Republic of Dirt (26 page)

And then there was that word:
relapse
. It had a serious ring to it, suggesting severe complications and harsh difficulties to follow.

“Okay?” said Mr. Spratt, barely trying to hide his impatience.

I dug into my pants and pulled out a tenner.

“Can you pick me up?” I asked. “In about … well, later.”

And as I spoke, I realized with stunned relief that I
would
be leaving this place, eventually. I’d lost sight of that fact. I might be covered in bedbugs and no longer a virgin, but eventually I would leave this cottage of tainted dreams, and life would go on.

Dean Spratt shook his head. “I’m off,” he said. “Call Cedar Cabs if you need a ride.” Ten seconds later, I stood in the round gravel clearing in front of the house, surrounded by equipment, watching him back out of the narrow driveway, pressed in on both sides by the overgrown laurel hedges that surrounded the front of the property.

Please come back, I thought but didn’t say.

My phone buzzed again.

Hard on the heels of that text came another one.

How was I supposed to get lost and get less with people after me all the time?

For the sake of my self-respect, I could halt the story right
here, but I feel like some explanation is required. It’s the difference between reading the back cover of a Stephen King novel and reading the whole thing.

I stood in the driveway and waves of revulsion and fear at what lay ahead, pest-eradication-wise, crashed into the waves of wanting to get laid. I’m sorry not to be more poetic, but that was really the situation, wave-wise.

It’s impossible to say how long I stood there, surrounded by my steamers and two grocery bags full of sprays and powders and safety goggles and face mask and plastic booties so I wouldn’t get bedbugs and bedbug babies on any part of me.

I gave serious thought to knocking on the door, handing the drama teacher the supplies and educational DVD and telling her to take the Mike Holmes approach. She was strong enough to handle the work. I’d wrestled with her enough times to know that. She wasn’t toned, it’s true, but she was sturdy.

Or I could sneak up and leave the supplies on her doorstep and run away.

Before I could decide on the right cowardly path to take, the front door swung open.

The drama teacher was dressed in a robe, heart-attack red to match the color of the front door. She cast a glance around to make sure we were alone, then opened the robe to reveal what can only be described as a sex garment. I have spent a lot of time on the Internet. A lot of things scare me but few things surprise me. So when I say I was shocked to my core by the drama teacher’s outfit, you can be sure it was quite the sight.

“It’s steampunk,” she said. “Do you like it?”

I couldn’t speak for a second.

“I’m writing a steampunk play. I plan to make the costumes myself.”

I hoped the play wasn’t for a younger audience. The drama teacher’s steampunk negligee was hugely not safe for work or for children.

There was a green velvet corset that squished her stomach and chest and armpit flesh in a way that reminded me of Yorkshire puddings spilling out of a tin.

Then there was her bra. It was like something you’d use to hang volleyballs in a gym. Each individual boob was wrapped in some sort of green netting. The effect was beyond screwed up, but it was also extremely sexy, which is the inexplicable part.
One
of the inexplicable parts.

There was a garter belt and some ornate, steampunky decorative necklaces hung between her net bra and old-fashioned granny heels, and everything about the outfit had a severe falling-apart quality. I have a lot of sympathy for anyone with a less-than-perfect physique. It’s not the drama teacher’s body I’m talking about. What I mean is that thing was coming apart already. Some of the metal grommets that kept the lacing in place had been torn out. Stray threads poked out everywhere and the boob netting was, well, it was just incredibly strange and looked super harsh on her nipples. In summary, I was pretty much open-mouthed, which I would have been even if she’d been dressed in regular clothes.

So what did I say to her? I said what every virgin of twenty-one years says to the woman who will only sleep with him if he takes care of her extermination needs. “You look nice.” I followed up that erotically charged gem with “I brought the stuff.”

The drama teacher smiled a lascivious smile. I bent down and looped the reusable grocery bag handles over my arms in order to leave my hands free to pick up my power tools. That’s what I’d been
telling myself they were, so I wouldn’t be so scared. I kept reminding myself that I was a handyman with
legitimate
power tools.

