by Tyler Knox
It wasn’t going to be a battle, it was going to be murder, pure and simple.
Them fuses they was lit, just like I expected, but they was lit too soon. I looked left, looked right. It was time for the coronets, as if led by Louis Armstrong hisself, with his fanfare entrance and his sweet tone of righteousness. But where was them coronets? I was wondering just that when a second explosion blew another set of glass choppers chewing through the sky.
Where was them coronets?
And then they opened up, as if I had brought them in myself with a swift wave of my baton. Lieutenant Nick Fallon, Vice, and his army of coppers came a-charging. They came a-charging, but not with no chorus of paddy wagons, no ma’am. This wasn’t going to be just another raid with all them gunsels down in the street ending with a short pull in the poky afore the mouthpieces showed with piles of cash to spring them like springs. There wasn’t no paddy wagons because there wasn’t going to be no survivors. Lieutenant Nick Fallon, Vice, sent his army down both sides of the street, two battalions with guns blazing, like a loud blast of brass, shooting away at them boys outside the warehouse, forcing them back, back, back toward the very building they had set to blow.
The entire underworld was going to go up in one great torrent of fire and brimstone to slake the hunger what was burning inside my own damned soul.
It wasn’t that she laughed, with me kneeling on the floor before her. I been laughed at near all my life, laughter I can take. It wasn’t the laughter, it was the bitterness what was beneath it. Like who did I think I was? Who did I think she was? Did you ever kiss me, Mite? the laughter asked. Did you ever want to kiss me? Do you desire me like a man desires a woman, and don’t you think I deserve that? Don’t you think me worthy of that? Mite? How dare you, Mite.
I had never felt so small in all my life, smaller even than when them Thomasson twins took their turns with me. I knew what her laughter it was saying, what it was shrieking. And it was while I was still on my knees, and feeling the acid truth of her laughter wash through me, that I decided to follow her and see where she was getting what she couldn’t get from me.
And I found out, without a doubt, and threw that moldy old lemon at his door, damn me to hell.
So I told the Nonos what I told the Nonos. And when I learned what he had in store, to turn that warehouse into a crematorium, I had an even cleverer idea, and so I told Fallon what I told Fallon. He talked about keeping the rackets going, did Lieutenant Nick Fallon, Vice, keeping the status quo so all could take their pleasures and their cuts, but he had hisself his own tidy dream, didn’t he? He spilled it to me every time we met, and Hubert showed up laughing every time he spilled it, and it was in Fallon’s dream that I spied the means to the ultimate obliteration. For Fallon wanted to be Johnny Broderick but better than Johnny Broderick. Johnny Broderick cleaned up the Square, Fallon was going to clean up the whole stinking town, scrub it fresh in one purifying burn, and in the process earn his own damn movie.
And the world I knew burst into flame. And the smoke billowed. And the heat grew hotter than even I could stand. And the black tar melted against my pants, my suit jacket, my tie. And just at the height of it all, I spotted something across the street, I spotted something, and in a blind fear I tore myself from off the roof, leaped the gap, sprinted back to the open door, raced down the stairs and out, back to the Square.
It was only a few short blocks to Penn Station and the love what was waiting for me on the train, but I had one thing more to do as I made my way out from the Square for the last time, one thing more to do. So I stopped at the Paddock for a drink and then at Benedict’s for a drink and then at Kennedy’s for a drink, and so Mite is suitably out of his skin and ready, yes he is, for that one thing more to do.
“Hey, Mite,” says Tab, what Mite passes on the street, Tab the hustler what was always kidding hisself about who he was. “What happened to your threads, man?”
“Go to hell, you faggot,” says Mite.
“I got something just for you, sweetheart.”
“Shut up,” says Mite. “Shut the hell up, you tit-face queer.”
“Hey, baby, I might just be your last chance at heaven.”
“You think so, dick-breath?” says Mite. “You really think so?”
“Sure I do.”
“Then prove it.”
“What? You mean—”
“Shut up and prove it.”
And he did, yes, yes he did, and gave me something what I knew for certain only then that Celia never could.
And after, I was on that train heading west, shivering from the cold, from the drinks, from the fire. Shivering from what I had learned about myself from Tab. But shivering most of all from something else, from the thing I had spied afore I had sprinted off that roof.
But leastways I wasn’t alone, I couldn’t have stood my own damn self if I was alone. We was together now, now and forever. We leaned on each other and held to one another and we whispered pledges of undying fidelity one to the other, Hubert and me, lovers at last.
And Hubert, he was a great teacher, better even than Old Dudley. Old Dudley taught me the way to advance in the world: Behave yourself and eat your spinach and take them mopes for all they was worth. But Hubert, he knew better and showed it to me clear. There is no way, there is no advancement, there is no worth. Everything it is false, everything it is empty. And them things what behave as if it is any different, them things ain’t only lies, theys worse than lies. And it isn’t good enough to just see them for what they are and let them be, whether the Nonos or the Boss or the whole stinking life, no that isn’t good enough at all. He lit a hunger in my soul, did Hubert, and there was only one thing what would satisfy it, one delicious thing.
