Craps
Because they had been drinking Wild Turkey into the night and because they had no dice, they used two sets of six fire ants, counting only those that landed on their backs, and letting the pot build on zeros and ones. Shooting craps with fire ants was a tedious, sometimes painful process. The ants refused to cooperate. Whenever possible, they’d dig into the men’s flesh with their mandibles and sting their hands, arching their abdomens at the petioles and plunging in the barbs. The men would inadvertently clap their hands and kill four or five ants; then they’d have to go out into the yard and dig up more. Finally Odo proposed they put a bunch in a Mason jar so they wouldn’t have to trek back and forth. Stingo thought it was a clever idea. He went out to the garage for the shovel, and then Anu held a flashlight on the anthill while Odo dug and Stingo held the jar. Of course the lid didn’t work very well, and when they got inside, the ants left the jar and clustered instead in the day-old donut holes and on the scraps of pizza crust in cardboard boxes on the table. The men didn’t care. They went back to shooting craps.
“Ow!” Anu complained, smacking his wrist. “Bitch.”
“Why you say that?” Stingo asked.
“All worker ants are girls,” Anu answered. “Everybody knows that.”
“Oh,” said Stingo. “Right. Bitch.”
When craps bored them, the men took a can of gasoline into the yard, doused the anthill, and set it afire. Their hands were swollen, lumpy and red in the flickering orange light.
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