Rotters

by Daniel Kraus

  Occasionally my father read something that particularly nabbed his attention, and he would hurry to the archives of one of his dusty stacks and thumb through back issues. He did just that early in the morning on the first Saturday in October, rushing to one of the piles that made up the boundary of my floor space. Directly above me, he rustled through the pages until he found what he was seeking on the inside of the back page. The paper was old and thin enough that I could see right through it and read the backward headline: SEIRAUTIBO.

  Paper in hand, he grabbed his sacks and hurried to his truck. I examined the stack. It was the Benjamin County Beacon, published in Mazel, Nebraska. Dredging up my iffy mental map of the U.S., I estimated that it was at least a five-hour drive to the Nebraska border. I listened to the spit of stones and the snapping of twigs down Hewn Oak. He was in a hurry; I had all day.

  The safe in his closet resisted dozens of combinations. I planted my ear next to the dial, just like they do on TV, to hear whether any of my numbers triggered reactions. I sat on his bed—a mattress and box springs but no frame—and tried to think of obvious patterns. My mother: I tried her birthday, 12-15-60. I tried it backward, 60-15-12. I tried it European, 15-12-60. Bereft of ideas, I cranked my wrist through the numbers of my own birth date and with a clucking sound the lock unlatched. I stared and told myself it was coincidence. Everything about me, prior to crash-landing into Bloughton one month ago, should have been a mystery to my father. Yet here was a chilling countertruth.

  I pulled lightly on the handle and the door of the safe squealed open. The awful stink of the cabin had an origin—it gasped out at me in a foul expulsion of putrid air. I gagged and dove my head to the side to spit it out. Coughing, my eyes watering, I steadied myself and peered into the darkness.

  The first thing I thought of was Woody and Rhino and Simmons and Diamond, and how all those bastards had been right. Ken Harnett was a thief. My ears burned in private humiliation. Stacked inside the safe were valuables of such variety that each item must have come from a different home: rings, necklaces, cuff links, antique hairpins, ornate purses, bejeweled broaches, unusual belt buckles. In the back of the safe was a burlap sack spilling forth strange coins. I reached for a rusty Planters peanuts container and tilted it toward me. Gasping, I let it fall back. It was half full of gold teeth.

  There was also a discolored manila envelope stuffed with cash. My desperation for money trumped everything else I was feeling, and I removed three twenties and stuffed them in my pocket. Having thieved from a thief, I pushed myself away from the safe and its reeking cloud. I leaned back against my father’s bed, my eyes darting over the piles of jewelry. Quickly I made the connection to the newspapers. My father read obituaries to see which houses were newly vacant and used his archive to research the person’s background and wealth. Keeping himself up to date allowed him to drive overnight to places like Mazel, Nebraska, in order to loot the joint before the family had time to divvy up heirlooms. I thought about my mom’s leftover property and whether someone like my father had rifled through her leavings. I was suddenly filled with a righteous fury. This was why she had left him, I was positive. He was a career crook, a scumbag, and I had been sent by her to make sure he was put behind bars.

  I shut and locked the safe. Then I walked into town and treated myself to the lunch counter at Sookie’s, hiding from teenage voices by lodging myself in a corner booth with my face to the wall. I paid with one of the twenties, took the change to the hardware store/pharmacy, found the disposable camera I was looking for, and brought it to the cashier. On impulse, I threw in a bar of soap. When my father returned late in the night and I heard the familiar sound of shower knobs twisted full blast, I imagined his surprise at finding the zesty foreign object.

  Sunday morning I thumbed through the new newspapers and used homework techniques to memorize as many obituary details as possible. I ate breakfast—generic bran flakes and coffee—and pretended to do schoolwork until my father rose several hours later. He did not say good morning. We had not become that cordial, not yet, and given what I was planning to do, I was glad.

