Rotters

by Daniel Kraus

  “I don’t know,” I said. “They could be at home. My dad didn’t tell me.”

  At the mention of my father, her tongue again retreated to her cheek. She was clearly weighing her words. “Everything going okay out there?”

  Without hesitation I lied. “Yeah. It’s just that we didn’t get to talk before he left for work. He must’ve forgotten to give me my books.”

  She took off her glasses. They dangled around her neck on a pearled chain. “It does say here he picked them up on Friday.” She sighed again and rubbed her forehead. “Talk to him tonight, find those books. For the time being I’m going to give you a replacement folder. It’s got some information about the school, dress code, instructions about your computer access, all that stuff. There’s a salmon-colored packet in there about extracurricular activities, too. You like sports?”

  I just stared at the folder she had in her hands.

  “I like band,” I said.

  She flapped a hand. “Well, hon, it’s all in your salmon packet. I’m going to give you this pen, too, because it looks like you need one.” She opened the folder, tucked the pen inside the pocket, and slid it across the counter. She gave me another lingering look, then briskly lodged her glasses on her face. “You should be able to survive today. You have any problems, you come see me. My name’s Laverne, like the TV show.”

  I picked up my class schedule. With my other hand I took the folder. It was red, white, and black, and had an icon of a plummeting bird with its claws splayed for attack. BLOUGHTON SCREAMING EAGLES was printed in a collegiate font.

  “Thank you,” I said. I turned away from Laverne, my face buried in my schedule. Room 214. Up the stairs. English. Mr. Pratt. I stepped into the reverberating dimness of the hallway. My forehead struck something hard—someone’s chest.

  “Sorry,” I said. Moving aside, I saw that it was Woody Trask. The sly smile had not left his face.

  “The Garbageman is your dad?” he asked.

  Sixteen years I had gone without knowing my father’s name, and here suddenly was a town where everyone seemed to have an opinion on him. I blinked a few times. I could not fathom why this person was speaking to me. He was big, blandly handsome, and obviously into sports—a profile that did not at all match my own. But I needed a friend, and badly.

  I attempted an easygoing smile. “I’m Joey Crouch.” I held out my hand. It was a risk, but also a necessary reach from the precipice.

  Woody Trask regarded my hand as if it were a fly pestering his vision. His lip curled. “Must be shitty having such a shithole for a dad,” he said, stepping away and heading for the stairs in giant animal lopes, two textbooks dangling from a single monster hand. Before disappearing, he cringed. “By the way, dude, you fucking stink.”

  7.

  I DIDN’T SEE HER in English class; Mr. Pratt accepted my late entry wordlessly and gestured to a seat directly in front, so I never had a chance to look behind me, and her name on the roll call meant nothing. I didn’t see her in calculus because she wasn’t there. It was biology where I saw her for the first time, striding in with a pencil in her hair and the hard plane of her textbook slanting against the curvature of her chest. She was dark-lipped and black-haired with Egyptian eyes, and wore a loose yellow dress that softened the withering severity of her features. She sat down across the room from me and spoke secrets to the girls who fell in place around her. Somehow the geometric bracket of her chair made her all the more beautiful; I could see how her lower back arced away from the plastic and how the cruel flatness of the seat accented the teardrop of her rear, and as she switched her legs I could see the tender underskin of her knees unseal and reseal with sweat. I didn’t want to speak to her or meet her. I just wanted to watch her for the rest of my life.

  Mr. Gottschalk took attendance. Justin Ambrose’s first name had been misprinted Justine on all the attendance sheets, and this was the third class in which I had to watch him shrug off the chuckles. The next name called was Celeste Carpenter, and she, the girl, raised her hand. A tiny woven bracelet fell from her wrist to the swell of her arm. Celeste—that name rang a bell, but how could I possibly know her? I leaned forward, trying to see around dozens of uglier bodies, but from where I sat, only the barest outline of her face was visible.

  “There’s no Joey Crouch? Going once, going twice …”

  How long had he been saying my name? Seeing Gottschalk go back to his list, I raised my hand and blurted, “Here!”

