The Cockroaches of Stay More (25 page)

“What?” Tish said aloud, although Jubal frantically tried to hush her. “What did ye
say
?”

The eye attempted to look at her. The great head attempted to lift from the sand. The voice, humming, droned, “Juicy da lim what bunked me?” Then the voice faltered another hum of “Mawris?” and the head lifted, then fell, and the voice moaned, “Ya aint Mawris. Who ah ya?”

Tish understood this question, and she answered, “Letitia Dingletoon.”

“Anudda friggin cockroach,” hummed the Mouse. “Way’s Mawris?”

“Mawris
who
?”

“My brudda,” hummed the Mouse. Then the rain stopped. The Mouse hummed, “Comere alidda closa, toots. I can’t see ya.”

Although Jubal grabbed at her to stop her, Tish shook him off and moved closer to the Mouse, not close enough for him to reach her, unless he was just pretending to be injured. “Are you hurt?” she asked him.

“A tree lim bunked me on da head,” he said. “Juicy it?”

“No,” she said. “Can I do anything for you?”

“Howsbout sum teet?” the Mouse hummed.

Tish could not understand him. It was a very peculiar foreign language that he was speaking. She had to ask him to repeat himself, and then she repeated it to Jubal, “Howsbout sum teet?” and Jubal thought at first the Mouse was referring to a tit, or teat, which mammals have. But that was not it.

At length, Tish asked, “Are you askin for somethin to eat?”

“What I said awready,” hummed the Mouse. “Whatcha got? Come alidda bit closa, kiddo.”

Jubal whispered behind her, “He wants to eat
you
, Tish! Don’t go no nearer than that!”

Tish returned to the log, but only long enough to search the pile of funeral feeds for a scrap of something, which she carried in her touchers bravely within chomping distance of the Mouse, who could have swallowed her up whole, but did not. Instead he took the offering in his teeth. “Cheese I know,” he said. “Velveeta?” He gulped it down. “Say, dat’s simply delish, snooks. If ya’ll ponny spression.”

She fetched him another morsel, a cupcake fragment. And then another. She even took him a tad she had been saving for herself: the last bit of peanut brickle.

“Dis I don’t know,” he said, humming appreciatively. “But it takes da cake. If ya’ll ponny spression.”

She carried to the Mouse every last crust and crumb remaining in the pile of funeral feeds, and then she announced, “That’s all. There’s not any more.”

“Donkey shay, angel. Way ja get all dat stuff?”

Tish attempted to explain to the Mouse the custom of the funeral feeds, and further to explain that although the funeral feeds had been intended in observation of the westering of her mother and father, they weren’t actually west but had only been presumed to be, and that she and her forty-two—no, now it was only thirty-one—brothers and sisters had been adrift on their log home for nights, until now, and were all too seasick to eat any more of it, so the Mouse was welcome to it, and it was hoped that he had had enough to eat that he wouldn’t feel like eating any of
them
.

“Hey,
right
, lambchop,” the Mouse commented. “So why should I wanna eat my
benefactors
, fa crissake, if ya’ll ponny spression awready?” He successfully raised himself into a sitting position.

Tish did not know “benefactor,” but assumed it was another of this foreigner’s strange words. “You sure talk right funny,” she observed.

“Jeez, chick, ya sound fahrin yasself, ya know,” he said.

“Fahrin,” she repeated after him, and then she understood it, and pronounced it her way, as if correcting him: “furrin.” She said it again: “Furrin.”

“Awright, furrin,” he said. “Whatcha say ya name was again?”

“Letitia. Everyone calls me Tish. What’s yours?”

“Hoimin. Please ta meetcha.” He extended one clawed paw as if for a shake, but of course she could not take it.

“How do you spell ‘Hoimin’?” she asked.

“Lady, I don’t spell, period.”

The rain was starting up, once more. Tish wanted to invite the Great Mouse into the shelter of the log, but she was hesitant. “Don’t you generally eat roosterroaches?” she asked.

“Do which? Na, I genly eat jiggers, bedbugs, cooties, whatevah. Cockroaches I don’t like. Dey gimme gas, if ya’ll ponny spression.”

Still she was hesitant, but she invited him in, out of the now drenching downpour. It was a tight squeeze; he took up almost all their loafing room, leaving no space for her brothers and sisters, who wouldn’t come out of hiding, anyway, except Jubal, who kept jumping around nervously from one gitalong to the other, as if he had to go potty.

