Kockroach

by Tyler Knox

  “I remembers.”

  “And after a while you finally came over to my table, water still dripping off your hair onto your face, and asked me for your usual thirty-nine cents.”

  “And you gave it.”

  “Why thirty-nine cents, Mite? Why not a dime like everyone else, or a quarter? Why thirty-nine cents?”

  “Was a Joe I knew when I was still a boy, an old guy what met me in the public library of all places.”

  “What were you doing in a public library?”

  “I was reading, what do you think? I used to be quite the reader, and not just comic books, thick books. The Count of Monte Cristo. You ever read that?”

  “It’s a boys’ book.”

  “Yeah, especially for a boy what’s been getting his butt kicked all over the schoolyard. Anyhoo, this old guy he taught me when you’re asking from dough always be specific, a set amount it gives comfort to the mopes paying out. He taught me a lot. Everything I done in the Square, it’s like I’m following his blueprint.”

  “He did you a favor.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Suppose? Why look at you. Look at all the money you have now, eating in the finest restaurants. Look at the way they treat you, like royalty. You’re Pinnacio.”

  “Pinnacio?”

  “The guy you told me about, the manager now in Hollywood. You told me about Pinnacio like he was a talisman, a symbol that everything was possible. I bet the up-and-comers don’t talk about Pinnacio anymore. I bet they talk about you.”

  “Go off.”

  “You found it, Mite. What did you call it?”

  “The pineapple pie?”

  “That’s it. It always sounded so tasty.”

  “But still, sometimes I feel the suit is too tight.”

  “Buy another,” she snapped.

  “See the thing is, Celia, the thing is,” said Mite, who was clearly trying to tell her something, who was obviously struggling to make himself understood, “my mother was trapped. I don’t know I ever told you about my mother.”

  “No,” said Celia, not sure she wanted to hear about his mother, there, in the “21” Club, drinking red wine and eating red meat and watching Jimmy Durante tell stories at his table.

  “She was…she had…I never told no one before, but she had these episodes, she called them. Episodes. They was more like the whole world crashing down. She would spin around and her eyes would roll up the back of her head and she’d be shaking and quivering and she’d fall down bang to the floor and there’d be nothing there, nothing there. The first was this big surprise and the second was not such a surprise and after that she just didn’t want to go nowhere in case it happened right there, on the street, with everyone watching. So it was like she was trapped by this thing, this affliction of emptiness which I never told no one about but which scared me small. It still does.”

  “Do you want more wine?”

  “Yeah, sure. And now I see those mokes in their suits, wage slaves Old Dudley called them—Old Dudley was the guy what set me on my way—the suckers riding the train in and working on someone else’s money and then riding the train back. Better they hang themselves with them ties, he used to say. Except what are they going back to, Celia? The wife, the kids, the family I never knowed because my dad he ran and my mom she had her episodes, the little houses that Levitt he’s building for them out on the Island with them picket fences. And you know, it gets me wondering.”

  “That’s not you, Mite.”

  “Why not? Why the hell not? I could wear gray, not green. I could fold my paper on the train, fold once, fold twice, a little bend and there it is, the baseball scores ready for my perusal. Hey, Don, how’d them Gints do yesterday? I could like opera, maybe, or that queen from Tennessee.”

  “Mississippi, actually.”

  “Well, nows I understand. But see there’s a whole ’nother layer in the Square that I know nothing about. All them theaters, all them parties at Sardi’s, all them books I don’t read no more. Look around, these mokes are all part of it, why can’t I be too? Sometimes I feel as trapped as my mother she ever was, like I got the same affliction and the emptiness it’s pouring down on me like rain.”

  “Mite, stop. Please.”

  She didn’t want to hear this, his anxieties and doubts, the weepy telling of his childhood traumas. It was selfish, she knew, he was trying so hard, she could tell, but still his confession was more than she could bear. She needed him to be a cartoon, an amiably winning surface of strut and language whose number had hit and who now was taking her along for the ride. And that other stuff, that darker stuff, the Blatta stuff that tightened his collar, for her that was more than just part of his color, his charm. For her that was, somehow, the root of everything. So she didn’t want to see the undersized boy tending to his epileptic mother after his father had run away. She didn’t want to see the gangster straining against the violence of his trade and yearning for the bland homilies of suburban life. She didn’t want to see the man, naked and alone, bewildered by his existential anxieties. For God’s sake, did he think he was the only one with the specter of emptiness threatening to swallow him? Didn’t he realize that the surface he wanted to discard, that edge of darkness that sickened him, was the only thing protecting her from the same damn specter? So no, she didn’t want to hear any of it, not because of what it said about him, but for what it said about her taste for pearls and wine, her new job on the day shift, her growing hunger for animal flesh cooked rare.

  “I’m sorry, Celia. I don’t want to ruin your dinner. I just thought you’d understand what it meant, and all, feeling trapped.”

  Like she was slapped. “I don’t feel trapped.”

  “You know what I meant. We all of us are in—”

  “Mr. Pimelia, sir?”

