by Tyler Knox
It was Mite who bought these clothes for him, it was Mite who told him to put them on. “It’s what the fat cats will be wearing out there, I’m telling you, Boss,” he had said. And Kockroach had gone along. This wasn’t pleasure, this was business. So he had put on the colorful socks, the short green pants that buckle below the knee, the yellow shirt, the vest, the hat, not his usual fedora but a slouchy herringbone cap. So maybe it is the clothes that have him ill at ease, but he doesn’t think so.
He has felt this before, this unease, and is feeling it now, more and more often. Something has gone astray. For a while, after Mite and Celia came back into his life, he found once again that the simple satisfaction of buying pieces of the city and providing for his colony was enough for him. But Mite and Celia came back years ago and the satisfaction has worn off and now he can’t escape the gnawing sensation that something is missing in his life. Which is why he agreed to this meeting. When something is not right in Kockroach’s life, he knows what to do. He is a cockroach, he devours.
And today he will devour a company.
“Drive around the side,” says Mite, leaning forward from the backseat to get a view.
They are somewhere in the country, everything is green and tidy. The building before them is overly grand, with a tall flagpole in the front. The Stars and Stripes. It is tasty, that flag, like a great cake ready to be eaten. The sight of it stirs his hunger.
Mite isn’t wearing the funny colors, the stripes and diamonds, just his normal green suit. And Istvan, driving, is dressed in his normal uniform, and Champ, sitting beside Istvan in the front seat, is dressed in his normal black. Only Kockroach is wearing the ridiculous outfit. He knows in some animal species the strongest male is clad in the gaudiest finery. Maybe that is why Mite had him wear these clothes. So be it, if that is what it takes.
They are meeting today with a man named Gorman. Gorman is the boss of the company Kockroach wants to devour. This is supposed to be just a friendly face-to-face, Mite had told him. Kockroach isn’t sure what is friendly about a face-to-face. Business is business, the only question is whose face is going to get chewed off. Gorman started his company from a single dry cleaning store. Now he owns newspapers, magazines, a motorcycle factory. Gorman’s cash flow, Mite has said, is like a great green river.
Cash flow. Kockroach has always loved those two words. The sound, the taste. Cash flow. It fizzles on the tongue like champagne.
“Keep going,” says Mite.
“The drive ends here,” says Istvan. “You want I should drive on the grass?”
“Why not? Let’s announce our presence to the swells.”
The car lurches as it drives over a curb and then rocks softly across the lawn, coming to a stop beside a closely mowed area with little flags all across its curvy surface. A number of men are bowing down with sticks in their hands, as if praying to the white round fetishes at their feet.
As Kockroach steps out of the car, all the men straighten and stare, their jaws dropping. Kockroach takes a cigar out of his pocket. Mite pulls out a lighter, flicks it alive.
“What do they do here?” says Kockroach, waving at the huge expanse of long green meadows and tall trees.
“It’s a golf course,” says Mite as he lights the cigar. “It’s where Gorman plays golf.”
Kockroach rolls his cigar over the flame, sucks in a mouthful of smoke, lets it out slowly as a little man in a suit rushes at the car, waving his arms.
“What’s golf?” says Kockroach.
“It’s good to finally meet you, Blatta,” says the elder Gorman, shaking Kockroach’s hand with great enthusiasm. Gorman is one of those humans with a deep chest and a ruddy complexion who squeeze hard when they shake hands. Kockroach has learned not to squeeze back. “I’ve heard nothing but grand things about Brownside. Our people say your books are shipshape.”
“We do our best,” says Kockroach.
They are on a flat area overlooking one of the long green meadows. In the distance is a round circle of green with a flag planted in the middle. Gorman is there with his son and two men with green vests who are carrying long bags with metal and wooden implements sticking out of the top. Champ, in his black suit, is carrying the same sort of bag, holding similar implements.
“So what’s your number?” says Gorman. “I’m a six. Herman here”—he thumbed at a tall handsome young man with dark wavy hair—“my son, is a scratch.”
“Number?” says Kockroach.
“Your handicap.”
“Handicap?”
“You don’t have a handicap? Where do you play?”
“Play?”
“Golf. Where do you play golf?”
“I don’t.”
“I was told you played golf,” says Gorman, looking now at Mite. “Was I mistaken?”
“He’ll do fine, Mr. Gorman,” says Mite. “Don’t you worry. What say we make a little wager?”
“But he doesn’t play,” says Gorman.
“That’s the beauty of it. He never played before, but I figure he’ll pick it up quick. Let’s just say he’s a natural. No bad habits, right? What about a hundred a hole, against each of you,” says Mite. “Even up?”
“Even up, when he’s never played before?” says Gorman. “That would be like stealing thirty-six hundred dollars.”
“What?” says Mite. “It ain’t enough?”
Gorman’s son steps up. “Let’s not be pikers then,” he says, his easy grin showing his even white teeth. “A thousand a hole. Ties carry over.”
