Out of Hiding
Every
night after the sun goes down, big black cockroaches come out of
hiding and gather on the front porch. They’re the ugliest kind of
cockroaches I’ve ever seen. They’re even worse than the brown
house-roaches that live in the cupboards and under the sink. These
ones have long flat bodies and fat, hairy legs. They live outside,
but they don’t like the light, so they wait in their hiding places
during the day and at night they climb down from the branches of
bushes and trees, crawl out of the cracks in the sidewalk, and then
they all head for all the porches in my neighborhood. I think they
especially like my porch because the street-light in front of our
house is broken and our porch area is darker than the others. The
larger of the cockroaches crowd themselves into clumps, and sometimes
the smaller ones crawl into the house through the gap at the bottom
of the door. Mom always steps on them, smashing and smearing their
ugly white insides across the dusty front room floor. Then she makes
me clean up the mess.
I’m
afraid of the black cockroaches. They remind me of everything scary
and dirty. I sometimes think that they were sent from hell to
collect souls for the devil. My friends from next door, Angelo and
Jessie, used to be afraid of them too, but not so much anymore. Only
Angelo is really still a little bit scared, but he never talks about
it now that he’s older. My mom and their mom are widows. Their
dad got killed by a robber and my dad was shot by a hospital security
guard. Our moms get lonely without husbands, so they go out with
their boyfriends almost every weekend. They stay out all night long
and don’t get home until Sunday morning. Miss Pilates, Angelo and
Jessie’s mom, brings them over to my house for the night and her
and my mom take off together, leaving us kids all alone.
I’m
left in charge of the house because I’m the oldest, and I have to
babysit the boys because they’re still kind of young. After our
moms leave, we usually watch or play video games, or just look at the
roaches clumping on the porch. Angelo usually goes straight to
sleep, but me and Jessie stay up late so we can feel like grown-ups.
Sometimes I feel so old that I think my hair is turning grey like my
dad’s was when he first came home from the war. Mom didn’t like
him as much without his black hair, but I like it fine. He should
have had it that color even before he went away. I wouldn’t have
minded. Mom said that he should never have left, that he should have
hid from the army, that he would never have been made a prisoner in
the jungle that way. But dad was like that. He volunteered for
everything. He liked to help change things. But it was the war that
changed him. And now he’s gone and things just aren’t the same
as they used to be. Maybe if he had been there on that final
weekend, things would be different now. But they aren’t. On that
last weekend, that dark Saturday, the usual things were turned black
by the cockroaches.
Long
before the last weekend, when our moms were still going out every
Saturday, I would always listen to everything that went on in the
house from my hiding place. I would be in the closet when mom and
Miss Pilates were in the bedroom getting ready to go out and putting
on all their perfume and make-up. They were always complaining about
not moving away from this neighborhood as soon as their husbands died
and how they were in
trouble
with the city hall because they didn’t move out of their houses
when they were ordered to. The city wanted to tear down our dead-end
street, but mom, Miss Pilates and Old Mrs. Azara from across the
street refused to leave the neighborhood. When my dad was shot, the
story got in the newspapers, and they printed that the security guard
was to blame for not firing a warning shot. Because the papers were
on my dad’s side, the city hall couldn’t make mom or the others
leave the street. It would make the city look worse than it already
did. Mom really hoped that the mayor would try to bribe her into
leaving, but no bribe ever came. So only three houses out of twenty
were left on the street, and the city abandoned all new construction
for the area. People started dumping their trash on the empty
looking street and there were always gang fights in the backyards of
the empty houses. Mom and the others were stuck on the deserted
street.
Mom
blamed Old Mrs. Azara for being in this position. After all, she
said, the old woman should have shown the city that she was willing
to leave. But Mrs. Azara said that she wanted to die in her house
and not in some hospital for old people. She was the last of her
family; her children were dead, her brothers and sisters were dead,
and all her blood-kin was dead. She had outlived them all, and that
was her curse, but she would be the city’s curse because she
refused to leave her home. Mom believed that if her old neighbor had
been willing to leave, that the mayor would have offered them money
to vacant, but since he knew that the old woman would never leave, he
never made the offer. Miss Pilates agreed with my mom. But then she
always agreed with whatever my mom said. They also agreed to stop
talking to Old Mrs. Azara to make her feel as lonely as possible.
Mom always knew how to hurt people who liked her.
When
she wasn’t complaining about money and moving, mom was usually
regretting having me for a son. Her and Miss Pilates loved to trade
complaints about their children. They wished that they didn’t have
kids to look after so that they could bring their boyfriends home for
the weekend. They figured that if their boyfriends knew that they
had kids that they wouldn’t want to date them anymore. They were
probably right. Still, I hated to hear their complaints about us
kids. But I listened anyway so that I can get a fix on my future.
Dad once told me to keep my eye on the future if I wanted to keep a
grip on the present. I think that one of these days mom isn’t
going to come home. If I can hear her say that before she does it,
then I can keep my grip on the present. It gets harder and harder to
keep my grip. It’s just that I wish I didn’t have to hear all
the other stuff about me and Angelo and Jessie. But I would never
tell the boys what I heard our moms saying about us because they were
too young to really understand. I just wish I didn’t understand.
