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Piss Ants and Horned Toads
By Celia McClinton They watched the pair of horned toad lizards. The one in the center of the harvester ant mound, a mound with a radius as long as she was tall, did push-ups to some internal reptilian rhythm. Up-down-up-down, its whitish belly flashing brightly in the hot sunlight at the crest of each repetition. Its mate sat stiller than a stone except for an occasional burst of motion. Those sudden explosions always surprised and delighted her. No matter how hard she concentrated, she always failed to discern that moment of sudden death, but she was certain that the abrupt action had reduced the universe’s population of harvester ants by at least one. Not that it mattered. There would always be piss ants, as every child, belle, matron, and preacher called them. There would always be piss ant mounds, two to the acre and neither more nor less, and on each mound there would always be two predacious horned toads feeding on the ants like a pair of cows in an infinite meadow. The absolute certainty of piss ants and horned toad lizards reassured her. He admired the sparkle in his cousin’s lime green eyes as she studied the pair of lizards. She was a constant marvel thrilling him beyond words. Her auburn hair astonished him the most. Its color was richer and more vivid than all the other reds surrounding them. The reddish brown of the lizards contrasted with the pale orange of the half-inch long ants. Red dust tinted the mesquites’ gray bark and masked the thin green of their leaves. That same dust encrusted the lower boles of those ramose trees making them ruddier toward the base until they finally merged into a soil so red it seemed to glow. The gritty loam derived from still brighter sandstone bedrock. Cliffs of it hung above them. Only the early morning sky, a Persian blue freshened by dew and the night’s calm, provided relief from the theme of eternal red, and even that gave way in the day’s heat and wind to a blinding white-haze that somehow hinted of red. They turned their attention back to the river, the Brazos, where they would spend the rest of the day fishing its waters that rippled clear as crystal over russet sandstone. In the afternoon’s stifling heat, they would also swim, immodestly and innocently naked. Years later, when life had become something more serious, they walked along the same trail on the river’s bank. They held hands, she was demure and shy, and a horned toad skittered ahead of them, its strides awkward and waddling but still sufficient to carry it faster than a man can run. We always assumed they would marry, and maybe we assumed that because it was what they assumed, and maybe agreed to, if they ever even spoke of it. Some said they did marry just he was taken away, but others denied it. The Army settled our arguments when it told her first, even before his mother, that he was missing. By then she was working in the county library and living in the tiny house she’d inherited from her father. Its row of rooms, all in a line, sat astride the narrow lot on 3rd Street, like a line of railroad cars on a siding. Later, she got the postcard with its black eagle wings on either side of a circle surrounding a black swastika. Below was the note scrawled with a pencil stub by his very own hand, so we came to know that he was a prisoner of war and alive, or at least he had to have been when he wrote the note four months before. But he didn’t come home to her and the little house on 3rd Street until sometime after the war’s end. He was still cadaverous and skeletal, a grim stick-figure caricature, of himself. Everyone said he was a hero, but secretively, some wondered how a man who’d let himself be captured could be a hero. Even if their cause was hopeless, heroes fought to the death, didn’t they? He himself never spoke about any of it. Not about a bitter-cold, gray world under a canopy of blue-black evergreens that contrasted so completely with the warm reds of his every experience. He even remembered the snow, sometimes so deep it came up to the tank’s turret, as purple blending monotonously into black. He never told about fighting till there was no ammunition and no gas for the tanks or about being ordered to surrender so that the Germans would have to feed them. He never told about the daily ration of stale bread or the uncertainty of the weekly cup of watery potato peeling soup, that nourished him and kept him alive through the long winter that gave way to a bleak, cheerless, desolate spring of steady rain, pelagic mud, and the unceasing grumble of distant artillery fire. He never told about being marched east until they could hear the Russian guns and then west until they could hear the American or British guns and then turning around to march the other way again. He never talked about what happened to those who fell behind. He never told about carrying Earl Dabney on his back until he was so weak he had to set him down and walk away. He never spoke of that single shot that still exploded in his mind at the oddest of moments. He never spoke of any of this. Or if he did, it was only to her, and she never spoke of it to anyone. At first, he