Mikal Ritko traveled alone. Things had gotten out of hand. Bren was abducted and killed by Fussell Duware. Ritko should have killed him years earlier.

Gus had jumped the hospital and fled with Jimmy. They likely drove west toward a story that would end badly for someone, maybe even them.

Agent James was dead in the door of the ER in Andalusia. Duware was good at his job and willing to do anything to get the job done. Anything.

In this case, dressing like a woman and shooting Agent James in the unpleasant daylight. It piled up in his head, ugly and unorganized.

Lemuel Zapata was still alive, probably. He had a talent for it. His son, Zeke, however, had not been so fortunate. Duware was culling.

Zeke lay cooked in cooling wreckage under a pecan tree towards Mississippi. Zapata had lost Bren and Zeke to the same piece of business.

Fussell Duware was still working, a murderer with intentions to kill everyone involved in his perceived slight. Ritko was on that list.

Jolene was out in Texas or Louisiana somewhere, probably killing people who deserved it. Ritko’s office called so much he tossed his phone.

He did not need it anymore. Silence would serve him better than the complication of communication. He stripped his life part by part.

Ritko had been trained to become invisible. Thousands of government dollars went into educating him on the skill of vanishing.

Going off the grid is not an easy thing. There must be a body. There must be a dead end. I.D.s, service weapon, badge, everything.

Fire was good; hard to run a trace on charcoal. CSI was sophisticated, but not like on TV. Cooked bones and a badge would work down here.

He made sure everything that could I.D. him was in the wreck. The men who died, like so many others, deserved it. Perhaps Ritko as well.

He was no longer Mikal Ritko. He was no one when he hot wired the farmer’s truck next to the carport and drove to the end of the highway.

Ritko’s life had been a geometric equation of people, events and evidence. He worked the calculations until he found his result. Not now.

The ordeal before him was blood and loose ends. For the first time in his life, after all of the violent things he had done, he was afraid.

He was not afraid of dying. He expected that. Felt it was overdue. He was afraid of failing. Dying was easy. Failing was unacceptable.

Ritko owed Jimmy Gantt. Jimmy had saved his life once – by not killing him when he had the change. Ironic mercy is enough sometimes.

So he owed the man for that one. More importantly, Jimmy had given Ritko the inside track on cases that made his career in the service.

Ritko came from a poor family. His parents spoke no English. Ritko’s job from childhood on was to succeed. He had done his job – and more.

He had done the worst jobs available because the odds of glory and promotion were quicker. Of course, the odds of failure were inherent.

Ritko did not fail often. And when he did, he was good enough to cover it up. Now he was covering up his entire life by going off the grid.

“No one expects a dead person to do anything,” Jimmy had told him years ago. “So dead people can do everything.”

He was officially dead as society measures life. He was neatly cinched up, freed of the daily mendacity that defines human existence.

For the first time in years, he felt alive. The trees were greener. The leaves had textures he had never noticed. Water tasted better.

Breathing was enjoyable. He had never noticed it before. His lungs felt sweet with each intake. The smell of freedom made him smile.

I looked it up. It appears to be derived from Persian or Hindi. Poor people wore seersucker until it worked its way up the apparel food chain into the wardrobe of college students in the 19th century. At some point after that, it became the summer uniform of Southern aristocracy. From the look of his stained seersucker suit, the knife salesman didn’t get the memo. It was January.

He sat on the couch and opened his Naugahyde case and paused as if to pray. Perhaps he was just trying to remember his pitch. We sat across from him and waited. After returning from the spiritual world of knife salesmen, he arranged his cutlery on our coffee table and began his spiel. He was clearly aiming the conversation at my wife. His strategy: women make these kinds of purchases. He had been trained to tolerate the husband; keep him busy fondling the cutlery; sell to the wife. The blood came next.

“Here, sir, test this balance,” he said handing me the long chef’s knife handle. Before I could grab it, he flipped it around to show me how balanced the blade was.

“Feel that?” he asked, confidently.

The blade whirled and carved an impressive cut into my thumb.

“Yeah,” I said. “I felt that.”

