“I’ll give it an extra squeeze,” Felix told him. But he knew the entire house would have to be immersed in a tank of Spectracide to get rid of the many insects crawling over the oily paper bags of garbage stacked around the stove. When he opened the door under the sink, the darkness writhed with German roaches.
He finished with the kitchen, then walked into the cheaply paneled living room, where Mr. Scalson was arguing with a teenage son, Bruce.
“It wont my fault,” the son screamed.
Mr. Scalson grabbed the boy’s neck with one of his big rubbery hands and slapped him so hard with the other that his son’s nose began to bleed. “You shoulda never been born, you little shit.”
Felix sprayed around them as though they were a couple of chairs and went on. Glancing out the window he saw Mrs. Scalson burning a pile of dirty disposable diapers in the backyard, stirring them with a stick. In an upstairs bedroom, he found the round-shouldered daughter playing a murderous video game on an old television surrounded by half-eaten sandwiches and bowls of wilted cereal. In another room, the sour-smelling grandfather was watching a pornographic movie while drinking hot shots of supermarket bourbon.
The tragedy of the Scalsons was that they didn’t have to be what they were. The grandfather and father held decent jobs in the oil fields. Their high school diplomas hung in the den. Yet the only thing the Bug Man ever saw them do was argue and then sulk in their rooms, waiting like garden slugs dreaming of flowers to kill.
—
Felix Robichaux lived on what was left of the family homestead outside of Lafayette. The white frame house was situated a hundred yards off the highway, one big pecan tree in front and a live oak out back between the house and barn. Rafts of trimmed azaleas floated on a flat lake of grass. He thought the shrubs looked like circles of children gossiping at recess. He ate his wife’s supper, a smoky chicken stew, and helped her clear the dishes from the Formica table. While she washed them under a noisy cloud of steam, he swept the tile floor and put away the spices. Then they went out on the front porch and sat on the yellow spring-iron chairs that had belonged to his father.
Clarisse and Felix lived like a couple whose children had grown and moved out. They felt accused by the absence of children, by their idleness in the afternoons when they felt they should be tending to homework or helping at play. They had tried for all their married life, ten years, had gone to doctors as far away as Houston, and still their extra bedrooms stayed empty, their nights free of the fretful, harmless sobs of infants. They owned a big Ford sedan, which felt vacant when they drove through the countryside on weekends. They were short, small-boned people, so even their new motorboat seemed too large the day they first anchored in a bayou to catch bream and talk about where their lives were going. Overhead, silvery baby egrets perched in the branches of a bald cypress, and minnows flashed in the dark current sliding around the boat’s hull like time.
From the porch Clarisse stared at the pecans forming in the tree in their front yard. She slowly ran her white fingers through the dark curls at the back of her neck. Felix watched her pretty eyes, which were almost violet in the late-afternoon light, and guessed at what she would say next. She asked him whose house he had sprayed first, and he laughed.
“I started out with Boat Man.”
“That’s Melvin Laurent. A newer one?”
He nodded. “Then Fish, Little Man, Mr. Railroad, the Termite Twins.” He stared high into the pecan tree and flicked a finger up for each name. “Beauty Queen and the Slugs.”
She put a hand on his arm. “You ought to call them Beauty Queen and the Beasts,” she said.
“I spray the Beasts tomorrow.”
She laughed, a tinkling sound. “That’s right.” Clarisse crossed her slim legs and held up a shoe to examine the toe. “It’s too bad Mrs. Malone doesn’t get married again. Just from the couple times I saw her working down at the bank, I could tell she’s got a lot to offer.”
Felix pursed his lips. “Yeah, but she needs a lot, too. You ought to hear all the droopy-drawers talk she lays out in the afternoon. Everything’s sad with her, everything gets her down. She lost too much when her husband got killed.” He thought of the Beauty Queen’s eyes and what they might tell him.
“You think she’s good-looking still?”
“Talk about.”
She stared off at the highway, where a truck full of hay grumbled toward the west. “Too bad we can’t fix her up with somebody.”
