Untitled (18 page)

  They kept Paula at the lab for over a week afterward, giving her every test under the sun. X-rays, CAT scans, blood work. They sedated her at night, and she dreamed of Janet's toe slipping into water, Janet's toe like the tip of an iceberg, Janet like a big fish swimming through her heart in a wash of blood and disappearing in a distance. While she slept they did exploratory surgery with lasers, looking into various parts of her body, although with no advance in their understanding. Finally they let her go home. Paula continued to see Angie on a weekly basis for months; there was never a sign of what had happened. Angie would ask Paula, "How do you feel?" and Paula would say, "Usual." She'd shake her head and sigh. By midsummer she could even laugh a little. She'd give Angie a wry smile, and she'd say, "At least that itch is gone."

The Bradshaws got back from their vacation late Friday evening and discovered right away that they were not alone.

  Marvin Bradshaw was coming up the front walk, having gone across the road to pick up their accumulated mail from the neighbors, when he heard his wife scream. He ran up the stairs and into the house, cursing and wishing he had tried a little harder to get that pistol permit; but there were no intruders to be seen, only his wife standing white-faced and trembling in the kitchen, pointing in the direction of the sink. "Look," she said.

  He looked, wondering what he was supposed to see. Everything was as he remembered, but then he had never given much attention to the kitchen area, which after all wasn't his department. He said, "What?" and then he saw something small and dark moving rapidly along the sink's rim. Now he saw another one, slightly larger, going up the wall behind the faucets.

  "Son of a bitch," Marvin Bradshaw said. "Cockroaches."

  "I came in here to get a drink of water." Pamela Bradshaw's voice was almost a whisper, as if that one scream had used up all her volume reserves. "I turned on the light and Marvin, they were
everywhere
. They went running in all directions." She shuddered. "I think one ran over my foot."

  Marvin Bradshaw stepped toward the sink, but the cockroaches were too fast for him. The one on the sink dived off into space, hit the floor, and slipped into a barely visible crack beneath the baseboard. The one on the wall evaded Marvin's slapping hand and disappeared into the cupboard space above the sink. Marvin swore in frustration, but he felt a little relieved too; he hadn't really been eager to crush a cockroach with his bare hand.

  "Cockroaches," he said. "Wonderful. Bust your ass for years, finally get out of the city, away from the dirt and the coloreds, into a three-quarter-mil house on one of the best pieces of ocean-front property on Long Island. And then you go away for a couple weeks, and when you get home you got cockroaches. Jesus."

  He glared at his wife. "You know who's responsible, don't you? You had to go hire that God-damned Mexican maid."

  "Inez is Guatemalan," Pamela protested. "And we don't know – "

  "Mexican, Guatemalan, who gives a fuck?" Marvin had never seen the point of these picky-ass distinctions between people who said
sí
when they meant yes. Maybe you needed to know the difference between Japs and Chinamen and other slopes, since nowadays you had to do business with the yellow assholes; but spics were spics, whatever hell-hole country they came from.

  "The fact remains," he said, "we never had cockroaches here, and then two months ago you hired her, and now we do. I'm telling you, you let those people in, you got roaches. Didn't I run that block of buildings in Spanish Harlem for your father, back before we got married? Cockroaches and Puerto Ricans, I saw enough of both. Don't tell
me
."

  "I'll speak to her when she comes in tomorrow."

  "No you won't." He took a sheet of folded paper from the stack of mail in his left hand. "That was what I was coming to tell you. Look what your precious Inez left us."

  She took the paper and unfolded it. The message was printed in pencil, in large clumsy block capitals:

NO MAS. YOU NO PAY ME 5 WIKS NOW. GO LIV SISTER IN ARIZONA. PLES SEN MY MONY MARGARITA FLORES 72281 DEL MONTE TUCSON AZ 85707. INEZ

Marvin took the note back and wadded it up and hurled it at the kitchen wastebasket, missing. "Comes in here, turns our home into a roach motel, runs out on us when our backs are turned, then she expects to get paid. Lots of luck, you fat wetback bitch."

  Pamela sighed. "I'll miss her, all the same. You know, I was working with her, trying to help her remember her past lives. I believe she was a Mayan princess – "

  Marvin groaned. "Christ sake," he said, "not now, all right?"

  He hadn't had much fun over the last two weeks. He hadn't liked Miami, which had been swarming with small brown people, and where there had been nothing to do but swim – which in his book was something you did only to keep from drowning – or lie around getting a tan, if you were asshole enough to want to look colored. The flight home had been delayed again and again. All in all, this was no time to have to listen to Pamela and her New Age crap.

  "Okay," he told her, "we'll go out, get something to eat. Monday I'll call an exterminator. Antonio's okay? I could go for seafood."

  Driving away from the house, he considered that at least there was one good side to the situation: eating out would give him a chance to have some real food, rather than that organic slop that Pamela tended to put on the table. He suspected this was merely a cover for her basic incompetence in the kitchen; chopping up a lot of raw vegetables was as close to real cooking as she could manage.

  "Marvin," Pamela said suddenly, "you said an exterminator. You mean someone who'll kill the cockroaches?"

  He glanced at her, wondering what the hell now. "What, you're worried about chemicals, poisons, like that?"