He was shocked and blurted apologies and pulled out a stained handkerchief and thrust it toward me. My hand pooled a crimson puddle on the table. I was not sure which was worse, the cut or the thought of bandaging it in his snotty rag. I tersely declined his handkerchief.

He didn’t mean to do it. They didn’t teach that in knife-selling class. I suppose he meant to spin the blade to demonstrate a point. I got the point. Remember Dan Aykroyd playing Julia Child from the old Saturday Night Live skit? It was like that.

He knew the sale was botched. He looked worried that I would call the company and report a customer slicing. He was thinking lawsuit and banishment to a bad Funk & Wagnell’s territory.

I sat emotionless, staring at my blood then back at him. My reaction was not so much pain as disgust. I squeezed my other hand into a tourniquet around my blood-slimed thumb and silently walked into the kitchen. My wife took care of his departure. I ran cold water over my hand and boiled with anger. Stabbed by a knife salesman wearing seersucker in January. How pathetic.

The first clap of thunder rattled the old panes and silenced the patrons. Drumming water imitated static on the roof. Rain sluiced from an ornate pipe and pushed across the gravel parking lot. Across the highway, the yellow glow of a Shell station reflected in aggregating puddles.

I remember a rain in Texas that cracked open the sky like ripping a mellon. On a porch in Grapevine, I watched drops fall like elephants crying. Even the cover could not protect me from the swirl of water and the aching noise from electrical disturbance above. Porches in Texas are less for rain watching than for sun avoiding.

The first full-tilt, frog-strangling, cow-peeing-on-a-flat-rock porch rain I remember happened on my grandparent’s sagging gallery on our farm. It was Sunday. My grandmother was cooking dinner. I was wearing my best church clothes: white button down shirt, checked tie, black pants, shiny shoes – freshly polished.

The porch jutted into the bare yard and protected a rusted horseshoe, hanging for luck over the front door. My grandfather and I sat on the warped swing he’d hung from the questionable roof with old chains that ached and whined. Everything about the old unpainted house was warped from the roof to the floor to the doors. Old dogs and a couple of chickens huddled under the slats below, hiding from the weather.

The clouds boiled, then clabbered and started spitting across the fields to the west. It was a rock-floater of a storm. Red clay splattered like bloody bullets stinging the ground. The violence above hypnotized me. It was total beauty and absolute fear and made me realize that sometimes they are hard to tell apart. No on spoke. We watched it respectfully, feeling the moist breeze, tasting the fecund rain on our tongues.

I turned to walk back into the house, but my foot slipped off the edge of the slick wood and I tumbled headlong into a foot-deep puddle dug by the deluge off the roof. One of my nice shoes came off and nearly knocked a chicken unconscious. The dogs barked at me as if I was a chunk of shrapnel falling from Sputnik.

I jumped up. Everything on me was brown. I looked like I had been dipped in lumpy chocolate. A word I had heard my grandfather use regularly burped out of me. That particular word was not supposed to be in my mouth to begin with, especially on Sunday. I was saved from a good whipping, however, by the gallons of mud in my pants. I was just too filthy to whip without splattering every Sunday dresser within 50 feet. The embarrassment was total. I stood with my head in a rivulet off the roof. It slowly used gravity and hydraulics to free me from most of the mud. The harder it rained, the more the flow, the cleaner I got.

The mud stained my white church shirt into an interesting pattern that seemed to fall into the social leanings of the 1960′s. It was as if I have been baptized in the mud hole and come out, not so much cleaner or dirtier, but hippier. Janis Joplin started sounding like a siren to my Southern ears. Jimmy Hendricks laid down one side of a song and the next night Duane Allman would twist it up a bottleneck. The chunky monkey sound of the Greatful Dead harmonies chugs in my ears. 1968 was coming, and I’d just stepped off the back porch and fallen right into it.

In a weakened mental state and suffering from being 21 years old, I decided the next day that it would be a wonderful idea to pack our turd-brown Vega (I believe that was the official color listed in the bill of sale) and drive to Susan’s other sister’s house in Colorado Springs in the cool of the evening, since it was hardly cool during the day in Texas. So we headed out on Highway 287 toward Raton, New Mexico and on north to C. Springs.