  The newspapers seemed to please him. His features while he was reading morphed through a complicated gallery: he looked enthralled one minute and was nearly laughing the next, only to fall into a grimace of grief so genuine I felt my heart beat in unexpected sympathy. Ultimately the reading seemed to excite him. He became restless. He ate while pacing. I saw him, still barefoot, take one of his gray sacks outside. He tidied the woodpile and even spent fifteen minutes picking up soiled clothes from around the house and chucking them into a large garbage bag that he set next to the door. After a while, he plucked a seemingly random book from the center of one of the towers, but paged through it impatiently, his foot wagging. He was waiting for something. So was I.

  When a ribbon of pink spread across the sky, he began to gather his things. I held off until he was rooting around in his bedroom, and then I exited through the front door. I made sure to walk at a casual pace in case he saw me. The camera in my pocket pressed into my thigh with each step. Near the Jackson intersection, I crouched in a ditch opposite the mailbox. The sky was purple now, and concealed me. My stomach roiled and my chest tingled.

  Even with my ears trained for the sound of his truck, it caught me by surprise. Suddenly it was leaping from the leafed canopy of Hewn Oak, moving faster than I had expected. I flattened myself against the dry grass. In seconds the truck was upon me, its tires chomping gravel right next to my head. Dirt blew in my face and made mud in my eyes. The truck was making a turn to the left, not the ideal direction for what I needed to do, but I scrambled up the side of the ditch, counting on the cloud of dirt to hide me. I ran at the truck; I felt it pick up speed and make a dizzying surge away; I ran harder, reaching outward, feeling a spray of gravel strafe my shins like machine-gun fire, and felt my palms grip the back door. With a last burst of strength, I hurled myself over the edge. I landed inside the truck bed, edges of metal intersecting with the knobs of my shoulders and the blades of my ribs. I was on top of one of his burlap bags of tools. I rolled off. The engine’s thrum shook my skeleton at such a pitch that the lunch in my stomach whipped and the sky above became a vomitous swirl. I closed my eyes. Wind, bugs, and sediment razed my skin.

  Then there were highways. Velocity increased. The noise enveloping me lost its caged reverberation and joined with a hundred other racing vehicles. We were moving; we were out of Bloughton, maybe even out of Lomax County. Purple light turned into the red doom of an interstate at night. My extremities were numb from vibration; the back of my skull throbbed. An uncertain amount of time passed, what must have been hours. Surely I had miscalculated—this was one of his longer trips, and I would miss days, if not weeks, of school. Any enthusiasm at such a prospect was mixed with the everlasting fear of falling irreparably behind; I thought of Gottschalk and his self-satisfied smirk as he took credit for scaring me away.

  But then the truck slowed. My stomach lurched as we slung through the vortex of an exit ramp. There was the distant ticking of a turn signal, the vertiginous pull of a sharp right. More turns, these made without signaling. The roads became rougher. The sky became true black with only the periodic abatement of a moth-flickered lamp. I drew my body to the far edge of the truck bed, bracing myself for the moment of escape. Through the cab window I could see my father scanning the streets as he rolled along what looked like a sparsely populated country neighborhood. He shut off the headlights and began to inch toward the shoulder. I made sure he wasn’t checking his rearview, then vaulted myself over the flatbed door.

  The pulse of the engine had hammered my legs to rubber. My knees wilted and my butt scraped rock. The truck continued to creep along without me. Ten feet, twenty feet; as it took a corner the brakes tapped momentarily and colored me red. When the vehicle eventually stopped and the putter of the engine ceased, I kneeled among the tall weeds and waited. After a moment, my father emerged, a black shadow against the blacker she
et of night, and he moved with surprising swiftness to the back of the truck. Gray bags were lifted from the trunk, and then he moved away, over the slight rise in the road and down the other side.

  He was out of sight. I scrambled up the shoulder and paused for breath against the side of the truck. The engine pinged softly. I moved again until I reached the crest of the hill. Beyond, I could see the distant specks of farmhouse lights. My father had vanished.

  It might not have been an accident that the truck was parked beneath the arachnid limbs of an overhanging tree. I stepped carefully through the ditch, feeling gutter water sop through the worn material of my sneakers. Using the snaking root system of the tree, I pulled myself up the other side of the ditch and squatted behind the expansive trunk. I sat panting for a while, my naked knees wedged against prickly bark, an old wooden fence behind my shoulders.

