by Brian Hodge
Bobby Lee stood beside Jasper’s truck and helped him up into the seat, slamming the door for his friend.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, partner,” Bobby said. “Bright and early.”
“You done a piece of work today, Bobby,” Jasper replied. “Maybe you should sleep in a bit. Won’t be any good tomorrow if you’re all worn out or hung over.”
Bobby winked at him, and something in that gesture, something sparking deep in his friend’s eye, sent the cold a shiver through the air, and the murmur of distant voices caroming off his skull and ricocheting about his mind.
“Don’t you worry about me,” Bobby said, his voice low. “I’ll be here, ready to rock.”
Jasper turned the key in the ignition and brought his old truck to life. He punched down on the gas and shot out of the small gravel lot onto the feeder road without a word. He was shaking, and his skin was coated in sweat.
“Damn beer,” he whispered, gunning his engine and praying not to see a cop.
Bobby Lee stood, watching his partner depart, and then turned back. He didn’t head for his own truck, but slid through the door of the metal shed and pulled it tightly closed behind him. Moments later, the night filled with the drone of a thousand mosquitoes, or the grating crackle of Cicadas in season. The blood-red sun drenched the skyline and melted to black.
Jasper saw the signs before he was within five miles of his stand. The first one was simple, square and white, black lettering.
“LOOK - 5 MILES”
Then they got progressively larger, and more explicit, as he moved along 17. Jasper didn’t take 17 very often, but this morning he’d had to restock his beer cooler in Elizabeth City, so he’d come in the popular route - the way his customers would come in.
“DON’T MISS OUT”
“3 ½ MILES TO YOUR WORST NIGHTMARE”
“2 MILES - THE WORLDS LARGEST AND HARDEST TO KILL”
“ONLY ONE MILE, TURN IN ON LEFT”
“½ MILE TO WORLD’S LARGEST COCKROACH! TURN NOW!”
This last sign was sub-titled with the words “Fresh fruit and produce, inquire within.”
Jasper turned down the side road and gunned his engine, spinning his tires and shooting dust and gravel into the air so thick he couldn’t see the road behind him. He saw that even the dirt road itself hadn’t escaped the signs. There were small ones and large ones, some proclaiming TOMATOES and others with large brown roach feelers raised high and eyes bugged out, starin’ at the road.
When he pulled up in front of his stand, he saw that there was a walkway, flat river stones set into the loose dirt of the field, running around back of the produce stand. A huge white wooden finger pointed the way around the corner toward the shed in back. Jasper climbed down out of his truck, slammed the door in case by some miracle Bobby Lee hadn’t heard him, and followed where that finger pointed.
The shed was transformed. Sometime in the night, Bobby Lee had brought in paint and turned the drab, beige-colored pressed metal into a gleaming, multi-colored monstrosity. The base was black, but there was orange trim, and there were pictures, cockroaches running this way and that, little roach motels in pastel, Miami-Florid sorta colors, and to the right of the door a large can of raid with feet, holding a finger to its button and spraying toward the entrance.
Jasper’s jaw dropped, and his legs turned to rubber, but before he could collapse to the newly-lain stone walk, Bobby Lee hurried out the door of the shed and grabbed him by the arm, steadying him. Jasper gaped at his friend, who was wearing a button-down shirt, a clean pair of black pants, a damned belt.
“Wha...” Jasper never got it out.
“Mornin’ partner!” Bobby Lee said. “I did a little sprucin’ up, seein’ as how this was our first day in business, and all.”
“Sprucin’....but..”
Bobby Lee cut him off again. “Don’t you worry about it partner. I didn’t expect you to be here to help. I just got the bug, you know? Get it? GET IT?”
Bobby Lee was shaking him, and Jasper wished it would stop. He couldn’t decide whether he more wanted to collapse to the ground or puke, and the shaking wasn’t helping him with the decision. Then Bobby whirled back toward the front of the produce stand, supporting Jasper by the grip on his arm, and led him to his rocker.