Hoimin really liked to talk. As he lay there, snug in the dry confines of the log’s main chamber, he told to Tish, and to hopping Jubal too, his story. He talked most of the night. Jubal crept off to find his brothers and sisters and urge them out of their hiding places. “His name is Hoimin because he’s always hummin,” Jubal explained to them excitedly, “and now he’s hummin the beatinest story ever ye heared!” One by one the brothers and sisters crept within earshot—or rather prongshot—of the Great White Mouse and listened to his story.

He had been born and raised in a great city, far away to the east—and “east” meant not “alive” to him but merely a direction he called “Dataway.” East Dataway was a city of zillions of human beings who lived in houses stacked one atop another until they reached to heaven. Hoimin had been born in a cage high up in one of these fabulous towers of East Dataway, and along with his brothers and sisters he had lived the life of someone named Riley, well-fed and cared for, but once Hoimin had reached adulthood, full size, he was daily subjected to certain indignities, and he chronicled each of them for his listeners, followed by the question, “Hodda ya like dat?” He was stuck with needles; Human Beings picked him up and stuck needles into his “butt” and injected some kind of fluid into him. “Hodda ya like dat?” He was put into boxes with labyrinthine passageways that he was required to find his way out of. “Hodda ya like dat?”

Tish was not certain how to answer his repeated question. She
did
like that, in the sense that she liked the telling of the story, but she did
not
like that, in the sense of all the strange things that were done to Hoimin. So each time he asked “Hodda ya like dat?” Tish would usually reply, “I don’t like that.”

Eventually Hoimin plotted his escape from the Human Beings who were doing crazy things to him. There was a Man who each day brought into Hoimin’s room a flattish box called a “briefkez.” This Man, whose name apparently was A. Sun Poddy, as Hoimin referred to him, sometimes left the briefkez open, and one day Hoimin saw his chance when A. Sun Poddy’s back was turned, found his way completely out of the labyrinth in which he was caught, and snuggled into a pile of papers in A. Sun Poddy’s briefkez. Later that day A. Sun Poddy shut up the briefkez and it remained closed for several days, during which Hoimin experienced sensations of being carried, and then of flight, and being carried again, and then more flight, weightlessness almost, in the deafening roar of great engines, and then being carried again, until, at last, the briefkez was opened on a table top and Hoimin emerged to see many Human Beings standing around him, including A. Sun Poddy, who exclaimed, “What the shit?!”

The Humans tried to grab Hoimin but he leapt off the table and gained the floor and made it out through a door and into a long corridor and down some steps and to the curb of a street where many four-wheeled vehicles were dashing past. One of them stopped at the curb and its rear door opened and a Human stepped out and Hoimin jumped in. He hid beneath a seat in the vehicle and rode for two nights and a day until the vehicle came to a stop, and he jumped out and found himself on the dirt road that led to Stay More, the strangest country he had ever imagined.

For over a year now Hoimin had attempted to adapt himself to life in the woods and fields of Stay More, encountering all sorts of creatures and having countless close brushes with west, experiencing enough adventures to keep his listeners entertained for a month of Sundays. But now the sky was lightening up in the east, dataway, and the sun would soon rise, and Hoimin intended to get caught up on his sleep.

Tish yawned and realized it was bedtime for herself and all her brothers and sisters too; and she realized something else—the rain had stopped, for good, or at least for a long long time. But before she could think of sleeping in the same log with a rodent creature who ate insects, she had to ask him a question. She remembered all the stories of Doc Swain’s encounters with the Great White Mouse, and assumed it was Hoimin.

“Didn’t you ever try to eat a roosterroach?” she asked Hoimin.

“Yeah, once, maybe,” he admitted. “A sun poddy what tried to bite off the tip of my tail.”

“That wasn’t A. Sun Poddy!” Tish said. “That was Doc Swain.”

“Huh? Lisn, buttercup, he was a sun poddy what took a bite on my tail! Hodda ya like dat? But I dint try teet da bug, I was ony goin skeer da bejeesus outa him. If ya’ll ponny spression.”

Tish yawned again, and said, “Well.” She shooed all her brothers and sisters off to bed. “Tonight we’ve got a long way to go. We can’t float this log back upstream, so we’re going to have to walk.” She spoke these words to her siblings but loud enough for Hoimin to hear, and then she said to Hoimin, “If we’re not here when you wake up, you can have our house. We won’t be needing it any more.”

