Kockroach (5 page)

Blatta behind me suddenly grabs hold of Roscoe’s wrist, the one connected to the hand still latched onto my nose. He grabs Roscoe’s wrist and pulls it away from my face and then jerks the arm down with a terrible force. The sound of Roscoe’s knees hitting the floor comes at the same time as the snap of the bones in his arm.

The howl Roscoe lets out as he sags back on his heels, cradling the flopping remnant of his arm, brings me out of my shock. I steps back and turns. He’s standing there, smiling his maniac smile, Jerry Blatta, the Boss, though not yet the Boss, as calm as if what he had just done was as simple as flicking a switch.

“Who the hell are you?” I says.

“Blatta is it?” he says, “Jerry Blatta? Look, Smithy, your week’s up tomorrow and we want you out.”

I squints up at him, but not for long. Old Dudley had taught me that when things they slide in unexpected directions there is always advantages to be had. Things here had slid in an unexpected direction all right. I glance once more at Blatta and turns back to Roscoe, who is letting out a high-pitched wail and laying now in a puddle of his own drained dew.

“What about my money, you muscle-bound craphead?” I says.

Roscoe, still cradling his arm, keeps on howling even as he struggles to rise, his eyes steady on Blatta.

Blatta steps forward and smacks Roscoe’s forehead with the palm of his hand. The son of a bitch sprawls backwards into the doorway.

I leans over, pats Roscoe’s pants pockets, feel nothing but a slippery wetness, wipes my hand on his head, then steps over him into the bare apartment that smells now like some gypsy old-age home, all incense and urine. I toss a few cushions, empty a few drawers, scatter a shelfful of strange religious tracts as I remembers the vicious rumor going round that Roscoe was a Buddhist. The search, it doesn’t take me long. For all Roscoe’s talents, cleverness wasn’t one of them.

The cigar box, it is slipped behind the tank of his toilet bowl, a box filled to the brim with sweet bills of many churches and all denominations. I consider carefully counting out the hundred I was owed, but then figure what the hell and takes it all. Six hundred and some dollars it turned out, enough to get me off the hook with Big Johnny Callas, for sure.

But already I wasn’t so much worried anymore about Big Johnny Callas.

I stood inside the apartment, with the wad in my hand, and looked through the doorway, beyond the broken, prostrated body of Roscoe, to Jerry Blatta standing there in his dark glasses, smiling at me with that plastered-on smile. And right there I knew, in my heart, with the inbred instinct that
has been the key to any success I’ve ever grabbed hold of in this life, that I had found another one.

For here it is, the sad truth of my existence: I am not enough to make it on my own. I learned it early, I learned it hard, and since I learned it I have always been on the lookout for someone stronger to latch onto. Others have the strength to head out on theys own, to embody the pioneering spirit what stretched America from one ocean to the next. Others, but not me. Because I am not enough. Let others fill their hearts with the lonely struggle to reach great heights, I need someone to carry me.

And I figured, if I played my cards just right, I had found my someone, a jive-talking, jazzy-walking, shady-eyed customer name of Jerry Blatta. Now all I needed was a plan.

I steps over Roscoe, whimpering as he was, still on the floor, and gives him a kick in the side for good measure. “Stiff me again, Siddhartha, why don’t you?” Then I grabs at Blatta’s sleeve and says, “Let’s blow.”

“But first, Roscoe, we needs to get square,” says Blatta.

“What?” I says. “You want your cut now? Sure.” I separate the bills into rough halves and offer Blatta the thicker share. When you’re my size, muscle always gets the thicker share. “Here you go, palsy.”

He takes the wad of bills I hand him and examines it, as if he were realizing the value of money for the first time, afore stuffing it in his pocket.

“All righty-rooty,” I says. “Time to amscray the hell out of here.”

“Not so fast, big boy,” says Blatta.

I step backwards as Blatta leans over Roscoe. “Nothing personal, pal,” he says. “Just beeswax.”

Roscoe squirms backwards in fright, like a wounded spider trying to get away.

Blatta ignores him, staring instead at the still-lit cigarette lying on the floor, loosing a thin white string into the air. Blatta picks it up, looks at it queerly, sticks it in his teeth.

“Smoke,” he says.

Kockroach doesn’t question
where the little man in the green cloths came from. One moment Kockroach was staring up in awe at the giant face breathing smoke into the night sky, and the next moment, as if upon decree from the great fearsome figure itself, the little man had appeared, spoken to him as if they already were familiar, and gestured for him to follow. Kockroach’s immediate instinct had been to scurry into a hiding place, but something about this human, its size, its overt familiarity, the color of its cloths, made it seem a less threatening presence than the other humans he had observed. He decided instead to follow along and see what he could learn.