“You don’t worry ‘bout a thing, Jasper,” Bobby said. “Any customers show up, you send ‘em around back to me. I’ll handle it from there. You stay up here, sell the fruit, smile at the people, and watch out for ol’ Sheriff Grouse. I expect we’ll see him before the day’s out. I got his paperwork all finished and signed in my truck, but I figgered I’d let him have the satisfaction of figurin’ he’s got us by the balls before I showed it to him”
Mention of the sheriff broke Jasper out of his fog.
“What papers? What did you do, Bobby Lee? Why would the sheriff...”
“Well, you don’t think he’ll drive down 17 and miss those signs, do you?” Bobby Lee asked, keeping his voice low and slow, like he was talking to a recalcitrant mule. “I tried to get as many out there as I could. Got to rememberin’ those signs for the biggest ball of string I was tellin’ you about, and just let my imagination go, you know?”
“When did you sleep?” Jasper asked finally. “My God, Bobby Lee, where did you learn to paint like that …” Jasper waved his hand back in the general direction of the shed and its not-quite-dry murals, “over yonder? And where in HELL did you get a button-down shirt that had all the buttons?”
Bobby Lee’s grin never faded.
“I feel like a new man,” Jasper, he said. “I feel like this has been my destiny, you know? Everyone has to find them a place in life, and I reckon I walked into mine when I hit that flea market the other day.”
“You was born to rip off suckers on a giant wooden cockroach display?” Jasper asked, trying to sort it all out in his head. “That what you’re sayin’, Bobby Lee? You tellin’ me your momma raised you and fed you and tried to put you through school just so’s you could build a home for a giant bug?”
Bobby Lee blinked. Just for a moment, Jasper thought he might be getting through, and then the light in Bobby Lee’s eyes faded out, and blinked on again, high-beams flashing.
“That’s exactly what I’m sayin’, I guess,” he replied. “You just send them folks around to see me,” he added, “and don’t forget to sell them their ticket first.”
Jasper glanced down to where Bobby’s gaze had strayed, and noticed a big roll of paper tickets on the old wood table next to his cooler. The tickets said $5 ADMIT ONE. Jasper shook his head. He was about to comment further when Bobby Lee abruptly turned on his heel and marched back around the corner to his shed. Jasper thought about following to press whatever point was forming in his mind, but something made him sit tight. He didn’t want to go into that shed again. He didn’t know why, would have denied the sensation altogether if confronted with it, but there it was. He remembered those voices. He remembered the chill, the dampness, and the way his steps had slowed as if he were wading through butter.
Jasper got up, set to work putting out his produce and clearing away what he’d left behind the night before. He pointedly ignored the walkway leading behind his stand – until the people started coming.
Over the next week, the produce stand became something of a sensation. It seemed like everyone from the Outer Banks and Kitty Hawk to Raleigh and Durham had heard the news. There was a new roadside attraction, and they were flocking to it in droves. Jasper’s small garden had proven unable to keep up with the sudden demand for fresh tomatoes and strawberries, and Bobby Lee worked straight through one weekend to get pavers in to create a real parking lot. The drive coming in from 17, which had been nothing more than a gravel and dirt side-road, more discouraging than inviting to anything with wheels, had been resurfaced by the county, who were quick to see what the new attraction was doing for the tourist trade and local businesses.
The white signs on the freeway had been replaced by a longer ser
ies that ran up and down route 17 and onto some of the bisecting and intersecting roads with exits. In the middle of the bypass on the way to Virginia, there was a huge black sign with dripping green letters proclaiming.
“STRAIGHT FROM THE DEPTHS OF THE GREAT DISMAL SWAMP. NO KITCHEN IS SAFE - NO TRASH CAN IS SACRED. HE’S BIG - HE’S THE BIGGEST DURNED COCKROACH IN THE WORLD - 18 Miles, South 17. FRESH PRODUCE - T-SHIRTS - SOUVENIRS - PEANUTS ”
The sign featured a giant, comical bug crawling over the top of the letters, huge antennae blocking the long, flat view of cotton fields beyond. It was only one of many signs, and it wasn’t kidding about a bit of it. Racks of t-shirts lined the front of the parking lot. The produce stand itself had grown, incorporating a double-wide trailer with siding that housed vats and bins of rubber and plastic cockroaches and giant mosquitoes, rubber snakes and bumper stickers that said, “I Saw it and Lived” and other such things. Jasper’s mind was whirling so fast form one new thing to the next that he nearly forgot the shed out back, and what lay within.
