10 Tahoe Trap Page 25

  “I’ll shovel twice as fast.”

  “I don’t think you understand how fast fire ants move.”

  “I saw some at Paco’s house. They were running, but it didn’t seem like a big deal.”

  “Have you seen a nest?”

  “Paco’s going to show me where to find some.”

  “When you see it, you’ll know what I mean. Fire ants are frenetic. Frantic. Like they’re in constant panic mode. They run so fast it’s as if they’re dancing on a vibrating platform. The moment you touch them, you’ll get an explosion of movement. Transferring any significant number of ants into a bucket will be a real trick.”

  “I was thinking that I could just scoop with a bucket and then pop the lid on.”

  “Then you’ll crush them,” Street said.

  “I thought they were super tough.”

  “They are, but if you dump enough dirt on top of ants, you’ll immobilize them just like burying a human. They move around underground through their tunnels. Without tunnels, they’d be trapped and eventually die. At least the ones that don’t figure out how to get into your underwear.”

  “Lovely picture.”

  “And when you get ants in a bucket, you can’t just put the lid on, either. They’d suffocate.”

  “Ants need air?” I said.

  “Of course,” she said.

  “I could wrap screen over the top instead of a lid.”

  “Not just the top. They need air down in their dirt. If you had some kind of a miniature lattice network to dump them into, then they’d have air and they wouldn’t get buried with too much weight on them.”

  “Right.”

  There was a pause on the phone. “As a scientist, I should also let you know about the risks of introducing new species into an environment that hasn’t previously seen them.”

  I’d heard about that problem. “Like the bird-eating snakes in Guam?”

  “Yeah. But as I think about it, I don’t think you’d be creating an ecological catastrophe. Fire ants are very temperature sensitive. As soon as they experience a single cold fall night in Tahoe, they will mostly die. The rest will succumb soon after.”

  “Hey, hon?”

  “What?” Street said.

  “You’re a dream.”

  “Because of my expertise?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “All kinds.”

  “Thanks.”

  We said goodbye, and I told Diamond and Paco what she’d said. I didn’t expect Paco to respond, but I thought it was probably good that he have the experience of an adult running ideas past him.

  “Once you get ants,” Diamond said, “you’ll have to be ready to move fast. Even if they’re superhero bugs, they won’t survive long in a bucket.”

  “Which brings up the same point about pepper spray,” I said. “Let’s say we grind up a bunch of peppers. It could be that the potency of the chemical wouldn’t last long. Whatever method we devise for spraying it would have to be ready to go.”

  Diamond finished his last swallow of beer and stood up. “A problem that will be easier to solve after we get some sleep.”

  “Still okay if we use your truck to move around? Salt and Pepper know my Jeep. Your truck would be a good disguise.”

  “Of course,” Diamond said. “Just remember that it barely runs. You might want to put alternative transportation in the back. Bicycles. Or Roller Blades.”

  “We’ll take our chances.”

  “It’s got so many rusted holes it’s like built-in air conditioning.”

  “One of its many attractions,” I said.

  “Be my guest. The key is under the mat.”

  “It won’t fall out one of the holes in the floor?” I said.

  “Not while it’s just sitting still in my drive. Unless you bump the truck hard when you get inside.”

  Diamond fetched two sleeping bags from his camping closet, and he showed us which towels to use in the bathroom. Paco, Spot, and I climbed the steep stairs to the attic bunk room where, a year ago the previous summer, Spot and I had grappled with the killers who came onto Diamond’s roof.

  Diamond’s second floor is one of those classic, fun spaces with an angled ceiling following the roof’s contours, the kind of place where kids naturally like to play. But Paco didn’t even seem to notice.

  There were two bunks, narrow beds tucked under the sloping roof on either side of the room.

  “Which bunk do you want?” I asked Paco.

  He looked around. “Where is Spot sleeping?”

  I pointed to the narrow four-foot area between the beds. “Here, probably.”

