The Mosquito Truck Is Not Spraying for Mosquitoes

the route. not the route they print.

Every summer night between nine and eleven, a pickup truck with a fogging rig in the bed drives the streets of every little town in this basin, leaving a white cloud in the road behind it. You have all seen it. Your children have chased it on bicycles, which you should not let them do. The parish says it sprays for mosquitoes.

This week the parish paper in Le Marais Perdu printed what I have been noticing since 2011: the mosquitoes leave with the truck. They do not die. They leave. They come back about forty minutes later, and the paper's word for how they come back was rested.

So I followed it. Two nights, headlights off where it was safe, notebook on the dash. I logged every turn. That truck does not drive the streets in any order a man trying to kill mosquitoes would drive them. It goes to the ball field first. Then the church lot. Then one particular lady's side yard. Then it goes out the levee road and stops for six minutes at the edge of the parish, engine running, fogger off. Then it comes back.

DocFenwick, whom I called before writing this (he picks up now, which is new), says the route is set by complaints and the stop at the parish line is the driver eating a sandwich. Doc is probably right about the sandwich.

Here is my read. That truck is not killing mosquitoes. It is herding them. Somebody needs the mosquitoes moved off the ball field and the church and that lady's yard every night by eleven, and needs them back by midnight, and the parish has a budget line for it and a man with a sandwich.

I do not know what the mosquitoes are for. I know the fog smells like oranges this year, which it never has, and when I mentioned that to the driver at the gas station, he said "new guy at the office," and looked at the floor.

I relay. You decide.

In Truth and Terror.
— Beau