Well I'll be hanged! Look who's here -- a gentleman of the Holy Cloth. Yes, I've got a few things to get off my chest, so thanks for offering me your warm hand of solace during this difficulty.

I know it's your particular game and holy obligation to do so, as is my disagreeable morning appointment with the intractable noose-knotting Arthur Ellis.

It may surprise you, Father, that I hold no quarrel with that. Though - with small justification - I might harbor some nascent resentment. However, I do look forward to the end of the nightmares whereby I suffer having my face devoured by maggots. Before the hood of my erasure is in place then, I thank you for the chance to confess all, thus reflecting more of my inner worth than was revealed at the trial.

It's good to get the thing said, I mean the ends tied in respect to Maylene and Julian - Tilly and poor lost Becky and what came next - so somehow I can rest with it. Was that a pun? Ends tied? Does Arthur still use hemp, or is it now sisal fiber? We all can use a little of God's gallows humor right now.

I'm just an ordinary guy who lived comfortably with my wife, Becky. Of simple pleasures, I loved to fish Coho and Spring Salmon from the pier every other afternoon, first picking up bait at Julian's place and jawing a little. Once I went to fetch him and found big jars lining the shelves labeled with Latin names and filled with squirming creatures, "What the hell's all this here, Julie?" I asked.

"Them's my live specimens. I have a collection, don't you know, since a year back. They call it entomology - the study of insects and some's arachnids: spiders and scorpions. We got a club that extends around the world, shipping bugs back and forth. Right there you're holdin' a million Siphonaptera Ctenocephalides, fleas from the Dead Sea, eggs, pupae and adults." Julie was damn smart, I knew. But I was surprised by this revelation.

I picked up another jar. "Godamitey! These are fierce looking buggers."

"Fire Ants - Solenopsis - from the Carolinas. They're coming north with their poison stings, like those Killer Bees in yonder terrarium. One too many of them little pricks and you die die die in agon-eye." Julian's face lit up like a grinning devil with a red mouth full of fangs. I'd swear his eyes glowed flames at that point, if I didn't know better.

"Killer Bees, huh?" I looked at the label: Hymenoptera - Apis mellifera scutellata - AFRICAN KILLERS CROSS.

"And next to them that's a whole different animule, pardner. Them's African Scorpions. Arachnids - Scorpionida, Pandinus Imperator - They'll kill you even quicker."

"Wow!"

Taking a little comfort with Maylene next door to Julian's, following a round of fishing, didn't feel like cheating on Becky. Julie told me Maylene did more banging than a screen door in a windstorm, so I was just a little gust that visited her shack on the odd balmy afternoon. So sassy in her Daisy Mae halter top and blue cutoffs, she'd tease, "Well now come on in. I have right here a most delightful and refreshing afternoon branch tea for you, if you'd care to partake in the refinements of a most florius day."

We'd duly share a few refinements, and I'd leave a fish in her ice box stuffed with a ten or twenty, and sing Gone Fishin' on the way home to Becky who was none the wiser for my fun and refreshment -- a pleasant routine that continued until Becky's Aunt Tilly came to stay.

It wasn't that Tilly had no other place to go. "Before settling down with my sister in Osoyoos, I do owe you the same attention I've paid the rest of the family," she chimed as she moved into the suite we'd prepared. And it wasn't right off that I thought of the three hundred grand she had packed away, but I suppose it did hit my aware button now and again. What Maylene and me could do with that sure gave me mind-candy daydreams.

In some ways Aunt Tilly was the most ill-starred woman that ever walked the trail. I mean we went to the airport to fetch her, and right away, "They went and lost my luggage." She said it quietly. No ranting, no swearing at the agent. Nothing. She serenely accepted her new room, but not thrilled. Maybe that's the trouble. Reminded me of warm porridge, smiling like she was on tranquilizers.

Becky said to me, "Auntie is no trouble at all, is she?" Certainly I was forced to agree with that reckoning. One day per week she'd shop at Zellers as the common folks do, and nearly every day they'd stroll along Marine Drive past Julian's to the Seaside, enjoy a café latte, and buy into the meat lottery, thus screwing up any hopes I had for poking Maylene. Tilly came fully equipped with a whole library of tedious movies and few ho-hum books, thus savaging me in a tyranny of cranium-busting boredom, Father.

One afternoon I bought a jar of discounted hungry Dead Sea fleas from Julian.

During one of those sunny spring days things took a turn initiating the sequence that has brought you and me together here. What's your first name? I didn't catch it. Well Patrick - do all you Irish turtle-shirts come with the same moniker? Last name wouldn't be O'Brien, by any chance? This particular time Becky got excited. "Come on Auntie, we'll walk those stone steps down to the beach. I just love the sea and rocks this time of year."

I did hear that Tilly was a little reluctant to do that, her being a roly-poly, but she went along befitting her docile demeanor. So she steps on a loose rock and whups herself all the way down, waltzing Matilda ass over antlers, until she reaches bottom. Becky told me she didn't even scream. Luckily there was a man nearby who helped Tilly home where we wrapped ice around the bashed-in places and applied ointment to her gross raw abrasions. By next morning, realizing she had a broken ankle, we took her to the clinic where they prepared her for a goodly spell with cast and crutches, and all that entails.

Enter the fleas. Becky told her, "I do not know how they got there for we disinfected your place a dozen times, scrubbed every cranny." But there they were, and as it turns out poor Tilly is allergic to those critters.

