Untitled (20 page)

  He became aware that his fingertips were tapping steadily on the railing, thumping out a medium-fast four-four beat that was, he realized then, the same rhythm the Indian kid had been beating on his drum.

  "Jesus H. Christ," he said aloud. And downed his drink in one long shuddering gulp.

Pamela stayed on the phone for the rest of the afternoon, telling her big story to one cuckoo-clock friend after another. Since this kept her off Marvin's back, he figured the whole thing had almost been worth it.

  He went into the kitchen and stuck a frozen dinner into the microwave. The smoke smell was still very pronounced, though the air looked clear and normal now. He took the cardboard tray out to the sun deck and ate his lunch, letting the sound of the ocean drown out the Indian music that kept running through his head.

  Later, he tried without success to find a game on television. All the sports shows were taken up with silly crap like tennis. That would just about make it perfect, spend the afternoon watching a couple of bull dykes batting a stupid ball back and forth across a net. Finally he found a Bronson movie he hadn't seen before, and after that, over on PBS, Louis Rukeyser had some really interesting things to say about the stock market; and so Marvin made it through the afternoon, and most of the time he hardly noticed the smoke smell at all. And only a few times, maybe once or twice an hour, did he catch himself tapping a foot or finger to the beat of the Indian kid's drum.

  When they went out to dinner that evening, Marvin drove clear to the next town up the coast, to a not particularly good and way to hell overpriced steak house, rather than eat at Antonio's. He was feeling particularly pissed off at Antonio, whom he suspected of setting the whole thing up as a practical joke. Ought to drown the grinning little greaseball, Marvin thought, in his own fucking lobster tank.

  A little after eleven that night, Marvin was sitting in the living room, trying to read Rush Limbaugh's latest book, when Pamela called him from the head of the stairs.

  He had the radio on, tuned to a New Jersey station that played country and western – which he hated, but he was trying to use one irritation against another; a bunch of Gomers singing through their noses might cancel out that God-damned Indian racket that wouldn't get out of his mind. Pamela had to call several times before he got up and came to the foot of the stairs. "What?"

  "You'd better go out and have a look, Marvin," she said calmly. "There are people down on our beach."

  "Oh, fuck." He'd always known it would happen sooner or later, but why did it have to happen now? "Get me my shotgun," he said, "and phone the cops."

  Pamela didn't move. "Don't overreact, Marvin. I don't think there are more than two of them, and they don't seem to be doing anything. They're not even close to the house. Probably just walking along the beach in the moonlight."

  "Sure." Marvin threw up his hands. "Right, I'll just go see if they'd like a complimentary bottle of
champagne
. Maybe a little violin music."

  He went down the hallway and through the kitchen, muttering. Probably some gang of crack-head punks from the city, looking for white people to rob and rape and murder. Pamela wouldn't be so God-damned serene when they tied her up and took turns screwing her in the ass before they killed her. He hoped they'd let him watch.

  The glass door slid silently open and Marvin stepped sockfooted out onto the deck. The tide was out and the sea was calm, and in the quiet he could definitely hear voices down on the beach.

  He reached back through the door and flipped a switch. Suddenly the area beneath him was flooded with light, bright as day. One of the voices made a sound of surprise and Marvin grinned to himself. It hadn't cost much to have those big lights installed underneath the deck, and he'd known they'd come in handy some night like this.

  He walked quickly across the deck and peered over the railing. It was almost painful to look down; the white sand reflected the light with dazzling intensity. He had no trouble, though, in seeing the two men standing on the beach, halfway between the house and the water. Or in recognizing the two brown faces that looked up at him.

  "Hi, Mr. Bradshaw," the Indian kid called. "Hope we didn't disturb you."

  The old man said something in Indian talk. The kid said, "My grandfather wants to apologize for coming around so late. But it was a busy night at the restaurant and Mr. Coelho wouldn't let me off any sooner."

  "What the fuck," Marvin said, finally able to speak.

  "You ought to come down here," the kid added. "You'll want to see this."

