Rotters

by Daniel Kraus

  “Dying is a tragedy,” he lectured from the darkness. “Death, though—death is just science. When we’re dead, A happens, then B happens, then C. None of it’s pretty. When the embalmers, those crooks, when they get their hands on us, they do their worst. They suture our anuses to keep everything inside. Kid, I’m just telling you how it is. But they can’t stop science.”

  Science—Gottschalk’s paper. I set my muscles to the rhythm of Harnett’s speech and doubled down.

  “A wooden casket, six months after it’s gone under, we’re talking about some body discoloration, maybe some mold. An airtight job, same amount of time, and we’re looking at the kind of mess we saw the other night. Those caskets are ridiculous. The inner liner’s bolted, the outer liner’s cemented shut, and sometimes they put the whole thing inside a concrete vault. And then they bury it five feet down? You should be asking yourself what’s the point of all this nonsense. Who are they protecting the body from? It can’t be rain, it can’t be decay—they both find their way in anyway. It’s us, kid. After all these years, it’s still us.”

  I found better ways into the dirt, new angles of attack, cunning trajectories.

  “Was a time when the opposite held true. Everyone was scared of being buried alive and wanted an easy route out. Coffins had gadgets, little rods attached to bells above the earth, mausoleums with switches inside to activate lights and buzzers. You can sort of sympathize. Medicine wasn’t what it is today. Mistakes were made. Imagine disinterring a loved one and finding the underside of the lid covered with their scratches.”

  There were animal bones down there, graves within graves.

  “Why bury them in a box at all? Good question. Why put them in clothes? Funeral directors run up bills into the millions just dressing up corpses and poisoning the dirt with chemicals. We Diggers are ecologists by nature, kid; if I could, I would remove every body and plant it naked back in the dirt. Composting is the ideal. Instead we pay three thousand bucks for a four-by-five-by-seven plot, a plot that can get sold out from under us if the cemetery gets lazy setting aside their twenty percent for upkeep. There’s a funeral director in Michigan who held a body for four years while he sued the family over a late payment. It’s disgusting. Disgusting. Cemeteries are more profitable than farms.”

  My homework was in my hands but it would not reach Gottschalk in time—I had another assignment still in progress, and had yet to erase my traces.

  “It almost seems like revenge, then, doesn’t it, that heirlooms are buried to keep them out of the hands of others? But it’s not revenge. It’s pride. It’s belief in some awards-based system of afterlife. That is self-aggrandizement taken to fanatical levels. Sure, it has a historical basis. Fine. As do we. So they will keep giving and we will keep taking. It’s the natural order of things. The earth should be kept clean.”

  He took a moment to observe how I poured dirt back into the hole.

  “You would be exposed in one day,” he grunted. “One hour.”

  It was true. I made what pitiful repairs I could and slunk off to school. Gottschalk received the paper over lunch period and he gloated over its lateness. He took out his red pen in front of me so that I would see its bloody point. Next time, I promised myself—next time I would dig faster. No assignments were due the following day, so that evening Harnett had to get creative. After dinner I dug for my shoes by flashlight. My initial reluctance faded when I recognized that studying was studying—biology, calculus, digging, any one of them might become my future. I sank my naked toes into the cold dirt. As I labored, Harnett sat cross-legged in the grass with a bowl of noodles. He had rubber-banded a crinkled sheet of red transparency over the end of my flashlight; apparently that made it harder for human eyes to see the beam. I dug through an alien planet of purple grass and crimson dirt. My father ate and talked about the newspapers.

  “The Crafton Legion. The Tri-County Bobcat. The smaller the paper, the better; details get loose, editors get sloppy. I don’t fault them for this. I admire it. These are real people who know how to mourn. So. Start with the obituaries. Read the names. Go with your gut. Janvier: yes. Fitzbutton: no. Know your history. Family names have legacies. There was a fire in ’eighty-nine that killed three generations of Wilkins. It was hard to go to work that day—I had followed so many of them into so many graves. I gave them one month. When I saw them again, they did not look good. Burn victims rarely do.”