  Thirty minutes, tops—that was what I expected. I used the moon’s glow to monitor my watch, and thirty minutes passed. Then one hour, two hours—now it was after midnight. I slumped against the fence, clicking my thumbnail across the plastic slats of the film-advance wheel. Combined with the incriminating shots I would collect later at the cabin, one shot of a theft-in-progress was all I needed, although I planned to take as many photos as possible before once again stowing myself in the back of the truck. Unrest mixed with anticipation. Perhaps kids at school would hear about this, the news that Joey Crouch was not like Ken Harnett at all; that he was, in fact, the direct opposite, a crusader, a young man brave enough to defend Bloughton against his own flesh and blood. My mother, how proud she’d be.

  There are a million noises in the night, and by the time I noticed his footsteps he was almost upon me, moving fast, making less racket than seemingly possible. I sat up from the fence and coiled my legs beneath me. My fingers, instantly sweaty, gripped the camera. My father sailed toward the truck. One sack was slung over his left shoulder. An object was clenched in his right hand. The bag was swung high over the truck bed and lowered soundlessly. He opened the passenger door with his left hand, while still holding the object with his right. I leaned my upper body past the tree, moving the camera to my eye. I saw him dislodge something from under the seat; moonlight glinted on wrenches and hammers as he unlocked a toolbox. There was the soft sigh of stirring metal as he dug and found what he was looking for. He turned around, wielding the tool of his choice, and leaned against the truck.

  The moment was perfect. I pressed the button on the camera, realizing a split second too late that, in all my planning, I had forgotten the simplest of facts: this was an automatic camera and it was night and cameras at night use flashes. White light shocked us. Everything was illuminated in one instant of motionless clarity: individual blades of tall grass, bugs caught in the air like thrown pebbles, the mirrored surface of the truck, my father, his stunned expression, the handheld wire cutter, the sparkle of multiple jeweled rings, and, clenched in my father’s fist, wearing these rings, a severed human hand.

  17.

  ON THE WAY HOME I sat up in the truck bed. There was no more reason to hide. As we pulled away from the tree, I noted with dulled surprise that the wooden fence I had leaned against marked the outer confines of a graveyard. It rolled gently over the hill, the white ghosts of gravestones perishing quietly into the pitch.

  My father is a grave robber, I told myself, over and over and over—the only garbage he carried was carrion. I hoped the horror of it would diminish with each repetition, but instead it overtook me. My brain spun in slow and terrified loops: disgust at such an unspeakable act, disbelief that my mother could have lived with such knowledge, the potential reactions to such revelations by Woody or Celeste or Gottschalk or Simmons or Diamond or Laverne or Ted, and more than anything else the smell—that odor invading the very fibers of the cabin walls as well as my clothes, skin, and hair. I finally knew its origin.

  I ran through the last moments back there outside the graveyard: his blank astonishment, my immobility, his slow forward motion to take the camera from my numb fingers. He placed the camera in a pocket, then picked up the wire cutter again. I heard a snip and the soft chip of bone detaching from bone. I watched him remove two rings from the isolated finger, put them in his pocket, and then take the hand, as well as the finger, with him back up the hill. I followed him with my eyes and saw him scale the cemetery fence. He was returning the hand to where he found it. It was lunacy. I could barely think, hardly move. It was much later, maybe another hour, before my father returned. He had with him the other sack, which he placed in the truck bed. He seemed beyond wrath; his eyes were glazed and he spoke not a word. When he looked at me, I held out a trembling hand to stop whatever was coming next.

  “Look,” I said, but I had no other words.

  He did the opposite and looked away. He entered the truck, slammed the door, and started the engine. It growled to life and I watched the brake lights color the exhaust. I expected him to drive away. Instead he sat motionless behind the wheel. After a minute I climbed into the back of the truck.

