresh wounds made by me and Abraham.

“Just looks like an old, dead hog now,” I said. “Not like no Indian medicine man, demon, or devil. Just a dead hog.”

“Well,” Abraham said, “before he got dead, he sure made a lot of other things dead, and I figure he planned on a long career. So don’t you go and start feeling sorry for him.”

Abraham bent down over him. “He’s an old one all right. Bet he’s old as they say. And all scarred up.”

“I don’t feel so good,” I said.

“Oooie,
Ricky, you’re losing a lot of blood.”

“You noticed,” I said. My pants leg was ripped from knee to hip and my leg was covered in blood. Abraham took off his shirt, tore it up, and tied off my cut. Not hard enough to stop the flow of blood, but enough to keep it from gushing.

“He didn’t get a main pipe,” Abraham said, “but he got you some good.”

“It ain’t good in my book,” I said. I was starting to feel light headed. Things suddenly seemed funny. “You goofy thing. You and that shield and spear stuff. You ain’t no African.”

“Hadn’t been for that rickety shield, you’d be getting my dead body down from one of them tree limbs over by the river. That hog would have tossed me like wet wash.”

The silly feeling went away and was replaced by pain. “I don’t think I’m going to be walking back, Abraham. I ain’t sure I’m going to be going back at all.”

“You going to make it back. That river, that’s how we’ll go. Ain’t neither one of us going to walk. I’ll take the cane knife, hack some small trees down and use the rope to make a raft. Float us home in a lot less than half the time it took us to go through the woods.”

“I ain’t going to be much help.”

“You ain’t going to be no help. Lay down there and rest while I get to work.”

I laid down next to the boar. His stink filled my head, but I was too weak to move.

Abraham went away and a little later I heard the cane knife hacking. I thought about Old Satan. He had killed a lot of things, caused a lot of pain, and I had hated him. Now, somehow, I just felt sorry for him. He was only being what he was meant to be. A wild hog gone touchy in the head.

Whatever, he was gone and the Sabine River Bottoms had most likely seen the last of his kind for good. The dark god of the forest was dead.

There’s not much left to tell, really. Abraham made a raft and he got me on it and we floated down to the Wilson place. The dogs, including the young tired one, came home on their own.

As for the trip, well, I don’t remember much of it. I kept passing out, and what times I was awake, I recall looking up into Abraham’s sweaty, smiling face as he held me on that little raft.

Next day a team of men followed Abraham’s directions to Old Satan. They gutted him and skinned him right there. The meat wasn’t any good to eat by then, least not for people, but the dogs enjoyed it. But before all that, they brought a scale with them and they weighed him. He was four hundred and forty-eight pounds. His tusks were ten inches long and sharp as a sabre. I could have told them that much, and the place on my hip could have testified.

The dogs may have gotten the hog himself, but Abraham got the hide to rebuild his shield with, and I got the tusks. I keep them in the box with my typing paper. I use them as paper weights.

After that time, I guess I thought of myself as a man. If it was true or not. I had faced a mad killer and bested him. I had gotten a wound as a badge, a wound that sometimes aches in cold weather and left me with an ugly set of scars on my hip. And I had been saved by a friend and had returned the favor. What more could you ask?

Let’s see, what else?

Not much left to tell. As I’ve said, the crops didn’t do good that year. The heat and the bugs were awful. But Papa made enough money wrestling so that we not only got through the year, we bought a car and I started going to school more often.

Uncle Pharaoh lived another three years, got him a hog named Phil and trained him to the cart. He never missed a chance to tell a stranger, or even someone who had heard it a dozen times, about how Abraham and I killed The Devil Boar. He told the story so good, you would have sworn he was with us. I know this, I never missed hearing him tell it if I could.

Abraham came to visit me while I healed up, and I read Doc Savage and every magazine we had aloud. They all went back to the tree house when I finished, and they’re there still.

Oh yeah, Mama and Ike came home with a brand new baby sister. Her name is Melinda.

Also, as you can see, I learned to type pretty good. But that’s pushing ahead of this time I’m telling you about, and has nothing at all to do with the summer of ‘33, when, with Abraham Wilson, I hunted down and killed Old Satan, The Devil Boar.

With more than thirty books to his credit, Joe R. Lansdale is the Champion Mojo Storyteller. He’s been called “an immense talent” by
Booklist
; “a born storyteller” by Robert Bloch; and
The New York Times Book Review
declares he has “a folklorist’s eye for telling detail and a front-porch raconteur’s sense of pace.”

He’s won umpty-ump awards, including sixteen Bram Stoker Awards, the Grand Master Award from the World Horror Convention, a British Fantasy Award, the American Mystery Award, the Horror Critics Award, the Grinzane Cavour Prize for Literature, the “Shot in the Dark” International Crime Writer’s Award, the Golden Lion Award, the
Booklist
Editor’s Award, the Critic’s Choice Award, and a
New York Times
Notable Book Award. He’s got the most decorated mantle in all of Nacogdoches!

Lansdale lives in Nacogdoches, Texas, with his wife, Karen, writer and editor.

Find him online at
www.JoeRLansdale.com
.

Savage Season (1990)
Mucho Mojo (1994)
Two-Bear Mambo (1995)
Bad Chili (1997)
Rumble Tumble (1998)
Veil’s Visit(1999)
Captains Outrageous (2001)
Vanilla Ride (2009)
Hyenas (a novella) (2011)
Devil Red (2011)
Blue to the Bone (???)

The Drive-In: A “B” Movie with Blood and Popcorn, Made in Texas (1988)
The Drive-In 2: Not Just One of Them Sequels (1989)
The Drive-In: A Double-Feature (1997, omnibus)
The Drive-In: The Bus Tour (2005) (limited edition)

Zeppelins West (2001)
Flaming London (2006)
Flaming Zeppelins: The Adventures of Ned the Seal (2010)
The Sky Done Ripped (release date unknown)

Act of Love (1980)
Texas Night Riders (1983) (published under the pseudonym Ray Slater)
Dead in the West (1986) (written in 1980)
Magic Wagon (1986)
The Nightrunners (1987)
Cold in July (1989)
Tarzan: the Lost Adventure (1995) (with Edgar Rice Burroughs)
The Boar (1998)
Freezer Burn (1999)
Waltz of Shadows (1999)
Something Lumber This Way Comes (1999) (Children's book)
The Big Blow (2000)
Blood Dance (2000)
The Bottoms (2000)
A Fine Dark Line (2002)
Sunset and Sawdust (2004)
Lost Echoes (2007)
Leather Maiden (2008)
Under the Warrior Sun (2010)

…And that's not counting the pseudonymous novels, the short stories, the chapbooks, anthologies, graphic novels, comic books and all the rest. Get the full story at
www.JoeRLansdale.com
.

The Boar
was first published by Subterranean in 1998. This digital edition (v1.0) was published in 2011 by
Gere Donovan Press
.