The Call of Distant Shores (12 page)

"Damn beer," he whispered, gunning his engine and praying not to see a cop.

Bobby Lee stood, watching his partner depart, then turned back.
 
He didn't head for his own truck, but slid through the door of the metal shed and pulled it tightly closed behind him.
 
Moments later, the night filled with the drone of a thousand mosquitoes, or the grating crackle of cicadas in season.
 
The blood-red sun drenched the skyline and melted to black.

Jasper saw the signs before he was within five miles of his stand.
 
The first one was simple, square and white, black lettering.

"LOOK - 5 MILES"

Then they got progressively larger, and more explicit, as he moved along 17.
 
Jasper didn't take 17 very often, but this morning he'd had to restock his beer cooler in Elizabeth City, so he'd come in the popular route - the way his customers would come in.

"DON'T MISS OUT"

"3 ½ MILES TO YOUR WORST NIGHTMARE"

"2 MILES - THE WORLDS LARGEST AND HARDEST TO KILL"

"ONLY ONE MILE, TURN IN ON LEFT"

"½ MILE TO WORLD'S LARGEST COCKROACH!
 
TURN NOW!"

This last sign was subtitled with the words "Fresh fruit and produce, inquire within."

Jasper turned down the side road and gunned his engine, spinning his tires and shooting dust and gravel into the air so thick he couldn't see the road behind him.
 
He saw that even the dirt road itself hadn't escaped the signs.
 
There were small ones and large ones, some proclaiming TOMATOES and others with large brown roaches, feelers raised high and eyes bugged out,
starin'g
at the road.

When he pulled up in front of his stand, he saw that there was a walkway, flat river stones set into the loose dirt of the field, running around back of the produce stand.
 
A huge, white wooden finger pointed the way around the corner toward the shed in back.
 
Jasper climbed down out of his truck, slammed the door in case by some miracle Bobby Lee hadn't heard him, and followed where that finger pointed.

The shed was transformed.
 
Sometime in the night, Bobby Lee had brought in paint and turned the drab, beige-colored pressed metal into a gleaming, multi-colored monstrosity.
 
The base was black, but there was orange trim, and there were pictures, cockroaches running this way and that, little roach motels in pastel, Miami-Florida
sorta
colors, and to the right of the door a large can of Raid with feet, holding a finger to its button and spraying toward the entrance.

Jasper's jaw dropped, and his legs turned to rubber, but before he could collapse to the newly-lain stone walk, Bobby Lee hurried out the door of the shed and grabbed him by the arm, steadying him.
 
Jasper gaped at his friend, who was wearing a button-down shirt, a clean pair of black pants, a damned
belt
.

"
Wha
..." Jasper never got it out.

"Mornin' partner!" Bobby Lee said.
 
"I did a little
sprucin
' up,
seein
' as how this was our first day in business, and all."

"
Sprucin
'....but..."

Bobby Lee cut him off again.
 
"Don't you worry about it partner.
 
I didn't expect you to be here to help. I just got the bug, you know?
 
Get it?
 
GET IT?"

Bobby Lee was shaking him, and Jasper wished it would stop.
 
He couldn't decide whether he more wanted to collapse to the ground or puke, and the shaking wasn't helping him with the decision.
 
Then Bobby had whirled back toward the front of the produce stand, supporting Jasper by the grip on his arm, and led him back to his rocker.
 
"You don't worry 'bout a thing, Jasper," Bobby was saying.
 
"Any customers show up, you send 'em around back to me.
 
I'll handle it from there.
 
You stay up here, sell the fruit, smile at the people, and watch out for ol' Sheriff Grouse.
 
I expect we'll see him before the day's out.
 
I got his paperwork all finished and signed in my truck, but I
figgered
I'd let him have the satisfaction of
figurin
' he's got us by the balls before I showed it to him."

Mention of the sheriff broke Jasper out of his fog.

"What papers?
 
What did you do, Bobby Lee?
 
Why would the sheriff..."

"Well, you don't think he'll drive down 17 and miss those signs, do you?" Bobby Lee asked, keeping his voice low and slow, like he was talking to a recalcitrant mule.
 
"I tried to get as many out there as I could.
 
Got to
rememberin
' those signs for the biggest ball of string I was
tellin
' you about, and just let my imagination go, you know?"

"When did you sleep?" Jasper asked finally.
 
"My God, Bobby Lee, where did you learn to pain like that..." Jasper waved his hand back in the general direction of the shed and it's not-quite-dry murals, "over yonder?
 
And where in HELL did you get a button-down shirt that had all the buttons?"

Bobby Lee's grin never faded.

"I feel like a new man," Jasper, he said.
 
"I feel like this has been my destiny, you know?
 
Everyone has to find them a place in life, and I reckon I walked into mine when I hit that flea market the other day."

"You was born to rip off suckers on a giant wooden cockroach display?" Jasper asked, trying to sort it all out in his head.
 
"That what you're
sayin
', Bobby Lee?
 
You
tellin
' me your momma raised you and fed you and tried to put you through school just
so's
you could build a home for a giant bug?"

Bobby Lee blinked.
 
Just for a moment, Jasper thought he might be getting through, then the light in Bobby Lee's eyes faded out, and blinked on again, high-beams flashing.
 
"That's exactly what I'm
sayin
', I guess," he replied.
 
"You just send them folks around to see me," he added, "and don't forget to sell them their ticket first."Jasper glanced down to where Bobby's gaze had strayed, and noticed a big roll of paper tickets on the old wood table next to his cooler.
 
The tickets said $5 ADMIT ONE.
 