He sat out front every day, watching them, curious coming and sort of dazed and glazed going. They bought the shirts, and the produce, bags of peanuts and handfuls of rubber bugs. Jasper had never had so much money in his life, and, for once there didn’t seem to be a legal reason he couldn’t keep it.
But as things settled into a rhythm, and he had some time to sit and watch them come and go, little things began to itch at him. Bobby Lee, for one thing. The man never slept. As far as Jasper could tell, Bobby Lee had not slept a wink since the first day he’d brought the damned cockroach to the stand. It didn’t show. Bobby Lee was always smiling, always moving, working, and scheming. The shed out back had grown a foundation of concrete blocks that raised it a good four feet higher off the ground, for instance, and it had happened, seemingly, overnight. There was no sign that Bobby Lee had hired the work done, or that anyone else had an idea how it might have happened, but the next morning Bobby Lee was as fresh as a daisy and ready for anything. So he said.
Jasper had seen the difference the minute he pulled into his reserved spot at the front of the lot. There had already been three families in from Raleigh, waiting for the cockroach exhibit to open, parked in the lot. The shed, which should have been, as always, hidden by the structure of the produce stand itself, was clearly visible, rising into the sky to a height it should not have attained. Jasper had nearly run over a stand full of t-shirts staring at it.
Ignoring the calls and questions of the customers, waiting on him to open, he ran around the corner to the shed. Bobby Lee stepped quickly through door, as if he’d been waiting for his partner to arrive, smiling broadly and waving at the new foundation with a flourish of one brawny arm.
“Well, what do you think? I got to worryin’ over hurricanes and the like, thought I might get ‘er fixed into the ground a little more permanently.”
Jasper stared up at the ludicrously tall structure and frowned. His mind was framing all sorts of questions, most of them starting with the words “How in the HELL,” but none of them would quite make the journey to his lips. He stepped toward the doorway, and reached around to where he knew the light switch was mounted on the wall, but before he could flick it, Bobby Lee grabbed him by the arm.
“You might not want to do that,” Bobby Lee said softly.
The touch of Bobby Lee’s hand on his arm was cold. Where their skin met felt like ice had been packed in under Jasper’s skin. He heard the scuttling of what his mind conjured into a mound of thousands of crustaceous, squirming bodies. He stared into the shadowed interior of the shed, and more tiny glittering pinpoints of light than the stars in a cloudless summer’s night sky winked back at him – then were gone. Something huge and hulking centered the shed, larger than the cockroach itself could possibly be, twelve, maybe fifteen feet in the air, instead of seven. The interior of that shed had a cold draft, and the scent of the place was dank and sweet with rot. Like the swamp.
Jasper reeled back from the stench, yanking his arm free of Bobby Lee’s grip. His partner was still smiling, but the smile was brittle, and for the first time Jasper looked deeper into his friend’s eyes. They were bright, far-too bright to be natural. His skin was sun-dried to the point of being leathery - or even papery. And the cold.
“You mainlining ice, Bobby Lee?” Jasper whispered. “What the hell is wrong with you – and – with that place?”
“Not a thing, Jasper,” Bobby Lee said. His voice was as normal and pleasant as ever, but there was no mistaking the way he moved in front of the shed door. It was a sidewise sort of shuffle. Like a scuttling bug, or a man working his arms and legs via strings, like a puppet. Too fast, but sort of clumsy and “wrong”.
“You go back out front and send those folks in,” Bobby Lee said softly. “We don’t want to disappoint them.”
Jasper turned, remembering the customers gathered at the edge of the parking lot for the first time since he’d rounded the corner. He stepped back, started to say something, then turned and fled to the front – to his chair, and his beer, and the line of folks already stretching halfway around the parking lot, all of them wanting a glimpse of that damned giant cockroach.