Have you ever been in a room with no electricity and no moonlight, a space so bone-hard dark that when you felt your way to the john, you were peeing and waiting for the splash to tell you if the target was accomplished? The darkness outside Wichita Falls, Texas at that time in the late 1970’s was ebony plus several shades south. It was so dark the stars seemed movie-specked faked. So thick that the streetlights were sucked into the inky black hole of the night. The pitiful headlights on the Vega battled up front but could only muster enough illumination to tell me what might be 12 feet ahead.

The road around Amarillo was similar. There were times when we couldn’t pick up a radio station, not even bad country and western music. At one point, we smelled something burning. It had the aroma of roasting dope with an armadillo chaser. I estimated during that trip that we saw at least 400 road-crossing armadillos or flat ones before we got to Raton – no other animals except dillos. We pulled over so I could extract a chunk of sagebrush that had wedged itself between the Vega’s cartoon radiator and aluminum lawnmower engine. That was the smell.

Dawn arrived just north of Raton, New Mexico and with it I saw the mountains my wife had told me about since we’d gotten married. The Rockies cut the earth like the Smokies could only dream of doing. The folds I’d seen in Gatlinburg were nice hills; these peaks were Everest-like to my Southern eyes. I drove speechless for at least two hours, watching the sun project long shadows across what seemed like hundreds of miles. Light was not like light where I grew up. I couldn’t wrap any words around it then and I fail when I try now.

The light there was as pure as clover honey and I swear I could smell it. Rosemary or Juniper or some variation of pine I’d never sniffed filled the plastic Vega vents. The sky was as blue as the rim on my grandmother’s enameled cookery. There was no humidity to dull it or gray it down and the chill on my windshield was wintry compared to Texas.

The Southern atmosphere diffuses the sunlight and smears and smoothes it out across the land in a thick paste. Not in the Rockies, The sun was doing zero to millions in seconds with no curve in its trajectory from it to me. In the South, when it came to light, God threw curves and sliders and sinkers. He bounced it off this and that. Up here it was only fastballs and He hit you hard with it.

I have been deep into the Canadian Rockies since then on shoots and seen similar light. I have seen the sunsets in Maui that can drop anything else on earth to amateur sunset status after one viewing. I have seen astounding scenery in dozens of places and felt humbled by what the earth is capable of doing without our interference. But I will never feel the same as I did that morning outside Raton, New Mexico as we passed into Colorado and the flatness turned to jagged incredulity, smashing against a blue that no painter can ever replicate and the light was perfectly foreign to me, like a language I couldn’t use but wanted to hear endlessly. My Southern smallness escaped that day and I have kept my eyes and mind open ever since because I know one day, I will see something else that makes me feel the same way.

I look for it every day.

A long time ago, I worked with some rodeo types. We made considerable use of the space between sunrise and sunset, shooting western scenery and working cowboys. Life is measured in stories per square inch. Cowboys have a few.

Cows and horses will step on you, bite you, run over you, wedge you against stationary objects and throw you far enough to cause trouble later. Every hit I took during that time left a mark. We took our licks and followed cattle and wagons and drank campfire coffee so strong it would not just curl your toes but your boots too. Sometimes we would use a truck. More often than not, we used a horse. The sky can look like torn peaches at certain times of the morning and if you want to see God, get up early enough to find out where he keeps the good stuff. I recall a particular sunset on a Wednesday that wilted orange and hot down under clabbered clouds that looked like purple mashed potatoes dappled with red biscuits. It hard to forget something that beautiful and even the old cowboys stopped to admire it.

Dogs followed along to get the leftovers of a life on the scabby, prickly pear’d ground south of Dallas near Mexia. We drove cows just to prove we could and to get the evidence on two and a quarter and 35mm film. One night, a guy with too many Lone Stars in him tried to run our old pickup off the road with his Firebird. He lost his enthusiasm when four shots from a 357 into his hood changed his mind. Times were different back then. Lawyers were just starting to get control of the earth. Real people still held the edge.

