“You think she’s good-looking still?”
“Talk about.”
She stared off at the highway, where a truck full of hay grumbled off toward the west. “Too bad we can’t fix her up with somebody.”
He rolled his eyes at her and put his hand on hers. “We don’t know the kind of people she needs. What, you gonna get her a date with Cousin Ted?”
“Get off your high horse. Ted’s all right since he’s going to AA and got his shrimp boat back from the finance company.” She pulled her hand away. “I could call names on your side, too.”
As the lawn grew long in shadow, they brewed up a playful argument until the mosquitoes drove them inside, where their good cheer subsided in the emptiness of the house.
* * *
For the rest of the month he sprayed his way through the homes of the parish, getting the bugs out of the lives of people who paid him no more attention than they would a housefly, and on the thirty-first, in the subdivision where the Beauty Queen lived, he visited a new customer, a divorced lawyer named McCall. Even though it was the first time he had sprayed there, Felix was left alone by the tall, athletic attorney, who let him wander at will through the big house he had leased. Felix took his time in the living room so he could watch McCall and size him up. He sprayed in little spurts and stopped several times to pump up. The lawyer smiled at him and asked if he followed pro football.
“Oh yeah,” the Bug Man said. “I been following the poor Saints since day one.”
The other man laughed. “Me too. You know, I handled a case for a Saints player once. He sued a fan who came into the stadium tunnel after a game and bit him on the arm.”
“No kidding?” Felix was fascinated at the story of a human insect, a biting football fan. He stayed a half hour and drank a beer with Dave McCall, discovering where he was from, what he did for fun, what he didn’t do. After all, why wouldn’t the lawyer tell him things? He was the Bug Man, who might not ever come again. The round little Cajun listened in his invisibility to things that might have significance.
“You should meet Mrs. Malone,” he found himself saying. He had no idea why he said this, but it was as if a little blue spark popped behind his eyes and the sentence came out by itself, appearing like a letter with no return address. “She’s a former beauty queen and a real nice lady.” The lawyer smiled, seeming to think, What a friendly, meaningless offering. His smile was full and shining with tolerance, and Felix endured the smile, knowing he had done something important, had planted a seed, maybe.
On the fifteenth, he watered the seed when he had coffee with Mrs. Malone. She seemed empty, gray around the eyes, offering him only a demitasse, as though trying to hurry him off, though she was not brusque or distant. There was no need to spend brusqueness or distance on the Bug Man.
“You know,” he began, delivering his rehearsed words carefully, “you ought to get out more.”
She showed him a slim line of wonderful teeth. “I guess I do what I can.”
He took a sip of coffee. “There’s a single man your age just moved in down the street. I met him the other day and he hit me as being a nice guy. He’s a lawyer.”
“Are lawyers nice guys, Mr. Robichaux?”
The question derailed his train of thought. “Well, not all of them. But you know … uh, what was I talking about?”
“A new man in the neighborhood.”
“Single man.” He had run out of coffee; he tilted his cup to stare into it and then looked at the carafe. She poured him another sip. “I sprayed Buffa—I mean, Mrs. Boudreaux—this morning, and she said there was gonna be a neighborhood party at the Jeansonnes’ tomorrow. This guy’s supposed to be there.”
“So you think I should check him out?” She wiggled her shoulders when she said “check him out,” and Felix was worried that she was making fun of him.
“He’s an awful nice man. Good-lookin’, as far as I can tell.”
“Would your wife, Clarisse, think he was good-looking?”
He bit his lip at that. “Clarisse thinks I’m good-looking,” he said at last, and the Beauty Queen laughed.
* * *
That night Clarisse and Felix sat on their porch and listened to the metallic keening of tree frogs. The neighbors had just gone home with their two young children and Felix put his hand on a damp spot near his collar where the baby had drooled. He caught the cloth between his fingers and held it as though it contained meaning. Clarisse sat with her left arm across her chest and her right fist on her lips. “If we had had a little girl, I wonder who she would have looked like.”
“Dark curly hair and eyes deep like a well,” he said. The frogs in the yard subsided as he spoke. They sometimes did that, as though wanting to listen.
