The Cockroaches of Stay More Read online

  Sam smiled. He would like to tell his kindred the Holy Housers that She had called them “demons.” The Woman suddenly reached back with Her hand, and Sam thought She was going to swat him, but She only wanted to scratch the back of Her neck. Her fingers were lovely. If there was one way in which the Human creature was really superior to the roosterroach in design, Sam reflected, it was in the fingers. Roosterroaches had nothing like them; a roosterroach’s touchers were clumsy stubs by comparison. One of Sharon’s fingers was enwrapped with a dazzling metallic band more yellow than Her hair; the light glittering off it, reflected from the kerosene lamp, nearly blinded Sam.

  “…don’t you think? It must have been at least the hundredth one, I don’t even count them. What? Oh, of course I keep them, I’ve got a shoebox full of them. I wouldn’t think of throwing them away, they’re so beautifully written, such elegant language. I can hardly resist the urge to answer one of them, to write him back, at least to tell him that he’ll never get his work done as long as he spends all his time writing letters to me….”

  The Woman turned Her head to one side, not enough for Her to see Sam even with peripheral vision, but enough for him to see the iris of Her eye. Her eyes were blue, a lighter blue than any of the shades of the evening air, a blue like the eggs of robins whose nest had fallen in a March storm into the yard of Parthenon, where Sam had come upon it. Roosterroaches do not have the color vision to detect most hues of blue. Their color vision is most perceptive in ultraviolet, which Man cannot even see (one reason Sam was convinced that Man was not the omniscient ruler of the visible world). But Sam could clearly perceive that Sharon’s iris was the azure tint of the robin’s egg. The eyes of all roosterroaches are iridescent shades of green. Sam adored Sharon’s eyes.

  “…at least he’s supposed to be doing a long critical essay on Daniel Lyam Montross, which is why he says he has to stay here. No, he hasn’t written any more poetry himself for years. At least he doesn’t write any of it to me, or if he does he doesn’t show it to me. He said he’s having trouble getting started on the Montross thing, but at least he’s started it….”

  In those metamorphic dreams he sometimes had, when he became Her lover, Sam preferred not to bring Her down to his level and give Her pheromones, but instead raised himself to Manhood, keeping his affy-dizzy however and tempting Her with it, crawling into Her bed and—no, “crawling” was the wrong word. He was not all that clear what he would do with Man’s body if he had one.

  He was so transfixed by Her beauty and his daydream of making love to her that he had not noticed the voice had stopped entirely, the voice had said “Good night, Gran, sleep tight,” and the Woman had returned the talking-instrument to the table beside Her cheer-of-ease. Now She was standing up. Now She was turning….

  Sam’s gitalongs went into action and he sprang for the crevice between the cushions of the cheer-of-ease. But he was just a fraction of a second too late. She saw him. He heard Her gasp.

  In all the time the Ingledews had enjoyed the privilege of dwelling in Parthenon, they had never allowed themselves to be glimpsed by Her. Sam had violated this tradition, and he felt just rotten and awful. His father would wester him.

  Chapter six

  Doc Colvin Swain was the seventh son of a seventh son, which Ozark tradition indicates as infallibly as the daily setting of the sun that he was destined to become a physician, even in spite of himself. He was born of a Swain (it is an old, old family name not to be confused with “swain,” the name for an immature pre-imago male roosterroach, the male equivalent of “nymph”) who was the last, or seventh, swain to emerge from his mother’s easteregg, and Colvin himself emerged from his mother’s easteregg last in line following Irvin, Gavin, Alvin, Marvin, Steven, and Vincent.