The
last weekend was almost the same as every other weekend, except that
there were lots more cockroaches all over the place. Miss Pilates
brought Angelo and Jessie over and went into the bedroom where mom
was putting on her make-up. She looked like a clown with all her
make-up on. So did Miss Pilates. They looked like twin clowns.
Before she left, mom told me that I was responsible for the house and
the boys because I was the oldest. She started to give me a goodbye
kiss, but the taxi-cab driver honked the horn and Miss Pilates yelled
at my mom to hurry up. They ran outside to greet the driver. It was
always the same guy driving the cab. Our moms were running, giggling
and bumping into each other. I wanted to wave goodbye from the
window, but the cab took off too fast. I stared at the sinking sun
as it swallowed up the cab driving right into it.
The
Saturday sun never set fast enough for me. And even though mom was
never nice to me when she got home, I still looked forward to seeing
her again Sunday morning. I even waited up all night whenever I
could, but most of the time, I fell asleep at the window. Once, mom
came home drunk and woke me up, and after Miss Pilates took the boys
home, she started yelling at me for no reason other than for my
falling asleep on the sofa instead of on my bed. Her face was all
puffy and she looked fatter than she was really. She called me dirty
names and said that it was my fault that dad left us. But I know
that he didn’t leave us the way mom said he did. Dad got killed
because of mom’s boyfriends. She was always bringing them home
while dad was at work. She would send me next door to play with
Angelo and Jessie whenever she had company. But I only pretended to
leave. I really stood behind and hid in the front room closet where
I could hear who came over and when he’d leave. I would look
through the small cracks in the door to see what they were doing on
the sofa. I was hiding the day that dad caught mom with one of her
boyfriends. He got mad and made fists, but he didn’t hit her. He
just cried and cried, but with no tears, and mom’s boyfriend just
left, saying he was sorry. Mom laughed at dad and said he wasn’t a
man anymore. She was real drunk and had trouble keeping her balance
as she yelled at dad. She stumbled against the closet door and heard
me crying. She pulled me out of the closet and told me that at least
I should be a man. Dad cried even more when he saw mom slapping me.
His fists were shaking a lot. He covered his face with the folded
brown grocery bag that he always used for his lunch at work, and ran
out of the house. Mom yelled at him not to come back. She slammed
the door and told me to stop staring at her or she would slap me
again. I stopped real fast and looked down at my old brown shoes,
staring straight at the floor until I heard her go into the kitchen.
Then I glanced around to see if anything had changed.
Everything
was still the same. The furniture wasn’t broken or torn, the
windows weren’t cracked, and the floor wasn’t covered with blood.
But in my mind I kept thinking that something was very different,
that something had happened, something broken and cracked and bloody.
But I couldn’t figure out what it was. I went outside to wait for
dad to come back. I couldn’t think clearly. It felt like a
cockroach was chewing into my brain.
The
sun was almost gone. It looked like it was sinking behind Old Mrs.
Azara’s house, where her television light was glowing through the
two front windows. That was her only light, day and night. The dark
shadow of her house reached for our house as the sun fell behind old
wooden frame. I wondered when dad was coming home. I felt like
crying, but I was afraid that mom would hear me. I stood outside in
the cold with my hands in my pockets. I would rather freeze to death
than have mom yell at me again. I felt a warm tear roll down my
cheek and drop off, landing on my shoe. I looked down at it. Next
to the shiny tear were several black cockroaches gathering by my
foot. A chill stung in my chest, and I froze to the spot, afraid to
move. But when the roaches crawled on my shoe, I kicked them away
from me. I almost slipped twice. One of the roaches managed to
climb on my shoe, and the others I had kicked were crawling back
toward me. Then I wondered what dad would think of me frozen in fear
there on the porch because of a few cockroaches. Suddenly I unfroze.
I stepped on every single one of the roaches, crunching and popping
their spiny backs and smashing them into flat pieces of insect parts.
But for every one I smashed, several more appeared on the porch.
Reinforcements were crawling everywhere. I backed against the front
door and heard mom going into her bedroom, which meant that she was
going to knock out from the booze as usual and that it was safe to go
back in. I stepped on a few more roaches then went inside and
flopped on the sofa. I cried as softly as possible. It wasn’t
that I was afraid to wake up mom. When she knocked out, no one could
wake her up. It was just that I didn’t want the cockroaches to
think that they chased me inside.
The
next day after dad ran away, a black man from dad’s work came over
to the house and told mom that a hospital nightwatchman had shot dad
while he was trying to break into the hospital. The guard thought
that dad was going to steal drugs. He ordered dad to a halt, but dad
yelled something that sounded like Chinese at him and kept climbing
over the barbwire fence. When he reached the other side of the
fence, the guard shot twice at him. Both bullets hit him in the
chest, and he died before the doctors could reach him. When the
black man finished telling mom what had happened to dad, she didn’t
cry or anything. All she wanted to know was whether or not dad had
left her any insurance money. Dad didn’t have much money to leave,
the man said. Most of his compensation money paid the bills for the
private hospital room that he demanded when he was released from the
jungle prisoner of war camp in Nam. The army doesn’t foot the
bills for private rooms. What little he had he left to the Veteran’s
Hospital, where the doctors helped him to keep in touch with normal
life in the city. Only he didn’t call it a city; he called it a
‘jungle.’
