Stragview Stories: Strange Tastes

"Ah, dude, that's so nasty."

Peterson, Waldo to his friends, let the roach crawl across his tongue for a few seconds as the rest of us watched. When he swallowed it down, he ran his tongue out again to show us it was gone, grinning as we made noises of repulsion.

I've been a resident of Stragview Prison for the last three years, and I'll continue to be a resident for another year and a half at the least. A couple caught me in their house one night, and after shoving past the guy to get out, I guess he hit his head on the way down. I got eight years for assault and burglary, and on my first day, I met Waldo.

They call him Waldo because of his thick glasses and the stripped hat he always wears. I couldn't tell you where he got it; I've never seen anything like it at the commissary. Most people believe that he made it himself, and I'm prone to agree. He used to work in laundry, emphasis on used, and I’ve certainly seen weirder clothing items come out of that place.

No one took it from him, not even the admins, and the name Waldo seemed to have stuck.

Waldo was known for two things on the compound, his hat and eating unusual things.

Waldo was in prison for assault, but his talent was his cast iron stomach. When he introduced himself to me, he was eating something out of a Tupperware and smiling hugely. I shook his hand and told him my name, only then realizing that the bowl was crawling with crickets. He was eating them by the handful, scarfing them down with loud crunches, and he laughed as I noticed the bugs.

"Groundscrew had been catching them for weeks for me. Gave me twenty dollars of canteen to eat the whole bowl, but that's just more food for Waldo."

Waldo was an exhibitionist, pure and simple. People paid him money to eat things, usually bugs or old food, and Waldo ate them down without complaint. Moldy banana? No problem. Cockroaches? By the fistful. Waldo would eat anything, and it didn't always have to be eatable things. He would eat batteries, a pack of double A's at a time, and he'd eat sand right off the rec yard. Nothing seemed to make him sick or slow him down, and we all just watched in awe as he ate anything that would stand still long enough.

That was until we found the ants.

"What do you reckon they are?" I asked.

The hill had cropped up overnight, a giant mound of red clay and fine sand, and it looked like nothing so much as a termite hill in a National Geographic magazine. Faust reached out with his stump, then growled as he traded it for the hand with some fingers on it. He was still getting used to only having one hand, even after so many months without it. I grabbed his wrist before he could touch it, and he looked at me with a mixture of confusion and aggravation.

"Can't have you losing the other one too, Faust," I said, trying to postpone his rage.

Faust was a cool dude, but he was quick to anger.

"Yeah, well, they don't look like they'd eat much."

In that, he was wrong.

The ants were just as strange as the hill they inhabited. Each of the crawling things was the size of my thumb, veins of purple worming through their deep red exoskeletons. They had pinchers on their heads, long wiggling antennae, and twelve scuttling legs that took them quickly across the hill. They were carrying all sorts of things back with them, food and other insects, and I found myself wondering if they could be a threat.

How much would it hurt if those pinchers got a hold of you?

"Whatcha lookin at?"

I jumped as Waldo came up behind us, Faust and I looking around like we'd been caught doing something wrong. His eyes got big as he saw what lay behind us, and he made an impressed noise as he looked at the hill of roaming insects. He had clearly never seen anything like them before, and they thrilled him as only something unknown can.

As Faust watched him, I could see an idea beginning to form, and I was not too fond of it.

"How much?" Faust asked suddenly.

Waldo looked back at him, confused, "How much?"

"How much to eat one?"

Waldo looked back at the ants, thinking it over, before settling on a price.

"Twenty bucks of canteen, and I'll eat it right now."

Faust groaned, "Man, twenty bones? That's pricey."

Waldo had caught one of the ants between his fat fingers and was lifting it up for a better look. The ant riggled furiously, trying to escape as he clacked those monstrous jaws. Waldo was being careful not to put his fingers too close to its pinchers, but the way the ant was thrashing, it would get him eventually.

"Going once," Waldo said.

"Maybe ten? I can do ten?" Faust hedged.

"Nope, gotta be twenty," Waldo said, moving his hand towards the hill, "going twice," he said again.

"I'll put up another ten," I said, not really sure why I had.

That seemed to be what he was waiting to hear, and he threw the ant into his mouth and bit down with a loud crunch.

"Sold."

He chewed the ant, his face becoming almost rapturous the longer he chewed. He looked like someone eating a sweet for the first time, someone taking a bite of a favorite meal, and he turned back to look at the hill with real desire. I could swear there was drool sliding down the corner of his mouth as he watched them scuttle about, and his hand shook a little as he reached for the hill.

