The Cockroaches of Stay More (6 page)

Now Sam watched Sharon, who had heard the calling of her name twice, followed by a long silence. Sam’s sniffwhips detected an unmistakable scent of yearning. The bristles on the lower tier of sniff-whip segments are especially sensitive to scents of yearning, wanting, inexpressible wistfulness, in either one’s fellow roosterroaches or in Man, and it is considered good luck to pick up, on one’s sniffwhips, such a pining smell. There is a popular saying, “More rare than pine is the smell of pining”—which is rare indeed, for there are few pine trees in this part of the Ozarks.

Sharon pined. And because he clearly detected it, Sam grew excited, knowing that some good luck would occur to him. He was not ordinarily superstitious, certainly not like the vast majority of roosterroaches, who could not even turn around without observing some of the most ridiculous beliefs and practices, but Sam believed that superstitions are more credible rules of conduct than religion, for which he had no use whatever: he knew enough to conclude that Woman had not created him; certainly Sharon had not. He did not believe that Joshua Crust had been the son of Sharon or of Larry or of any of Their ancestors. He did not believe that Sharon would continue feeding him only if he sang praises to Her…although he felt like singing praises to Her anyway. He did not believe that when he westered he would go to live forevermore on Her right hand. She wouldn’t want him on Her right hand or Her left. And as for this Rapture business which that mountebank Chidiock Tichborne preached and extolled, Sam would love to be raptured by the Woman but not in the westerly sense, and certainly not by a firearm, which the Woman did not own.

But he did believe that the scent of pining brought good luck, and the very best luck he could wish for, which sometimes he dreamed about in his daily sleep, would be some magic that would either transform the Woman into a roosterroach, or, better, metamorphose Sam into a Man. And yet, desiring this with all his heart, he realized that such metamorphosis was sheer fable.

Sam stepped out from his Clock and crept to the edge of the mantelshelf. The Woman was picking up the black talking-instrument and cradling it against Her ear, while one of Her fingers twiddled the belly of the other half of the instrument around and around. Sam wondered if she was only calling Tel-Med, perhaps for a program with a name like “What to Do When Your Ex-Lover Drunkenly Yells Your Name in the Middle of the Night.” But she began talking into the thing, and one never talks to Tel-Med. Of course Sam could not hear what she was saying, nor could he, this time, even imagine it. Could he hear her if he moved closer? Very close? Say, right up the cheer-of-ease? Dare he?

First he wanted to be sure that he was scrupulously clean, although he had already had his evening bath and it was too early for his morning bath. He scrubbed his head vigorously, then washed both of his sniffwhips, counting each segment as it passed between his lips, 356 segments in all, each responsible for absorbing some information about the world around him. Next he washed and scrubbed his tail-prongs with his rear gitalongs, and tested each prong, wiggling it and standing it erect, for although his tailprongs were no longer sensitive to sound they were still capable of full erection. He could also use them, if the occasion required, for feeling his way backwards; reverse sniffwhips, as it were.

How does a fastidious genteel roosterroach know when his nightly (or thrice-nightly) ablutions are finished? Of the 178 segments on each sniffwhip, the last two, at the very tip, have as their sole function an appraisal of one’s own cleanliness, tidiness, and aroma. Sam no less than any other roosterroach would rather have lost both his tailprongs and been totally deaf than to lose the tips of his sniff-whips. Whenever an individual loses these, through accident, battle, or failure to keep them clean, that individual is almost certain to be dirty, stinking, and flowzy…until he regenerates the tips.

For all Man’s repugnance toward him, the roosterroach is the most immaculate of insects, permitting no speck of dirt or disease to remain upon his body. And Gregor Samsa Ingledew was the most immaculate of roosterroaches. Not just in his person but in his surroundings: he kept the interior of the Clock, and most of its exterior too, spotless. The Woman, who was a fastidious housekeeper Herself, would have been proud of Sam, if She knew he existed. She did not. Didn’t She ever wonder, when She was dusting Her room, why the Clock and the mantelshelf never needed to be dusted?

Sam climbed down the mantel and gained the floor. He was about to approach closer to a female, other than his mother, of any species, than he had ever been since his life began. For all his excellent grooming, which along with his intelligence, squirehood, and residential situation made him the most attractive and eligible bachelor of Stay More, Sam had a congenital flaw more damaging than deafness: he was enormously and painfully shy of females. All Ingledews had been, as long as anyone could remember. It was a family legend, nay, a longstanding family joke: if every Ingledew male had been the subject of some great story of heroic deeds, he was also the butt of some hilarious anecdote involving his shyness toward females and the extraordinary circumstances of fate or feminine intrigue that had permitted at least one male Ingledew in each generation to marry and perpetuate the family name…as well as the congenital dread of females.

But his terrible shyness toward any member of the opposite sex would not now prevent Sam from approaching Sharon, for he did not intend to let Her see him. She was absorbed in Her conversation over the black talking-instrument. He selected the best route to get as close as possible to Her voice without being seen, and climbed up the very back of the tall cheer-of-ease, an easy task of crawling gitalong over gitalong through the nap of the fabric. Reaching the summit, he climbed down the other side, right behind Her head. He was very careful not to touch Her hair, and very careful to keep an escape route in sight in order to vanish in an instant in the unlikely event that She began to turn Her head in his direction.

From this proximity, Her voice was almost booming, although She spoke quietly. He could hear, if not every word, at least some of it.

“…and feel so sorry for him but don’t see that there’s a blessed thing I or anyone could do…” She was saying. She was, Sam assumed, talking to Her grandmother. He had anticipated that She might be putting a call through to the Man Himself, but Holy House did not contain a talking-instrument. Sam was surprised to discover that he was glad She wasn’t talking to Larry, which would have made Sam jealous.
Jealous
? he said to himself, in wonder.
I am jealous of Man
? Well, why not?

“…if he could just give up and go away,” She was saying. “Vernon has offered to evict him if I only tell him to. Vernon really hates what he’s doing to that house, letting it go to ruin and shooting it full of holes. No, no, Gran, I’m not worried he’ll shoot me. I never go near the house. He only shoots late at night, when he’s blotto, I guess, and maybe his demons are pursuing him. Yes, maybe he’s shooting at his demons….”

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

D
oc 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.