The little human had taken him to a fierce predator human with the smoking white stick, a human who had proceeded to grab onto the beak of the little human and then to kill one of Kockroach’s former brothers. For some reason he couldn’t fathom, Kockroach was now in the middle of a battle. It was a fight that Kockroach sensed wouldn’t be won by a stilt-legged show of aggressiveness. So instead he had grabbed at the predator human and tried to pull his arm off, like the mouse had pulled off Kockroach’s leg many molts ago. Kockroach had failed to detach the arm, but the attempt
was enough to injure the predator and just that fast the battle was won.

With a quick victory, and with the placing of the white fire stick in his mouth to pay tribute to the great smoking god, Kockroach’s confidence swells. He still doesn’t doubt that the humans would crush him had they half the chance, but now he knows it won’t be so easy for them to do so. And with that realization comes a familiar and innate urge.

Rams butt heads over ewes, mustangs rear at one another for the right to mount mares. All animals fight over territory, battle over mating rights, struggle claw and breath for sheer superiority. It is the natural order of things for the strongest of a colony to impose his strength upon the others. Kockroach looks around himself, sees the little man, the injured predator human, remembers all those he has passed in the street. Maybe he is stronger than other humans. Delicious possibilities begin to open to him.

After the battle, the little human had given Kockroach more of those green pieces of paper with the faces on them. Those pieces of paper remain a great mystery to Kockroach. He has seen them passed back and forth among humans as a sort of token. He doesn’t know what they mean or what they are used for, but he can tell they are important to the humans, so when the little man offered him a number of the papers, Kockroach understood immediately what was happening. The little human had given him a form of tribute, a token bespeaking clearly Kockroach’s superior status. He likes the feeling. He
wants more tokens from more humans, more green pieces of paper. The desire for these papers grows almost as large as the other desire that burns in his blood. Almost.

Now that the little human has given tribute and acknowledged Kockroach’s superior status, Kockroach feels far more comfortable following him out of the building and down the street back toward the seeming center of all human activity.

“So, Jerry Blatta,” says the little human, “what can Mite get for you? Anything. I owes you, palsy. You did a job on Roscoe, you sure did.”

“Smoke,” says Kockroach. That word, which the little human had taught him, seems to have magical properties.

“Oh yeah, let’s see.”

The little human reaches his claw up to Kockroach’s face and takes the white smoking stick from between Kockroach’s teeth. It is now short and stubby, no longer glowing, no longer loosing its noxious burning smell.

“We need get you more, we do,” says the little human, the human called Mite. “What’s your brand?”

Blatta points up at the great visage in the sky with the smoke pouring out its fearsome open mouth.

“Camels it is. You got matches?”

“I like it dark,” says Kockroach, pulling what seems to be appropriate from his stored inventory of human sounds.

The little human lets out a loud snort, pats Kockroach on the upper arm, disappears into one of the doorways off the street. Kockroach stares after him but doesn’t dare follow. He
worries for a moment that the little human has left for good. It was a comfort having him close, someone who acknowledged an inferior status to Kockroach and yet was willing to usher him through the bizarre twists and turns of the human world. Kockroach’s smile remains even as he searches with his gaze for the little human. Mite. Of all the humans, his is the only name Kockroach knows. Mite. He wants this Mite to stay near, to guide him through the thickets of this strange new territory.

After many minutes, the human returns. The relief Kockroach feels is both surprising and enjoyable. The little human gives him a small packet with silver at the top. Kockroach stares at it without understanding what it is. The little human takes the packet, rips off the top, taps the bottom so that three of the little white sticks appear. Kockroach takes them all. They are long but without the glowing tips. Still he puts them in his teeth. He tries to give the packet back to the little human, but the human refuses.

“My growth’s stunted enough, don’t you think? But I got you something else,” says the little human. “A gift.”

The little human shows him a small shiny thing, golden in color, a thin rectangle with a line running through it. Kockroach peers at it without comprehending its purpose. Then, shockingly, the little human opens the top and spins a little wheel.

Flame magically appears.

Kockroach backs away and squeals. The little man steps
toward him, places the fire to the end of the three white sticks. They begin to glow and smoke.

As Kockroach stands on the street with three smoking white sticks in his teeth, the humans passing him stare. He must seem very powerful with the three sticks, strong with magic. But he grows fearful being noticed like that. He tells himself that from now on, to remain as inconspicuous as possible, he will limit himself to one at a time.

