Grapevine, TX. Leroy, our shepherd/border collie best friend, was going crazy on the back patio. His intense barking dislodged in me the memory of a big, yellow cat that had stumbled over our stockade fence back in the winter. Leroy and the cat and me had tangled business ends during an extreme altercation. The cat attacked Leroy and rode his head like a rodeo bull. I introduced the cat to a broom. The cat, all teeth and toenail, shimmied up the broom handle and rodeo’d my chest, angrily. Being summarily bloodied and anxious to rid my torso of the demon beast, I Babe Ruthed the poor feline over the fence into the yard on the other side. In the dark, Leroy’s canine verbalizations echoed through the mesquite trees again back there in the Texas heat.
I walked out the back door barefooted, toting a PBJ sandwich and looked into the dark. Texas nights are awfully dark, darker than when you sleep face down. Leroy directed his barking straight into the ground, snout pressed to earth like he was trying to communicate with China. I casually strolled over to have a look and found myself standing in a congregation of fire ants. Familiar feelings raged up my feet and legs and a few other worse areas and grabbed my brain by the stem. The directions were clear: Throw the sandwich, lose the pants, slap the ants!
I know fire ants like nobody’s business. It is impressive how fast you can get your clothes off when a horde of angry fireballers move into your drawers and give the signal to unload the serum.
I jumped and slapped and stripped and knocked and smashed fire ants while dancing one-legged and, suddenly, something hot shot up my leg that made the fire ants seem like a nice bowl of orange sherbet. This was not normal pain, this was pain with several extra letters added and a few fishhooks and some habaneros and a bunch of gasoline and matches igniting all at once. I stumbled backward and fell through the door and into the den floor. My pants were still outside. I writhed and moaned. It was pathetic.
“What is wrong with you?” said my wife. “Where’s your pants?”
“Something… in… my foot.” My tongue tried to grab some words but the words were having no part of it.
If Satan could poke his pocketknife into a person and twist it, that might begin to approximate this pain. The hurt gouged at my foot, raged up my right side, burned my neck and right arm in explosions and spasms of hellish stings. I’ve been chewed by dogs and cats and spiders to opossums and hornets and wasps and fat-bodied bumblebees and yellow jackets and little snakes and some linebacker from Greenville, Alabama in a pile-up on the 10-yard line in 10th grade. If all of them were put together and wrapped in electrified barbed wire, they couldn’t come within 3,000 miles of this horrible hurt.
Seeing me act like a wounded and talentless ballerina, Leroy really went nuts. Grabbing my discarded pants, he slapped them like he was beating a brush fire. My wife turned on the light and there it was, the source of my displeasure, ready to rock, tail arched over its back, pinchers spread out, scooting across the concrete. A scorpion.
“You stepped on a scorpion!” she said. “Should we get you to the hospital?”
“No, no,” I mumbled. My heart was beating like an angry drunk on a dorm room door and my chest ached. Seeing the forked perp strutting across the patio, Leroy attacked the scorpion straight up. Somehow, even though dogs don’t really have lips, Leroy peeled his skimpy little doggy non-lips back, exposed his teeth, and chomped the evil thing to death. He avoided the tail better than I had.
We killed at least a hundred scorpions in that house. We found them on the table, in the cabinets, under the bed covers or crawling up our arms while we watched that fine drama, “Dallas”.
As I lay on the floor for an hour wondering when the pulses of pain would stop, I wondered if the scorpion’s brother would try to exact revenge. Then the pain disappeared just as fast as it had come. There was hardly a mark on my foot, which made me feel like a size 42 long wimp, especially since Susan, while telling the story to her friends, made sure to use the word “whimp” at least four-hundred times over the next week.
Texas is a beautiful place unless you count the weather and the animals and the bugs and the heat and the cold and the things that happen in the dark in your backyard.
Tags: , Dogs, Family, Insects, Personal Stories, Texas