The Bug Lady

The Bug Lady

Robb White

Lonny went into autopilot, thinking only a single thought piped from his neocortex: Escape! He fumbled with the keys trying to start the engine; it cranked, died. He tried lifting his arm to pull the door latch but it was made of lead and wouldn’t obey. He was too weak to get out and run anyway.

He slumped lower in the seat, looking between gaps in the steering wheel. Kids on bikes yelled at one another passing him. He couldn’t hear what they were saying, all talking at once. Happy, carefree—how he and Jory used to be as kids.

A time before drugs, before petty crimes that got them both jugged and turned them into people no one wanted to know. Blips of pain canceled thought, strange sounds his body seemed to be making on its own. Suddenly, release, a vivid memory of a summer day he and Jory went bass fishing on the river. Jory’s cast going awry as usual, bouncing off an overhead willow branch and hanging there. The red-and-white spoon, the swamp rot of the riverbank, the suffocating humidity that prickled his skin—a treble hook dangling from a branch. Jory yanked and the whiplashing lure stuck in his back. Jory pried it loose with his filleting knife.

His words floated inside as if transmitted through time to come out the speaker: Good on you, Lon. You didn’t cry out . . .”

Lonny, Hey, Lonny! You hearin’ me . . .

Lonny Birdsong didn’t hear his cousin Jory Perkins calling because he was busy ransacking the old woman’s dresser in the downstairs bedroom where the family had moved her after first stroke. The corpse remained undiscovered for a week. Cadaver flies filled the house by the time her body was discovered a week after her last stroke, the one that ended her life alone in her house. She’d fallen to the floor after taking a bath and lay there decomposing in the bathroom. By the time cops were called to for a welfare check, every orifice in the old lady’s face had been plugged with insect eggs. The responding officer thought she was alive at first because of the seething maggots. The casket had to be closed.

Jory spotted her obituary in the Herald-Tribune, moving his lips as he read.

“Hey, Lon, check this out. Her nephew from out-of-state donated her collection of first editions to the university library where she taught.”

“What’s that got to do with the price of tea in China?”

Lonny favored his mother’s sayings, although he didn’t know what half of them meant.

“It means, you moron, she had some bucks. The old gal probably has valuables lying around.”

“Good news for the nephew. I say again, what’s that got to do—”

           “Says here, listen up. ‘Professor Eleanor Stoker was a nationally recognized entomologist.”

“What’s that mean, ‘en-to-something’?”

“Who cares? If she’s famous, she’s rich.”

“Then why are we sitting around here on our asses when we could be hauling off the old bird’s swag?”

Lonny fancied himself the brains of their criminal duo.

“Because, ahem, says here, the funeral’s today. That means everyone’s out to Greenlawn Cemetery in Kingsville right about an hour from now.”

“What else does the paper say? Maybe help us get a jump on where she stashed some expensive stuff.”

Jory read on in his maddening, one-syllable-at-a-time style, stumbling over the big words. Lonny understood that the old woman had a degree in bugs and the State Bureau of Criminal Investigation routinely consulted her as a forensic specialist in larval dating at crime scenes.

Jory laughed.

“What’s funny?”

“Says she wrote this mon-o-graph of the “cheese skipper,” the Piophila casei”—which Jory spelled out.

“What is that—another bug?”

           “Some fly attracted to decaying matter.”

“Like your brain, cousin. I thought it was just cuz you don’t shower none in summers.”

“Funny, ha-ha.” Jory was used to jokes about his B.O. “Bet you won’t laugh much when I come out of there with my arms full of jewels.”

The cousins did time in county for breaking into people’s houses when the mourning family was at graveside. The Trib called them “cemetery robbers.” Lonny knew all the places to look—places where frightened old people liked to stash their coin collections and other valuables. The only reading Jory did was to scan obituaries for the deceased so they could figure out when houses would be vacant while the family was away at the funeral. Lonny even created a phony Facebook page so they could “friend” as many people as possible for that off-chance when some naïve social butterfly or media chatterbox posted vacation photos.  

