The Cockroaches of Stay More (29 page)

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 never 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

S
quire 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!”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Chid said. “Try it and see.”

Squire John began to suspect that Chid was trying to poison him, but he couldn’t resist the beverage and its scalding bite. Before he knew it, he had magically shrunk the preacher to the size of a third instar roosterroach. “
Ex
-preacher,” he corrected himself, for it was apparent that Chid Tichborne no longer had a reputable deity to venerate. If Chid gave up preaching and became just an ordinary feller, he might not be such a bad sort, after all. He wouldn’t be any better than Squire John. Already he wasn’t half as big as Squire John. Squire John and him could be good pals, if they gave it a try.

“Come on here there,” Squire John urged the shrinking ex-preacher, slurring his words, “and try a leetle snort of this here gin yoreself.”

“It’s all your’n,” Chid declined. “Take the whole drap.”

“Don’t mind if I do,” Squire John remarked, and proceeded to lap up the entire droplet of gin. The preacher shrank to nothing.

Nighttime came at broad day. How awful, that a feller in bad need of sleep, and thinking it the west middle of the daytime, should suddenly find it nighttime, after all. But Squire John didn’t care. He just drifted off to dreamland. Blackness surrounded him. Even with his good night vision Squire John could see no trace of the ex-preacher. Jack Orville Dingletoon was Boss Squire of Parthenon and had it all to himself and could dream his whole life there, a cockroach in the Land of Cockaigne, the floors paved with pastry, the walls of barley sugar and cakes and pies.

When he woke, and discovered that his old head felt as if his sniffwhips had been pulled wrongside out, it was indeed nighttime, or at least completely dark all around him. His supersensitive night vision could see nothing, not even his sniffwhips in front of his face. He could only attempt to feel his way around, and it was hard going, terrible going. He had a vague memory of having been on a countertop in the Parthenon cookroom, but that was not where he was now. He was surrounded by substances. Sticky stuff, gooey stuff, coarse stuff, slime and gaum and gunk and goop and glop: garbage, yes, it was some kind of hodge-podge of sheer garbage that surrounded Squire John. A feller ought to be able to find paradise in garbage, but Squire John thought he had gone to hell. None of this was really edible: coffee grounds, black and damp and murky, foul-smelling. Chicken egg shells. The squeezed pulp and rind of a fruit that he identified as the green stuff the Woman had put in Her drink. Several strands of the Woman’s hair. Floor sweepings of dust, grime, dirt, and only a particle or two of edibles. With his touchers and sniffwhips Squire John explored further and found unrecognizable messy substances and liquids, and he found the body of the housefly he had encountered earlier. It had been crushed by a swatter, and stank to high heaven. Elsewhere in this prison were empty cartons, containers, and crumpled pieces of paper. The walls of this prison were of some resilient shiny smooth material, black as pitch, which Squire John could not bite through. He heaved himself against it, and it gave with his weight, but only slightly, and sprang back, mocking him. He explored in every direction, but the shiny smooth black material had no exit. The one place where it puckered and narrowed to an apparent exit was bound tightly from without.

“Josie?!” Squire John called, pathetically, futilely. “Chid?!” he wailed. “Anybody?!” he tried. He was alone, and had the worst hangover he could ever have imagined, and although he was not west, he might as well have been, because there was no way out, no escape, no going back to the world of folks and love.

“What did I do to deserve this?” he cried aloud. There was no answer. Not yet. And then came one. As he crouched in abject despair, convinced that he had gone to Hell, he had his conviction confirmed by the sound. “BOMB,” it said to him. “DOOM,” it added.