After a long while, she said, “Too bad,” a comment that could have been about a thousand different things. One by one the frogs commenced their signals, and the moon came out from behind a cloud like a bright thought. Across the road a door opened and a mother’s voice sang through the silvery light, spilling onto the lawn a two-note call—“Ke-vin”—playful but strong, and then, “Come out of the dark. You’ve got to come out of that dark.”
* * *
The next week he showed up off schedule at Mrs. Malone’s house, later than usual, and found her in the backyard looking at the empty pool.
“Since the weather’s been so damp, I thought I’d give a few sprays around while I was in the neighborhood.”
She nodded at him as he walked by her and began spraying the cracks in the pool apron. “I appreciate the service,” she told him, a hint of something glad lingering around her mouth.
“Uh, you been goin’ out any? You know, chase the blues away?” He drew a circle in the air as if to circumscribe the blues.
“Thinking about it,” she said, hiding her mouth behind a ringless white hand.
“Yeah, but don’t think too long,” he said. “Might be time to check it out.” He wiggled his shoulders and blushed. The Beauty Queen bit a nail and turned her back on him slowly.
When he sprayed the lawyer’s house, he spent an hour with him, marveling at both Mr. McCall’s charm and two bottles of imported beer.
* * *
Three weeks later the Bug Man went down to LaBat’s Lounge for a beer after supper. As he was driving down Perrilloux Street, he passed the Coachman Restaurant, an expensive steak house. He saw a BMW parked at the curb, and stepping out of it smoothly were the long legs of Mrs. Malone. The lawyer was holding her door and looking like he had been cut with scissors out of a men’s fashion magazine. In the short time he had to look, Felix strained to see her face. It was full of light and the Beauty Queen was smiling, all unpleasant thought hidden for the night at least. Her blond hair spilled over her dark dress, and at the throat was a rill of pearls. The Bug Man drove on, watching them in his rearview mirror as they entered the brass door of the restaurant. When he reached LaBat’s old plywood barroom, he drank a Tom Collins instead of a beer, lost three dollars in the poker machine and won four in a game of pool with two cousins from Grand Crapaud, and for the rest of the night celebrated his luck.
The next day was the fifteenth, and Mrs. Malone served him coffee and no sad talk, but not one morsel of what was going on between her and the lawyer. And the Bug Man could not ask. He made himself satisfied with the big cup of strong coffee she fixed for him and the sight of the new makeup containers on the vanity in her bedroom. He finished up carefully and went to spray the Slugs’. Even the visible stench of the Slugs’ bathrooms could not dampen a deep, subtle excitement Felix felt, almost the anticipation and hope a farmer feels after he has put in a crop, a patient desire for a green future.
Mr. and Mrs. Scalson were having an argument as Felix was trying to spray the kitchen. She got her husband down on the floor and beat at him with a flat-heeled shoe. Her lip was split and her brows and cheeks were curdled and swollen. Mr. Scalson broke away from her, grabbed a pot of collard greens from the stove, and slung it, hit
ting her in the legs. The screaming was a worse pollutant than all the rotten food stacked against the stove. Felix watched the greens fly across the floor, the water splashing under the cabinets, a hunk of salt meat coming to rest under the table, where he knew it would stay for a week. The young daughter ran into the kitchen, a headset tangled in her hair, and began pulling ice from the refrigerator for her mother’s burns. The Bug Man left without waiting to be paid, jogging down the drive toward his white truck, which waited, scoured and shiny, a reminder that some things can be kept orderly and clean.
The summer months rolled into August, and Felix Robichaux mixed his mild, subtle concoctions, spraying them around the parish in the homes of good and bad people, talking to anybody, drinking anyone’s coffee, and seeing into private lives like the eye of God, invisible and judging. He began using a new mixture, which was odorless and, unlike the old formula, left no cloudy spots or drips, and now there was even less evidence that he had been in the world, had passed along the ways of people’s lives, and that was all right with him.
He became even more curious about Mrs. Malone, and he stepped over the understood boundary between them to ask about Mr. McCall with a directness that made her eyes flick up at him. There was no doubt that for weeks she had been a happy woman, asking about Clarisse, telling him about plans for putting her pool back in service, since she’d found out that the lawyer liked to swim.