I
understood what he was talking about, although I didn’t recognize
the words he was using, but I don’t think that mom understood him.
The man mentioned that dad had a small pension that would go to her
and me, but she didn’t care to hear about it. Whatever the amount,
it wasn’t enough to move out. She told the black man to get out of
the house and slammed the door after him. I didn’t notice it
before, but as I watched the man walk down the walkway to his car, I
saw that he didn’t have any left arm. It was then that I
understood what dad used to call a complete soldier but half a man.
After
the black man left, mom was quiet for a long time. Most of the
afternoon went by while she sat by the window, looking at Old Mrs.
Azara’s shady house. I stood next to her, waiting for her to say
something. Then, as the sun went down and darkness covered the
porch, she looked at me with her dark, sad eyes and whispered dad’s
name. She looked like she wanted to cry or say she was sorry for
slapping me in front of dad. She tried to smile, but her lips locked
in a crooked frown. I thought she was going to hug me so I picked up
my arms to hug her back. But then she pushed me away, cussing at me,
and ran into her bedroom, slamming the door behind her. I opened and
closed the front door so that mom would think that I went outside,
but I really went into the closet to listen to mom crying on her bed.
I didn’t know if she was crying because dad was dead or because
she didn’t get enough money to move out of this neighborhood. It
was comforting to me just to know that she was capable of crying too.
She
was sad for a few weeks, crying, cussing and drinking more than
usual. I thought that she might stop seeing all her boyfriends and
pay more attention to me, but she started going out more often, not
just on weekends but on weekdays too. But that was only for a few
weeks, and then she returned to strictly weekends. It was about that
time that the city officials tried to get mom to move out and offered
her moving fees. But it wasn’t enough mom told them and added that
they couldn’t kick out a veteran’s wife. She even told on
official that she would move when death turned off Mrs. Azara’s TV.
I’m sure that that’s when the city gave up on her.
When
summer came, me and Angelo and Jessie were out of school and mom and
Miss Pilates let us stay out later than usual. My mom stopped
inviting her boyfriends over and stopped drinking for a while. We
played in the empty street during the long hot days and watched TV at
Miss Pilate’s house while she spent time with my mom. She tried to
help my mom deal with dad’s death, telling her that eventually she
would get over it and that the best way to start was to begin seeing
men again. She said that that was the hardest thing for her to do
after Mr Pilates died but that she didn’t want to hide from men all
her life. In a way she was telling my mom the truth, but in another,
she was lying to get my mom back into her life. Eventually mom
agreed with her and they started going out again on weekends. It was
strange, but I preferred mom when she was lonely and sad, because she
was like a real mother then, like the kind that come out on TV. But
Miss Pilates made her realize that real life existed only on the
weekends. It was surviving the week that was phoney. Mom nodded her
head to show her that she understood. When Miss Pilates wanted
something from my mom, she had a way of making lies sound like the
truth.
I
didn’t mind when she left the kids down my house, --not all the
time anyway; it’s just that sometimes I just wanted to be alone to
think about dad and the dark jungle where he was alone during the
war. His company of men walked into a trap and dad was the only one
to escape into the jungle, hiding for months and months from the
enemy who never gave up searching for him. When they finally caught
him, he was starving and skinny as a skeleton. Dad never told me
much about what happened after they found him, but whenever he did
talk about how he evaded the enemy for months by hiding in swamps and
shrubs, his eyes got shiny like he was far away in some safe place,
and he would smile and look real proud of himself. He had outsmarted
them before they caught him, he said, before they got him and taught
him to stay quiet for days, for months, to stay still, to eat without
using his hands. He told me a lot about those days in the jungle. I
didn’t always understand all of it, except for the being smart. I
know about being smart in the jungle. I always wanted to be as smart
as he was in the darkness in the woods, so I thought carefully about
everything that he did and talked about while in the war. We would
sit by the front room window, on top of that old sofa that dad bought
for mom before he went off to fight for his family, and I would
listen as he spoke of the years he lost to the jungle.
That
last night I wanted to sit alone on the sofa by the window and wait
for the Sunday sun to rise, but Angelo and Jessie kept my mind on my
responsibility for watching out for them by nagging me about how
bored they were with my silence. They didn’t realize that they
sometimes bothered me, I guess because I really never told them and I
hid it so well. I didn’t want to sound like their mother. I
didn’t want that much responsibility. Most of the time they went
straight to sleep, but at other times they stood up late and really
bothered me with all of their questions about video games and late
night movies. They knew how much I loved those subjects, so they
liked to get me talking about them. I didn’t usually get mad at
them for asking so many questions because I had a way of dealing with
the bother. I would just pretend to be alone. That always worked.
It soothed my nerves like a strong cup of coffee the first thing in
the morning. I love coffee. It clears my head and makes me think
straight for a couple of hours. I got hooked on it while waiting for
mom until the morning hours early Saturdays. I would sit with Jessie
and Angelo and watch, a cup of hot coffee in one hand and the remote
control in the other. Long after the kids fell asleep I would be
awake with so much coffee in me that I could barely understand what
the guys on the TV were saying. During those sleepless times, during
the commercials, I loved to stare at the black cockroaches on the
other side of the window. They were far out of my reach, and I felt
real secure knowing they couldn’t get to me.
