Halt, You Swine

By John O’Bryan

“Hey, you guys need help?” I asked through the rolled-down window of my pickup.

My wife Kelly, our daughter Molly, and I had just come upon two very large pigs strolling down the middle of Main Street in a northern central Idaho town (this is a true story, but the exact place and names have been disguised to protect the innocent).

The pigs looked for all the world like a father and son on a Sunday walk after the church potluck. 

Earlier in the year, my daughter had broken her ankle and we were just returning from an appointment with a very tan orthopedic doctor who spent half the year fishing in Mexico and the other half taking money from people whose daughters are sure they know how to skateboard and realize too late that it’s a lot harder than it looks.

He was certain he could fix it…for a price. It was mid-afternoon and I was looking forward to being home. 

“Dude, yes,” a man replied to my query. He was dressed in ratty blue jeans and a muscle shirt with the armpits cut out to the waist and a filthy trucker hat pulled over greasy hair. He weighed all of one hundred and twenty pounds and his tattoo-to-tooth ratio was about two to one.

I jumped out of my truck (I was very thankful I was driving it and not my Prius because no one in Idaho ever trusts anyone in a Prius, or Pious, as I’ve come to call it) and slowly walked towards the animals with an eye to getting in front of the six-hundred-pound beasts. Tattoo guy jumped around yelling and waving his arms, trying to get the pigs to do something—what, I’m not sure, but from the looks of him he was trying to stampede them into the sunset.

A stocky guy in a clean white T-shirt and heavy-duty work pants came out of a big brick building and started yelling.