  Smaller shovel strokes at acute angles. Finally I saw the logic.

  “Look at the spelling. Smith: no. Smythe with a Y: oh, yes. Look at the middle names for clues. Wadsworth. Whittaker. Middle names are what really reveal a family, what they are proud of, what they are ashamed of, how old parents were when their kids were born—an important fact if you think about it for even a second. Now look for the spouse. An entirely new surname to cross-reference. Children, too, same paragraph. He leaves behind three children. Get their names. And be wary of exotic spellings: Kayleigh with all sorts of useless letters. Weigh the variations. Surviving her is her daughter Katherine. Kathleen. Kathy. Katie. Kate. Kat. Kay. Say these names aloud. You know them from school. Picture these girls. Picture Christmas morning. Picture the gifts. Notice rings on hands, how Christmas lights sparkle on new jewelry.”

  By my red light I passed through soil horizons I had learned about in school: surface soil, subsoil, substratum. I’d studied hard and knew what to expect.

  “How old was he or she when he or she died? This one’s easy. A lot easier than calculus, kid. If they died young, don’t lose hope. Parents are weird with dead kids. They will weigh them down with mementos. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s an offering so that their other kids don’t die the same way. And also: how recent was it? Because under most circumstances it’s unwise to bother a grave people are still visiting daily. These kinds of mourners notice everything. They take pictures. They bring gardening gloves and shears. I’ve seen people bring their own push mowers. Be patient. Obits are like sales leads, except these leads never grow cold.”

  I found my shoes six feet deep and wrapped in plastic. I treated them like flesh, lifting them with utmost care.

  “Obits love nicknames, get used to it. Some of them seem redundant. Robert ‘Bob’ Douglas. Others demand attention. Jeffrey ‘The Bulldozer’ Wallace. Herman ‘The Monkey Man’ Hansen. Laura ‘Spanky’ Hopkins. A girl called Spanky—do I need to draw you a picture? Do not bother with this grave. Unless she is old money, and then make haste. It’s easy to get bogged down with details. The papers will tell you what church they went to. Forget it. They will tell you which local schools they attended. Forget it. Sometimes they’ll tell you what their favorite book was. This is rare but helpful. Use your head. This part isn’t rocket science.”

  I saw for the first time how soil fits back together in a kind of order. It filled me with happiness.

  “Most obits don’t give home addresses. If they do, sure, go ahead, do a drive-by. Also, don’t forget: every story has a writer. Get to know each newspaper staff. Often rookies get the death desk, even interns. That doesn’t do us much good. But true mom-and-pop outfits? You want to run an obit for your granddad, you write it yourself, mail it in, and they’ll print it. This is when things get interesting. Hyperbole kicks in, or a devastating lack of it. Grale Gompers. He ran the most successful salted cracker company in the Midwest. Or: He worked at a factory. That hurts. That’s not an obit, that’s a middle finger. He had three beautiful children who attended Stanford, Yale, and Princeton. Versus: He had several kids. It’s not whether he was loved or hated. It’s whether he was loved or hated and by whom and when, and what that means about what was put under the dirt. If you need to, take notes in the margin.”

  The sod swathed the filled hole like a bad toupee. I still had a lot to learn.

  “Last thing. The picture. Sometimes there will be a picture. It’s usually a snapshot of some sentimental value. Listen up: almost never will it match the text. The text may speak of a man of means: you’ll se
e an old geezer in pj’s. The text may hint at abuse and disorders: you’ll see a bow tie and champagne. So ignore it. Pictures are not facts, they are fleeting instants with little meaning. Cut it out with a scissors if you have to. Because you don’t need it and you don’t want to know, trust me. You don’t want to know what they looked like.”

