The Cockroaches of Stay More (10 page)

He heard a distant voice calling his name. Or calling him by the name he used to have, Jack. Now he was Squire John, but this voice didn’t seem to know that. It was a high-pitched female voice, and Jack tried to identify its owner with his sniffwhips, but all he could pick up on his sniffwhips was the smell of the beer all around him, along with a steadily growing scent of westwardness, the west of the belly-up feller beside him, Jaybird.

“Jack, whar air ye?” came the voice, again and again, and Jack realized it was Josie.

He called back, “Josie? I’m down here inside of this beer can!” Soon he saw her face peering down at him from the slot overhead. How had she got up there, to the top of the can? She had no wings. Had someone boosted her up? “Keep back from the aidge!” he cautioned her. “You’ll fall in, too.”

“What’re ye doin down thar, Jack?” she asked.

“Jist a-layin here, floatin around and feelin fine,” he declared.

“You aint drownded, air ye?”

“Noo, but it ’pears thet ole Jaybird might be.”

“How did ye git down thar, Jack?”

“Same way you’re liable to git down here if ye don’t step back,” Jack warned her, but the words were not out of his mouth before he saw her tumbling headlong down into the can. With a gentle splash she landed beside him, and got a snootful of beer.

“Mmm-mmm,” she purred, licking her mandibles. “This is the real stuff!”

“Now look what ye’ve done went and done,” he pointed out. “Now we’re both trapped in here.” He had figured the problem out.

She noticed belly-up Jaybird. “Is he really westered off?” she asked. “That, or he’s drunker’n a fried coot,” Jack said.

Josie had never seen a fried coot. But she sniffed the distinct odor of westwardness that emanated from Jaybird’s corpse, and she felt both a mingling of sorrow for the westered and a sense of responsibility: she wondered which, if any, of the few edibles stored in her larder she could take to Samantha Coe for the funeral feed. Josie didn’t have a scrap of sweetstuff anywhere in the log, what with her big family, but the other ladies would be sure to bring Samantha a bit of pie or cake or at least cookie for the funeral feed, and Josie would look cheap, as usual. She complained to her husband, “I don’t have a blessit thing to take to the funeral feed.”

“Lorgamercy, Maw, is thet all ye kin think of, at a time like this?” Jack demanded. “It aint Jaybird’s funeral we’re concerned with. It’s our own, if we caint git out of here.”

Josie took another sip of the beer that surrounded her, and wondered how long it would take her, with Jack’s help, to drink all of it. “How deep is this, hon?” she asked.

“I aint tried to touch bottom,” he declared. “And I aint so certain I’d keer to try.”

Josie attempted to explain her plan. If they drank all the beer, they couldn’t drown in it.

“Now thet is real, real clever,” Jack commented with sarcasm, tapping his forehead with a toucher. “But jist think about it a minute. Whar is all the beer we drink gonna
go
?”

Josie thought for a minute. “Oh,” she then said. She lapsed into worried silence, and paddled around idly with her tailprongs, but the fun of it rapidly palled. “Jack,” she asked, “kin ye turn right side up?”

“Maw, I wush ye’d stop callin me ‘Jack.’ You don’t have to call me ‘Squar John’ but at least ‘John’ would be a heap of improvement.”

“Wal John, if you’re shore enough a Ingledew, you orter be able to turn right side up and spread yore wings and fly out of here.”

Jack had a vague but pleasant memory of having recently escaped from a Santa Fe by using his wings. It was worth a try. He rolled to one side, and kicked all six of his gitalongs, but could not flip over onto his stomach. “Give me a shove,” he told his wife.

Josie tried shoving him, to turn him over, but she only succeeded in pushing him across the pool. She pushed him up against the metal wall of the tank, and there, by continued shoving and his own splashing efforts, she was able to turn him right side up. He tried to spread his wings, but they were soaked with beer, and he quickly discovered that he had no buoyancy in this position. He could only float if he was belly-up.

“Halp!” he cried, and sank.

“Oh, Lord, save us!” Josie cried out to Man, who was still sound (or unsound) asleep in the back yard. “Climb the wall, Jack!” she begged her husband, and shoved him hard against the aluminum wall, and he scrabbled with his foreclaws and scratched with his hind claws, and clutched with his touchers and thrashed with his tailprongs and lashed with his sniffwhips, but could get no purchase whatever on the smooth metal. All his frantic efforts only had the effect of flipping Josie over onto her stomach, so that she no longer had any buoyancy either.

