Kockroach

by Tyler Knox

  Kockroach understands fear, and in dealing with the human he has learned that, of all the emotions, it is fear that drives it, fear even more than pride or vanity, hate or greed, even more than the mysterious joys of love. Fear of hunger, fear of pain, fear of dismemberment, fear of insects, fear of a stranger rising unbidden in your very own house, rising step by step, silently, in the darkness, up your stairs while you sleep, rising to your kitchen, opening your refrigerator, devouring your food with great noisy chomps while the light bathes his front, ripping meat off bones, swallowing raw eggs whole, and, though still not sated, wiping the residue off his mouth with the back of his hand before passing the door of your mother-in-law’s room and rising ever farther up your stairs, skulking past your three sleeping children, entering your very own bedroom, sitting on the side of your very own bed, where you and your wife sleep the sound sleep of the unsuspecting.

  Shaking you awake in the darkness.

  Startling you awake with a shake in the darkness.

  “What? What?” you ask, as if the darkness itself will hold some answers. And it is the darkness itself that responds, darkness in the shape of a shadow, a shadow with broad shoulders and a fedora cocked on its head, a shadow whose voice is both twittering and deep, the deranged voice of fear itself.

  “Cooney,” it says. “Cooney. You’re late.”

  Kockroach sits in the back of the car as it speeds through the Bronx toward Manhattan. He examines a spot on the cuff of his shirt, a dark splatter. He rubs at it with his thumb but the splatter has soaked into the fabric.

  “Back to the Square?” asks Istvan.

  “Yes,” says Kockroach, still rubbing futilely at the spot, “but first stop at Kirschner’s.”

  In Manhattan, the brown car double-parks in front of a small storefront, Kirschner’s Delicatessen. In New York, all creatures have a favorite deli, even cockroaches, especially cockroaches. The neon beneath the name reads: open all night.

  “The usual?” says Istvan.

  “Two.”

  “Hungry tonight, Mr. Blatta?”

  Kockroach doesn’t respond. It is a foolish question; he is hungry every night. After a few moments, Istvan steps out of the delicatessen with a brown paper bag, nearly translucent with grease on the bottom.

  With the car again on its way south, Kockroach opens the bag, takes a deep whiff. The rich oily scent, starchy and sweet, reminds him of his childhood.

  Sitting now beside Kockroach in the back of the car is a woman with dark hair piled high. Her heels are spiky, her earrings dangle, her white blouse is tucked into her tight gray skirt: a secretary tarted up for a late night assignation with the boss. The look is catnip for conventioneers. Her thin mouth shifts and wriggles like a nervous worm on a hook. The brown car jerks east between two cabs on Forty-second Street.

  “He was going to stiff me, the bastard,” she says.

  “Never use my name.”

  “I had to tell him something.”

  “Lie.”

  “My momma taught me never to lie. Whoring was okay, but not lying. Is it the truth what I heard about Sylvie?”

  “None of your beeswax.”

  “Okay. Sure. She’s been tough to take lately anyway, still thinking she was some kind of queen bee even with her junkie shakes. She’s better off on them piers, how skinny she got. I’m tired and hungry and my dogs are barking. What’s in the bag?”

  “It’s not for you.”

  “C’mon, Jerry. I’m hungry. Just a bite. It smells good.”

  “I need something from you, sweet pea.”

  “Of course you do.”

  She slips off the seat onto her knees, begins to unhook his belt buckle. He pushes her away.

  “There is a man in a bar.”

  “There’s always a man in a bar,” she says.

  “He’s tall, thin, his suits are expensive and too tight. You can tell him by the way his hair grows down to his eyebrow. You’ll go in. He’ll make a move. You’ll promise him a freebie and take him to the alley behind the bar.”

  “Then what?”

  “That’s it. I’ll take over from there.”

  “Never knew you liked the other side, Jerry.”

  “I like everything, sweet pea. And you mention my name again, you’ll be strolling the piers with Sylvie.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “Here we are. Hair down to his eyebrow. Put on a smile and make nice.”

  Kockroach waits in the alley behind the bar. He stands stock-still, in the darkest crevice of shadow, well out of the single shaft of light that pierces the darkness. He waits with his inhuman patience.

  He doesn’t imagine what is happening inside the bar, the music, the smoke, the laughter and slapped backs, doesn’t imagine the woman sitting on her stool, turning her head, smiling at the tall man in the tight suit, taking a cigarette from her purse, placing it in her fingers, waiting for the man to leave his friends, step over and light it. Kockroach doesn’t imagine the repartee, the sexual innuendo, the flitting erotic imaginings that slip through the man’s brain as the woman places the lit cigarette in her mobile lips. He has already worked out the moves in advance and so now he simply stands there. The brick of the alley is weeping. A cat scampers around a puddle and jumps atop a metal trash can. The intermittent sound of cars passing by the narrow alley rises and falls in an endless series, the closest Kockroach has ever gotten to the sound of ocean waves. If you ever wondered what a cockroach was thinking when standing motionless on your kitchen floor, don’t. It doesn’t move, it doesn’t think, it merely waits for the proper stimulus.