Even as Kockroach is teaching himself moderation in his new smoking habit, the little human does something marvelous; he closes the top of the magic rectangle and places it in Kockroach’s claw.

Kockroach rubs the magic rectangle with his digits. “Mite,” he says in a soft, slurry voice. “This is a surprise.”

“We’re pals, ain’t we, palsy?”

“You got it, sweet pea.”

Kockroach opens the magic rectangle. He spins the wheel slowly. Sparks but nothing more. He tries again, harder, and suddenly a flame erupts. Fire: the bane of arthropods throughout all eras, scorcher of the bold, decimator of colonies. With a bright yelp, Kockroach drops the magic rectangle.

The little man picks the rectangle up, closes the top, and gives it back.

Kockroach opens it again, flicks the wheel: fire. He closes the top, opens it again, spins the wheel, repeats the act over and over, over and over. Fire. Fire. Fire.

Cockroaches have existed on earth for more than a quarter of a billion years. Fossil evidence shows hundreds of species of cockroaches living among the ferns and mosses that
covered Pangaea during the Paleozoic age, 150 million years before the coming of the dinosaur. From that distant age to this, cockroaches have evolved little. Any 350-million-year-old cockroach that magically appeared on the sparkling linoleum of a New York kitchen would be recognized for exactly what it was and squashed without a second’s thought. They were cockroaches then, they remain so today, crawling along in the manner passed down for billions of generations with nary an advance. So it is safe to say that Kockroach’s mastery of fire would qualify as the most stupendous leap forward ever in the bland, static, and yet oh-so-persistent history of his species.

“Hey, palsy,” says the little human as Kockroach stares into the flame in utter fascination, “you hungry? You want some grub?”

For a cockroach, the question is rhetorical.

Each night after work,
as she poured the cream into her coffee at the Times Square Automat, Celia Singer watched the ebbs and flows of lightness in her cup as if in the swirling shapes a private message about her future was being relayed, the meaning of which was just beyond her grasp. She was everywhere haunted by the vague terror that she was missing the meanings of things. It was an occupational hazard, she supposed, eight hours each night plugging lines, making connections, eight hours behind the huge grid, sockets connected by fraying cords over which endless words were streaming back and forth in a great communal conversation, words of which she caught the hum and rhythm and yet no meaning.

She added sugar and twirled her spoon in the cup. Her second cup. It was well after midnight and still the Automat was alive with comings and goings, with life. Maybe that was why she came here each night and sat by the window with her coffee and a slice of pie and let the night burn down around her, even as Gregory slept alone in their bed at the apartment. She preferred the tortured intimations of others’ lives to the dead quiet of her own, and at the Automat there was a regular group of others on which to latch her attention.

Over there, at their usual table by the coffee spout, were the
politicians in their shabby suits, loudly arguing about the great issues of the day as they endlessly refilled their coffee cups. Celia admired their passion, it was obvious that their political beliefs were the most important things in their lives, certainly more important to them than their teeth.

And sitting as far from the cashier as they could sit were the college boys in their sweatshirts, slurping their makeshift tomato soups, concocted from ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, butter, and hot water. They split a sandwich bought with three precious nickels from one of the windows and talked with an uncontained excitement about the new jazz record bought by some hipster named Elmer, and the Céline novel being passed around, and the reform school kid on his way in from Denver, and their plans for getting out of the city and hitting the open open road. They were a jittery crew, slapping arms, jabbing fingers in the air, seeming to buzz with a pure current of energy that electrified the night for them but to which Celia was immune.

Far to the side, hunched over his pie, sat Tab, thin and good-looking, with his black leather jacket and ruined complexion, who trolled the shadows of the Square for men willing to buy what their wives could never give them. Tab made bravura come-ons to all the girls in the Automat, including Celia, just to be sure everyone knew that he was only doing what he did for the money, though no one believed him. Celia felt nothing but sympathy for the young boy, and the things he was forced to do to survive, but still, sometimes, in the mornings she would wake up beside Gregory with a start, realizing she had been dreaming of Tab stretching his lean
muscular body over hers. Whatever that said about the state of her malformed id, she didn’t want to know.

And at a row of tables pushed together near the great decorative pillar in the center of the dining room sat the comics and chorus girls and trombonists from the shows, calling out hearty greetings and swapping jokes. She was jealous of their laughter, jealous of their direct connection to a brighter world, but jealous most of all of the pretty girls and their ability to dance. The very thought of it pressed tears to the back of her eyes, tears that should have dried and died years ago.