Angelo
and Jessie were sitting on the sofa by the large window that Dad used
to look out of during his brief return home. Angelo’s nose was
running, but instead of wiping it with his dirty sleeves, he just
sniffed the snots back into his nostrils. He was wearing a pair of
tennis-shoes that were all torn away on the sides. His pants were
too big for him. I think they were Jessie’s pants at one time.
Miss Pilates always bought one size of pants for each of her kids:
one size too small for Jessie, and one size too large for Angelo. I
could never figure this habit of hers out. Jessie’s tennis-shoes
were all worn out on the bottom, and he had a piece of cardboard
covering up the holes. He didn’t have any shoelaces and used two
safety pins to keep the flaps together. He said that he never went
out anywhere, so why did he need shoelaces. He had a pair of leather
shoes that his mother only let him wear once in a while; I remember
he wore them to his dad’s funeral. I told him to get the laces
from those shoes and use them on his tennees, but he said that he got
used to not having any shoelaces. He was carrying a folded paper
towel that he used to wipe Angelo’s runny nose. Sitting there on
the sofa they looked like messy little Angels, the kind that shoot
arrows at lovers, fat little cherubs with red cheeks and white faces.
I went over and sat between them. It made me feel like they were
protecting me from the devils that got dad.
We
didn’t talk for a long time. Angelo was bouncing his chubby legs
on the sofa and humming songs that didn’t sound like music. Jessie
was tapping his fingers on his knees, counting the taps out loud in
rhythm. I sat still, thinking, watching the lamp in the far corner of
the front room as it flickered, faded and flashed back to brightness.
The room took turns being shadowy and then bright, big then small.
The shadows grew long, then short, turning into exaggerated shapes of
chairs and tables, until the light pushed them back into the darkness
outside. I started to think about Angelo and Jessie, and wondered if
they thought about their father as much as I thought about mine. A
robber killed their dad a long time ago, before my dad went to war.
It was after midnight and Mr. Pilates caught a guy stealing a
portable TV from the front room. He grabbed the TV from the robber,
and the guy shot at him. The blast sounded like an exploding
firecracker in a tunnel. The noise woke mom and dad up. I was
already awake because I hardly ever slept good at night. I always
stood awake late watching old movies till dawn.
Dad
wanted to call the police when he first heard Miss Pilates scream for
help, but Mom wouldn’t let him because she was afraid. They peeked
out through the corners of the curtains, staring and waiting for some
other neighbor to come and help; but even though in those days a lot
of people lived on the dead-end street, not one of them came out to
help. Mom and dad waited until morning and then went over to Miss
Pilate’s house to see what happened.
Mr.
Pilates was on the floor holding onto the small black and white TV
like it was a baby. He was dead. Mom found Miss Pilates crying in
the bedroom closet clutching the babies. The robber didn’t hurt
Angelo and Jessie, because, I guess, they were only babies then, but
he did hurt Miss Pilates. Dad drove her to the hospital and mom
brought the babies over to our house. Then she called the police.
Mom didn’t mind trouble during the day; it was just at night that
it scared her. When the police came, Mom yelled at them for not
coming sooner; they shook their heads as if they were feeling sorry
for her. A few minutes later I saw the ambulance taking poor Mr.
Pilates away. I was surprised to see that the TV was no longer in
his arms.
Mom
took care of Angelo and Jessie until Miss Pilates came home from the
hospital. When she got back, she acted different around everyone.
She started hitting the kids when they started to cry, and she
stopped talking to mom and dad, and gave them both dirty looks when
they passed each other on the sidewalk. I think that she was mad
because they didn’t help her when she screamed for help. Nothing
would have happened to her if someone would have helped, she yelled
into the neighborhood late one night. She came out dressed in her
husband’s pajamas, drunk and angry. The kids were crying. Usually
someone would have yelled at her to shut up and let the neighborhood
sleep in peace, but after Mr. Pilates’ death, the neighborhood sort
of died too.
Once,
she knocked out drunk on the porch and mom had to help her inside
before she caught pneumonia; she caught a bad cold anyway. Mom
helped to nurse her back to health, and even though Miss Pilates was
reluctant at first to accept mom’s help, eventually, over the next
few days, they became good friends again. Mom blamed dad for
everything, and Miss Pilates believed her and started hating dad and
me even more. She never forgave my dad, even after he got back from
the war and needed friends, and she avoided me except when she needed
a babysitter. Then she told my Mom to have me babysit the kids and
would thank me with that cold voice that she developed after her
husband’s death. It was with that voice that she would yell at the
kids into the night; they were too little to understand why she was
yelling so they would just cry louder because the ‘voice’ scared
them. She stopped yelling at them as they got older and began to
take good care of them. She’s really a good mother; I just think
she needed someone to blame for Mr. Pilates’ death. If it were up
to me, I would have blamed the TV.
I
used to close my eyes when I heard the kids crying at night. I would
think about the place dad was put after he came home from the war.
