Pest Control

by Bill Fitzhugh

  “Well,” Marcel wheezed as he stood to show Chantalle out, “I shall not waste any more of your time. This is my problem, and I will just have to deal with it.”

  “Well, good luck, mon ami. Keep me in mind for the future.” She kissed Marcel’s cheeks and with a “Ciao!” she was gone.

  “What about that new American, the Cowboy?” Jean asked from the sofa. He imagined a rugged, tan roughneck in faded denim and handsewn, oil-tanned premium leather boots.

  “No. From what I have heard, his approach lacks the refinement we need. And I will thank you not to mention the Nigerian. Seven feet tall and black as coal, I somehow think he would stand out in Switzerland. No, I am afraid we are going to have to solicit some offers.” His tone betrayed his distaste for advertising.

  “I don’t know why you sound so appalled,” Jean said. “It worked perfectly well the last time.” Jean gently fingered the inseam of his breezy-cool linen/cotton-blend slacks before crossing the room to a large filing cabinet.

  “I don’t like it,” Marcel said irritably. “People come to me for my network of contacts, not because I know how to use the want ads.”

  “Still, it works,” Jean said. He pulled open a drawer stuffed with files. “Where shall we place it? The Daily Mail? We could go to London and—”

  “No,” Marcel interrupted, “the New York Times has a much better cost per thousand, especially the Sunday edition.”

  Jean flipped through the files until he found the folder he wanted. He pulled it and began reading. “So, which one shall we use? ‘Seeking Experienced General Contractor’?”

  “No. Never use the same ad twice in a row.” Marcel waddled across the room.

  “How about the one for a mechanic?”

  “No, with our luck Jan Michael Vincent would respond.” “Very well,” Jean said, flipping to the next page in the folder. “How about the one for a grave digger?”

  “I don’t like that one,” Marcel said with a shudder. “It’s too ghoulish.”

  “Funeral director?”

  “No.”

  “Undertaker?”

  “No. I don’t like any of these.” Marcel looked as if he might pout, “I am afraid we will have to write a new one.”

  They stood in silence for a moment, thinking. Marcel frowned and crossed to the window looking out over gay Paree.

  Jean’s mind wandered to a solid seersucker blazer he had seen in a catalogue that morning. Two-button front and single-vent back with patch flap pockets and natural shoulders.

  Suddenly Marcel felt quite clever. He turned to Jean and smugly announced, “I have it!”

  Chapter Seven

  Bob’s confidence waned dramatically as he entered the house that afternoon, so he headed to his Bug Room for some inspiration.

  Hanging on a nail just inside the room was Bob’s custom-made baseball cap, a gift from Mary on his last birthday. The bulk of the cap was ink-black, but the stitching was dark red. Emblazoned across the front in bold, dark-red stitching was the word “exterminator.” Bob snugged the cap onto his head and scooted toward his desk.

  He picked up his magnifying glass and crossed to the bugquarium containing the Eastern Bloodsucking Conenose (Triatoma sanguisuga), sometimes called the Mexican Bedbug. He bent over and, with the magnifying glass, looked closely at one of the bugs resting next to the glass wall.

  The Bloodsucking Conenose was shaped like a miniature tennis racket with eyes, legs, and tiny antennae on the tip of a tapered grip. It had an oblong abdomen which was brown with orange stripes extending to the sides. The thorax was sturdy and had a slight ridge bridging the sides horizontally. Its head was slender and ended with a menacing, tapered beak, unlike the typically curved beak found in the other Reduvius members. It was as elegant a killing device as existed in the insect world, unforgiving and final in its application.

  Bob laid the magnifying glass on table and prepared to meet with Mary.

  He expected to find her getting ready for another night at the coffee shop. This wasn’t going to be an easy sell.

  He entered the bedroom and announced with a flourish, “Honey, I’ve got great news!”

  “AHHHHI” Mary screamed. She wasn’t expecting Bob home this early, so his sudden materialization and enthusiastic decree caused her to topple over onto the bed as she struggled into a pair of panty hose with a smutty run in the thigh.

  Bob bounded onto the bed and began kissing Mary’s neck. “What are you doing here? I thought you were in Brooklyn.”