As I walked past her, the drama teacher swayed a bit and I caught a whiff of eau de old vino and realized that not only was she dressed like a steampunk porn star who was just learning to sew her own clothes, she was very drunk.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

She staggered in behind me.

“They’re in there,” she said, gesturing expansively toward the back of the little house. I saw that her sewing machine was still set up and bits of fabric and netting lay around the table. My heart felt knotted up at the idea of her putting all that effort into an outfit that was frankly terrifying.

“They?” I said.

“The bugs.”

“Right,” I said. “Are you one hundred percent sure you have an infestation?”

The drama teacher wandered unsteadily over to the table with all the sewing paraphernalia on it and grabbed for a Big Gulp–sized glass of what I assumed was white wine.

“Huh,” she said, licking her lips.

“Is that a yes?”

“What do you think?” she asked and let her open robe fall down her shoulder as though to demonstrate something. It was a white shoulder. Not exactly muscular. But solid.

“I don’t see—”

“Look at it!” she said, waggling her shoulder at me.

I took a few steps toward her, feeling confused now as well as scared and horny. A trifecta of out-of-control emotions.

Her shoulder looked fine to me. Quite nice, really. After all, it was a woman’s shoulder.

“Closer!” she urged. So I drew nearer. I hadn’t been that close to the drama teacher since we used to make out in her car. When I was her student. Her eleventh-grade pupil.

The whole thing was so bad. But my head swam from the heady bouquet of herb-scented candles, hormones and disrepute in her house.

“Do you see?” she asked, sounding like the killer from
The Silence of the Lambs
.

I did not see. I’d spent hours staring at bedbug bites on the Internet. When people react, they get everything from tiny red dots to huge red welts. Three welts in a row is a common reaction. The pros call that arrangement “breakfast, lunch and dinner.” It’s revolting, but I saw nothing like that on the drama teacher’s shoulder or on any of the other parts of her squeezing out from under her ill-fitting sex outfit.

“Oh, yeah,” I said, hoping to defuse the situation and tell her what she wanted to hear. “Now I do.” Part of me felt a flutter of hope. Maybe the drama teacher was just being dramatic.

Then she turned around and let the robe fall in a heap on the floor. Her lower back was covered in red welts.

The breakfast I’d eaten hours before nearly came up.

I was really going to have to treat the place. The poor woman was being eaten alive.

“Are you sure you don’t want to call a professional?” I asked, realizing that I was putting my chances of having sex at risk.

The drama teacher swayed a little, then propped herself against her sewing table.

“I don’t have the money for a pest company. And I can’t let my ex-husband find out. He hardly lets me see Daisy as it is.”

“Daisy?” I repeated, stupidly. “You have a kid?”

“Our dachshund. After our divorce, we split custody of the puppy. He took her and left me, not long after that thing happened with you. She was only ten weeks old. We’d had her for less than two weeks. I missed so much of her childhood. If he thinks she’s going to catch bedbugs over here, he won’t let her come at all. He uses her like a pawn.”

I couldn’t think of anything else to say, so I got to work. I followed the directions I’d found on the Internet and on the how-to DVD. I did the same thing I’d done in Earl’s cabin, but this time I unleashed the full arsenal: pesticides, diatomaceous earth. I placed talc-lined plastic cups under all the bed and table legs. I went over her carpets as carefully as a cokehead who just sneezed on the mirror. I vacuumed and steamed every object in the bedroom, starting on the outside edges of the room and working inward. I bagged every piece of fabric that could be laundered. I put all the books in plastic bags and knotted them shut. She could vacuum each individual novel, if she wanted to. There were limits to how much vacuuming I was prepared to do, even if there was sex to look forward to at the end of it.