  Nearly everyone in the room turned. I was met with the faces of my new life: inquisitive, territorial, bored, amused. I felt the red that colored my face, remembered my stupid duck-in-sunglasses T-shirt. I couldn’t help it: I looked at Celeste Carpenter. She had found me as well.

  Gottschalk looked up. He was a short, thick man with a triangle of dark hair rising from the top of his head. There was something swollen about his face, as if the underlying structure had been made from tied balloons, then painted over with skin. “Mr. Crouch, splendid of you to join us!” He bent his balloon-animal face. “The name is unfamiliar. I take it you are new?”

  I nodded but was so far away I couldn’t be sure that he saw it.

  “Stand up,” he said.

  I gripped my desk. It felt scummy, hard, and real—unlike this moment.

  “Mr. Crouch,” he said. “Do as I say. Stand up.”

  I slid sideways from the chair and stood. My vision rocked. Far below, students’ eyes twinkled up like street-lamps.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, this is what we call a teachable moment,” said Gottschalk. “Observe Mr. Crouch. This is his first day here. He is ill at ease. These feelings incite within him distress. But this is not psychology class—that’s upstairs with Mrs. Keaton. This is biology, and what we’re interested in here is how the exercises of the mental induce actualities of the physical. So take a look at Mr. Crouch. What do you see?”

  My arms hung flat at my sides. I stared at the teacher, afraid to look anywhere else. There was giggling, but no one said anything.

  “I only know two of your names thus far, so I’m forced to call on Mr. Ambrose, Mr. Justin Without-an-E Ambrose,” said Gottschalk. “Mr. Ambrose, meet Mr. Crouch. Tell me what you see.”

  There was an edginess to Justin’s appearance that I had seen too many times before. It was the desperate look of the bullied finally given occasion to bully. I braced myself.

  “I see sweat?” Justin ventured. The class roared as if prompted by a maestro. I reached one hand to steady myself against my chair but it was too many miles away. Justin was right, of course. The stains from my morning run still shadowed my pits. I felt a drop of perspiration clinging to an eyelash and I tried not to blink. I see tears! I could almost hear Justin Ambrose’s jubilation.

  “Very good!” said Gottschalk over the merriment. “Sweat, aka transpiration: courtesy of the good old hypothalamus, the body generates water as a means of thermoregulation, a process that cools us as the sweat evaporates, keeping things cozy enough that we can continue to hunt the savage beast or, in the case of the female, suckle the brood.”

  He looked down at his attendance sheet. “Miss Carpenter, I’m afraid it’s up to you. Look at Mr. Crouch and kindly supply us with a description.”

  A low groan of pleasure gusted through the class. Dozens of smiling faces banked to Celeste, who blinked her night eyes at the teacher, then slowly turned her face to me. Distantly I heard the clock at the front of the room tick. The compulsion to specify tugged at my gut and I fought it.

  “In case you need glasses, Miss Carpenter,” Gottschalk said, “Mr. Crouch is the sweaty one swooning at the back of the class. Take a look and tell us what you see.”

  Perfect lips parted.

  “I see a boy,” she said.

  An uneasy, possibly disappointed noise nickered through the rows of students. “Diplomatic, Miss Carpenter,” said Gottschalk. “Diplomatic but also correct. He is—we can presume, anyhow—a boy, which enacts its own particular set of pheromonal influ
ences when it comes to producing that sticky mix of water and solute that we can see glistening from all the way across the room. Other acceptable answers would’ve included the bags under his eyes or the blemishes on his skin; the origins of which, I promise you, we will get to in due time. We have, after all, all semester.” He turned back to the attendance list. “You can sit, Mr. Crouch. A-plus for the day.”

  8.

  A BOY. IT HAD sounded good coming from her, but standing in the hallway watching two hundred kids funnel into the lunch line and stream into the cafeteria coop, the two words rang in my ears as something more demeaning. Not a man, not even a young man, but a boy. I felt it, too: here was a simple human endeavor—lunch—and I was too scared to move.