"Whoa, man," Faust said, "you win, aight? You ate one, don't get crazy."

Waldo either didn't hear him or didn't care. He was suddenly picking up ants like they were berries on a bush. He was popping them into his mouth one after another, snapping them off the hill with quick, deft hands. A thick orange juice was running down his chin, the crunching sounding like the poppers I had thrown as a kid, and when I stepped up beside him, he turned and glowered at me like a dog with a bone.

"Waldo, you've got um, man. No need to," but he smacked my hand away when I tried to touch his shoulder.

He bent over the anthill and started gobbling them down.

He pushed them into his mouth by the handful, his throat bulging as they slid greedily inside him. Soon he was pulling handfuls of dirt off the mound, the dirt streaking down his face like a child eating pudding. When he pushed the mound over, the mud and dirt structure falling easily, I saw the ants come swarming out. They moved over his arms, mixing easily with the coarse hair that lay there. If they bit him, I never saw him wince, and I could only imagine that his throat was being nipped as he swallowed them.

"What the hell is he doing?" came a voice from behind us.

Faust and I turned to see Officer Grange with his big hairy fingers in the loops of his duty belt, the leather creaking as his gut pushed at it. Grange was a big guy, almost six and a half feet, and his belly grew a little bigger every year he remained in DOC. He was what the inmates called a beater, a guard who would lay hands on you even if he didn't have to, but his face was more curious than angry today. He wasn't sure what he was looking at, and the sight made him concerned rather than angry.

Waldo hadn't even noticed.

His eyes goggled, the orbs swimming with tears as he found what he was looking for.

The queen ant was the size of a small mouse. Her body was a deep green, her eyes a swirl of florescent neon as she inclined her head up to look at Waldo. Grange told us to stop him, but before we could even reach for him, Waldo had taken the fat little matriarch between thumb and forefinger. His hands shook as he lifted her to eye level, the two sharing a long stare before Waldo popped her into his mouth.

He fought us as we pulled him off, but his face was awash with ecstatic joy.

I'd seen one of my nephews eat fudge my mom had cooked once, and his face looked just like that.

That perfect mixture of joyous completion and the despair of knowing you will never find anything like it again.

Grange yelled for us to get him back to the dorm, and it wasn't till we got off the wreck yard that Waldo stopped shaking. He still looked off, twin brown streaks marking the corners of his mouth, discarded legs clinging to his lips, and when we set him on his bunk, he just stared ahead like he didn't know he was in the world. Faust returned with a small pile of noodles and snack cakes, and as he dumped them on Waldo's bed, I remembered that I still owed him my half of the deal. I came back with a bunch of commissary and added them to the collection of foodstuffs. Normally Waldo would have scooped it all into his locker before the leeches in the dorm could come around to beg for food, but he just let it sit there as he stared at the wall. He was acting weird, not at all like his usual self, and it started to worry Faust and I. Finally, after several hours of trying to engage him in activities or conversation, the two of us just went about our business.

When I went to get a shower later, I saw that he hadn’t moved an inch the whole afternoon.

He was still just staring at the wall, the dried dirt starting to look like blood in the hazy fluorescents as it coursed down his face.

I came out of the shower when the guard started yelling about count time, and I saw Waldo lying on his side. He was coughing, silent hacks that wracked his body. He had the covers pulled up, shivering hard enough to make the bed frame rattle. I watched him out of the corner of my eye as I got dressed, and when he didn't sit up for count, I knew something was wrong.

Officer Darrow blew his whistle then, and I saw him coming out of the station with his roster in one gloved hand.

"Alright, get your IDs out and sit up for count."

He had taken only a few steps when his keen eyes fixated on the prone form of Waldo. He didn't go right for him. That would have seemed too personal and would have made him look like he was looking for trouble. Instead, he made his way along, checking IDs and checking off names, until he finally came to the bunk he wanted.

He stood at the foot of the bed and tapped his foot against the leg of the bed.

"Wargree. Inmate Wargree, sit up for count and present your ID."

He appeared calm, but Waldo wouldn't be the first inmate Darrow had pushed out of bed.

Darrow was always spoiling for a fight. It was why they wouldn't let him work in confinement anymore, and he had been forced to find his sport elsewhere. He'd been put in E dorm because they felt that he couldn't stir up too much trouble, but whoever had decided that was a fool. Darrow stirred up trouble wherever he was; it was in his nature.