It was a big white place with lots of rooms and nice nurses who took
care of Dad; they would bring him clean clothes, hot food and cold
juices. It was better than any hospital or home for old people, Dad
used to say, and that’s where he was the happiest. He got real sad
when they told him that he was ready to go home, and he got even
sadder when he got home. He would just sit around the house and
stare outside the window in the front room. The neighbors avoided
him because they felt embarrassed when his coversation wandered to
the war stories. I once asked him what he thought about when he
stared out the window, and he said the big white place for old
soldiers. I told him that he wasn’t old and he laughed. It was
the first time I had seen him laugh since he got back. He said, maybe
not old but faded. Then I told him that if he ever goes back there,
I’d go with him. He wrapped his arms around me, and his smile
faded as his gaze returned to the open window. As we sat there, I
pretended to be with him in the big white place where the cockroaches
aren’t allowed.
I
was thinking so hard about Dad that when Jessie tapped my shoulder he
scared me so bad that I jumped to my feet.
“What’sa
matter?” he asked.
“Nothing,”
I said. “I just wanted to get up.”
“Oh,
I thought I scared you,” he said almost apologetically.
“Well,
you didn’t,” I told him with some embarrassment that he had
noticed it.
“Do
you wanna play something?” he asked me.
“Yeah,
play sumthin’,” Angelo said, echoing Jessie’s words. He had a
habit of doing
that.
“I don’t know,” I answered. “What do we usually do?” We
usually watched TV, but it wasn’t working because Mom knocked it
over when she was drunk. The mayor was on the screen, and Mom yelled
at him to get off her TV set and pushed it off the cart.
Jessie smiled and shrugged his shoulders. He wasn’t about to
mention the broken TV to me; he knew how much I loved to watch it.
“Let’s just play something,” he suggested, not even realizing
that he was indirectly referring to the TV with his suggestion.
Where else does one play video games, after all?
His smile grew wider, but then he remembered that he didn’t have
any front teeth and closed his lips real fast. A small grin still
pressed the corners of his mouth upward.
“Yeah, play sumthin’,” Angelo echoed, hooking a finger into
his ear, scratching away at the inside.
There were no games to play with in the house because Mom thought
I was too old for toys, so I couldn’t suggest anything that we
could play with inside. Then Jessie offered, “How ‘bout a game
of hide-n-seek?”
I agreed to play since it was a game that we could play inside the
house. It was getting dark outside and the cockroaches were probably
coming out of their hiding places and getting ready to crawl all over
the porch. I didn’t want to be outside when it turned completely
dark. That’s when the whole place would be covered with big, black
cockroaches.
We played hide-n-seek for about an hour and grew tired of the game
pretty quickly. Angelo instantly fell asleep when he leaned back on
the sofa; Jessie and I lifted him and put him on mom’s bed. I
turned off the lamp because the light was flickering and I didn’t
want the flickering to bother his dreams. We returned to the sofa,
and Jessie rolled back the curtains so we could see outside the front
room window. The moon was hanging over Old Mrs. Azara’s house like
a guard. The moonlight was bright enough to be making shadows on the
porch, and we pretended to see shadowy animal shapes fighting with
the cockroaches that were scurrying across the porch. The light
glimmered off the backs of the roaches’ shinny black bodies, and
chills rushed through me because for a moment their backs looked like
eyes watching me. I got cold all over, but I didn’t want to put on
my sweater since Jessie didn’t have his on; so I told him that I
was going to turn the heater on so Angelo wouldn’t catch cold. I
turned on all the burners on the stove; that was our heater.
The real heater was broken again, but this time mom refused to get
it fixed. “No money,” she said, polishing her toenails, “so
just learn to live with the coldness in this house like I’ve
learned to live with your father’s coldness for me in bed. Some
war hero he turned out to be. I kept his house warm for him and
waited too damn long just to welcome home some cold hero. Damn
melted ice-cube!” When she spoke of dad’s coldness, her eyes
would shine like glass as if the memory of dad were stronger than her
bad words about him. I would listen to her without really
understanding what she was talking about. Then she would notice me
standing there watching her, and she would stroke my uncombed black
hair, moving it from my eyes where it would usually fall. “You are
your father.” Her voice would get real soft and her eyes seemed to
look right through me. Then without a warning she would get mad at
me and push me away, calling me dirty names that I heard her use when
she cussed at the mayor whenever he came on TV.
After lighting the stove for heat, I returned to the sofa where
Jessie was still looking out at the shadows of bears, dogs and cats
doing battle with the indestructible roaches from hell. The moon soon
disappeared and took with it the shadows. Only seamless darkness
remained on the porch. Jessie and me were kneeling on the sofa with
our elbows resting on the window-ledge, our chins in our palms and
our fingers wrapped around our cheeks. The reason it was so dark
outside without the moon was that some gang boys with a b-b gun shot
out the street-lights. Old Mrs. Azara came rushing out of her house
and waving her crooked cane in slow-motion at the young punks, as she
called them. They ran away because they were afraid of her, and
that’s why they shot out the lights on her block, just to show that
they weren’t afraid, but they weren’t proving anything. They
believed that she was some sort of witch or crazy lady. I wasn’t
afraid of her. She was the one person on the block that I liked.
She always had her TV on, and at night I felt safe knowing that the
soft light that shone on her porch at least kept some of the
cockroaches away.
Then I thought of dad’s flashlight in the cabinet. I got it
from the kitchen and returned to the window where Jessie was sticking
his tongue out at his reflection in the glass. I remembered how my
dad showed me how he used to use the flashlight to scare away
dangerous animals in the jungle when he was in hiding from the enemy.