  After having bought snacks on the Amtrak, I had less than ten dollars left in my wallet, and much of that was in change. My mother’s meager fortune, as well the proceeds from the auction of her belongings, was inaccessible to me for two more years. For now, this was it: eight dollars and thirty-three cents. I flipped through the bills as covertly as possible, but still people looked my way.

  The line got shorter. I moved to the counter, accidentally ordered too much, and used almost every cent to pay for it. The woman at the register watched bemusedly while I counted out change.

  Waiting until everyone else had gone first was a mistake, I saw that right away. Although this school was much smaller than my previous one, instead of splitting lunch into separate periods they tossed everyone together, grades nine through twelve. The tables seethed with feeding. There was nowhere safe to sit without impinging on claimed territory.

  I wanted to flee, but my stocked tray had already been noted by too many people. I’m too old for this, I told myself as I began walking down the center of the room. I swept my eyes from side to side while trying to look as if I couldn’t care less. There was a seat—but I’d have to squeeze in between two girls. There was another one with better elbow room—but the bleary-eyed punks who had commandeered it looked less than inviting. I was nearing the end of the room. To double back would be disaster.

  Impulsively I sat. The two boys nearest me were younger. “Hey,” I grunted, nodding curtly to indicate that conversation was not necessary. The kid at my elbow edged away like I had leprosy, but the boy across from me pushed a response past his pizza. I stared down at my food, recognizable shapes in autumn colors. None of it looked edible.

  “Hey, Crouch!” It was a shout from the next table over: Woody Trask, smacking his lips. He swallowed and grinned, his perfect white smile marred with something green. There was snickering from the guys around him, while the girls rolled their eyes and covered their faces. My heart sank to see Celeste Carpenter sitting to Woody’s right.

  “Hey,” I responded weakly, turning back to my tray.

  “I’ve got a few questions I’d like to ask you,” Woody said. “If you have a moment, that is.”

  My eyes caught those of the boy sitting across from me. He glared, furious that I had drawn such harassment to his table. I wanted to tell him that I didn’t know Woody Trask and had not done anything wrong, but he grabbed his tray and left. I picked up my silverware and stared at it, feeling the bench fluctuate as two or three other boys fled the table.

  “It’s no big thing,” Woody said. “I just want to do a little fact-checking. Now, the Garbageman, he’s your dad, right?”

  I could almost hear Gottschalk’s narration: The chemicals raging inside of Mr. Crouch, ladies and gentlemen, are a disgusting but nevertheless normal part of the physiology of the teenage male. There were a number of ways this could end, all of them bad. My mind shuttled through the options. My best hope, I determined, was to say nothing at all. With luck, by tomorrow Woody would choose a new target.

  The cheeriness of his voice flattened. “I’m talking to you, Crouch.”

  “Crotch?” sputtered a different voice. “Trask, did you just call that kid Crotch?” I glanced up. A behemoth sat to Woody’s left, slobbering over a cupcake, his head the size, color, and texture of a shaved pig. I distantly recalled a teacher referring to him as Reinhart as she made her way down the attendance list.

  “You heard right, Rhino,” Woody replied, keeping his eyes on me. “That is exactly what I said. So how about it, Crotch, is your dad the Garbageman or what?”

  The Garbageman: it was more than a job description. At Bloughton High, at least, that was his official name. All around me, the crackle of utensils against plastic gave way to a strange wave of silence. I couldn’t help it this time; I began to ease into the soft nirvana of specifying—

  —the marbled turtle shell of my tray—

  —the braille of dry boogers freckling the table—

  —an ancient and blackened Band-Aid trampled into the floor at my feet—

  —the rhythmic patterns of knees popping nervously against tables—

  —the mist of someone’s sneeze hanging like motes in the sun—

  —in the concavity of my spoon, twenty students turning synchronously—

  —but their pause was mine to break. I dragged myself back to life.

  “Yeah, I guess,” I responded. I looked at Celeste. Beneath the flawless cheeks, her jaw flexed in a chewing motion. Her expression remained perceptive yet removed.