If you have never seen 400 head of longhorns begin to disgorge their bowels all at once, it is a sight and a smell to behold. If you have never ridden a sweating Palomino as hard as it can run through chest deep prairie at sunrise, it is a feeling to behold. If you have never eaten a cold, 3 inch-thick bologna burger for breakfast, it is not something you want to behold.

There are people in this country who don’t need an attorney and a judge to settle their differences. Two fists will do just fine. It’s simple, and afterwards, they are friends. This is how my grandfather did it. This is how some of these men did it. One cowboy called it “decision making.”

Some people have never been hit in the nose, never been bitten by a large animal, never tasted their own blood. To others, it’s an everyday occurrence. We have carved out existence into homogenized, cul-de-sac’d monotony. Is your day well done or rare? It is your choice.

Your heartbeat is not there to measure time; it is there to measure life. There is a difference.

This year, it seems about 6,000 people showed up at Garland Pool’s ATV park (I can only imagine what goes on at an ATV park during normal business hours) and rooted and drank and partied and generally performed as rednecks are supposed to for a weekend of fun, frivolity, beer, gasoline, blood, vomit, vehicles, danger and unruly behavior. It was called the Texas Redneck Games, after all.

Somehow, I doubt Hillary and Obama showed up for campaign donations. Sadly, I have been around these things before. Alabama and Georgia have put on unofficial versions of these things for years. But nobody brags about it.

Texas does.

One event down in the Lone Star state, called the “Mattress Chunk,” team up good old boys who quickly chug a 12-pack, crank up their pickups, get moving at a good pace, then jump in the back and try to toss a mattress. While that may seem stupid to the average person who has never actually hung out with people who like to get drunk and shoot at each other (images of the Vice President of the United States fill my head right about now), such crazed behavior is crude and embarrassing.

In a word, yes. But that’s the point, I believe, isn’t it?

I hate to admit this, but when I was in high school, my cousins and I (stone sober) would get the old 1965 Chevy pickup up to about 40 mph in a terraced field and see who could jump out and hit the ground running. If you are not drunk, I can promise you, chunking a mattress is like playing Twister with your sister compared to hitting a cow pasture at 40 mph. What goes through your mind is your rear end.

At the Texas redfest, they also had an “Ugly Butt-Crack Contest.” I’m not sure Bic lighters and methane gas were involved, but I’d say there’s a good chance of it.

The revelers gorged themselves on beer (and BBQ, no doubt) and sang and danced and fought and somehow found time to participate in semi- structured games of dubious origin. I am sure there will be naked pictures on the Internet, as there should be.

How long can you hold your breath in a mudhole? Who can grab a pair of mountain oysters (look it up) off a pole with his teeth while riding on the back of a motorcycle? Who can wake up in the bed of his F-150 with the woman he came with? Find your teeth in the grass after the pop-knot contest (also known as who can take the most punches in the face without passing out). These are questions that have to be answered – and likely were. If not, they will be next year.

When the Texas Redneck Games were over, 54 people were sharing accommodations and three squares a day, courtesy of the Henderson County Sheriff’s Department. Only 54? Wimps.

This is great PR for the Games, although organizer Oscar Still could be facing $1,000 fine and 90 days in the slammer for disturbing more than the peace in this conservative community. But that’s the point, right? If you don’t throwdown like a dog show at Michael Vick’s house at a celebration called The Texas Redneck Games (basically everything they’d arrest Oscar for is exactly what you expect to find), then what’s the use of getting all sloppy drunk, swollen-faced and muddy.

If you are honest with yourself, this is about the point in this story where you achingly admit that you have attended an office Christmas party that sounds a lot like the affair above. That’s okay. It happens. Just never tell anyone that you won the Ugly Butt-Crack Contest.

Yeah, I was at the same Christmas party.

“Jerry Jones is a sumbitch and I’ll have some scrambled e’s and Jimmy Dean with biscuits and redeye,” he said, curling his Skoal-toned lips and adjusting his weight to accommodate a belt buckle big enough to serve a pizza on. He wasn’t alone in his appraisal.

