Almost Complete Short Fiction, page 39
“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.”
“Huh,” Marvin said again. “A redskin exterminator. Now I’ve heard everything.”
“He’s not an exterminator, strictly speaking.” Antonio gave Marvin an odd grin. “This is the part your wife’s going to like. He doesn’t kill anything. He just makes the pests go away.”
Marvin turned his stare onto Antonio. “This is a gag, right? You’re going to tell me he blows a horn or something and they follow him away, like the Pied fucking Piper? Hey, Antonio, do I look like I’m in the mood for comedy?”
“No, this is for real.” Antonio’s face was serious. “I’m not sure how he does it—what I heard, he sort of smokes them out. Indian secret, I guess.”
“I’ll be damned.” For a moment Marvin considered the idea. Indians did know a lot of tricks, everybody knew that. “Nah. Thanks, but I’ll wait till Monday and hit the yellow pages. Hell, I can stand anything for a few more days.”
But later that night, about to go to bed—in the guest bedroom, sure enough—he felt a sudden thirst, and went down to the kitchen to get himself a beer; and when he turned on the light, there they were.
Pamela hadn’t been exaggerating. The cockroaches were everywhere. They swarmed over the sink and the counter and the dishwasher, the refrigerator and the walls and the floor: little flat brown oblongs that began running, all at once, when the light came on, so that the whole room appeared to squirm sickeningly for a moment. In almost no time most of the roaches had vanished, but a few remained, high on the walls or in other inaccessible places. Through the glass doors of the china cupboard Marvin could see a couple of them perched on top of a stack of antique bone-china dishes.
Then he glanced up and saw that there was a large roach on the ceiling directly above his head. Its long feelers waved gently as if in greeting. It seemed to be looking at him, considering a drop.
“Jesus Christ!” Marvin shouted, and ran from the kitchen without stopping to turn off the light.
His hands were shaking as he picked up the phone. The restaurant was closed for the night, and when he dialed Antonio’s home phone he had to listen to a lot of rings before Antonio picked it up.
“Listen,” Marvin said over Antonio’s sleepy protest, “you know that old Indian you were telling me about? How fast do you think you could get hold of him?”
Next morning when Marvin went nervously into the kitchen for his coffee, there were no roaches to be seen. He knew they were still there, hiding during the daylight hours; still, it wasn’t so bad as long as he couldn’t see them.
He poured himself a cup of black coffee and went out through the sliding glass doors to the sun deck. The sun was well up above the eastern horizon and the light hurt his eyes; he wished he’d brought a pair of shades. He sat down at the little table at the north end of the sun deck, keeping his back to the sun.
The Bradshaws’ house was built at the edge of a rocky bluff, sixty or seventy feet above the ocean. If Marvin cared to look straight down, through the cracks between the planks of the sun deck, he could see the white sand of what Pamela liked to call “our beach.” It wasn’t much of a beach, just a narrow strip of sand that sloped steeply to the water. At high tide it was almost entirely submerged.
He tested his coffee cautiously. As he had expected, it was horrible. Have to start interviewing replacement help; Pamela’s efforts in the kitchen were going to be almost as hard to live with as the cockroaches.
Cockroaches. He made a disgusted face, not just at the bitter coffee. He had really lost it last night. Now, sitting in the bright morning sunlight with the cool clean wind coming off the sea, he couldn’t believe he’d gone into such a panic over a few bugs. Calling Antonio up in the middle of the night, for God’s sake, begging him to bring in some crazy old Indian. Going to be embarrassing as hell, eating at Antonio’s, after this.
Marvin raised the cup again and took a mouthful of coffee. God, it tasted bad. Even more gruesome than Pamela’s usual coffee-making efforts, which was saying something. There even seemed to be something solid—
He jerked suddenly back from the table, dropping the cup, spilling coffee over himself and not noticing. He raised his hand to his mouth and spat onto his palm the soggy cadaver of a drowned cockroach.
Marvin leaped to his feet and dashed for the railing and energetically emptied his stomach in the direction of the Atlantic Ocean. When the retching and heaving at last subsided he hung there for several minutes, clutching the rail to keep from collapsing to the deck, breathing noisily through his mouth.