Kockroach grins back at him. “Sweet pea,” he says.
“Herman, stop this,” says Gorman. “Mr. Blatta is our guest. This isn’t right.”
“But of course it is,” says Gorman’s son. “We’re all sporting men here, aren’t we?”
“Sure we are, sport,” says Kockroach.
“See?”
“You gots a game,” says Mite. “Step on up and whack it, why don’t you.”
As Gorman the younger steps between two large blue balls pressed into the flat ground, Mite sidles up to Kockroach. “Champ used to caddy in New Orleans growing up,” says Mite in a soft whisper. “You listen to Champ and you’ll do just fine.”
Kockroach watches carefully as Gorman’s son takes a stick out of one of the bags, places a little white ball on a small peg of wood in the grass, steps up to the ball, and swings the stick. The little ball sails into the sky and lands far off in the meadow, about two thirds of the way to the green circle in the distance. The young man turns and grins. Gorman sends his ball also into the sky, landing it short of where his son’s ball lies.
“Want me to show you how to grip it, Blatta?” says Gorman.
“I can figure it out,” says Kockroach.
Champ takes a stick out of the bag, hands it to Kockroach. It is metal, long, with a big blob of wood on the far end. Champ takes a ball, sets it on a small peg in the ground. “Hit it down the middle, Boss,” says Champ.
“How far?” says Kockroach.
“See that flag?” says Champ. “That’s the target. Right where that flag is, there’s a little hole. You want to hit the ball into that hole.”
Kockroach steps up, places the wooden blob behind the ball as he saw the two other players do. Swaaaaack. The ball flies as if being chased, rises high, sails long, and then falls far far far beyond the other two balls, before rolling onto the circular green area, stopping just short of the flag in the distance.
“I missed,” says Kockroach.
“Well, now you knows to hit it harder for next time,” says Mite.
“What do I do now?” says Kockroach.
“You go on up and knock it into the hole,” says Champ.
Kockroach looks at Gorman and his son, who are staring at Kockroach with their jaws dropped and something lovely in their eyes.
“You mean I get another chance?” says Kockroach.
“Yes you do, Boss,” says Champ, shouldering the bag.
“How sweet is that?
” says Kockroach as he tosses the club to Champ and strides off toward his ball, the Gormans staring after him.
Kockroach doesn’t understand this thing about humans and their games. The ritual of chess he understands, an exercise in controlling the future, but these other games make no sense to him.
The humans take it so personally, like it is combat, when it is exactly the opposite. Combat between arthropods is a life-and-death affair where everything is on the line, that morsel of food, that attractive female with enlarged glands, leadership of the colony. The beauty of combat is that the stakes are so high. But after the human game is over, everything is the same. And yet humans take it all so seriously. Like this golf. There is a bet, but it is air. A few thousand dollars. The number means nothing to Kockroach, it means even less to the Gormans, who are wealthier. And yet, to watch the Gormans play their game with this paltry amount of money on the line is to watch some awesome weight bear down and crush them. The way their lips press one against the other, the way their knuckles turn white as they grip the sticks, the way their heads drop as Kockroach, on the closely mowed greens, steps up to the ball without the least preparation and smacks it into the hole.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” says Gorman after Kockroach sends his ball skittering across the green until it drops into the cup. “You’ve never played before? Really?”
“Really,” says Kockroach. “But how hard can it be? It’s just a game.”
“He hustled us,” says Gorman’s son as he steps toward Kockroach, the small flat-faced stick still in his hand. The boy’s features are twisted in anger, his throat is close enough for Kockroach to grab hold and crush if he so desired. “You’re a goddamned sandbagger.”
“Herman,” says Gorman, “stop it.”
“I’m definitely a bastard,” says Kockroach, grinning into the boy’s face. “And if being a sandbagger’s a profitable thing, then I’m that too.”
Gorman’s son raises his stick into the air like a sword.
Kockroach doesn’t flinch.
Champ steps forward, but before he can reach the raised stick, Gorman’s son brings the stick down with tremendous force so that its face buries in the soft green ground.
“Herman, enough.”
“He cheated us, Dad. Don’t you see? You better triple-check his books. He’s a swindler.”
“You’re being rude to our guest.”
“Soon enough he’ll be an employee,” says Gorman’s son as he pulls his stick out of the ground and stalks away.
“Pleasant guy, ain’t he?” says Mite. “And a good loser, to boot.”
“Does this mean the game is over?” says Kockroach.
“I’m afraid so,” says Gorman, watching the boy’s exit with a pained expression on his face. “And I must apologize for my son’s behavior. He’s always been quite competitive.”
“Aren’t we all,” says Kockroach, handing his stick to Champ. “So, enough pleasantries. Let’s talk business. How much?”
Gorman’s gaze snaps back to Kockroach, his face turns impassive. “We haven’t gone over all the figures yet, but our accountants have put a preliminary price on the whole of Brownside Enterprises, one I think you’ll be pleased with.”
