UPPER DECK: The Curious Case of the Werepig

Mike Fisher -- DB.com

Bubba worked at a carwash and liked to take his lunch break at the bar next door where his normal lunch consisted of a chilidog with extra onions and a couple of beers. Its funny how Bubba had never really grown to understand the concept of a couple. Some days a couple was two some days it was six or eight. Bubba liked having his lunch break at the bar because he got to catch up on the local gossip, and right now the gossip was about something called the swine flu virus. He had heard a couple of guys in the next booth laughing it up, and one of them said, “Oh no, I have swine flu, oink oink.”

One of his buddies said, “You better watch out, Halloween’s coming up and there is supposed to be a full moon, you’ll turn into a pig. A werepig.“ His buddy just responded with a grunt and a couple of more oinks.

Needless to say, Bubba was more than just a little concerned, the fact is he was downright terrified he would contract the swine flu virus. Not because of the reasonable concern that most of us have about a serious injury but because Bubba really believed that contracting the disease could actually change you into a werepig. It may be hard to imagine how anyone could believe anything so crazy, but as I mentioned before Bubba was a few fries short of a happy meal.

A reasonable person might have been able to talk Bubba out of this notion but the fact is that Bubba did not know many reasonable people. His friends knew even less about the disease than he did, and in fact his friend Jimmy had banned bacon from his house and had thrown away every can of  generically labeled “seasoned pork product”  he owned.

Bubba had somehow figured out that you could not get the disease from eating pork. Actually, he had not so much figured it out as he had refused to even consider giving up the chilidogs. The only thing bigger than Bubba’s level of dumbness was his waistline and bacon, sausage, pork jerky, and hotdogs were a big part of his diet.

It was fate that caused Bubba to walk home from his job down at the carwash, where through dedication and hard work he had finally got the promotion to head towel man and where he had recently set his goal of learning to use the hot wax machine. It was a lofty goal and his wife Nadine had not really been exactly supportive. She always ridiculed him because he had not completed eighth grade and she had. So after a rather heated discussion on the phone where she had ridiculed his intention to become the hot wax king of the carwash and where she had said, “Bubba you are so dumb you could not pour pee out of a boot if instructions were on the heel.”  Bubba had a number of clever retorts that he could not quite think of, so he simply responded, “Yeah, well you are too dumb to, um, too dumb too, uh, oh yeah. So he had decided to walk home and not have Nadine pick him up.

It was a good three miles from the car wash to the trailer park but Bubba knew a short cut across the Barlow farm, which was a good sized spread just on the edge of town  He had cut across there a number of times before so it was no big deal.  What he did not fully realize was what they raised on the Barlow farm. If he had known, he would not have gone near the place.

About three quarters of the way across the farm, Bubba was getting pretty winded. He was sweating like a, well like a pig. He wondered if swine flu could be contracted from pig like perspiration.  It was just as he was about to dismiss the thought as silly when he saw her. "Her'' was Sally Mae, Mr. Barlow’s prize sow.

It might surprise city people to know that pigs can be very aggressive, particularly when they are sows and have a litter of piglets. It was about the same time that Bubba saw Sally Mae that a brain cell in the distant recesses of his brain had fired up with one simple one-word message: “Run.”

So over the next few hundred yards, Bubba ran at a full gallop with a highly agitated Sally Mae in close pursuit, he saw the gate and had decided he was going to make it when he tripped. Sally Mae was on him in no time, and took quite a chunk out of his gluteus maximus (that is his butt for you non-medically-educated people).

Bubba managed to scramble away with a rather ugly bite mark on his rear end, and a deep abiding fear that now he was a goner. He was certain that he was going to get the swine flu and you know what that meant? It meant turning into a werepig. He was pretty sure that Nadine would let him have it full tilt with that know-it-all tongue of hers when he told her about it. So instead of going home, he went straight to his doctor. Doctor Redwine had been his family doctor for the better part of his life, and he felt sure the good doctor would be able to give him something to help. Unfortunately, upon arriving at the office he found that the doc had just left for the day. His nurse upon hearing the story, laughed in a particularly cruel way, but explained to him that he would not get swine flue from a pig bite, and that even if he did get the flu he would not turn into a werepig.

A week later on Halloween night, the biggest full moon, Bubba had ever seen lit the night sky. He had just gotten to feel better from the vicious attack and thought everything would be okay. He and Nadine were going to take little Earl and Beulah out for tricks or treat. They had just started for the truck so they could drive into town when Bubba saw the candy bar on the ground, a Snickers, no doubt left by an overanxious goblin. Bubba bent over to pick it up when he heard a blood curdling scream from behind him.

Nadine, was white as a ghost, and pointing at Bubba she yelled, “You have a curly tail!”