  The logical thing to do at this point, of course, was to go back in the house and call the police and have these two arrested for trespassing. But then it would come out, how Marvin had gotten involved with the red bastards in the first place. The local cops didn't like Marvin, for various reasons, and would probably spread the story all over the area, how he had hired an Indian medicine man to get the cockroaches out of his home.

  And if he simply shot the sons of bitches, he'd go to jail. There was no justice for a white man any more.

  Marvin went back through the house. Pamela was still standing on the stairs. "It's those damn Indians," he told her as he passed. "If they scalp me you can call nine-one-one. No, you'll probably bring them in for tea and cookies."

  He went out the front door and around the house and down the wooden stairway to the beach. The two Indians were still there. The old man was down in a funny crouch, while the kid was bent over with his hands on his knees. They seemed to be looking at something on the ground.

  "Here, Mr. Bradshaw," the kid said without looking up. "Look at this."

  Marvin walked toward them, feeling the sand crunch softly beneath his feet, realizing he had forgotten to put on any shoes. Socks full of sand, great. He came up between the old man and the kid and said, "All right, what's the – " and then in a totally different voice, "Jesus God Almighty!"

  He had never seen so many cockroaches in all his life.

  The sand at his feet was almost hidden by a dark carpet of flat scuttling bodies. The light from the floodlamps glinted off their shiny brown backs and picked out a forest of waving antennae.

  Marvin leaped back and bumped into Pamela, who had followed him. "Look out, Marvin," she said crossly, and then she screamed and clutched at him.

  The cockroaches, Marvin saw now, were not spreading out over the beach, or running in all directions in their usual way. They covered a narrow strip, maybe three feet wide, no more; and they were all moving together, a cockroach river that started somewhere in the shadow of the house and ran straight as Fifth Avenue across the sandy beach, to vanish into the darkness in the direction of the ocean. Marvin could hear a faint steady rustling, like wind through dry leaves.

  "You wanted them out of your house," the kid said. "Well, there they go."

"How . . . " Pamela's voice trailed off weakly.

"They're going home," the kid said. "Or trying to."

  Marvin barely heard the words; he was watching the cockroaches, unable to pull his eyes away from the scurrying horde. He walked toward the house, studying the roaches, until he came up against the base of the bluff. Sure enough, the roaches were pouring straight down the rock face in a brown cataract that seemed to be coming from up under the foundation of the house.

  "See," the kid was saying, "the kind of roaches you got, the little brown cockroaches like you see in houses in this part of the country – they're not native. Book says they're German cockroaches, some say they came over with those Hessian mercenaries the King hired to fight Washington's guys. I don't know about that, but anyway the white people brought them over from Europe."

  Marvin turned and stared at the kid for a moment. Then he looked down at the cockroaches again. "Fucking foreigners," he muttered. "I should have known."

  "Now down in Florida and around the Gulf," the kid added, "you get these really big tropical roaches, they came over from Africa on slave ships. Then there's a kind that comes from Asia, very hard to kill."

  Pamela said, "And your grandfather's, ah, medicine – ?"

  "Makes them want to go back where they came from. Well, where their ancestors came from. Makes them
have
to. Look."

  Marvin was tracking the cockroach stampede in the other direction now, out across the beach. The moon was up and full, and even beyond floodlight range it was easy to see the dark strip against the shiny damp low-tide sand.

  At the water's edge the cockroaches did not hesitate. Steadily, without a single break in the flow, they scurried headlong into the sea. The calm water of the shallows was dotted with dark specks and clumps that had to be the bodies of hundreds, maybe thousands of roaches. Marvin found himself remembering something he'd heard, how you could line all the Chinamen up and march them into the ocean and they'd never stop coming because they bred so fast.

  The old man spoke as Marvin came walking back across the sand. The kid said, "He says he'll leave it on the rest of the night, in case you got rats or mice."

  "It works on them too?" Pamela asked.

  "Sure." The kid nodded. "No extra charge."

