Our Lady of the Ticks

BY: HAL DITTBRENNER 

I had been in line for three hours, the smell of olive oil and salt nauseatingly strong. All around us, people had given up waiting patiently. Those with food ate. The line itself stretched around the small expanse of countryside, and we stood restlessly like ants. There were elephant paths at our feet, and the sky above us was starless. At my side were two hitchhikers, Taliyah and Santiago, of whom I was confident didn’t give me real names.  

  The first thing I learned about these girls was that Santiago had leprosy.  

  “Stupid dog killed an armadillo,” she’d said, when she got into my truck ten hours before. Fresh lesions on her face and hands oozed red. “I got some of the blood on my hands, and that was that.” 

  “It’s not contagious,” Taliyah added. I knew enough about the disease to know she was partially lying. I pushed those thoughts aside, registering the illogicalness of it all. 

  Instead, I said, “Armadillos? In Illinois? The fuck are they doing up here?” I punctuated my words with curses to put on the perfect cross-country trucker persona. I chewed candy cigarettes from the corner of my mouth. 

“It’s too hot in the South for them. Climate change and allat,” Santiago said, lisping from congestion.  

 On the way up to Pennsylvania, from the cornfields of Illinois, I had made a point to keep track of all the towns deserted due to the heat. Two-hundred and sixty-three, all the residents fled North. Taliyah pointed to one in Indiana and said it was her hometown. I did the same in Pennsylvania. 

  In the line, Santiago’s nosebleed. It spilled down her pale green shirt, sweat and crimson dampening the fabric. Taliyah rushed for a handkerchief while Santiago caught the mess in her hands. They were folk Catholics, the cloth blessed on the feast of Saint Brigid.  

  Santiago was waiting to drink the tears of Saint Perpetua, Lady of the Ticks She was there when early Christians were mauled in pits by wild beasts, and she is here now as the world overgrows itself, our people scabbed by tick bites and tattooed with animal scratches. This is what Santiago told me. Taliyah paid me extra scrap to wait with them so they could ride with me again. 

  There was a line and a priest. This was a weekly affair. In front of everyone was a small stone statue of a woman. She was tall and slender, unsubstantial in eroded robes, skin and cloth connected seamlessly. Water dripped from its eyes, like a faucet that leaked, back when reservoirs were full. 

  The person in front of us dropped his bread when he was next to go. I recognized the distinct pink rings of Lyme Disease on his arms. He went up to the Lady of the Ticks and collected the tears as they trickled down, his hands in a beggar’s cup. After maybe five minutes, when he had enough to fill the basin of his hands, he drank. The priest mumbled something I couldn’t make out through a thick Italian accent. 

  Santiago was next. She did the same, her movements well-rehearsed. She went up to the Lady of the Ticks and collected the tears as they fell. She was slightly more prepared than the man before her; she had a small ringed, rubber cup, the sort that flattened to a disk when pressed. She collected the water in her cup and drank as the priest mumbled again. I caught sentence shards—in the name of the Mother; be blessed; and you; fleeting. She wiped her mouth, licked the droplets, and moved to the back of the line. 

  I offered a place in my truck, but Santiago refused. Attached to her hip was Taliyah, rummaging through her pack. We were in line again, all the way at the back. My body was stiffening from standing for so long.  

  “Again?” I asked my two hitchhikers. Santiago smiled at me, a crooked but genuine thing. 

  “Three times at every stop,” Santiago said as blood dripped in gasps from her nose. She swiped at it with her hand. “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.” 

  “Mother, Daughter, and an old Maid,” Taliyah added. “All the best things come in threes.” 

  The two of them were on a pilgrimage that flanked the few remaining settlements of the eastern states. They stopped at roadside crosses and ramshackle monuments, a roadmap full of healing statues and religious miracles. Anything west of Illinois was torn off, irrelevant. They travel, they told me, by hitchhiking. They go in circles from Illinois up by way of Maine. Every religious figure they stopped at, every saint, was female. This was their second time at the Lady of the Ticks.  

  “There’s an old alehouse ‘bout two roads down from here,” Taliyah said as she rummaged through her bag. “They’ve got drinks. And cockfights. You bet?” 

  “I don’t,” I said.  

  “They’ve got somethin’ even I’ve never seen before. Insect fights. You ever see crickets go at each other?” 

  “I can’t say that I have.” 

  With her blood-stained middle and index fingers, Santiago made claws. She scratched them at each other, like two insects tearing at each other’s throats. I looked away. More people accumulated at the end of the line. 

  “Insect fighting. Of course, we haven’t seen it yet, ‘cuz that means leaving the line. One of the locals was telling us about it. They agitate the crickets with straw to the antennae. It pisses ‘em off good. They do that to two males, and they start at each other.” 

  As Taliyah spoke, she finished her rummaging. She had produced a few squares of hard bread and slices of cheese thinner than Bible pages. She handed out the meal to Santiago, to herself, to me. I took a bite and grimaced at the staleness. I swallowed hard, trying not to imagine cricket guts. Again, I glanced back. More people. Many more. They ate meager meals and rested on tarps and rationed out lead-leached water for their dogs. 

  “It’s getting late. We really should go,” I tried to convince them. I knew I was fighting not a battle, but maybe a war I had already lost to religion. “Back to the truck. Or the alehouse. Anywhere. I can’t let you stay out here in the cold. You’ll—you’ll catch your death out here!” 

  “I’ve already caught worse than that,” Santiago said in between bites. Her jaw moved slowly, and she spoke with a disease-induced drawl. “Ritual won’t work if we leave the line.” 