Jasper shook his head.
 
He was about to comment further when Bobby Lee abruptly turned on his heel and marched back around the corner to his shed.
 
Jasper thought about following to press whatever point was forming in his mind, but something made him sit tight.
 
He didn't want to go into that shed again.
 
He didn't know why, would have denied the sensation altogether if confronted with it, but there it was.
 
He remembered those voices.
 
He remembered the chill, the dampness, and the way his steps had slowed as if he were wading through butter.

Jasper got up, set to work putting out his produce, and pointedly ignored the walkway leading behind his stand – until the people started coming.

Over the next week, the produce stand had become something of a sensation.
 
It seemed like everyone from the Outer Banks and Kitty Hawk to Raleigh and Durham had heard the news.
 
There was a new roadside attraction, and they were flocking to it in droves.
 
Jasper's small garden had proven unable to keep up with the sudden demand for fresh tomatoes and strawberries, and Bobby Lee worked straight through one weekend to get pavers in to create a real parking lot.
 
The road coming in from 17, which had been nothing more than a gravel and dirt side-road, more discouraging than inviting to anything with wheels, had been resurfaced by the county, who were quick to see what the new attraction was doing for the tourist trade and local businesses.

The white signs on the freeway had been replaced by a longer series that ran up and down route 17 and onto some of the bisecting and intersecting roads with exits.
 
In the middle of the bypass on the way to Virginia, there was a huge black sign with dripping green letters proclaiming.

"STRAIGHT FROM THE DEPTHS OF THE GREAT DISMAL SWAMP.
 
NO KITCHEN IS SAFE - NO TRASH CAN IS SACRED.
 
HE'S BIG - HE'S THE BIGGEST DURNED COCKROACH IN THE WORLD - 18 Miles, South 17.
 
FRESH PRODUCE - T-SHIRTS - SOUVENIRS - PEANUTS."

The sign featured a giant, comical bug, crawling over the top of the letters, huge antennae blocking the long, flat view of cotton fields beyond.
 
It was only one of many signs, and it wasn't kidding about a bit of it.
 
Racks of t-shirts lined the front of the parking lot.
 
The produce stand itself had grown, incorporating a double-wide trailer with siding that housed vats and bins of rubber and plastic cockroaches and giant mosquitoes, rubber snakes and bumper stickers that said, "I Saw It and Lived" and other such things.
 
Jasper's mind was whirling so fast form one new thing to the next that he nearly forgot the shed out back, and what lay within.

He sat out front every day, watching them come and go, curious coming and sort of dazed-and-glazed going.
 
They bought the shirts, and the produce, bags of peanuts and handfuls of rubber bugs.
 
Jasper had never had so much money in his life, and, for once there didn't seem to be a legal reason he couldn't keep it.

But as things settled into a rhythm, and he had some time to sit and watch them come and go, little things began to itch at him.
 
Bobby Lee, for one thing.
 
The man never slept.
 
As far as Jasper could tell, Bobby Lee had not slept a wink since the first day he'd brought the damned cockroach to the stand.
 
It didn't show.
 
Bobby Lee was always smiling, always moving, working, and scheming. The shed out back had grown a foundation of concrete blocks that raised it a good four feet higher off the ground, for instance, and it had happened, seemingly, overnight.
 
There was no sign that Bobby Lee had hired for the work done, or that anyone else had an idea how it might have happened, but the next morning Bobby Lee was as fresh as a daisy and ready for anything.
 
So he said.

Jasper had seen the difference the minute he pulled into his reserved spot at the front of the lot.
 
There had already been three families in from Raleigh, waiting for the cockroach exhibit to open, parked in the lot.
 
The shed, which should have been, as always, hidden by the structure of the produce stand itself, was clearly visible, rising into the sky to a height it should not have attained.
 
Jasper had nearly run over a stand full of t-shirts staring at it.

Ignoring the calls and questions of the customers, waiting on him to open, he ran around the corner to the shed.
 
Bobby Lee stepped quickly through door, as if he'd been waiting for his partner to arrive, smiling broadly and waving at the new foundation with a flourish of one brawny arm.

"Well, what do you think?
 
I got to
worryin
' over hurricanes and the like, thought I might get '
er
fixed into the ground a little more permanently."

Jasper stared up at the ludicrously tall structure and frowned.
 
His mind was framing all sorts of questions, most of them starting with the words "How in the HELL," but none of them would quite make the journey to his lips.
 
He stepped forward toward the doorway, and reached around to where he knew the light switch was mounted on the wall, but before he could flick it, Bobby Lee grabbed him by the arm.

"You might not want to do that," Bobby Lee said softly.

The touch of Bobby Lee's hand on his arm was cold.
 
Where their skin met felt like ice had been packed in under Jasper's skin.
 
He heard the scuttling of what his mind conjured into a mound of thousands of crustaceous, squirming bodies.
 
He stared into the shadowed interior of the shed, and more tiny glittering pinpoints of light than the stars in a cloudless summer's night sky winked back at him – then were gone.
 
Something huge and hulking centered the shed, larger than the cockroach itself could possibly be, twelve, maybe fifteen feet in the air, instead of seven.
 
The interior of that
shed
had a cold draft, and the scent of the place was dank and sweet with rot.
 
Like the swamp.

Jasper reeled back from the stench, yanking his arm free of Bobby Lee's grip.
 
His partner was still smiling, but the smile was brittle, and for the first time Jasper looked deeper into his friend's eyes.
 
They were bright, far too bright to be natural.
 
His skin was sun-dried to the point of being leathery – or even papery.
 
And the cold.