“This door’s locked,” Jory called out, once they were inside. Lonnie was already busy rooting among a dozen shawls and certificates of recognition she had stored beneath them.

“Well, bust her open! Jeez, I got you tell you everything?”

“Jory?”

“Keep your shirt on. I’m lookin’ for a pry bar.”

“You ain’t gonna find it in there, knucklehead.”

Jory returned with a decorative brass fireplace poker. “This oughta do. Might be worth something at the salvage yard.”

“Just hurry up. That funeral ain’t gonna last all day.”

Jory jammed the beveled edge of the poker tip into the door and threw his weight into it.

The door popped open.

“Gotcha!”

Lonny stood behind him holding up his hand, a key dangling from his index finger.

“Lookee here, dummy. Key’s layin’ right in that bowl on the sideboard all the time.”

“Whatever. Let’s see what the old girl’s tryin’ to hide on us.”

“Age before beauty.”

The room was in semi-darkness. Thick drapery hung over the windows. Lonny slapped the wall switch but nothing happened. It looked like a storage room for odds-and-ends: stacks of books, magazines, clothing on portable racks, more ceramic knickknacks—a cluttered mess. Weirdest of all was a table of glass tanks, all empty. Sun lamps sat atop a pair of cabinets pointed at a couple of the glass cases.

“The old lady was one of them whatchamacallits—misers.”

“Hoarders,” Lonny corrected.

“Lookit all this crap!” He kicked a stack of magazines that toppled to the floor and laughed. “Just a buncha junk in here. No antiques, like you said was gonna be. Them fish tanks ain’t even got fish in ‘em.”

He lifted a smaller tank by an edge and made a goofy face at his cousin; then he let the tank slip from his fingertips, the glass smashing into pieces that shot around the floor.

“You tryin’ to get us caught, idiot?”

           Jory liked to ham it up on their capers.

“Funny I don’t hear no sirens comin,’ cuz.”

“Quit clownin’ around and get to work. Woman musta been goofier than Wallace’s flying frog. Fish tanks, no fish.”

“One of these days,” Jory said, moving some boxes, “I’m hopin’ you might explain that saying of your momma’s means.”

A sudden scuttling sound from the corner made Lonny jump; he collided with a stack of cardboard boxes and sent the pile tumbling to the floor. College diplomas and certificates spilled out. 

“What was that? A rat?”

           “Didn’t sound like no rat to me,” Jory said. “Or else a mighty big one.”

“Dog maybe,” Lonny whispered, inching backward a step.

“Who’d keep a guard dog locked up in a room?”

“What’s that smell?”

Jory noticed it, too. More than a long closed-up room. An odor penetrated his nostrils through the still air released from the pent-up silence of a dusty stillness. Feral, like an animal’s, but a pungency mixed with a more rancid smell of rotting food. Another, stronger smell rose above the rest like a foul cloud of decomposition. Jory got a whiff of it that reminded him of roadkill in high summer before you got too close.

Another scuttling sound like fingernails on a board from the opposite corner. A comical scramble of the two men, both flailing, attempting to escape, ensued. Lonny emerged first; Jory—a step behind—fell backward onto the living room carpet. He kicked the door shut.

“What the hell was that?”

“I ain’t gonna worry about it,” Jory said, leaping to his feet. “Grab that TV set and let’s go!”

“Go take a dump in your hat,” Lonny replied. “I’m bookin’ it right now!”

“Wait!”

           His cousin’s command stopped Lonny halfway into the kitchen. He was about to thrust a leg up to the sink where they’d entered, squeezing through a window after slicing the screen and punching in the glass with a towel wrapped around a fist.

“Wait? Wait! What the hell for?”

“Think about this,” Jory replied, hands up, placating. “She locked whatever’s in there up so it musta been worth something to her—something she didn’t want no one else to have.”

“What about that smell? Stunk like somebody died in there.”

“We both seen dead people before, right? Ain’t no big thing.”