Jasper wondered if they felt it. He wondered if they smelled the stench, and heard the scuttling feet – the soft, chitinous voices that never stopped speaking or chirping or chanting or whatever-the-hell they were doing. Maybe he was just losing it. Bobby Lee had sure done him a good turn, letting him in on this deal, and one thing was certain. There was no shortage of cockroach suckers in the world. No sir.
Jasper grabbed the roll of tickets and began doling them out, five dollars a pop, to bright, eager faced kids and tolerant parents, young couples on long vacations and truck-loads of rednecks in for a quick laugh. He only paid them half a mind, but one family caught his eye.
They pulled up in a brand new SUV, the kind with a million features, DVD player in back and On Star up front. Mother, father, a boy of maybe 13 in a black t-shirt with the center of his lower lip pierced and his hair spiked like a damned purple and green porcupine, and the girls. They were twin girls, probably eighteen or nineteen, tall and long-legged with matched honey colored hair and short skirts. Jasper couldn’t have missed them if he tried, and despite his need to vend tickets to the next twenty people in line and price t-shirts for another fifteen visitors on their way out, he managed to keep an eye on them until they wound around the corner and out of site toward the shed.
For the next half hour or so, Jasper was too busy to think about them, and that was a tribute to how hard he was working, because there was absolutely NOTHING Jasper loved better than a cute set of twins. He liked to watch TV LAND on cable so he could catch the old Doublemint Girls commercials. It wasn’t until that family was winding their way back out, the boy selecting a truly disgusting plastic roach souvenir, and the mother laughingly holding one of the “I Survived the Great Dismal Swamp” t-shirts across her breasts and winking at her husband, that Jasper remembered them at all.
It was later in the afternoon, and Jasper scanned the diminishing crowd quickly for the twins. They were nowhere to be seen, and he grew almost frantic, staring out over the thinning traffic in the small parking lot to see if he’d somehow missed their trek back to the SUV. There was no one visible inside the vehicle, and the rest of the family seemed oblivious. They laughed and joked a little - or the parents did. The boy jammed a pair of headphones onto his head, cranked the volume on some sort of expensive portable MP3 player, and zoned out. They walked away as a group, straight to the SUV, opened the doors, and got in.
Jasper stepped away from his counter, holding up a hand to those waiting on him to give him a moment. He stepped to the corner of the stand, and glanced around at the shed. Bobby Lee was there, grinning and waving at him, but there was no sign of the girls. Jasper frowned. He turned to scan the SUV again, but its taillights were already disappearing out the feeder road toward 17.
“What the hell?” he muttered. He turne
d back to the counter and went through the motions for the next twenty minutes or so, ushering the last of the crowds out and away. Jasper carefully counted out the days proceeds, which were phenomenal, and packed the bills away into the bank bag he’d taken to carrying in a lock box beneath the seat of his truck. When the shirt racks had been wheeled inside, and the tiny remnant of the day’s fresh produce had been stored for the night, he locked up carefully.
He stepped to the corner of the building, as he did every night, and called out to Bobby Lee.
“You done for the night, Bobby?”
“Just about,” Bobby called back. His voice floated out from the interior of the shed, and for a moment, Jasper stared. There was no light on inside, and it was growing dark outside. The shadows inside had to be deeper still.
Jasper shook his head and turned, walking deliberately to his truck. He had no intention of going home, but he had him a plan, and it involved Bobby Lee watching him leave the parking lot, so he drove on out the feeder road and turned right on 17 toward Elizabeth City. He figured it wouldn’t take him more than five or six beers and a shot or two to be ready to come back.
The hulking signs leading toward the world’s largest cockroach loomed over the ditches and crossroads of Highway 17 as Jasper passed them, winding his way slowly back toward the stand, and the shed, and what lay within. He had no intention of turning in onto the feeder road; that would be too obvious. Jasper had been running his produce stand for a lot of years, and he knew more than one way in, and out. He passed the main road and went about half a mile until a paved road bisected the highway. It bore the same name as a thousand North Carolina roads, Dead End, but he paid that no mind, other than to hope it was just a name, and would not prove prophetic.