Them Again
by Scott Teel

It started in the bathroom. First there were only a couple, but I knew that more were on the way. Ants are not loners. When a serial killer ant is captured, his neighbors never say, “He always kept to himself...”

I was living in a tiny apartment at the time. Sure enough, within a few days ants were rummaging around in my bathroom like it was a winter resort. “We heard the crumbs here are excellent,” I could see them communicating to each other with their little feelers. Little maroon ants all marching single file past my shower towards whatever the original scouts had found worth retrieving from behind the white barrister bookcase that held my towels. Their tiny size was no barometer of their viciousness. I knew that certain smaller types of ants will gang up on larger, more docile ants whose territory they want to move in on and chop them up with their pincers like a chef in a sushi bar. Size means nothing in the ant world.

I vacuumed them up, but obviously these ants had studied under David Copperfield because they miraculously reappeared immediately (also, some of them were carrying small pieces of green metal, which explained that whole disappearing Statue of Liberty trick). Vacuuming was going to be a waste of time. In many ant colonies the queen produces thousands of horrible little offspring each day, like France does. This situation required a pesticide.

Ant traps behind the toilet. They work on this principle: Ants, who are selfless and put the needs of the queen and colony first, take the poison back home, killing the queen and the rest of the colony. But mine were a group of mutant greedy capitalist ants. The ones who even paid any attention at all to the traps munched the sweet poison down right away and started writhing and croaking all over the bathroom floor.

My friend Jon, who had an ant farm as recently as six months ago if you can believe it, told me that this was a good situation. “They’ll take the bodies back to the colony and spread the poison,” he told me. “They even have a little graveyard. They’re very interesting to watch.”

“What happened to yours?”

“They’re very interesting to watch up to a point, then they become boring bugs so I let them go. I found them all dead on the stoop. Very interesting.”

So I let the very interesting little corpses pile up. And up. And up. Until I finally just got rid of them. The other ants weren’t falling for it. Oh, they were smart ones all right, they knew just what they were doing. They walked right past all their fallen comrades, continuing on their path for whatever it was they were getting out of the bathroom. What were they getting out of there anyway? It’s a bathroom, right? I didn’t eat in there. “Why aren’t you guys in the kitchen, anyway?” I asked them, not realizing that they understood English and were prone to suggestion.

They were in the kitchen the next day. Just two. But I knew these two. Reconnaissance. Scoping out the kitchen. A little Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon just sniffing around for the King Tut’s Tomb of antdom. I smushed them, but I knew it was futile.

The next day, when I got home from work, they were in the kitchen, massed under and in the sink like there was an ant Republican Convention going on. As soon as I opened the cabinet under the sink, where the Frosted Flakes were, they started to split. “That big thing that also eats Frosted Flakes is back, scram quick!” They were almost all gone before I could even get the vacuum out.

I went up to my landlord to explain the situation and she gave me a bottle of Raid Ant Killer. “Fresh Scent!” the bottle exclaimed joyously on the front, surrounded by flowers. “CAUTION: DO NOT INHALE. HAZARDOUS TO HUMANS AND ANIMALS.”

I tested the Raid on a few ants who were still meandering around the kitchen floor. One drop per ant. They just stopped and rolled over. No suffering, no dramatic ant death scenes played out before my eyes, no ants gasping, “Tell…tell little Timmy I love him…” They just keeled over. That was fine with me. I’m not gung-ho about killing anything, but I was out a box of Frosted Flakes here, a Costco family-size box, not one of your ordinary regular size boxes. That counts in over 100 countries as an official declaration of war (although no boxes of Frosted Flakes have yet been found in Iraq).

I had experienced ant problems before, but not when I was living on my own, and not this type of ant. The ants I had now were the little ants you see swarming over a dropped glob of ice cream in the summer, or making little sandy hills in the cracks in your driveway that children have been gleefully obliterating daily since the dawn of mankind. The kind we had when I was 12 or so were the big black ants, ants that could carry off a child like an eagle (albeit a slow, ground-based eagle) if they felt like it.

They were all over our kitchen, and my mother started to get paranoid about them. She had never been afraid of ants, but as we found more huge black ants in the cabinets, under the fridge, down the steps to the basement, she started to fray a little. Around this time, I put a quarter in one of those little supermarket prize machines and happened to get a large plastic ant. It was pretty realistic, if you didn’t count that it had bulging red eyes, big white pincers, and was over four inches long.

Real ants were crawling all over the small landing down the back steps, which led to our side door and basement. I put the big plastic ant in the middle of the floor and cried, “Oh my God, you’ve got to see this ant!” My mother came over, maybe expecting a big ant, but not this Schwartzenegger ant I had laid down there.

A beneficial upshoot of what happened is that if my mother is ever in trouble at any time in the future, I’ll recognize her scream of terror immediately. I never saw her move faster, and vertically no less. She just jumped into the air and sort of hovered in place, legs jockeying around, screaming. I got her with that ant three different times in a week, once poking its head out of a box of sugar in our cabinets. I kept it in the basement for years after that, and one time I found it sitting on top in the garbage down there. She had stumbled across it and gotten another good scare, without me even trying, and tried to get rid of it for good. But I found it and I still have it, somewhere.

Mom laughs about those times now, and our hope is that soon scientists will develop a pill to help her stop.

