The Cockroaches of Stay More Page 9

  From Hinglerocks Tish could see all the way to Parthenon, two furlongs distant; the house-long-ago-converted-into-a-general-storeand-now-back-into-a-house was silhouetted in the moonlight against the holler in which it nestled, a single light burning within one room to the left, a kerosene light, pale as a distant star. The weed-forested Roamin Road led to it; the closest Tish had ever been to Parthenon was the edge of this forest on the Roamin Road just the night before, when the parade of damsels marched there. The Lord never drove His vehicle over this road any more, nor did He even walk it any more, except to put envelopes into the Woman’s mailbox.

  For what must have been an hour or more, Tish sat at Hinglerocks gazing out toward Parthenon and summoning her courage to venture there. At last she decided at least to approach the place, and sniff around it.

  Another hour was consumed in her journey: as she approached the forest of weeds that loomed between her and her destination, she almost hoped to be spared arrival by some forest-creature: the oblivion of a shrew’s gullet would be preferable to the rigors of interviews with Ingledews. She would rather encounter a badger, a possum, even the weird rare armadillo, than face an Ingledew. Then she remembered that her own dear late father had been an Ingledew, and there had been nothing fearsome about him. For that matter, she was an Ingledew! Suddenly she became very self-conscious, and as she entered the forest of weeds she examined herself. Weren’t her hips and thighs too long and fat? All six of them, or at least four of them? Were her gitalongs too tiny? Was her thorax full enough?

  Before she crossed the front yard of Parthenon, she paused to give herself a thorough bath, washing her sniffwhips twice each, and cleaning every spike on her gitalongs; she felt that this was the most important bath she had ever given herself, and she was thorough and meticulous. She passed her sniffwhips slowly over her entire body and examined the result. Did she detect the faintest trace of fragrant pheromone? If so, it was from excitement, not from lust.

  She crossed the yard. Among the random patches of grass, the unceremonious expanse of smooth dirt was strewn with commemorative statuary: here a copper penny, there a wad of tinfoil; here a threaded screw and a washer, there a poptop from a beverage can; here a glass bead, there a nacreous button. Tish paused to examine a round glass marble, a Man-child’s plaything, streaked with colors, transparent, wonderful. She considered the contrast of this yard of Parthenon with that of Carlott, which was littered with roller bearings, rusting cotter pins, oily couplings, bent valves, sparkplugs, the miscellaneous detritus of automobile parts. Tish could have spent the whole night examining Parthenon’s marvelous yard, but there ahead of her was the porch of Parthenon itself.

  Stone piers supported the porch, and she climbed the one nearest to the window whose light she had seen from afar. She scaled the wooden wall to the ledge of this window, and looked through the screen. There, in a cheer-of-ease, sat the Woman. Tish had heard many legends, reports, histories, descriptions, and rumors about the Woman, but had never seen Her so close before, big as life, bigger than life, almost as big as Man. But Man, when Tish had seen Him the night before and even touched Him, had been deeply asleep, if not drunker than a pied piper. This Woman was wide awake, Her eyes open. She was reading. In Her hands She held some sheets of paper, white, and She was reading one of these. Her hair was as yellow as a comet moth’s wings, and Her smooth mouth was turned up at one corner in a smile. She had a very kind and gentle expression. Tish would have liked to climb up into Her lap and talk with Her, but Tish was old enough to know that the Woman would not tolerate the touch of a roosterroach any more than the Man would.

  High on one wall of the room was a mantelshelf, above a boarded-up fireplace, and on the mantelshelf rose a clock, the Clock, of which Tish had heard so much, and whose chimes she had heard all her life. But those chimes, from the distance of Carlott, had sounded like only so many little pings and pongs. Now, as Tish waited and watched, the Clock began to strike the hour, and it said “BUN!” nearly startling Tish off her perch. Then it said, “TART!” A third time it struck: “TRIFLE!” Tish counted a fourth: “FUDGE!” And a fifth: “FONDANT!” The Clock pealed six: “SCONE!” And the Clock struck seven: “SUGARPLUM!” Tish was debating with herself whether it had really said all these things, when it said “EGG!” For nine o’clock, the Clock said “NOU-GAT!” Then it struck ten: “DIVINITY!” with a reverberation that seemed to shake the very ledge that Tish sat upon. The last thing the Clock said was “ECLAIR!” Tish waited for a twelfth chime, and was prepared to count it, but it never came.

