Pig-Boy and The Insectorator - 2. A Forest God and Prairie Oysters

At supper with his parents, David described his ride up the Jana Mountain logging road and how well his new bicycle had performed.

“You weren’t the only one went up that mountain today,” Pete said. “I heard a strange story from Aaron Jameson. He said he got attacked by a bunch of birds up there. You see anything like that?”

“He drive a red pickup?” asked David.

“Yep, a little red 4X4 with a gun rack in the back window.”

“He just about run me off the road. I don’t know if he was attacked by birds or not, but there was a whole flock of starlings chasing his truck when I saw him. He was goin’ about sixty miles an hour.”

“Those birds really spooked him,” said Pete. “He had little peck marks all over his face. Those starlings bother you?”

“Nope.” David shook his head. “After he went around a corner, they flew back toward me. It was kinda like they were looking at me for a minute, but they didn’t bother me at all and just flew away into the park.”

David didn’t describe his experience with the naked boy. There were too many private feelings in that experience, emotions he’d not yet processed. One lesson he’d learned from Pete was to be wary of sharing anything that affected him deeply. His mother was more open to his ideas and feelings, but he was sure that what he had felt and seen on Jana Mountain was more than even she could accept.

In bed that night, David recalled the day’s events, one by one, and tested his memories against his reason. He tried to find explanations that satisfied both.

David regretted the fear that made him run away. He had been overcome by the strangeness of what he had seen, like it was a daydream or a hallucination. The skinny, tanned boy seemed to be part of the forest. He was the right size, the right shape, and the right color, as if he had sprung from the soil beneath the trees. He belonged there. David knew he wanted to see the boy again. He wanted to be like that boy, relaxed and integrated with the natural world and all its creatures.

He wondered about the animals’ unusual behavior. The fawn had not only accepted the mysterious boy but had been playing with him. Then the boy had appeared to communicate with that squirrel. Was he the same squirrel David had seen a few minutes earlier?

David smiled as he considered an idea: perhaps wolves had raised the boy, but that kind of thing only happened in movies or cartoons. Still, there was no doubt his forest boy had an extraordinary rapport with wild creatures.

Then there were the starlings. Was their attack on the red pickup related to the dusty golden boy in the glade? David recalled the single starling who had landed without fear on the boy’s shoulder, as if he were an old friend. He perched there like an equal, not a pet. He had stared knowingly at the huckleberry bush that David had thought concealed him. Was it a coincidence that starlings had flown so closely around him as he had ridden away from the forest? Were they the same starlings who had attacked Aaron Jameson?

The last mystery David thought about was the feeling of someone watching him. Someone capable of touching his innermost thoughts had seen him naked in the forest.