  That night I set my aching back against the sink and picked at the dirt under my fingernails. My mind raced and everything came out jumbled. Was it Harnett torturing me in gym class? Was it Gottschalk thrusting a shovel into my hands? What day was it? What month? I clung to Friday because I knew it was homecoming, but that wasn’t enough and the idea of a calendar disgusted me. How could I bear to see all those school days still to come, blank white squares marching forth in their patient infinity? Then I thought of what Harnett said about hatch marks left inside a coffin by someone buried alive. It was a feeling I understood. Taking a knife from the counter, I carved the first hatch mark on the side of the sink, where Harnett was unlikely to see it. This was exactly how I wanted to conceive of my new life: a past scratched down in memory of my mother and a future that could still lead me anywhere.

  29.

  “TRANSLATED FROM THE LATIN meaning ‘carrying-away vessel,’ the vas deferens, the duct that transports sperm to the urethra, is not present in all species of animal, though it is most certainly present in Mr. Crouch here. Although clothing impedes us somewhat, you can see from the indication of my pointer the location of the penis, and, slightly moving southward now, the scrotum. Now, the scrotum—My apologies, Mr. Crouch, for that tap, which apparently was a bit vigorous. As I was saying, the scrotum houses the testes, something hopefully all of you know by now, and coiled near the back of the testes is the epididymis, which connects the efferent ducts—remember the efferent ducts, class, from the quiz you all did so poorly on?—which connects the efferent ducts to the vas deferens, somewhere approximately right here. Again, apologies, Mr. Crouch. Folks, let’s keep the laughter at a reasonable level. Very good. Now, let’s follow the path. During the onset of ejaculation, the sperm travels from here—apologies—through the smooth muscle walls of the deferens in what is known as peristalsis, until it gathers here—once more, apologies—in the urethra, collecting secretions from the bulbourethral and prostate glands, until the flow of semen is expelled from here—and now I fear that my wrist has a mind of its own because it seems as if Mr. Crouch is approaching a fetal position. It is not my wish to perform an accidental vasectomy, so perhaps I ought to let our volunteer take his seat. His reaction is, however, worth noting. It is a sensitive bundle of parts, the male genitalia, certainly not anything you want someone striking repeatedly with a metal rod. Although if that person is yours truly, a teacher trained in all things anatomical, then one might hope such a teacher knows what he is doing. One might hope. Now, now, boys and girls, I appreciate the show of enthusiasm, but let’s at least attempt to keep the volume to a low roar.”

  30.

  FUN AND GAMES CONTINUED to the superhit stylings of Richard Marx and Wang Chung. The latest game involved an enormous beach ball and a volleyball net, but I had successfully convinced Stettlemeyer to let me sit this one out on account of a “stomachache.” Gottschalk had only connected two or three times, but the tip of his pointer was equal to a Rhino kick any day. I crouched against the bleachers, my midsection aching, and watched Woody on his way to the weight room. He smiled at Celeste and then at me, though the qualities of the smiles were vastly different.

  Stettlemeyer blew the whistle and the game began. I leaned my head back and counted. Five hundred and seventy-one seconds later two ratty sneakers approached. It was Foley, my silent partner in this ongoing disgrace, having been rotated out of all the bouncing bullshit.

  “Gottschalk got a little personal today,” he said.

  Foley shared my biology period, though it had taken me half the semester to realize it. My pulse raced as he sat down next to me, but I kept quiet—it was the safest course.

  “Supposedly five or six years ago a kid tried to call him on his shit and sued the school for emotional damages. The whole town went ballistic. He’s got like ten degrees, so everyone thinks he’s God. The lawsuit got dropped and Gottschalk got a raise out the deal. So if you’re thinking of appealing to the greater good, think again.”

  I kept my eyes on the girls. Heidi Goehring had the ball and didn’t know what she was supposed to do with it, but I liked how the heat of exercise had turned her cheeks pink.

  “I hear what they call you,” Foley added.

  “Congratulations,” I said.

  “No need to be a dick. I just have ears.”

  “Well, that’s good information to know. Thanks for that.”

  “Dick,” he said under his breath.

  We sat in silence for a moment, listening to the shrieks of the girls and watching the beach ball twirl across dozens of bright fingernails.

  “Ever heard of a power dump?” he asked.

  I glanced at him. “No.”