  “Like I said, I’ve got great news!”

  “You got a raise?” Mary asked between kisses.

  “Better,” Bob said.

  “They made you supervisor?”

  “Better,” he replied.

  “So give already.” Mary was not in the mood for guessing games, but Bob’s playful nature always made her smile.

  “I got fired!”

  Mary’s smile vanished. She pushed Bob onto the floor. This wasn’t exactly what had come to mind when Bob had announced he had great news.

  “You what?” she asked.

  “Well, actually, I quit, but a second later Rick fired me, so it depends on how you look at it. I sort of doubt I’ll qualify for unemployment since I jammed my spray wand up his nose, but he asked for it. He was giving me the usual shit and told me to triple my parathion again. So I—”

  “Bob, I don’t care if he told you to eat the damn bugs! You know we can’t afford this.”

  Mary’s uncharacteristic use of profanity underscored her anxiety, Bob thought.

  “C’mon, don’t be so negative. This is great! Think about it. This couldn’t be better if we had planned it. The timing’s perfect,” Bob said, putting more than a little spin on the truth.

  “Bob, no, we can’t do this,” Mary said. “We absolutely cannot afford it right now, so don’t even start.”

  The Dillon’s financial situation was the same as many Americans’. Even when Mary had worked at the Savings and Loan and Bob was full-time at Bug-Off, their combined income allowed them only to cover the monthly nut and to save enough to cover the next major car repair or the occasional weekend vacation on the New Jersey coast.

  At its peak, their savings had reached $1,689.58, but then Katy had needed some minor surgery. Since the plan with the $2,000 deductible was the only way they could afford complete medical coverage and since Congress had decided there really wasn’t a health care crisis after all, well, the savings were long gone. And since Mary was down to earning tips and Bob’s paychecks were meager at best, they had fallen behind on their bills quickly. In fact, they were just a few months from being homeless—or trying to squeeze friends and relatives for cash.

  “C’mon, honey, think about it,” Bob said, “everybody’s concerned about the environment, right? And nobody likes roaches and termites. Put those facts together and what pops into your head?”

  “Visions of bankruptcy,” Mary said.

  “No, silly, Bob’s All-Natural Pest Control!”

  “Oh no, not again.”

  “I’m telling you, sweetheart, there’s no better time than now to start it up.”

  “With what?!” Mary wanted to know. “Have you seen our bank statement lately? It looks like Cory Pavin’s score card after nine holes on a good day.”

  Cory Pavin? Bob never realized Mary was so fluent in golf. “What’s your point?” he asked.

  “You can’t start a business without money,” Mary said, “and if you take a good look around, Mr. Venture Capital, you’ll notice that we not only don’t have any actual money, but we don’t even have anything left to sell to generate any.”

  To demonstrate her point, Mary picked up a piece of gold jewelry from her dresser and thrust it toward Bob.

  “In fact, your grandmother’s locket
is the only thing of any value we’ve got left, and you’ll have to pry it out of my dead fingers before you sell it to fund this venture of yours! If I’ve got anything to do with it, Katy is going to give this to her daughter one day…”

  Bob interrupted, wielding his optimism like a blunt object. “Honey, think about it this way, if I don’t do something to stop people from spraying triple doses of parathion, Katy’s uterus is gonna shrivel up like a prune and she won’t even be able to have a daughter.”

  Alright, Mary thought, Bob’s got a point. But, still.

  “Pratt’s been over here twice today looking for the rest of the rent,” Mary said in an attempt to derail the dream express. “What are we going to do about that?” She stepped into her tacky and stained polyester waitresses’ outfit, turning around for Bob to zip her up.

  “Did you know you had what looks like ketchup on the back here?” Bob asked.

  “Don’t change the subject,” Mary said, “It’s strawberry syrup.”

  “What do we owe Pratt?” Bob asked.

  “Three hundred twenty bucks.” Mary turned around and stuck a finger in Bob’s face. “I don’t want this to mess up my credit rating. We’ve got to pay the rent!”

  Bob kissed the tip of Mary’s finger. “You are such a worrier,” he said. “I’ll come up with something, or who knows, you might get a few big tippers in tonight. Anyway, being a little low on operating capital doesn’t hurt us a bit.”

