Kockroach

by Tyler Knox

  “I must have sent thirty tea-heads up here in the last two months. You owe me my cuts. We had a deal.”

  “I’ve changed the arrangement. Go outside and play. We’ll talk later.”

  “Roscoe, man. Man. I need it, the money. You know Big Johnny he’s breathing down my neck. I gots to give him something. I figure you owe me like a hundred. That was our deal. Big Johnny, he’ll crush me I don’t pay.”

  “I’ve got two words for you, Mite: grey and hound.”

  “Roscoe, you’re dicking me, man.”

  “Yes, well.” He drags at his cig. “It happens, kid. It happens.” With his left hand he quickly grabs my nose and gives it a twist.

  Just then Roscoe’s gaze, it falls to the floor. A fat cockroach was taking its main chance and sprinting across the threshold of his doorway. With his hand still grasping my nose, Roscoe reaches out the toe of his shoe and flicks the cockroach onto its back. The little bugger’s legs spun wildly in the air, like it was trying to ride a bike, afore Roscoe, he brings his shoe down and squashes it with a loud snapping crunch that pops out the pale insides.

  I hears a strange gasp from behind me.

  “Get the picture?” says Roscoe.

  I does, absolutely. I had been bullied before, I would be bullied again, I knows the dance. I’m back on the schoolyard with them Thomasson twins, fat and fatter, passing me back and forth as they lay their blows. And there isn’t a damn thing I can do about it. I would have run, I would have, my nature demanded it, except it’s hard to make a getaway with your snoot in some Joe’s hand, so I am standing there, trembling, when it happens.

  Blatta behind me suddenly grabs hold of Roscoe’s wrist, the one connected to the hand still latched onto my nose. He grabs Roscoe’s wrist and pulls it away from my face and then jerks the arm down with a terrible force. The sound of Roscoe’s knees hitting the floor comes at the same time as the snap of the bones in his arm.

  The howl Roscoe lets out as he sags back on his heels, cradling the flopping remnant of his arm, brings me out of my shock. I steps back and turns. He’s standing there, smiling his maniac smile, Jerry Blatta, the Boss, though not yet the Boss, as calm as if what he had just done was as simple as flicking a switch.

  “Who the hell are you?” I says.

  “Blatta is it?” he says, “Jerry Blatta? Look, Smithy, your week’s up tomorrow and we want you out.”

  I squints up at him, but not for long. Old Dudley had taught me that when things they slide in unexpected directions there is always advantages to be had. Things here had slid in an unexpected direction all right. I glance once more at Blatta and turns back to Roscoe, who is letting out a high-pitched wail and laying now in a puddle of his own drained dew.

  “What about my money, you muscle-bound craphead?” I says.

  Roscoe, still cradling his arm, keeps on howling even as he struggles to rise, his eyes steady on Blatta.

  Blatta steps forward and smacks Roscoe’s forehead with the palm of his hand. The son of a bitch sprawls backwards into the doorway.

  I leans over, pats Roscoe’s pants pockets, feel nothing but a slippery wetness, wipes my hand on his head, then steps over him into the bare apartment that smells now like some gypsy old-age home, all incense and urine. I toss a few cushions, empty a few drawers, scatter a shelfful of strange religious tracts as I remembers the vicious rumor going round that Roscoe was a Buddhist. The search, it doesn’t take me long. For all Roscoe’s talents, cleverness wasn’t one of them.

  The cigar box, it is slipped behind the tank of his toilet bowl, a box filled to the brim with sweet bills of many churches and all denominations. I consider carefully counting out the hundred I was owed, but then figure what the hell and takes it all. Six hundred and some dollars it turned out, enough to get me off the hook with Big Johnny Callas, for sure.

  But already I wasn’t so much worried anymore about Big Johnny Callas.

  I stood inside the apartment, with the wad in my hand, and looked through the doorway, beyond the broken, prostrated body of Roscoe, to Jerry Blatta standing there in his dark glasses, smiling at me with that plastered-on smile. And right there I knew, in my heart, with the inbred instinct that has been the key to any success I’ve ever grabbed hold of in this life, that I had found another one.

  For here it is, the sad truth of my existence: I am not enough to make it on my own. I learned it early, I learned it hard, and since I learned it I have always been on the lookout for someone stronger to latch onto. Others have the strength to head out on theys own, to embody the pioneering spirit what stretched America from one ocean to the next. Others, but not me. Because I am not enough. Let others fill their hearts with the lonely struggle to reach great heights, I need someone to carry me.

  And I figured, if I played my cards just right, I had found my someone, a jive-talking, jazzy-walking, shady-eyed customer name of Jerry Blatta. Now all I needed was a plan.

  I steps over Roscoe, whimpering as he was, still on the floor, and gives him a kick in the side for good measure. “Stiff me again, Siddhartha, why don’t you?” Then I grabs at Blatta’s sleeve and says, “Let’s blow.”

  “But first, Roscoe, we needs to get square,” says Blatta.

  “What?” I says. “You want your cut now? Sure.” I separate the bills into rough halves and offer Blatta the thicker share. When you’re my size, muscle always gets the thicker share. “Here you go, palsy.”

