Rotters

by Daniel Kraus

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Devil. Salt.” Like many of the people around me, he had a Southern accent. “Sorry, I saw you throwing salt.”

  Still he did not meet my eyes.

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “Did I get it on you?”

  “It’s to keep away devils, they say.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said. “It was just something my mom did.”

  “That’s right.” He nodded to himself. “I had forgotten.”

  He turned to me and offered a tentative smile. His eyes were the clearest blue I had ever seen, like glass, like pictures of Mediterranean waters. These gentle pools were captured within a face that looked edgy and exhausted, but a face that nonetheless did in fact resemble a baby’s, with everything cute taken to an uncomfortable extreme: rosy flush rendered eczemic, cherubic cheeks gone saggy, hair so tangerine and fine it floated like broken cobweb. Most discomfiting were his rows of tiny teeth, mere dots of white upon red gums.

  My chest constricted.

  “You’re Boggs.”

  A fly hit him in the eye; he nudged it away with a knuckle.

  “I’ve come such a long way to meet you, son. You wouldn’t believe how long.”

  Everything told me to run. Knox had warned me about him; Harnett had refused to discuss him; the Diggers had offered to his name their ominous regrets. But I was rendered motionless by how utterly dissimilar he was to my mental picture of him. Though muscular, he was diminutive. He was soft-spoken, well-dressed, mannered. And he looked at me with an earnest hopefulness that was heartrending.

  “I’m not supposed to talk to you,” I said.

  He held up a nervous hand and licked lips that were dry and cracked from too many hours in the sun. “I know. I mean, I had a hunch. But hear me out, son. I came so far. California—that’s two thousand five hundred seventy-five miles I came, and I had to jack a Hyundai in Missouri when my first ride up and died on me. Maybe that was wrong of me. Maybe so. But I had to get here. I been dreaming of this day so long.”

  He firmed his lips as if mobilizing himself for action, and then thrust out his hand. I stared at it. The fingers were stubby, the nails purple and pulverized beyond that of any Digger I’d met. Either he was unusually clumsy or unusually busy.

  Dejection flickered in his eyes. The hand floated erratically. I couldn’t bear it. Limply I took it and his warm fingers curled over mine. The shake itself was minute but as firm as granite. His crystalline eyes sparkled.

  “Antiochus Boggs.” His voice clotted with emotion.

  He had me by the hand; I shrugged and replied. “Joey Crouch.”

  “Joey, son, I’m not your dad. But I should’ve been.”

  I pulled my hand away. In an instant my textbook was stowed and I was on my feet. Boggs slid from his stool and veered to cut me off. He was shorter than I. I could see sunburn shine through the loose whips of his red hair. When he raised his hands to halt me, the suit strained over his shoulders and biceps.

  “Apologies,” he said. “That was out of line. I’m tired. Been driving nonstop for three days. Haven’t slept. Barely eaten. My brain—it feels like it’s busted open. Earlier on I thought I felt it dripping out my ears.” He laughed once, tried to reel me back in with the admission. “I’m serious. Kept reaching up there and everything. Thought to myself, Now, what’s that boy gonna think when he meets his uncle and sees brain dripping out his ears?”

  “You’re not my uncle,” I said.

  “Is that what I said? Lord, my mind. No, son, no, I’m not your uncle. That’s true. Dammit, you’re right. But I feel like I am. Your dad and I grew up close as brothers. Closer, even. There was some unpleasantness, yes, and the unfortunate result was that I did not get to make your acquaintance. Not then, not for sixteen years. But here you are. And here I am. Sixteen years later and I’m finally meeting my son.”

  He shut his eyes and gave his head a brisk shake.

  “Sorry. Sorry. My brain’s sliding right out my skull. Apologies?”

  He turned upon me those spectral eyes. Specks of blood dotted his bottom lip.

  Slowly I sat. Keeping his eyes on me, he again mounted the stool. It took him several moments. When he was properly seated, he straightened his sleeves and attempted to tuck excess ruffles into his pants.

  “You’ve been given what we in the South call sucker bait. A false bill of sale.” He gestured at the street. “I’m guessing those men you met sketched me out to be a monster. And you believed them, because why would you not? They’re your elders. They’re supposed to look out for you. But, son, look. Use your own eyes. Do I look like a monster?”

