The Cockroaches of Stay More Read online

  Then Tish did a very strange thing. She introduced the Mouse to Doc. “Hoimin,” she said to it, “I want you to meet Doc Swain. You owe him three apologies.”

  The Mouse spoke to Doc! “Haughty,” it said. “If ya’ll ponny spression. Please da meetcha. Da lidda pigeon says ta me I should big ya poddon I ate ya legs off. It was mistook identity, belive me. I taught ya was a edible bug, ya know?”

  Tish and Squire Sam were doing some kind of dance with their sniffwhips. The Mouse kept on talking to Doc. Doc thought he was dreaming. Suddenly from down the Roamin Road came strolling Squire Hank Ingledew. Doc knew he was dreaming.

  “Like to skeered yore other three gitalongs off, I bet!” Squire Hank said to Doc. “Aint this some critter? Name is Hoimin, which is jist the way he misspeaks Herman. Got a story as long as my right sniffwhip, but he caint talk good English. Lissen to him!”

  The injunction was hardly necessary, because Doc couldn’t avoid listening to him; the Mouse wouldn’t stop talking. Every other utterance seemed to be “ya know?” or “if ya’ll ponny spression” and the Mouse kept asking Doc, “Hodda ya like dat?”

  “Where did ye find this?” Doc asked Squire Hank, and reached out to touch the white fur.

  “Tish found him, down the creek a ways,” Squire Hank said. “Doc, I got a long story to tell, myself. But what’s a-gorn on here? What’s all these folks doing? Trying to deliver another message?”

  When Squire Hank had been brought up to date on events, he commented, “Now that is the pure-dee dumbest notion ever I heared!” and he turned to his son and said, “Sam, boy, why in blazes didn’t ye jist try writin another message on the typin machine?”

  Squire Sam looked blankly at his father, not hearing him. Then the younger squire turned to his girlfriend and asked, “What did he say, Tish?” and Tish waved and wiggled her sniffwhips into all sorts of odd positions, and Sam said, “Oh,” then he said to his father, “There wasn’t time, Dad. And there wasn’t any guarantee the wind wouldn’t have blown the second message away too. We’ve got to get Her attention before dark!”

  “Wal, why don’t ye jist run up thar and hop in Her lap?” Squire Hank asked.

  Tish seemed to be taking the older squire’s words and translating them into some kind of sign language for the younger squire.

  “What good would that do?” Sam said to his father. “You’ve told me never to reveal myself to Her, and if I did, it would just frighten Her.”

  Tish spoke, timidly but with conviction. “I have an idea, sirs. What if we had Hoimin march at the front of the arrow? The Woman would see Hoimin because he’s white.” As she spoke, she expressed this in her sign language for Sam’s benefit.

  The two squires looked at each other, then looked at Doc, and Doc looked at them and then at Tish and at Archy and at Hoimin, who was looking at each of the others in turn and saying, “Hey, ya know sumthin? Da lidda sweety is positively kerspang on da button, ya know? Attawaygo, beby!”

  If he were dreaming, Doc did not want to wake up. The reason he knew he was dreaming was that there was no possible way a fellow who had endured all that he had been through for the past several days could even hope to stay awake. He had to be asleep. He hadn’t had a good day’s sleep since the day before the night Lawrence Brace had shot himself in the gitalong. Doc was somewhat ashamed of himself for falling asleep right in the middle of the most dramatic and essential portion of the rescue operations, but it couldn’t be helped. He was asleep, and here was this preposterous daymare of this great nemesis of his, the White Mouse, who was suddenly speaking like a laboratory rat with a Brooklyn accent and who was about to become the hero of the whole affair.

  The nice thing about dreams is that you don’t really have to exert yourself and be active. You can sit back and just watch all these things happening to you and to others, and you don’t even have to respond, if you don’t feel like it. Doc wasn’t even required to resume his position at the left flank of the arrow. Squire Hank took that place, and Doc just stood over to one side—or, if he was dreaming, just crouched asleep over to one side—and watched.

  The arrow of hundreds of roosterroaches of Stay More, under the direction of Squire Hank and Squire Sam, and Tish, the latter practically riding on Hoimin’s long pink scaly tail, reformed itself in the yard of Parthenon, right beneath the porch upon which the Woman sat, gazing at Holy House. The arrow began moving out across the yard, with Hoimin at the head, or point. “Hey, lookit me!” Hoimin hummed. The arrow followed Hoimin. “C’mon, Lady, lookit me!” Hoimin squealed, over his shoulder. “Fevinsakes awready, Lady, willya lookit me?!?!”