  He takes the wad of bills I hand him and examines it, as if he were realizing the value of money for the first time, afore stuffing it in his pocket.

  “All righty-rooty,” I says. “Time to amscray the hell out of here.”

  “Not so fast, big boy,” says Blatta.

  I step backwards as Blatta leans over Roscoe. “Nothing personal, pal,” he says. “Just beeswax.”

  Roscoe squirms backwards in fright, like a wounded spider trying to get away.

  Blatta ignores him, staring instead at the still-lit cigarette lying on the floor, loosing a thin white string into the air. Blatta picks it up, looks at it queerly, sticks it in his teeth.

  “Smoke,” he says.

  5

  Kockroach doesn’t question where the little man in the green cloths came from. One moment Kockroach was staring up in awe at the giant face breathing smoke into the night sky, and the next moment, as if upon decree from the great fearsome figure itself, the little man had appeared, spoken to him as if they already were familiar, and gestured for him to follow. Kockroach’s immediate instinct had been to scurry into a hiding place, but something about this human, its size, its overt familiarity, the color of its cloths, made it seem a less threatening presence than the other humans he had observed. He decided instead to follow along and see what he could learn.

  The little human had taken him to a fierce predator human with the smoking white stick, a human who had proceeded to grab onto the beak of the little human and then to kill one of Kockroach’s former brothers. For some reason he couldn’t fathom, Kockroach was now in the middle of a battle. It was a fight that Kockroach sensed wouldn’t be won by a stilt-legged show of aggressiveness. So instead he had grabbed at the predator human and tried to pull his arm off, like the mouse had pulled off Kockroach’s leg many molts ago. Kockroach had failed to detach the arm, but the attempt was enough to injure the predator and just that fast the battle was won.

  With a quick victory, and with the placing of the white fire stick in his mouth to pay tribute to the great smoking god, Kockroach’s confidence swells. He still doesn’t doubt that the humans would crush him had they half the chance, but now he knows it won’t be so easy for them to do so. And with that realization comes a familiar and innate urge.

  Rams butt heads over ewes, mustangs rear at one another for the right to mount mares. All animals fight over territory, battle over mating rights, struggle claw and breath for sheer superiority. It is the natural order of things for the strongest of a colony to impose his strength upon the others. Kockroach look
s around himself, sees the little man, the injured predator human, remembers all those he has passed in the street. Maybe he is stronger than other humans. Delicious possibilities begin to open to him.

  After the battle, the little human had given Kockroach more of those green pieces of paper with the faces on them. Those pieces of paper remain a great mystery to Kockroach. He has seen them passed back and forth among humans as a sort of token. He doesn’t know what they mean or what they are used for, but he can tell they are important to the humans, so when the little man offered him a number of the papers, Kockroach understood immediately what was happening. The little human had given him a form of tribute, a token bespeaking clearly Kockroach’s superior status. He likes the feeling. He wants more tokens from more humans, more green pieces of paper. The desire for these papers grows almost as large as the other desire that burns in his blood. Almost.

  Now that the little human has given tribute and acknowledged Kockroach’s superior status, Kockroach feels far more comfortable following him out of the building and down the street back toward the seeming center of all human activity.

  “So, Jerry Blatta,” says the little human, “what can Mite get for you? Anything. I owes you, palsy. You did a job on Roscoe, you sure did.”

  “Smoke,” says Kockroach. That word, which the little human had taught him, seems to have magical properties.

  “Oh yeah, let’s see.”

  The little human reaches his claw up to Kockroach’s face and takes the white smoking stick from between Kockroach’s teeth. It is now short and stubby, no longer glowing, no longer loosing its noxious burning smell.

  “We need get you more, we do,” says the little human, the human called Mite. “What’s your brand?”

  Blatta points up at the great visage in the sky with the smoke pouring out its fearsome open mouth.

  “Camels it is. You got matches?”

  “I like it dark,” says Kockroach, pulling what seems to be appropriate from his stored inventory of human sounds.

  The little human lets out a loud snort, pats Kockroach on the upper arm, disappears into one of the doorways off the street. Kockroach stares after him but doesn’t dare follow. He worries for a moment that the little human has left for good. It was a comfort having him close, someone who acknowledged an inferior status to Kockroach and yet was willing to usher him through the bizarre twists and turns of the human world. Kockroach’s smile remains even as he searches with his gaze for the little human. Mite. Of all the humans, his is the only name Kockroach knows. Mite. He wants this Mite to stay near, to guide him through the thickets of this strange new territory.

  After many minutes, the human returns. The relief Kockroach feels is both surprising and enjoyable. The little human gives him a small packet with silver at the top. Kockroach stares at it without understanding what it is. The little human takes the packet, rips off the top, taps the bottom so that three of the little white sticks appear. Kockroach takes them all. They are long but without the glowing tips. Still he puts them in his teeth. He tries to give the packet back to the little human, but the human refuses.

  “My growth’s stunted enough, don’t you think? But I got you something else,” says the little human. “A gift.”

