The Cockroaches of Stay More

by Donald Harington

  “Isn’t it dangerous for Him to be in a coma from booze when he’s so badly hurt?” Sam asked Doc, and Doc nodded vigorously. “Can you do anything for Him?” Doc shook his head, sadly. “Couldn’t you go and tell others what the situation is, and maybe get some help to try and wake Him?” Doc slowly nodded his head. “Where’s my dad?” Sam asked. “Find my dad, and get him to help, too.” Doc nodded, and then lay his sniffwhips down heavily upon Sam’s, indicating he should rest and be still. Then Doc left.

  Only after Doc had gone did Sam begin to think of an endless string of additional questions that he wanted to ask. Did anyone else know that Sam was convalescing up here? Where was Tish? What had become of her after the incident? She had been with Archy Tichborne; had she fled with him? What had become of Tichborne’s father, Chid, who had instigated the disaster? Perhaps “instigated” was the wrong word; yet Sam, being able only to watch but not hear the minister’s ranting exhortation of the mob, had had the impression that Chid had willed the shooting.

  Sam began to feel sorry for himself, not so much because he was weak and unable to get out and discover what was going on in the world, but because he was deaf and had no business trying to discover, let alone control things. He should remain an observer, not be a participant. But if he had not acted when he did, either his father or Tish might be west at this very moment. How had he known that the third bullet was directed at one of them? How had he known the instant when he needed to spoil the Man’s aim? Maybe, he told himself, there was a Fate-Thing, and he had been acting as the Fate-Thing’s agent.

  If so, it was not his father but Tish whom the Fate-Thing was protecting. The Fate-Thing had great plans for her. If nothing else, she was destined to become the mother of the next generation of Ingledews, perhaps a generation of Ingledews who would lead Stay More through the post-Bomb period and pave the way for a new Golden Age. Perhaps his job, his whole reason for existence, had been simply to plant that marble in her. Perhaps all the countless meals he had found and eaten had been simply sustenance to keep him alive for that responsibility of propagation.

  His purpose in life, he realized, was now to protect Tish from the bullets of Man or from whatever other dangers awaited her. He was the Fate-Thing’s lieutenant and aide-de-camp. But where was Tish? Why had she taken leave of him and of his Clock without any further word (or sign) to him? Perhaps their sexual linking, wonderful though it had been, had been too soon, too sudden. Their hours of “talk” in sign-language had made them as familiar with each other as they would ever be with anyone, but still, wasn’t it wrong to fuck on the first date?

  During the interminable hours that Sam was required to lay immobile, convalescing, helpless, his mind dwelt upon all these things, over and over again. It replayed for him those hours of that one act of lovemaking, when their bodies were joined end-to-end together, and the alternatively slow and fast rubbings of all the points of contact, each in a different tempo, counterpoint and syncopation, building slowly to an almost unbearable pitch…. Thinking thus, Sam began to realize something important about Larry and Sharon. Larry had known Sharon in some distant place, had experienced one or more sexual couplings with Her, and, when She returned to Stay More, to the world of Her youth, He had followed Her, because He loved Her and wanted to experience again the act of Their lovemaking, or even, if denied the chance to do that, to watch out for Her, to protect Her. Larry, Sam realized, was the lieutenant and aide-de-camp of Sharon’s Fate-Thing.

  But now, because He was injured, She should help Him. Who am I talking about? Sam asked himself. He was talking about all four of Them: Larry and Sam and Sharon and Tish together. He knew that Sharon had to help Larry. And he knew he could certainly use some help from Tish, if nothing else, to help him understand what was happening in the world, to be his surrogate tailprongs, to “translate” into sign language for him what others were saying. But where was Tish? And where was Sharon, who had been so strangely absent from Her room when he had last been there?

  Sam kept his sniffwhips tuned to the room he was in. The comings and goings of roosterroaches down below registered dully on his olfaction. He lost track of time. He slept, even during the night, which he had never done before. He slept, of course, all the daylight hours. He had a dream, which he did not know was a daydream or a nightdream, of Tish as captain of a ship. Waking, he tried to interpret it: he had seen her clearly, on the quarterdeck of a brigantine or something, giving orders to the boatswain. The vessel was being tossed on the waves, and was in peril of being dashed against rocks. Maybe the vessel was called Fate-Thing, though Sam could not read that name clearly across the bow in the dream. The ship was swarming with deckhands trying to heed the boatswain’s orders, relayed from Captain Tish. Was that boatswain Archy Tichborne? No, he was younger. Sam went back to sleep and tried to follow the rest of the dream, but it drifted downstream away from him.