Not to forget Sylvie, on a break from the street, sitting alone, staring into her coffee as if it were to blame for what she had become. Celia supposed she should have felt sorry for Sylvie, in the way good girls feel sorry for girls like that, but Celia was no longer a good girl and what she felt instead of pity was a kind of bitter envy. Sylvie had the most magnificent body, long legs and wide hips, pillowy breasts, all of which she showed off with the sweaters and tight wool skirts and gorgeous high heels that Celia would never ever wear. When Sylvie walked through the dining room with her tray, each man in the restaurant watched the shifts of her body with some sad longing in his eyes. That it was as available as the lemon meringue pie behind the little glass doors if you had enough change didn’t alter the way they looked at her.

“You’re such a pretty girl,” her mother had told Celia over and over. “You have the face of an angel. You’ll have the family you deserve, a family to make you whole.” This was not what she supposed her mother meant, this ragtag assortment of losers and late night hangers-on that surrounded her each
night at the Automat, but this was the closest thing she now had to a family. “The boys will come running, they won’t let you slip by just because,” had said her mother. Except they had, hadn’t they, Mom? All but Gregory, who behaved as if he were doing her the greatest favor of her life, reaching down to help the disadvantaged, like they were two models in a March of Dimes poster.

Maybe Gregory actually was doing her the greatest favor and maybe she should be ever so grateful. He was basically decent and fairly upstanding and not bad-looking in a scholarly sort of way. But Gregory had no problem with indecipherable messages, he delighted in relaying to her the meaning of everything. Of course he was a graduate student in Russian history and so he knew just enough about everything to be unbearable. And of course he was a Communist, which meant his earnestness and self-importance were beyond endurance. But it was not like she had so many alternatives. And he seemed so certain of everything, which was comforting in its way because Celia was the most uncertain person she knew. Maybe his certainty was why she had stifled her doubts and let Gregory move into her little walk-up when his lease ran out.

So now she was living in sin. She laughed ruefully at that. Living in sin was what her mother called it when she spoke of the town strumpet or the widow in the next township. Oh, the image it brought to a young girl’s mind. Other girls dreamed of marriage, of children, of the family Celia’s mother so desperately wanted for her; Celia had dreamed of living in sin. Well, be careful what you wish for. Where was the canopied
bed, where were the long lascivious nights, where was the secret passion that kept the world’s scorn at bay?

Living in sin, hell, it was more like living in Cleveland.

She turned to look out the window at the passing stream, a scene decidedly roguish. Sometimes she thought she stayed nights at the Automat to be apart from Gregory, and sometimes she stayed nights to feel a part of this. This was the juice in her life, not Gregory, not the job, not her pale hopes for the future, but her little table at the Automat, sitting with this strange dismal family, separated from the carnival of Times Square by a single pane of glass. It was sometimes hard to impress, even upon herself, exactly how pathetic her life had become.

Someone caught her attention in the throng outside the window. A man in brown, a handsome-faced man in sunglasses walking with a strange, jerky step. He had a ragged beard, his suit was on wrong, though how it was on wrong she was uncertain, his nails were long and unkempt, and he had a bizarre smile fixed around the cigarette in his teeth. Her immediate reaction to spotting him outside her window, just a few feet from her, was an irrational but very real fear. And her peculiar fear increased when he stopped right next to her, turned to the window, and stared inside.

She cowardly dropped her gaze to the tabletop before her. At all costs she wanted to avoid this strange man’s gaze. “Please, please,” she whispered to her coffee and still-uneaten pie, “don’t come into the Automat.” Celia loved being part of the midnight world, but only so long as she could maintain
sufficient distance from its inhabitants. That was her method of approaching all of her life, the rigid defenses of the maimed.

She stirred her coffee, lifted it to her lips, felt its tepid heat upon her teeth. When she put it down again she glanced up to the window. He was gone. Relief and disappointment both all at once and she wondered to herself at why that man had given her such unease.

It was his awkwardness, his hesitance. Celia could tell in some subliminal way that the mass of instinctual acts we take for a physical presence were not, in his case, being done instinctively. Nothing was easy, nothing was natural. That was it, his raw unnaturalness, and who felt more unnatural than Celia? In that way he was a mirror into her own uneasy place in the world and she mustn’t have that. She had troubles enough, she didn’t need some lunatic in a bad brown suit pointing out to her with utter clarity her own gnawing sense of alienation. So instead of reaching out, one alien to another, she hid in her coffee cup. How brave, Celia, how wondrously courageous. She felt sick, useless. Maybe that was why she didn’t want to go home, so that even Gregory wouldn’t find her out.

She glanced up and saw the man in the brown suit suddenly inside the restaurant, his right side brushing the wall as he scurried toward the food. It was a shock to see him and she had to fight a strange revulsion. But having castigated herself before, this time she bravely refused to look away.

