An Evil Doctor, his floozy nurse and 8000 roaches

From the novel, The Yankee Doctor, by R. Harper Mason.

It's the summer of 1944 and a new doctor has moved to Norphlet. Everybody is excited and glad to see him---but Richard and John Clayton. The boys overhear a conversation between the doctor and his floozy nurse. He's been run out of town in Vermont for dealing drugs and now he's in Norphlet preparing to do the same thing. The doctor finds out the boys know about his scheme, and he is determined to get the boys sent to reform school. In desperation the boys decide to try and run him out of town.


….We dashed across the street, stopping at the office door to look around, to be sure nobody could see us, and as John Clayton held the door open, I ran in and dumped a bunch―oh, I don’t know, maybe about thirty-five or forty pounds―of roaches on the floor behind Miss Tina’s desk. Wow, them roaches was so glad to get outta that sack, that they were scurrying all over the office, climbing up the desk legs, and fanning out all across the floor by the time I got back to the door. I closed the door real softly, John Clayton jammed a flat piece of wood under the bottom of the door, and we started back toward the patch of weeds.
“Hey, John Clayton,” I hissed as we ran, “I’ve still got quite a few roaches in this sack. I guess some of ’em held on to the sack when I tried to dump ’em out.”
“Richard, look, that’s Doctor Carl’s car! See if it’s unlocked!”
“It’s unlocked!”
“Dump the rest of the roaches in the car.”
I opened the car door of that big old Buick and shook the toe sack real good. Shoot, there were a whole lot more roaches in that sack than I thought, and before I could shut the door they was scurrying all over the front seat and even crawling up the dashboard. I shut the door, hurried back to the patch of weeds, and waited for Miss Tina to come back to the front office. In a couple of minutes roaches started climbing up the window and door facing, and even though we were across the street crouched down in a patch of weeds, we could see roaches all over the office. Then it just hit me like a brick: “Oh my god, John Clayton, there’re too many―way, way too many! They’re everywhere! I told you thirty-five pounds of roaches was too many!”
“What? No, you didn’t. In fact, I had to stop you, or we’d have had forty or fifty pounds of roaches.”
“Oh, lord, seven or eight thousand roaches in that little office,” I mumbled.
We were in a panic now and as we watched roaches climb up the plate glass window, my heart was beating so hard I could hear it, and John Clayton started whining about how much trouble we were gonna be in, and how this little trick was gonna get us sent straight to reform school. Right at that moment I wanted more than anything else in the whole, entire world just to have those roaches back in that toe sack, but it was too late―way too late.
Well, we waited and waited and nothing happened; well, except the roaches had spread out to where you could see them almost covering everything in the office. Where was Miss Tina? Evidently Miss Tina and Doctor Carl had a long talk or something, because she stayed and stayed in the back room.
The more we waited the more John Clayton whined, “Dang, Richard, maybe all the roaches will leave if she stays out a little longer.”
“Nahaa, they can’t go nowheres but in that one little room, and man, thirty-five pounds of roaches is a heck of a lot of roaches.” When I said that I had a little choking feeling, but I tried to act as if the eight thousand roaches in that little office didn’t bother me a whit.
“Oh, oh, oh,” moaned John Clayton.
Just then Miss Tina stepped outta the back room and started toward her desk. Her hair looked a little messed up and she was straightening her dress, and I guess she didn’t look down or pay no attention to the floor ’cause she just went straight back to her desk, sat down and started going through some papers. Nothing happened at all. She just started working and me and John Clayton looked at each other in shock.
“Where are all the roaches?” I whispered.
“Maybe they all ran off because she was in the back so long.”
Then Miss Tina lit a cigarette, started to lean back in her chair, and then, whoa, look out Trigger!—things just went crazy.
“Ahaaaaaaaa! Ohaaaaaaaa! Eeeeeeeeeee! Eeeee! Eeeee! Eeee!”
First, there was a bunch of hair-raising screams, which you could’ve heard ten miles away, and Miss Tina jumped up from her desk, slapped her legs, and danced around while she screeched at the top of her lungs. Shoot, that cigarette just flew outta her hand and she hopped around in them highheeled shoes like some wild Indian, but you know something? You can’t dance on a roach carpet because when you step on maybe six or eight roaches at one time it gets real slick on your shoe, and sure enough, there was another whoop and Miss Tina hit the floor. Well, we watched her go down with arms waving and legs kicking and then―my gosh―there was another scream like nothing I’ve ever heard in my whole entire life, and then she jumped up, and I’ll swear on a stack of Bibles, there was roaches all over her. Well, I ain’t never seen anybody slap and yell so much all at the same time. Course, we’d been kinda shocked to start with because Miss Tina was so wild, but after she fell down and jumped up with roaches all over her we rolled on the ground laughing.
“Ahaaaaa, help, help, ahaaaaaa, Carl, come here! There’re roaches everywhere! Ahaaaaaaa, oh, Carl, they’re on my legs! Ahaaaaaaa!”

Part one of a three part blog