Spraying For Bugs
Chapter Ten of The Troika
The sprays might be driving the bugs into the foundation. Perhaps I could lure them out with some bait.
Peanut butter? Chicken liver? Dead dog? The dead dog would be perfect. I walked out into the moonlight and fetched it indoors. I put it on the bedspread and hid in the bedroom closet with the bathrobes and tennis rackets.
Still the bugs wouldn’t show themselves. I needed more bait.
I went to the alley and broke through the plastic crust of one of the hillocks of old garbage. Dragged two black plastic bags back to the house and used a garden rake to distribute the trash evenly. I kept going for more until I had it to a depth of six inches on all the floors. Then I hid in the closet again.
All night I lay in wait, watching with my eyes, listening with my gloves, smelling with my boots. The air conditioner turned itself on, turned itself off, a well adjusted appliance. Cars drove past. I turned off my eyes and just listened. My head felt as if it had retracted into my chest.
But I could make out a new rhythm behind the tranquil murmur of the air conditioner. A chirping. A shrilling. Dozens of shrillings. From the walls, the floor, from every side. A strident mantric din like a horde of locusts. I left the closet and turned on a lamp. The bugs went right on singing, safe in their crannies.
The air conditioner was distracting me, so I ripped out its cord. That’s when I saw my first cicada.
It dropped out of the air conditioner and landed on the floor. A huge fucker, six inches long. With a humped brown shell like a cricket’s. Angular sawtooth legs. Crooked feelers tapping at the floorboards like blind men’s canes. A radically mutated giant cicada. It belonged in a monster movie, knocking down Hoover Dam.
It scuttled nervously toward the wall, then stopped. I froze where I stood and processed optical data. Sampled out a dorsal view and a profile and ran them through my morphological comparitor. This cicada was not the traditional seventeen-year root sucker. This thing was a carnivore.
I wasn’t normally given to emotional reactions to vermin. But the giant cicada filled me with a physical dismay. It made the vinyl creep on my aluminum bones. It made my clothes itch.
Such things were to be expected. This was the decade when all the genetic codes went through a cheap photocopier. This was the generation when none of the babies were quite what they seemed. These were the years when puppies lay squirming on puppy blankets, all sticky and feeble and new and not quite puppies.
Cautiously I sank to my hands and knees and extended one palm over the specimen. The hideous insect tentatively twitched and squeaked. Then it rushed at me, a sickening scrambling concentration of vitality. I crushed it under my glove. The crunch was deafening.
Luckily for purposes of documentation, the cicada’s head escaped mangling. Its beady eyes glared at me while it died. I lifted my hand, and it hung from the underside, glued there by its own ichor, weakly waving its legs. Then it fell to the floor. I stuffed the corpse into a sandwich bag. The cicadas under the floor went on singing.
I had to simplify the floor plan. I went to my van for a crowbar. The sun was up, and the gravel was wet. A street scrubber drove slowly north along Stone, past the Presbyterian Church and Madelaine’s Beauty College.
Mrs. Everson might come home today. But she couldn’t stay here. I intended to make life very unpleasant for those cicadas.
The best thing would’ve been to burn the fucking house down.
I went back indoors and punched the fucking water heater right through the fucking bedroom wall. Then I tore out the bathroom sink and rammed that into the fucking attic. Just to show the fucking cicadas I meant business.