Up on that roof, with the tar melting onto my clothes, I was tasting it. There was a third explosion, and then a fourth, like the sharp final exclamations of my great opus, and it was this fourth explosion what seemed to catch onto something else and blossom wild until the whole building collapsed into the center of a huge flower of fire. And out from the fire billowed a pillar of smoke, gray and thick, and I swear, I swear, it towered so high it fell back down on itself and from the light of the fire I could see the shape of a thick gray mushroom in the sky.
It was biblical, missy, and it devoured everything what was in its orbit, everything and everyone, everything and everyone but one.
A shadow what I swear I saw climb out from the center of the fire and appear to me for just an instant against the surging orange backdrop of flame. A shadow what intruded into my grand finale like the long bass note of an angry tuba. It stood there for an instant, the shadow, staring up as if right at me for just long enough to show me it survived, afore it somehow disappeared. A shadow with broad shoulders and a fedora still in place and a posture so distinctive and jaunty it could only be the shadow of one Joe, one Joe, the same Joe what I followed Celia to after she had laughed me down and set me on my path, the one Joe what was sticking it to her after she done stuck it to me.
Blatta.
And it was that shadow what scared me senseless and sent me running and set me to shivering on the train, with Hubert clutching and smothering me in his long gray arms.
But this I can tell you, missy, this, the strangest thing of all. It was in the outline of that shadow, that jaunty inhuman shadow, and the strange web of emotions it conjured, that lay for me the first intimations that maybe Hubert, he wasn’t my one and only, my earthly fate, that somehow the son of a bitch with his deathly death grip could be beaten back.
It was just a matter of doping out how.
16
Singed and smoldering, driven relentlessly by fear, Kockroach slithers through the encircling line of police thugs with Thompson machine guns at their hips. He moves stealthily, from shadow to shadow, scuttling as quickly as his leg, burning from some interior fire, allows. When one of Fallon’s cops turns in his direction, he slips into darkness and holds deathly still. He is working from deepest instinct, trusti
ng what he had been to lead what he has become to safety.
He is crouching now against the scorching skin of a building across from the blazing warehouse. His hand reaches down to his thigh and feels a warm wetness. He brings his fingers to his mouth and licks them clean with his tongue. Briny, like his evening shrimp. Shrimp. The delicious crackle in his teeth, the sweetness. That, he knows, is now over. All of it is over.
Across the street, his plan to wrest power from the Nonos is burning with an intensity that pains the exposed sections of his fragile human flesh. There was a moment when his pieces were in perfect position and the human dream of great power was within his grasp. But now the entire chess board is being devoured by fire. He was betrayed from within, betrayed by Mite.
Mite was up there, on the roof, looking down upon the destruction. Kockroach gazed up as he made his way out of the blaze and spied him. But it was not a surprise, none of it. He sensed Mite would betray him, always, and knew it for sure when, in the middle of mating, he heard the loud thump on the door. He detached himself from Celia, opened the door to the hallway, saw the remains of the rotting lemon clinging to the wall and wood. And yet, even after seeing the scattered pulp, he continued with his plan. He thought he had enough power to topple the Nonos despite Mite’s betrayal, but he should have known better. No matter how skillfully he arrays his pieces, Mite always beats him at chess. Maybe there was something in Kockroach that rejected the human dream even as he reached to grab it in his fist.
Kockroach stares at the great conflagration and the burgeoning gray acrid smoke and he feels not bitterness nor anger nor a deep thirst for revenge. It is over. The world he knew and its possibilities are destroyed. He lets the fact of it wash over him and through him until it is part of him.
Deal with it, that is the cockroach way.
He has survived, he will move on, maybe even to molt once more back to his original form. He is through with the gangs, through with the whores, the protection rackets, through with twisting legs and snapping arms, through with humans altogether. The money he has out on the street will stay there and that is the only thing he regrets, along with no more shrimp.
The fear that pushed him out of the burning building and past the police rises up in his throat. It swivels his head, left and right, he searches for a way to escape, left and right. Then he spies something. A hole, in the street, the heavy cover tossed to the side by one of the invading armies. He scans the scene quickly to be sure no one is watching, glances nervously up at the sky, and then dives down into the darkness.
He slops into the slop. The smell is sweet, the darkness a balm, something squeals as it races across his shoe. Kockroach has found the sewers, and like the prodigal son of whom he knows nothing, he has come home.
Chased by fear, Kockroach hobbles through the tunnels, dragging his injured leg behind him. He veers left, hops right, travels straight for a long distance, and then bounds again to the left. He is rushing away from danger and to safety and judges each choice by some instinctive measure which he understands not at all and trusts completely.
When he reaches an obstruction he can’t pass he stops, searches for a new route, and finds a long metal ladder climbing to a tiny shaft of light. He clambers up the ladder, places his hands on a metal disk with a single hole letting in the light. A roar reaches through the metal and vibrates into his bones. He stiffens his uninjured leg and pushes upward.