  Paco studied it. Realized that the center aisle was equally close to the beds.

  “I’ll sleep on the floor with Spot,” he said. “Then he can use the edge of my sleeping bag. It would make him happy.”

  “Kind of hard, that thin carpet. But as you wish.”

  I helped spread Paco’s sleeping bag on the floor. Spot saw his opportunity to lie on human bedding, and he immediately sprawled across the entire expanse. I had to push him toward the side to make a small area for Paco to lie next to him.

  Paco got down, snuggled close to Spot.

  We lay in the dark for a time. By Paco’s breathing, I could tell that he wasn’t sleeping.

  “Whatcha thinking?” I said.

  “Nothing,” Paco said.

  “You still think trying to catch these superhero guys is a good idea?”

  He was quiet for a bit. “Yeah,” he finally said. “If we don’t catch them, they’ll catch me. Then I’ll have no future.”

  “What do you want for your future?” I asked.

  More silence. “Maybe just to work and make money and buy some good things.”

  “What would you like to buy?”

  “I don’t know. A place where I could stay.”

  “Is that what you wish for? A place of your own?”

  “It doesn’t have to be mine. I just want a place where I don’t have to leave if I don’t want to.”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  The next day Diamond was already gone when we got up.

  While we ate breakfast, I turned on Diamond’s computer and Googled the other aphorism that Paco told me about, the line that Cassie sometimes said.

  ‘The only thing that overcomes hard luck is hard work.’

  It turned out that it was a quote from Harry Golden, a guy who was convicted of mail fraud when he was young. After he was released from prison, he became a writer and through dogged determination became very successful.

  I wondered if Cassie’s prison was housecleaning and if her success at tomatoes was like Harry’s writing. Probably lots of people could grow good tomatoes and experiment with making them better. But Cassie was driven far beyond ordinary gardeners.

  After breakfast, Paco and Spot and I took Diamond’s old pickup and headed out to acquire supplies. We picked up three empty 5-gallon paint buckets and lids at the paint store. The closest thing to a hazmat suit was a painter’s jumpsuit. The store had an extra large, which wasn’t long enough. But I planned to augment it with heavy plastic garbage bags and packing tape. At the hardware store, we got a roll of window screen, aluminum dryer vent pipe, duct tape, flexible dryer vent tubing, a short roll of aluminum flashing, some utility lights, extension cords, and power strips.

  The store also had safety goggles, but they had vent openings and wouldn’t protect our eyes from pepper spray. So we went to a sporting goods store where we got two pair of swim goggles.

  “My harvest tools are in the van,” Paco said. “We’ll need stuff to pick the peppers.”

  “Got it.” I drove to the farm store and followed Paco as he walked down the aisles picking out knives and snips and gloves.

  Back in Diamond’s tiny garage, which he’d set up as a workshop, I handed Paco a shears and showed him how to cut and bend the screen. While he worked the shears, I put a fine-tooth blade in Diamond’s saber saw and cut multiple window openings in the sides of two of t
he paint buckets. I also cut a larger circle in the lids.

  I took a short section of aluminum vent pipe and made cuts in one end to create tabs. After bending them out 90 degrees, I inserted the pipe through the underside of the paint bucket lid so that the tabs rested up against the plastic. With duct tape on the metal tabs, I secured the pipe in place. I now had a bucket lid with a vent pipe coming out of it like a smokestack coming out of a flat-roofed building. Next, I rolled a sheet of flashing to make a large funnel, the small end of which I duct-taped into the smokestack.

  I also duct-taped pieces of window screen onto the inside of my window openings.

  “How you doing on the screen?” I said to Paco.

  He shrugged and handed me a lumpy, round chunk of shiny screen. It was a mangled, knobby contraption about 10 inches long by 14 inches in diameter. It looked vaguely like an asteroid model for a low-budget sci-fi movie.

  “Perfect. You got two of them?”

  Paco handed me another.

  I positioned them both inside the buckets.

  “What’s it for?” Paco asked.