He said that it saved his life many times. I aimed the beam of
light into the darkest corner of the porch, and all the roaches
scattered into safer areas of darkness. Jessie giggled in delight to
see the roaches running in circles or off the porch in an effort to
avoid the light. I turned off the light and waited for the roaches
to regroup. Then I hit them with the light again.
“Yeah,” Jessie shouted, “yeah, yeah!”
After a half an hour or so of using the flashlight, the beam
yellowed, then started to fade, so I turned it off to give the
batteries a rest. We stared out into the dark street. I pretended
that my Mom would be coming home early, even though I knew that she
really wouldn’t. Jessie decided to go check on Angelo because he
kept hearing him toss and turn. As we entered the room, Angelo
slapped at his cheek and rubbed off a smashed mosquito. Then he
growled awake and sat up scratching his cheek. I went to the
medicine chest and got some ointment that was supposed to stop
itching. I put some on Angelo’s cheek and placed a band-aid over
the greasy area so the medicine wouldn’t rub off as he tossed in
his sleep. With a smile on his face he dozed off, pleased with the
band-aid on his cheek. I returned with Jessie to the front room, and
we sat on the sofa so we could look out the window. The cockroaches
were regrouped and appeared to be waiting for us.
I pressed my forehead against the cold window pane while Jessie
tested the strength of the flashlight beam. It was still yellow, so
we decided to let the batteries rest a while more. It was the only
light we had left. The glow from Mrs. Azara’s house across the
street shone weakly through her window as she drew the heavy curtains
and produced too weak a light to reach our porch. Once in a while a
lost car would turn into the dead-end street and make a u-turn to get
out; its headlights would change the night into day for a split
second, and in that second, I could see that the roaches did not
scatter, that they were not afraid of the car lights. Then I
realized that they were only afraid of the flashlight. They didn’t
move when the headlights hit them, but they fled for their lives when
the bright beam of the flashlight struck into their clumps on the
porch, sending them into an insect panic that was ten times better
than panicking ants on a kicked ant hill. They were afraid like the
animals yapping and scattering into the dense jungle when a tiger or
lion has entered their safe haven.
I peeled my forehead from the glass and watched the impression of
my forehead on the pane disappear like an evaporating breath exhaled
on a frosty night. I pressed my hand against the glass and gently
removed it to make sure that I left a good impression on the glass;
it, too, evaporated. Jessie watched me curiously. We met eyes, and
he smiled, again smacking his lips shut as he remembered his missing
front teeth. I pressed my face on the glass next, rolling it from
cheek to cheek to try to get as much of it on the window pane as I
could. I pulled back and looked at the impression of my face on the
glass. My mouth fell open in surprise. The image looked like my
dad’s face when he came home from the war. A tear rolled down my
cheek and I wiped it off before Jessie could see it.
“Was that a mosquito biting you?” he asked.
I shook my head no.
Then he asked, “Aren’t ya gonna shine da light on da roaches
no more?”
I shook my head yes.
He added, “Let’s go outside and do it.”
“No way,” I gasped. “It’s too dark.”
“Ya scared?” he grinned.
“No way,” I told him. “It’s just too cold.”
“It’s too cold for Angelo, but not for us,” he bragged.
“You go, if you want, but I’m staying here inside,” I said.
“You are afraid, huh?” he laughed.
“No way,” I said, trying to defend myself.
“Come on then,” he said, standing up.
“I dunno,” I moaned, wishing he hadn’t brought up the
subject.
“Come on, don’t be chicken. You’re bigger than me. You
can’t be a chicken. You just can’t.”
He walked to the door and opened it.
I
followed him outside into the darkness with only the flashlight to
protect us, a flashlight with weak batteries.
The
moon was gone, the street-lights were busted and I held a flashlight
with a dimming bulb in my shaking hand. All forms of familiar light
were gone that night. I looked at the cockroaches on the porch and
swallowed what little spit I had in my mouth, trying to moisten my
tongue; it didn’t want to stay wet, no matter how much spit I
mustered. The black cockroaches were gathered in big lumpy clumps
that looked like black popcorn balls. I chose the biggest clump to
shine the weak beam at. The light struck and the clump dissolved
into a panicking bunch of ugly roaches. I walked over to another
clump and repeated the action. The roaches broke into a blind
frenzy. Meanwhile, Jessie was kicking the scattering insects off the
porch, stepping on the stubborn ones that refused to leave on their
own. “King of the porch,” Jessie shouted. “They’re all
gone.”
The batteries weren’t as weak as I had imagined. Maybe I was
just being a chicken. Jessie stood like a champion on the edge of
the porch. Then I began to notice just how cold it really was
outside. There wasn’t any wind or clouds, so if the moon had stuck
around there would have been a lot of stars in the sky that could
have kept it company in all this coldness. As it was, there was only
the weak old light of the stars glowing over the darkened street.
Jessie was wearing only a t-shirt and the sight of him send shivers
down my back.
“It’s my turn now to work the light,” Jessie proclaimed and
grabbed the flashlight from my hand. “First we’ll wait for them
to regroup, and then will blast them again.” A rather large roach
crawled back on the porch, and Jessie squashed it with several stamps
of his shoe.
