Janie’s voice slid out of the radio. “The ordinance in Gumwood is limited to neighborhood streets, Raynelle. It wouldn’t affect your driving through town.”
“Yeah, well what if one of us wants to take a leak or something, and we have to buzz in off the highway? Those fat cops in Gumwood will jump on us like bottle flies.”
“You don’t think anyone should mind being inconvenienced by your racket?” The voice was a little thinner, and Wesley arched an eyebrow.
“Hey, everybody has to put up with some BS.”
“Yes, but ugly noise is—”
“Aw, what the hell do you know, girlie. You never rode a Harley. You never get out of that radio station.”
“Yes, but—”
“You got a leather jacket?”
There was a second of dead air. “Why would I want one?” The voice was flat and poisonous. Wesley leaned closer to the radio.
Raynelle shouted out, “What?”
Another second of dead air, and then Janie’s voice splintered, trantrumlike and shrill. “Why would I want to dress like a bull dyke who thinks the highest achievement of Western civilization is a stinking motorbike that makes a sound like gas being passed?” Wesley dropped the rib cage, then caught it up quickly at his ankles and hoisted it onto the cutting table.
“You bitch,” Raynelle screamed.
Janie said something that made Wesley sit back against the meat, hold his nub, and stare at the radio. Just then, his father came through the back door, shaking rain off his hat.
“What you frownin’ at, Wes? You look like somebody just had a accident.” He began pulling off a raincoat.
“Aw hell, I don’t know,” he said. Janie played a commercial and then broke for the national news. Turning on the band saw, he positioned the ribs, watching the steel flash through the meat.
* * *
The next morning Wesley tuned in the local station on a new stereo in his apartment. A male voice filled his living room, an old guy with a scratchy throat who hung up on people when they disagreed with him. Wesley was surprised, the way he’d felt when something unexpected had come into the road in front of his gravel truck. He called the station and talked with the secretary, but she wouldn’t tell him anything. For two mornings he listened for Janie but heard only the disgruntled voice, a sound rough and hard-nosed, a better match for the backwoods folks of the parish than Janie could make herself be. He called her at home, but the phone had been disconnected. He went to her apartment, but it was being cleaned by a Vietnamese woman who said she was getting it ready for the next occupants. Finally, he stopped at the station, which was upstairs over Buster’s Dry Cleaning, and found the manager in his littered office.
“Hey, I’m Wesley, a friend of Janie. I wonder if you could tell me how to get up with her.”
The manager, a tall, square-shouldered man in his sixties, invited him to sit down. “I’m kind of curious about her whereabouts myself. After she lost control with a caller the other day, she just jerked the headset out of her hair and threw it. She ran down the stairs with this damned angry look on her face and I haven’t seen her since.”
“Does she have any relatives around here?”
The manager looked at his desk a long time before answering. “She moved here with an uncle when she was a kid. He had to raise her, don’t ask me why. She never mentioned any parents.”
Wesley bit his cheek and thought a moment. “She told me about the uncle.”
The manager shook his head and looked across the hall to the broadcast booth. “She was the best voice I ever had. I don’t know what happened. I don’t care about what she did the other day.”
“She sounded great all right.” The two men were silent a moment, savoring Janie’s words as though they were polite touches remembered on the back of the neck.
“I wish I could tell you something, Wesley, but to me, at least, she was mainly a voice. It did everything for her—it was her hands and feet.” The manager leaned closer to him and narrowed his eyes. “After she lost her uncle, I listened to her, and she didn’t sound any different.” He motioned to a dusty speaker box over his door. “But if you looked in her eyes, you could see how everything but that voice had been taken out of her. Do you know what I mean?”
“I think so,” Wesley said, standing up to go. He tried to picture her walking in and out of the studio’s dowdy tiled rooms, but he couldn’t see her.
The manager followed him to the door and put a hand on his back. “She sounded like she knew it all, didn’t she?”