  Now, the ride nearly over, the wheels left the relative smoothness of pavement for dirt. Here it was, my final resting spot, the place where he would fulfill his earlier promise of a Scottish blade driven with soft precision. Trees laced their fingers above me, then clenched to blot out the night. The truck shuddered to a halt. I heard the cab door open and shut. I sat up and saw that we were not in some unfamiliar thicket but back at the cabin, and my father was loping toward the front door, leaving the sacks with me. The whisper of the river was outrageously keen after the truck’s guttural howl. I looked at the sacks and wondered wildly if he expected me to bring them inside.

  A long time passed. After a while I stood and urinated off the side of the truck. I lay back down, accepting for a bed the graphed surface of the vehicle much as I had accepted the floor by the sink. I checked my watch: four in the morning. The sun would be up in a couple of hours and it would be Monday. School seemed a method of escape: I could go there, just like always, and lose myself in routine as I thought about what to do. There were even people there who could possibly help me: Simmons, maybe; maybe Ted; maybe I could even tell Laverne. Though I could not imagine how to introduce the topic. All opening statements I imagined were spectacularly insane. I closed my eyes but knew I would never sleep, and then, a few minutes later, fell asleep.

  18.

  THE POSITION OF THE sun told me I had awakened at my usual time. I yawned and felt unfamiliar patterns ridge my cheek. My homework and books were inside. I would have to go in.

  I hobbled to the front door and entered. My father’s bedroom door was closed. I listened and heard nothing. The bathroom looked too inviting to pass up and I slid inside, closing the door behind me, and scrubbed my face with cold water, hoping to work the indentations from my face. I washed my hands and looked down at them, remembering what I had seen. It had been a woman’s hand. On her third finger had been both an engagement and a wedding ring. She had been married. The hand had belonged to someone’s wife, maybe someone’s mother.

  I grabbed my green backpack and made for the front door. Simultaneous with my opening of it, I heard the opening of my father’s bedroom. I whirled around and there he was, his eyes blazing, his gray hair wilder than ever, the tufts from his chest ruffling his unbuttoned shirt. I braced for attack.

  His expression, however, was pinched and anxious. He doesn’t want me to turn him in, I realized, repulsion and anger rising once more. I slammed the door behind me and hustled across the yard. I was beneath the trees in a moment but did not feel secure until I was well on my way down Jackson, new sweat from a new day making strange perfume with the unwashed odors of the night.

  People held their noses in biology. I knew I stank; I half-lidded my eyes and tried to live inside myself. When Gottschalk called me to the front of the room, I stumbled across someone’s book bag and didn’t care when everyone laughed. I stood there, barely conscious, raising my arms when I was told so that Gottsch
alk could prod my moist pits with his pointer and reiterate the miracle of transpiration. Through the slits of my eyes I watched Celeste Carpenter’s perfectly inexpressive expression; through the barred cage of my eyelashes I saw her look back with all the objectivity of a zoologist.

  I sleepwalked through both classes and lunch until I found myself on my way to the band room for individual instruction. When I got there, Karla, one of our four flutists, was sitting outside the door with earbuds inserted. She saw me, paused her music, and gathered her things.

  “Ted’s out sick,” she said, letting her buds dangle. “You might as well use your time, though.”

  The room was eerily quiet. Two chairs before a music stand gave the impression that Ted had died in the middle of a lesson. I wandered through the space, thankful for the chance to be alone, and eyed one of the chairs, wondering whether if I sat and closed my eyes for twenty minutes, Peyton, our drummer, would bother to wake me up when he arrived. Probably not.

  There was a rattling noise. I turned and saw that Ted’s supply closet was closed. I had never seen it less than agape in a blatant display of its bounty. I moved closer and listened. From within I heard muffled sounds. My sapped brain did not connect them with human activity. I had only the dumb idea that if I sorted through all the stuff in the closet, I might be able to keep myself awake. I opened the door.

  Woody was inside, masticating Tess’s neck, her shirt up around her armpits, his hands kneading her bra. My fellow trumpeter saw me first, and her look was one of annoyance rather than shock. Woody raised his head, his lips separating from her slick neck with a smack, and regarded me with a curious sort of half-grin.