They were sinking together. As he had done in the instant before the Santa Fe tried to seize him, Jack reflected upon his life’s brief moment of glory: how fleetingly he had been allowed to enjoy the privileges of Ingledewidity, how transitory the pleasure of fame. But this time he had neither wings nor courage to save him.

Josie thought of her daughter Tish. Would Tish know how to receive properly all the guests who came bearing funeral feeds? Would Tish be certain that each child had a proper share of the bits of pie, cake, or cookie? Would she make certain that the log was scrubbed clean and that each child was thoroughly bathed and spruced up? Then, when the funeral feed was over, would she, as Josie had told Jubal to tell her to do, present herself at Parthenon and claim kin to the Ingledews?

“Tish has got to claim kin to the Ingledews,” Josie said to Jack as they both floundered and sank.

“What?” Jack wondered what nonsense his wife was babbling in her moment of west. “What’s that got to do with us a-westerin? All I kin think of, is when I git to Hell I’ll have to go to
work
.”

Chapter ten

I
f a bird gits me, I deserve it, O Lord,” Brother Tichborne said aloud, as the dawn came up. There was not quite yet enough light for a bird to see him, and the earliest bird would get the worm, not him, but he knew that if he kept going in the direction he was heading, he would never get back to the safety of Holy House before he was visible to all daytime creatures, and west in the clutches of a bird or reptile would be no Rapture at all.

Yes, the Lord still lay. In His profound stupor, He had slightly shifted, no longer flatly supine upon the grass of Carlott but twisted to one side with one of His knees flexed upward toward His chest, and His butt elevated like one of the mountain peaks that rimmed Stay More valley.

It was this peak that Brother Tichborne boldly climbed, having no trouble gaining its summit but feeling shocked at his own audacity in scaling the Lord’s Butt. At the crest of the bluejeans-covered prat he sat, or crouched, and surveyed the world below and around, slowly lightening in the foredawn. He studied the Lord’s profile: a face never seen so near nor so lit up before. How many of his fellow roosterroaches had ever had such a view? There were certain unholy heathens particularly among the closet Smockroaches, who claimed to have crawled upon the Lord’s person while the Lord was in His bed; but Chid Tichborne doubted that any of them had seen His face with so much light upon it.

It was a magnificent face, although the strong, firm jowls were hidden beneath a scraggly, gray-streaked beard. Brother Tichborne would have preferred, somehow, that the beard be all white, more in keeping with his concept of a deity, but the several white hairs or whiskers among the darker ones were enough to give the Lord a scholarly look. Some folks claimed there were other Men in the world; although Chid Tichborne preached against this polytheism, he admitted to himself that it was a possibility, even if he had never seen one of the other Men. But surely no other Man was as smart, as strong, and as all-powerful as our Man.

…Unless, Chid Tichborne thought with a violent shudder, the Lord had westered. Was He stirring at all? Did His chest rise and fall perceptibly with His shallow breathing? In Brother Tichborne’s knees, as in the knees of all roosterroaches, there were special sensors which could detect the slightest vibration in the substratum, but the patch of jeans upon which Chid was perched was totally inert.

If the Lord were west, what would become of His rooster-roaches? Of course they would not starve, but they would get powerfully hungry, and they would have to leave Holy House. Few of them could forage in the woods, like common Carlotters, eating raw algae and fungi. Most of them would want to invade Parthenon, which is exactly what Chid was planning, although everybody feared the Ingledews almost as much as they feared the Lord. Silly of them, because the two Ingledews were vastly outnumbered, no matter what legendary powers of combat they were purported to possess.

If the Holy House roosterroaches conquered the Ingledews and took over Parthenon, Chid realized, he would have to make revisions and alterations in his religion. He could no longer preach the Kingdom of Man, but would have to speak of the Queendom of Woman, and he was not certain he could do that. He had nothing against matriarchy itself; he simply didn’t have much use for females. A female, whether Woman or roosterroach, was all right as far as her functions went: bearing and raising children, keeping the house and all, but you couldn’t very easily base a whole system of theology around one of them. Chid tried to imagine himself beginning a prayer “Our Mother who art in Parthenon…” and felt ridiculous.