“She could give advice,” Wesley told him, “but she couldn’t follow it.” Together they stared through the soundproof glass at a fat man scratching his bald liver-spotted skull with the eraser of a pencil, an unfiltered cigarette bobbing on his lips as he berated a caller.
* * *
He looked for her off and on for six months, writing letters and calling radio stations throughout the South. Sometimes he’d be cutting meat, hear a voice by the display cases, and go out and search the aisles. His father tried to match him with one of the cashiers, but it didn’t work out. One evening he was helping the old man clean the attic of his house on Pecan Street when they found a wooden radio behind a box of canceled checks.
Wesley studied the Atwater Kent’s dials and knobs. “You stopped using this before I was born. You reckon it still works?”
His father walked over to where Wesley knelt under a rafter. “Don’t waste your time.”
“Let’s plug it into the droplight there.” He stretched to the peak of the low attic.
“You won’t get anything. You need a dipole antenna.”
Wesley pulled a wire from the back and attached it to an aluminum screen door propped up sideways under the rafters. “Didn’t you tell me these old sets could bring in Europe?”
His father sighed and sat Indian-style in the attic dust next to Wesley. “You’re crazy if you think you’ll find her on that,” he said. They watched the Ivorine dial build its glow, heard a low whine rise as the screen door gathered sound from the air. Outside, it was sundown, and all over the country the little stations were signing off to make room for the clear-channel fifty-thousand-watt broadcasters coming from Del Rio and New Orleans, Seattle and Little Rock. Wesley turned the knob slowly, the movement of his fingers like a clock’s minute hand. He passed a station in Baton Rouge, then brought in Mexico City on a rising whistle.
“This thing’s got some power,” Wesley said.
His father shook his head. “All you’ll get is junk from all over the world, especially at night. What’s that?”
“Bonjour is French. Are we getting France?”
“Maybe Canada. It’s hard to tell.” For ten minutes, as the roof timbers ticked and cooled above them, they scanned the dial for used cars in Kansas City, propaganda in Cuba, Coca-Cola in someplace where children sang a clipped language they had never heard before, the voices coming clear for a moment and then fading to other tongues even as Wesley kept his hand off the dial, the radio tuning itself, drifting through a planetful of wandering signals. And then, a little five-hundred-watter from another time zone where it was not yet sundown skipped its signal for a moment over Pine Oil, Louisiana, and Wesley heard a woman’s liquid voice as she ran the tail of a talk show off toward nightfall.
“Oh, it’s usually not as bad as you think it is,” she was saying.
A sour voice answered, an angry sound from the inner city. “You’re not in my shoes. How do you know what I feel?” Somewhere lightning struck, and the words began to stutter and wane. Wesley grabbed the walnut box and put his head down to the speaker.
His father let out a little groan. “It’s not her. Don’t be such a fool.”
“I can’t know how you feel,” the announcer said. “But are you saying there’s nothing I can tell you?”
The response was lost in a rip of static, and the woman’s voice trembled away from Wesley’s ears, shaking like his father’s dusty hand pulling back on his hair
.
The Bug Man
It was five o’clock and Felix Robichaux, the Bug Man, rolled up the long, paved drive that ran under the spreading live oaks of the Beauty Queen’s house. He pulled a one-gallon tank from the bed of his little white truck and gave the pump handle five patient strokes. When a regular customer was not at home and the door was unlocked, the Bug Man was trusted to spray the house and leave the bill on the counter. Her gleaming sedan was in the drive, so he paused at the kitchen door and peered through the glass. A carafe of steaming coffee was near the sink, so he knew Mrs. Malone was home from the office. When he tapped on the glass with the shiny brass tip of his spray wand, she appeared, blond and handsome in her navy suit.
“Mr. Robichaux, I guess it’s been a month? Good to see you.” He always thought it funny that she called him Mr., since he was five years younger, at thirty-one the most successful independent exterminator in Lafayette, Louisiana.
“You been doing all right?” He gave her a wide smile.
