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.