The Cockroaches of Stay More Read online

  His wife, Squire John decided, had some intelligence that he had not given her credit for.

  Josie had a troubled look. “It don’t appear that neither one of them Women has any idee that Man shot Hisself in His gitalong.”

  But here Squire John’s sniffwhips detected the scent of rooster-roaches, and he spun around, expecting to see the Squires Ingledew and Tish.

  Instead he saw, coming into the cookroom as if they owned it, three Holy House deacons, led by the preacher, Brother Chidiock Tichborne.

  “Morsel, Reverend,” Squire John said, and added, “Morsel, boys,” and spat, marking his space.

  “Good morsel to ye, Squire John,” said the parson, and spat too. Each of his confederates also spat.

  Chapter twenty-seven

  Would this redundant rain ever stop? All her life, or at least since the first cold rain she could remember, from her childhood back in November, Tish had loved the rain, its power to magnify all the scents of the world, its ability to quench thirst simply through the vapors it left in the air, to be squeezed from one’s sniffwhips. Without this moisture she would not have grown, no less than the zillion plants whose roots were constantly nourished by the water. But enough was enough, the rain had been falling constantly for five days, and continuously since the ark of Tish’s log home had come to rest atop a sandbar called Ararat many furlongs down Swain’s Creek from Stay More.

  Would she ever find her way home again? Did she even want to—to reveal to all the world this easteregg that kept edging its way out of the end of her abdomen? Maybe the Fate-Thing had intended the rain to wash her and her house away until the easteregg dropped off the end of her abdomen and was hidden somewhere, or abandoned, or at least left her body unmarked and disemburdened.

  Jubal had been the first to notice it, and during the downstream voyage, when it was clear he had nothing better to do than take his attention away from the roiling current to observe the condition of the passengers on the vessel, had remarked to her, matter-of-factly, “Looks like somebody has done went and knocked ye up.” She had flinched and been unable to say anything or divert her attention from the direction of the current that was carrying the log down the now-raging creek. Others of her brothers and sisters had remarked, “Tish is in a family way,” or “Tish is p.g.,” or “Tish has got a cake in her oven,” or “Tish has swallered a turnipseed,” or they had said that she was any one of the following: teeming, heavy, ketched, gravid, great with child, anticipating, sprung, pizened, or coming fresh. But mostly they said that she was “prego,” and Tish thought she would go crazy hearing them ask, “Are you prego, Tish?” and “How did you get so prego, Tish?” and “How prego are you, Tish?” and simply, “Preg, oh, Tish?”

  But if it had not been for their interest in her easteregg, they might have been more frightened than they were by their plight, the undirected wandering plunge of the ark down the stream. In the course of the voyage nearly all of them had become seasick, and, despite all their mother had taught them about the need for puking in solitude, they had vomited in one another’s presence, openly and unashamedly, and now nobody could stand to go near the remainder of the pile of funeral feeds. Nobody had any appetite.

  Despite her best efforts to captain the ship and keep everybody safe, Tish had lost several passengers. It wasn’t her fault. She had urged them all to stay off the top of the log, to keep inside of it, and they had, but the log kept crashing into rocks, or the shore, or tree limbs or roots, and each time this happened Tish would count heads afterwards and discover one or more passengers had been dislodged from the vessel and fallen into the tide, never to be seen again. The population of her brothers and sisters was now down from forty-two to thirty-one, and Tish wondered if Brother Tichborne could even keep track of all their names in his next funeralization.

  Tish realized that the next funeralization was going to have to run all night and maybe have a matinee. Not alone for roosterroaches but for all critter-kind: the stream was full of the corpses of every conceivable insect. Not just insects of every possible configuration of soggy sniffwhips and drenched wings, but furred and feathered creatures too: when the brothers and sisters were not busy making remarks about Tish’s pregnancy they were observing and commenting upon the westered wildlife floating past. They saw drowned birds, they saw drowned rodents, they saw a drowned pig, a drowned possum, even a drowned fish. There were drowned frogs and drowned snakes and drowned turtles, and then, when the ark landed and lodged on the sandbar, there came a drowned mouse.