  “We’ve been at our little cycle for three months at this point,” Taliyah said, swallowing. “I would hate to start all over again.” 

  “We paid you extra scrap to stay with us. Please.” 

  And I, so stupid for thinking of my purse, stayed awake and beside them. By the time morning started to stretch over the horizon in bands of orange and pink, Santiago took her rubber cup, drank, and moved to the back of the line, now longer.  

*** 

  I could tell I hadn’t slept well because I was seeing in twos, Taliyah and Santiago both sporting twins in the corners of my eyes. My legs ached, begging to sit. My eyes raced with escape plots amok just behind my irises. I shifted my weight from leg to leg, though the burn stubbornly persisted. The line extended through the countryside clearing. We stood there, waiting, for over two days. 

  “What’s going to happen after the third round, here?” 

  “There’s a spot in Jersey that comes next. Marian,” said Santiago, munching on stale bread. 

  “They’re usually Marian,” Taliyah said, adding salt to her own slice. 

  “Nah, nah. I mean after the third round overall. You said you’d be in Maine?” 

  “Right. Then we’ll be in Maine. Then we’ll head back to Illinois,” Taliyah said. 

  “And then I’ll be cured.” 

  At the front of the line, a dot on the horizon line we couldn’t see, someone drank from the Lady of the Ticks. We moved a single pace forward, almost mechanically. I planted my hands on my thighs, as if to will them to move just another step forward. 

  “You seem exhausted,” Taliyah told me, sensing my desire to run. As she spoke, she slapped at a mosquito on her arm, the remains stuck to her palm. It was fat and pulsing before it stilled. The line we stood in was full of sickness and those just waiting to get one. Sitting ducks at the mercy of Mother Nature. One of the bugs landed on Santiago. Taliyah swatted it away for her. The people stood in the line, almost frozen it started to seem, until it came time to trudge forward a few paces. Mosquitoes all over them. I noticed mosquitoes on my own body, too, drawn to the scent of my sweat. I scratched at the terracotta expanse of my skin until I drew up blood. 

  Taliyah have me the once over, her eyes pouring over my condition. The way I had slouched, the violet that pooled under my eyes, the way my head tilted as if it were made of lead. My desire, almost animalistic, to leave the line. 

  “Looking a little antsy there?” Santiago said, scratching at the redness of her own skin. I nodded.  

  “Tell you what,” Taliyah said, pressing some more scrap into my palm. “The alehouse I was telling you about the other day. The one with the bug fights. Get yourself a bottle, then tell us who won the most recent fight, okay? That’s your mission. Just please, please come back. We need someone to drive us out from here.” 

  “You’ve got a lot of scrap to go around,” was all I said to them. 

  “Either we’ll need it or we won’t.” 

  I walked to the alehouse. The clearing was flat, the grass high and insect ridden. I felt a pinprick pain coming on my thigh. A tick clung to my pants, its mouth stuck to the flesh underneath. I dug it out with my hands, grimaced as a part of it stayed stuck tight in the meat of my leg. 

  The world around me was hot. Dried-out. The sun came in waves much too large and violent to be obscured by the cloud line. Sweat clung to my boots, to the clothes I kept too tight to my body, to the sheen of mosquito repellent that didn’t work anymore. 

  The alehouse was small and lit only by the too-bright sun. People drank not ale but moonshine slop from whatever foodstuffs survived the heat. The bees certainly didn’t. No fleshy fruits. No coffee. No cocoa.  

  In the center of the place was a small ring, no bigger than a dinner plate, and inside were two crickets, one green and one brown, each violently chittering at its opponent. The green was Amos. The brown was Ephraim. 

  Men stood around the table, their faces tight with concentration. One poked the two with a stick, rubbing the antennae as the two insects lunged at one another. Amos leapt on top of Ephraim, his little legs pumping as his opponent tried to flip. The men placed scrap around the ring until it looked to be a junkyard that thoroughly trapped the two little bugs.  

  A man, without provocation, perhaps on seeing that I was the only woman in the room, told me where the crickets were sourced. Amos was bought from a merchant settlement for cheap. Ephraim was found along the wastelands. He told me before the fight, a female cricket would be placed in the cage, as if to increase his spirits. I ordered some moonshine slop and drank it steadily. 

  Amos seemed to be scratching at Ephraim’s carapace, and the men whooped. With nothing more than a chirp, Ephraim fell, his limbs twitching as his body began to slow into stiffness. The men who voted on Amos took up their scrap, while those for Ephraim scowled. I watched as they placed the little insect in a small clay casket, and they took him behind the bar. 

  Of all the things to keep alive in the end, this is what we have chosen. Bugs kill us. We kill them. 

  When I returned to the line, which now crossed a great breadth, I was surprised to see myself completely alone. I walked from the front, my back to the statue, to the last rows of people, my two hitchhikers nowhere to be seen. Yards and yards of people, desperation clinging to their faces like sweat, sick people, you could smell it from them.  No Santiago, No Taliyah. My legs, barred from the relief of sitting, screamed. The tick bite in my leg throbbed. 

  Maybe they completed the ritual, found someone to drive off with them. Off to Jersey, as they said they would, another road mark crossed off by a thin tick of graphite. When I looked in my truck I saw, where Santiago once sat, a large purse of scrap. I had come back. I had listened. They did not. 

  I cannot say why I am still here. But then, I waltzed to the back of the line, waiting for my hitchhikers to return, down, down in the sticks of Pennsylvania, news of the winner caught in my throat, ready to drink from Our Lady of the Ticks.