Cicada (10 page)

He drew more than a little attention to himself when he knocked on the wrong door on his first try. But the occupants, an extended family of eight—all living beneath the roof of one of the dozen or so little one bedroom cracker-style houses that made up the isolated neighborhood—knew the Andersons well, and quickly sent him three doors down to where Ben was busy in his front yard, building a rabbit hutch.

“Howdy there. Might you be Ben Anderson?” John hailed from the cab of his truck over the engine’s idle.

Ben nodded, but didn’t speak, a dull silver tuft of three-penny nails sprouting from between his clenched lips. John cut the motor and climbed from the cab.

“Got the wrong house on my first try,” he said motioning with his thumb back to where he’d just come from down the road. Still, Ben remained silent. “I’m, uh, I’m John Sayre. Got a farm over a piece. Good size place. Passed down from my daddy…from his daddy,” he gestured pointlessly again with a grim smile.

Ben put down the claw hammer in his hand, placing it atop the unfinished hutch, followed by his worn, leather gloves. Lastly, he plucked the nails from his mouth and slid them into his coveralls. Several yard chickens, which had scattered upon the approach of John’s pickup, returned from wherever they’d fled to continue their pursuit of scratching and searching the unchecked growth of wilting grass and weeds that made up most of the front yard.

“So…what can I do for ya?” Ben asked taking a few steps over the several between them.

“Well now, see, the thing is, I met your sister the other day. Cicada. She, well, she mentioned that you might be looking for work. And work…well I got more than I can handle.”

“Already got work,” Ben said, cutting his eyes over to the hutch.

“Yeah, yes, I see that.”

The two men beat down the seconds considering each other warily, neither offering to say anymore. John was just about to apologize for having troubled him, but then Ben caved. His sister was right, after all. While there was plenty of work to be had around their home, not much of it would be lining his wallet with bills anytime soon.

“What kind of work you have over that way?”

John smiled at the unexpected opening. “All kinds…plowing mostly, I’d say. Another small field of baling. I won’t kid you, ain’t none of it too tolerable. ‘Specially in this heat…but, to be sure, it is God’s honest work and I will pay you a good wage.”

Ben studied him a few seconds more and looked over to see just how far the sun had managed. Not far at all. “You had breakfast yet?” he asked.

“Uh…why, no.”

“Well, why don’t ya come on in. Cicada ought to have it ready ‘bout now. We can discuss the particulars over French toast. Girl tries her best.”

“That’d be right fine, Ben. Sounds good. Thank you, kindly.”

“Might save your thank yous ‘til after you tasted Cicada’s cookin’ and heard my wages,” Ben said. John paused and pursed his lips. Ben realized he may have gone a tad far. He looked around and then acquiesced. “Alright, I’m just having some fun. The girl can cook…I suppose. And people tell me I’m reasonable.”

John, still a bit unsure of his footing with Ben, simply smiled and nodded a bit dumbly as he followed the bigger man inside.

…

“He’s sweet on ya,” Uncle Nef pointed out to his niece, Cicada, just a few minutes after John Sayre left after sharing breakfast with them that morning.

Cicada didn’t need to be told. Still, she blushed and played the innocent all the same.

“Uncle Nef,” she said, and swatted at him with a dishtowel.

“Where you go gettin’ your crazy fool notions,” her other uncle, Saul, scowled. His face was a cragged topography of weathered flesh that showed such harsh expressions had been common to him, practically etched there now regardless of his mood.

“He’s a white man, Nef,” Ben joined in on his Uncle Saul’s side.

“So? What the hell difference do that make? Not a damnable bit. He a man, ain’t he?” He turned to Cicada. “An’ don’tcha go thinkin’ I don’t know somethin’ else.”

“Oh, Nef,” the young woman sighed.

“I seen the way you giggled like a school girl at near every word what was comin’ out his mouth.”

Ben cast a suspicious eye to his sister. All she offered was her back as she hurried the morning’s dishes to the sink. The Anderson family grew quiet.

A stone’s throw down the street, Raymond Stout’s son, Tyrone, watched intently as a bizarre, yet commonplace, spectacle of life played out at his feet.