just sat on the front porch of that tiny house on 3rd Street. He always sat in the full sun no matter how hot it got, as if he were trying to absorb the sun itself. And over time he filled out again so he looked more like himself, but it was never right, he could never shed that gloomy, cheerless complexion. Eventually he went to work down at Jacksboro Industries where he repaired large engines for farm and oil field equipment. People said he was damn good at it, too. After all, he’d a lot of experience tinkering with tank engines all over North Africa and much of Europe. But anyone who studied him even a little could tell his heart wasn’t in it. More and more, he took to that wilderness that was the Brazos River’s bottom. He said he was hunting but that wasn’t so, and she knew it, as did the rest of us. He never came back with anything to show for his effort, and sometimes he even forget to take a gun with him. Finally he just disappeared into that wilderness. Every now and then, she’d go walk along the trail by the river where they’d played as children and where they’d walked hand in hand while they courted, and he always anticipated her, coming to that trail to meet her even before she knew she was going to it herself. He never failed but once. They would walk together holding hands while a horned toad scuttled along ahead of them, and sometimes she would trim his hair and beard that had grown long and shaggy. Sometimes she brought him a new shirt or trousers and once or twice a new pair of brogans. But mostly they sat in quiet conversation and occasionally she would notice a piss ants’ mound with its pair of horned toad lizards. She was never angry, only sad, and at a distance they looked as if nothing had gone wrong. Only so much had. Sometimes, one or the other, and sometimes both, would stare up at the vermeil cliffs high above them. From their tops, Comanche or Kiowa once peered into the trough of the Brazos while on their interminable hunts and endless wars. Beyond, the steppe spread away, a carpet of grass disappearing into a horizon of enduring solitude. But, nothing had endured. The Comanche and Kiowa had gone off to Oklahoma and oblivion, and cattle replaced buffalo. At first, they were sinewy, ill-tempered long-horned beasts with the glint of wildness in their eyes, but these have been replaced by white-faced cattle with blank, bovine stares suggesting a complete absence of will or even curiosity. As cumbersome as bricks, even their walking seems miraculous, but they can eat and to prove it, they’ve eaten the steppe bare. A red-tinged, gray-green forests of mesquite, its canopy too thin to provide shade for a ground devoid of life and nutrients, replaced the grass. Where there had been a horizon, there was now only a maze of wrinkled mesquite branches. For a time, people tried to pasture Angora goats in these thickets and the land started to smell like the disastrous African bush it so much resembles. While Dallas businessmen sporting patent-leather cowboy boots spewed platitudes about progress and bought political offices in Austin and Washington, a swath of destruction spread across Texas and nobody noticed or gave a damn. Somehow the piss ants and horny toads survived even this. Eventually the Dallas businessmen got around to damming the Brazos where its reservoir would flood that part of the river he called home. The businessmen wanted recreational homes and shops to sprout along the shores of what they would call Coatimundi Kingdom Lake. Even the name is a lie: their lake is a reservoir, and no Coatimundi has ever been within a thousand miles of it. But what they got was something quite different. A Japanese weed infested the reservoir. It killed the fish before dying itself. Then, when the wind is right, co-eds at Texas Christian University, over a hundred miles away, gag on the reservoir’s putrefying stench. When the smell fades, the plants re-sprout and the debacle begins again. An army of chemists struggles to find an efficient herbicide that doesn’t also kill laboratory mice or melt glass test tubes. But that was all in the future. While politicians debated not so much the wisdom of the proposed project but who would pay for it, an English professor at Southern Methodist University wrote a book bidding the river farewell. In it, he wrote about the river’s hermits and how the children enjoyed tormenting them whenever they found where one lived. This simply wasn’t so. Most children were too frightened of the river’s madmen to pester them, and anymore, few children are skilled enough in woodcraft to survive an excursion into that wilderness. But we did worry about what might become of him when the reservoir began to fill. It turns out we worried for nothing. She went out early one Saturday, and for the first time, he wasn’t there to meet her. She waited all day and then contacted the county sheriff. He reassured her, but the next morning, he went back into that wilderness just to reassure himself. The sheriff found him lying on his makeshift bed in the lean-to he had built under the red sandstone cliff that he and she had often admired when the evening sun set it aglow. Nearby a pair of bobbing horned toads faced