“You know me. Up’s the same as down.” She turned to place a few dishes in the sink. He remembered that a touch of sadness lingered around the edges of nearly everything she said, around the bits and pieces she had told him about herself over the years, about her dead husband. Why she told him things, the Bug Man was not sure. He noticed that most of his customers told him their life stories eventually. He began to walk through the house, spraying a fine, accurate stream along the baseboards. He treated the windowsills, the dark crack behind the piano, her scented bathroom, the closets hung with cashmere and silk. Soon he was back in the kitchen, bending behind the refrigerator and under the sink.
“Would you like a cup of coffee?” she asked. Then, as he had done off and on for five years, he sat down with her at the walnut breakfast table and surveyed her fine backyard, which was planned more carefully than some people’s lives, a yard of periwinkle beds skirting dark oaks, brick walks threading through bright, even St. Augustine, and in the center an empty cabana-covered pool. The Beauty Queen had been a widow for four years and had no children. He called her the Beauty Queen because she once had told him she had won a contest; he forgot which—Miss New Orleans, maybe. Each of his customers had a nickname he shared only with his wife, Clarisse, a short, pretty brunette who worked as a teacher’s aide. She liked to be near children, since she couldn’t have any of her own.
“Hey,” he began, “have you seen any bugs since the last time?”
She turned three spoons of sugar into his cup and poured his cream. He stirred. “Just a couple around the counter.”
“Little ones, big ones, or red ones?”
“Red ones, I think. Those are wood roaches, aren’t they?” She looked at him with her clear cornflower blue eyes.
“They come from outside. I’ll spray around the bottom of the house.” He put a hairy arm on the table and raised the cup to his mouth, sipping slowly, inhaling the vapor. “You don’t have newspaper piled up anywhere, do you?”
She took a sip, leaving a touch of lipstick on the ivory cup. “I quit reading the newspaper. All the bad news bothers me more than it should.”
Felix looked down into his coffee. He thought it a waste for such a fine woman to live an empty life. Clarisse, his wife, kept too busy to be sad, and she read every word in the newspaper, even police reports and the legals.
“I’d rather read sad stuff than nothing,” he said.
She looked out through the large bay window into one of her many oaks. When she turned her head, the natural highlights of her fine hair spilled into his face. “I watch TV, everybody’s anesthesia. On my day off, I shop. More anesthesia.” She glanced at him. “You’ve seen my closets.”
He nodded. He had never seen so many shoes and dresses. He started to ask what she did with them all, since he guessed that she seldom went out, but he held back. He was not a friend. He was the Bug Man and had his place.
In a few minutes he finished his coffee, thanked her, and moved outside, spraying under the deck, against the house, even around the pool, where he watched his reflection in a puddle at the deep end, his dark hair and eyes, his considerable shoulders rounding under his white knit shirt. He saw his paunch and laughed, thinking of his wife’s supper. Turning for the house, he saw the Beauty Queen on her second cup, watching him in an uninterested way, as though he might be a marble statue at the edge of one of her walks. He was never offended by the way she looked at him. The Bug Man lived in the modern world, where, he knew, most people were isolated and uncomfortable around those not exactly like themselves. He also believed that there was a reason people like Mrs. Malone opened the doors in their lives just a crack by telling him things. He was a religious man, so everything had a purpose, even though he had no idea what. The Beauty Queen’s movements and words were signals to him, road signs pointing to his future.
After Mrs. Malone’s coffee stop came Felix’s last job of the day, the Scalsons’; he had nicknamed them “the Slugs.” As the Bug Man, he had seen it all. Most customers let him wander unaccompanied in and out of every room in the house, through every attic and basement, as though he had no eyes. He had seen filthy sinks and cheesy bathrooms, teenagers shooting drugs, had sprayed around drunken grandfathers passed out on the floor, had once bumbled in on an old woman and a young boy having sex. They had looked at him as though he were a dog that had wandered into the room. He was the Bug Man. He was not after them.
Even so, he faced the monthly spraying of the Scalsons’ peeling rental house with a queasy spirit. Father Slug met him at the door, red-faced, a quart bottle of beer in his hand. “Come on in, Frenchie. I hope you got some DDT in that tank. The sons of bitches come back a week after you sprayed last time.”