  A world opens, the sound of trumpets and piano, of talking, of clinking glasses and celebration, then the sound dies with a slam. He hears footsteps, a spark of laughter, a growl.

  “Where you going, baby?” A man’s voice. “Here is fine. Why not here?”

  “C’mon, silly.”

  “To where?”

  “Someplace private.”

  “This is private enough, what I got in mind.”

  “Just over here.”

  They step into the narrow shaft of light. The man’s suit is tight, his glossy black hair pulled back from low on his brow. There is a bland cruelty in his eyes.

  “You’re a hot one, ain’t you, baby?” he says.

  He roughly opens the woman’s white blouse, popping a button as he reaches for a breast. He grabs hold of her rear and squeezes.

  “One hot baby.”

  He leans his mouth into her long pale neck. The woman unbuckles his belt, pulls down his suit pants. His knees are bony, bristly. He takes his hand from her rear, yanks down his own boxers, reaches now under her skirt, growls and laughs at the same time.

  With a quick press of her arms, she pushes herself away, leaving him alone in the light, his pants and boxers pooled around his ankles.

  “No more teasing, baby. Let’s just get to it.”

  “I can’t,” she says.

  “You can’t? Don’t act shy now, you tease. Come on, baby, Papa needs to sing.”

  “Got to go, baby.”

  “Oh no, no you don’t. Not till I say you go, understand? Get on your knees, bitch, or I’m going to rip apart your—”

  “Hello, Rocco,” says Kockroach, taking a step from the shadows.

  Rocco Stanzi’s head swivels as if slapped. “Blatta?”

  “Wait for me in the car.”

  The woman nods and scampers out of the alley, tucking her blouse in all the while.

  “Hey, Blatta, what are you doing? I was just about to get a little action here. Can’t you wait until—” Stanzi stops speaking, looks at the girl rushing off. “One of yours?”

  Kockroach takes another step forward.

  “What, you didn’t hear the news? They didn’t tell you?” Stanzi grapples for his pants, pulls them up, fiddles unsuccessfully with the belt. “There’s a citywide truce. Zwillman’s guys and your guys and our guys, all of us, we’re on the same side now. Didn’t you hear?”
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  “I heard,” says Kockroach.

  “Good, yeah. Isn’t that something? One day we want to rip each other’s guts out and stamp them into the dirt, the next we’re bosom buddies. You want a drink or something, to celebrate? No hard feelings about that thing we had, right? That’s all past us now. It was only business. But now we gots bigger fish to fry. Moonstone’s a bear, he’s going to be tough. But together, man, we’re going to fry his black ass. And let me tell you, no one’s gladder than me to have you on my side. You want a drink? Let me get you a drink. To celebrate our alliance. On me. We’re on the same side now, right? We’re partners now, right?”

  “Right,” says Kockroach.

  “Good, great.” Rocco Stanzi, his belt still undone, his pants held up with one hand, reaches out his other. “Partners?”

  Kockroach steps forward, takes Rocco’s hand in his own. “Partners,” he says. They shake on it, once, twice—and then Kockroach squeezes.

  The bones in Rocco Stanzi’s hand press against each other, press into each other, grind into each other, grind and twist and split.

  As Rocco Stanzi begins to scream Kockroach’s free hand dives at Stanzi’s throat and clamps hold. The scream is choked off like a stalled engine. Still gripping hand and throat, Kockroach lifts Stanzi in the air.

  Stanzi, face now bursting red, swings his arm and feet wildly. He kicks Kockroach in the chest, in the legs, grabs at his eyes. Kockroach pulls Stanzi close, holds him face to face so the flailing limbs lose their leverage. Kockroach’s breath washes across Stanzi’s purple face. Stanzi’s pants drop, binding his ankles together. His flailing grows wilder. Kockroach’s smile deepens. The grip on Stanzi’s neck tightens. Stanzi’s struggle eases. Stanzi’s breathing falters, fails.

  After, Kockroach slaps the dust off his pant legs. He takes a bag out of his jacket pocket, the brown paper bag with the greasy bottom. From the bag he pulls out a small brick of pastry. He takes a bite. Potato. Kirschner’s has the best knishes in the Square, they have them delivered daily from Yonah Schimmel’s on the Lower East Side. He takes another bite and then leans over Rocco Stanzi’s body, opens Rocco Stanzi’s slack jaw, jams the rest of the knish in Rocco Stanzi’s mouth so that it sticks out like a thick beige tongue.

  “Nothing personal, pal, just beeswax.”

  Kockroach puts the bag back in his pocket, wipes his hands on the dead man’s shirt, heads back to the car.

  Kockroach has a hobby.

  It is a very human trait to have a hobby, a pastime with which to while away the hours, and so one might be surprised to learn this of Kockroach. It is hard to imagine him dabbling in watercolors, working with wood, collecting stamps from foreign countries. But Kockroach’s hobby is not philately.