  He woke to a scene that seemed even more a dream, another swarm of deckhands, but they were not scurrying over the rigging of a ship but over the rigging of a body, Man’s. The captain was not Tish but Squire Hank, and the boatswain was Doc Swain. The deckhands, Sam recognized, were non-Crustians, every one of them, and thus not hindered by the impious act they were performing: trying to wake Man. They were crawling on His face, floundering through the thickets of His beard, tickling His eyelids, stomping in and out of His gaping mouth, creeping in and out of His nostrils, in and out of His ears. Surely He was not insensate to such unbearable tickling. Squire Hank was shouting orders, urging them on, although his voice did not move Sam’s westered tailprongs. But there was no effect whatever upon Man, except the slightest involuntary twitch of His facial muscles. Man was not totally west, yet. Goading them on to renewed effort, Squire Hank himself leapt into the rally, climbing Larry’s lip and disappearing into His mouth.

  Sam discovered that he was standing up now, though his gitalongs were weak. He was standing and cheering, rooting for his father.

  Abruptly Man’s jaws clamped shut.

  INSTAR THE FOURTH:

  The Consequence

  Chapter twenty-five

  Doc was at a loss. The Patient’s skin was moist, clammy, cool, and it had, in what light fell upon it from the reading lamp, a distinctly morbid grayish hue. The Patient’s pulse was weak, almost imperceptible, but quite rapid, so rapid that the pauses between beats could barely be detected: more a hum than a pulse. The Patient’s respiration was hardly discernible. All of the symptoms of shock were present, but, Doc was the first to admit to himself, he had no experience with shock in human beings, and shock in roosterroaches manifests itself in somewhat different sequelae. Quite possibly the signs here were of shock exacerbated by intoxication, or vice versa. Whatever the exact condition and its prognosis, the Patient, in addition to His other traumas and pathology, now had a Periplaneta lodged in the oral cavity somewhere between the palatine papilla, or the palatine raphe, and the sulcus terminalis linguae. The immediate concern, as Doc saw it, was that the patient might swallow, involuntarily, with unfavorable consequences to both the Patient and the Periplaneta, who could become lodged in the esophagus or, worse, the trachea…or, worse still, as far as the Periplaneta was concerned, end up in the stomach. Even if the Periplaneta remained in the anterior oral cavity, the prognosis was especially complicated by the possibility that Bacillus tetani had entered the gunshot wound of the patient and might within forty-eight hours release tetanospasmin toxins, resulting in rigidity of musculature around the jaw, or lockjaw. Doc checked for any sign of risus sardonicus, the sardonic smile sometimes seen in the early stages of the disease, but the particular twist of the patient’s mouth could be the result of a natural sardonic smile, not the onset of lockjaw.

  Examining up close the configuration of the smile, Doc thought to holler, “HEY, HANK, ARE YE IN THAR?” but the Patient’s teeth and lips were so firmly clamped as to preclude any sound escaping from behind them. Nor could Doc’s sniffwhips detect any scent of the Squire, overwhelme
d as it was by scents of bourbon whiskey, unbrushed teeth, nicotine, and a general effluvium of westwardliness.

  Should efforts continue to wake the Patient? Thus far everything had failed, including the attempt of the squire himself to excite the interior of the Patient’s mouth. “Boys, we might as well take a rest,” Doc called to his helpers, who were still clambering upon Man’s face. If the Patient woke too suddenly, He might gasp, indrawing air that would swallow Squire Hank. Better to just keep an eye on things and think, Doc told himself.