  The Woman yawned and raised Her long arms overhead. She smiled again. Then yawned again. Then She folded up the sheets of paper and placed them inside an envelope, which She placed inside a book, and closed the book. She stood up from Her cheer-of-ease, blew out Her kerosene lantern, returning the world to its normal intensities and colorations, and then She climbed into Her bed.

  Chapter twelve

  Gregor Samsa Ingledew was so startled to detect, with the whole length of his sniffwhips, the approach of the scent of none other than his own father, that he instinctively prepared himself for combat, something he had been required to do only once before in his life in the Clock, when a scorpion had attempted entry. The scorpion, a mortal foe of all roosterroaches, is an arachnid, like a spider, but an overgrown one, with crab’s pincers, and a tail like a crane tipped by a deadly stinger. Like the roosterroach, he is a night-prowler, but the roosterroach prowls for garbage and the scorpion prowls for rooster-roaches. A favorite taunt or curse of roosterroach children is to say to one another, “Scorpy on you!” Sam had supposed his Clock a safe refuge from scorpions as well as all other creatures, but one night while winding the Clock the Woman had left the glass front door ajar, and the scorpion had crept in. Sam had often had dreams, or rather daymares, of being attacked by a scorpion, and he had thought he was asleep when he first saw it coming at him, thrice as large as he. He had hoped he would wake up, but discovered that he was already very much awake. If he had been asleep, it would have been his last sleep. Awake, he was able to summon up unrealized reserves of the Ingledew strength, cunning, and martial art.

  The scorpion had been no match for him, really. Before he could stop to consider what he was doing, he had confronted it, attacked it, wrestled it, mutilated it. Deftly sidestepping the plunging poisonous stinger, he had bitten off one of the scorpion’s pincers while grabbing the other and twisting, throwing the scorpion over onto its back, rendering the tail ineffective, and had chewed into the underside of the scorpion’s thorax. The scorpion had screamed in pain and fright and had begged mercy in a language totally foreign to Sam, but with a universal sound of piteous beseechment so heartrending that Sam had been tempted to let it go. But he had quickly killed it instead, ripped out its heart and its brain, and dragged its carcass to the edge of the mantelshelf and kicked it off, for the Woman to find and dispose of. Only much later had he begun shivering with wracking fear.

  Now he was confronted again, not by a scorpion but a possibly worse intruder, Squire Hank Ingledew, who had never visited the Clock before in the time Sam had lived there, namely, all his life. “Dad?” Sam said in great astonishment, even before catching sight of his father.

  Squire Hank hove into view. “Morsel, son,” he said, and immediately began looking around him, and above him, at the great intricate innards of the clockworks, the appurtenances and impedimenta of Sam’s apartment. “Right spiffy-lookin place ye got here,” Squire Hank observed.

  Sam could not hear a word. “Morsel, Dad,” he said, and politely asked, “To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?”

  Squire Hank laughed. “Queer, aint it? I never wunst clum up here afore.” The elder Ingledew got misty-eyed and waxed reminiscent, “The whole time ye was growin up, yore Momma had all the say in yore raisin, and I hardly never saw ye. Ever since she went and westered off, I’ve been meanin to come drap in on ye, and say hidy and all, but I reckon I’ve jist not had a good reason. Not
until now.”

  Sam, hearing none of this, assumed his father was awkwardly trying to make conversation about the weather. “Yes,” he said, “I expect we might get a thundershower any time now.”

  “Worser than that, I reckon,” his father said. “It’s a gal. A female.”

  “But I suppose the flowers need it,” Sam said. “It’s been awful dry.”