But then there was a change. In mid-August she let him in without speaking, going to the sink and doing dishes left over from the day before. While he was spraying the living room, he heard her gasp and drop one of her expensive plates to the tile floor. He put his face in the kitchen doorway.
“Let me clean that up for you;” he said. “I know where the dustpan’s at.”
“Thank you. I’m a bit shaky today.” Her color was good, he noticed, but there was a worried cast to her usually direct, clear eyes. He knelt and carefully swept the fragments into a dustpan, then he wet a paper towel and patted the floor for splinters of china.
“You want me to make you some coffee?” he asked.
She put her head down a bit and shaded her eyes. “Yes,” she said.
The Bug Man set up the coffeemaker, then sprayed the rest of the house while the machine dripped a full pot. When he came back, she had not moved. He knew where the cups and the spoons were in hundreds of houses, and the first cabinets he opened showed him what he wanted.
“What’s gone wrong?” he asked, pouring her a cup.
“Oh, it’s nothing. I’m just not myself today.” She crossed her legs slowly and pulled at her navy skirt.
“Mr. McCall been around?”
“Mr. McCall has not been around,” she said flatly. “He tells me he will never be around.”
The Bug Man shook his head slowly. Mrs. Malone and the lawyer looked like the elegant, glittering people on the soap operas his mother watched, people he could never figure out. He was not an educated man and had never set foot in a country club unless it was having a roach problem, but he guessed that many wealthy people were complicated and refined, that those qualities made it harder for them to be happy. But he had no notion of why this was so. He thought of Clarisse, and felt lucky. “I’m sorry to hear that,” was all he could think of to say. “I thought you two were hitting it off real good.”
She grabbed a napkin from the table and began crying then. Embarrassed, he looked around the kitchen, raised his hands, then dropped them. “Yes,” she said, and then she looked at him with such an intensity that he glanced away. He could have sworn that she really saw him. “We’ve been hitting it off very well. I thought David was a little like my late husband.” She looked toward the backyard, but her gaze seemed to waver. “I thought he was a man who carried things through.”
“Aw, Mrs. Malone, these things have a way of working out, you know?”
“I’m pregnant,” she told him. “And David wants nothing to do with me.”
Felix Robichaux took a swallow of hot coffee, opened his mouth to say something, but his mind was blasted clean by what she had said. A light seemed to come on in the back of his head. “What are you going to do?” he said at last.
“I’m not sure, exactly.” She narrowed her gaze and watched him carefully. “Why?” He scooted back his chair and ran his left hand down his white uniform shirt, his fingers pausing just a second on the green embroidery of his last name.
“I mean, do you think you’ll keep it or give it up for adoption or what?” His eyes grew wide and he slid his round bottom to the edge of the chair.
Her voice chilled a bit with suspicion. “I shouldn’t be discussing this with you.” She looked down at the glossy tile.
“Mrs. Malone, Clarisse and me, we’ve been trying for years to have a baby, and if you’re going to give up the one you got, we’d be happy to get it, let me tell you.” The Bug Man was blushing as he said this, as though he was trying to become intimate and was unsure how to proceed.
The Beauty Queen straightened up in her chair. “We’re not talking about a cast-off sofa here, Mr. Robichaux.”
“Mrs. Malone, don’t get mad. You know I’m just a bug man and can’t talk like a lawyer or a businessman.” He opened his thick palms toward her. “Just think about it, that’s all.”
She stood and held the door open for him, and he picked up his tank and walked outside. “I’ll see you in a month,” she said. When she closed the door, the smell of her exquisite perfume fanned onto the stoop. For a moment, it overcame the smell of bug spray in Felix’s clothes.
For the next month he made his rounds with a secretive lightness of spirit, not telling Clarisse anything, though it was hard in the evenings not to explain why he held her hand with a more ardent claim, why he would suddenly spring up and walk to the edge of the porch to look in the yard for something, maybe a good place to put a swing set. The closer the days wound down to the fifteenth of the month, the more hopeful and fearful he became. When he sprayed the lawyer’s house, McCall let him in without looking at him, disappearing into a small office upstairs, leaving him alone in the expensive, empty house. The Bug Man decided to name him Judas.