  Hours passed. Doc wondered what his friend the squire was doing. If it was me, Doc told himself, I would be a-kickin and ajumpin and carryin on and doin somersaults and backflips even. But knowing Squire Hank, he was probably just laying low, keeping as still as could be, not wanting to make any move that would cause Man to swallow. That, or he was already in Man’s stomach, being slowly disintegrated by the juices there. Even if he weren’t swallowed, Squire Hank’s body would be diluted by salivary secretions and possibly even decomposed by the enzyme ptyalin.

  One possibility eventually occurred to Doc: perhaps Man had one or more missing teeth. If so, and it were possible to determine where the missing tooth was located, the lips covering that spot might be forced apart, with the combined efforts of all his helpers, sufficiently to permit Squire Hank to squeeze through. Roosterroaches are, after all, designed to flatten their bodies for passage through the most narrow openings; the squire could easily pass through the space of a missing tooth. But was a tooth missing?

  Doc sent his helpers to spread the news throughout Holy House and Carlott, and to ask if anyone could recall having seen the Lord’s face close enough to determine whether or not a tooth was missing. Several individuals reported back that, yes, they had seen the Lord’s face only recently when he was lying in the grass of Carlott, but he had not had his teeth bared. A fellow was located who claimed to have been still awake one morning, in the Lord’s washing room, when the Lord was brushing His teeth, but he had not been able to see the teeth because they were all covered with the white frothy and foaming toothpaste.

  Somebody reported that there was an image of the Lord on the wall in the ponder room, and the teeth were exposed in a smile. Doc himself went to investigate, instructing his helpers to keep a close watch on Man’s Adam’s apple, in case Man showed any signs of swallowing. Doc had never been to the ponder room before, and he was impressed. The walls were lined with books, the several filing cabinets climbing halfway up the wall, Man’s great oak desk topped with the black creature of fifty eyes staring upward, a “typewriter” it was called. On one wall, sure enough, there were several glass-covered images, icons, representations of Man alone and Man with other Men and Women, Man with rows of other Men, Man holding an infant, Man delivering a lecture in some kind of arena. Only in this picture did Man have His mouth open, but His teeth were not visible. But there was one portrait, the only picture of Man alone, in which Man was smiling, and His teeth were visible, His front teeth at least. It was not exactly the sardonic smile that Man naturally wore; it was more of a forced, artificial, obligatory smile; edges of the first molars were visible, all of the bicuspids, canines, and incisors, none of them missing. Doc sighed.

  While he was in the ponder room, Doc could not resist, as long as he had climbed up the wall to take a close look at the picture, climbing further along the wall to the bookshelves, and examining Man’s library, which, from what little Doc knew of literature, was almost exclusively concerned with poetry: complete sets of complete works of complete poets, incomplete sets of incomplete works of incomplete poets; poets of all centuries, major poets and minor poets, biographies of poets, and critical studies and interpretations of poets. Even the few prose writers were those who wrote poetically. In what seemed a place of honor near Man’s desk were double copies or triple copies of four titles: Where Knock Is Open Wide: The Life and Work of Christopher Smart, by Lawrence Brace; Yet What I Am Who Cares: The Life and Work of John Clare, by Lawrence Brace; The Heart without Story: A Sort of Life and Work of Richard Jefferies, by Lawrence Brace; and Life Is Whose Song?: The Wrong Life and Right Work of John Gould Fletcher, by Lawrence Brace. There were six copies of the latter, and Doc concluded that that was all that had been printed.

  The desktop itself was a mess, surrounding the typewriter, the black creature with fifty eyes, which, Doc discovered on closer examination, were not eyes but, rather, nodules imprinted with letters of the alphabet, numerals, and doodads. A strange steady purr came from the machine. Doc observed that one of the elongated nodules bore at either end two contradictory messages: “On” at the depressed upper end, and, at the raised lower end, “Off.” Beside the typewriter were piles of white note cards, small slips of paper, some of them blank, others scribbled with an indecipherable handwriting, and a stack of books: The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Roget’s International Thesaurus, and Clement Wood’s Complete Rhyming Dictionary.