  The little human shows him a small shiny thing, golden in color, a thin rectangle with a line running through it. Kockroach peers at it without comprehending its purpose. Then, shockingly, the little human opens the top and spins a little wheel.

  Flame magically appears.

  Kockroach backs away and squeals. The little man steps toward him, places the fire to the end of the three white sticks. They begin to glow and smoke.

  As Kockroach stands on the street with three smoking white sticks in his teeth, the humans passing him stare. He must seem very powerful with the three sticks, strong with magic. But he grows fearful being noticed like that. He tells himself that from now on, to remain as inconspicuous as possible, he will limit himself to one at a time.

  Even as Kockroach is teaching himself moderation in his new smoking habit, the little human does something marvelous; he closes the top of the magic rectangle and places it in Kockroach’s claw.

  Kockroach rubs the magic rectangle with his digits. “Mite,” he says in a soft, slurry voice. “This is a surprise.”

  “We’re pals, ain’t we, palsy?”

  “You got it, sweet pea.”

  Kockroach opens the magic rectangle. He spins the wheel slowly. Sparks but nothing more. He tries again, harder, and suddenly a flame erupts. Fire: the bane of arthropods throughout all eras, scorcher of the bold, decimator of colonies. With a bright yelp, Kockroach drops the magic rectangle.

  The little man picks the rectangle up, closes the top, and gives it back.

  Kockroach opens it again, flicks the wheel: fire. He closes the top, opens it again, spins the wheel, repeats the act over and over, over and over. Fire. Fire. Fire.

  Cockroaches have existed on earth for more than a quarter of a billion years. Fossil evidence shows hundreds of species of cockroaches living among the ferns and mosses that covered Pangaea during the Paleozoic age, 150 million years before the coming of the dinosaur. From that distant age to this, cockroaches have evolved little. Any 350-million-year-old cockroach that magically appeared on the sparkling linoleum of a New York kitchen would be recognized for exactly what it was and squashed without a second’s thought. They were cockroaches then, they remain so today, crawling along in the manner passed down for billions of generations with nary an advance. So it is safe to say that Kockroach’s mastery of fire would qualify as the most stupendous leap forward ever in the bland, static, and yet oh-so-persistent history of his species.

  “Hey, palsy,” says the little human as Kockroach stares into the flame in utter fascination, “you hungry? You want some grub?”

  For a cockroach, the question is rhetorical.

  6

  Each night after work, as she poured the cream into her coffee at the Times Square Automat, Celia Singer watched the ebbs and flows of lightness in her cup as if in the swirling shapes a private message about her future was being relayed, the meaning of which was just beyond her grasp. She was everywhere haunted by the vague terror that she was missing the meanings of things. It was an occupational hazard, she supposed, eight hours each night plugging lines, making connections, eight hours behind the huge grid, sockets connected by fraying cords over which endless words were streaming back and forth in a great communal conversation, words of which she caught the hum and rhythm and yet no meaning.

  She added sugar and twirled her spoon in the cup. Her second cup. It was well after midnight and still the Automat was alive with comings and goings, with life. Maybe that was why she came here each night and sat by the window with her coffee and a slice of pie and let the night burn down around her, even as Gregory slept alone in their bed at the apartment. She preferred the tortured intimations of others’ lives to the dead quiet of her own, and at the Automat there was a regular group of others on which to latch her attention.

  Over there, at their usual table by the coffee spout, were the politicians in their shabby suits, loudly arguing about the great issues of the day as they endlessly refilled their coffee cups. Celia admired their passion, it was obvious that their political beliefs were the most important things in their lives, certainly more important to them than their teeth.

  And sitting as far from the cashier as they could sit were the college boys in their sweatshirts, slurping their makeshift tomato soups, concocted from ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, butter, and hot water. They split a sandwich bought with three precious nickels from one of the windows and talked with an uncontained excitement about the new jazz record bought by some hipster named Elmer, and the Céline novel being passed around, and the reform school kid on his way in from Denver, and their plans for getting out of the city and hitting the open open road. They were a jittery crew, slapping arms, jabbing fingers in the air, seeming to buzz with a pure current of e
nergy that electrified the night for them but to which Celia was immune.

  Far to the side, hunched over his pie, sat Tab, thin and good-looking, with his black leather jacket and ruined complexion, who trolled the shadows of the Square for men willing to buy what their wives could never give them. Tab made bravura come-ons to all the girls in the Automat, including Celia, just to be sure everyone knew that he was only doing what he did for the money, though no one believed him. Celia felt nothing but sympathy for the young boy, and the things he was forced to do to survive, but still, sometimes, in the mornings she would wake up beside Gregory with a start, realizing she had been dreaming of Tab stretching his lean muscular body over hers. Whatever that said about the state of her malformed id, she didn’t want to know.

  And at a row of tables pushed together near the great decorative pillar in the center of the dining room sat the comics and chorus girls and trombonists from the shows, calling out hearty greetings and swapping jokes. She was jealous of their laughter, jealous of their direct connection to a brighter world, but jealous most of all of the pretty girls and their ability to dance. The very thought of it pressed tears to the back of her eyes, tears that should have dried and died years ago.