He rolled his eyes at her and put his hand on hers. “We don’t know the kind of people she needs. What, you gonna get her a date with Cousin Ted?”
“Get off your high horse. Ted’s all right since he’s going to AA and got his shrimp boat back from the finance company.” She pulled her hand away. “I could call names on your side, too.”
As the lawn disappeared in shadow, they brewed up a playful argument until the mosquitoes drove them inside, where their good cheer subsided in the emptiness of the house.
—
For the rest of the month he sprayed his way through the homes of the parish, getting the bugs out of the lives of people who paid him no more attention than they would a housefly, and on the thirty-first, in the subdivision where the Beauty Queen lived, he visited a new customer, a divorced lawyer named McCall. Even though it was his first time spraying there, Felix was left alone by the tall, athletic attorney, who let him wander at will through the big house he had leased. Felix took his time in the living room so he could watch McCall and size him up. He sprayed in little spurts and stopped several times to pump up. The lawyer smiled at him and asked if he followed pro football.
“Oh yeah,” the Bug Man said. “I been following the poor Saints since day one.”
The other man laughed. “Me too. You know, I handled a case for a Saints player once. He sued a fan who came into the stadium tunnel after a game and bit him on the arm.”
“No kidding?” Felix was fascinated by the story of a human insect, a biting football fan. He stayed a half hour and drank a beer with Dave McCall, discovering where he was from, what he did for fun, what he didn’t do. After all, why wouldn’t the lawyer tell him things? He was someone who might not ever come around again. In his invisibility he listened for things that might have significance.
“You should meet Mrs. Malone,” he found himself saying. He had no idea why he said this, but it was as if a little blue spark popped behind his eyes and the sentence came out by itself, appearing like a letter with no return address. “She’s a former beauty queen and a real nice lady.” The lawyer smiled, seeming to think, What a friendly, meaningless offering. His smile was full and shining with tolerance, and Felix endured it, knowing he had done something important, had planted a seed, maybe.
On the fifteenth, he watered that seed when he had coffee with Mrs. Malone. She seemed empty, gray around the eyes, offering him only a demitasse, as though trying to hurry him off, though she was not brusque or distant.
“You know,” he began, delivering his rehearsed words carefully, “you ought to get out more.”
She showed him a slim line of wonderful teeth. “I guess I do what I can.”
He took a sip of coffee. “There’s a single man your age who just moved in down the street. I met him the other day and he hit me as being a nice guy. He’s a lawyer.”
“Are lawyers nice guys, Mr. Robichaux?”
The question derailed his train of thought. “Well, not all of them. But you know…uh, what was I talking about?”
“A new man in the neighborhood.”
“Single man.” He had run out of coffee; he tilted his cup to stare into it and then looked at the carafe. She poured him another sip. “I sprayed Buffa—I mean, Mrs. Boudreaux—this morning, and she said there was gonna be a neighborhood party at the Jeansonnes’ tomorrow. This guy’s supposed to be there.”
“So you think I should check him out?” She wiggled her shoulders when she said this, and Felix worried that she was making fun of him.
“He’s an awful nice man. Good-lookin’, as far as I can tell.”
“Would your wife, Clarisse, think he was good-looking?”
He bit his lip at that. “Clarisse thinks I’m good-looking,” he said at last, and the Beauty Queen laughed.
—
That night Clarisse and Felix sat on their porch and listened to the metallic keening of tree frogs. The neighbors had just gone home with their two young children, and Felix put his hand on a damp spot near his collar where the baby had drooled. He caught the cloth between his fingers and held it as though it contained meaning. Clarisse sat with her left arm across her chest and her right fist on her lips. “If we had had a little girl, I wonder who she would’ve looked like.”
“Dark, curly hair and eyes deep like a well,” he said. The frogs in the yard subsided as he spoke. They sometimes did that, as though wanting to listen.
After a long while she said, “Too bad,” a comment that could have been about a thousand different things. One by one the frogs commenced their signals, and the moon came out from behind a cloud like a bright thought. Across the road a door opened and a mother’s voice sang through the silvery light, spilling onto the lawn a two-note call—“Ke-vin”—playful but strong, and then, “Come out of the dark. You’ve got to come out of that dark.”