  And the Lady looked at him. When Her gaze shifted downward, caught by a ball of fur hopping, skipping, bouncing, and dancing, someone—it appeared to be Squire Sam—dropped back and arranged the last few hundred roosterroaches into a new formation:

  A great philosophical question which had often preoccupied Doc Swain in his casual musings was the possibility that in dreams not only is the dreamer dreaming but also every participant in the dream is dreaming. If I dream that you are there, you in turn are dreaming that I am here. Therefore, Doc reflected as he watched this procession, every last one of those roosterroaches out there is only dreaming that he (or she) is doing this, and also, of course, the Great White Mouse is dreaming.

  …and also, of course, the Woman was dreaming. Surely She Herself had to think that She was dreaming, seeing this strange sight. (I think I dream, therefore I dream I think I am. Et cetera. Philosophy was complicated, Doc realized.)

  So the Woman went on thinking She dreamed, as the procession slowly wound its way down the Roamin Road toward Holy House. But then the Woman stood up, unsteadily, and put down the glass of whatever had been responsible for the dreaming. Then, instead of going out into Her yard to follow the arrow to Holy House, She turned, and went into Parthenon. She was gone for a moment, and then returned, muttering loudly to Herself, “Goddamn Newton County Telephone Company!” She raised one hand to become a visor on Her forehead, and peered out across the Roamin Road into the gathering dusk, where the arrow was fading into the direction of Holy House. She took a step down Her front steps. “Gran, I’ve only had four gin-and-tonics,” She said to the air. “Well, maybe it was five. But I’m not drunk. I swear. I know what I’m seeing. Unless I’m dreaming.”

  She took the rest of the steps down into Her yard and began walking in the direction of the arrow. “Well, it wouldn’t hurt to just go see, would it?” She asked.

  “No, it wouldn’t, Ma’am,” Doc said. “You’d be mighty surprised what You would discover. Hurry!”

  The Woman began walking rapidly, as fast as She could. Doc followed. Hobbling for all he was worth, he could not keep up with Her. The procession of the arrow had almost reached Holy House. As the Woman caught up with it, it was already at the steps to Holy House, where, as the Woman reached it, the roosterroaches disbanded and decamped. The Woman climbed the porch of Holy House, knocked at one of the three front doors, knocked again, and disappeared inside. Doc had scarcely reached his own clinic, halfway between Parthenon and Holy House, when he watched the Woman enter the latter.

  He kept going, but was still a hundred yards short of Holy House when the Woman came out of it again. She looked up and down the Roamin Road as if looking for someone else, but saw no one. Then She began running. Not toward Parthenon but in the opposite direction, toward the Man’s mailbox. But She did not stop at the mailbox. She kept running out into the county road and across the WPA low-water bridge.

  She disappeared in the direction of the old canning factory. Doc could not understand what reason She might have to go to the abandoned canning factory. But maybe She was going beyond it. What was beyond it? Far beyond it, up the mountain, lived other humans, or so the old legends told. But they were a long way off. No, nearer beyond the canning factory was the old schoolhouse. But why was She going to the old schoolhouse?

  Before he could figure it out, Doc heard the sound. He had ne
ver heard it before, but had heard from oldtimers who had in turn heard from their ancestors what the sound was like. “BOMMBBB!” it said. The sound reverberated all over everything and seemed to drip from the trees. There was an instant’s interval to let the sound rumble and roll all over Stay More valley, and then a slightly different sound pealed. “DOOMMM!” it said. Doc noticed that not he alone but all the roosterroaches in sight were standing frozen, their tailprongs erect and tingling from the sounds.

  “BOMMBBB!!” the great sound came again. “DOOMMM!!” Doc understood what was producing the sound, and who was causing it, and even how.

  “BOMB!” “DOOM!” Doc decided he wasn’t dreaming, after all, because in dreams you don’t hear such sounds. In dreams you don’t hear sounds you’ve never heard before.

  “BOMB!”

  “DOOM!”

