The Bear in a Muddy Tutu by Cole Alpaugh

the largest trucks tested their faith, slowly creeping up and over the rickety bridge onto Fish Head Island.
    “Ain’t gonna make it, ” the driver of Billy Wayne’s truck said, resigned and matter - of - factly, and just a few hundred yards away, the exact same words might have been spoken with a drunken slur by Warden Clayton Flint.
    * * *
    W arden Flint was perfectly happy sitting on the back step of the shack that doubled as an official department office and his home, smoking cigarettes and taking pulls off a bottle of cheap Russian vodka. What brought him joy was the absolute silence he’d caused to go along with the lack of a single flying or otherwise biting bug, despite being smack dab in the middle of what would normally be called bug central.
    Flint was in charge of protecting the fish and game inhabiting a plot of roughly twelve square miles of percolating land and water. He was also responsible for a weekly hump out to the county seat to fill up the hundred gallon drum with either temephos or malathion pesticides. His truck was equipped with a mist blower , whose powerful blast eject ed insecticide into the airstream, killing either the larvae or adult pests. Some three decades back Flint had begun the job with great resolve and ambition, making absolute ly certain to treat every square foot of his territory. He even went so far as to check the wind gauges before setting out, ensuring the drift would come from the right direction and taking particular care to mist the small eddies and ponds after rains.
    As the years wore on, the circle of treatment grew smaller and smaller, until a few months ago, when he stopped bothering to drive the truck anywhere after returning with the poisons. He still had to drive out to headquarters, fill the tank, and then sign and file the required paperwork in order to show he was doing his job. But there was nobody to check how the poison was disbursed , nobody to care.
    Back at his post on th e marshes off Great Bay Boulevard, he simply cranked the mist blower motor, opened the valve, and went inside the shack to relax in the air -co nditioning . He would cozy up with a magazine featuring huge boobs and off-color party jokes , while a deadly fog engulf ed the shack and surrounding wetland .
    W hat difference would it make? Days after you stopped spraying, the mosquitoes, green heads, horse flies, no-see-ums, and black flies came back in full force. And the only people he was protecting were the day crabbers who came down from nearby cities w ith chicken legs on strings and long handled nets. T hese people were unbelievable pigs to the very last one. Every carload was good for a dozen cans or bottles tossed into the canal, left bobbing next to the floating potato chip bags and sandwich wrappers. The kids who came down at night kept their engines running, air conditioners and music blaring. They noticed the bugs about as much as they did Flint ’s occasional episodes of exhibitionism, which he only engaged in when drunk a nd regretted when sober.
    “People are pigs, ” Flint said into the night, taking another swig of Russian vodka, referring to the litterers, and a little to himself. He let the bugs feast away on the city slickers, and it served them fucking right.
    When it came to bugs, Flint could sit on the back step of this shack naked as a ja y bi r d at any hour of the day or night, if the urge so took him. With a full hundred gallons of insecticide injected into the ecosystem of the immediate area on a weekly basis, not a cricket chirped or a fly buzzed. Any frogs — had they been able to tolerate all the poison — would have long since packed up and moved on for lack of food, as had the fish in the canal and any terns or ducks in the tall grasses. Everything with a heartbeat was dead or driven off, except for the game warden.
    “Slow actin’ . ” Flint held the bottle of what he knew was his own poison out in front of him, tilting it toward the yellow light