The Cockroaches of Stay More Read Online Free PDF Page A

by Man.
    All roosterroaches are scavengers in the best sense, not of feeding on westered or decaying organic matter, but of cleaning up the leftovers carelessly neglected by other creatures, Man chief among them. But three hundred and fifty million years before Man climbed down out of trees and learned to cook, roosterroaches were finding some thing to eat.
    The residents of Carlott, though most of them were Crustians and believers in Man, lived on what they could find in the forests, fields, and yard behind and beside Holy House. They never entered Holy House except by invitation from their kinfolk among the Frockroaches and Smockroaches. The Carlott community took its name from the circumstance that its dwellings—rotten logs, hollows in trees and in limbs, concavities beneath old boards and metallic junk—were centered around the rusting hulk of an inoperable automobile, a Ford Fairlane of ancient vintage which was said to have delivered Man to Holy House but was no longer used, and a still operable Ford Torino of more recent manufacture, which Man occasionally drove away and returned in, parking it beside the older car in a small yard in the rear of Holy House. The chassis of the older car was also inhabited by a large nest of Polistes annularis , the paper wasp, who was strictly a daytime creature and never bothered the roosterroaches.
    The family Dingletoon, of whom Jack was paterfamilias, occupied a hollow fallen limb or branch of maple on the weed-forested side of Carlott, within sight of the great ruin of the edifice known as the Three-Hole Privy, long ago abandoned entirely by Man, and the exact purpose of which remains a mystery to modern rooster-roaches, although legends abound, particularly concerning the ancient victuals provided there. Jack Dingletoon remembered as a child hearing Gramp Dingletoon tell wondrous tales of how generation upon generation of Dingletoons were sustained and even nourished by the edibles provided in the cellars of the Privy.
    But Tish Dingletoon, Jack’s eldest daughter still at home, had not cared for these stories of the Privy food; the stories she picked up from her girlfriends concerned the viands available at Holy House and the rumors of incredibly delectable treats consumed at Parthenon, or Partheeny, as it was pronounced. Tish had never tasted a Twinkie, and could scarce imagine it. She was tortured by descriptions of bismarcks, fritters, crullers, Saratogas, danish, and doughnuts glazed, raised, and jellied. The closest she had ever come to sampling any of these was a bit of white fluff given her by a Smockroach swain, Jim Tom Dinsmore, who said it was “Wonder Bread.” Tish had suspected that Jim Tom was simply preparing her with an appetizer, as it were, to entice her to taste the affy-dizzy of his tergal gland, a forbidden and dangerous potion.
    Her mother had taught her always to resist the temptation to lick affy-dizzy, as the exudate of the male tergal gland was called. Some of her girlfriends had tasted it, but Tish had not. To reach it, you practically had to climb up on the boy’s back, beneath his wings, and if you did that, he had you where he wanted you, and might make you take one of his marbles. Taking a marble was supposed to be a right smart of fun, but it also meant you’d soon have to carry a big easteregg sticking out of your rear end for several days before you could drop it somewhere.
    Tonight would be a dance. Now as the near woods and the far fields and even the impossibly distant mountainsides began to echo with both the sound and smell of the Purple Symphony, from every covert cranny and hidden nook of Carlott, and down from the holes of Holy House too, crept forth dozens of maiden rooster-roaches, who gathered into two long parallel snaking lines, sniffwhips to one another’s tail-prongs, end to end, two by two, side by side, and began to promenade all over the glens and glades of Stay More, stepping, nearly prancing, in tune to both the smells