We ended up clearing everything out of the kitchen, taking the dog to my aunt’s, and bombing the place with insecticide while we went to a movie. I didn’t like the idea of poisonous fumes floating through our kitchen, where we kept things like Twizzlers, but ants were gross too, and at least they were finally gone.

I opened the window and sprayed the Fresh Scent Raid all around where the floor and wall meet in the kitchen and bathroom. The place is pretty small, so with the window open and the bathroom fan on, I wasn’t too concerned about the fumes, though I do now seem to remember playing Uno with former President Howard Taft, who beat me two games out of three that day.

The ants disappeared. After about a week I did a little “No More Ants” dance, and I was glad no one was around to see that. About a week after that, I picked up a pair of pants that were next to my hamper in the bedroom, and there was a little ant walking on the crotch.

“I’ve got ants in my pants!” I said out loud, and I was glad there was no one around to hear that.

They were coming from next to the hamper, out from where the rug touched the wall. But they were having real problems here. The rug was ant-resistant. It wasn’t a very expensive rug, and the fibers and frays had snared dozens of ants somehow, and just held them there until they gave up and died. So there was this little pile of dead and dying ants all weaved into my bedroom rug, like a scene out of Gone With The Wind. It was pretty gross. To vacuum them out, I had to use the little skinny vacuum attachment, and rub it pretty hard, and that meant that the ant carcasses were breaking apart, flying all over, a head here, a thorax there, some legs. It took a while to suck them all out and spray some Raid down between the rug and wall to pick up the ones who were smart enough to stay out of the rug, but not so smart that they didn’t hang around yelling, “I told you so!” at the others.

I was thinking about the old sci-fi movie Them, where you hear a loud chirping noise across the desert and the little girl whose parents were eaten by giant ants screams, “It’s THEM!” I think they ended up burning the ants in that film. All they needed was a giant cheap rug, really. I suppose there’s less drama when you have a 12-foot ant threatening to eat a group of people and then it gets stuck in the carpeting. I always wondered why the ants chirped in that movie. I never heard an ant make any noise, not that I know of anyway. And I listened. I leaned in close to these ants and tilted my head like an Indian listening for hooves, but I didn’t hear anything. One thing about ants: you don’t need to yell at them to keep it down at night.

I also remembered a song we used to sing at Boy Scout camp that went:

The ants come marching one by one

Hurrah, hurrah,

The ants come marching one by one

Hurrah, hurrah,

The ants come marching one by one,

The little ones stop to have some fun

And they all go marching

Down into the ground to get out of the rain,

Boom, boom, boom.

And so on up to ten. The little ones always stopped to do something that rhymed with whatever number we were on. Such poetic insects. But I saw less ants in a week at camp than I did in one day in my kitchen. The ants in my apartment pretty much skipped over the one to nine part of the song and just marched ten by ten.

At work, I told my friend Greg about the ants. “But I got rid of them now, I think I wiped out the whole colony, thank God,” I said.

“You know,” he said, “ants are very intelligent creatures. They do a lot of sophisticated things. You shouldn’t kill them.”

“So what should I do? They’re not helping out with the rent, you know.”

“Hmm…I’ll bring something in for you tomorrow.”

What he brought in was a pamphlet about ants that explained how they communicated, built, fought, buried their dead, had little office get togethers (“Great quarter for the sand moving team, let’s hear it for them”), and actually played soccer with crumbs (like the rest of the world, the ants call it football). Had I wiped out an advanced civilization? Had I exterminated little ant Hemingways and Copernicuses and Martha Stewarts with extreme prejudice? Could I not have shown compassion to this noble, perspicacious species and selected only the Martha Stewart ones to destroy?

I had my doubts, especially since the pamphlet had come when Greg had ordered his ant farm not too long ago (don’t ask me how I meet these people). It’s in the best interest of the ant farm community for us to think that these bugs are intelligent and caring. We’d lose interest and stop buying ant farms if we thought they were just little globs of carbon and randomly firing neurons. Who do you think controls every presidential election? The ant farm PACs, obviously. This conspiracy runs all the way to the White House, and it’s only a matter of time before The Washington Post exposes it for the obvious scandal that it is.

Not to mention, how did they know these ants were playing soccer with the crumbs? Did they see one ant’s antennae signaling “GOOOOOOOAAAAAAL?” There’s an ant I’d squash for sure.

I gave Greg his pamphlet and the finger and told him something else I had learned about ants: they’re annoying little shits. “My ants are almost all dead,” he told me. “I think they died from a lack of love.”

“Maybe you didn’t hug them enough,” I said.

Strangely, the same day I read a small article about ant resuscitation. If you put an ant under water, it will seem to die, but when you take it out, even a few days later, it will come back to life, resurrected like Lazarus, except that Lazarus didn’t drown in a Hamburgler glass. Like most insects and Jerry Springer, they breath through holes in their sides too small for the water surface to break though and drown them. So they just pass out from carbon dioxide poisoning until you take them out of the water (up to a limit, of course; for example, you don’t see many ants from the Titanic disaster wandering around these days).

They’re a hardy little breed. Remember the fable of the grasshopper and the ant: the ant toils long and hard through the summer to make sure there is food for the winter while the grasshopper frolics in the summer, only to find that he is starving in the winter, so he hatches a plot to kill the little goody-goody ant and steal his food. It won’t be easy.

© 2005 Scott Teel