Untitled (19 page)

  "Huh," Marvin said again. "A redskin exterminator. Now I've heard everything."

  "He's not an exterminator, strictly speaking." Antonio gave Marvin an odd grin. "This is the part your wife's going to like. He doesn't kill anything. He just makes the pests go away."

  Marvin turned his stare onto Antonio. "This is a gag, right? You're going to tell me he blows a horn or something and they follow him away, like the Pied fucking Piper? Hey, Antonio, do I look like I'm in the mood for comedy?"

  "No, this is for real." Antonio's face was serious. "I'm not sure how he does it – what I heard, he sort of smokes them out. Indian secret, I guess."

  "I'll be damned." For a moment Marvin considered the idea. Indians did know a lot of tricks, everybody knew that. "Nah. Thanks, but I'll wait till Monday and hit the yellow pages. Hell, I can stand anything for a few more days."

  But later that night, about to go to bed – in the guest bedroom, sure enough – he felt a sudden thirst, and went down to the kitchen to get himself a beer; and when he turned on the light, there they were.

  Pamela hadn't been exaggerating. The cockroaches were everywhere. They swarmed over the sink and the counter and the dishwasher, the refrigerator and the walls and the floor: little flat brown oblongs that began running, all at once, when the light came on, so that the whole room appeared to squirm sickeningly for a moment. In almost no time most of the roaches had vanished, but a few remained, high on the walls or in other inaccessible places. Through the glass doors of the china cupboard Marvin could see a couple of them perched on top of a stack of antique bone-china dishes.

  Then he glanced up and saw that there was a large roach on the ceiling directly above his head. Its long feelers waved gently as if in greeting. It seemed to be looking at him, considering a drop.

  "Jesus Christ!" Marvin shouted, and ran from the kitchen without stopping to turn off the light.

  His hands were shaking as he picked up the phone. The restaurant was closed for the night, and when he dialed Antonio's home phone he had to listen to a lot of rings before Antonio picked it up.

  "Listen," Marvin said over Antonio's sleepy protest, "you know that old Indian you were telling me about? How fast do you think you could get hold of him?"

Next morning when Marvin went nervously into the kitchen for his coffee, there were no roaches to be seen. He knew they were still there, hiding during the daylight hours; still, it wasn't so bad as long as he couldn't see them.

  He poured himself a cup of black coffee and went out through the sliding glass doors to the sun deck. The sun was well up above the eastern horizon and the light hurt his eyes; he wished he'd brought a pair of shades. He sat down at the little table at the north end of the sun deck, keeping his back to the sun.

  The Bradshaws' house was built at the edge of a rocky bluff, sixty or seventy feet above the ocean. If Marvin cared to look straight down, through the cracks between the planks of the sun deck, he could see the white sand of what Pamela liked to call "our beach." It wasn't much of a beach, just a narrow strip of sand that sloped steeply to the water. At high tide it was almost entirely submerged.

  He tested his coffee cautiously. As he had expected, it was horrible. Have to start interviewing replacement help; Pamela's efforts in the kitchen were going to be almost as hard to live with as the cockroaches.

  Cockroaches. He made a disgusted face, not just at the bitter coffee. He had really lost it last night. Now, sitting in the bright morning sunlight with the cool clean wind coming off the sea, he couldn't believe he'd gone into such a panic over a few bugs. Calling Antonio up in the middle of the night, for God's sake, begging him to bring in some crazy old Indian. Going to be embarrassing as hell, eating at Antonio's, after this.

  Marvin raised the cup again and took a mouthful of coffee. God, it tasted bad. Even more gruesome than Pamela's usual coffee-making efforts, which was saying something. There even seemed to be something solid –

  He jerked suddenly back from the table, dropping the cup, spilling coffee over himself and not noticing. He raised his hand to his mouth and spat onto his palm the soggy cadaver of a drowned cockroach.

  Marvin leaped to his feet and dashed for the railing and energetically emptied his stomach in the direction of the Atlantic Ocean. When the retching and heaving at last subsided he hung there for several minutes, clutching the rail to keep from collapsing to the deck, breathing noisily through his mouth.