“Sweet pea,” says Kockroach, “there’s been a mistake.”
“Excuse me?” says Gorman.
“A mistake. You’ve made a mistake. You’re not buying me,” says Kockroach. “I’m buying you.”
“I like the shoes,” says Kockroach.
He is in the backseat of the car. They are driving away from the golf place, driving toward the big house in the city. “I want to wear them all the time.”
“They’ll be hell on the wooden floors,” says Mite, sitting beside him. “You’ll have to get that by Celia.”
“But they’re my floors.”
“So they are,” says Mite. “Still, you be the one to tell her. She likes them floors. What do you think of the rest of the outfit?”
“It makes me want to throw up.”
“Don’t it though? But you was noticed, wasn’t you? That Gorman wasn’t so happy with the idea of his company getting bought. He near to burst a vein when you told him what you had in mind.”
“He’ll come around,” says Kockroach.
“Don’t think so, Boss,” says Mite. “Not the way he was acting out there. I think he wants to keep the business for that son of his to take over.”
“The sport.”
“Yeah. He wants to keep it in the family. They get like that, fathers do. At least some of them. And the son of his has a son of his own to get the company in turn. So it don’t look to me like Gorman will be willing to sell, no matter how much we offer.”
“He’ll sell,” says Kockroach. “Get the goods, Mite. Get the goods and we’ll convince him.”
“How, Boss? I already looked into the guy. There ain’t nothing there.”
“There’s always something.”
“I tell you, Boss, I asked around, did the sniffing on my own. Gorman’s clean.”
“You’re looking in the wrong place.”
“Where should I be looking?”
“Not at the old man,” says Kockroach. “At the sport.”
There is a moment of quiet. Kockroach watches as Mite and Champ glance at each other, and in that moment Kockroach senses that Mite had found something and is holding back. He can feel it in the air, what he felt before, the misty scent that always swirls around Mite like a sour pheromone. Betrayal.
Is that where it comes from, this unease that has once again come over him, is it from Mite? No, nothing there is out of sorts. With Mite there is always a whiff of betrayal in the air. It is part of him, he can’t help himself. No, the unease comes from someplace else. For the time he was with Gorman he had lost it, business always puts his mind at ease. But the business now is concluded. After playing the game with the Gormans, he knows it is only a matter of time. They will sell, he saw the weakness in their knocking knees as they tried to roll the ball into the hole. They will sell, willingly, and be ever grateful. And so it is as good as over and Kockroach once again is ill at ease.
He wonders why. It is a puzzle. Something is troubling him. Outside the car window, great fields pass by. The car is deep in the country, the fields are green and stretch on forever and their very greatness is what troubles him.
Business has made him rich, powerful in the world of men. It has allowed him to rise, to support his colony, it has brought Mite back, and Istvan, and Celia, and Norman. But business, he now sees, has its limitations. The more he buys, the more there is to buy. In the ribbons of possibility floating into the future he sees the positions of his pieces on the chessboard advance and then retreat. There are too many other players who all want to be on the same blocks, there is too much money that will never be his. His fear has been greatly eased in the world of business, McGreevy has seen to that, but with the lessening of his fear, his greed has concomitantly grown to monstrous dimensions, whispering, imploring, shouting in his ear that he doesn’t have enough, not enough, that he needs more, more, everything.
He gazes outside the window at the passing fields with their rising mounds, their twisting valleys. He wants to stride over those fields, he wants to plow the earth with the spikes hammered through the soles beneath his feet, he wants to spill his seed along the furrows, he wants to make his claim, he wants to mark, control, dominate the entire breadth of the world.
“I like the shoes,” he says.
23
I suppose I gots a problem with saying goodbye.
Maybe it’s something in my genes. My daddy he wasn’t no good at saying so long neither, but at least he would just take a powder. I leans toward the powder keg. Why I can’t just get on with it, like other Joes, what shake a hand and are on their ways, is a mystery. Champ, for instance, didn’t make no big thing of leaving. It was just, “Goodbye, Mick,” two words, a nod, and quick as that he’s off in the old Packard for points west.
> I ever tell you how I said goodbye to Old Dudley, what first taught me chess and the ways of the world? This was after my mother got swallowed whole by Hubert and I checked out her rainy-day cookie jar and found not a dollar, not a cent, just an IOU signed by, wouldn’t you know it, Old Dudley hisself. So we were pulling one of our inside jobs, scouring some house shiny of its jewels and silver and cash, all placed in that white sack of his. And then, just as he’s shimmying legs-first back out the window, I slams the frame on his back, locking him in. “Mickey, my boy,” he says, that puzzled look on his puss. But the puzzlement it disappears when I takes the sack and starts to bashing his face with it. It was his blood and my tears and so long Dudley. I left him there, trapped like a rat for the cops to find, and used that sack to pay my way to New York. But that’s what you get, that’s the price of betrayal.