  "The hell," Marvin said, "you're going to claim you people didn't have rats or mice either, before Columbus?"

  "Some kinds. Woods and field mice, water rats, sure. But your common house mouse, or your gray Norway rat, or those black rats you see in the city, they all came over on ships."

  "I don't see any," Pamela observed.

  "Oh, you wouldn't, not yet. The bigger the animal, the longer the medicine takes to work. Matter of body weight. You take a real big gray rat, he might not feel it for the rest of the night. Along about daybreak, though, he'll come down here and start trying to swim back to Norway or wherever."

  The old man spoke again. "My grandfather says we'll come back tomorrow, so he can turn the medicine off. Can't leave it on too long. Things . . . happen."

  At their feet the cockroaches streamed onward toward oblivion.

Marvin slept badly that night, tormented by a persistent dream in which he ran in terror across an endless empty plain beneath a dark sky. A band of Indians pursued him, whooping and waving tomahawks and beating drums, while ranks of man-sized cockroaches stood on their hind legs on either side, shouting at him in Spanish. Pamela appeared in front of him, naked. "It is your karma, Marvin!" she cried. He saw that she had long antennae growing from her head, and an extra set of arms where her breasts had been.

  He sat up in bed, sweating and shaking. The smoke smell in the room was so strong he could hardly breathe. "Gah," he said aloud, and fought the tangled covers off him and got up, to stand on wobbly legs for a moment in the darkness.

  On her side of the bed Pamela mumbled, "Marvin?" But she didn't turn over, and he knew she wasn't really awake.

  He went downstairs, holding tight to the banister, and got a bottle of Johnny Walker from the liquor cabinet. In the darkened hall way he took a big drink, and then another, straight from the bottle. The first one almost came back up but the second felt a lot better.

  He carried the bottle back upstairs, to the guest bedroom, where he cranked the windows wide open and turned on the big ceiling fan and stretched out on the bed. He could still smell the smoke, but another belt of Scotch helped that.

  He lay there drinking for a long time, until finally the whiskey eased him off into a sodden sleep. He dreamed again, but this time there were no Indians or cockroaches; in fact it was a pleasant, restful dream, in which he found himself strolling across gently rolling pasture land. Big oak trees grew along the footpath where he walked, their branches heavy with spring-green leaves. Sheep grazed on a nearby hillside.

  In the distance, at the crest of a high hill, rose the gray walls and battlements of an ancient-looking castle. A winding dirt road led up to the castle gate, and he saw now that a troop of soldiers in red coats were marching along it, headed in his direction. The
poong poong poong poong
of their drum carried across the fields to Marvin, and he could hear their voices raised in song:

He awoke again with the sun shining through the windows. He lay for a long time with a pillow over his face, knowing he wasn't going to enjoy getting up.

  When he finally emerged from the guest bedroom, sweaty and unshaven, it was almost midday. Passing the main bathroom, he heard the shower running. Pamela would have been up for hours; she always got up ridiculously early, so she could do her silly meditation and yoga exercises on the deck as the sun came up.

  Marvin was sitting in the living room drinking coffee when the doorbell rang. He lurched to his feet, said, "Shit!" and headed for the front door. Sunlight stabbed viciously at his eyes when he opened the door and he blinked against the pain. He opened his eyes again and saw the two Indians standing on his porch.

  "Sorry if we're a little early," the kid said. "I have to be at work soon."

  Marvin regarded them without warmth. "The fuck you want now?"

  "Well, you know, Mr. Bradshaw. My grandfather did a job for you."

  Marvin nodded. That was a mistake. When the agony in his head receded he said, "And now you want to get paid. Wait here a minute."

  There was no way these two clowns could make a claim stick, but he didn't feel up to a nasty scene. His wallet was upstairs in the bedroom, but he knew Pamela kept a little cash in a vase on the mantlepiece, for paying delivery boys and the like. He dug out the roll and peeled off a twenty and went back to the front door. "There you are, Chief. Buy yourself a new feather."