He mulled over his memories of the day, trying to make sense of them and to decide what he should do next. The more he thought about the day’s events, the more certain he became that they were all related to the forest boy. After he had come to that conclusion, he knew what he had to do. Then he rolled onto his side and slept.

~~~

River Jameson was determined that he was not going to be gay, but he worried about it. It was Sunday morning, and he lay in bed feeling himself. He had a luxurious feeling, like there was a million dollars in his penis. It was rich. It was full of something good, something that wanted to burst out in a big splat of pleasure.

River mentally thumbed through images of boys he had seen in the school shower room the previous week. He tried to understand why he couldn’t help looking at their bodies, at their penises. He didn’t want to look; he had to look. He shook his head.

River remembered one of those boys in particular, the black-haired one with the bright green eyes, David McAdam. There was no reason he should seem so attractive. He wasn’t pretty, like a girl. That scatter of freckles across his cheeks seemed like a badge of boyhood. But, he was vegan. He didn’t even care if people knew. River hated him for being vegan. That was so gay. It didn’t make any sense. People were supposed to eat animals. Boys were supposed to think about girls. It was all part of the same package, part of being a man.

River couldn’t understand what compelled him to look at David, why that boy was so interesting. River sometimes felt as if he went into a trance when he saw David naked in the locker room. Other times, it was like he entered a time warp, where everything slowed down. His gaze flicked from place to place on David’s body. He thought if he could find a bad part, like a bent toe or a hairy mole, some little ugliness, he would be free, but he never found anything that wasn’t perfect, and if he looked for more than two seconds, he started to get an erection. He had to turn away then and dress quickly, before anyone noticed he was swelling and stiffening. Thank God for jock straps that kept things under wraps.

River disgusted himself. He shook his head hard and reached under the mattress to retrieve a stained copy of Hustler magazine. He opened it to its most revealing female nude and glared at the photo while he stroked himself to climax. After he had cleaned up, he went downstairs to the kitchen. Since it was Sunday morning, he could have stayed in bed, but he was awake and wanted to do something.

Nobody was in the kitchen. River’s two eldest brothers, twins Ricky and Nicky, wouldn’t be down until noon at the earliest, and it would be best to stay out of their way then. They were always hung over on Sunday mornings. His other brother, Aaron, had still been fast asleep when River left their shared bedroom. Their father was already over at the pig shed supervising the hired help. Weekends meant nothing to him or the thousands of pigs he was producing for slaughter.

River laid a half dozen strips of bacon in a frying pan and drank a glass of orange juice while they sizzled.

On the previous evening, his father had been angry about Aaron's speeding ticket. Aaron’s story about a flock of birds attacking him irritated him even more. “You mean to tell me you got a speeding ticket because you were afraid of some goddamn little birds?”

“There was hundreds of ‘em,” protested Aaron, “dive-bombing me!” His face bore witness to the truth of his tale.

“What a pile of shit!” said the old man, as he marched out of the room. He left them unsure whether he was referring to the bird story, or Aaron, or everything in general. He had soured since the death of his wife, several years earlier.

River pushed the bacon aside and scrambled four eggs. He scraped it all onto a plate and added a few squirts of ketchup and two slices of buttered toast. After washing that down with a tall glass of cold milk, he burped with satisfaction and decided to ride over to Derek’s place. Derek usually had something happening, and if not, there was always Jeremy, Derek’s little brother. He might be hanging around. He might need tickling.

As River pedaled his bike past the lane that led to the pig shed, he heard the squealing of piglets. That told him his father and the hired hands, Evan and Willie, were still castrating. They’d be at it for a couple of days. River felt his testes tighten up in his crotch at the thought of what the piglets were experiencing. He could have earned some pocket money by helping, but it made him feel bad to do it.

He remembered the process. Grab a piglet by the hind legs, hold it between your knees, and slice the nut-sack twice. Then pull one nut out. Cut the white cord first. Then pull it out a bit further, give it a few twists, then cut the blood vessel and drop the testicle into the bucket. Do the other nut, then drop the piglet and grab another.

It was hard work, but he didn’t mind the labor. He was big for his age and strong. What bothered him was the screaming. It haunted his memory. Tail-docking wasn’t so bad. The piglets only shrieked a few times when he snipped their tails, but when he castrated them, they seemed to understand they’d lost something important, and their screams were filled with rage and sorrow.

The old man had advised him to kick the piglets after he’d cut them. He said, “They don’t make so much noise if you give ’em a good boot when you put ’em down.”

River knew they’d be having prairie oysters for supper that night. He stood up on the pedals, increased his speed, and took a deep breath. The summer morning air was rich with the scent of lilacs his mother had planted along the drive. He was thankful that the breeze was not coming from the big, square lagoon that held the waste products from the pig shed.

~~~

“You be careful up there,” said Pete, as David mounted his bike. The deputy had recalled Aaron Jameson’s tale a couple of times since he’d heard it. Every time he thought about it, he dismissed it as no more than an unusual natural event, but it had left him uneasy. It might have been a natural happening, but there was something disturbing about it. If the story was true, those birds weren’t acting naturally. If it wasn’t true, then what really did happen? And here was his ornery son heading up that mountain again this Sunday morning. “Skedaddle outta there if you see anything weird,” Pete added.

“Okay,” said David, as he pedaled down the driveway.

“You got your phone?” called Pete to the boy’s back.