“What izzis, toodlum? Ya don’t like my looks maybe? Lemme go witcha, awready, hey? Just lemme grab a few Z’s first, okay? Den we’ll talk. Gimme a break. So I’m a type person what’s hod to know maybe but just gimme a chance, hey, lidda dew-drop…?”

Still babbling, the Mouse drifted off to slumberland.

Chapter twenty-eight

P
arthenon surpassed the wildest stretches of his fancy, Chid thought, and he had seen only the cookroom so far. When would Josie offer him some of that strawberry shortcake? (If she didn’t invite him to taste it soon, he might have to come right out and ask her.) Parthenon was a heaven on earth; no, it was not even earthly, it was kingdom come, the promised land, the world above. It surpassed his most vivid preachments. It was a mansion in the sky, the hereafter come hither.

Chid realized he was drooling. He glanced at his deacons, and they were drooling too. That hike-and-swim all the way from Holy House to Parthenon would have given anybody an appetite sufficient to eat a loaf of bread. And Parthenon was clean and tidy compared with Holy House; there was no dirt, no clutter, no grime or filth to require one to wash oneself unnecessarily. Chid realized he could probably get by with only two baths a day when he lived here.

The three drooling deacons, Brothers Sizemore, Ledbetter, and Stapleton, represented only half of the party who had started out from Holy House on the expedition to Parthenon; the other three deacons had been drowned on the perilous voyage. There had been moments when Chid himself had doubted his ability to stay afloat, moments when he had prayed, not to useless Man, nor even to anticipated Woman, but to God, Chid’s private solace and salvation. The fact that Chid had survived, and was now standing east and whole in the Paradise of Parthenon, seemed to indicate to him that there
was
a God who was concerned with his well-being.

“Josie,” he said, in the same seductive voice with which he had persuaded her nearly a year ago to sample his affy-dizzy, “do ye reckon ye could see yore way to let us fellers have a taste or two of thet thar strawberry shortcake?”

“Why, jist look at me!” Josie exclaimed, lashing herself on her face with her sniffwhip. “Aint I awful? Here I’ve done went and fergot my manners! Jist hep yoreself, Reverend, and take all ye want.”

Chid attacked the strawberry shortcake, and, with the help of the three deacons, reduced it instantly to nothing. His stomach stopped raising a howl and putting up a squawk. He was so grateful to Josie that he decided to spare her when he executed her husband.

He turned to the latter and observed, “Wal, Squire John, it ’pears like ye aint done went and westered off, atter all, don’t it? How did that come about? I’ve done already preached yore funeralization.”

“Wal, thanks a heap, Reverend, I ’preciate it,” Squire John replied, “but what happened was, that thar beer can didn’t never drown me nohow, nor did it wester me when it crashed, as was thought.”

“Good to hear it,” Chid lied, and then wanted to know, “Does anybody else know you’re still east?”

“Only Josie,” Squire John said.

Chid told Jack and Josie the story of recent events at Holy House up to the swallowing of Squire Hank by Man.

“Wal, strike me three shades of pink, if that aint the beatinest thang ever I heared!” Jack declared, when Chid finished the story. “I’ll be switched!”

“So it appears that the Ingledews are no longer masters of Parthenon, but rather you, Squire John, are the lord of the manor now.”

“Is that a fack?” Squire John said with wonder, and glanced vain-gloriously at his wife, who was all worshipful toward her husband.

“And our blessed Savior and Redeemer is no longer Man, whose gitalongs were of clay, who has been weighed in the balance and been found wanting, and who was drunker’n a tinker besides, but instead Woman, most fair, most mighty, most graceful, most merciful and most perfect!” Chid enjoyed these new intonations coming from his mouth. He turned to Squire John and asked, “Where is She?”

“Reckon She’s sound asleep in Her bedroom yonder,” Squire John said.

“Show me, that I might pray unto Her,” Chid requested. Squire John led him toward the bedroom. The others started to follow, but Chid turned and said, “Josie, why don’t ye give our brethring a tour of the cookroom?” He wanted to be alone with Squire John.

Chid had not yet determined the best way to perform murder upon the person of Squire John. He could, conceivably, simply bite Squire John’s thorax, and chew into the vitals, but that might be messy. And it might not look like an accident. No, better to wait, bide his time, proceed with caution.