Roach from Red Ant's Head

A big cockroach sauntered out from under my desk and paused, waving its feelers. I eyed it, and tapped my foot threateningly. The roach just sat there, looking smug. I couldn't smash them on the carpet and they knew it; a squashed roach just flattened into the pile, then bounced back up as soon as I took my foot away, no worse for wear.

I wasn't any stranger to roaches; Philly has its share. It was a matter of attitude. You walk into a dark kitchen in Philadelphia, snap on the light, and you hear a sound like hail--dozens of roaches hitting the deck, running for cover like grunts in a rice paddy. Come in and find a four-inch Phoenix sewer roach rifling your garbage and you feel like apologizing for disturbing its dinner.

Eastern roaches know they're roaches. Western roaches have no sense of shame.

I nudged the roach with the toe of my shoe. He moved an inch sideways and sat there. If he'd had a face, it would have been leering.

"Yeah, well, screw you, too," I told him.

"Shhhh!" Veliger scowled at me, hand over his mouthpiece. "I'm talking to the Bishop!"

"I think he's heard the word," I said. "Especially if you're asking him about Father Lockwood."

The Reverend Albert Lockwood, that is; a parish priest who'd picked up a teenaged hitch-hiker and taken him back to the rectory for the night. What might have been an act of Christian charity went downhill fast when the Reverend put on an x-rated video, removed his pants, and began to masturbate, saying heartily, "I'm not going to be shy about this; are you?"

Evidently so; the Reverend's guest asked to use the bathroom, escaped through the window and called the police. Bootleg photocopies of the ensuing interrogation had been floating through the news room all week, embellished with notes and drawings that could best be called marginal.

I turned my back on Veliger and the roach and began to thumb through the phone slips. For a guy who'd been in town two weeks, a lot of people seemed to know where to find me.

On four of the slips, I penciled an "H" and set them aside. Heartbreakers, I called them. The receptionists were trained to ask for name and number, but often they took down the purpose of the call, too, recorded in telegraphese that should have drained all emotion from the messages, but didn't. Kid needs liver transplant, family no health insurance. Single mother/six kids on streets; can't raise rent deposit. Pregnant teenage widow, husband killed in gang shooting, parents pressuring her to give up her baby.

Any one of them was a story that would break your heart--especially the true ones. Trouble was, there were too many. I could do one in every single column I wrote, and still have enough phone slips left over to stuff a sofa.

Besides, the paper already ran Dear Abby every day. Aside from the question of journalistic quality, though, there was the little question of judgement. Publicity works wonders. The media is king (are king? I wondered briefly), and everybody knows it. Run a story about the kid who needs a liver transplant, and money flows in. Do one about the 15-year-old mother-to-be, and you'd have everybody from her next-door neighbors to the DES breathing down her parents' neck.

So who gets the coverage? One story can maybe change a life. Maybe not, but maybe so. So who gets it? Whoever I picked; whoever I thought I could write about.

"Power corrupts, kids," I murmured, putting the little stack aside. I'd call later in the afternoon; an ear was all I could give most of them.

"Hah?" Veliger, off the phone, stopped groping for his cigarettes and stared at me.

"Lord Acton," I told him.

He gave me a cold look and picked up the phone again.

"Knock, knock," said a cheery voice. "Bugman." A long brass nozzle poked through the door, followed by a short guy in a white uniform, with "Herman" stitched in green over the logo on his pocket.

"About time," Veliger said. "Goddamn crickets ate a hole in my wool pants last week. Hello? Is this Angel Rodriguez's residence? May I speak to Mr. Rodriguez?"

"Crickets eat clothes?" I asked, imagining a fanged Jiminy Cricket gnawing on Veliger's leg. Desert bugs were a lot tougher than I'd thought.

"Sure do," Herman said. "You got any wool stuff put away for the summer, put mothballs in with it."
/split

I moved my feet to accommodate the spray.

"That stuff's not flammable, is it?" I said, with a glance toward Veliger. He was talking on the phone, trying to open a fresh pack of cigarettes with one hand. He wouldn't light up ‘til he got outside--or at least I hoped he wouldn't--but he liked to hold one while he worked, as a sort of security blanket. Our corner of the newsroom always smelled like tobacco. It was like living in a short-stop's back pocket.

"Nah," the exterminator assured me. "Doesn't hurt a thing but bugs."

"Too bad." I popped a wintergreen LifeSaver off my roll and let the fumes chase the smell of Camels out of my sinuses.

Veliger turned his back, hunching his shoulders as he raised his voice over the noise of the fan.

"Sixteenth and Greenway? Right, yeah, I know it--used to be Southern Baptists before they moved to that big place down on Central. It's still a church? Well, yeah, what else would they do with it, but..."

"This is great stuff," Herman insisted, poking energetically behind my desk with his nozzle. "It paralyzes the little suckers, so they fall down and can't walk. Then they just dehydrate. Dry up and blow away. Or get vacuumed, I guess," he added logically.

I felt a little queasy.