  I pointed to the mini-asteroids. “These will provide air spaces in the dirt so the fire ants can breathe. And these windows let in fresh air. The bucket lids snap on top. I shovel ants and dirt into the funnels. They fall into the bucket. They’ll try to climb out, of course, but it won’t be easy to go up the bucket sides, across the lid, down the protruding funnel, around the edge and out.”

  “They will,” Paco said. “Fire ants can go anywhere. Fast.”

  “Because they’re superhero bugs,” I said.

  Paco nodded, solemn as always.

  “How are we gonna get the ants out of the bucket and into the house?” he asked.

  “Same way we get the pepper spray out of the third bucket. Venturi effect,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “If you blow across the top of a straw, it reduces the air pressure over the straw, which means the air pressure in and below the straw will push up whatever material is in the straw. Probably, the person who figured it out was named Venturi.”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Paco made a slow head shake.

  “You ever used a pesticide sprayer?” I said. “You put the stuff in the sprayer jar and screw on a lid that’s attached to a hose?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Paco said. “And it’s got a tube that sticks down into the liquid.”

  “Right. That’s the straw. Turn on the hose, and the Venturi effect draws the pesticide up and mixes it with the water spray.”

  “I don’t think we should mix pepper spray with water,” Paco said. “It would make it... not so burny.”

  “Right. We don’t want to dilute it. So we won’t use water to spray it. We’ll use air.” I picked up the lid with the vent pipe coming out of it. “But I have to figure out some way to get a high pressure air hose to blow air across the top of this smokestack. Except that a typical air compressor doesn’t put out very much volume. We’d never be able to inject enough pepper spray and ants into a house to drive people out of it.”

  I looked at the bucket lids. “Paco, my plan may have a major flaw. I need more air. I need something that...” I paused.

  “Leaf blower,” Paco interrupted.

  “My God, Paco! That’s brilliant!”

  No smile. Not even a hint of a grin.

  “I can use this other piece of dryer vent,” I said. “I’ll cut a hole in the middle and attach that to the smokestack pipe. We’ll put a flexible dryer hose on one end of the vent pipe, and on the other end we’ll put the leaf blower. The blower will blow high-powered air across the top of the smokestack.”

  I spent an hour cutting and bending flashing and vent piping. When I was done, I had a T-shaped pipe that protruded from the lid. I set the lid on the bucket and showed it to Paco.

  “The leaf blower goes on this end. The flexible hose goes from the other end. The ants come out the flex hose. Will it work?”

  Paco looked into the T-shaped pipe and hose.

  “I think the leaf blower is going to blow the ants into the bucket instead of sucking them out,” he said.

  I looked where he looked. “I think you’re right. I need to create a baffle to direct the blower air over the top of the smokestack and out the flex hose. Then the Venturi effect will work.”

  It took another hour of cutting and bending and taping. Paco watched me the entire time. Periodically, I found ways that he could help. Hold a strip of flashing while I cut it. Crimp a bend with the pliers. Tear some duct tape. Paco was able to put his entire hand inside of the vent pipe, securing the baffle with tape. When we were done, we had two lids with T-shaped vent pipes ready to put onto buckets with ants.

  We still had to have a way to blow homemade pepper spray.

  I took the third bucket lid, cut a much smaller opening, and fit a section of hose through it. The hose went down to the bottom of the bucket.

  “Like a superhero bug sprayer,” Paco said.

  “Yeah. I’ll drill a couple of vent holes in the top to let air in to replace the pepper spray as it gets sucked out.” We cut a small opening in another piece of vent pipe and inserted the hose into it. With Paco’s small hands, we once again created a baffle inside the vent pipe, hoping that it would aid in sucking the pepper spray out, rather than forcing air down into the pepper spray.

  When we were done, I did a kind of a talk-through dress rehearsal. As I spoke, the plan sounded crazier than ever. But I wanted to stay with it because it just might work and because the pepper spray and ants were Paco’s ideas. It would be good for him to witness the power of his thoughts.

