The Cockroaches of Stay More by Harington Donald

Author:Harington, Donald [Harington, Donald]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: AmazonEncore
Published: 2011-08-04T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter twenty-one

Hit’s pourin down pitchforks, cats and dogs!” Jack observed, flinching from the pelting rain. He didn’t mind the wet, which couldn’t penetrate his cutin, but the force of the heavy drops kept knocking him off his gitalongs, and the drops were cold.

Josie thought, which kept her from minding the long hike. “Do some folks think that cats and dogs fall with the rain?” she asked, and belched.

“Huh?” said Jack. “Naw, that’s jist one a them ole sayins, pourin down cats and dogs. You ever see a dog fall from the sky?”

“I aint never seen a dog,” Josie said, and tripped over a pebble of sandstone and fell down.

“You still drunk as a fiddler’s bitch?” Jack asked her, helping her to her gitalongs. He wasn’t exactly sober himself, but they would never get home if his old lady didn’t stop falling down and asking dumb questions and burping like a grasshopper.

“What’s a fiddler’s bitch?” Josie asked.

“Aw, that’s jist a breed of dog,” he said. “Now shut up, Maw, and watch where you’re going.” He raised a limb of grass to clear her sniffwhips, then passed under himself. It was hard going. Ever since the previous night, except for the bright daylight hours which had forced them to seek darkness in an abandoned ants’ burrow, they had been making their way slowly homeward from the Lord’s Garden and Refuse Pile, where they had been lost for the entire length of time it took them to sober up enough to walk. Jack would never forget the terror of those impossibly long moments he was airborne, inside the beer can hurtling into the unknown, the dregs of beer swirling all around and over them and getting into their mouths and spiracles, and the weightlessness that went on and on, until, with a horrible jolt and crash, the can landed amidst a pile of other cans, not just empty beer cans but cans of emptied pork and beans, cans of emptied pineapple, cans of emptied ravioli, cans of emptied 30 w motor oil. If I hadn’t of been a Ingledew, Jack told himself, I would of been westered shore as shootin. They had spent hours recovering from the crash, sustained by nothing more than whatever beer remained in the can, quite a lot of it, and then they had found their way out through the opening of the lid of the can, which fortunately lay on its side, and had found themselves among all those other cans, the exploration of which, and the escape from which, had consumed all of the rest of their night.

The Lord’s Refuse Pile was a fabulous place, and Jack was determined to return with his whole family there on an outing and picnic, some night when the weather was fair. Tonight the weather was awful unfair, and the flashes of lightning had panicked Josie and driven Jack not into complete sobriety but into a partial cure of his hangover. There was so much illumination from the sky’s electrical display

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