Like life, Patrick, the worst trouble has a way of searching and rooting you out. For instance this gap between my teeth. When I was five an old crone pointed to that and cackled to my mother, "That there Cro-Magnon gap means the boy is borned to be hanged. You can count on it." Tilly had this natural fear of fleas, and so that's what came her way.

Every time I watched her scratch I'd think of that old joke: "What is the most faithful animal on the planet? Fleas. Once they find someone they like they stick to them" Well they loved Tilly plenty! They proceeded to root her out.

I did the best I could. Not my fault Julian had passed along absolutely no knowledge of allergen immunotherapy that might have prevented what happened. We moved Tilly around the house as I sprayed and fumigated, which inflamed her asthma. But it was the fleas that got her in the end. Death is unpleasant at the best of times, but murder by flea is repugnant to witness. There old Til lay halfway to the toilet, chomping down on one of Becky's best crocheted rugs, all welted up with jumping crawlies eating at her soul, it seemed.

After they took her away we called an exterminator and experienced no subsequent problem with those varmints, though Becky absolutely refused to allow me to touch her inheritance: "Auntie's money is for me in case of emergencies. Now you keep your money, and I keep mine," a most hurtful declaration to me who'd contributed so extensively toward acquiring her newfound largess.

Then Becky got on me about the ants. So we had a few carpenters coming into the kitchen. "They won't hurt you," I tried to tell her." They're just nosing around."

"Well you know how allergic Auntie was, and I'm probably too," she screamed. So perpetually we chased, scrunched and poisoned those poor ants, and I didn't get into fishing or even Maylene, thus becoming pissed with the general situation. Funny that word "pissed." Comes from the word "pismire" the old word for ant, due to it's secretion of formic acid, Julian said. Mire and piss being the same.

Man: What's the biggest ant in the world?
Wifey: My Aunt.
Man: No, it's an elephant.
Wifey: You obviously haven't met my Aunt
Man: Sure I have, she was a tyrant and now she's a dead Aunt.

Then one day a light bulb went off when I read:

Almost everyone stung by fire ants experiences a severe debilitating reaction to the venom; sixteen percent of people suffer life-threatening reactions. More than eighty recent fatalities have been attributed to fire ant-induced anaphylaxis.

Next day I dropped into Julian's and picked up a jar of Argentinean Reds. This'll really give Becky something to complain about, I mused. As usual she overreacted to what I thought was a solution to all my problems.

Subsequently, I had Becky cremated.

In mourning, Maylene and I visited Becky's club and generated crocodile tears among her colleagues gathered at the Arbutus for their monthly Sunday breakfast before taking off for Vegas, Disney Land and Palm Springs. What a party! But a parade soon to be rained upon when we returned and discovered Julian tapping his foot as we unloaded the Hummer.

"So you guys having a good time, and nary a word even to good old Julian here what helps certain folks in their time of need. Not even a thank you post card note did I get in my mail?" I could see he was mighty perturbed, to say the least.

"Come on in, Old Buddy Julie, we'll have a homecoming drink."

Well he came in, but I could see it wasn't much use. "You made certain purchases from my bait shop of which the authorities might be interested. Now you'll be thinking around ten thousand for good old button-lip Jule and his keeping it that way for you, Partner."

He was leering and outright insolent, and I could see as how I was losing face with Maylene, for she likes her men hardboned and mean.

Even as I hit him and blood gushed all over the table I knew it was a mistake. Soon I'd either have to pay the fare he demanded or - well - insure he'd somehow jump off the pier, for with that mouth he could bring down the sky, and now I just couldn't face jail time and do without the home comfort Maylene provided. I thought about all that as he ran home screaming invectives too disgusting for your ears, Father? Okay, Brother Patrick then.

It was a mighty persnickety perplexity. What to do about Julian soon became the issue permeating my mind, especially when I came home late one night after hoisting a few down at the Seaside.

Though I searched most everywhere Maylene was no place. Along the beach I heard a familiar giggle and a few squeals of joy coming from Julian's window, and naturally peeked in. Hell I realize that girl is no nun - pardon Brother Patrick - but what I saw gave rise to the inner devil in me, for there they were pumping the hell of one another like some sex-crazed animals. Naked as hairless hogs just a going at it. Now I could see me losing the money, even my life, and most of all sweet Maylene. That's what broke it.

Well now some say it was the whiskey that got my goat, and there are those who claim maybe I possessed a normal man's rage, but it was like I was someplace else, my brain took leave of the body. I crept out there in the shed and grabbed a big jar. You guessed it, Pat, about a million or so fiery killer bees exploded against that bedpost while I took a flying leap off the pier to drown myself, I suppose, or just maybe to smother the sound of screaming. After all these were my two finest friends, and what was going on was definitely hard for me to endure.

You know the rest, Brother Patrick: the detective who went to check my place opened the ice box and got stung by a thousand springing scorpions, so I reckon Maylene and Julian had prepared their own special surprise for me, inflicted upon that poor boy in error.

There was nothing left for it but to tell the Inspector all and get it off my conscience. They were sufficiently compassionate to allow my presence at the funerals of my two best pals, and now it's time to honor my appointment with Mr. Arthur Ellis the Hangman who awaits me at first light up on the thirteenth trap door step of the gallows.

Thank you for your prayers, Brother. I'm sure they help diminish this blot on my character.

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