“I’ll give it an extra squeeze,” Felix told him. But he realized that the entire house would have to be immersed in a tank of Spectracide to get rid of the many insects crawling over the oily paper bags of garbage stacked around the stove. When he opened the door under the sink, the darkness writhed with German roaches.
He finished in the kitchen, then walked into the cheaply paneled living room, where Mr. Scalson was arguing with a teenaged son, Bruce.
“It won’t my fault,” the son screamed.
Mr. Scalson grabbed the boy’s neck with one of his big rubbery hands and slapped him so hard with the other that his son’s nose began to bleed. “You shoulda never been born, you little shit,” he told him.
Felix Robichaux sprayed around the two men as though they were a couple of chairs and went on. He glanced out the window, to see Mrs. Scalson burning a pile of dirty disposable diapers in the backyard, stirring them with a stick. In an upstairs bedroom, he found the round-shouldered daughter playing a murderous video game on an old television that was surrounded by half-eaten sandwiches and bowls of wilted cereal. In another room, the sour-smelling grandfather was watching a pornographic movie while drinking hot shots of supermarket bourbon.
The tragedy of the Scalsons was that they didn’t have to be what they were. The grandfather and father held decent jobs in the oil fields. Their high school diplomas hung in the den. Yet the only thing the Bug Man ever saw them do was argue and then sulk in their rooms, waiting like garden slugs dreaming of flowers to kill.
* * *
Felix Robichaux lived on what was left of the family homestead outside of Lafayette. The house was a white frame situated a hundred yards off the highway, one big pecan tree in front and a live oak out back between the house and barn. Rafts of trimmed azaleas floated on a flat lake of grass. He thought the shrubs looked like circles of children gossiping at recess. He ate his wife’s supper, a smoky chicken stew, and helped her clear the dishes from the Formica table. While she washed them under a noisy cloud of steam, he swept the tile floor and put away the spices. Then they went out on the front porch and sat on the yellow spring-iron chairs that had belonged to his father.
Clarisse and Felix lived like a couple whose children had grown and moved out. They felt accused by the absen
ce of children, by their idleness in the afternoons, when they felt they should be tending to homework or helping at play. They had tried for all their married life, ten years, had gone to doctors as far away as Houston, and still their extra bedrooms stayed empty, their nights free of the fretful, harmless sobs of infants. They owned a big Ford sedan, which felt vacant when they drove through the countryside on idle weekends. They were short, small-boned people, so even their new motorboat seemed empty the day they first anchored in a bayou to catch bream and to talk about where their childless lives were going. Overhead, silvery baby egrets perched in the branches of a bald cypress, and minnows flashed in the dark waters, sliding like time around the boat’s hull.
* * *
Clarisse stared from their porch to the pecans forming in the branches of the tree in their front yard. She slowly ran her white fingers through the dark curls at the back of her neck. Felix watched her pretty eyes, which were almost violet in the late-afternoon light, and guessed at what she would say next. She asked him whose house he had sprayed first, and he laughed.
“I started out with Boatman.”
“That’s Melvin Laurent. A new one?”
He nodded. “Then Fish, Little Neg, Mr. Railroad, the Termite Twins.” He stared high into the pecan tree and flicked a finger up for each name. “Beauty Queen and the Slugs.”
She put her hand on his arm. “You should call them Beauty Queen and the Beasts,” she said.
“I spray the Beasts tomorrow.”
“That’s right.” Clarisse crossed her slim legs and held up a shoe to examine the toe. “It’s too bad Mrs. Malone doesn’t get married again. Just from the couple times I saw her working down at the bank, I could tell she’s got a lot to offer.”
Felix pursed his lips. “Yeah, but she needs a lot, too. You ought to hear all the droopy-drawers talk she lays out in the afternoon. Everything’s sad with her, everything gets her down. She lost too much when her husband got killed.” He thought of the Beauty Queen’s eyes and what they might tell him.
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