He reached the glass serving doors and peered inside at all the offerings, the pies, the fruit, the sandwiches, tuna, egg salad, deviled ham, olive loaf, the crocks of baked beans, the
bowls of soup, the little dishes of spinach, of macaroni and cheese, of Harvard beets and carrots glazed with brown sugar. His head moved back and forth and his whole posture bent with a desire so obvious it was pitiable. When had he eaten last? He reached out a hand, caressed one of the little glass doors, grabbed hold of the chrome handle, pulled. It didn’t open. He pulled harder. It still didn’t open. He slid to another door, took hold of the handle. Then to another. He moved from one to the next, looking for a door that would open. He must be hungry and have no money. He shouldn’t be in here if he didn’t have any money. Why was he here, ruining it for everyone? Why did he insist on making everyone feel so uncomfortable?

She spun her gaze around the Automat. The politicians, the college boys, Sylvie, the comics, no one was noticing the strange man in brown. Even the cashier was more interested in her nails. It was only she whom he was making uncomfortable. Celia felt suddenly ashamed at everything she had been feeling, the revulsion, the anger, even the pity. Who the hell was she to feel any of those things for anyone else when she felt those exact same things for herself?

Almost as an act of penance she was about to stand and make her way toward him, to buy him a sandwich, when she realized he wasn’t alone. There was a smaller man in a bright green suit bustling about him. She recognized the suit immediately.

Mite, the tiny young aspiring gangster who spent his evenings at the Automat huddled over a hot tea, eyes desperate and searching, ever vigilant for a mark to hustle. Mite introduced himself to everyone new at the Automat, sat down, told an
elaborate series of lies, and then asked to borrow thirty-nine cents. Always thirty-nine cents, as if the sheer specificity of the number made it hard to refuse the entreaty. He was short, thin, nervous, full of hope and despair all at once, and Celia, overwhelmed by the empathic sympathy only one loser can feel for another, had given up the thirty-nine cents more times than she could remember. Now they were close to friends.

She was shocked to see him there, in the Automat, that night. A few weeks ago he had told everyone about the big deal he was about to score. A little import-export, he had said. All he needed was some up-front cash, he had said. It was sad seeing the hunger that marked his face like a stain, a hunger that couldn’t be satisfied in that Automat with all the nickels in the world. It was that hunger that had sent him to Big Johnny Callas, who often held court in that very Automat, to borrow the up-front cash at the Greek’s brutal rates. And, as could only have been expected, Mite hadn’t settled up when he was supposed to. She hadn’t seen Mite for a couple of nights, she had heard he was on a bus to somewhere new, Moline, she had heard, or Fresno, away. She’d been glad he had escaped.

But now here he was, stunningly present, accompanying the strange man in brown. And now here he was leading the man by the elbow, bringing the man across the floor, past the politicians, past Tab and the comics, right smack to her table.

“Yo, Celia,” said Mite. “This is my new friend, Jerry. You mind if we sits here with you?”

Celia kept her eyes off the strange man, always obedient to her mother’s order not to stare whenever a strange or de
formed person crossed her path, much as others fought not to stare at her. She would have liked to say no, would have liked nothing better than to be left alone that night to peer at Mite and the stranger from afar, but Mite just then seemed so anxious to please, so desperate almost, that her heart cracked for him.

“What are you still doing here, Mite?” she said. “I heard you were already on a bus out.”

“You heard wrong, then, didn’t you?”

“Big Johnny has been telling everyone about his plans for you. They’re not very pretty.”

“Let him talk.” His nonchalance died quickly and he peered out at her warily. “What plans exactly?”

“Something to do with the spleen. You know where the spleen is, Mite?”

“Isn’t that in New Jersey somewheres?”

“It’s behind your liver. Big Johnny says he intends to remove it.”

Mite sucked in a breath and then shrugged. “Well, the hell with him, excuse my Polish. He wants that spleen thing he can have it, I gots no need for it no more.”

“Mite, you have to go. It’s too dangerous for you here. Do you need money, bus fare?”

“Nah, I decided to maybe stick around a bit. It’s a free country, ain’t it? Believe it or not, things is looking up for me. Thanks to my friend Jerry, things is looking way up. So can my pal park hisself here while I grabs us some grub?”

“Sure, I suppose,” she said. “Any friend of yours…”

Mite pulled a chair from the table. “Sit down, palsy. I’ll take care your dinner. Keep an eye on him, Celia, won’t you, whilst I load up? Anything you want?”

“No thank you, Mite. I’m fine.”