It was then that Pamela appeared in the kitchen doorway. “Marvin,” she said, “a couple of men are out front in a pickup truck. They say you sent for them.”
The kid from Antonio’s was standing on the front porch, hands jammed into his ass pockets. With him was a little old man—no more than five feet tall, not much over a hundred pounds—with a face like a sun-dried apple. They both wore faded jeans and cheaplooking checkered work shirts. The old man had on a mesh-backed cap with a Dolphins emblem on the front and some kind of feather dangling from the crown. Behind them in the driveway sat an old pickup truck, its paint so faded and scabbed with rust that it was impossible to tell what color it had originally been.
The kid said, “Mr. Bradshaw? Mr. Coelho said you had a roach problem.”
The old man said something in a language that sounded like nothing Marvin had ever heard. The kid said, “My grandfather needs to have a look around before he can tell you anything.”
Marvin nodded weakly. He still felt dizzy and sick. “Sure,” he said, and led the way back to the kitchen.
Pamela came and stood in the kitchen doorway beside Marvin. They watched as the old Indian walked slowly about the kitchen, bending down and studying the baseboards, running his fingers under the edge of the counter and sniffing them, peering behind the refrigerator. Suddenly he squatted down and opened the access doors and reached up into the dark space beneath the sink. A moment later he was standing up again, holding something small and wiggly between his thumb and forefinger. His wrinkled dark face didn’t really change expression—it hadn’t been wearing any recognizable expression to begin with—but there was something like satisfaction in his eyes.
He spoke again in that strange-sounding language. The kid said, “He needed to know what kind of roaches you had. He says no problem. This kind is easy.”
The old man went out on the sun deck and flipped the cockroach over the rail. He came back and said something brief. “He says one hundred dollars,” the kid translated.
For once Marvin was in no mood to argue. He could still taste that coffee-logged cockroach. “When can he start?”
“Right now,” the kid said. “If that’s okay.”
The kid went back up the hall—Marvin thought he should have had Pamela go along to make sure he didn’t steal anything, but it was too late now—while the old man continued to study the kitchen. A few minutes later the kid was back with a pair of nylon carry-on bags, which he set on the counter beside the sink. The old man nodded, grunted, unzipped one of the bags, and began rummaging inside.
While he was rummaging the kid said, “Any animals in the house? Dogs, cats?”
Pamela shook her head. Marvin said, “Hell, no.” That was something he couldn’t understand, people keeping dirty hairy animals in the house. Maybe a good guard dog, but even he belonged outside, behind a fence.
“It would be better,” the kid said, “if you could go somewhere, like out of the house, till this is over.”
“Yeah?” Marvin grinned. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
Pamela kicked his ankle. To the Indian kid she said, “Is this going to involve any toxic chemicals?”
“No, no, nothing like that.” The kid gestured at the pile of stuff the old man was taking out of the bag. “See, we don’t even use respirators. No, it’s just, well, better if you’re not here.”
“Uh huh,” Marvin said. “Forget it, Geronimo. Nice try.”
The kid shrugged. “Okay.” He turned and began unzipping the other bag.
By now the old man had laid out several bundles of what looked like dried weeds. Now he selected four of these and twisted them together to form a single long bundle. From the bag he took a roll of ordinary white twine and began wrapping the bundle tightly from end to end, compressing it into a solid cylinder about the size and shape of a rolled-up newspaper. He put the rest of the stuff back into the bag and spoke to the kid.
The kid had taken out a small drum, like a big tambourine without the metal jingles, and a long thin stick with one end wrapped in what looked like rawhide. He gave the drum a tap and got a single sharp poong that filled the kitchen and floated off down the hallway.
The old man produced a throwaway butane lighter, which he lit and applied to one end of the herb bundle. Marvin expected a quick flare-up, but the stuff showed some reluctance to ignite. The old man turned the bundle in his fingers, blowing gently, until at last the end of the bundle was a solid glowing red coal.
By now smoke was pouring from the bundle in thick white clouds, billowing up to the ceiling and then rolling down to fog the whole room. Marvin started to protest, but then he decided that the smell wasn’t bad at all. He recognized cedar in there—for an instant he recalled the time he had been allowed to burn the family tree after Christmas because his father was too drunk—and something that might be sage, and other things he couldn’t guess at.