Then
he turned off the light. Suddenly, it was even colder than before.
I wished I had brought my sweater. I began to feel chills all over
me. Jessie and I stepped down the porch steps very carefully, trying
not to smash any roaches as they climbed back toward the porch. The
wooden steps creaked real loud, and I wished they weren’t so noisy;
I didn’t want the black cockroaches to hear us or even to notice
us. Everywhere else on the street was dead quiet: there were no dogs
barking, crickets chirping or branches whooshing. But there was one
sound. I could hear my own breathing, and when I noticed it, I also
noticed that Jessie’s teeth were chattering like two bottle caps
bouncing on a sidewalk. He wasn’t scared like I was though; he was
just cold with only that t-shirt on.
I
was grateful to finally reach the bottom of the steps. Jessie folded
his arms across his chest and said, “They’re back on the porch.”
He turned on the flashlight. The beam fell on a black clump at the
top step, and in a second the roaches were scattering across the
porch again. Jessie’s eyes widened in glee. Then sounds from all
over the street erupted as the roaches scurried between the porch
rails, off the porch and into the gaps between the wooden planks that
made up our porch, sounds of bats screeching overhead, dogs fighting
behind the vacated houses, cats mewling with human voices in every
bush, cars in the distance honking their horns, and the eternal
blaring of Old Mrs. Azara’s nineteen inch color TV. The trees
rustled and gasped as a violent wind pushed them to life, and the
lamp-posts moaned as they teetered back and forth. But loudest of
all was the scratching of the cockroach claws against the wooden
planks.
The
larger roaches knocked into the smaller ones in their effort to
escape the attack of the bright beam, and as the black insects raced
about, I kept thinking that if I could keep them from clumping again,
then they might stay away from our porch. I figured that the secret
was keeping them separate by keeping the porch lit and denying them a
shadow to hide in. In that way they would just keep running and
running until the sun came up, and then they’d burn in the sunlight
like vampires.
“Keep
shining it,” I told Jessie “it’s starting to go out.”
He
shook the flashlight and the beam came back bright and strong. He
swept the light across the porch, holding the beam tight only on the
spots where the clumps were reforming.
The
black cockroaches were everywhere, running, bumping into each other,
into walls and rails, crashing against the stairs as they leaped off
the porch; some landed on their backs and kicked at the air
helplessly; others landed on their clawed legs and made soft clicky
noises when they took off running. In a blind panic many of them ran
toward us. Jessie used the beam of light to keep them from us as
best he could, but there were so many of them I had to kick the
bigger ones away when they came near us. Jessie stepped on as many
of them as he could, giggling and yelping all the while. Still they
kept on coming. We tried moving away, but no matter where we moved,
there they were again. It seemed like we were surrounded by
thousands of giant black cockroaches that didn’t care if we were in
their way.
Then
Jessie said, “There’s one on you.”
I
grabbed the flashlight from Jessie and used it to brush the bug off
me. I checked my clothes to see if there were anymore on me. I told
Jessie to check my back to make sure there weren’t any crawling on
me. He said that there wasn’t anything there. But it sure felt
like there was. The chilly air gave me goose bumps and the bumps felt
like the roaches were stabbing me with their claws. I told Jessie to
double-check my back, and he insisted that there was nothing there.
“Shake
the light,” he said, but I didn’t quite understand him.
The
street grew quiet once more. The light dimmed and the neighborhood
went dark. Jessie took the flashlight from my hand, shook it and the
bulb turned yellow, orange then black. It was dead. Tiny chills
crawled up and down my back; they felt like little cockroach claws
dragging on my skin and creeping under my t-shirt and up my pants. I
grabbed the flashlight from Jessie, who was toying with the switch,
and used it to smash the roaches invading my pants. I struck at my
legs, hitting each chill, not feeling any pain or caring if there
were any. Jessie tried to stop me by grabbing at my wrist, but he
missed and knocked the flashlight from my hand. It flew from my grip
and crashed on the cement next to a clump of roaches that immediately
broke up into a swarm of panicking insects. The glass shattered into
rows of slivers. Jessie avoided the sharp shards as he lifted the
flashlight; he shook it free of loose glass and pinched the small
light bulb back into place.
I
looked down at the pieces of broken glass in staring disbelief as
several cockroaches gathered by the shards and examined them with
their antennas. The chills came back; they stung at my legs and
arms. They felt like needles sticking into me, pinching under my
skin; I could only imagine how many hundreds of hairy, crooked black
legs were hooking onto my body under my clothes.
“It’s
broke,” Jessie said.
I
didn’t answer him because I couldn’t think of a thing to say.
Low
moans escaped my open mouth, and I hit my fist against the side of my
leg, at first lightly then more heavily as the darkness began to cave
in on me. The night had grown ugly and the cockroaches angry. I
stood there staring down at the walk-way covered with black, shiny
clumps of roaches that squirmed with a life all their own, like a
slow-motion cartoon, moving in mass toward me and Jessie, gathering
their forces at our feet. The mass waved hundreds of antennas at our
shoes. And the clumps, meanwhile, kept growing bigger. I looked at
the front door; it seemed so far away, and I so badly wanted to go
inside and never come out again. I wanted to rush through this night
and reach the bright, bright day and greet mom and Miss Pilates. I
heard a voice tell me to go inside, but I couldn’t tell if it were
Jessie’s or the one in my head. Either way, I took Jessie by the
hand and headed for the front door.
