Looking for God 

Three boys: Edwin, Berol, and Raymon, helped drill a shallow oil well in Central Tejas in 1975. The well was a dry hole. The drillers offered the trio work, so they relocated there. The nearest town was named Caca Springs. They rented a stone cottage outside town.

Raymon was a cat enthusiast. He brought a female from Dalice. It had a bad habit. It would briefly watch an LP record turn, then leap onto it, and scratch the vinyl so badly it would from then on make a staccato crackling like popping corn.

Raymon contacted the proprietor of a beanery in Caca Springs who had two large felines in back of his place of business. They ate table scraps. Raymon asked him if he could have the male. The guy told him if he could catch it, he could have it.

Raymon hornswoggled Edwin into helping capture the beast. The plan was, Edwin would hold open a canvas bag while Raymon stuffed the cat into it. The cat hadn't been briefed on the plan, and it was uncooperative. They walked up to the cafe's back door nonchalantly, and while Raymon talked gently to it, Edwin opened the bag.

As soon as Raymon's hands tightened on it, the cat knew something was up. Its claws fastened on the edges of the open bag when Raymon tried to thrust it in. He pulled it free, and it proceeded to mortally muck up his forearms with its claws. Three more times Raymon pulled it loose and tried to stuff the cat into the bag. Each time it grabbed the bag's neck with its claws.

"Get 'im off me!" Raymon cried.

Edwin crammed the bag over both the enraged cat and Raymon's bloody forearms, then drew the string shut. Raymon pulled his arms out one by one. They took it to the rock house and released it. It ran off straightaway, and eventually found its way back to Caca Springs.

The next day, Raymon and Edwin drove out to the city dump, just to see if there were any pickings to be had. A dog materialized with a swollen neck and several unmistakable fang marks thereon. Edwin kept a jug of water in the truckbed for emergencies and found a hubcap to pour some in. The cap was refilled until the jug was empty. The thirsty animal drank the whole gallon. They drove back to a convenience store, pooled their fiscal resources, and bought four packages of mystery meat franks. The hound gobbled them up.

While it decimated the last package, Raymon saw a tag on its collar with a phone number on it. They called the number, and it was a man in a town nearby. They drove there, and met the guy at a gas station on the outskirts of the settlement. He had a bumper sticker on his truck that said, "Please don’t tell my folks I work in the oil patch, they think I’m a piano player at a bordello." He bred, raised, and trained dogs to hunt. He also pumped leases part time. The snakebit dog was a novice who wandered off and got lost during its first foray into the bush.

The man told them dogs and humans could survive a snakebite if it was on a site that had room to swell, like the loose skin of the bloodhound's neck. If it had been on the critter's leg he said, it would have died from gangrene in the swollen, bloodflow-constricted region. The dog breeder gave them a sawbuck apiece to reimburse them for gasoline and the chicken lip wienies, then left with his canine charge. Edwin and Raymon went back to the rock house.

Not long after they moved to The Oil Patch, Berol and Edwin found their work clothes getting discolored. The duds got more and more oil stained every week. Locals used soda ash to wash oil out of stained work clothes. They tried it, but it didn't work for them. Edwin had a brainstorm. He'd wash the petroleum out with gasoline, let them dry on the line, then rewash them with detergent. It worked splendidly.

On one wash, after he’d laundered them in gas, then hung them out, when he checked them, the clothes were still damp, but only a little. He took them to the town's only laundromat, put them on to wash, then drove back out to the rock house for a nap.

When he drove back to put them in the dryer, there was a crowd gathered around the laundromat. He sighted Earnest, an older man he worked with. Since his was the only familiar face there, he approached him, and asked, "What’s going on here, Earn’?"

"Some idiot put some gas tainted clothes in a washer. The spark from the washer lit it. If someone had’n been in there, saw it, and called for help, the whole place woulda’ gone up."

"Well, I wonder what dumb ass did that?" Edwin asked, then meandered to his pickup. He was calculating in his head how much it’d set him back to buy new work threads. There was no way he would claim those at the washeteria. Washing the stained clothes in gas was a sound idea, he just had to let them dry completely.

That was the second time he’d had problems involving wet clothes and a nap. The first time, he’d hung them out and gone inside, turned on The Pathetique Symphony, and fallen asleep. While he was asleep, there was a cloudburst. It was over by the time he awoke.

He went out to check the clothes. They were sopping wet. The grass was wet too. "Musta’ come a sprinkle while I was asleep. I’ll leave ‘em out overnight," he thought. He overslept the next morning and was woken by the work truck’s horn out front. Earnest was there to get him. He ran outside in his skivvies and snatched a pair of dry jeans off the line.

He got inside, sat on the floor, and thrust a leg in.

When it rained a lot in the desert southwest, after the ground soaked up some, it closed and ran the rest off. The vermin that lived on the ground knew instinctively to go up. In the days preceding precipitation, turtles crossed roadways en masse headed for higher ground. They were more reliable than the TV meteorologist.

The gullywasher Edwin slept through had soaked the clothes. As they got heavier they sagged. When the trouser cuffs brushed the ground, a multitude of small brown scorpions clambered up in them to wait it out. They weren’t the big, black emperor variety that could kill. The little chestnut ones’ sting was comparable to a hornet’s... unpleasant, but not lethal.

It was difficult to say which Edwin did quicker, cram his leg in, or jerk it out after he felt many white hot stabbings. When he pulled his leg out, scorpions poured out. As soon as they hit the floor, they took off running, trying to get under something and hide.

Edwin grabbed an oilfield boot and smashed all he could, threw the pants outside, pulled on a pair of clean dirty jeans from the soiled bin, and went on to work. When he got in that evening he used a broomstick to turn those on the line inside out. They were all full of scorpions.

The view of the night sky was spectacular from the porch of the rock house. It became customary to imbibe inexpensive beer, gaze at the welkin, and have cosmic discussions. Berol said the cosmos was a growing god, with the stars protons and the planets electrons in the atoms, composing cells.

"What are moons then?" asked Raymon.

"Sub atomic particles called ‘leptons’," Berol replied.

"I can’t imagine infinity," Edwin said. "It can’t go on forever. There’s got to be an end to it."

"There is. Astronomers say the furthermost things they can see are ’quasars,,and they are speeding away at nearly the speed of light. That is the skin surface of the creature mankind calls ‘god.’ God is a hermaphrodite."

"A what?" asked Raymon.

"God is both sexes. To devotees, God is the same gender as the beholder. God grows a little every day. Humans need more than just food and shelter. They need a friend, an enemy, and something they can’t figger out. No mortal can understand god. That’s what all the strife in the world is about. Every creed thinks they’re right, and everyone else ain’t. Lookin’ up like we are now is about the closest anybody has ever come to seein’ god," Berol commented.

© Sam E Hime 2001