  If being seventh was not enough to doom him to medical practice, Colvin Swain’s name and its sake, which he never had the inclination to change, would have kept him from being a “normal” roosterroach, because the human Colvin Swain had been the greatly beloved physician to the village of Stay More in its last years of existence as a community, eons ago. Not only that, and not even to mention that Doc Swain the roosterroach had taken on Doc Swain the long-westered human’s personality, his speech, his character, and even his habit of making “house calls,” Doc Swain occupied the ruin of the old Swain clinic, on Roamin Road halfway between Holy House and Parthenon, that is, one furlong from each. The collapsing Swain clinic had no inhabitants except Doc (a widower) and a family of Daddies-long-legs who considered Doc too large to eat, and several families of Theridon tepidariorum, your ordinary house spider, whose webs had covered every corner of the interior of the clinic but who, like bats, ate only insects who flew, something Doc hadn’t done since his last escape from the Great White Mouse. Indeed, Doc was rumored to have practiced medicine on various of these arachnid housemates of his; in any case, he was on good terms with the spiders and had the run of the clinic…or rather the hobble of it, since he was missing three unregenerated gitalongs, two on one side, one on the other, lost to the bite of his nemesis, the Great White Mouse, who had ambushed him on one of his errands of mercy into the backbrush…or so he claimed, although an eyewitness had hinted that the mysterious monster-mouse might have had provocation, that Doc was seen attempting to bite off its tail to use in one of the philters or nostrums that he occasionally concocted. It was said that the tip of an albino mouse’s tail is an essential ingredient in the remedy for gout, which afflicted several of Doc’s male patients. But Doc swore the attack of the Great White Mouse upon his person was totally unprovoked, and he constantly plotted revenge.

  “Heal thyself,” nobody ever said to him, but ought to have, because he was a wreck of a specimen himself. In addition to the three missing unregenerated gitalongs, his heart was irregular, his digestion faulty, his ocelli, or stargazers, were nearly blind…and he appeared to have the gout. But his mind was sound, and next to Squire Hank Ingledew he was considered the wisest sage in the world.

  In fact, next to Squire Ingledew was where he wanted to be, the two old codgers preferring each other’s company to that of lesser mortals, and they could often be found together, of an evening, lounging on the porch of Doc’s clinic, watching the world go by, commenting upon it, and holding court for the various other loafers, mostly older male roosterroaches, who liked to gather there, being forbidden by Squire Hank from congregating on the porch of Parthenon, and leaving the porch of Holy House to other folk.

  On any given night, after breakfast, a couple dozen or more members of this Loafer’s Court could be found lolling around Doc Swain and Squire Hank, listening to them holding forth on the ancient stories of Stay More, swapping tall tales, and waxing prophetic about their favorite subject, which was The Bomb, particularly the irreligious, anti-Rapture view of it held by many, who did not believe that Man would save the righteous from that great explosion but rather that Man himself would perish in the holocaust, and the roosterroaches would have the onerous responsibility of inheriting the earth, something they did not particularly desire. No one could conceive of any explosion louder or worse than Man’s bullets, and there were many who thought that Man’s shooting was itself The Bomb, but the True Bombers told the Anabombers that The Bomb would make the explosions of bullets from His revolver seem like mere clearings of the throat.

  Tonight, Doc Swain, Squire Hank, and the Loafer’s Court had watched the parade of damsels go sashaying down Roamin Road to Parthenon and back, had seen drunk Jack Dingletoon straggling along in pursuit, and had made comments, jokes, and insinuations about various of the girls, about Jack, about one another, and about anything within the visible or sniffable world.

  When the end of the train hove into view and there was comical Jack Dingletoon yelling, “Hi yoop! I aint no Dingeltoon no more! By cracky, I’m a pure dee pure blood Ingledew now, and a squire to boot!” the members of the Loafer’s Court cast glances and sniffs at Squire Hank to see his reaction, and one of them, O.D. Ledbetter, remarked, �
��Now what d’ye reckon has guv that fool sech a notion?”

  “Chism’s Dew allus makes a feller feel bigger than he is,” observed Elbert Kimber. “That’s what it’s suppose to do, aint it?”

  Squire Hank did not comment, but spat, and made ruminative gestures of his cheeks. No one could remember when he had ever been silent before.

  “Naw,” remarked Doc Swain, “that aint it. He’s jist out of his head, maybe, because I tole him a little while ago that he aint got long for this world afore he goes west. He ast me to look ’im over, and blamed if his old Malpighian tubes aint all kivvered with fatty bodies.”

