Kockroach (18 page)

He thinks about the members of his colony, their hungers, their fears. Cockroaches do whatever they need do to survive. They would eat him if they had the wherewithal to bring him down and teeth sharp enough to chew the meat off his bones. That he is ready to do the same to them is only proof of the continuing purity of his cockroach nature.

But why must he even try to justify his actions to himself when greed and fear were justification enough before? If only the woman in the bank had given him an opportunity, he wouldn’t be here, now, beneath this sign, with the case in his hand. That too is something new, along with thought comes what? Regret? He has no doubt about what he is going to do, and yet still he thinks of the reasons why, as if the reasons mattered. This thinking, he thinks, is like a sickness, only you can’t squeeze it out with your morning crap.

A boxy brown van drives to the front of the office and shudders to a stop. On the side of the van is an identical sign
to that atop the small building, with an identical drawing of an arthropod. Irv Brownside steps out of the van holding a steaming mug and a bag, wipes his mouth, checks his watch.

“You are an eager beaver, ain’t you?”

Brownside doesn’t wait for a reply. He unlocks the door, steps around the counter and into his office. Kockroach follows.

“Cassie don’t come in till eight-thirty,” he says when he is seated behind the pile on his desk. He clears a spot in front of him and papers flutter to the floor. He puts down the mug, reaches into the bag, pulls out six donuts, one after the other, lays them on a stack of invoices, licks his finger. “What’d you say your name was again?”

“Blatta. Jerry Blatta.”

“What is that? Italian?”

“Greek.”

“Son of a bitch. All right. Show me what you got.”

Kockroach lays the chest on the floor, unsnaps the latch.

“It ain’t so easy, I told you,” says Brownside. “Didn’t I tell you?”

“You told me,” says Kockroach even as he lifts up the small steel cage and unlatches the door.

They fall in a torrent, a waterfall of brown, scurrying madly once they hit the pile, diving beneath the papers, climbing around the canisters of poison, swarming in thick piles over the donuts, hundreds and hundreds, dropping with audible snaps to the floor and dashing to the far walls and crevices.

Brownside jumps back for a second and then raises his gaze from the undulating desktop to Kockroach’s face.

“Piece of cake,” says Kockroach.

Brownside’s unshaven face cracks into a broad smile. He steps forward, swats most of the cockroaches away from one of the donuts, picks it up with two fingers, shakes the rest off, takes a bite. “Help yourself.”

Kockroach reaches for a donut himself, shakes it free of arthropods, jams it all at once into his mouth. Vanilla cream oozes through his teeth.

“Welcome aboard,” says Brownside. “Let’s get you a uniform.”

Kockroach stands beside the brown van, outside a tall tenement with cracked windows and weeds sprouting through the brick.

He is wearing a brown coverall zipped to his throat with the crude drawing of a cockroach on the breast, brown gloves, brown boots, a brown baseball cap. His eyes are covered by goggles tinted yellow. Strapped onto his back is a heavy metal tank and in his gloved hands is a metal nozzle shaped like a gun with an extralong barrel. His smile is broad and white and pearly. He looks up at the building rising before him as if he were looking at his hope.

Irv Brownside stands beside him in an identical outfit, though not so well pressed.

“You ready to clean up Tombstone, Jerry?” asks Brownside.

“I’m ready, Irv,” says Kockroach. “I’ve been ready all my life.”

Eight years after,
after it all went to hell, eight years after I came back to face the ghosts.

It was Champ what was driving the old ’55 Packard over the Georgie W. and he wasn’t none too happy about it, no ma’am. Far as he was concerned, he wanted nothing ever more to do with this burg. I knowed that because it’s what he tells me while we’re stalled in traffic smack in the middle of the bridge.

“I want nothing ever more to do with this burg,” he says in his soft voice scarred forever from one too many jolts to the throat. “Look at it there, all towers and lights, leaning forward like a hungry southpaw, just waiting again to knock me on my keister.”

“It wasn’t the city,” I says. “It was Izzy Berg and Fighting Paddy Conaghan what did the knocking.”

