Rooster and Hog Crossing by Scott Beard

Rooster and Hog Crossing

The squall blew sideways screaming in from Hollow Point, Hawaii.  The undulating waves slammed along the coffee cliffs of igneous rock jig-sawing along the sandy beach.  The jet-engine surf churned and the west wind ironed the water into vertical glass plates that boiled and slammed onto the salty sand of the beach.  The gray clouds sailed along the horizon; tufted temples watching over the gray-green saltwater below.  The foam swirled along the peg board sand before the stony gray-green waves swallowed them again.

A gray albatross rode the wind, undulating in and out with the breaks along the salty shoreline.  Randall sat with his navy blue backpack in the sand, legs crossed, watched west wind work ripples into the waves.  He sighed, stood, and stretched.  The wind tugged at the bill of his baseball cap and he tightened it with a tug.  He scanned the shoreline again; past the smooth pegboard sand to the magnolia shrubs that laid low and humble on the salty sand.  A rooster had worked its way onto the shore, its typewriter head sprung up and down as it bobbed its way along the sand.  The clouds billowed and Randall looked at his brown legs; salt and pepper sand clung to them.   The wind whipped off the water and Randall steadied himself, a shaky palm facing the wavy water.  The rooster raised its red triceratops crown, warbled and strutted along the sand.   Randall watched until it skittered under another low magnolia.  He stretched, lifted the pack to his shoulders and headed up the pegboard embankment.

His house stood across the street, a primeval four-room shack overshadowed by the blue-black stringy long hairs of firs and pineapple trees that waved their way up the slope to the crowns of the Naptahli Mountains, their factory smoke stack domes, scalloped cliffs of auburn iron rising over six thousand feet above lapping teal sea.  The rain fell in long straight lines; Randall could make out individual bands of breaking water vapor, falling like crystal plumes of dust settling to the earth—the kind of rain that makes rainbows when the sun finds a pocket in the gray clouds to peek out of.

But the clouds did not break.  The gray and black billowed high above the mountains and the vapor grew to drops that tap-danced on the salty sand.  Randall reached the crest of the sandy bank and the hair-dryer roar of pineapple trucks kicked mud and pebbles up along the damp asphalt.  He waited.  Another truck approached, its headlights illuminated water crystals that shone in the bright light, the wooded slats on its high sides hiding piles of pineapples in its belly.

The road cleared and Randall stepped on the asphalt.  In the distance, a pair of yellow orbs broke through the rain, growing in brilliance as they approached.  Nick was in the south bound lane and onto the gravel shoulder as he wiped away beads of water breaking down his forehead.  He turned off the highway by cutting through a row of palm trees playing hide and seek with an aluminum shack, in the rain the rust had oozed into a brown paint that squeezed its way down the gray walls, making muddy lines of iron behind as it fell to the ground.  His boots lopped along in the mud like lathered soap wrenched between clenched fingers.  The rain pelted his cap, sifted under the stubble of his gray beard as it blew in long lines.  He lowered his head, walked along the tall pampas grass; its green tails writhed in the rain, whipping back and forth, undulating up and down as he passed.  The muddy path forked and he turned down a gravel walkway.  The trail narrowed as it battled for space with the knots of Hala and Eucalyptus—an endless town of grass tepees that blocked the black forest from Randall’s house.

That’s when he noticed the hog.  It stood in high grass beneath a knot of Hala trees, craning a thick, gray neck toward Randall.  Randall squinted, caught the shape of a blackened, rounded back, charcoaled hair bristled along the top of its crooked spine.  It stood motionless, and between the breaks of rain dripping from the canopy, Randall heard the venting nostrils, short bursts from a spray nozzle.  It stammered in the high grass, front legs bucking into damp earth.  It bucked again, kicked hind legs, flinging mud and grass from under its hooves.  Randall watched.  In the evening light, the fading rays cast a gray tint along the hog’s mane and face.  An optical illusion of advanced aging.  He sighed.

The tremors had started about a months ago.  Nothing serious at first, little flickers in his eyes, a tick in his brain, the momentarily loss of equilibrium.  The dizziness came a few weeks later, and it was only last week that they told him.  Blood work this week and the treatment would begin next Monday.  Six months of bi-weekly sentences, handcuffed to the drug drip port, a few hours each day, medicinal fluid diffusing through veins like the slow steep of jasmine tea, cold and gray in the dark recesses of a chipped ceramic mug.  Murky.  Tired.

Randall shuddered.  A rooster crowed from the road behind him.  The light had gone to black now, and he turned toward the hog.  It was gone, hidden in the dark drip of the forest.  He turned back toward the fork.  He walked now, feet crunching soggy stocks of Hala underfoot.  His house stood on the hill.  The hog wrestled further into the dark.  Randall continued to walk.  When he got home he would shower, sleep.  He left the thought of the hog in the dark of the writhing eucalyptus.  In the fading light, Randall kept it as a memory.  There would be plenty of days ahead when he could look for the hog in the forest.