  The loafers stared at Doc and at one another. “Is that a fack?” several said, and “You don’t mean to say so,” said others, and one even said, “What’s a malpigeon tube?” Each of them spat, each in his turn. Most of them had good reason for spitting, not to mark any territory (for all of this territory belonged to Doc), but because among the many other blessings bestowed upon them by Man, He left cigarette butts scattered throughout Holy House, from which an abundance of chewable leaf was salvaged and masticated by most of the male roosterroaches of Stay More. Tobacco did give one’s head a pleasant giddiness and ease, but the chewing and spitting of it was essentially a ritual way of asserting one’s identity and masculinity and the merging of one’s identity with that of the male group.

  “The Malpighian tubes,” Doc explained, “are part of the digestive system, sorta wrapped around your gut like little wires. Man calls them ‘kidneys’.”

  “Aw, shore,” said Tolbert Duckworth, “I allus have a little drink fer my wife’s kidneys.”

  The other loafers laughed, but Doc said, “Not that kind of kidney. This kind is sort of midway between yore gizzard and yore butthole. It sorta strains all the juice that runs through yore system.”

  Several of the company nodded their heads in understanding, spat, and Lum Plowright observed, “So ole Jack’s strainer is on the blink?”

  “Wal, the fatty bodies has shore squoze up his Malpighian tubes,” Doc declared, feeling just a little guilty for breaking the Hypocritic Oath by openly discussing a patient’s problems.

  “His wife is a real fatty body,” Fent Chism remarked, and the assembly guffawed, picturing Josie Dingletoon, a still-shapely dish despite her many and frequent litterings of eastereggs.

  “She’ll be a mandamn widow-gal, shore, afore long,” Doc remarked.

  This comment caused each loafer to reflect, as loafers will, upon his own mortality, the widow he would leave behind if he were not already widowered, the children who would survive and mourn or not for him, and the nature of west and of life, if any, after west. Such meditations naturally introduced one or the other of their two most popular topics, Janus-faced: the glorious history of now-almost-westered Stay More, and the any-day-now (or any-night-now) advent of The Bomb.

  Tonight the court lingered upon each subject until it was exhausted. Perhaps it is unfair to call this assembly “loafers,” because all roosterroaches are by nature gentlefolk of leisure, nonworkers, even vagrants, as the name Periplaneta suggests. Especially in contrast to the busy bee, the hyperactive ant, the industrious termite, the various nest-builders, daubers, potters, borers, and biters whose diurnal or nocturnal existence is of ceaseless activity, the roosterroach, once he has found his nightly share of morsels, crust or crumb, does nothing, knocks off, loiters about, putters, piddles, takes his ease without any responsibility other than the heavy chore of finding ways to fill up the time between dusk breakfast and dawn supper.

  No wonder roosterroaches are fond of gossip, philosophy, kidding and kibitzing, jokes, stories, tall tales, legends, superstitions, and half-baked religion. In this natural inclination, roosterroaches are ideally suited to imitate the Man of the Ozarks, or at least Ozark Man as He used to be, in the legendary days of Stay More’s past, when Man, although a farmer, and a capable one, devoted only enough labor to His farm to provide food for His family and His devoted roosterroaches, and spent the major portion of His life in unhurried idleness.

  Although there was only one Man left in Stay More for these roosterroaches to depend upon and venerate, and although He was not nearly as interesting as the fabled Stay Morons of yore, He was at least, like them, devoted to leisure. He did not work. He did not farm, though there were rumors that He spent a tiny portion of His daylight hours, late afternoon, before any roosterroach awoke to watch, puttering in a tiny vegetable garden across Roamin Road from Holy House. One night a delegation of roosterroaches had gone there and inspected His puny lettuce. The last of the human Ingledews had been gardeners, if nothing else, famed for their ability to grow onions as big as apples, but also pronouncing them “ingurns” as in the first syllable of their name. This Man did not pronounce them that way…or perhaps He did. It was hard to tell, because He never spoke. He had no one to speak to.

  The loafers, if we must call them that, admired their Man because He was a total loafer too, but pitied Him because he had no one to loaf with. None of the roosterroaches now living could ever recall when there was more than one Man, and indeed most of the fundamentalist Crustians believed that there was only one Man in all the world, but the old stories which the loafers told and retold on the porch of Doc Swain’s place always involved a Stay More peopled with many Men, and Men (as well as Women and Children) living together and loafing together in an idyllic Golden Age.