David raised his hand in an affirmative gesture as he rode away. Pete continued working on his current Sunday morning household project. He was replacing two worn steps at the front entrance of the house. In the afternoon he planned to get the barbecue out of the garage and prepare it for summer use.

Two hours later, David locked his bike to a tree in the forest. He hoped to see the mysterious boy again, but this time he wouldn’t let his fear make him run away in panic. If the boy was there, he planned to walk right up and introduce himself. He made his way to the stream where he had undressed the previous day. Because he felt unsure about what he might encounter, he decided not to remove his clothes. David worried that the mystery boy might not be alone, and he felt shy. He followed the stream until he found a place where he could cross by hopping from rock to rock. On the far side, he walked in the direction of the glade.

The anticipation of meeting the forest boy had excited David, but walking among the ancient trees calmed him. He stopped and leaned against the trunk of a giant maple. He felt good there, but it wasn’t as intimate an experience as when he had been naked. This day, there was no sense of another consciousness in his mind. He became more tense when he crept up to the huckleberry bush he had previously hidden behind.

The clearing was empty. David examined the ground where the boy had lain, but there was no sign that anyone had ever been there. He sat down, disappointed that the boy was gone without a trace. In the bright sunshine, fuzzy, black and yellow bumblebees buzzed over clumps of small, pink flowers. A finger-long skink slithered out from behind a boulder.

David smiled at the bumblebees. They helicoptered from flower to flower with their chubby, striped bodies and tiny wings. He remembered an article he’d read about a scientist who had proved that bumblebees could not fly. The relationship between their body-size and their wing-size proved it was impossible. Yet they did fly and seemed to do it with ease.

David tried to open his mind to see if he could recapture the strange sensation from the day before. He tried to sense if anyone was aware of him, or watching him. There was nothing. Aside from the snaky skink and the bumblebees bouncing around in the sunlight, he felt alone.

He stood up and made a slow circuit of the glade. He looked for clues that might lead him to the boy, or confirm that the boy had been there and hadn’t been a hallucination. Then he shouldered his backpack, determined to search further.

On a rocky ridge high above the valley, David sat to eat the lunch he’d packed. Much of the park lay spread out before him. He looked in vain for a curl of smoke from a campfire or a bit of color outside the range of normal forest hues. There was no hint of any other person.

He enjoyed the avocado sandwiches he’d made, but when he was about to open the vegan energy bar he’d brought for dessert, he stopped. He nodded to himself, then returned the bar to his pack along with an apple and an orange.

An hour later, David was back at the grassy open space where he’d seen the boy. He gathered some loose rocks and small boulders. From these, he built a cairn beside where the boy had been playing with the fawn. He balanced one rock on top of another until he had a waist-high structure. On the flat rock that crowned his creation, he laid the vegan energy bar, the orange, and the apple.

“Offerings to the forest god!” he said, and laughed.

When he left the clearing, he looked back at the cairn he’d made. A starling perched there examining the bar and the fruit. He looked up at David and cocked his head.

“You tell him I’ll be back,” called David to the starling. “I’ll come again next weekend.”