As I worked, I saw all these little indicators about the drama teacher’s life that were even more disturbing than her homemade sex outfit and her bug bites. For instance, it was obvious she’d cleaned up before I came, but she’d missed a few things. There was a dish of dried-out macaroni and cheese
under
the bed. It wasn’t homemade either. It was Kraft Dinner. Don’t get me wrong. KD was a regular feature in my house. My mom loves it and is probably eating it right
now. But after living with Prudence for a few months and watching movies and reading health magazines, I know KD is a food product eaten mainly by children, teenagers and people who have given up all hope for a better life.

Part of me thinks that my mother’s extreme reliance on KD and associated meals, such as Chef Boyardee ravioli and Spaghettios, has a self-conscious aspect to it. She’s living the white-trash dream. She watches daytime TV, smokes like a grass fire and eats KD in order to have a consistent self-presentation. And to be fair, my mom’s kind of funny about the boxes of KD in our house. She calls it “Killer D,” for no real reason, and is always talking about how she likes to “spice it up” with black pepper.

I could tell the drama teacher didn’t eat KD to be consistent or funny or anything else. She’s a drama teacher, for chrissake. She is conversant in the works of Tennessee Williams and, you know, other playwrights. When she hangs out with drama nerds, or as I used to think of them, drama turds, she sure never lets on that she spends her evenings sewing sad sex costumes to wear while former students try to do pest control applications to her cottage. She doesn’t mention that she eats Kraft Dinner in bed.

She had some serious books, too. I checked them out before I bagged them. She had a copy of the play
Waiting for Godot
on her bedside table, and another one called
Present Shock
, which looked sort of interesting but also looked like it had never been opened. Equally unread was the copy of
Underworld
by some guy called Don DeLillo. She might have cracked the paperback copy of
Oryx and Crake
sitting on top of
Underworld
, but it was a library book, so who knows. A small, cold part of me wondered if she’d put those books out so I’d see them and be impressed.

Her furniture was fairly tasteful, so far as I could tell with my limited experience of taste. It was in line with what you’d expect from a professional woman. Made of wood and upholstered. Nothing in light blue fake velvet.

When I approached the bed, things took a turn for the serious. Bedbugs can live at a considerable distance from their target. They might be nestled in behind a picture or a bedside table or any number of nooks and crannies. You have to remain alert for signs, such as blood smears and larval castings, but so far I hadn’t seen anything like that. Chances were that the drama teacher’s bugs were being predictable by living
in
the bed. Maybe under the box spring or in the bed frame. Close to the food source, anyway. Fuck me. Food source. I wanted to sleep with a food source. What did that make me?

I stripped off the sheets with the care of someone defusing a bomb and put everything into the extra-large garbage bags I’d brought. I hoped bedbug eggs and particulates weren’t cascading onto the floor and onto my protective gear. I saw no evidence of blood meals on the sheets or the mattress cover, but the drama teacher hadn’t taken my earlier advice to get white sheets, so it was hard to tell.

“See anything?” she asked, leaning in the doorway like Mrs. Robinson in
The Graduate
, only significantly less together.

“Well, the sheets are dark pink, so it’s hard to see if there’s any sign on them.”

“I like passionate colors,” said the drama teacher.

Had she always been such a cheese ball in the conversation department? I never really noticed before because she was so hot, in her semi-terrifying way, and I had usually been a little or a lot drunk.

After that, I couldn’t really maintain the chitchat, because I was steaming the edges of the mattress and turning it and steaming the
other side and then unzipping it and looking for evidence of bedbuggery. Nothing. Unblemished surgical-unit whiteness.

The drama teacher watched, motionless but for the steady movement of glass to mouth. Maybe she was fixated on how manly I looked. Probably not.

“I’m going to be spraying the whole thing down before I put it in a bedbug-proof mattress encasement. You might not want to stand there without a mask. The spray’s pretty poisonous.”

The drama teacher heaved a deep sigh.

“You know something else that’s poisonous?” she said.

She didn’t wait for me to respond.

“Other people.”

“Yeah,” I said. I remembered finding other people incredibly poisonous, too, especially when I drank.

I was marginally better at liking humanity since sobering up. Mostly because quite a few people have been nice to me.

“Passion basically overflows from me,” said the drama teacher.