  The man who appeared at their table was portly and sweating as he stood, literally, hat in hand. She had seen others just like him on other nights, all clothed with either greater or lesser aplomb but all with the same terror in their eyes. This one had a golden ring on one of his fat fingers and the neatly trimmed beard of a man who wasn’t used to standing, literally, hat in hand. She was so relieved to see him it was like he was a reprieve from the sentence Mite was about to impose upon them both.

  “Aw hell, Cooney,” said Mite, who didn’t rise to greet the man but instead glanced at Celia as if the appearance of the man proved his point, and then sawed into his steak, untouched during his awkward revelations. “How’d you get in here?”

  “I’m sorry to disturb your dinner, Mr. Pimelia.”

  “Yeah? So come back when we’re done.”

  “Can we talk?” The man glanced at Celia. “In private?”

  “What’s to talk about?” said Mite, sticking a piece of meat in his mouth, chewing, continuing to talk all the while. “You’re late again. Two weeks this time.”

  “The closing, Mr. Pimelia, they keep putting it off. Now it’s a problem with the deed. The buyer is ready and willing, but they keep putting off the closing.”

  “And that’s supposed to be our problem? You knew the terms. More wine there, Celia?”

  “Yes please,” she said brightly. Mite poured the last of the bottle into her glass, raised his hand, snapped his fingers.

  “Yes, Mr. Pimelia,” said Peter, who had appeared quickly and silently, and was now standing just behind the man with the beard. “Is there a problem? This man said he was a friend of yours.”

  Mite glanced up at the man in the beard and then said, “No, no problem. We’re out of wine here, is all. And get Jimmy over by the bar another bottle of whatever it is he’s drinking and tell him I gives my regards.”

  Peter leaned over, snatched the empty bottle from off the table. “Very good, Mr. Pimelia.”

  The man with the beard watched until the maître d’ had left and then began again with his pleading. “I can’t make the two-fifty, per, Mr. Pimelia. I just can’t. You’ll get it all when we close, I swear, with some extra. But just
now, I tried to get the five I owe you.”

  “And this week’s too.”

  “Of course, yes, I tried. And I can’t.”

  “You got a house, don’t you?”

  “And three kids, Mr. Pimelia, and a wife and a mother-in-law living in a first-floor bedroom.”

  “Aw, Cooney, we don’t want to hear about your mother-in-law, please, we’re eating here. Look, you got something to say, you want to make a deal, make it with the big guy.”

  The man’s eyes swam like two fish, left, right, bulging forward. “No please, God, no. That’s why I came to you, Mr. Pimelia, to avoid going to him.”

  “But Cooney, there’s nothing I can do. If you can’t make the payments or a deal with the big guy, there is nothing I can do.”

  Mite sawed at his steak and then looked up at Celia. Celia glanced at the man and though she believed she should have felt pity, compassion, horror over what was being done to him and his family, what she felt instead was a familiar tremor of thrill at being part of some force powerful enough to shake a man like that to his core. The affection she felt that instant for Mite grabbed at her heart, and if he had asked her just then for anything, anything, she would have given it gladly and without hesitation.

  “What about that ring you’re sporting there, Cooney?” said Mite, while still staring at Celia. “The big gold one. How much it worth?”

  “I don’t know. It has sentimental value.”

  “We’ll call it five.”

  “It’s solid gold, with two diamonds and a ruby, Mr. Pimelia.”

  “How big are them diamonds?”

  “Mr. Pimelia, please God, I don’t remem—”

  “How big?”

  “Half carat each maybe.”

  Mite raised his eyebrows and smiled, still looking only at Celia. “All right, you’re lucky you got me on a night when my mood is sweet and I might just be in the market for a ring. I’ll need to resize it, and that will cost me, still I figure it’s good for seven-fifty.”

  “But, but—”

  “Take it off.”

  The man hesitated and then, quickly, he began scrabbling at his finger, trying to yank off the ring. It wouldn’t budge past the knuckle. He gave it a twist, tried again, his face strained with the effort.

  “I’ll tell him you’re clear up to this week. But next time don’t come back to me like this. Either bring the money or go see him. And Cooney, believe me when I tell you this, it’s better you find him than he finds you.”

  “I understand,” said the man, his voice slow and constipated as he struggled with the ring.

  “All right, all right, let’s have it.”

  “I’m trying, Mr. Pimelia,” the man said, his face twisting grotesquely from the effort. “All the nervousness, my hands are swollen, but I’m trying.”

  Celia edged a small crock of butter his way.

  She was still feeling a quivering thrill at what she had done when she looked up. Her heart leaped when she saw him. He was coming toward them, energetically darting through the crowd, arms outstretched. His bent back, his famous nose, a great gleam in his eye.

  “Mickey, you son of a gun,” came the celebrated rasp, full of merriment and rhythm, “how you ended up with the swellest dame in the room I’ll never know. It’s a mystery, it is. Guess my good news. Guess. All right I’ll tell you. I made a killing today in the market. Yes indeed. I shot my broker. Mickey, my friend, you look like a million. So how the hell are you?”