—
The next week he showed up off-schedule at Mrs. Malone’s house, later than usual, and found her in the backyard looking at the empty pool.
“Since the weather’s been so damp, I thought I’d give a few sprays around while I was in the neighborhood.”
She nodded at him as he walked by her and began squirting the cracks in the pool apron. “I appreciate the service,” she told him, a hint of something glad lingering around her mouth.
“Uh, you been goin’ out any? You know, chase the blues away?” He drew a circle in the air as if to circumscribe the blues.
“Thinking about it,” she said, hiding her mouth behind a pale ringless hand.
“Yeah, but don’t think too long,” he said. “Might be time to check it out.” He wiggled his shoulders and blushed. The Beauty Queen bit a nail and turned her back on him slowly.
When he sprayed the lawyer’s house, he spent an hour with him, marveling at both Mr. McCall’s charm and two bottles of imported beer.
—
Three weeks later the Bug Man went down to LaBat’s Lounge after supper. As he was driving down Perrilloux Street, he passed the Coachman Restaurant, an expensive steak house. He saw a BMW parked at the curb, and sweeping out of it smoothly were the long legs of Mrs. Malone. The lawyer was holding her door and looking like he had been cut with scissors out of a men’s fashion magazine. In the short time he had to look, Felix strained to see her face. It was full of light, and the Beauty Queen was smiling, all unpleasant thoughts hidden for the night, at least. Her blonde hair spilled over her dark dress, and at her throat was a rill of pearls. The Bug Man drove on, watching them in his rearview as they entered the restaurant’s brass doorway. When he reached LaBat’s old plywood barroom, he drank a Tom Collins instead of a beer, lost three dollars in the poker machine, won four in a game of pool with two cousins from Grand Crapaud, and for the rest of the night celebrated his luck.
The next day was the fifteenth, and Mrs. Malone served him coffee and no sad talk, but not one morsel of what was going on between her and the lawyer. And the Bug Man could not ask. He was satisfied with the big cup of strong coffee she fixed for him and the sight of the new makeup containers on the vanity in her bedroom. He finished his work carefully and went to spray the next customer. Even the visible stench of the Slugs’ bathrooms could not dampen a deep, subtle excitement Felix felt, almost the hopeful anticipation a farmer feels after planting, a patient desire for a green future.
Mr. and Mrs. Scalson were having an argument as Felix was trying to spray the kitchen. She got her husband down on the floor and beat at him with a flat-heeled shoe. Her lip was split and her brows and cheeks were curdled and swollen. Mr. Scalson broke away from her, grabbed a pot of collard greens from the stove, and slung it, splashing her on the legs. The screaming was a worse pollutant than all the rotten food stacked against the stove. Felix watched the greens fly across the floor, the water spattering the cabinets, a hunk of salt meat coming to rest under the table, where he knew it would stay for a week. Their young daughter ran into the kitchen, a headset tangled in her hair, and began pulling ice from the refrigerator for her mother’s burns. The Bug Man left without waiting to be paid, jogging down the drive toward his scoured and shiny white truck.
The summer months rolled into August, and Felix Robichaux mixed his mild, subtle concoctions, spraying them around the parish in the homes of good people and bad, talking to them all, drinking their coffee, and seeing into private lives like the eye of God, judging but invisible. He began using a new mixture that was nearly odorless and, unlike the old formula, left no cloudy spots or drips, and now there was even less evidence that he had passed through these people’s lives, which bothered him a bit, because everyone wants to leave something of themselves behind, more, anyway, than an empty coffee cup and a bill.
He became even more curious about Mrs. Malone, and during one visit he stepped over the implied boundary between them by asking about Mr. McCall with a directness that made her eyes flick up at him. There was no doubt that for weeks she had been happy, asking about Clarisse, telling him about plans for putting her pool back in service, since she’d found out that the lawyer liked to swim.
