The Killer Inside Kid Rock

Ten miles outside town on a two-lane county road, just past the trailer park and across the street from Hank Williams Jr.’s place, there’s a driveway with a poster that says “Re-Elect Sheriff Russell Thomas.” Beyond a gate, a dirt road winds around a small lake, past a “Don’t Feed the Hippies” sign, leading to a brown double-wide trailer (WiFi password: Troublewide). Kid Rock stands outside puffing a cigar, his ponytail spilling out of an orange hunter’s hat. “Welcome to L.A.!” he says, meaning Lower Alabama. “I thought you were coming yesterday. We got our days screwed up. We cooked fuckin’ chitlins!”

It’s noon on a sunny Thursday in Troy, seat of Pike County. Rock introduces his buddy Gabe, a portly local salesman who sold Rock a dog. They’ve been hunting on Rock’s 500-acre property since 5:30 a.m. He started e-mailing me at dawn, urging me to come early, promising “a badass surprise.” “I wanna tell you what it is so bad,” he says. He steps into the trailer; a photo of Hank Jr. hangs on the wall near two mounted deer heads. “I guarantee you ain’t seen this before.”

As Gabe makes turkey sandwiches and Rock makes small talk, his girlfriend, Audrey, arrives in a pickup truck, just back from Walmart. Rock spotted Audrey, a no-nonsense brunette, five years ago at a Michigan restaurant and asked her out on the spot. The next day, when she asked where they were eating, he said Chicago. They had a blast, and have been going strong ever since. Audrey spends much of her time here now; she loves to hunt, though she had to take a break a few months ago when she broke her leg in a nighttime ATV crash.

Rock heads across the road to his huge barn, a man cave decked out with a pool table, a full bar and a safe stocked with guns: a .22 rifle, two custom .45 pistols with ivory handles inside a case marked “American Badass Set,” and a semiautomatic with a silencer. “Guys with the president carry this,” he says. “You have to get these pre-1985 with a silencer. I bought it when Obummer came into office, because I’m thinking, ‘What if he fuckin’ bans guns?’ ”

Rock knows his fan base: “45-50-year-old girls wearing extra-large T-shirts — they’re my bread and butter.”

Rock loads a few of them into one of his four-wheelers and we head into the woods, cruising his ragged dirt roads. He’s installed several cameras in trees to keep track of wildlife from his barn: deer, coyotes, bobcats — and lately, feral hogs, which have been damaging his property. He points out a torn-up stretch of grass. “A nice green field — they fucked it all up,” he says. Then we reach the clearing with Rock’s badass surprise: a small cage trap containing three fat, wide-eyed hogs. They wandered into it this morning, lured by the corn inside. “See that?” he says with a grin. “We’re about to do some murderous shit.”