  "Well, that too." Pamela paused, frowning. Marvin realized he'd just handed her something else to be a pain in the ass about. "But what I was going to say," she went on, "isn't there some other way? Besides killing them?"

  "Christ." Marvin ground his teeth. "You want to get rid of the roaches but you don't want the poor little things hurt? What's that, more Oriental mumbo-jumbo? The roaches might be somebody's reincarnated souls?"

  "I wish you wouldn't be so negative about reincarnation," she said stiffly. "I suppose it's not part of the religion you were brought up in."

  Actually Marvin Bradshaw's parents had never shown any interest in any religion at all, and he had followed their lead; churches were places you went for funerals and weddings, and then only if you couldn't get out of it. All he had against reincarnation was that it was believed in by people from India – such as the one who collected fat payments for sitting around in a sheet spouting this shit to Pamela and a bunch of other goofy middleaged women – and Hindus, after all, were just another variety of little brown bastards who ought to go back where they came from. (Which, in the case of the said Baba Lal Mahavishnu, Marvin suspected would be somewhere in New Jersey; but that was another matter.)

  "In any case," Pamela added, "it's not true that human beings can be reborn as insects. That's a Western misconception."

  "Then – "

  "Still and all, Marvin." Pamela bashed right on over him, an avalanche-grade unstoppable force. "Babaji says it's always best to avoid harming any living creature. The karma accumulates. All those roaches, there must be hundreds, even thousands – disgusting to our eyes, of course, but so many lives. I can't imagine the karmic consequences of killing them all."

  "Then what do you want me to do about the fucking things? Ask them nicely to leave? Get them their own place? How about you go talk to them," he said, enraged beyond control. "That would make any self-respecting insect hit the road."

  She didn't answer. From the tone of her silence Marvin figured one of them would be sleeping in the guest bedroom tonight. Well, that was another bonus.

  Pamela kept up the silent treatment almost all the way through dinner. Marvin knew it was too good to last. Sure enough, as he was finishing up his lobster, she started in again. "My God," he said, "couldn't you wait till we're out of here? Talking about roaches, what are you, trying to make me sick?"

  He leaned back and looked at the remains of his meal. He didn't really like lobster all that well; he'd just ordered this one to jerk Pamela's chain. Antonio's was one of those places with live lobsters in a big glass tank, so you could pick yours out and have them boil his ass alive. Marvin had enjoyed saying "boil his ass alive" and watching Pamela cringe. She hadn't been too horrified, he noticed, to clean her own plate. Probably thought all those clams and scallops had died naturally. Ocean roadkill, maybe, run over by a submarine.

  He got up, tossing his napkin on the table, and headed for the men's room. As he was coming back the proprietor stepped not quite into his path. "Mr. Bradshaw," Antonio said. "I hope your dinner was satisfactory."

  Marvin nodded and tried to smile. Antonio was small and dark and his black hair was a little too glossy; but he came from a Portuguese family that had been in the area for a couple of centuries at least, and he ran a hell of a good restaurant. Marvin thought that Antonio was okay for, well, an Antonio.

  "No offense," Antonio said, glancing around and lowering his voice, "but I couldn't help overhearing your conversation just now."

  "You and everybody else in the place," Marvin said. "Sorry if she upset your customers, talking about cockroaches. She's been kind of weird, last year or so. Think she's getting change of life."

  "Oh, that's all right." Antonio made a quick no-problem gesture. "No, what I was going to say, you're not the only one with roaches. I've heard a lot of people complaining, the last couple of weeks. It's like they just moved into the area." He made a face. "In my business it's something you worry about."

  Marvin thought it over. So it wasn't just his house. Must be the new people moving in, bringing the pests with them. The standards had really gone to hell around here since that housingdiscrimination lawsuit.

  "Point is," Antonio went on, "it won't be easy getting an exterminator any time soon. You'll do well to get one by the end of next week."

  "Shit!" Marvin said, louder than he meant to. "Hey, Antonio, I can't live with those things in the house for a week. You must know some people, guy in your line. You know anybody might be willing to make a special call? I'll make it worth their while."

  Antonio shook his head. "Believe me, all the ones I know are already making 'special calls' and charging through the nose, too." He rubbed his chin. "Now there's one possibility, maybe . . . "

  "Talk to me. Come on, Antonio. Help me out here."

  "Well – one of my bus boys," Antonio said, "the one doing that table by the door, see? He's got this grandfather, supposed to be good at getting rid of roaches and rats and the like."

  Marvin saw a short, chunky, very dark kid in a white apron. Coarse, badly cut black hair. Huge cheekbones, heavy eyebrows, big nose. "What's he," Marvin said, "Mexican?" Thinking,
no way.

  Antonio laughed. "Actually, he's an Indian."

  "From India?" No way in
hell
. "Doesn't look it."

  "No, no. American Indian. Some small tribe I can't even pronounce, got a reservation upstate."

  "Huh." Marvin stared, amazed. As far as he knew he had never seen an Indian in these parts before. That was one thing you had to say for Indians, compared to other kinds of colored people: they kept to themselves, lived out in the sticks on reservations, didn't come pushing themselves in where they weren't wanted.

  "I don't really know much about it," Antonio admitted. "Some people I know in Amityville, the old man did a job for them and they were very pleased. But they didn't tell me a lot of details."