“They were just the front men, Mick. It was the promoters, the cops, the managers, the cut men, the whole damn city. Slipping that shiv so clean across my brow I didn’t feel a thing, ruining me just because I had the local Irish boy in the deep.”

“You sure it wasn’t a chop to the eye what started you to bleeding?”

“Whatever else I was, Mick, I wasn’t a bleeder.”

“Excepts for that night. Keep your eyes on the road.”

“I hate this city. We’ve got no call to come to this city. What about we head to the coast?”

“Let me see what I need see, and if it ain’t worth our while, then we’ll blow.”

“We could head out to Santa Cruz, buy a boat. Catch fish for a living.”

“What do you know about catching fish?”

“They don’t punch back, I know that. And it don’t cost nothing to snatch them out of the ocean. It’s like gold just floating around, waiting to be hooked and pulled in.”

“With all we knows about fishing, we might as well throws a hook into a bathtub.”

“I always wanted to own a boat. And what I heard about Santa Cruz, cheap rooms, cheap eats. Man can fish all day, fill his belly at night, and sleep sound in Santa Cruz.”

“Things work out like I expect, Champ, we won’t need to be watching our dimes no more.”

“I miss old Chicago. Best damn hot dogs in the world in old Chicago.”

“Well we can’t go back to Chicago, now can we?”

“No we can’t.”

“You took care of that, didn’t you?”

“Yes I did.”

“Nedick’s.”

“What say?”

“Nedick’s got good dogs. Or I’ll take you up to Nathan’s on Coney Island. Take my word, there’s good dogs in New York.”

“Better than Chicago?”

“No, Champ. No place in the world’s got better hot dogs than Chicago.”

Chicago, city of the big snow, of the cold shoulder, of kielbasa and corrupt aldermen and a rap to the teeth, a punch-drunk city always climbing the ropes for more. After the big blowup I had meant to take the train from New York all the way across to the far ocean, but when it stopped in Chicago, the thought of all them rolling prairies, them palm trees swaying and beaches filled with stuffed bikinis, all of it turned my stomach. I stepped out of the train into the grit of the big city, breathed in the industrial stench, and you know what it smelled like, missy? It smelled like mother’s milk, that pure. It smelled like home.

What would I do on a beach, all that sand getting in my Regal shoes, in my fedora, shining up my green suit? What would a guy like me do on a beach, I ask you that?

So I dusted off my suit and stayed, in Chicago. I found a small room with a bed and a sink on the North Side, close enough to the ballyard I could hear the yobs cheering through my window whenever Big Ernie, he parked one on Waveland Avenue, and that’s where I stayed to figure it all out between me and Hubert, which is where that lawyer he came in.

“Th-th-thank you for coming to see me, Mr. P-P-Pimelia,” he says, sitting at one end of the long conference table, desirous to keep his distance from something so distasteful as the likes of me sitting at the other. “I’m afraid we have some unpleasant b-b-business to which to attend.”

His name was McGreevy. He was tall and pale, with a sharp pointy nose. When he spoke his eyelids fell so low you couldn’t see the green of his eyes. He wasn’t much older than me, but still, with his pale skin, his black vested suit, with his long banker’s jacket, he reminded me of the old-money Philadelphia I heard tale of when I was a boy but what I never got a whiff of firsthand, ancient, secret, wealthy, powerful, incestuous, grasping.

“It is your uncle, your dear Uncle R-R-Rufus, third cousin twice removed of your dear departed mother. I am grieved to inf-f-form you your Uncle Rufus has passed away. A tragedy yes. But as in many such tragedies, there is a b-b-benefit to the survivors. Uncle Rufus left a will.”

McGreevy, the lawyer, he come along at a low point, that’s for sure. It had been four years since I arrived in Chicago and things with Hubert and me hadn’t gone so swell, no ma’am. First of all I had run out of money, and the little hustles I had undertaken, the tired scams, the small-time dealing, all of it had proven less than profitable and sent me to the slammer more than once. I was struggling, yes I was, struggling to even make the pitiful rent on my pitiful room. It got so bad I took a job, that’s right, a job, bagging groceries, a job. How low had I sunk don’t even ask ’cause that will tell you everything. And I was drinking too, and that’s not a good thing because I’m not a drinker, never was, could never hold nothing, but I was drinking nightly at the corner tavern to fill the hole.