  10

  Kockroach does not dream. The inner mechanisms of his brain won’t admit to gorgeous flights of fantasy and it need not trouble itself with working through the unsolved dilemmas of the day because Kockroach’s day has no unsolved dilemmas. He does what he needs to get what he wants and moves on. In fact, Kockroach’s life has little day in it. He falls peacefully to sleep at the earliest announcement of the early dawn, the dreamless sleep of the innocent, if innocence is remaining true to inner character, and arises only as the promise of night begins whispering in his ear. What song he hears from the onset of night is the song that has serenaded his species awake for a hundred thousand millennia:

  “Darkness comes, sweet darkness, so arise, ye scions of the night, and devour.”

  At the first rap on his door Kockroach scurries from beneath his bed. He has slept his peaceful slumber in the lovely narrow gap between the bedsprings and the floor, but still the covers and sheets of the bed are tossed and twisted with some fierce abandon. For a cockroach, a night without sex is like…well, how would one even know? He pushes himself to standing, protects his eyes with the dark glasses, strolls, naked and unabashed, arms rising languidly in his contrapuntal step, to the door, which he opens.

  The man in the red jacket studiously keeps his gaze averted as he rolls in the cart with its twin domes, like two great silver breasts. He parks the cart, bows stiffly, and silently backs out of the suite, leaving Kockroach alone.

  Kockroach lifts one dome to find a huge bowl of ice topped with thick pink shrimp, cooked but still in their shells, their little legs clutching at the ice. He dips his hand into the red spicy sauce, licks his fingers clean with his long tongue, and then one by one jams the shrimp into his mouth. He masticates with abandon, letting out a strange series of chortles with each snap of the jaw. He has taken a great liking to shrimp, their briny sweetness, like the briny marshes in which his great and noble forebears first evolved. The lovely crunch of their thin shells reminds him of the crunch of chitin eaten after a molt.

  Beneath the second dome lies a great rack of lamb, the bones arranged in a crown, pink paper hats on the tip of each rib. Kockroach lifts the rack, each hand grabbing a number of ribs, lifts it above his head, and then, in a savage jerk, rips it apart. He snaps at the tender chunks of meat rolling off each rib, first from one hand, then the other, and back again, ripping the meat with his teeth, mashing it to pulp with his molars, swallowing the sweet roasted muscle before snapping at more. His lips, his cheeks, his body is smeared with the grease of the rack. When the meat is gnawed off he starts on the bones, crushing them in his teeth, sucking out the marrow.

  This fascination with meat, with bone and marrow, with the slippery strips of fat that line each stria of rib, is a corruption of his essential cockroach nature by the carnivorous traits of his human body, and yet, yet…it feels right, oh so right. It is different, yea, but not a departure, nay, not a departure at all. Instead it is a great evolutionary step forward, a natural progression from the discovery of fire. This is how cockroaches would eat had they the wherewithal to hunt larger prey, to cook their victims over savage fires, to smear the grease of their roasted conquests across their abdomen, their legs, their genital hooks.

  He struts around, his back arched, his legs stepping high, holding the final remnants of the ribs in the air as the light reflects off the smears of fat on his body, struts and laughs and revels.

  He is in the shower when the man in the red coat arrives to roll out the cart. The shrimp are gone, muscle and shell. All that’s left of the rack of lamb are the tiny paper hats, tossed carelessly across the floor.

  Kockroach sits back in the stiff, high chair, the white robe cinched around his body, his glasses on, his grimace fixed, the lower part of his face covered with hot white foam. A man scrapes at the foam with a straight razor. A female rubs his nails with a yellow stick. A man is in the corner shining his shoes. Mite sprawls on the couch, his feet on a coffee table, talking.

  “The girls are all out, Jerry, all but Sylvie what says it’s so painful she can barely walk. Don’t know what it is with her lately, but she ain’t bringing in what she was, no surprise the way the skin it hangs off of her like a baggy sack of nylons. She’s on the sleeve, I think, but everyone knows not to sell to our girls so I don’t know where she’s getting it. Having her around, it’s bad for business, gets the other girls upset and, truth be told, she ain’t so appetizing to the buyers. We need do something about her soon.”

  Kockroach says
little when Mite speaks, but it is not out of a paucity of words. He has learned much of the language, picked it up on the run from conversations overheard, from statements barked by his associates, from the movies Mite sometimes takes him to on hot, slow nights. He now knows the names of the parts of his new body, the names of the human things that surround him. He has collected strung-together bits of noise that he sounds out during the gaps in his sleep until they are polished and ready for the world. The sentences he has learned are short, to the point, active, orders aped from the most powerful humans he has come across. And along with the sentences he has learned a trick about speaking with humans: the fewer sounds you make, the more they respect and fear you; the fewer sounds you make, the more you maintain control.

  “The protection’s been coming in like clockwork, no worry there, not after what you did to Paddy’s place and then to Paddy’s wife. Once word got out, the others what was holding back all fell in line like tenpins. Oh she’s walking again, by the way, case you was worried, Paddy’s wife, though she ain’t walking so well.”