The Mantis

I found it in what is often the way for very tiny things – I simply glanced down at the ground and there it was. The day was a little on the windy side but this did not prevent the black asphalt from nearly shimmering in the heat. The tiny brown nymph couldn’t have been more than a few hours out of the ootheca; all of the adult features were there, the curve of the back and distinctive folded forelimbs, but the head was disproportionately large in the way of neonates and the tiny eyes already shone with the light of an alien intelligence.

I wasn’t worried that it might not survive without my assistance but I wanted to keep it close to me and watch it grow larger. With this in mind I gingerly transferred it into the cellophane from a pack of cigarettes before stepping into Sandy’s Cafe to ask for a small white styrofoam coffee cup and lid. The next order of business was to look for other insects small enough for it to prey on. Ideally I should have made a trap to collect fruit flies, it even would have been easy as I lived in an RV, but I didn’t have mobile data at the time so I just made a mental note to keep my eyes peeled for any critters I could catch of the requisite size.

Well, it was next small order of business anyway, I had bigger reasons for being where I was than the oblique possibility of finding a newborn mantis nymph on the ground.

The parking lot also held a Denny’s but my destination was in the undeveloped arroyo out back through a broken gap in the chainlink fence. If they didn’t have some kind of vehicle, most of the homeless druggies in Thousand Palms lived in a small cluster of willows and cottonwoods back there. It kept both the direct sunlight and the gazes of blight concerned citizens off of their tents and clutter.

Everybody knew they were back there but, like a slightly less sore thumb, they didn’t stick out so much.

I was looking for the beer-bellied blonde kid that went by Truckstop because he usually had the dope that month. No matter who you got it from, all of the tar in Thousand Palms came from this guy Carlos who lived in a trailer out in Indio. For whatever reason his business model was built around cutting his shit to about one fifth of the usual potency then selling it at one fifth of the usual price.

None of us junkies were especially fond of this unique system but it wasn’t like Carlos dropped off customer satisfaction surveys when he met us in a parking lot or on the side of the Del Taco drive through. Occasionally I would run into another member of our select club at the penny slots in the casino and they would rave about how they’d gotten ahold of something that “wasn’t Carlos’s shit” so we’d conduct a small trade. It was always Carlos’s shit.

Anyway I didn’t know Carlos personally yet so I was looking for Truckstop and Truckstop was around and had what I was looking for. He’d been spending large chunks of time alone in the camp and told me about some recent unexpected interactions he’d been having. The roots of the shade trees formed a system of tunnels under the tents and Truckstop said some kind of elves, small, naked people with brown skin and enlarged heads, had been calling to him from these tunnels and occasionally appearing above ground to allow him to catch furtive glimpses.

Now except for us all the homeless druggies of Thousand Palms supplemented their heroin with copious amounts of meth, and being homeless in the desert invariably involves a constant level of minor sun fatigue, so I didn’t immediately put a lot of stock in Truckstop’s account. With that said, I wouldn’t want to entirely dismiss it out of hand either, which is why I’m trying to remember exactly what kind of trees grew around the camp in case any particular desert species has a reputation for housing tiny earth elementals.

I wasn’t as into trees back then so I’m retroactively going with willows and cottonwoods to be on the safe side. Unsurprisingly, willow trees are known for housing elves in European folk lore and the Cottonwood is a spiritually significant tree to Native Americans, with their wood being the preferred carving material for Hopi kachinas. Peruvian Red Pepper is another strong contender for what might have been growing back there.

If I’m ever back in Thousand Palms, I’ll be sure to run back there and get a positive ID. I also wish I’d asked Truckstop a little more about what kind of things the elves had been saying to him, but there’s a lot of things I would have done differently if my primary reason for being there was to conduct an ethnography on elf encounters and not to purchase a small quantity of black tar heroin.

While we were talking I noticed some black ants crawling on the floor of Truckstop’s tent and quickly plucked one up to toss into the cup for my mantis. Truckstop was less happy to see them:

“Fucking ants!”, he grabbed a can of Raid and started indiscriminately spraying the floor, a fact that would soon become significant. The weather was warming up in Thousand Palms and ants were getting to be a problem for everyone, although they somehow never appeared in our RV. I’d been back at the RV with LaPorsha for a minute when the guy everybody called Rico showed up.

Rico appeared in a car from somewhere around the Gulf of Mexico one day and never left. I forget what his actual name was but he was Black and Native American with no Latin American heritage to speak of. Truckstop nicknamed him Rico as a kind of caricature of an overeager Latin paramour, the name fit his personality so it wasn’t going to be going anywhere. Everybody met Rico the morning he arrived because he announced himself by stealing everybody’s phones from the various unsecured outlets we used for charging behind water and ice machines in a meth fueled streak of kleptomania.

Fortunately somebody had seen him do it and he gave all the phones back without any trouble so he was tolerated after that. The standards for belonging to our particular social organization were not especially stringent at that time. By the time of this story he’d lost his car, broken his foot and had no permanent camp that I knew of, all of which contributed to him being in a constant state of sunstroke and heat exhaustion, as he was when he came to our RV’s door.

Rico said he just needed to get out of the sun and off of his foot for a minute so we let him in and gave him some water but there was clearly something more serious going on. He kept having little tics and spasms, punctuated by short screams, as he lay on our floor but any attempt at questioning him as to the nature of this trouble led to the same empty reassurances that he just needed rest and would be fine and on his way any moment here.

Eventually we called the paramedics and they knew what was going on the moment they laid eyes on him. Rico had accidentally injected a trace, but medically significant, amount of bug spray directly into his veins. It hadn’t necessarily been in Truckstop’s tent. People were leaving used cookers and cottons on the ground, then spraying that same ground for ants, all around the homeless camps of Thousand Palms. Scrounging around for discarded equipment in the hopes of extracting traces of water soluble drugs carried this new risk of cross contamination, and Rico clearly wasn’t the first person it had happened to.

I can’t imagine the First Responders were able to do much for him. Not long after they picked up someone else for the same reason, then dropped him back off, still twitching and screaming, a few hours later. They don’t usually give rides in both directions like that but I can see why they would have been hesitant to discharge this particular patient right outside the hospital.

A week or two later the police had a stretch of desert outside the casino taped off and the word was that they’d found a body. Nobody got official confirmation that it was Rico but as he hadn’t been around and no-one else we knew was missing it seemed like a good bet. He was probably limping around out there and lay down in a spot where he wouldn’t have been visible from the road before succumbing to dehydration. Being a homeless drug addict in the desert sucks but it didn’t suck for anybody else nearly as much as it sucked for him.

It almost takes a special effort.

After the paramedics took Rico from our RV I peeked into my cup to see how the mantis was doing with the ant and got a nasty surprise. I’d badly misjudged their relative sizes and the ant was not only nearly double the infant mantid’s size, but apparently some kind of soldier caste with formidable mandibles as well. It had ripped the baby mantis in half – the head, thorax and forelimbs sat in one spot with the abdomen and rear legs in another. All light was gone from the tiny eyes.

The ant had apparently lost all interest in its opponent and was trying to climb up the inside of the far edge of the cup. I walked off of the RV and deposited it gently onto the ground. We were a long way from where I’d found it and, unless they can be somehow absorbed into an alien colony, it probably starved to death out there.