"You mean the spray doesn't kill them? They just lie around until they die of thirst?"

"That's right," he said with ghoulish glee. "They twitch a while, but as soon as they fall over, they're done for." He aimed a final blast under Veliger's desk and went out.

I took a cautious breath, but the bug spray didn't seem to have much smell. Not nearly enough to compete with the Camels. I coughed. Veliger had a fresh cigarette between his fingers; he swiveled halfway around in his chair, leaned back, and blew a long stream of imaginary smoke toward the ceiling.

I coughed again, took my phone slips and headed for the door. I'd go through them in the coffee shop over a piece of pie, and maybe Puff the Magic Dragon would have gone out for his nicotine fix by the time I was finished.

I thumbed the slips as I wandered down the hall toward the men's room. A message from US West, wanting to sell me beeper service. A woman named Janice illegible-squiggle, with the terse notation, "Marcy's friend." A good sister looks out for her brother's sex life. You would have thought I was five years younger than Marcy, not five years older. Still, I wasn't in any position to turn down favors. I folded that one and put it in my breast pocket.

Two names and numbers, no messages. And then one that made me stop dead in front of the men's room, so the guy coming in behind me had to step around, muttering apologies.
/split

"Joe Mastroianni," the slip said. "About a car." I didn't think the number on the slip was the Porsche dealership; maybe Joe's home. So he didn't want me to call him at work? That was interesting. He didn't want to sell me a used Jag, then.

Somebody else brushed past me, and I came to life. I pushed into the restroom, stuffing the slips into my pocket. Both stalls were full; too bad. Even when I didn't need a toilet, I liked to use the left-hand stall, because of the graffitti.

On the right, you could be entertained by the usual assortment of genital drawings, crude suggestions and phone numbers. There were a few of those in the left-hand stall, too, but running down the inside of the door was an ongoing discussion of whatever philosophical or political matters happened to be occupying the great minds of the Daily Blaze at the moment.

Right now, it was the notion of marital rape, and this being a men's room, the idea was getting short shrift, except for the comments of someone who wrote with a black Sharpie. My best guess, judging from the comments, was that Sharpie was a woman who worked in drag. Which notion added a lot of interest to my interactions with the rest of the male personnel.
/split

It couldn't be Veliger; beard aside, I'd seen him at the urinal, and he was definitely male. I suspected him of being the woman-hater with the blue ball-point, given that he'd been married three times.

I turned to the urinal myself, unzipping. My eye caught a flicker of movement near my foot, and I looked down.

Herman the bugman had been here; a two-inch roach lay on its back, legs waving helplessly in the air. His abdomen pulsed with his struggling.

"Ick," I said. I lifted my foot to squash him against the tiles, but thought better of it. He might be disabled, but he was still juicy, and my $129 Asics were only hours old and spotless. How long did it take them to dehydrate? I wondered.

I eyed him. His feelers thrashed against the floor, but he was growing weaker. One leg unfolded, then fell back. A few days, maybe. He'd be gone tomorrow; the janitor would come tonight and vacuum him up. I thought of dying by inches in a dark vacuum cleaner, packed in tight with dust and grit.

I grunted in disgust and picked him up, before I could think better of it. He didn't weigh anything, but he wiggled with panic, making my skin crawl.

I turned to the urinal, but the drain holes were too small; he wouldn't go down. Somebody flushed a toilet in one of the cubicles.

"Hurry up!" I muttered. I opened my hand, trying not to touch the roach. He flung out a leg, hooked a claw in my skin and turned over. All his legs scrabbled madly against my palm.

With an involuntary jerk of revulsion, I threw him away from me. He landed in the urinal.

I scrubbed my hand hard on the leg of my pants. I heard the stall door open behind me, but was too embarrasssed to turn around. I was already unzipped; I pulled it out and peed on the roach.

"At least you won't dehydrate, will you?" I muttered under my breath.

I could feel the guy at the sink turn his head to look at me. I didn't look at him, but could see him from the corner of my eye. It was a UPS driver, a heavyset Native American with a broad face and a round head; slanted black eyes like pieces of obsidian.

He dried his hands carefully, watching me as I zipped up.

"You are a very mean person," he said disapprovingly. He dropped his paper towel in the trash and went out.

I stood still, gritting my teeth. The roach was on its back again, still kicking. Its wings were half-spread under it, and its striated belly gleamed with urine.

I stomped into the empty stall, ripped off a wad of toilet paper, came back and grabbed the roach out of the urinal. I flung the whole nasty handful into the toilet, slapped down the handle and stood there glaring.

"Die, goddamn it!" I said.

The whoosh of water had drowned his footsteps. The first hint of his presence was the whiff of stale tobacco-breath. Veliger leaned over my shoulder to peer into the pot, where the roach rode its whirlpool to a merciful oblivion, round and round and round, still kicking.

"Geez," Veliger said, with a sidelong glance at me. "You really hate bugs, don't you?"

I took a deep breath.

"Yeah," I said. "I really do."