The Times & Travails of Manny

Got out of bed, poured a cup of coffee, added a splash of half & half and looked on unbelievingly as it instantly curdled. Not a good start to my Thursday morning and despite a Christian tongue I did let loose with a few loud “Damn! Titty-Titty, Damn Damns!” Nobody wants to get in the car to drive five miles for more half & half when they’re standing at the kitchen counter in nothing but a pair of ratty shorts at 7:00 A.M. 

Thirty minutes later a fresh cup of coffee with a splash of good-until-next-month half & half erased my sour temper. 

By anyone’s count it has been much too long since I gave some attention to writing in this blog. Not surprising how practice can easily dwindle away, every day aims becoming once a week goals and soon enough something that was once a week diminishes to an infrequent trickle. I have to hope it isn’t the nature of life in these woods around Old Dixie Lane that has turned my head from spending more time in Scriblets. It prompts the question, what is the nature of life in these woods? 

Manny and Jimmy were barbecuing Mexican sausages across the fence late yesterday before sunset. Back at the edge of the woods where Jimmy’s trailer is set up, it’s nasty to imagine what the mosquitos must’ve been like around their picnic table. Jimmy’s sister, Jean threw him outta the house because she had company coming, told him he could buy a trailer to park out in the backyard. And he did. Then she upped his rent from 400 to 500 a month, her own brother. Since he had that quintuple bypass surgery last summer, and with an assumed prognosis of little time left, he’s busy drinking himself to death, trying to spend the 50,000 in savings he’s got left. Jimmy is a Vietnam vet living off his pension, which seems to do him okay. Thin as a rail, somewhere in his early 60s, I guess. Along those jungle paths back in the day he got shot up and came home with a Purple Heart. Now he smokes funny cigarettes and drinks all day long every day. I don’t see much of Jimmy but sometimes hear his 70s rock booming out of the trailer. Manny says he plays it so loud they can’t hear each other talk inside the trailer, have to go outside and sit in the mosquitos.

Speaking of Jean, about a week ago I walked over with Farina to say hello around 4:30 and stayed until 7:00 sipping on Randy’s nasty Canadian whiskey and ginger ale. Jean sat across from us throwing back Southern Comfort on the rocks. At one point Manny came tooling down the road on his lawn mower pulling a baggage cart, come to pick up some laundry Jean had done for him (a bedcover she said later hadn’t been washed in 36 years) and without even the foam off of one beer managed to drive his mower and cart bang into Jean’s car, a broadside to the passenger door. In her state, Jean didn’t give a damn but Manny was discombobulated. Conversation came around to pests in the area and Jean announced she wouldn’t harm a single pink hair on an armadillo’s belly and even enjoyed watching two babies play out in her yard. Two seconds later she told us if she ever got her hands on one of those guys who raise fighting dogs she wouldn’t hesitate to put a bullet through his medulla oblongata and walk away like she’d just swatted a fly. Me and the dawg didn’t get home until after dark, treading carefully along the dirt road, eye out for night vipers.

Hard to understand Randy and Jean getting all over Manny for fattening a wild hog in his pen down the road. Not sure how they did it, but they badgered him into letting the hog free, saying it was cruel to pen it up for fattening and eventual death on the chopping block. Wild hogs are popular with hunters in these parts, a delicious meat for the table which is what it’s all about for Manny and his small government pension, barely enough to live on. Missing the point, Randy and Jean tell him if he wants to eat roast pork to go to the supermarket and buy it. Not the first time they’ve freed his catch, last year they sent Jimmy down to Manny’s place when he was gone and let loose another wild pig he was fattening. Well, Jean is a forceful kind of animal lover, but she’s given up on me and the pesky critters. I told her she better make sure those not so cuddly armadillos stay on the south side of the fence because I’ll blast them to smithereens without blinking an eye and go off hunting more of them.

Manny had a roadkill cookout last week but nobody showed up so he was unhappy about that. Walked up here later, grumbling, bringing his insurance guidebook and needing help picking an eye doctor out from the list inside. I looked at the book for ten minutes and told him I couldn’t find any eye doctors, full of dentists, orthodontists and periodontists, without an eye doctor in the bunch. So he took the book on next door to have Jean, a former blood technician study it. Last time Jean drove him to the doctor, the doctor was head down over Manny’s lab report when Jean snatched it out of his hand to get a look at it herself. The doctor told Manny when he was leaving not to bring that woman back again. 

Hallelujah! The county tractor came to mow down the head-high weeds on the verge of our road. Farina had a conniption fit, running up and down the fence line barking her fool head off. We’ve needed those weeds chopped down for a while now. The last time they sent a guy out here who’d never done it before and he drove his ginormous tractor halfway down into the canal and came out of it with a dozen water moccasins coiled around the underside. 

Big mufflers on muscle cars are rumbling hard across the way. Haven't laid eyes on another person today but the air has been seasoned with gunshot and roaring engines, pow! and vroom! all day long. Doesn’t bother me much, all part of the soundscape out here. Distant airplanes, trains, birdcalls, barking, lawnmowers, and who could ignore the goats that at a certain time of day conduct goat talks that sound like recess at the nuthouse.

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Life gets serious around here once in a while and there are always a few books to enjoy in the cool of my back porch. A couple of good ones here of late that I’ve given thought to writing about but always falling short in my distraction with dawg, yard or visit from Manny. Here is a list of some recent good reads that have impressed me.

                

                

                                   

The Bone Collector (1997) by Jeffrey Deaver — This first in a long series featuring forensic criminologist Lincoln Rhyme is surely one of the best and most compelling crime novels ever. It offers a fascinating look into the history of New York City as well as introducing a devilish serial killer pitting himself against a bed-ridden detective.

Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983) by Andrew Hodges — A big book of 800 pages about Alan Turing, the man who helped break the Nazi Enigma codes in WW2 and was also the first to conceive of thinking machines (computers). An awful lot of math, logic and physics but nonetheless a satisfying look into the man Turing was and the tragedy of his short life.

The Martian (2014) by Andy Weir — No, not science fiction, but an incredibly convincing tale about a fictional astronaut’s time on Mars. This first novel by a software engineer-space hobbyist is funny, compelling and believable down to the last tiny piece of space hardware. This one went from blog to Kindle to bestseller to movie deal in a matter of months.

All the Light We Cannot See (2014) by Anthony Doerr — A Pulitzer Prize winner and National Book Award finalist, this one tops my list of books read this year, an exquisitely written story of a young blind girl finding her way through the rubble of WW2. 

Sympathy for the Devil (2015) by Michael Mewshaw — The latest biography of the iconoclastic and prolific writer, Gore Vidal. With such a colorful life to work with, the writer has balanced well both the serious and outlandish sides of his subject. Vidal was a remarkably intelligent man who could turn his words from reason to scandal in the blink of an eye and Mewshaw catches all the colors and shadings.

Armadillos & Leprosy

‘Nothing at the time was more peculiar to me than the armored mammal of Louisiana, the armadillo, which I had seen dead on the road as I traveled to relatives in Baton Rouge. It was a thing aggressively obsolete in animal history but still mucking its way along, its stupid ranks torn to flat bits by modern autos on pavement laid down through the bogs. I could not know how closely related these creatures were to the poor lepers themselves. Among animals, only armadillos have leprosy. At Carville…I saw the doubloons from last year's Mardi Gras at Carville were imprinted on one side with an armadillo.’

                       —from Old Terror, New Hearts by Barry Hannah

The past year of rural life along the unpaved roads of central Florida has been an experience made tactile by more than a few battles with some of the area’s natural inhabitants, creatures here long before any of us two-legged wanderers decided to stop and call it home. Native of Louisiana, it’s hard to imagine wild things in Florida that weren’t a regular sight in my bayou homeland, but for one reason or another, these Florida woods have engendered a deeper exposure. The swarms of mosquitos were at first a constant bother, soon joined by hairy caterpillars and legions of fire ants. That nuisance was soon replaced by an invasion of squirrels not satisfied with the bird feeder and finding a way inside the house. Night toads I kick away from the door on a regular basis. I’ve stumbled upon rat snakes, black snakes and even a rattlesnake and one day watched as a six-foot alligator swam past my driveway. One way or another, I’ve managed these invaders, but what continues to plague the happy green of my yard is a nightly mob of armadillos on the hunt for grubs. For many, armadillos are those nasty flattened blobs seen squashed on highways. The reason so many end up as roadkill is a result of their odd habit of jumping vertically three to four feet in the air when startled. Armadillos end up as roadkill when they leap up against the grill or underside of passing vehicles, their hardshell armor as useless as chiffon when crashing against a steel box traveling at high speed. 

The name comes from a Spanish word meaning “little armored one,” but recent experience has made me think of these ancient varmints as something closer to abominable and not particularly little. In the palmetto scrublands of coastal Florida I wage daily battles with these ugly mammals that have been nosing around the southern United States for something like 65 million years. Five mornings out of seven I walk out into the somewhat wild acre of land surrounding my house to find wide swaths of grass that appears to have been exploded by a dozen or so buried cherry bombs—trademark of the nightly feeding habits carried out by the local armadillo population digging for grubs and turning my pampered yard into a plowed mess.   

Growing to the size of a terrier dog, the armadillo’s upper body is encased in a bony carapace with large shields on the shoulders and rump and nine bands in between. It has four toes on its front feet, the middle two being the longest, while the hind foot has five toes, the middle three the longest. All four feet are tipped with large, strong claws. The tail is long and tapering and completely covered by bony rings. In coloring, it is brownish gray with scattered hairs that can be yellow-white or even pinkish along the belly. For teeth it has only several peg-like molars. On average, nine-banded armadillos are about 30 inches in length, with a tail measuring close to 13 inches. Adult males weigh from 11 to 17 pounds, the females, 8 to 13 pounds. Overall it is possibly uglier even than the Predator that Arnold Schwarzenegger battled in the 1987 movie of that name. 

The nine-banded armadillo, the species found in the southern U.S., digs burrows and sleeps for long periods, up to sixteen hours a day, then forages in the early morning and evening for beetles, grubs, ants and other insects. They have very poor eyesight but utilize a keen sense of smell to hunt. They use strong legs and huge front claws for digging, and long, sticky tongues for extracting ants and termites. In addition to bugs, armadillos eat small vertebrates, plants, and some fruit. On occasion they will eat carrion. It moves quickly, and when necessary can remain under water for as long as six minutes. The density of the animal’s armor will cause it to sink in water unless it swallows air, inflating its stomach to twice normal size and raising its buoyancy, allowing it to swim across narrow streams and ditches. Solitary animals, they do not share their burrows with other adults.

Often used in the study of leprosy, armadillos are among the few known species that can contract the disease systemically. Humans can acquire a leprosy infection from armadillos by handling them or eating armadillo meat. Before the arrival of Europeans in the late 15th century leprosy was unknown in the New World, so given that armadillos are native to the Americas, they must have acquired the disease from humans at some point.

If moth balls don’t do the trick, the next step is to order a few bottles of coyote urine to sprinkle around their regular entry points. According to some, the armadillo’s keen sense of smell is inflamed by the odor of moth balls. They are also acutely attuned to the scent of their worst enemy’s urine and will not enter an area where a coyote has left its mark.