  “That’s fascinating,” said Woody. “Because we were just discussing how none of us have ever seen him pick up a single piece of our crap. Rhino here, his dad works for county sanitation, and Rhino’s dad told Rhino that he ain’t ever seen your dad pick up a single McDonald’s wrapper. So what we’re curious about, Crotch, is what exactly does he do all day?”

  If I told them that I hadn’t the slightest idea, I would only sound stupid. Specifying continued its pull—

  —brown flaws in each corn kernel like coffee stains on teeth—

  —the unnatural shrug in the neck of my fork—

  “Pop says the Garbageman’s always at the pawnshop,” Rhino said, interrupting my trance. “Always selling shit. Always got mud all over his clothes, and always selling shit. You know what Pop thinks?”

  Woody held my eyes with minimal effort. “What’s that, Rhino?”

  “Pop thinks he’s a thief. Who else has that much shit to pawn?”

  I looked for a clock, a teacher, any excuse to get going. Instead I saw a battered old pay phone, mounted on the far cafeteria wall. The impulse to call Boris overwhelmed me. I had not bothered to reset my cell phone after Claire had suggested that I wait and see what kind of coverage was best in Bloughton. Boris’s cell number, though, I had memorized, and if I’d had just a bit more change left I could have called him, explained what was going on, told him that things were taking a series of bad turns and that I needed to get back to the city as soon as he could line it up.

  “Man, I’ll never forget that time we were fishing out on the Big Chief and ran across that dude, and he was standing in the water,” Woody was saying, “like up to his waist in water.” He shook his head at the memory. Celeste’s neat smile suggested she had heard this story before.

  “I don’t remember that,” said Rhino.

  “You weren’t there, dipshit,” said Woody. He gave his face, beaming and animated, to the table around him, and the eyes of his friends replicated his joviality until all of them, Woody included, were handsomer. “We were in a boat and came within probably ten feet of this guy, and he was like chest-deep in the water trying to catch fish with his hands. Colder than a motherfucker and this motherfucker was out there with water up to his chin, swiping at fish. I was with Gilman and Parker and we hadn’t had a bite all day, but this guy, Crotch’s dad, the Garbageman, he pulls this two-foot bluegill right out of the water in front of us. With his bare hands! Seriously about blew our minds.”

  My head was spinning. I couldn’t imagine the inert figure I had met the night before doing anything demanding such bizarre resourcefulness.

  Woody did not see it that way. “It’s sad, man,” he said, his eyes landing on me once again. “A working m
an like that having to fish without bait or tackle. What they’re paying garbagemen these days must suck.”

  “They get paid very well,” said Rhino knowledgeably. “Very well.”

  “Well, then you must be right, Rhino.” Woody sighed. “Resorting to crazy shit like that? The Garbageman must be a thief.”

  Celeste was merciful. Wordlessly she decided it was time to go, and everyone else followed suit, forgetting me in an instant. Even without explicit violence I was shaken. The lunch period was short, only thirty-five minutes, and just when I had settled enough to seriously contemplate my food, everyone began hastening away. The room rose almost in unison; it felt as if I were the one sinking.

  The day crawled. I kept my head down. Weaving through the crowded hallway during the next class break, I heard “Crotch!” called at me. By the time the last bell had rung and I was speeding for the nearest exit, I heard it from multiple sources. Not me, I pleaded, knowing that every school has one untouchable pariah. Please let it not be me.

  9.

  I WELCOMED THE HEAT that singed me all the way home; it dulled my anguish and hunger. I even welcomed the prospect of a second round with my father. This abysmal day and any others like it still to come were his fault, and I would not be quick to forgive.

  His truck was still missing. Despite myself, I almost sobbed in relief. I broke into a run. Inside the cabin, I flung myself to the floor in my corner by the sink. I buried my eyes in my hot elbow and felt my chest hitch up and down in alarming jags. In the darkness my mother comforted me and, after a while, whispered me away.