Chid’s sniffwhips caused him to shift his gaze from the Lord’s handsome but possibly westered countenance to the grass of Carlott surrounding the Lord, where daytime life was beginning to stir. A nightcrawler had come to a stop near the Lord’s nose and was broadcasting, “BREAKER ONE OH. HOWBOUTCHA, GOOD BUDDY? GOT A DEAD WHALE TO STARBOARD. TUNNEL SIXTEEN BLOCKED.” This was followed by a buzz of static and then a distant nightcrawler on the other side of the Lord answered, “FOUR ROGER. TAKE A SHAKE TO TUNNEL TWENTY-SEVEN, AND SKIRT THE MOTHER. NO BLOCK ON TWENTY-SEVEN. DO YOU READ?”

The nightcrawler shifted gears and changed direction, down the length of the earth beside the Lord’s body in search of another hole in the ground, but he had not gone far before a robin swooped out of the sky, took one hop, and seized the entire nightcrawler and lifted it, wriggling rig and all, off into the sky, its pitiful last message rapidly fading: “WE UP AND AWAY TO GLORYLAND, THREES AND EIGHTS….”

Brother Tichborne scanned the sky nervously for other birds. In the grass near the Lord’s hindquarters Chid saw a lizard, fearsome as a dragon and swifter than a snake, its darting tongue serving as a pronged sniffwhip and already catching the scent of Chid, and approaching.

“Lord, hear this sinner,” Chid prayed aloud, also silently praying that the Lord was not too westered to hear his prayer, “I have done wrong, I know, Lord, and I confess. I have jined ends with my own sister, Lord, and got her with marbles and eastereggs, and married her. I have jined in adultery with other ladies, Lord, amongst them Josie Dingletoon, who hardly ary feller could resist, but she never tempted me, it was my own sinfulness. Now wilt Thou permit the beasts of the field and the critters of the air to consume me, instead of Thy divine Rapture? Lord, I pray that I be saved, to stay east and preach Thy glories to all roosterroachkind, or, if it be Thy will, to be raptured by Thy hand and Thy sacred shootin-arn. But if I am to be westered off by a beast of the field or a critter of the air, let it be swift, O Lord, swift as Thy rapturing, and take me to live on Thy right hand in the Heaven of Stay More Forever. In Joshua’s Blessed Name I pray, Amen.”

And behold, the Lord opened one eye.

Even though the Lord held His one eye opened for only a few jerks of a second and then closed it tightly again, Chid Tichborne took this as a sign that the Lord had heard him and intended to spare him, that the Lord forgave him for his transgressions. A chill shiver ran through Chid; no, he realized it was not his own chill shiver, but one running through the Lord Himself, the Lord’s whole body quivering. Chid saw a bird swooping downward, aimed right at him, but he feared no evil, for the Lord was with him, and the Lord twitched an elbow, which caused the bird to swerve and miss and rise back out of sight. Likewise the lizard in the grass retreated.

The Lord began to rise. He got His knees up under Himself and spread His palms upon the ground, and arched His back. Chid did not want to fall off into the grass, where lizards, snakes, birds, or Lord knows what-all might get him. He clung to the Lord’s jeans and sought to crawl into the Lord’s hip pocket, but the space was too tight. As the Lord rose to His knees, Chid climbed above His belt to the back of His shirt, and as the Lord continued rising to a standing position, Chid crawled up beneath the back of the Lord’s shirt collar. There, out of sight of any creature, even the Lord, he hid, and hung on, as the Lord staggered around the yard of Carlott for a while, kicking into pieces of car junk, then tottering toward the back porch of Holy House.

Although this height and his own boldness made his nerves tingle, Chid felt elevated above his former station in life and almost sanctified, almost possessed of godhead himself. Wouldn’t those infidel Smockroaches be astonished into piety if they could see him? But all roosterroaches had retired for the day into deep slumber, and none were abroad to witness the minister’s daring ride on the back of the Lord’s neck.

The Lord shuffled along through Holy House to His cookroom. He swung open the great door of the Fabulous Fridge, and a blast of cold air pierced Chid and made his mandibles chatter. The Lord just stared for a long time at the interior of the Fridge, as if trying to decide what to take, or perhaps only checking to see that nothing was missing (no roosterroach had ever succeeded in sneaking into the sealed interior). Then the Lord closed the Fridge’s door without removing anything. He bent low over the double-tub Porcelain Sink, a place of frequent wading parties for roosterroaches, and placed His head directly beneath the Fantastic Faucet and turned on the water, causing a great gush of it to splash all over His hair and even the back of His collar, where Chid crouched, only partially sheltered from the spray. For what seemed like a full minute, the Lord held His head beneath the rushing water, then raised His head and shook it vigorously, as if to dry it.