  “What do you think?” I asked him when I was done recapping our plan. “You think it will work?”

  Paco shrugged. Affirmative style.

  THIRTY-NINE

  We left before dawn the next morning. I worried that a departure in the morning darkness would bring bad associations to Paco, but, like always, he showed no emotion.

  Diamond’s pickup was ridiculously tight with Spot, Paco, and me all in one seat. I didn’t think that Salt and Pepper would have set up a continuous stakeout at Harrah’s rear parking lot, so I pulled Diamond’s pickup into the space next to my Jeep, and we transferred to the Jeep so that Spot could have his own seat.

  We arrived at Cassie and Paco’s house at 7:30 a.m. I was relieved to see that the landlord’s pickup was gone. We turned through the fence opening and drove down the long dirt road that followed the outside of the fence. Paco’s house stood dark and seemingly untouched since our last visit days before.

  “You want anything in the house?”

  Paco shook his head. It was hard to see a kid who appeared to have no more connection to his own home than a homeless man has for his last curb-side sleeping spot. Either Cassie failed to provide a psychological sense of home, or Paco was a world-record hard case. But when I looked at Paco’s face, rigid and tense, I realized that neither interpretation was correct. He didn’t want to go in because it was too painful. Everything that he’d ever become attached to had been taken away. This house was just one more set of disappointments.

  We parked and got out. Spot ran around, excited to be back in farm smells.

  “Let’s get the peppers first,” I said. I grabbed two of the big plastic garbage bags.

  Paco picked up the bag with the new harvest tools. He led the way around the house to the hothouse. He opened the flimsy door and walked inside. Spot and I followed.

  Spot trotted up and down the aisles, sniffing the planters.

  Paco walked over to the inner door that separated the tomatoes from the peppers. He opened the door and pointed.

  “All the Cassie’s Vipers are in here. Spot can’t come in. Too dangerous.”

  I looked in through the door. Within this side of the hothouse were many peppers. But unlike the large, rounded bell peppers that I bought at the store, these were narrow, bent, squashed, and mostly colored orange or red.

  We stepped in
side and shut the door behind us. Spot sniffed from the other side of the screen.

  I got out the garbage bags. “Any trick to picking them?” I asked.

  Paco pulled gloves out of the bag and handed me the larger pair. Then he handed me a snips. He put on his gloves.

  “Like this,” he said. He held onto the plant and cut the pepper off so that it retained a short stem. “That’s the best way for the plant,” he said.

  I pulled on gloves, and we started picking.

  “Don’t rub your eyes,” Paco said.

  “Got it,” I said.

  “And don’t, you know...”

  “Don’t what?” I said.

  Paco looked down, embarrassed.

  “What, Paco?”

  “If you have to pee, you can’t touch yourself with your gloves. Otherwise, you’ll be doing the hot chili dance.” He looked up at me. “It really burns,” he said, almost pleading.

  “Lesson received,” I said.

  Ten minutes later, we’d filled two garbage bags. They were heavy enough that I worried that they would rip apart. I cradled the bottoms as I carried them back to the Jeep. We put our pepper gloves in the Jeep.

  “Ready for ants?” I said.

  Paco nodded.

  I grabbed my other gloves, my jumpsuit, goggles and other gear, picked up the two customized paint buckets and said, “We’ll follow you.”

  I held onto Spot’s collar. I didn’t want him running into a fire ant nest.

  This time Paco went behind the hothouse and walked toward the far corner. Then he turned and walked diagonally away from the building. He moved slower with each step, eventually stopping and staring out toward the field.

  Paco took very slow tip-toe steps as if he were sneaking up on a sleeping tiger.

  After three steps, he turned and came back to me.

  “Right out there,” he said pointing.

  I wasn’t sure, but I thought his voice had a touch of tremolo in it.

  “Okay, you hold Spot’s collar while I suit up. Don’t let go of him.”