People who “love” machinery are handy to have around. After all, there are some things that are difficult to do a’horseback.

DOZERMAN

Ron is one of those good ranchers who has an affinity for machinery. The new bulldozer was his proudest possession. The monsoon rains had turned his northern Mexico ranch as green as Indiana. But they had also washed out a few pasture roads.

He kissed his wife good-bye and headed out the door to spend the day “dozing.” She handed him his lunch sack and commented on the new straw hat he was wearing. “All you need is a cape and mask, and you could be ‘Dozerman,’ ” she teased.

Well, Dozerman had a great day. He smoothed, graded, and moved large rocks in a single bound. At day’s end, he started home. Passing under a dead oak tree, he noted that, being more powerful than a locomotive, he should push it over someday.

Little did he know that his superthoughts were being monitored by residents of the oak tree. They mobilized and swarmed the open cab of his bulldozer. Attack of the killer bees!

Dozerman was unprepared. The air around him was filled with angry buzzing. Little squiggly feet, flapping wings, and pointy stingers tormenting his ears and arms and head and knees. With cartoonlike martial arts flailing he managed to knock his new hat onto the dozer track. He caught a glimpse of it riding forward and disappearing over the front like a log going over a waterfall.

Seizing control of the situation, he leaped from the seat, arms windmilling. He tugged his hat from beneath the track and, being faster than a speeding bullet, he tried to outrun his attackers.

In his mind, he imagined diving into a lake to evade the swarm. Alas, there was no lake. They continued to dive-bomb his hair, neck, and torso, to crawl down his collar and into his gloves. He rolled, whirled, pirouetted, stumbled, skipped, and cartwheeled across the pasture, slapping himself silly with his free hand and beating his hat into the shape of a dish towel.

Finally he outran the horde and stopped, arms on his knees, chest heaving. He looked back through his swollen vision to the bulldozer still purring like a mountain lion under the oak tree. How had he run the course of rocks and knee-high weeds without stepping on a rattlesnake?

And, how does someone, even with X-ray vision, find his glasses when he can’t see them? Undaunted, he waded back the way he had come, swishing the deep grass with a big stick like some demented beachcomber, and got lucky.

The bees had won the round, but they let him sneak back on the bulldozer and clank home in his flapping straw turban, crooked eyewear, and bumpy skin. He was a sight to see.

Look, up in the sky, it’s a bird, it’s a plane, no . . . it must be Dozerman’s hatband and right glove being carried off to buzzard heaven.