But suddenly there was a change. In mid-August she let him in without speaking, going to the sink and doing dishes left over from the day before. While he was spraying the living room, he heard her gasp and drop one of her Doulton plates to the tile floor. He put his face in the kitchen doorway and said, “Let me clean that up for you. I know where the dustpan’s at.”
“Thank you. I’m a bit shaky today.” Her color was good, he noticed, but there was a worried cast to her usually direct, clear eyes. He knelt and carefully swept the fragments into a dustpan then wet a paper towel and patted the floor for splinters of china.
“You want me to make you some coffee?” he asked.
She put her head down a bit and shaded her eyes. “Yes,” she said.
The Bug Man set up the coffeemaker, then sprayed the rest of the house while the machine dripped a full pot. When he came back, she had not moved. He knew where the cups and the spoons were in dozens of houses, and the first cabinet he opened showed him what he wanted. “What’s gone wrong?” he asked, pouring her a cup and taking his seat.
“Oh, it’s nothing. I’m just not myself today.” She crossed her legs slowly and pulled at her navy skirt.
“Mr. McCall been around?”
“Mr. McCall has not been around,” she said sharply. “And he tells me he never will be.”
The Bug Man shook his head slowly. Mrs. Malone and the lawyer looked like the elegant, glittering stars on the soap operas his mother watched, people he could never figure out. He was not an educated man and had never set foot in a country club unless it was having a roach problem, but he guessed that many wealthy people were complicated and refined, qualities that made it harder for them to be happy. But he had no notion of why this was so. He thought of Clarisse and felt lucky. “I’m sorry to hear that” was all he could think of to say. “I thought you two were hitting it off real good.”
The Beauty Queen then grabbed a napkin from the table and began crying.
Embarrassed, he looked around the kitchen, raised his hands, then dropped them.
“Yes,” she said, and then looked at him with such intensity that he glanced away. He could have sworn that she really saw him. “We’ve been hitting it off very well. I thought David was a little like my late husband.” She looked toward the backyard, but her gaze seemed to waver. “I thought he was a man who carried things through.”
“Aw, Mrs. Malone, these things have a way of working out, you know?”
“I’m pregnant,” she told him. “And David wants nothing to do with me.”
Felix took a swallow of hot coffee, opened his mouth to say something, but his mind was blasted clean by what she had told him. A light seemed to come on in the back of his head. “What are you going to do?” he said at last.
“I’m not sure, exactly.” She narrowed her gaze and watched him carefully. “Why?” He scooted his chair back and ran his left hand down his white uniform shirt, his fingers pausing just a second on the green embroidery of his last name.
“I mean, do you think you’ll keep it, or give it up for adoption?” His eyes grew wide and he slid his round bottom to the edge of the chair.
Her voice chilled a bit with suspicion. “I shouldn’t be discussing this with you.” She looked down at the glossy floor.
“Mrs. Malone, Clarisse and me, we’ve been trying for years to have a baby, and if you’re going to give up the one you got, we’d be happy to get it, let me tell you.” The Bug Man was blushing as he said this, as though he were trying to be intimate and had no idea how to proceed.
The Beauty Queen straightened up in her chair. “We’re not talking about a cast-off sofa here, Mr. Robichaux.”
“Mrs. Malone, don’t get mad. You know I’m just a bug man and can’t talk like a lawyer or a businessman.” He opened his thick palms toward her. “Just think about it, that’s all.”
She stood and pulled the door open for him, and he picked up his tank and walked outside. “I’ll see you in a month,” she said. When she closed the door, the smell of her exquisite perfume fanned onto the stoop. For a moment, it overcame the smell of bug spray in Felix’s clothes.
—
For the next month he made his rounds with a secretive lightness of spirit, not telling Clarisse anything, though it was hard in the evenings not to explain why he held her hand with a more ardent claim, why he would suddenly spring up and walk to the edge of the porch to look in the yard for something, maybe a good place to put a swing set. The closer the days wound down to the fifteenth of the month, the more hopeful and fearful he became. When he sprayed the lawyer’s house, McCall let him in without looking at him, disappearing into the garage, leaving him alone in the expensive, empty house. The Bug Man decided to name him Judas.
Signals Page 15