Devil’s Canyon
H. P. LOVECRAFT ONCE said that life is a hideous thing, but I think what he really meant to say was that the most hideous things have a way of making themselves right at home in your life.
The first one felt like a little nip, or perhaps a flick. It was the kind of sensation you get when you scratch an itch on your ribs and then suddenly feel a tingling sensation at your neck. As I moved my hand down to swat away the unwelcome visitor, I felt many more of them. And they apparently felt me too, because they clung themselves onto my hand faster than a great white sinking its teeth into the blubber of a chunky seal.
I raised my right hand up to my face and just stood there like a frozen mummy, with my jaw loosely dangling downward toward the Earth. My hand was red and it was no longer moving. Or perhaps I should say that my hand was still, but the creatures covering it were moving. Thousands of them. They were red and bulbous and they were the most hideous things I had ever seen. And they moved so fast! Here and there and everywhere. They either had a specific place they were trying to go, or they were completely insane and were running about in every possible direction without any real function or purpose. My instinct told me that the former was true.
I had heard rumors of the Killer Red Ants of Devil’s Canyon, but I dismissed such stories as mere folklore. In the age of the Internet, I have learned to believe only what I read in physical books. But a rumor becomes the truth real fast when it is crawling all over your hand.
The pain started before I had time to even shake my hand or try to rub myself off on a boulder along the side of the hiking trail. My hand felt as if it were going to explode at any moment — as if someone had hooked up a bicycle pump to my thumb and had pumped the lever up and down faster than two coal miners on one of those old pump train carts that skid down the tracks in black-and-white old-timey silent movies.
They were all over my leg also, marching in 300 single file lines from the top of the anthill (which I had clumsily stepped on while enjoying a drink of water from my canteen) up and over my REI hiking boot, across my thick wool sock, and straight up onto my precious and vulnerable human flesh. The pain and sense of intense pressure at my leg mirrored that of my hand, as if my two body parts had correlated this horrible dance of agony with my central nervous system.
As I looked off into the horizon, the mountains became blurry, and I noticed that the turkey vulture circling directly above me seemed to have suddenly sprouted an identical twin who made his every movement in perfect tandem with his twin brother. My stomach felt “sour” as they say on the bottle of TUMS that sits politely in my medicine cabinet waiting to be used after a hard night of drinking. Each breath became more and more difficult to take, as if the overweight bully in my sixth grade class had beaten me up on the playground and was now sitting on my chest.
My legs became weak, and I felt myself crumple to the ground like a wet dish rag.
* * *
I was 10 years old and I was riding my BMX bike to the arcade at the mall so I could play Kung Fu Master with the eight quarters that I had found in the various junk drawers around our house. I was listening to the Walkman I got for my birthday and Van Halen was telling me to Jump. I was too young to understand the music, but all I knew was that Van Halen had the most badass album cover of all time and their drummer was hitting the drums so hard that he sounded like he could kill a T-Rex with his drumsticks if he really had to.
From a 10-year-old boy on my bike, I drifted to my first time on stage with a guitar slung over my shoulder. I was 14 years old and I had hair that was longer than most of the women in my family. I was nervous and I was sweating and my mouth was dry and my heart was beating so fast that I was starting to wonder whether 14-year-olds could have heart attacks. The drummer was playing and the snare drum was snapping in my ear and the dude from my algebra class with the bushy blonde hair was standing at the front of the stage, screaming into the mic like a Civil War soldier who was having his leg amputated after the Battle of Gettysburg.
I was then standing at an altar, wearing a black tuxedo with a white shirt and a white bow tie and a matching white vest. A beautiful woman in a white dress and flowing blonde hair was walking toward me, with a bouquet of some sort of flower I could not pronounce clutched gently in both of her hands. I was nervous again, but not the kind of nervous that I was when I was standing on stage with my band for the first time. This was the type of nervousness that comes when the weight of an entire lifetime sits upon your shoulders.
As the beautiful woman with the flowing blonde hair walked closer and closer to the altar, a heavy darkness fell upon me and I fell down below fast, as if a trapdoor to the bowels of the universe had fallen open beneath my patent leather shoes.
* * *
There was some swearing. Not the type of swearing that you hear from lowlife drunks at a bar, but the type of swearing that comes from the mouths of people who originate from good families.
“I’ll be damned. What in God’s creation happened over here? What in tarnation, are those ants?”
They were slapping at my body and pouring water from a jug over my head. My mind was returning to Earth, but it was returning ever so slowly. They were still all over me, but many of them had been brushed away. The people had placed their hands beneath my arms and were helping me to my feet. I continued to slap and kick the ants away, one at a time.
“We’ve got to get him to a hospital. He can barely breathe and his face is so swollen that it looks like it is going to explode. There is no way we’re putting him in the car, though. Get the rope.”
Nearby, I heard the hollow popping sound of a trunk of a sedan opening. Although my eyes were swollen almost completely shut, I could see black luggage racks creating a blurry outline along the top of a Honda Accord. Before I knew what was happening, my hiking boots were stomping along the dark blue hood of a stranger’s car, then climbing up the top of the windshield and onto the luggage racks.
“Really sorry about this, partner. Just sit tight, and keep your head low. We’ll get you to the hospital in no time.”
The man and his wife wrapped rope tightly around my thighs, stomach, and chest, as I looked straight up into the sky, shielding my eyes from the harsh sun with the palm of my hand. It was hard to breathe, but I managed. I heard the screeching of tires along a desolate highway, followed by a sensation that I was flying like a drunken eagle along an empty desert landscape.
Despite the heat of the desert, the movement of the car and the wind on my face felt refreshing. There were still a few of them left on my arms and legs, but the wind was blowing them off, one by one. I closed my eyes and laid my head back onto the flimsy metal that provided shelter for the car’s passengers. I looked back down at my legs one more time, and noticed that all of them were gone.
© J.S. Lender 2020
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