The traffic on Eighth Avenue buzzes ferociously. Taxis and long black cars. A huge gray truck thunders by.
He ignores the traffic, throws the metal lid to the side, lifts his head out of the hole.
A taxi swerves to avoid him, a delivery van sideswipes the taxi. Brakes squeal, a truck blows its horn as it roars right over him. A big black car avoids him by darting to the left before slamming into a parked car.
Accompanied by the sound of traffic snarling angrily around him, the sound of twisting metal and shattering glass, Kockroach climbs out of the hole and stands in the middle of the street. Smoke rises from his suit pants, his hat, smoke rises like an aura of doom from his shoulders.
He looks left, looks right, quickly scurries off the street, through the startled crowd, and disappears.
Kockroach knows now to where he is headed. In the underground sewers, his instincts were leading him to an indeterminate place of safety, but now, as he slides quietly uptown through dark alleys, as he hides in shadows as humans pass, he knows to where he is headed. Something inside of him rises as he comes closer, as he recognizes the neighborhood, the street, as he recognizes the very sheets of plywood sealing up the windows.
He pulls opens the rear door and slides inside his house on Ninety-fourth Street, the one property his real estate man, Albert Gladden, is never permitted to sell.
Once inside, he staggers through the kitchen and falls. The pain and weariness have finally taken him down like a fierce predator leaping onto his back, a panther maybe, black and heavy, or, in his earlier incarnation, a mouse. He drags himself to a corner of the living room, strips off his human clothes, curls up so that three sides of his body are protected.
His leg burns where it is bleeding, his ears ring still from the explosions, his skin throbs red from the heat, his mouth and tongue are raw from smoke, his vision is spotted from the great balls of fire that blossomed about him. He is in a dangerous state, he knows, his new body is failing him and he has no idea of what the future will hold. Yet his senses are as over-stimulated as if he had been antennae fencing with a fleshy palmetto bug drunk on Sterno. Even as his body burns, and even as fear shrieks in his ear, he finds himself in the mood to mate. This is no surprise, really. Kockroach is always in the mood to mate.
And to a cockroach the crackle of destruction is as seductive as a Barry White sigh.
He awakes with a start at the tiny skritch he feels on his finger. One of his brothers has come to visit.
With his thumb, Kockroach gently rubs the arthropod’s wings. It straightens its legs and lifts its back in response, antennae swaying all the while. A moment later another comes to be stroked, and then another, and still another until they swarm over his hand, his arm, his entire body. They are nibbling his nails, gnashing his lashes, crawling in and out of his ears in search of tasty morsels of wax. They dive beneath his limbs and massage his skin with their tiny tarsi. Once again a feeling of connection rises within him, a feeling lovely, warm, scratchy, familiar, rich, sensuous, luxurious, loving, and it continues to rise, beyond what he felt before, to almost overwhelm him.
They are after food, he knows. They are searching for the delicious balls of knish he has hand-fed them before and he feels their disappointment, as if it were he himself who was searching for something marvelous and failing to find it. He has no concern for the scores who have died that night in the warehouse, they are mere humans, but he feels responsible for these dark creatures who are swarming around the wound in his leg, lapping up his blood with the healing touch of their tongues.
And in the middle of the swarm he does feel better, stronger, he does feel revitalized. The world in which he had found himself, the world Mite had led him to, the world of power and death, the world of the Nonos, dissolves for him as if he had awakened from a strange dream.
He feels himself revert to a simpler and superior thing.
Kockroach is back on the street, clothed again, haunting the back alleys, the Dumpsters, darting with his limp through the darkness as he searches for food to feed the colony he now supports. The city is no longer a mystery to him, he knows now where to find quickly and safely what he needs. Each night he scours his favorite spots for bits of rotted vegetables, of maggoty meat, of glops of congealed noodles dumped behind chop suey houses. He eats all he can stuff into his throat and brings all he can carry back to his colony.
No more do they move hesitantly in his presence. They rush him as soon as he appears, a great swarm, far more than ever before survived in that house. From the neighboring houses they have come, from the
street, from the sewers they have come. They arrive in great heaving armies, racing each madly as they make their dash to the provider. He leaves his special treats and watches as they climb one over the other over the next to devour them. Small white nymphs scurry among the legs of the adults, snapping up the morsels too small for the older ones to bother with. The sight of it fills him with a strange feeling, warm and rich, a feeling that, most strangely of all, has a name.
Satisfaction.
He is living the same way he had lived before ever he met Mite and was led into the dream world from which he escaped. But he is also not living the same way.
He tried to groom himself and his clothes, but that proved unsatisfying. He found the taste and hairs in his teeth to be unpleasant, and he was never as clean as he remembered from the showers. He also missed the fresh feel of the razor scraping his cheeks and jaw. So he has found a bathhouse nearby that is open all night, and a place to buy new clothes after dark, and a barber that cuts his hair and shaves his beard even after midnight. He spends what money that remained in his pockets after the destruction to keep himself clean and his new clothes pressed.