Spraying For Bugs
Chapter Ten of The Troika
Then I walked around the house screaming insults at them. Just the normal kind of things you scream at a time like that. “Come out of there, you yellow little pukes!” “I know you’re in there, you slimy faggots!” That sort of thing.
Then I looked for them. I looked in the oven and pried the back off the television and pulled the stuffing out of the cushions. I wished that I could see through walls. That way I could’ve seen the bugs, snug in their cozy dens, warbling their miserable songs. I could’ve mapped their demographics and charted their social organization. Then I could’ve wiped them out—crushed their eggs, burned their larvae, tortured their drones for strategic information.
But since I couldn’t do any of that, I contented myself with pounding a crowbar through Mrs. Everson’s flocked pastel wallpaper, again and again and again.
I took a break. I felt I was entitled. I sat down in Mrs. Everson’s bathtub with the television set on my lap. I watched Saturday morning cartoons for a couple of hours.
One of the cartoons concerned a magpie that wanted to eat a worm. Another involved a wolf who wanted to eat some sheep. I enjoyed the jokes, but it bothered me that the worm and the sheep never got eaten. I think that a story should be realistic.
Just then my van made a noise on the tightbeam. It wanted to alert me regarding a Threat To Vehicular Security that was developing in the alley. Apparently a couple of suspicious looking Mexican kids were hanging around, sitting with their backs against the storm fence. One youth had a shaved head and was picking her teeth with a screwdriver. The other had purple tattoos on her face and wore a necklace of spark plugs. The van thought that they were talking about him. He suspected the youths of being car strippers. I thought he was being an alarmist.
“_Alex_,” I told him, “you’re overreacting. Alex? Do you copy?”
But I received no response.
However, as I stood up in the bathtub, I knocked my head against the rod of the shower curtain. Flying into a rage, I tore the ugly fucking thing right out of the fucking wall—curtains, brackets, and all. Half the bathroom wall fell into the tub with me. And there I stood in the trembling dust, curtain rod in hand, gazing into the wall.
Gazing into the wall. My wish had come true. Here was the plumbing. There were the studs. And over in the shadows, a pale pod hung in a hammock of filaments. Within the pod, myriad milky larvae wriggled or slept. It was a nest of baby cicadas. Adults stuck their heads from crannies, squeaking in alarm.
The adults rushed to the pod and tore it open. Each stuffed a few of the infants under its belly and scrambled away. But they were bailing out a lifeboat with a thimble. I had them where I wanted them. By merely reaching out my glove and clenching my fist, I could turn their nursery into a slaughterhouse. I could fry their grubs in peanut oil and dip them in hot sauce and sell them door to door. How could they prevent me?
My van went completely paranoid. One of the Mexican kids stood up, and it rammed the kid into the storm fence. It was convinced that they were car strippers. I couldn’t talk to it.
“_This_ will break some bones,” it kept saying. “Come on out here, Alex. Don’t you want to see me break some bones?”
Anyway I was reaching into the wall for a handful of larvae when Mrs. Everson tapped me on my shoulder.
“This place looks so much better,” she told me. “I’m very grateful to you. And do you know what? At my sister’s house, I spoke with a nice young social worker. And she’s had me relocated. I’m very happy where I live now. They fix our lunches for us and give us free drugs. I have my own waterbed and my own VCR, and I watch pornography all day. It’s wonderful. You go ahead with your work, young man. And thank you so much for straggling that parakeet. I never liked it. It was a gift.”
She made a move for the door, but I was too fast for her. I wasn’t going to let her get away that easy. She still had to sign for the spraying. I put a sofa on top of her and sat down on it.