  His wingspan, when he spread his arms, wasn’t much. Behind him, the place was thickening with families absorbed in their own lunchtime mediations. Next to these groups of combed and belted believers, Boggs just looked remarkably unwell—and alone. I felt an unwelcome but unequivocal surge of sympathy. I, too, knew loneliness.

  “No,” I answered. The obvious pleasure the word gave him troubled me, and I forced an edge into my voice. “What do you want?”

  “Want? Well, for starters—I’m a little embarrassed to be honest. Seeing how we’ve just met and all. But I’m a little low on funds since my ride up and died. If you’re not intending on finishing those french fries, I’d hate to see them thrown out.”

  I blinked at him, then at the food. The smallest of shrugs was all he needed. He pulled the plastic basket until it was stationed directly beneath his chin. Small fingers fumbled through the salt and grease and came up with yellow slivers that he piled on top of his tongue. His shrunken teeth affected a horizontal motion to grind the food to mash.

  “That’s it?” I asked. “Food?”

  He paused midchew. “There is something else. A favor. It’s an embarrassment to have to ask it. I would’ve preferred to pass more pleasantries. But I feel like I know you, son. You feel it? It’s okay if you don’t. It’s not gonna hurt my feelings.”

  I did not answer.

  He swallowed and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. A moment later he winced at his behavior and wiped his sleeve with his fingers. Then he looked at his fingers and started searching around for a napkin. The holder was out of his limited reach and reluctantly I withdrew a napkin and handed it over. He nodded his thanks and wove it through his fingers.

  “I’d like to speak to your dad,” he said. “If you think you can arrange it.”

  I thought of the single wall that separated the diner from the coffee shop.

  “I’m not sure I can do that.”

  He fumbled inside his pants pocket and withdrew a dingy razor blade.

  “Wait.” Panic hit me—the blade, chipped and pimpled with rust, was no equal to my father’s Scottish masterpiece and would hurt plenty and spread disease when it cut. “Listen. Maybe I can. At least let me try!”

  He looked at me in confusion and then at the blade in his hand. He laughed.

  “This is my shaving razor,” he said. “I ain’t coming to get you, son, relax. I just wanted to show you that I’m taking this serious. Cleaned my suit at a BP back in Tennessee. Shaved this morning in the library up the road. Got myself a haircut, too.”

  He licked his palm and tried to paste down the flyaway hairs. Looking closer, I could see the flushed evidence of newly shorn cheeks, as well as the survivors flitting like orange antenna in the ceiling-fan breeze. I tried to modulate my heart rate. “He doesn’t know. Harnett—he doesn’t know you’re here. None of them do.”

  “That is by design, son,” he said. “Why would I announce myself? So they can make a spectacle of me? Had a lifetime of that already. How they’re creeping around that marble farm out there like they’re playing detective, that’s the spectacle. That fat, hairy one? The one with the rotter bitch dog? Fourteen times he circled that thing in one hour. What in blazes are you learning on your fourteenth lap?”

  He leaned closer. The blue pouches beneath his lower lids swelled to prominence. At the circumference of h
is perfect eyes I saw root systems of broken vessels. He smelled like all Diggers smell but dipped in the faint turpentine of insomnia. The latter was a scent I recognized from my mother.

  “That’s all they ever do,” he said. “They walk in circles. It’s like a metaphor. Once every blue moon they get together and slap each other’s backs and then get right back to walking”—and here he walked his fingers around an invisible track—“in circles.”

  Somehow I held back from nodding. The Diggers were a clique as insular as any in high school. Why I hadn’t realized this before baffled me, but I felt gratitude at being trusted with such an observation. Few people since I had left Chicago had met me with anything but skepticism or outright hostility; I wanted to reward him for that, as well as exercise the feeling of maturity it gave me.

  “They are old,” I offered.

  Boggs snapped his fingers and pointed at me. “My boy’s a sharp one. That’s right. They’re geezers, ain’t they? All but me and Kenny. And you too, son. I think that’s why I trust you. You’re not set in your ways. You’ve got an open mind. That’s the most important thing in the world, an open mind. Your mom had one. Kenny, too. I bet that’s hard to believe. He’s a rule follower, that one, an order giver. Be quiet, be still, be invisible. He wasn’t always that way.”