  “It’s when a whole bunch of guys sneak into your house and take a dump in a huge pile. Happened to me in eighth grade. I didn’t find it till much later because my mom was driving me back from my dad’s. When she saw it she cried like a baby. This was at a different school. Different kids than Woody and Rhino. But basically the same kind of assholes.” He snorted. “Literally.”

  It took me a second but I snorted, too. The echo of that tiny noise swelled, pushing all air from my chest. Laughter—at Bloughton High. Was such a fluke possible to replicate? My brain reeled with words, jokes, enticements that could keep Foley at my side before he remembered that I was lethal. My name’s Joey. I could at least say that. Foley, right? But I had no oxygen, no saliva.

  “Anyway,” he said, standing up. “There’s always gonna be Woodys and Gottschalks. It’s just a matter of making yourself so they don’t see you. Right?”

  And then the next girl rotated out and Foley moved to replace her. I watched him slink away, hoping he’d give me a smirk or raised eyebrow, something that said I was not alone. It was too much to hope for. I did not hold it against him.

  31.

  FRIDAY, HOMECOMING, AND THE white faces of Bloughton High were striped in red and black. The entire building rattled with artificially induced excitement. The morning’s regular schedule was interrupted by a pep rally, during which I sat in with the band as Celeste beat the odds by stealing the crown from her senior counterparts. I found myself pounding my seat along with everyone else. She was our queen, ours, which meant, in some little way, she was partly mine, too.

  Afterward Ted gave us our mission: bleachers, seven o’clock, fully zipped and buttoned and capped. He looked at me when he said this. I thought about that as I walked back home to grab some dinner and fetch my trumpet—his strange belief in me, his patience. Thirty minutes later I stared out the window and saw a peculiar thing, a man standing in the river.

  I carried my sandwich to the riverbank. Harnett was shirtless and waist-deep, his arms floating at his sides, his face turned to the water as if meditating. Suddenly he swiped, his arm cutting through the surface and lifting two razors of spray. I stood transfixed as the fish escaped. Harnett watched it dart away through the depths.

  He spoke without looking up. “You’ve got about two hours.”

  It was then I noticed the shovel rising diagonally from the rocky bank. I felt a flutter of something in my gut—not despair but the thrill of accepting a challenge. Always a step ahead, my father had buried my trumpet.

  It was my first dig on slanted ground. The top of the hole gave way constantly. Rocks fought back against my entry. Principles I’d learned had to be rotated and adapted. I succumbed to the authority of my arms.

  “Tell me about her funeral,” he said.

  “It was small,” I said instantly. I wondered how long the two of us had been readying this question and answer.

  “How small?”

  “My friend Boris and his parents. Some of h
er work friends. Couple neighbors. I can hardly remember it now.” In fact, most of what I remembered involved a spider dangling in the ceiling corner above the casket.

  “Why aren’t you digging? Keep digging.”

  I lifted the shovel and jabbed. Roots held possessively to the earth. I frowned and twisted the handle, my palm and fingers tingling with the sensitivity of a safecracker.

  “We didn’t know a lot of people,” I continued. “We hardly ever went out. She had like a thing about going out. She never once crossed the state border, did you know that?”

  I heard the glissando of another swipe through water.

  “She made me promise,” Harnett said when the music faded. “When we went our separate ways, she made me swear never to set foot in Chicago. Despite its value as a territory, I agreed.” There was a pause. “I was being shut out, I knew that. I didn’t know she was shutting herself in, too—shutting in both of you. Believe me. I had no idea.”

  Nothing was going right. The hole was eating itself so that I couldn’t gain entry. I took to my knees and probed with the shovel and muttered bad words. Mud soaked through my pants, bird shit was all over my arms, and I was in danger of being late to the game. A flash of resentment shot through me. I sent a prayer to Two-Fingered Jesus and spoke.

  “The cuts in her ear. That’s why she wanted you to stay away. Right? When you said you killed her, that’s what you meant. She couldn’t hear well and that’s why she got hit by the bus.” I swallowed. “That’s what I figure.”