His
small hand was icy and tense. I held it tight, and several times he
tried pulling free, complaining my grip was too strong, but still I
held him so he wouldn’t walk into one of the clumps and send them
panicking toward me. We moved real slow toward the door, up the
steps, across the porch, stepping over each clump, kicking aside the
curious bugs that wiggled their antennas at our shoes. The clumps
had grown to the size of footballs, and were still growing as more
roaches came out of hiding and claimed the porch as their own once
again. I could hear the clicking and scratching of a thousand
thousand hairy cockroach legs, and the tapping of flat cockroach
bodies hitting against one another as they each climbed into the
swirling orgy of black insects. My heart-beat was out of control and
my breath was nearly gone; my throat and tongue were dry and
leathery, and I could taste the sweetness of my bleeding gums,
welcoming any moisture in my mouth, any taste other than dust or ash.
Jessie’s
face was frozen in a funny sort of grin as he stared at me. I think
it’s the first time he ever seen so many cockroaches at one time.
I had to keep pulling him to keep him moving toward the door, because
whenever he stepped on a roach, the crunch under his foot startled
him and he would stop moving and try to pull away from me again. His
hand was getting colder in mine. I could feel his free hand hitting
me on the arm; he was probably knocking off roaches, so I didn’t
mind the small jolts of pain.
Then
I felt a cockroach on the back of my neck. I slapped at it. A weird
sticky feeling scratched at the skin on the back of my hand. The
roach on the back of my neck was now on my hand. I slapped the back
of my hand against my pants and heard the crunch. Then I felt
another stinging sensation on my hand that travelled up my arm and
into my sleeve. Several more stings scurried up my arm and got lost
in my t-shirt. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the shiny black
bodies of the cockroaches dash into my sleeve. With one swift motion
I released Jessie’s hand, ripped off my t-shirt and violently
swatted the filthy insects from my chest and arms. I asked Jessie if
he could see any roaches on me. I think that he said no, but just to
be sure I swatted myself a few more times with the rolled up t-shirt.
The
door-knob was inches from my hand, and as I reached for it I felt my
skin burning with stings and scratches from sharp insect claws. I
swallowed what little spit I could muster in my mouth and moistened
my dry throat. With the firmest of grips I wrapped my hand around
the knob, and a crunching sound followed; I felt an awful stickiness
in my palm. I looked at my hand and saw it covered with the white
insides of a large dead cockroach that was half on the knob and half
in my hand. I wiped its dead body from my hand and using my t-shirt
removed the rest of the roach from the knob. Then I tried the knob
again.
It
was locked.
Jessie
pushed me aside and began banging on the door with his fist, calling
out Angelo’s name. “The roaches are going to hear you,” I
whispered to him, but he ignored me and continued banging and
yelling.
Then
a roach crawled into his mouth.
He
spat it out and brushed phantom roaches from his sleeves. At his
feet thousands of black cockroaches were clumping over his shoes. He
saw them and his face froze in that funny grin of his, the one he
used whenever I mentioned how his mother used to hit him when he was
a baby. He mumbled something, but I only understood a few words he
said. I felt like a dreamer looking at a dream. There I stood, with
my rolled up t-shirt in my hand and my bare chest rippling with
goose-bumps, while Jessie stood helpless as the roaches clumped up to
his ankles, his waist, his chest and neck. It was as if they were
becoming a part of him, turning into a black, squirming mass of
insect flesh. I screamed, but nothing came out.
The
silent scream cleared my head for a moment, and I realized that I had
to help him. I reached into my pants pocket to find the house-key
but instead found a ball of prickly legs and hard shell bodies; I
yanked my hand from my pocket with several roaches attached to it.
My hand looked black. I showed it to Jessie so he wouldn’t think
that he was the only one with cockroaches all over him. His cherub
face was all I could make out in that swirling mass of black vermin.
He mumbled again, but all I could see was a little boy’s face on a
giant cockroach body trying to talk to me. As his face disappeared
into the blackness, I didn’t even bother trying to scream because I
didn’t want any roaches getting into my mouth.
But
I had to help him. I retrieved the flashlight and used it to knock
the layers of blackness from his body. I swung and swung until I
recognized his face for a moment, but the damned roaches kept
returning, covering him faster than I could knock them off. They
were becoming a part of him, inside and out. I stepped back and saw
one tall roach pyramid covering him. I threw the flashlight into the
mass and the pyramid toppled over me, engulfing me with vermin.
I
shut my eyes and then blacked out.
When
the sun lit the sky, I was lying on the porch next to a giant dead
roach. I heard Miss Pilates screaming. The taxi driver was holding
her as she was trying to reach something on the porch next to the
roach. Even Old Mrs. Azara was there. She was wearing her tsk-tsk
face. I could see across the street through her open door that her
TV was off. Mom was staring down at me with big black cockroach
eyes. In the distance I could hear the sirens bringing the nice
ladies from the white place to pick me up. I was going to the place
with no cockroaches.
I
was leaving the jungle.
I
was going home.