  “I aint so certain we need her,” Hank said. “She’s come to claim kin to us, and maybe move in on us. One of ole Jack Dingletoon’s daughters, him that thinks he’s discovered he’s a Ingledew. Now she says he’s probably west, and Josie too, and it’s her duty, bein head of household and all, to claim kin to us. So what should I tell her?”

  Hearing-impaired persons are good at detecting the asking of a question, even if they do not understand the words. Sam could hear the rising inflection of the question mark, and he assumed his father had shifted the topic of discussion from the weather to Sam’s personal well-being, so he answered, “I have no complaints.”

  “You mean you don’t care if she moves in or not?” Squire Hank was incredulous. “You want her to bring her whole caboodle of brothers and sisters too?”

  Two question marks. “I’m doing okay, thank you, and finding plenty to eat.” Sam gestured at his neat array of food fragments, of which he was proud. The dozens of them were arranged and catalogued, at least in his own mind, and he had specimens of everything the Woman had ever eaten.

  Squire Hank surveyed the larder. “Heck, they’d eat all that plumb up quicker’n ye could count.”

  “Thank you,” Sam said. “Yes, that one there is a rare dab of lemon meringue. And this piece is almost a year old, a croissant demisel. Here, try a taste of this one, a butterscotch marzipan.”

  Squire Hank idly chewed upon the offering. He asked, “Do you want a slew of them rotlog Dingletoon clodhoppers a-stompin all over these goodies?”

  The question mark led Sam to assume that his father was asking for samples of other specimens. He offered a taste of peanut brittle. Then he offered a taste of…“No, I don’t think you want this one. This is a pellet of ginseng root, recently acquired from Doc Swain, which he claims is good for—”

  Squire Hank snickered. “Yeah, he guv me a dose of that stuff, wunst. It works, I tell ye. But what use is it fer a feller my age? Come to think of it, you might jist be a-needin it, if you have to talk to this gal I’m tellin ye about, this Letitia Dingletoon, says her name is. You want to talk to her?”

  His father was being awfully inquisitive. What was he asking now? Had Sam tried the gingseng himself? “Sure,” he said.

  His father stared at him in wonder. “Then you’d better bite off a big hunk right now,” said the elder Ingledew and held out the pellet of gingseng. “Here,” he said. “Eat. EAT!”

  Sam heard a word, the first word he had heard his father speak. A command: eat. Although Sam did not understand why his father was insisting on it, he knew that the previous night, when he had sampled a taste of the ginseng, it had given him a kind of convivial glow, which perhaps was all it was intended to do. “I will if you will,” he said to his father, taking a bite and passing it back.

  “Maybe I’ll need it too,” said his father, and took a little bite, “if I got to go back down thar and talk to that gal and ’splain to her that she’s got to come up here and claim kin to you herself.”

  Sam wished he could hear his father. Possibly his father intended that the two of them share the ginseng and work up a pair of convivial glows that would allow them to be good friends, not just father and son. Sam was on the verge of confessing to his father that his hearing had failed him, but if he did that, there would be no further point in having a conversation with his father anyway. Hoping for quick intoxication, he took another, larger bite of the ginseng. “It has a rather strange taste,” he observed. “Don’t you think? Not like a food but like a drug.”

  This comment did not lead to further camaraderie. His father seemed preparing to leave. “Well, it’s your Clock,” Squire Hank said to his son, “and I aint about to tell ye how to live yore life. But iffen it was me, I shore would discourage that gal from any notions she might have about movin in on ye.” Squire Hank gave Sam a mockcuff on the side of the head, and said, “Allrighty, I’ll send her on up. Don’t do nothin I wouldn’t do, ye hear? Hawr-hawr.”

  No, he didn’t hear. Squire Hank made his exit. “So long, Dad,” Sam called after him, a bit disappointed the visit had been so brief, and so unproductive of any further bond between the two Ingledews. One of these days, Sam told himself, I’ll just have to tell him that I’m deaf.