Clinging helplessly to the stalk of a milkweed, a lone cicada was facing its greatest battle; one in which the outcome was all but inevitable. It had raced as quickly as it could up the stalk. Upon its back, riding like some disturbed jockey, an enormous wasp, nearly as big as Tyrone’s thumb, wriggled madly as it fought to gain position. The lost cicada had no more than run out of stalk to climb when the wasp made good its purchase. Driving the ebony spike adorning the tip of its yellow and black abdomen into a chink in the cicada’s chitin armor, the wasp cleaved into the base of the cicada’s neck.

“Ewww-wee!” little Tyrone squealed, scooting forward, haunches on his calves, to better witness the cicada’s death.

But the struggle was over. The cicada released its grip on the milkweed stalk and the two insects glided to the earth under the wasp’s control. Then the pair continued making their way across a dusty patch under the wasp’s power, while Tyrone looked for a twig or stick to consider poking them with. Several yards away, just where the weeds began again, was the mound of freshly dug soil that marked the entrance to the wasp’s newest nest. By the time Tyrone returned his attention to them, he was too late. He located the huge wasp just as she was tucking her way into the mound she’d dug. What Tyrone didn’t know was that it was but one of many where she was systematically laying a single egg alongside a paralyzed cicada, the latter of which would soon enough be the food source for her hatching larvae.

An idea came to Tyrone suddenly, and so he dashed off to the back porch and returned a few minutes later with an empty mason jar. Sweat was beading profusely on his arms and face, both from the heat and the excitement. He knelt once more over the nest, and, turning the jar upside down, he pressed it into the dry earth to completely encapsulate the small hole.

It wasn’t a long wait at all, only moments, before the killer wasp emerged from her egg’s nest. At first she wasn’t aware of her predicament, and so went on with the business at hand. Instinctively and methodically she filled the hole back in, briefly examining her work once finished. Satisfied, she suddenly took to flight only to thump unexpectedly against the glass. She fell back, stunned for a few seconds, but then quickly made several mad sorties to gain freedom. In each vain effort she was rebuffed by the trap Tyrone had placed her within. Like some malevolent deity entertained by his devious trick, Tyrone giggled and tapped the glass with his stick to torment the lesser thing at his mercy.

Tyrone spent several minutes continuing that torture before the pastime began to lose its appeal. The wasp had spent herself and now only walked in crazed, desperate circles as she sought some escape along the ground. Less and less could Tyrone goad her into taking flight by tapping the Mason jar. Then the boy had another idea. Leaping to his feet he dashed off down the road to find some playmates to share his discovery with.

It was a short while later when he returned with two other boys in tow.

“It’s a biggin’ I’m tellin’ ya!” Tyrone promoted as he persuaded the two to follow him even though they already were.

“Uh-huh.”

“Yeah, right,” his two incredulous would-be spectators said, sharing in their doubts of Tyrone’s boast.

“This big!” he squealed, straining the thumb and index finger of his small hand as wide as they could span.

The larger of the two boys waved him off dismissively followed by a great dissenting huff.

“Here…lookie here,” Tyrone said triumphantly.

But as he crouched down to the jar, he realized, much to his chagrin, that there was nothing to be seen inside.

The two others bent in as well and immediately chastised Tyrone for wasting their time.

“They ain’t no wasp! Why you always gotta be fibbin’, Tyrone?” the larger of the two said. He turned to his friend. “C’mon, we goin’ fishin’.” With that, they high-tailed off down the road into the wavering mirage of heat, running as wildly with flailing arms as if Tyrone had unleashed his mythical wasp upon them. The larger boy ran so hard, in fact, that it appeared the soles of his shoes were striking the backs of his pants.

“You’ll see,” was all Tyrone could manage in his defense.

He turned his attention back to the jar and that’s when Tyrone noticed that the hole had been re-dug. Piled loosely up against one side of the jar was a little mound of freshly excavated dirt.

“I know you in there,” Tyrone said angrily. He began to rap the side of the jar with his stick. He was greatly pleased when the irritated wasp made her re-appearance and began to madly attack the glass in a renewed effort to reach her tormentor. “See, I tol’ ya!” Tyrone screamed after the two boys. But they were already long gone around the nearby bend in the road.

“Stupid bug,” Tyrone berated it for failing him.