Finally, at a little before five on the fifteenth, the Beauty Queen let him in, and he went about his business quickly, finishing, as usual, by spraying under the sink in the kitchen. He noticed that she had prepared no coffee. He looked for her in the hall and in the living room, retracing his route, giving embarrassed little shots in corners as though he was going over a poor job. He found her in the bedroom, with her back against the headboard, reading a book.
“I left a check for you on the counter,” she said.
“I saw it. How you doin’, Mrs. Malone?”
“I’m fine.” But the stiffness of her mouth and the deep-set hurt in her eyes said otherwise. She rested the book on top of her dress, a dark print with lilies against a black background. “Is there something you forgot to spray?”
“Yes, ma’am. Usually I mist under your bed. Every now and then you leave a snack plate and a glass under the edge.” He got down on his knees, adjusted the nozzle on the tip of his wand, and sprayed. “You decided what to do about the baby yet?” He wondered if she sensed the wide gulf of anticipation behind the question.
“I’m having an abortion tomorrow,” she said at once, as though she was reading a sentence from the book in her lap.
His thumb slipped off the lever of his sprayer. He was frozen on his knees at the foot of her bed. “It would be such a fine baby,” he said, straightening his back and staring at her across a quilted cover. “You, a beauty-contest winner, and him, a good-looking lawyer. What a baby that would make.” He began to say things that made his face burn, and he felt like a child who had set his heart on something, only to be told that he could never have what he wanted. “Clarisse would be so happy,” he said, trying to smile.
Mrs. Malone drew up her legs and glared at him. “Mr. Robichaux, what would you do with such a baby? It wouldn’t be like you and Cla
risse. It would look nothing like you.”
He stayed on his knees and watched her, wondering if she had planned a long time to say what she had said. He reflected on the meanness of the world and how for the first time he was unable to deal with it. “It’d mean a lot to us” was all he could tell her.
“It would be cruel to give this child to you. Why can’t you see that?” For a moment her face possessed the blank disdain of a marble statue in her backyard. “Would you please just get out,” she said, looking down at her book and balling a white fist against her forehead.
The Bug Man left the house, forgetting to close the door, feeling his good nature bleed away until he was as hollow as a termite-eaten beam. In twenty minutes, as he pulled into the littered drive of the Scalsons’, his feelings had not changed. He was late, and the Slugs were seated at their hacked table, arguing bitterly over parts of a fried chicken. Felix stood in the door, pumping up his tank, looking into the yellowed room at the water-stained ceiling, the spattered walls, the torn and muddy linoleum, the unwashed and squalling Scalsons. The grandfather dug through the pile of chicken, cursing the children for eating the livers. The mother was pulling the skins from every piece and piling them on her plate while the children gave each other greasy slaps. They tore at their food like yard animals, spilling flakes of crust and splashes of slaw under the table. “Gimme a wing, you little son of a bitch,” Mr. Scalson growled to his son.
“It doesn’t have to be like this,” Felix said, and everyone turned, noticing him for the first time.
“Well, I’ll be damned. It’s the Frenchman. You must have water in that tank of yours, because the bugs have been all over us the past month. What’d I pay you good money for anyway, Shorty?”
Ever since he had opened the door the Bug Man had been pumping his tank, five, ten, twenty strokes. He adjusted the nozzle to deliver a sharp stream, pressed the lever, and peeled back Mr. Scalson’s left eyelid. The heavy man let out a yell and Felix began spraying them all in their faces, across their chests, the grandfather in the mouth with drilling streams of roach killer. The family sat stupidly for several moments, sputtering and calling out when they were sprayed again in the eyes as though being washed clean of some foul blindness. One by one the Scalsons scampered to their feet. The father swung at the Bug Man, who ducked and then cracked him across the nose with his spray wand. The grandfather came at him with an upraised chair, and the Bug Man snapped the brass wand across the top of his head, leaving a red split in the dull meat of his skull.
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