  “And how is that, Mr. Rockefeller?” Mary asked.

  “Because,” Bob said, “one of the advantages of an all-natural pest control business is low start-up costs.”

  Mary calmed at the thought of low-cost anything and, as always, Bob’s determination to make his dream come true appealed to her.

  “How low?” she asked, bending.

  “Hard to say, really. I need a few hundred more Wheel Bugs for the cross-breeding, then with a willing property owner with some infested buildings and…Oh! That reminds me, a friend of a friend mentioned my idea to Sy Silverstein.”

  “Sy ‘I-own-most-of-Midtown’ Silverstein? The developer? That Sy Silverstein?” Mary was impressed.

  “The very same,” Bob said. “He’s stuck with lots of see-through, so I’m trying to get a meeting with him. If he’ll let me use a few of his buildings, all I need is a couple of weeks to try out the different hybrids and then we’re in business.”

  “Assuming the bugs work,” Mary said.

  “Yeah, well, there is that,” Bob admitted. “But that’s what makes this whole thing so exciting, don’t you think?”

  “I’ll get excited when your first check clears.”

  By now, Mary was outfitted for another night in the hash house trenches. She grabbed her purse and migrated downstairs. Bob followed, hoping to close the sale.

  They reached the kitchen where Katy, their ten-year-old daughter, sat at the table. Her attention bounced between a bowl of sugary cereal, a professional wrestling magazine, and an old RCA showing MTV’s Videos That Don’t Suck.

  Katy’s nickname was “Doodlebug,” which was the common name for the larval stage of a predacious insect called the Antlion (Hesperoleon abdominalis).

  In their “doodlebug” stage Antlions have oval, plump abdomens and oversized heads with long spiny jaws, short legs, and bristles all over their bodies. And while the plump abdomen and the oversized head parts described Katy during her own larval stage, that is not why Bob gave her that nickname. Katy earned the name because, like the voracious Antlion larvae, she ate so much when she was little.

  Katy was now vaguely bow-legged and had finally grown into her head. Her once plump and oval abdomen was now stretched over a frame that was a bit tall for her age.

  Katy was a prime candidate for one of those studies which struggled to show a correlation between televised mayhem and violence committed by TV viewers against their fellow man.

  Raised in New York, Katy had heard about, read about, or actually witnessed the innumerable atrocities that the citizens of that city committed against one another. And since getting cable and CNN, she had been able to view videotaped footage of similar behavior practiced around the world.

  Katy loved Beavis and Butthead, the MTV cartoon paean to asinine teenage savagery and idiocy where the characters spent their free time playing fungo with frogs. She had seen every Schwarzenegger movie ever made, and whenever she and her friends had a spare moment and a king-size bed they practiced some of the more hazardous professional wrestling moves they had seen on the many World Wrestling Federation extravaganzas they watched.

  Katy was grateful for the new network television warning labels. As far as she was concerned they simply made it easier to find the types of programs she wasn’t supposed to watch.

  According to the brain trusts at organizations like Americans for Responsible Television, Katy should already have killed both of her parents, several of the neighbors, and some neighborhood pets as a result of the egregious violence she had witnessed via the media. But, in truth, the most violent thing Katy had ever been involved with directly was a spanking she once got while spending the night with Ann, a chubby friend from her Girl Scout troop.

  Ann’s mother, Lillian—even by politically correct standards—was an overprotective tub of lard who was frequently seen at school board meetings wearing a faded floral muumuu while trying to have Catcher in the Rye removed from the library.

  On the night in question, Lillian rented two of her favorite movies for the girls to watch: Jerrico, the Wonder Clown, a typically dismal Dean Martin/Jerry Lewis schlock-fest featuring Zsa Zsa Gabor, and Polly of the Circus, an ill-conceived vehicle for Marion Davies as a libidinous trapeze artist and Clark Gable as the minister after whom she libidoed.

  Once home, Lillian handed out red foam-rubber down noses and sacks of peanuts to the girls and they settled in for their under-the-big-top double feature. As Lillian guffawed at all the awful shtick of the former and gushed at the appalling melodrama of the latter, Katy and Ann inserted index fingers into their mouths, the international gesture for “gag me with a tent pole.”

