The Cockroaches of Stay More by Donald Harington Page A

would save the righteous from that great explosion but rather that Man himself would perish in the holocaust, and the roosterroaches would have the onerous responsibility of inheriting the earth, something they did not particularly desire. No one could conceive of any explosion louder or worse than Man’s bullets, and there were many who thought that Man’s shooting was itself The Bomb, but the True Bombers told the Anabombers that The Bomb would make the explosions of bullets from His revolver seem like mere clearings of the throat.
    Tonight, Doc Swain, Squire Hank, and the Loafer’s Court had watched the parade of damsels go sashaying down Roamin Road to Parthenon and back, had seen drunk Jack Dingletoon straggling along in pursuit, and had made comments, jokes, and insinuations about various of the girls, about Jack, about one another, and about anything within the visible or sniffable world.
    When the end of the train hove into view and there was comical Jack Dingletoon yelling, “Hi yoop! I aint no Dingeltoon no more! By cracky, I’m a pure dee pure blood Ingledew now, and a squire to boot!” the members of the Loafer’s Court cast glances and sniffs at Squire Hank to see his reaction, and one of them, O.D. Ledbetter, remarked, “Now what d’ye reckon has guv that fool sech a notion?”
    “Chism’s Dew allus makes a feller feel bigger than he is,” observed Elbert Kimber. “That’s what it’s suppose to do, aint it?”
    Squire Hank did not comment, but spat, and made ruminative gestures of his cheeks. No one could remember when he had ever been silent before.
    “Naw,” remarked Doc Swain, “that aint it. He’s jist out of his head, maybe, because I tole him a little while ago that he aint got long for this world afore he goes west. He ast me to look ’im over, and blamed if his old Malpighian tubes aint all kivvered with fatty bodies.”
    The loafers stared at Doc and at one another. “Is that a fack?” several said, and “You don’t mean to say so,” said others, and one even said, “What’s a malpigeon tube?” Each of them spat, each in his turn. Most of them had good reason for spitting, not to mark any territory (for all of this territory belonged to Doc), but because among the many other blessings bestowed upon them by Man, He left cigarette butts scattered throughout Holy House, from which an abundance of chewable leaf was salvaged and masticated by most of the male roosterroaches of Stay More. Tobacco did give one’s head a pleasant giddiness and ease, but the chewing and spitting of it was essentially a ritual way of asserting one’s identity and masculinity and the merging of one’s identity with that of the male group.
    “The Malpighian tubes,” Doc explained, “are part of the digestive system, sorta wrapped around your gut like little wires. Man calls them ‘kidneys’.”
    “Aw, shore,” said Tolbert Duckworth, “I allus have a little drink fer my wife’s kidneys.”
    The other loafers laughed, but Doc said, “Not that kind of kidney. This kind is sort of midway between yore gizzard and yore butthole. It sorta strains all the juice that runs through yore system.”
    Several of the company nodded their heads in understanding, spat, and Lum Plowright observed, “So ole Jack’s strainer is on the blink?”
    “Wal, the fatty bodies has shore squoze up his Malpighian tubes,” Doc declared, feeling just a little guilty for breaking the Hypocritic Oath by openly discussing a patient’s problems.
    “His wife is a real fatty body,” Fent Chism remarked, and the assembly guffawed, picturing Josie Dingletoon, a still-shapely dish despite her many and frequent litterings of eastereggs.
    “She’ll be a mandamn widow-gal, shore, afore long,” Doc remarked.
    This comment caused each loafer to reflect, as loafers will, upon his own mortality, the widow he would leave behind if he were not already widowered, the children who would survive and mourn or not for him, and the