  It was not just a mouse which washed up beside their log. It was the Great White Mouse himself…or maybe herself, nobody had the nerve to approach near enough to check, even if it was clearly drowned. The shore of the sandbar was littered with other corpses, drowned bugs and beetles and spiders, drowned slugs and leeches and snails, drowned ants and moths and flies, but the only drowned mammal on this stretch of shore was the Great White Mouse. Although she had never seen it before, Tish knew it at once, because she had heard many stories about it, and had in turn told many stories about it to her brothers and sisters, so that simply her hushed utterance of “The Great White Mouse!” at the sight of it sent thirty of them scurrying into the innermost recesses of their ark.

  “Looks west to me,” declared Jubal, who alone beside Tish had not hidden himself.

  “You don’t want to step over there and find out, do you?” she said.

  “Me? I aint that dumb. Let’s jist wait and see if it moves.”

  Tish and Jubal watched the Great White Mouse for a long time. He (they began to assume it was male) lay on his side, one gitalong bent at an odd angle, his eyes closed tight, his albino fur thoroughly soaked and grimed and matted.

  “Do you smell any westwardness?” Tish asked Jubal.

  He waved his sniffwhips slowly, turning them and tuning them closely. “Jist only all them other west critters. Pew.”

  She could not detect any mammalian westwardness on her sniffwhips, but perhaps it was too soon; perhaps the Great White Mouse’s heart had stopped beating only within the past hour and the corpse had not yet begun decomposing. Tish stepped down from the entrance of the ark onto the sands, and took a few steps closer to the Mouse.

  “Watcha doing?!” Jubal cried. “Don’t ye git no nearer to that thang!”

  “He looks bad hurt,” Tish observed.

  “Don’t ye jist hope he’s hurt west?” Jubal said. “I shore hope he’s hurt as west as ye can go! Now git yoreself back in here!”

  But until a renewed pouring down of the rain drove her back into the log, Tish stood and stared at the Great White Mouse, and even from the shelter of the log she continued to watch the Mouse, having tired of watching the rain long ago. Eventually her vigilance was rewarded.

  Beside her, Jubal jumped an inch and exclaimed, “Did ye see that!? His tongue crope out a bit!”

  Sure enough, the Mouse’s tongue, as pink as the interior of his ears and the edges of the closed eyes, had poked out one corner of his mouth. Then, more unmistakable, the tip of the long scaly tail twitched ever so slightly.

  “He’s still east!” Tish said, and realized she was whispering, as if the Mouse might hear her.

  Then they began to hear a sound coming from the Mouse: a high-pitched nasal whining, a sort of squeaky hum coming from the throat and larynx and nasal passages all combined. The one intonation of this hum rose into a higher note and then piped into a droning, unmelodious melody, slightly liquid and gurgling because of all the water the animal had soaked up.

  The Great White Mouse slightly opened one eye, which seemed to attempt to focus upon Tish and Jubal. The eye was pink all over, and turned up at the edge evilly like a snake’s. The Mouse hummed a feeble word, which sounded like “Mawris?” Tish and Jubal exchanged glances, and mumbled the word to each other, questioningly. Then the Mouse hummed, “Mawris, juicy da lim?”

  “What?” Tish said aloud, although Jubal frantically tried to hush her. “What did ye say?”

/>   The eye attempted to look at her. The great head attempted to lift from the sand. The voice, humming, droned, “Juicy da lim what bunked me?” Then the voice faltered another hum of “Mawris?” and the head lifted, then fell, and the voice moaned, “Ya aint Mawris. Who ah ya?”

  Tish understood this question, and she answered, “Letitia Dingletoon.”

  “Anudda friggin cockroach,” hummed the Mouse. “Way’s Mawris?”

  “Mawris who?”

  “My brudda,” hummed the Mouse. Then the rain stopped. The Mouse hummed, “Comere alidda closa, toots. I can’t see ya.”

  Although Jubal grabbed at her to stop her, Tish shook him off and moved closer to the Mouse, not close enough for him to reach her, unless he was just pretending to be injured. “Are you hurt?” she asked him.

  “A tree lim bunked me on da head,” he said. “Juicy it?”