He was trying to decide if he could get a lid to attempt to catch it, but fretted over the possibility of getting himself stung, when the wasp disappeared back down into its nest. Before the creature could exit again, Tyrone yanked up the jar and used the toe of his weathered tennis shoe to cave the tunnel in and pack the earth hard, dooming the cicada killer wasp alongside her egg and the prey it would never survive to hatch and consume.

Somewhat satisfied with himself, Tyrone tossed the jar into the nearby weeds and sulked off to look for some new thing to catch his fancy.

It was sad to say, but Jimbo was his given name. And considering the full breadth of his given name, Jimbo Henry David Dillard, he didn’t need a nickname; although between his gap-tooth mouth, harelip lisp, and the company he kept, folks thereabout could have certainly expected one. That his father was completely lacking in intellect, while his mother thought otherwise, made for a fitting family tree considering the fruit that had fallen from it.

From his earliest days as a toddler—perched awkwardly on his white trash mother’s boney hip while her sweaty beer rested on the other—Jimbo drooled and caterwauled as his mother screamed and applauded her brother’s hate-laden tent revival sermons beneath sweltering lights. In his mid-twenties, he would come into his own to strut those makeshift stages festooned in his white miter. The dull and dumb inexplicably found Jimbo to be their beacon of reason and inspiration, perhaps because they saw themselves in him. So much so, that one even went so far as to name both his second and fourth sons Jimbo in his hero’s honor. After all, it was Jimbo Henry David Dillard’s message, that theirs was the superior race, God’s own chosen people, that excited and inspired them so, not his diction. The ignorant hung on his every spit-showering word.

“What’s that there, Jimbo?” Tom Robert, or TR as he was known, Jimbo’s shadow of a lackey, asked of the bottle cap being kicked about by Jimbo’s boot.

“What?”

“I just wondered what that was,” TR said of the bent RC Cola top at Jimbo’s feet.

TR knew exactly what it was. But TR was a grown man who was a dog needing a master. His mother, tired of him after five others, had said as much, except not quite so kindly. When he was young and a weak sort, always in pursuit of praise, a reason to be underfoot, she’d said he had the heart of a bitch. Repeated it, in fact, twice over. A stupid woman, she thought it something of a compliment, or if not that, an encouragement. His family latched on. TR became even less than the family runt he already was. A few uncles and an older brother had their way and everyone turned a blind eye.

“What?” Jimbo asked again, but this time his eyes followed TR’s to discover the bottle cap.“Goddamned bottle cap, ya magnanimous thit,” he barked in his thick lisp.

Some folks might endeavor to learn a new word each day. Jimbo was one of these few, although his commitment only took him halfway. Just remembering the word was too often enlightenment enough for Jimbo. Definitions and proper usage would be more hit or miss. Regardless, new words found their way into his conversational repertoire. Sometimes he even got lucky and pronounced his newfound vocabulary correctly. Not that it mattered. In the social circles Jimbo moved in, hardly anyone—with the exception perhaps of Miles Perkins, the Feed ‘n’ Grain proprietor—would second guess him or know better. This was the case mostly due to their poor education, but even more so because Jimbo would have split their noses open for the insult.

“I don’t care for RC none,” TR confessed to Jimbo’s deaf ears.

“What elth?” Jimbo pressed.

“An’ root beer. I hate, hate, hate root beer. Leaves an after—”

“What? No, you thick thit,” Jimbo interrupted. “What elth you know about Sayre and his nigger bitch?” He kicked the bottle cap away off of the loading dock. The other men pressed in to better hear more. The other, Wes ‘Nugget’ Crocker, held back and looked away.

They’d known each other since high school, from which two—Jimbo and TR—had been shuffled through to graduation. Not that either had learned anything much beyond automotive repair and a smattering of woodworking. The other two, Wes Crocker and Jeffery Pritchard, had both dropped out during the same week of their sophomore year, but each for entirely different reasons.

Jeffery was a sad excuse for anything except an excuse, as folks who knew him were often heard to say. His mother had been put in the ground twenty years earlier when he was only ten years old. She’d been violently kicked down the stairs by Jeffery’s father, her broken neck mistakenly blamed on her alcoholism. Jeffery had witnessed the murder, and he occasionally reminisced mournfully on the crime when drunk. Almost everyone believed him, but no one did so much as lift a finger to dial a phone to do a thing about it. After all, Jeffery’s father was a retired pastor.