  It was then that Pamela appeared in the kitchen doorway. "Marvin," she said, "a couple of men are out front in a pickup truck. They say you sent for them."

  The kid from Antonio's was standing on the front porch, hands jammed into his ass pockets. With him was a little old man – no more than five feet tall, not much over a hundred pounds – with a face like a sun-dried apple. They both wore faded jeans and cheaplooking checkered work shirts. The old man had on a mesh-backed cap with a Dolphins emblem on the front and some kind of feather dangling from the crown. Behind them in the driveway sat an old pickup truck, its paint so faded and scabbed with rust that it was impossible to tell what color it had originally been.

  The kid said, "Mr. Bradshaw? Mr. Coelho said you had a roach problem."

  The old man said something in a language that sounded like nothing Marvin had ever heard. The kid said, "My grandfather needs to have a look around before he can tell you anything."

  Marvin nodded weakly. He still felt dizzy and sick. "Sure," he said, and led the way back to the kitchen.

  Pamela came and stood in the kitchen doorway beside Marvin. They watched as the old Indian walked slowly about the kitchen, bending down and studying the baseboards, running his fingers under the edge of the counter and sniffing them, peering behind the refrigerator. Suddenly he squatted down and opened the access doors and reached up into the dark space beneath the sink. A moment later he was standing up again, holding something small and wiggly between his thumb and forefinger. His wrinkled dark face didn't really change expression – it hadn't been wearing any recognizable expression to begin with – but there was something like satisfaction in his eyes.

  He spoke again in that strange-sounding language. The kid said, "He needed to know what kind of roaches you had. He says no problem. This kind is easy."

  The old man went out on the sun deck and flipped the cockroach over the rail. He came back and said something brief. "He says one hundred dollars," the kid translated.

  For once Marvin was in no mood to argue. He could still taste that coffee-logged cockroach. "When can he start?"

  "Right now," the kid said. "If that's okay."

  The kid went back up the hall – Marvin thought he should have had Pamela go along to make sure he didn't steal anything, but it was too late now – while the old man continued to study the kitchen. A few minutes later the kid was back with a pair of nylon carry-on bags, which he set on the counter beside the sink. The old man nodded, grunted, unzipped one of the bags, and began rummaging inside.

  While he was rummaging the kid said, "Any animals in the house? Dogs, cats?"

  Pamela shook her head. Marvin said, "Hell, no." That was something he couldn't understand, people keeping dirty hairy animals in the house. Maybe a good guard dog, but even he belonged outside, behind a fence.

  "It would be better," the kid said, "if you could go somewhere, like out of the house, till this is over."

  "Yeah?" Marvin grinned. "You'd like that, wouldn't you?"

  Pamela kicked his ankle. To the Indian kid she said, "Is this going to involve any toxic chemicals?"

  "No, no, nothing like that." The kid gestured at the pile of stuff the old man was taking out of the bag. "See, we don't even use respirators. No, it's just, well, better if you're not here."

  "Uh huh," Marvin said. "Forget it, Geronimo. Nice try."

  The kid shrugged. "Okay." He turned and began unzipping the other bag.

  By now the old man had laid out several bundles of what looked like dried weeds. Now he selected four of these and twisted them together to form a single long bundle. From the bag he took a roll of ordinary white twine and began wrapping the bundle tightly from end to end, compressing it into a solid cylinder about the size and shape of a rolled-up newspaper. He put the rest of the stuff back into the bag and spoke to the kid.

  The kid had taken out a small drum, like a big tambourine without the metal jingles, and a long thin stick with one end wrapped in what looked like rawhide. He gave the drum a tap and got a single sharp
poong
that filled the kitchen and floated off down the hallway.

  The old man produced a throwaway butane lighter, which he lit and applied to one end of the herb bundle. Marvin expected a quick flare-up, but the stuff showed some reluctance to ignite. The old man turned the bundle in his fingers, blowing gently, until at last the end of the bundle was a solid glowing red coal.