You see, Hubert, he scoops something out of you and leaves a hole, and you needs to fill it somehow, and I tried,
first with the destruction, and then with the drink, and in the end it was with the thoughts that were filling that hole when even the drink it wasn’t enough. The destruction that you want to unleash on your enemies and then on the world ends up turning on your own self. That’s what the drinking is, another form of destruction to fill the hole, and when that ain’t fast enough, then Hubert again starts whispering in your ear and you get faster ideas, and a knife it ain’t no longer just a knife and a gun it ain’t no longer just a gun and a bottle of pills it’s more than a bottle of pills, or maybe less is what I mean, less than anything, an invitation to nothing. And that’s where I was when the letter came from McGreevy asking me to meet hisself in the Loop, in the legal offices of some bluenosed firm called Hotchkiss and Tate.

“The will is still in pr-pr-probate, Mr. Pimelia, and pr-pr-probate could last years, decades even. But we are prepared to advance you a sum to tide you over.”

“How much of a sum?” I asks.

“A handsome sum, and there will be other payments in the future, so long as you don’t in any way c-c-contest the distributions I make to you.”

“I should just sit back and takes what you gives and ask no questions.”

“Yes, that is exactly what you should do. And you’ll need to sign a full agreement to that ef-f-fect, of course.”

“And what if I does contest,” I says. “And what if I hires my own three-piece suit to make sure I gets all that’s coming my way. How do I know I’m not being played for the patsy
here? My dear dead Uncle Rufus, I loved the man like a father, I did, and the rest of the family was just ingrates. Maybe I’ll decide to muck it up for everyone untils I get maybe even more than my fair share, like old Uncle Rufus would have wanted. What then?”

“Then our b-b-business,” he says, “is at an end.”

“I noticed your name, McGreevy, it ain’t on the door.”

“Hotchkiss and Tate is our local counsel.”

“So where’s your digs?”

“Think c-c-carefully before you decide.”

“Tell me this, then. Where did dear old Uncle Rufus kick it for good? Philly? Where should I tell my lawyer to start digging?”

“If you d-d-decide to sign, I can be very helpful in the future. If you need anything, you can simply get in touch with Mr. Tate. If you d-d-decide not to sign, then I won’t disturb you further.”

“This is screwy. Something it ain’t right.”

“They say there is a p-p-pot of gold at the end of every rainbow, Mr. Pimelia, but the trick, as in everything in the world, is f-f-finding it.”

I signed, course I did. And the payouts they came steady, just as McGreevy promised. And whenever I got the square idea of jumping out for more, it wasn’t the paper I signed what stopped me, it was the memory of that bloodless bastard with the stammer telling me about rainbows and pots of gold like he hisself was the leprechaun what could make it all disappear and would, believe you me, of that I had no doubt.

But strangely, McGreevy, that pale bastard, he started me
on filling the hole with something other than the dream of nothing. The money helped, sure, I was done bagging groceries, but it wasn’t the money, really, what started me up. No, it was good old Uncle Rufus, who never had I heard word one about in my youth. That someone, somewhere, had thought enough of my mother and me to remember us and want to take care of us, that someone had cared, that did the trick. Funny how much Hubert he hates that.

I had questions, sures I did, but I buried them and went about my life. And with old Uncle Rufus’s benediction I began to feel things I hadn’t felt in a long time. Connected, is what I mean. I saw a kid in trouble and I was that kid in trouble and I helped him out with a dime or a dollar when I could. I’d look at a Joe struggling with something and I’d feel the strain and lend a hand so I could struggle with him. I wasn’t no saint, believe you me, but I was feeling things again.