each other on a piss ant mound of lunar proportions but the sheriff missed noticing them. They buried him in pale yellow soil of the Pioneer’s Cemetery, and she never went back to the trail along the river, the trail where they had played and where later they had courted, the trail where she had spent so long trying to understand his wounds. It is just as well, since very soon after his death the trail and its piss ants and horned toad lizards drowned in 60 feet of putrefying water. She lived the rest her life in quiet solitude. There was only one other noticeable event. Ours had been a “sunset county,” meaning we didn’t let any blacks stay in it overnight. That came to a stop not because we were suddenly enlightened but because some court somewhere outlawed the practice of dumping an offending black at the border of the next county where they were quickly picked up and moved on to the next county. Any black on his way to Los Angles could have gotten a free ride most of way to El Paso though this was only theoretical since the issue never really arose. Hell, if we’d known any better, most of us wouldn’t have wanted to stay in the county over night, either. But when a black finally did move in, the First Presbyterian Church wasn’t inclined to cooperate. It denied him and his family membership even if he was the new high school history teacher and football coach. That’s when she walked out. She shifted her allegiance to the Assembly of God in Holiness Church. It welcomes anyone and everyone, including Snyder’s house cat, though its shockingly active Sunday service scares most neighboring cats into hiding generally until the following Tuesday morning when hunger drives them into the open once again. Voices rise to a fevered pitch while tambourines beat out a wild cacophony. The preacher strips off his coat and tie and rolls up his shirtsleeves to preach Jesus, the Holy Spirit, justification through baptism and blood, and mostly hell’s fire. At any moment, a wild ecstasy can sweep through the congregation driving everyone to frenzy. Everyone except her. It wasn’t that she didn’t agree with the loud, strong message, she just never made the transition from her staunch Calvinism. She could sit unmoved through the wildest hysterics. When she retired from the county library, her routines became petrified. She subsisted on a diet of corn bread or pounded biscuits, side pork, and okra or black-eyed peas. She was not seen in public except on Saturday and Sunday. On Saturday she did her modest grocery shopping. Sunday morning, all of it, was church, and then she walked downtown to the Bullet Café where she ate dinner, a piece of fried fish and an extravaganza of green vegetables boiled to the consistency of mush with a little piece of pork. Sometimes the preacher joined her, not at first because he liked her, but because this strange, quiet, emotionless woman always in the same black dress with its white collar was a curiosity. Eventually, however, he discovered her sadness, and she discovered that his jubilant religion hid a complex, puzzled uncertainty, and knowing such secrets about each other, they could not but become friends of an unruffled, distant sort. So he was anxious all that morning when she failed for the first time to appear at church. He found her on her back porch where she slept on a small cot during the hottest season, and the irony of how the sheriff had found her husband and how he had found her furnished his contemplative moments for the next several decades. The ants were already crawling on her. But these weren’t the large, pale orange carpenter ants so infinite in number that she had known in her childhood, but the invaders, the fire ants. Invasive and aggressive, they attack the piss ants in their nests and destroy them by the millions. The “new” Texans, those carpetbaggers from places like New Haven, Connecticut, have done the rest. They just can’t tolerate a Texas as God made it, with two piss ant mounds to the acre. They’ve applied poison with cock-a-hoop delight. So between the fire ants and the “new” Texans, the impossible has happened. The steadfast infinity of native harvester ants has become a rarity, and as they have disappeared, so have their constant companion and relentless predators, the horned toad lizards. They buried her next to him in the Pioneer’s Cemetery, and at first the preacher was concerned when his friend’s grave attracted a nest of piss ants and then a pair of horned toads. From time to time, he studied the furious activity and thought he should do her the favor of annihilating the infestation. But he never got around to it. *** The Texas horned toad lizard (Phrynosoma cornutum) is a threatened species in Texas (Federal Category C2) and ironically, TCU’s mascot. The term piss ant or puissant has been applied to a wide variety of ants in both Europe and North America. In Texas, I’ve never heard the term applied to any type of ant but the large red carpenter ant upon which the horned toad lizard feeds exclusively. A solid band of “sunset counties” existed west of Forth Worth. The practice and the laws fell into disrepute started during WWII. |
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