The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [18]
Happily, I didn’t die and four hours later was to be found sitting up in bed, head extravagantly turbaned, well rested after a nap that came during one of those passing three-hour moments when my parents forgot to check on my wakefulness, eating tubs of chocolate ice cream, and regally receiving visitors from the neighborhood, giving particular priority to those who came bearing gifts. Dr. Alzheimer arrived later than promised, smelling lightly of bourbon. He spent most of the visit sitting on the edge of my bed and asking me if I was old enough to remember Bobby Jones. He never did look at my head. Dr. Alzheimer’s fees, I believe, were very reasonable, too.
APART FROM MEDICAL PRACTITIONERS, Iowa offered little in the way of natural dangers, though one year when I was about six we had an infestation of a type of giant insect called cicada killers. Cicada killers are not to be confused with cicadas, which are themselves horrible things—like small flying cigars, but with staring red eyes and grotesque pincers, if I recall correctly. Well, cicada killers were much worse. They only emerged from the ground every seventeen years, so nobody, even adults, knew much about them. There was endless debate over whether the “killer” in “cicada killer” signified that they were killers of cicadas or that they were cicadas that killed. The consensus pointed to the latter.
Cicada killers were about the size of hummingbirds and had vicious stingers fore and aft, and they were awful. They lived in burrows and would come flying up unexpectedly from below, with a horrible whirring sound, rather like a chain saw starting up, if you disturbed their nests. The greatest fear was that they would shoot up the leg of your shorts and become entangled in your underpants and start lashing out blindly. Castration, possibly by the side of the road, was the normal emergency procedure for cicada killer stings to the scrotal region—and they seldom stung anywhere else, according to informed reports. You never really saw one because as soon as one whirred out of its burrow you pranced away like hell, pressing your shorts primly but prudently to your legs.
The worst chronic threat we had was poison sumac, though I never knew anyone, adult or child, who actually knew what it was or precisely how it would kill you. It was really just a kind of shrubby rumor. Even so, in any wooded situation you could always hold up a hand and announce gravely: “We’d better not go any farther. I think there might be sumac up ahead.”
“Poison sumac?” one of your younger companions would reply, eyes wide open.
“All sumac’s poisonous, Jimmy,” someone else would say, putting a hand on his shoulder.
“Is it really bad?” Jimmy would ask.
“Put it this way,” you would answer sagely. “My brother’s friend Mickey Cox knew a guy who fell into a sumac patch once. Got it all over him, you know, and the doctors had to like amputate his whole body. He’s just a head on a plate now. They carry him around in a hatbox.”
“Wow,” everyone would say except Arthur Bergen, who was annoyingly brainy and knew all the things in the world that couldn’t possibly be so, which always exactly coincided with all the things you had ever heard about that were amazing.
“A head couldn’t survive on its own in a box,” he would say.
“Well, they took it out sometimes. To give it air and let it watch TV and so on.”
“No, I mean it couldn’t survive on its own, without a body.”
“Well, this one did.”
“Not possible. How are you going to keep a head oxygenated without a heart?”
“How should I know? What am I—Dr. Kildare? I just know it’s true.”
“It can’t be, Bryson. You’ve misheard—or you’re making