  Chapter thirteen

  Sure enough, her nervousness was about to make her involuntarily release a molecule of pheromone. Like an effort to suppress a belch or a sneeze, the anxiety weakened the effort, and the fragrant pheromone escaped, preceding her like a herald of trumpets into the Clock.

  Of the three possible intruders into the Clock—scorpion, father, strange girl—the latter struck Sam as the most to be feared, even with the aid of ginseng, a third and largest bite of which he chomped on the instant the molecule began dancing along the length of his sniffwhip.

  The interior overwhelmed her. The parts of the Clock were moving, some swiftly, some imperceptibly, but they all moved, whereas the various cogs and gears littering Carlott were all inert, lifeless. She could not separate the minute quiverings of the mainspring from the tremblings of her mainheart.

  Sam, after the initial shock of the cavorting molecule of pheromone had paralyzed his sniffwhip, used his eyes to behold, up close, much too close, a female of his own species: a girl fully developed, with long and strong legs, all six nicely spiked on the tibia, the merons muscular and the trochanters shapely, the arolia small and dainty, the unguiae neatly manicured. Her face, although at the moment it was transfixed in fright, was a comely country girl’s with pastoral beauty and the most delicate suggestion of a feistiness: the scape of the sniffwhip was slightly recessed in its socket, and joined the pedicel firmly and assertively but with a touch of mischievousness. Her mouth had full paraglossae suggestively covered by smooth galeae, while the broad labrum rose up to the clypeus with audacity and authority. Sam thought he was about to faint, either from the sight of her or an overdose of ginseng, or both.

  Tish felt sick to her stomach. She had had nothing to eat tonight, but she felt as if she were about to puke, not from nausea but from nerves. It did not help, one bit, that Squire Sam Ingledew—for it was clearly he, handsome as all her girlfriends had gossiped he was—was looking at her as if she were something that had crawled out of a hole in the ground. It had been an effort to crawl up the mantel and reach the Clock, but she had made as dignified an entrance as she could.

  Moments passed. Knowing nothing better to say, she asked, “Are you Squire Sam Ingledew?” which struck her as silly, almost like asking of Man, “Are you Man?”

  It was the first time a female other than his mother had ever spoken to him, and even if he had heard her, which he had not, he would not have known what to say.

  “I met yore daddy, down below,” she went on, wondering if she was babbling, “who said he was Squire Hank Ingledew and is maybe yore daddy, if you’re Squire Sam Ingledew, which I reckon ye must be, if this here is yore Clock. I mean, you look like Squire Sam Ingledew, although I’ve never laid eyes on ye before but you just look just like I just figgered you’d just look!” She ran out of breath and had to stop.

  Sam managed two words: “Beg pardon?”

  Tish took a deep breath, a very deep one, as much as her sixteen spiracles could draw in, and repeated herself, word for word. But Squire Sam only continued looking at her as if she were something on the end of a stick.

  Was the ginseng taking effect? Sam managed to mouth five whole words: “I don’t hear very well.” He gave each of his tailprongs a wiggle as if to demonstrate that they were physically functional although sensorially impaired.

  “Oh,” she said, and watch
ed him wiggling his tailprongs. They were cute. She moved closer to one of them, cupped her touchers around her mouth and shouted, “HELLO! I’M TISH!”

  Sam jumped. “I’m not that deaf,” he said. Then he thought to ask, “Don’t you know that roosterroaches aren’t allowed in Parthenon…except for us Ingledews, of course?”

  Tish hung her head, and mumbled, “Yeah, I know.” Then she raised her voice and tried to explain.

  Sam tried to listen. Something about her father. Something about her mother. Something about her forty-three brothers and sisters. Something about claiming kin. He realized he must seem inquisitorial, not hospitable. He reached out and selected a dab of one of his collectibles, and offered it to her. “Vanilla egg custard?” he said.

  Her touchers told her it was edible, and she wolfed it down, finding it more than edible: the most delicious thing she’d ever eaten. But almost at once she feared it could have been a dollop of affy-dizzy from his own tergal gland, designed to seduce her. Still she commented, appreciatively, “Yum-yum.”