Armadillos & Old Lace Read Online Free PDF Page B

I said. “But do it gently or you’ll scare him. Armadillos almost never get this close to people. Dilly is a very special armadillo.”
    The girls crowded around Dilly and he seemed to luxuriate in all the attention. Some of them stroked his armored shell. Some tickled him behind the ears. He even posed for pictures with the girls like a little primeval spirit come to save the world from itself. For some only slightly sick reason, I thought of Christ in the manger.
    “Of course,” I said, “armadillos have been known to carry leprosy.”
    The two counselors stiffened and recoiled a bit, but the Bluebonnets remained in their attentive circle around Dilly.
    “What’s leprosy?” asked Jessica.
    “Disease where your nose falls off,” I said.
    The girls stopped petting Dilly and looked at me with that serious, half-believing expression children sometimes acquire when they suspect the adult they’re listening to may be insane. I shrugged.
    “Don’t worry,” I said. “They don’t pass it along to people. Only to other armadillos. Besides, Dilly’s already been up to the infirmary and the nurse gave him a health check.”
    As if to demonstrate his general fitness, Dilly jumped about two feet in the air, then bolted inside the trailer with about six little girls almost literally on his tail. Like a young rhinoceros, he slammed into everything in sight, knocking over the forlorn bowls of cat food and water, my guitar, and a small lamp. At incredible land speeds he scooted across the floor, back and forth, with the screaming Bluebonnets alternately running after him and then away from him. Eventually, he bolted out the door and into the night, and I began attempting to shoehorn personnel out of the trailer and back to their bunk.
    “What’s this?” asked Briana, holding up a piece of paper.
    I glanced at the page. It was a sketch of Kerr, Bandera, and several neighboring counties. Four black X’s appeared at various loci on the paper.
    “Where’d you get this, Bri?”
    “I found it on the floor,” she said.
    I looked at the page again. This time, with the little girls standing around me under the moonlight, an almost palpable evil seemed to emanate from it.
    “Is it a treasure map?” Bri shouted.
    “No,” I said. “It’s Dilly’s health chart.”
    At roughly 2:09 in the morning, in the middle of a rather gnarly nightmare about little girls transforming instantaneously into little old ladies, I woke up suddenly to hear a thump on the nonfunctioning air conditioner outside my window. Moments later, the cat jumped through the open window and, either deliberately or accidentally, landed on my testicles.

CHAPTER 9

    I woke up the next morning to the ringing of the old bell by the office and the sounds of radio station ECHO echoing off the hills. The disc jockey, Alex Hoffman, sometimes referred to as Phallax Hoseman, ran the station out of the media room. His first selection, unfortunately, was “The Purple People Eater.” ECHO was staffed and run by the ranchers, but it still reflected Phallax’s rather eclectic influence, ranging from “Wipe-Out” to early Bob Dylan, to “Happy Birthday from the Army,” to “Schwinn 24” by a little-known Texas group called “King Arthur and the Carrots.” ECHO, at Hoseman’s behest, also played Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle” at least two hundred times a day.
    The cat was sleeping beside me on the bed and, except for a rather irritated look in her eye, showed no signs of joining me to face the day. It was quite evident, however, from the way she was twitching her left ear, that she did not like the song “Purple People Eater.”
    “I’ll be sure to mention it to Phallax,” I told her, as I put on my boots, opened the creaky door of the green trailer, and stared at the large porthole painting of a cross section of a watermelon. The painting had been done many years ago by a talented, somewhat eccentric counselor named Jules LeMelle who’d