And then I found Champ. And he filled a hole even Hubert hadn’t dug. And Chi-town, when it all slipped into place, became for me a different world where different dreams was dreamed in colors I never knew existed.

But Chicago was dead to us now, both of us, and we couldn’t never go back, and so there we was, crossing the Hudson, heading into the Apple, another place that had died to me.

Rate I was going, Santa Cruz would be all I had left.

But first I was coming back to the big town, chasing my ghosts, coming home. Funny, ain’t it? I grows up in Philly, spends eight years in the distant wilderness of the Midwest, yet it’s New York what I still thought of as home. What did that Joe say, the Joe what wrote all those long sentences that fly around
like twittering birds and end up nowheres, didn’t he say you can’t never go home again? Well, maybe he was right, but there we was, the two of us, driving over the Georgie W., trying to make a liar out of him as I reached out for some shadow barely glimpsed in the midst of an apocalypse. You see, them questions I had buried had risen from the dead and it was time to finds some answers.

“Head south off the bridge,” I says. “We’ll check out first the Square.”

The Square, Times Square, my square, ever the same and yet. And yet.

The signs, sure, still there, brighter than before, but different faces, different products being hustled to the mokes, different names on the movie marquees, half of them with sex in the title or tagline. “Raw Naked Violence.” “Sex Without Shame.” The whole scene filthier, seedier, sad. The Astor Hotel, the grand old dame of the Square—shuttered up for the wrecking ball. The Latin Quarter—all shot to hell. The Roxy, the frigging Roxy—gone. The life of the place had been chewed off by Sister Time.

I stepped in the Automat, the land of promise for me as a boy, but it too was changed completely. Once an elegant refuge full of promise, a direct link to the grand parade flowing outside its windows, now it was dirty, muted, inhabited by a bunch of low-life bums sitting miserably alone at the tables, no punch or laughter or thrilling sense of possibility.

“What are we doing here?” says Champ.

“I don’t know,” I says. “But in my life I’ll never feel older than I feels right now.”

The only moke I recognized at the Automat was, believe it or not, Tony the Tune, still eating his Salisbury steak, still humming away, aged not a day since I left. I went over to ask him where everyone else had disappeared to, but afore I got two words out he blew me off.

“Get away from me, you little scalawag. I got no time to waste on the likes of you.”

It was the loveliest thing I heard since we crossed the Hudson.

On the street, I met a hustler with his T-shirt and tight jeans and I asked about Tab, but alls I got was a drugged-out pout and a halfhearted come-on, more pathetic than enticing. The hookers was all strangers too. Not a one of our girls was still on the street. There had always been turnover, sure, that was the nature of the game, but I hadn’t noticed how relentless it was whilst I was in the middle of it. But in eight years it must have turned over a couple times or more. Still I took aside what girls I found and asked them some names. Blatta? What’s that? Abagados? Who? Fallon? Nothing. Who’s in charge now? I asked. A name I never heard of, a name I didn’t want to remember.

“You ever hear of Pinnacio?” I says, but not a one a them did.

The legends was all dead.

In the Paddock was a barkeep I never seen before, a broad bus with a bully boy’s face who eyed Champ a good long moment afore wising up and giving him a beer.

“Does a copper name of Fallon still come in here?” I asks.

“Who’s asking?” he says.

“Just someone what used to work the Square is all.”

“Who were you with?”

“Blatta.”

“Never heard of him.”

“Abagados.”

“Never heard of him.”

“The extent of what you ain’t heard of would float the Hindenburg.”

“I got nothing for nobody I never heard of. Get lost.”

“Answer his question, Pops,” says Champ with that soft ruined voice of his, “and we will.”

The barkeep glances again at Champ, takes in his dark face, scarred and mashed, his ears engorged from rabbit punches, his neck thick from all that training, his huge hands laying still and heavy on the bar.

“There’s an old wino comes in sometimes, begging for drinks,” says the barkeep, talking to me but his eyes all the time on Champ, which was the way of it. “Goes on and on about how he used to be somebody before he starts the shouting and we need to toss him. He says he was a cop and once I heard his name, something like Fallon.”