“Sumbitch fired the greatest coach in pro football,” said a rail- thin young man eating chicken-fried steak and mashed potatoes with sweet iced tea – for breakfast. His buckle was pie-plate-big as well, and glinted in the sun streaming through the aroma of Maxwell House, burnt toast and bacon.

“The Cowboys can go straight to hell – and will,” spat another old cowboy across the way, sopping a buttery cat-head biscuit with his gnarled, scarred and calloused fingers. “He’s a sumbitch, all the way.”

“Sumbitch, alright,” grunted another old wrangler sitting at the bar, nursing a chipped cup. “Yessir, a pure-n-T sumbitch.”

As it turned out, maybe they were all right and all wrong, all at once.

1989 was not a good year to live in Texas. The Lone Star economy was gurgling financial red, not crude black. Oil was $10 a barrel. Texas was sucking an empty pipe toward bankruptcy as business after business closed and skyscrapers fell into court-appointed hands. I lost $10,000 trying to sell our house. It was not a pretty time.

Into this turgid maelstrom strutted cocksure Jerry Jones with a jailhouse smile, a brutally brusque manner, a chalkboard-scraping, hands-on management style and dry-hole-busting attitude. Worse for Texans, he was from Oklahoma via Arkansas.

“Arkansas sumbitch,” said one of the waitresses, refilling my cup and nodding to me. “Pardon our language, sir.”

I did.

She was stout, work-muscled, freckle-tanned and wearing a big belt buckle just like the men. Seemed Jerry Jones had a rep as a “sumbitch” with anybody who wore a big buckle.

“Thought he was from Oklahoma,” said the skinny cowboy.

“Arkansas, Oklahoma – sumbitch either way,” she grinned. They all laughed.

Jerry Jones paid Bum Bright $65 million for the once-great team (coming off a 3-13 season) and swallowed upwards of $100 million of the franchise’s debt when he took over (not that the cowboys in the cafe knew or cared about those details). America’s Team was partly just that; the government owned 12 percent of the outfit from a failed loan. Jerry had a long row to hoe.

His first official act was to fire NFL legend Tom Landry, cementing his “sumbitch” rep with a lot of Texans. He hired his old teammate from Arkansas, Jimmy Johnson, coach of the University of Miami. “Jimmy Jumpup” – as he was known because of his endless energy back when he and Jones played for the Razorbacks – became “Jimmy Who?” in Miami when he followed Howard Schnellenberger, who’d given the university a taste of winning with a national title in 1983. But “Jimmy Who?” went 52-9 and won a national championship with the Hurricanes. “Jimmy Why?” led the Cowboys to a 1-15 first season.

One night at The Grapevine Steakhouse, a diehard fan said to me about Jerry and his new coach, “Sumbitch ain’t just a sumbitch, he’s a losin sumbitch. And he hired another losin sumbitch as coach. Two sumbitches.”

But Jerry ignored his critics and bulled his way through losing and tough economics by meddling and wheeling and dealing and “coaching” from the owner’s box. His little oil company kept him in cash flow and his guts kept him in the news. Before anybody could say, “Set, down, hut,” the “sumbitch” was on top of the NFL world as Johnson, Troy Aikman, Emmitt Smith, Michael Irvin and America’s Team grabbed up two Super Bowl trophies in quick succession. Then Jerry got crossways of Jimmy and hired Barry Switzer, and the Cowboys won their third Lombardi Trophy.

Besides winning games, Jerry turned the Cowboys into an unprecedented cash Cowboy machine. And lost 60 pounds doing it.

While the last few years have been profitable, they’ve been lean in the win column. Jerry changed coaches often (not unusual in sports). But not even legendary Bill Parcels could turn the Cowboys into a championship team, and he left at the end of last season. Wade Phillips is the new coach, and while that may not exactly curl the toes of die- hard fans’ Ropers, Jerry Jones’ new stadium digs in Arlington should twist their little piggies like the witch after Dorothy’s house landed on her.