Waldo continued to shiver beneath his blanket, ignoring Darrow for all intents and purposes.

Darrow smiled, but it was like a wolf smiling at a lamb.

"Last chance, Wargree. Sit up and present your ID, or shits about to get really bad for you."

Waldo coughed, and it sounded like a handful of gravel hitting the ground. I tried to look, but I couldn't see what exactly he had coughed up. Whatever it was, it had escaped Darrow's notice. He was looking forward to a fight, and he didn't care who it was with.

He pulled back the covers, and I could see that Waldo was still wearing his dusty prison clothes from the yard. He had just laid over, it seemed, and he didn't even seem to realize that Darrow was talking to him. When Darrow reached down and took him by the shoulder and lifted him into a sitting position, Waldo looked dazed as he blinked his eyes at the guard.

"You deaf, Wargree? It's count time, and I know that you..."

His voice was harsh, but it turned into a disgusted yelp as Waldo vomited up a cluster of squirming ants on him. They were the same ones he'd been eating, and as they came up from his guts, they sank their pincers into his arms. Darrow shouted as he swiped at them, trying to clear them off him, but his efforts were useless. For everyone he knocked off, another five clamped down and dangled from his skin like tumors. Darrow reeled back from Waldo, screaming as the ants bit him, and his radio crackled as someone in the booth noticed him.

I heard emergency traffic being called and rushed over to Waldo to see if I could help him.

Waldo was leaning against the bunk across from him, and the ants were coming out of him in thick red clouds. They looked like blood as they hit the floor, thick clots of pulsating red that slid up his legs and back towards his mouth even as he vomited them onto the floor. I took him by the shoulder and turned him to look at me, and it took everything I had not to drop him again. His front was covered in ants, a squirming line of them already crawling up and back into his mouth. His face had this dumb look of surprise on it, but when his eyes met mine, I stumbled away and fell backward over his bunk.

My ass hit the floor then, and I scrambled away as I tried to get away from this ant terror.

His eyes had become the same multi-spectrum segments that the queens had been, and I pushed myself under the nearest bunk as I tried to escape him.

When the other guards came through the door, forcing him to the ground in a storm of bodies, it was almost a mercy not to have to look at him anymore.

At least until they all started screaming.

Waldo emerged from the stack as the four guards slapped at themselves and rolled away from him. Waldo was more ants than human now, and those odd eyes were the only thing visible amongst the squirming mass of bugs. He was little more than a writhing mass of red flesh, small oceans with their own tidal pull as they boiled over him. I watched as his hat emerged from the top, and it would have been the only way I knew it was him. One of the guards tried to gas Waldo, his can jittering as the ants snapped at him, and they parted as the chemical arced across them, and I could see a swatch of flesh beneath before they closed ranks. Waldo was gone, it seemed, and whether he was controlling the ants or they were controlling him didn't seem to matter.

They were one creature, and their symbiosis seemed permanent.

At least until Captain Holk and his security detail came through the door and Sergeant Moore hit Waldo with his taser.

The three-person group stood stunned by what they were seeing, and Moore's shot was likely just panic fire. The prongs hit Waldo square in the chest, the electricity sizzling up the lines as it made the ant flesh crackle and dance. Something screamed from deep within the ant mound, and I realized that Waldo was still under there somewhere. As Moore kept squeezing the trigger, Sergeant Daice drew his own taser and shot the mound of ants as well. The combined streams made the creature buck and waver, and when the ants fell off him, it was like hail hitting the ground.

Waldo fell amongst them, crushing most of them, and lay twitching as the Captain and his sergeants moved in to access the damage.

It was a real shit show, but they managed to get it all covered up. The guards who had been hurt ended up going to the hospital. Many of them had bites on over fifty percent of their bodies, and I heard a couple of them almost died. I never saw Waldo again after that night. They took him out in cuffs, but it looked like they were heading for the rec field rather than medical. I remember seeing Waldo look back at me, his weird segmented eyes staring sadly back at the faces clustered against the window, and I wondered if it might not have been kinder to let him die.

I never saw another one of those weird anthills, but the rec yard was closed for two weeks after that while they tore up all the grass and dumped pesticide by the truckload.

Stragview, I've come to learn over the years, has lots of strange stories like this one. From the rats to the ghosts to the strange creatures that inhabit the shadows of this place, Stragview is a place outside of time and space. I only have another year left in this place, and I pray I'll be allowed to leave.

I wonder if anyone is truly allowed to leave Stragview once it has its claws in them?