  “No,” she said. “Can I do anything for you?”

  “Howsbout sum teet?” the Mouse hummed.

  Tish could not understand him. It was a very peculiar foreign language that he was speaking. She had to ask him to repeat himself, and then she repeated it to Jubal, “Howsbout sum teet?” and Jubal thought at first the Mouse was referring to a tit, or teat, which mammals have. But that was not it.

  At length, Tish asked, “Are you askin for somethin to eat?”

  “What I said awready,” hummed the Mouse. “Whatcha got? Come alidda bit closa, kiddo.”

  Jubal whispered behind her, “He wants to eat you, Tish! Don’t go no nearer than that!”

  Tish returned to the log, but only long enough to search the pile of funeral feeds for a scrap of something, which she carried in her touchers bravely within chomping distance of the Mouse, who could have swallowed her up whole, but did not. Instead he took the offering in his teeth. “Cheese I know,” he said. “Velveeta?” He gulped it down. “Say, dat’s simply delish, snooks. If ya’ll ponny spression.”

  She fetched him another morsel, a cupcake fragment. And then another. She even took him a tad she had been saving for herself: the last bit of peanut brickle.

  “Dis I don’t know,” he said, humming appreciatively. “But it takes da cake. If ya’ll ponny spression.”

  She carried to the Mouse every last crust and crumb remaining in the pile of funeral feeds, and then she announced, “That’s all. There’s not any more.”

  “Donkey shay, angel. Way ja get all dat stuff?”

  Tish attempted to explain to the Mouse the custom of the funeral feeds, and further to explain that although the funeral feeds had been intended in observation of the westering of her mother and father, they weren’t actually west but had only been presumed to be, and that she and her forty-two—no, now it was only thirty-one—brothers and sisters had been adrift on their log home for nights, until now, and were all too seasick to eat any more of it, so the Mouse was welcome to it, and it was hoped that he had had enough to eat that he wouldn’t feel like eating any of them.

  “Hey, right, lambchop,” the Mouse commented. “So why should I wanna eat my benefactors, fa crissake, if ya’ll ponny spression awready?” He successfully raised himself into a sitting position.

  Tish did not know “benefactor,” but assumed it was another of this foreigner’s strange words. “You sure talk right funny,” she observed.

  “Jeez, chick, ya sound fahrin yasself, ya know,” he said.

  “Fahrin,” she repeated after him, and then she understood it, and pronounced it her way, as if correcting him: “furrin.” She said it again: “Furrin.”

  “Awright, furrin,” he said. “Whatcha say ya name was again?”

  “Letitia. Everyone calls me Tish. What’s yours?”

  “Hoimin. Please ta meetcha.” He extended one clawed paw as if for a shake, but of course she could not take it.

  “How do you spell ‘Hoimin’?” she asked.

  “Lady, I don’t spell, period.”

  The rain was starting up, once more. Tish wanted to invite the Great Mouse into the shelter of the log, but she was hesitant. “Don’t you generally eat roosterroaches?” she asked.

  “Do which? Na, I genly eat jiggers, bedbugs, cooties, whatevah. Cockroaches I don’t like. Dey gimme gas, if ya’ll ponny spression.”

  Still she was hesitant, but she invited him in, out of the now drenching downpour. It was a tight squeeze; he took up almost all their loafing room, leaving no space for her brothers and sisters, who wouldn’t come out of hiding, anyway, except Jubal, who kept jumping around nervously from one gitalong to the other, as if he had to go potty.

  Hoimin really liked to talk. As he lay there, snug in the dry confines of the log’s main chamber, he told to Tish, and to hopping Jubal too, his story. He talked most of the night. Jubal crept off to find his brothers and sisters and urge them out of their hiding places. “His name is Hoimin because he’s always hummin,” Jubal explained to them excitedly, “and now he’s hummin the beatinest story ever ye heared!” One by one the brothers and sisters crept within earshot—or rather prongshot—of the Great White Mouse and listened to his story.