“Yeah, but they’s all been relatives, fixed up nice and pretty in the caskets. Paper said she was dead in this house a full week.”

“You go, you lose,” Jory said. “Whatever’s in there’s gonna be all mine now.”

“Hold on. I ain’t said I wasn’t interested in checking it out.”

They re-entered the room, eyes of both men boxing the room, edging toward the smell, rubbery like skunk but lighter. Lonny lifted his tee-shirt to cover his mouth and nose. Boxes and containers had to be shoved aside to make a path to the corner of the room.

“What—what is that?”

Jory moved closer, leaned down to look. It looked like a child’s stuffed animal that had gone through the wash and been left to dry on the floor. A viscous halo of grease outlined the desiccated corpse and revealed darker and lighter circles where the drying had occurred over days.

“Got-damn,” Jory cursed. “Some kinda dead animal. Maybe a Guinea pig, a rabbit—I cain’t tell for sure. Looks like it’s been cored like an apple, too.”

“I see another one.” Lonny motioned with the toe of his boot. “Over yonder ‘neath that pile of boxes. Looks like it been drug there.”

A pair of tiny claws stuck out, half-exposed, attached to the shriveled arms of a rodent-like critter. Rigor and time had elongated the arms by shriveling. A trail of ants disappeared beneath the box where the dead animal lay.

“Nothing here but dead pets,” Jory laughed “Whew, like that Stephen King movie, you know—‘cept they ain’t got tombstones—”

“Something’s moving around over there,” Lonny hissed.

Jory moved a chair piled high with clutter out of his way.

“Nothing,” he said. “I don’t see nothing.”

“Hey, look here.” Lonny dug into a nearby cardboard box and came out with a clutch of papers.

“Gimme that.” Jory snatched the pages from him.

Yellowed with age and fragile as an old person’s skin, the sheaf was bound by a large rusty paper clip. He stepped around the debris toward the window and shoved the drapes aside to let light in.

“If it don’t say where the treasure is at, let’s go. We’ve wasted enough time in here.”

Jory twisted his head side to side, his lips moved as he sounded out the words, missing the majority, unable to piece the syntax together to make sense of it.

“Ar-an-has-arm-a-deiras.” He pronounce the last syllable like “dear ass.”

“It’s French, idiot,” Lonny said. “I heard it on the Netflix channel. Them people will be coming back any second while we’re messing around.”

Jory stared at the papers, ignoring him. “Got her name on it, though. She wrote this thing, whatever it says.”

“Who cares she wrote it? Let’s go, man!”

Jory, however, wasn’t going to let an opportunity to show off pass him by.

“Listen to this: ‘Phone—Pho-neu-tria Ni-gri-venter.’ That’s how she starts it out. ‘A genus’ . . . old gal misspelled ‘genius,’ even I know that one. Where was I? ‘The family C-t-e-n-i-d-a-e’ . . . that ain’t no word . . .‘mainly found in northern South America, with one species in Central America. Two species—’ O Lord love a duck, here we go again. ‘Pho-neu-tri-a fera and Pho-neu-tria ni-gri-vent-er, has some of the greatest potential in medical research owing to PhTx three, the para-ly-zing agent . . . boosts nitric oxide . . . activate suppressors in the imm—immune system . . . ALS, lupus, and a host of other neuropathological diseases . . . mumbo-jumbo, mumbo-jumbo.”

“You done, Doctor Jory? That gibberish gave me a headache.”

“Smart old geezer, using all them big words,” Jory said. “I wonder how come she ain’t got nothin’ worth stealing ‘cept that TV out there.”

Lonny picked up a magazine from a pile and rolled it to whack a fly buzzing around his face. He tossed it to the floor; uncurling the front cover revealed a glossy blow-up image on the front cover.

“Oh shit,” he said quietly.

“’Oh shit’ what, cuz?”