  Wrapped around the roller of the typewriter was a sheet of paper, which had typed at one corner of the top, “Stay More, Arkansas,” and beneath that, “Lawrence Brace,” and in the center of the page, “Myth, Meaning and Narrative in the Poems of Daniel Lyam Montross,” and then the beginning of a sentence, “What are we to make of” The rest of the sentence was incomplete…or at least Doc, losing his footing on the paper and sliding off the roller down into the innards of the typewriter, could not later recall having read more than that. He climbed up out of the machine and returned to the loafing room, where Lawrence Brace had not changed position upon the couch, had not moved, had not stirred, and was wearing the distinct beginnings of a sardonic smile, with parts of two upper bicuspids visible. Neither tooth, alas, was missing. But there was a minute crack between them, and Doc was able to press up to this crack and yell, “AHOY, SQUIRE HANK, AIR YE ANYWHERES ROUND ABOUT IN THAR?” Quickly Doc stuck a tailprong anent the crack, and heard his words echoing eerily in the chamber of the oral cavity.

  Then came a voice, muffled, liquescent, irritated, but calm, “Is it daylight yet out yonder? Can I go to sleep yet?”

  “Naw, Squire, it’s still night, but gittin onwards to dawn,” Doc called in answer, conversationally. “Are you all right?”

  “Wal, it’s purty damp and all,” Squire Hank allowed. “Too wet to plow, I’d say.”

  Doc laughed. “Have you seen the White Mouse?” he called.

  “There’s somethin real furry in here,” Squire Hank said, “but I think it’s His tongue.”

  Doc laughed again but asked solicitously, “How’s yore outsides? Any itches or irritations? Anything that feels like it might be a-sloughin off?”

  “Hard to tell, Doc,” Squire Hank answered. “Hit’s so blamed dank and cloudy, I caint tell what’s mine and what’s His’n.”

  “You jist take it easy,” Doc called, “and we’ll figger out some way to git ye out of thar.” Then he asked, “Could ye sort of feel around and see if any teeth are missing?”

  There was a long silence, and then Squire Hank replied, “Wal, my uppers is kind of wobbly, but there’re all here.”

  “Not your teeth, Squire,” Doc said. “His teeth. See if one of ’em’s missing big enough for you to crawl through.”

  Another long silence, then Squire Hank answered, “Yeah, they’s one of ’em gone, but it’s way down in the back.”

  “Third lower molar,” Doc said to himself, “the wisdom tooth.” He called out to his helpers, “Okay, boys, here’s what we got to try to do.” He explained to them the plan, and then he explained it to Squire Hank. A dozen of the strongest fellers would simultaneously press against the lower lip at its corner, forcing it downward enough to uncover enough of the missing molar for the squire to squeeze through. It would have to be well-timed, because they could only exert so much force for just a fraction of a second. Doc selected, from his knowledge of their medical histories, the twelve strongest fellows, and arranged them in position, and said, “Now, when I give the signal, shov
e as hard as ye can!”

  Doc gave the signal and everybody shoved, with much grunting and groaning, and managed to move the corner of the lower lip a tiny fraction of a millimeter, not even enough to reveal the edge of any gap of any missing molar.

  “Hey!” came the voice of Squire Hank from within. “Which side of the mouth are you fellers on?”

  “The left,” Doc Swain hollered back.

  “Which left?” Squire Hank answered. “Your left or His left?”

  It took Doc more than a moment to figure it out, wiggling his left toucher and then his right toucher, and he realized he meant, scientifically of course, the Patient’s left, that is, Larry Brace’s left, which would be Doc’s right side as Doc faced Him. That would also be Squire Hank’s left, assuming Squire Hank was facing this way.

  “Wal, the tooth that’s missing is over on the right side,” Squire Hank informed them. “His right side.”

  Doc directed the Stay Morons to shift position from the left side to the right, and once again he gave the signal and called “SHOVE!” and once again they strained and grunted and squealed and managed to move the right lower corner of the mouth back and downward a larger fraction of a millimeter, just enough to uncover a distant view of a missing molar, behind which Squire Hank’s face was expectantly waiting.

  But it was not enough. The gang collapsed, panting and sighing, and the corner of the mouth snapped back into its original sardonic smile. Doc realized he needed some stronger roosterroaches. Who was the strongest roosterroach in Stay More? Why, Squire Hank, of course, but he was on the wrong side. Who was the second strongest roosterroach in Stay More? Unquestionably that would be Squire Hank’s only son, Squire Sam, but he…