The bird continued to eye him. Then he threw his head back and warbled a phrase of such purity and sweetness that David caught his breath. “Wow,” he gasped, as the starling flew up and disappeared among the trees.

~~~

Derek’s mother was busy in the laundry room. “The boys ain’t up yet,” she rasped. She was a heavy smoker. “It’s noon! Go get ’em up if you can.”

River ran upstairs to the boys’ bedroom. Derek’s bed was empty, and the sound of the shower indicated his location. The boy-shaped lump in Jeremy’s bed told him that the younger boy was still drowsing. He sat down on the side of the bed and said, “Your mom told me to get you guys up, so…” With that, he reached under the bedclothes until his hand touched warm flesh. Great, the kid wasn’t wearing a pajama top. River ran his fingers over the boy’s ribs while he wriggled and groaned.

“River, you get outta here and leave me alone or…” the kid murmured in a husky, freshly-awakened voice.

“Or what?” said River. Jeremy was younger and smaller, and posed no challenge.

River reached further under the duvet and felt Jeremy’s stomach under his fingertips. God, the kid was so satiny smooth and warm. Nothing in his experience was as smooth as Jeremy’s skin. River had no control over his fingers’ hunger to touch Jeremy’s skin. The boy wriggled away, but River moved his hand lower to discover the kid wasn’t wearing a pajama bottom either. A quick grab and he had a small, hot erection in his fist. “Sleeping nude, eh? Well, that’s a dangerous thing to do!” crowed River.

Jeremy pulled himself away and rolled over, leaving River’s hand resting on his naked bottom. River always enjoyed looking at Jeremy’s bum and ached to skate his hand over it. In his eyes, it was perfect, the ideal bum, but he knew it wasn’t ticklish, and if his hand lingered there, it would be suspicious. He dug both hands into the ultimate tickle spots, Jeremy’s tender underarms. Jeremy shouted and squealed.

“Hey faggots,” said Derek, as he emerged from the bathroom. “River, stop trying to rape my brother, and I’ll tell you what we’re gonna be doing today.”

“Yeah, faggot,” said Jeremy, from where he was cocooned. “Stop feeling me up and bugger off with my douche-bag brother!”

“You know you love it,” said River, running his hands over the boy’s ribs again. He ducked to avoid the fist that barely missed his head. Then he turned to Derek as his friend pulled a pair of boxers up over his dark, curly pubes. River had a fleeting thought. Maybe the fact that he didn’t have any pubes yet, not a single hair, was why he wasn’t attracted to girls. Maybe when he got hairy, he’d stop noticing boys. He pulled his attention back into the room.

“What's up?” he said to Derek.

Jeremy kneed him in the back. River got off the bed and walked over to the window.

“Today,” said Derek, “we’re taking the first step towards losing our virginity.”

“No,” said River. “I’m not gonna let you into the pig shed to fuck one of our pigs.”

Jeremy exploded with laughter under his duvet. “Nobody but River gets to fuck his pigs!”

Derek ignored both of them. He said, “I have an appointment to mow the lawns and trim the hedges at the Kelman house.”

“The April and Aurora Kelman house?” queried River.

“Yes, indeedy. The delectable Kelman sisters will soon be slobbering over our shirtless, masculine bodies. While we make their yard beautiful, they will drool. I am giving you the opportunity to come with me, as my assistant. They have big lawns, front and back, and there’s lots of hedge.”

For one micro-second, River imagined saying he would prefer to climb under the duvet with Jeremy. There he would spend the rest of the day exploring all the sweet, warm spots the boy possessed. The thought flashed into existence like a strobe light, then disappeared into the void.

“Great!” said River, with enthusiasm borrowed from his micro-fantasy.

“As soon as I have some breakfast, we’ll go,” said Derek.

Jeremy erupted from his bed. “Can I come too?” he begged, while hugging Derek around the waist.

River drank in Jeremy’s beauty while glancing in random directions. He meant this to suggest he hadn’t any particular interest in the deliciously naked boy dancing around.

“No, no, no,” said Derek, manhandling his brother into a hug. “Such delights are not for you, little bro.”

“Maybe we could get some work out of him,” suggested River, hoping they might bring Jeremy along with them. The kid was shameless. He still had an erection and didn’t seem to care if anyone saw it.

“No,” said Derek, in a tone that said it was not a matter for discussion. He looked into his brother’s face while he replied to River. “He’s way too cute. If we bring him along, the girls are gonna spend all their time fussing over him. They won’t even notice us.”

“C’mon, Derry,” pleaded Jeremy. “I won’t be cute.”

“You can’t help it,” said Derek. “It’s a curse, I know, but you’ll just have to learn to live with it. Put some clothes on, and I’ll make enough breakfast for you too. Then, while River and I mow, and trim, and dazzle the Kelmans, you can go jerk off with some of your little friends.” He released Jeremy and said to River, “I plan to let the oldest one, April, fall in love with me. So, River, you will please focus your attentions on Aurora.”