About a good line drive away from beautiful Rangers Ballpark in Arlington, Jones is showing other NFL owners what $1 billion can build. Adios, Texas Stadium, hello, Mama. The Cowboys’ new playhouse will dwarf every other NFL stadium in audacity and size and shock and awe and every other category imaginable. Seating upwards of 100,000, it will be the mother, father, grandparents and third cousin of all ballparks. The yet unnamed, Jetson-ish, luxury-packed entertainment behemoth will host the 2011 Super Bowl whether the Cowboys get there or not (likely not). And it even has a funky hole (retractable, unlike the old one) in the roof as a nod to Texas Stadium’s retro concrete, deep fryer environment.

But this isn’t remotely like the old place – or anyplace really. The word impressive doesn’t have enough syllables to describe this thing. Check it out: http://stadium.dallascowboys.com

Yeah.

Jerry may not be the most likable “sumbitch” around (even other NFL owners probably don’t store his number in their cell phones for when they come up short and need a golf partner), but you have to hand it to him – he puts his money where his mouth is. And his mouth is all over.

As one of the most innovative owners in pro sports, he stood up and fought the NFL on broadcast rights and won. Because of that move, every other owner can thank Jerry when they cash those freakishly big checks these days. He turned money-sucking stadiums into cash machines and branded like Steve Jobs. Through ball-busting audacity, he turned a debt-riddled loser into a team/brand/giant worth $1.2 billion, according to Forbes. Think of a 1,800 percent increase in shareholder value –and Jerry’s the shareholder.

I talked to a friend of mine in Texas last night. We hit the usual topics like weather and old friends, and then it got serious as our words turned to football. He mentioned the recent article in Sports Illustrated about Jerry Jones and his massive new stadium.

“The Cowboys will be back,” he said.

“With Wade Phillips as coach?” I asked.

“Maybe not this year. But Jerry will by-gawd find a way to bring our Cowboys back.”

“Sounds like Texans have embraced Jerry in a more positive way than they did when I lived there,” I said.

He paused and then laughed in a rumble under his breath, like thunder in the Hill Country.

“Well, it’s true; Jerry is still a sumbitch,” he said. “But he’s our sumbitch.”

One morning before the sun came up, we were on a huge ranch north of Fort Worth, Texas, shooting cowboys rounding up longhorns. As we were about to start shooting, the entire herd gets upset stomachs – a kind term for what actually happened. Hundreds of bovinae suddenly unloaded everywhere as if on cue, like their colons were on a synchronized timer. The aroma hung in the air for miles.

While the real cowboys were working on this stinky setback, I stood over next to a fence watching and wondering how they would wash all those longhorns. What I didn’t see was the meanest horse on the ranch sneaking up behind me. He was taller than the other horses and had a Jack Nicholson air about him. Suddenly, he’d peeled his floppy horse lips back and protruded a pearly white set of giant teeth and chomped down on a mouthful of me.

If you have never been hoisted into the air by the skin of your back, you can’t clearly comprehend the pain involved. As he swung me around, two old ranch hands saw the action and moseyed on over. One looked up at me as I flailed in the pungent air and, with a sardonic cowboy drawl, said the obvious, “Looks like he’s got ya there.”

Yeah. I could feel a kidney and part of my liver going down Mean Mr. Ed’s throat before Hoss decided that the best course of action was to cold-cock the animal. He hit the horse on the nose with a roundhouse left hook which, of course, caused the horse to clinch his teeth even harder.

Now instead of operating out of playful mischief, the horse was snarling and angry. He snorted loudly and slung me about 10 feet like a cheap pet store toy and I did the only thing I could think of: I jumped over the fence. And landed in the freshly extruded ocean of longhorn dung. Strange as it sounds, at that particular moment, it was the better of the two options.

I was no worse for the biting and finished the shoot with a bruise between my shoulder blades the size of Steven Tyler’s mouth. The old cowboys all gathered around me at sunset and said, “You’re one of us now. Welcome to the ‘Got bit by the meanest horse in Texas’ Club.”

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.