  By now smoke was pouring from the bundle in thick white clouds, billowing up to the ceiling and then rolling down to fog the whole room. Marvin started to protest, but then he decided that the smell wasn't bad at all. He recognized cedar in there – for an instant he recalled the time he had been allowed to burn the family tree after Christmas because his father was too drunk – and something that might be sage, and other things he couldn't guess at.

  Hell, he thought, you could probably market this shit for some serious bucks. The old ladies in particular would go big for a new house scent.

  Now the old Indian was turning this way and that, waving the smoldering bundle, getting the smoke into all the corners of the room. The kid started beating his drum,
poong poong poong
poong,
and the old man commenced to sing. At least that was what he seemed to think he was doing, though for sure he was no Tony Bennett. It was a weird monotonous tune, maybe half a dozen notes repeated over and over, and the words didn't sound like words at all, just nonsense syllables such as a man might sing if he'd forgotten the lyrics.

  Whatever it was, Marvin Bradshaw didn't like it a damn bit. He started to speak, to tell the old man to get on with the fumigating and never mind the musical production number. But the two Indians were already walking past him and up the hallway, trailing clouds of smoke and never missing a beat or a hey-ya. Marvin said, "Oh, fuck this," and turned to follow, to put a stop to this crap before it went any further.

  Pamela, however, moved to block the doorway. "Marvin," she said, very quietly but in a voice like a handful of razor blades.

  He recognized the tone, and the look in her eyes. There were times when you could jerk Pamela around, and then there were times when simple survival required you to back off. There was no doubt which kind of time this was.

  "All right," Marvin said crankily, "let me go after them anyway, keep an eye on them. God knows what the redskin sons of bitches are liable to walk off with . . . is that liquor cabinet locked?"

The drumming and singing and smoking went on for the rest of the morning. The old man insisted on doing every room in the house, upstairs and down, as well as the basement, attic, and garage.

  At one point Marvin paused on the stairs, hearing his wife on the hall phone: "No, really, Theresa, I swear, a real Native American shaman, and he's doing a smoke ceremony right here in our house. It's so exciting . . . "

  There was a lengthy pause. Lengthy for Pamela, anyway. "Oh," she said at last, "I used to feel guilty about them, too. I mean, all the terrible things that were done to them. But you know, Babaji explained that really, the Native Americans who have it so hard nowadays – poverty and alcoholism and so on – they're the reincarnated spirits of white soldiers who killed Native people in earlier times, and that's how they're working off their karma."

  Upstairs the kid was banging the drum and the old man was chanting and smoke was rolling back down the stairs, but Marvin stayed to listen a moment longer.

  "I wish you'd been there," Pamela was saying. "Jessica told about giving some change to this poor homeless Negro she saw in the city, and Babaji said that giving was always good for one's own karma but after all, in a previous life, that man was probably a slave-ship captain."

  There was a happy sigh. "It's just as Babaji says, Theresa. Once you understand how karma works, you realize that everything really
is
for the best."

  Marvin snorted loudly and went on up the stairs. "Space," he mumbled, "the final fucking frontier."

  "That's it?" Marvin folded his arms and stared at the kid. "And for this you expect me to cough up a hundred bucks?"

  The old man was bent over, grinding the glowing end of the bundle against the floor to extinguish it. Without looking up he said something in Algonquin or whatever the hell language it was.

  The kid said, "You don't have to pay now. We'll come back tomorrow. If you're not satisfied with the results by then, you don't have to pay at all."

  Marvin started to tell him not to waste his time. But the old man turned and looked at Marvin with dark turtle eyes and Marvin heard himself say, "Okay. Sure. See you then."

  When they were gone Marvin went back into the house and got out the key to the liquor cabinet. It wasn't often that he had a drink this early in the day but his nerves were just about shot.

  The smoke had thinned a good deal inside the house, but the scent was still strong; he could even smell it out on the sun deck, where he took his drink. He leaned against the railing and looked out over the ocean, enjoying the salt breeze and the swishing mutter of small waves over the sand below. Saturday morning shot to hell, but at least it was over. Maybe there'd be a good game on TV in the afternoon, or a fight. Even a movie, as long as there weren't any Indians in it.