  There was, Doc reflected, a kind of irony involved in the meaning of the words the bell spoke. “Bomb” suggested that indeed the advent of The Bomb was at hand, or that, as Doc had suspected, The Bomb consisted only of Man shooting Himself in the gitalong. “Doom” suggested that now we were sure in for it. But the Bombing and the Dooming were sounds that meant help and hope, and a solution to the problem of Man. Doc understood why the Woman was ringing the bell.

  “BOMB!”

  “DOOM!”

  Wasn’t the Woman’s arm getting tired, pulling the bellrope? It went on and on. Then Doc’s tailprongs began to pick up a different sound: the engines of cars and pick-ups, converging on Stay More from every direction.

  INSTAR THE FIFTH:

  The Woman Pays

  Chapter thirty-one

  Squire John Dingletoon/Ingledew, pro tempore lord of the manor of Parthenon, began to suspect that his house guest, the Reverend Chidiock Tichborne, was cooking up murder. The minister’s behavior was such that Squire John believed he was plotting to commit insecticide, possibly upon Squire John’s own person. Squire John this morning had even voiced his suspicions to the lady of the manor, Josie, but Josie had replied, “Huh? Now what-for would Brother Chid want to do a thing like thet for?”

  “For to git rid of me,” Squire John patiently explained. “So’s he could be the boss squire of Partheeny, and have all these goodies to hisself.”

  “Why, we’ve got more’n a plenty, hon,” Josie pointed out. “He don’t have to wester nobody to git all he can eat. He don’t even have to ask. I’m always tellin ’em, ‘Jist hep yoresefs.’” Josie yawned. “Now it’s way past our bedtime, Squire John.”

  Squire John did not believe he could sleep. Long after the sun rose, and Josie had drifted into the arms of slumber, he crouched awake, his sniffwhips raised and waving steadily to and fro. He wondered, but doubted, if Chid and the deacons were asleep. Chid, when last seen and smelled, just before midnight, the hour of Tutti-Frutti, had been evacuating upon the Woman’s pillow. Squire John had been offended and angered by Chid’s rudeness, and had started down from the mantelshelf toward the bed, fully intent upon first removing the pellet of feces from the Woman’s pillow and then removing Chid from the bed, and, if need be, from Parthenon itself. But then the Woman had returned to the room and done something to the air. The beer can she held had fizzed, but the fizz hadn’t been like any beerfizz Squire John had ever smelled before. It was globulous and sticky and Squire John knew that it would asphyxiate him. He had fled as fast as his gitalongs could skedaddle, but not fast enough. He had decamped the room entirely, but the fumes of the fizz had already, if not asphyxiated, intoxicated him. He had become drunker than an Englishman, whatever one of them was. The rest of the night he had spent in the abandoned store part of Parthenon, the old post office, wandering around in a kind of hallucination, in which he envisioned that Chid was stalking him with a variety of murder weapons: a candlestick, a knife, a lead pipe, a wrench, a revolver, a rope, and poison. When the effect of the fumes had eventually worn off and the hallucinations ceased, Squire John had returned to Josie in the apartment they had made for themselves in a cabinet beneath the cookroom sink. The Woman had come and fixed Her breakfast, left a few traces of it behind, and left the cookroom.

  Like most Carlotters, Squire John could not read, and thus was not able to decipher the labels on the containers with which he and Josie shared the cook-room cabinet beneath the sink: Drano, Lysol, Oxydol, Ajax, Electrasol, Dawn, Drench, Pledge, Behold, Future, Glory, Windex, Fantastik, Spic and Span, 409, Mop & Glo, and Mr. Clean. None of these, Squire John could tell by sniffwhipping alone, was potable or edible. Sheer instinct led him now in the throes of insomnia to conceal himself behind a can of Lysol and spy upon the boudoir where Josie crouched in slumber.

  Soon Chid Tichborne stealthily entered the cabinet through a crevice and advanced upon the master bedplace. He carried a wrench. No, Squire John corrected himself, a lead pipe, in any case some instrument with which he intended to murder sleeping Squire John. But Squire John was not asleep, and he stepped around from behind the Lysol and said, “Morsel, Reverend, have ye lost yore way home?”

  Whatever the murder weapon was, it disappeared. Chid wheeled around to confront Squire John, coughed, gulped, and stammered, “Why, hidy, Squire John, I figgered ye would be asleep.”