  When Lillian left the room for her fifth sack of peanuts, Katy convinced Ann to flip on Cops in defiance of Lillian’s warning to the contrary.

  When Lillian returned, her sensibilities were shocked almost beyond repair as she witnessed the arrest of a man on charges of assault. The last thing the accused said before Lillian flipped back to the libidinous trapeze artist was, “Ain’t nobody beats my sister unless he marries her.”

  Lillian spanked both Ann and Katy and sent them straight to bed. The irony of that message was lost on all but Katy.

  At any rate, if you believed the experts on the effects of media-portrayed violence, Katy was a time bomb waiting to go off, but right now, she was simply slurping up another spoonful of cereal and listening to her parents’ lively conversation.

  Mary, in constant motion as she prepared to leave for work, had a few questions before she was willing to give Bob what he wanted.

  “How long do you think it will take?”

  “Six months?” Bob bargained.

  “I’ll give you two,” Mary counteroffered.

  Katy perked up at all this talk of lunar periods. “Wow, are you pregnant?”

  “What? Uh, no, just eat,” Mary said.

  Bob felt he was getting through. “Fair enough. The hybrids are almost ready, and I’ve got a good feeling about this deal with Mr. Silverstein. All I need is one job. Word-of-mouth will take care of the rest.”

  “Okay, two months, but it’s gotta be part-time. In the meanwhile you’ve gotta bring in some money or we’re S.O.L.”

  Katy looked to her father for his interpretation of the cryptic abbreviation.

  “Loosely interpreted it means, uh, sort of lousy,” he lied.

  “Do we hav
e a deal?” Mary needed his word.

  Bob held up his hand. “Resumes go out tomorrow.”

  “And if you get a job offer?” Mary said open-endedly.

  “I’ll take any job that’s offered. You’ve got my word.”

  “Alright. Two months. That’s it. But, Bob, listen to me.” Bob knew by the brevity of her sentences that Mary was serious. “You have a degree in entomology. Use it. See if you can find a teaching position, something with a steady paycheck. Katy and I are tired of living hand-to-mouth.”

  “We are?” Katy asked.

  Elated, Bob hugged his wife.

  “You won’t regret this.” Bob could smell his dream coming true. “I love you.”

  “You better,” Mary said as she looked deep into Bob’s eyes. The poor but happy couple kissed. When they broke their embrace Mary grabbed her purse and headed to the door.

  “I’ll be late tonight,” Mary said. “I’m going to try to get a double shift.”

  She kissed Katy and, in one practiced motion, scooped the wrestling magazine into the trash, flipped the TV to Sesame Street, and disappeared out the back door.

  “What’s going on, Dad?” Katy asked as she shoveled another spoonful of cereal into her mouth.

  “We’re starting our own business.”

  “Can I help?” Katy asked.

  “Well, I can’t pay much.”

  “That’s alright, I won’t work much.”

  Bob smiled. He put his EXTERMINATOR cap on Katy’s head. Katy spun it around so the bill faced backwards, gangsta-style. Bob put his arm around Katy. “You know, Doodlebug, I’ve had this dream for a long time. And with you and your mom helping, I just know we’re going to make it come true.”

  Katy looked at her dad, milk wandering down her chin. “I hope so,” she said, “otherwise we’re shit outta luck, huh?”

  As Bob considered the disciplinary options available to him, the doorbell rang.

  He went to answer the door and Katy flipped back to MTV.

  Given what Mary had told him, Bob had a good idea of who might be ringing the doorbell at this time of day. He peered through the distortion of the peephole and, sure enough, there was the convex head of Dick Pratt. He was a stumpy little ogre with a malignant disposition and advanced male pattern baldness. Indicative of his level of ingenuity, Pratt had conceived what he considered an innovative solution to the latter problem. He had cultivated a sheath of extraordinarily long, ropy hairs on the right side of his head which he then slicked with pomade and flopped completely over his scalp, the result of which was to give the impression that he was fooling no one except himself. Through the fish-eye lens of the peephole, Bob could see a smoldering Parodi sticking out of Pratt’s convex face.