  The Golden Age of Stay More would remain only the subject of endless legends and embellished conjectures among the tale-telling roosterroaches until after The Bomb, when according to Crustian belief, Joshua Crust Himself would be resurrected from the west and take everyone in a Rapture to live on the right hand of Man in the perfect Ozark Golden Age of yore. Even those roosterroaches who were such infidels that they could not accept the idea of Joshua Crust and His resurrection still believed that life after The Bomb would become a new Golden Age.

  Doc Swain alone did not believe this. Cheerful philosopher as he was, he was an utter pessimist on the subject of The Bomb. The Bomb, in his opinion, was inevitable. Whatever catastrophic form it took—asphyxiation, earthquake, famine, or, most dreadful for heat-loving roosterroaches, a big freeze—it would be horrible.

  Roosterroaches are omnivorous, but that would do them no good if there was nothing to eat. “Fellers, if it comes to it,” a loafer posed the question, “can we eat caterpillar shit?”

  “After The Bomb,” Doc pointed out, “caterpillars would be the first to wester.”

  The one drawback of the roosterroach’s durability, longevity, adaptiveness, and imperishability was that being the last creature alive after the holocaust would pose a great problem: Who, or what, would the roosterroach eat?

  “I’d shore hate to be the last roosterroach still east,” Doc remarked to the assembled loafers.

  “Nor me neither,” said several of the other loafers, and spat, thoughtfully but decisively, each in his turn.

  “Wal, Doc,” Squire Hank Ingledew spoke up, “if you was the last, you’d have to whup me first afore you could commence eatin me, and once you’d et me, then yore biggest problem would be to figger out which part of yoreself to eat first, next.”

  The loafers guffawed, and O.D. Ledbetter suggested, “Me, I’d eat my hind end first.”

  “Haw,” said Elbert Kimber, “then you wouldn’t have no butthole to ee-liminate what you’d done et!” All the loafers snorted or snickered.

  “I reckon I’d eat my sniffwhips first,” said Tolbert Duckworth, “since I wouldn’t be needin ’em no more nohow, what with nobody else around to sniff at.”

  “Then you’d never know how much you stunk,” Squire Hank observed.

  “Wouldn’t make no difference nohow,” Lum Plowright put in. “But me, what I’d do, since it’d be my last meal on earth, I’d enjoy myself and eat my stomach first!” Several others nodded in agreement, and spat.

  “That’d wester ye right off,” Doc Swain said. “Now I tell ye fellers, assumin I could whup Squ
ire Hank and be the last ’stead of him, and assumin I’d done already had the satisfaction of watchin that White Mouse wester a slow, painful west, I reckon I’d jist not eat none of me, but slowly starve to west, and take a last stroll down to Banty Creek and back.”

  “Might as well hop in it and drown,” Squire Hank said, and spat.

  “Naw,” said Doc Swain. “I’d jist look all around me, at ever livin thing that had westered, includin that putrefied White Mouse, and I would know that I was the very last mandamn livin thing on earth. Wouldn’t that be a satisfaction? Wouldn’t that be a reward for what-all I’d had to live through? Jist to know that? Jist to say to myself, ‘I am the last mandamned livin thing on earth?’”

  Since these were mostly heuristic questions, or rhetorical, or both, no one responded. The company of loafers lost themselves in meditation, imagining the scenario that Doc had pictured. At length, Tolbert Duckworth, who was a good Crustian and an elder in the church, remarked, “Hit shore is enough to make a body glad that our Lord Joshua Crust is gonna rapture us and save us from all sech as that, if Man Himself don’t rapture us first.”

  Several others nodded, and spat. Neither Squire Hank nor Doc Swain nodded, but they spat.

  Chapter seven

  Tish Dingletoon tarried beneath the Platform long after the play-party had been broken up by Brother Tichborne and everyone had gone home or elsewhere. She wondered if she would ever again have a chance to attract Archy Tichborne to her, ever to get him within range of her pheromones when she was ready to use them. No, probably the Fate-Thing intended for her to marry a Carlotter. How vain of her to aspire to the attentions of a Holy House roosterroach. Sure, Jim Tom Dinsmore would be glad to have her and would take her to live in the Smock if she would marry him, but he was a puny and unsightly specimen, compared with Archy Tichborne.