  He had been born and raised in a great city, far away to the east—and “east” meant not “alive” to him but merely a direction he called “Dataway.” East Dataway was a city of zillions of human beings who lived in houses stacked one atop another until they reached to heaven. Hoimin had been born in a cage high up in one of these fabulous towers of East Dataway, and along with his brothers and sisters he had lived the life of someone named Riley, well-fed and cared for, but once Hoimin had reached adulthood, full size, he was daily subjected to certain indignities, and he chronicled each of them for his listeners, followed by the question, “Hodda ya like dat?” He was stuck with needles; Human Beings picked him up and stuck needles into his “butt” and injected some kind of fluid into him. “Hodda ya like dat?” He was put into boxes with labyrinthine passageways that he was required to find his way out of. “Hodda ya like dat?”

  Tish was not certain how to answer his repeated question. She did like that, in the sense that she liked the telling of the story, but she did not like that, in the sense of all the strange things that were done to Hoimin. So each time he asked “Hodda ya like dat?” Tish would usually reply, “I don’t like that.”

  Eventually Hoimin plotted his escape from the Human Beings who were doing crazy things to him. There was a Man who each day brought into Hoimin’s room a flattish box called a “briefkez.” This Man, whose name apparently was A. Sun Poddy, as Hoimin referred to him, sometimes left the briefkez open, and one day Hoimin saw his chance when A. Sun Poddy’s back was turned, found his way completely out of the labyrinth in which he was caught, and snuggled into a pile of papers in A. Sun Poddy’s briefkez. Later that day A. Sun Poddy shut up the briefkez and it remained closed for several days, during which Hoimin experienced sensations of being carried, and then of flight, and being carried again, and then more flight, weightlessness almost, in the deafening roar of great engines, and then being carried again, until, at last, the briefkez was opened on a table top and Hoimin emerged to see many Human Beings standing around him, including A. Sun Poddy, who exclaimed, “What the shit?!”

  The Humans tried to grab Hoimin but he leapt off the table and gained the floor and made it out through a door and into a long corridor and down some steps and to the curb of a street where many four-wheeled vehicles were dashing past. One of them stopped at the curb and its rear door opened and a Human stepped out and Hoimin jumped in. He hid beneath a seat in the vehicle and rode for two nights and a day until the vehicle came to a stop, and he jumped out and found himself on the dirt road that led to Stay More, the strangest country he had ever imagined.

  For over a year now Hoimin had attempted to adapt himself to life in the woods and fields of Stay More, encountering all sorts of creatures and having countless close brushes with west, experiencing enough adventures to keep his listeners entertained for a month of Sundays. But now the sky was lightening up in the east, dataw
ay, and the sun would soon rise, and Hoimin intended to get caught up on his sleep.

  Tish yawned and realized it was bedtime for herself and all her brothers and sisters too; and she realized something else—the rain had stopped, for good, or at least for a long long time. But before she could think of sleeping in the same log with a rodent creature who ate insects, she had to ask him a question. She remembered all the stories of Doc Swain’s encounters with the Great White Mouse, and assumed it was Hoimin.

  “Didn’t you ever try to eat a roosterroach?” she asked Hoimin.

  “Yeah, once, maybe,” he admitted. “A sun poddy what tried to bite off the tip of my tail.”

  “That wasn’t A. Sun Poddy!” Tish said. “That was Doc Swain.”

  “Huh? Lisn, buttercup, he was a sun poddy what took a bite on my tail! Hodda ya like dat? But I dint try teet da bug, I was ony goin skeer da bejeesus outa him. If ya’ll ponny spression.”

  Tish yawned again, and said, “Well.” She shooed all her brothers and sisters off to bed. “Tonight we’ve got a long way to go. We can’t float this log back upstream, so we’re going to have to walk.” She spoke these words to her siblings but loud enough for Hoimin to hear, and then she said to Hoimin, “If we’re not here when you wake up, you can have our house. We won’t be needing it any more.”

  “What izzis, toodlum? Ya don’t like my looks maybe? Lemme go witcha, awready, hey? Just lemme grab a few Z’s first, okay? Den we’ll talk. Gimme a break. So I’m a type person what’s hod to know maybe but just gimme a chance, hey, lidda dew-drop…?”