  “I aint,” Squire John observed.

  “Wal, I was jist checkin up on ye,” Chid declared. “Jist wanted to make shore that both of you’uns was comfy and cozy and all, you know. It’s a hot day, aint it?”

  “Real hot,” Squire John allowed.

  “Couldn’t sleep a wink, myself. Got to wonderin if you and Josie was comfy and cozy and all, what with all this heat, you know. Seems like it’s too hot fer roosterroaches or beasts.”

  “Aint it, though?” Squire John agreed.

  “Reckon ye seen as how I nearly got trompled by the Woman in yonder,” Chid said. “And I aint been able to sleep good, since.”

  “Was that how come ye to crap on her bed piller?” Squire John demanded. He realized the noise of his voice threatened to waken Josie, who began to mumble in her sleep. “Let’s step outside,” Squire John suggested.

  They resumed their conversation on the cookroom floor. They were beyond prongshot of Josie but still Chid kept his voice low, conspiratorial. “Squire John, I have some terrible news for us all. The Woman aint holy and divine, after all. She aint the Lord, or even the Lady. Maybe She’s a Witch. Anyway, She’s in cahoots with a giant ant that is probably Her grandmother, and She talks to it.”

  “Is that a fack?” Squire John said. “Are ye shore it’s a ant?”

  “I’d show ye,” Chid offered, “but I aint a-gorn back in yonder again. I tell ye, it’s nearly enough to sour a feller on religion forever. First, our Man turns out to be undependable and worthless, and now the Woman turns out to be a Witch.”

  “Looks like you might be out of business, Reverend, if you aint got nobody to worship or preach about,” Squire John reflected aloud. Then he asked, “Did ye notice, was that there ‘ant’ connected to anything?”

  “Connected? Yeah, now you mention it, the ant had some kind of real long tail that run all the way down to the beetle, and the beetle’s tail run down to the floor and out through a hole.”

  “Them wasn’t tails, Reverend. Them is called ‘wires.’ Like all the ’lectric wires in Holy House, only they aint quite so electrified.”

  Squire John was about to explain the mechanics of thingumajimmies to the minister, but the conversation was interrupted by the quivering of the substratum that warned of the approach of Woman Herself. The two roosterroaches had just enough time to scurry beneath the cabinet’s toeboard before the Woman came into the cookroom. They watched as She removed two bottles from Her Fridge, along with a small green fruit of some kind, and then a tray of ice cubes from the freezer. On the countertop She began mixing the first of the drinks She would have that day. She took Her glass, to which a wedge of the green fruit had been added, back to Her room and thence out to the porch of Parthenon.

  Both roosterroaches waved their
sniffwhips and picked up the distant aroma of the liquids she had mixed. Brother Tichborne suggested, “How about a sample, Squire?” and the two of them scooted up the cabinet to the counter. A lone housefly was already there. Neither roosterroach had had much experience with the diurnal housefly or could understand its strange dialect. Among the many other things that roosterroaches have in common with human beings is their mutual disdain for houseflies, who lack other insects’ sense of personal hygiene and are careless disseminators of baneful microbes—not to mention their sheer ugliness: the hoglike snoot, the huge goggled eyes, the pudgy, bristly body. “Shoo, fly,” Squire John said to it, and jumped at it. The fly, likely alarmed at the encounter with an unfamiliar and nocturnal creature, flew.

  Squire John and Chid sampled the juice of the green fruit cut open on a cutting board, and found its sharp, tangy citrus flavor interesting but not exciting. They sampled a droplet of one of the two clear liquids, which the minister, from his experience at Holy House’s cookroom, identified as quinine, reputed to be a good cure for mosquito bite, not that he himself had ever been bitten by a mosquito. They approached, finally, a spilled droplet of the other clear liquid.

  “This here is called ‘gin,’” Chid explained. “Not being the drinking sort myself, Squire, or not usually, anyhow, I’ll have to pass on it, and let ye have it all to yoreself.”

  Squire John tasted it, and jumped an inch. It was powerful stuff. It had a kick like nothing Squire John had ever tried. Chism’s Dew was like Kool-Aid by comparison, not that he had ever tried Kool-Aid. The merest taste of the gin sent shivers through his brain. “Great jumpin Jehoshaphat!” he exclaimed. “A whole drap of that stuff would wester a feller!”