  Greed and fear, fear and greed. For a cockroach, a perfect hobby would combine the two, obsessively collecting something that also provides protection. Guns would seem then perfect, but Kockroach does not carry a gun and has never fully understood their allure. Oh, the mechanics he understands. Pull a lever and a shard of metal flies out and puts a hole in an enemy at a distance. Marvelously efficient, yes, but the fascination, the glorification is beyond him. Cockroaches don’t fight at a distance, they fight up close, claw to claw, mandible to mandible, the desperate hot breath of your adversary pawing across your face. That is how it has always been done from time immemorial. To kill from a distance seems to Kockroach unnatural and, in a way, obscenely human. No, a cockroach wouldn’t turn to guns for protection, instead it would want to somehow collect territories, places in which it is safe, holes, crevices to hide. And this indeed is Kockroach’s hobby.

  He collects real estate.

  Kockroach’s realtor is a tall mournful man with knobby wrists named Albert Gladden who, before he met Kockroach, managed a few desolate properties scattered along the West Side. Albert owed Big Johnny Callas a debt that was on the books still when Johnny mysteriously disappeared. When Kockroach paid the awkward, mournful Albert Gladden a visit in the dusty office in one of his buildings, the realtor raised his palms and sadly pleaded poverty before proposing a deal: a deserted tenement on Ninety-fourth Street in exchange for the debt.

  Kockroach toured his new building, sniffed the ruined plaster, bent his head beneath the leaking roof. In the dining area, his foot stepped through a rotted floorboard. The house smelled of old trash, of dead rats, of animal droppings, of desolation: it smelled wonderful.

  Immediately Kockroach wanted more.

  Now Albert Gladden works out of an office on a high floor in the Empire State Building, managing the properties of a generically named holding company whose primary shareholder he never reveals and whose empire continues to grow under Gladden’s watchful eye. He has a staff of four, including a title man, and each morning finds him carefully perusing the list of property foreclosures. He is still mournful and awkward, Albert Gladden, but now he lives on the East Side, drinks aged Scotch, smokes hand-rolled cigars, is married to a former Rockette with sturdy legs and breasts like huge smothering marshmallows.

  As Kockroach drives through the city, he enjoys passing by the properties he owns, run-down brownstones in Harlem, shabby apartment buildings, shabby storefronts, sad sagging hotels like the Murdock, including the Murdock, old industrial buildings, ragged office buildings with long empty halls, a deserted warehouse teetering two blocks off the Square, which Gladden rents to Abagados without ever divulging the name of the true owner. And now, in his inside jacket pocket, Kockroach holds the deed to a large white house in Yonkers that he has just obtained from Cooney. He has a plan for this house, but if this plan of his fails, then he will leave it to his realtor to decide whether to keep it and rent it out or to sell it and use the proceeds to buy something in the city. He leaves everything to Gladden, allows him to buy, rent, sell as he sees fit so long as Kockroach is kept completely informed. Gladden makes his reports in person, at clandestine midnight meetings in deserted alleys so that Kockroach’s hobby is kept secret. The only building Albert Gladden is forbidden to sell is the original property on Ninety-fourth Street, sagging, leaking, stripped of all pipe and wire, its front boarded up with plywood, a disaster of a ruin before which the brown Lincoln is now parked.

  Istvan taps his fingers on the steering wheel, the woman is asleep alone in the backseat.

  Kockroach roams through the dark ruin, stepping around holes in the floorboards, ripping cobwebs from his path, kicking piles of trash, splashing through puddles. The building sags, shifts, strange sounds emanate from the walls, the floors, joists settling, timbers splintering, plaster cracking loose from lathes as if the house is an old living thing falling into senescence. He breathes deep the smell of feces and decay, molder, rot. Home, it smells of home. In this place, of all the places he has been since his molt, he can best remember what he was.

  He stops in a stray beam of light floating through the cracked window of the rear door, standing now before a beaten and blackened stove, so worthless with misuse and age it has survived the multiple strippings of the property. Atop the stove sits the photograph Kockroach took from the room where he first awoke with this body. He keeps it in this house for safekeeping. He picks it up, stares at the face that is identical to his and the woman’s face beside it. For Kockroach the photograph has become a talisman of both his past and his future. He puts the photograph back upon the stove and stoops down on the filthy wooden floor. He reaches out a hand. From a crevice beneath the stove he sees two strands of brown, waving softly.

  He waits.

  The strands wave softly, wave, softly wave. And then, slowly, jerkily, with scurries and stops, a lone cockroach emerges and makes its way toward the outstretched hand, stopping just before it, letting its antennae brush the hand’s flesh. The cockroach stays there, motionless for a second, for two, before rising slightly on its hind legs. With the tip of his forefinger, Kockroach gently strokes the arthropod’s chest. The cockroach sways affectionately into the touch.

  Kockroach takes the greasy paper
bag from his pocket, reaches inside, pulls out the second Kirschner knish. He twists off a piece, rolls it into a ball, lays it on the floor.

  The cockroach approaches carefully, rubs it with its antennae and then mounts the tiny ball, working the greasy piece of starch with its legs, devouring it with its ironlike mandibles and chitinous teeth.