He pointed to the magazine lying at Jory’s feet. Jory stooped, picked it up and stared at the same image: a six-inch orange-red spider with its fangs embedded in the fur of an animal the size of a rabbit. Jory read the caption aloud: “‘The Brazilian Wandering Spider feasts on a paca’—whatever that is—‘on the rainforest floor. The Wandering Spider is known for having the deadliest, most painful venom in the world owing to its high concentration of ser-o-to-nin—”

Jory dropped the magazine as if it were infected with invisible virus. The hair prickled to life on the back of his neck. He looked at his cousin, but before he could get a word out, he caught the wide-eyed look of horror on his cousin’s face.

“What—what’re you gawking at me for, Lonny?”

“You—your shoulder. That, it’s on—”

Lonny couldn’t finish the sentence. What he was seeing on his cousin’s shoulder at that moment mesmerized him as much as it terrified him. 

Jory’s eyes popped. He felt a searing, pain lancing the tender flesh of his neck. Instinctively swiping at it, he felt the spindly legs and red jaws. The adrenalin jolt coupled with the pain knocked the air from his lungs and he fell forward, collapsing into a stack of books that had a domino effect on the five other stacks that tumbled toward the door.

“Oh-Oh-Oh, Jesus Gawd Almighty, Lon, h-help me . . . ”

Lonny’s horrified expression unfroze—and he bolted toward the door. The piles of heavy academic books had been knocked strategically to create not only an obstacle but a barrier. Giving no thought to helping his pleading cousin, Lonny flung and tossed books out of his path with a frenzied zeal.

The door remained partially blocked, but he managed to crack it wide enough to squeeze through, scraping his chest raw. Fleeing through the kitchen, Lonny hopped onto the sink and propelled himself out the window, landing on the ground and stumbled across a vacant lot to the place where Jory had parked the Silverado that morning while they watched the relatives leave the house for the funeral ceremony.

Wheezing, hands trembling with fear-induced palsy, Lonny sat in the driver’s seat. Sweat poured down his face, over his back sticking his tee-shirt. A slick sheen of perspiration covered his forehead, which he wiped off, flinging droplets of spray onto the dashboard.

He reached for the key and caught a glimpse in the rearview. A twig on his shoulder.

Something wrong—Not a twig . . . Oh God, I got one on me, too—

The twig moved, its tip fluttered up and down like an aged crone beckoning with a stick finger. Lonny reached a hand up slowly, slowly to dislodge it from its perch. Sensing danger, the big spider retreated to the center of his back, its spiky legs dotting a pinprick trail down his sweaty back like a mountain climber descending with crampons.

Oh Lord, help me now in my hour of greatest need, Lonny silently prayed, the words of a long-ago bible class flooding his memory as if he had just heard them spoken.

His cousin swiping at the massive spider had unleashed its anger. If he didn’t kill it outright by slamming it against the seat back, he’d suffer the same fate. Decision time. It hadn’t moved in seconds that seemed stretched out like taffy. 

Lonny held his breath, closed his eyes, and thrust himself backwards.

The fiery lancing told him better than any words could have that his gamble had failed. Gored by the spider’s fangs as it died in a pulpy mess, its carcass slithered down his back and came to rest on the back of his belt.

Lonny’s mind went blank. He urinated on himself, and began moaning. His eyes caught his face in the rearview. It was like seeing it for the first time. A white rim of circumference lined his mouth like a clown’s painted face or someone about to fall victim to heat stroke. A hot surging fire had been injected into his bloodstream with the spider’s venom.

How long I got? What did that old bug lady’s paper say?

He recalled through a fuzzy red mist his cousin’s monotone droning as he read about the Brazilian Wandering Spider’s fearlessness, its aggression, how it attacked small dogs and leapt from hiding in plants to inflict its bite on passing hikers . . .  

Before the light faded to black, he thought of a girl with freckles across her nose in sixth grade. He carved a Valentine heart on a maple tree near their school and put both their initials inside the heart. When he showed it to her, she said she liked Jory better . . .

“Huh, see him now, you wouldn’t like him all that much.” Lonny spoke to her with a crushed spider sticking to his back. The light faded as the surging fire scorched and clawed its way up his throat.

THE END