  I took the opportunity to resolve a controversy: “I can get anyone.”

  He laughed. “That’s right! I can get anyone—now, that’s the old Kenny. Back when he had a pair, right?”

  Loyalty tugged at me. Harnett wasn’t as bad as Boggs said, he couldn’t be.

  Boggs picked up on my hesitation. “No, see, you’re right to defend him. A good son protects his father and vice versa. You were my son, no one would hurt you, not ever, they wouldn’t dare. Lord, you’re a sharp one. May I ask you a question?”

  “I guess. Yeah, okay.”

  “It’s kind of personal.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “Okay.” He took a deep breath. “You ever wondered what would happen if they knew?”

  “Knew what?”

  “What you do at night.”

  I glanced around. Just the words made me sweat. “Who?”

  “I don’t know. The people you see every day. You go to school?”

  “Yeah.”

  His head bobbed with enthusiasm. “There you go. Kids at school. The jerks who shove you around. The teacher who treats you like dog crap on his shoe. The little lady who gives you a hard-on the size of Canada and then breaks it in two.”

  Just like that I was hanging on his every word.

  “What about them?”

  “Well, what if they knew? All of them.” A smile fluttered the edge of his lip. “Every single last rotter.”

  A thrill burned through my chest and up my spine. I saw the Root dripping dirt as she rose victorious from a hole, and the awed and submissive expressions of Gottschalk, Woody, and Celeste.

  Boggs slid a few inches closer. The cuff of his overlong sleeve was held back with what looked like rusty diaper pins.

  “Correct me if I’m wrong. But I sense something here. A commonality. A special bond between father and son that no one else—”

  “I’m not your son.”

  “My brain, it’s my brain, I swear earlier it was coming out my ears. The point is, you and me? We’re the same. Can’t you feel it?”

  “No,” I said automatically, but even I heard the lack of conviction.

  “No? Really? We’re not related by blood, I give you that. But look. You don’t have a mom or dad. You could make an argument on the dad part, I realize; it’s an open question whether Kenny fulfills the requirements of fatherhood. That’s for you to decide. Now, take me—I don’t have a mom or dad either. You want to know what happened?”

  How could I not? I tried to sound disinterested. “Okay.”

  “Originally I had both,” he said. “I was born in Atlanta. But when I came out … well, look at me. Surely you noticed I’m a little different.”

  I shook my head. It was a weak and futile gesture.

  “I appreciate that,” he said. “But there ain’t any hiding physical facts. I wasn’t born right. I guess you could call me deformed. So they sent me off. Foster homes. Nine of them. Largely unpleasant memories, if you want to know the truth. Stuff you don’t want to know about, like what happens when you pee the bed too many times or accidentally kill the new kitten. You wouldn’t believe how many daddies touched me in inappropriate ways. I would never do something like that to you, son.”

  I’m not your son—I wanted to say it but couldn’t for fear that it would shatter the wide, clear glass of his eyes.

  “There were good things about it, too. I got strong, real strong. I found out that there’s things in the dirt you can live off if you need to. Eventually the orphanages got me, but I kept breaking out until they stopped chasing. That’s when I fell in with the rotters. I mean the Diggers.”

  An even smaller Antiochus Boggs happening upon those strange and secretive old men—it was hard to imagine their acceptance of him until I remembered how I first came upon Ken Harnett, hostile and uncommunicative in a darkened cabin.

  “The point is,” he continued, “I’ve never fit in. Just like you. And I don’t mean any offense by that. Not fitting in? In my book, that’s a good thing. You can’t make a mark on the world if you just vote the party line. So can you see it? How we’re the same? Am I making any sense? My brain isn’t exactly right.”

  He looked aggrieved. I felt a need to reassure him. “I guess it makes sense.”

  “Lord, that’s sweet music.” His rotund cheeks quivered. His lips made inchworm shrugs. He shut his eyes and I pictured the pure and exquisite ocean that might flow from such resplendent irises. When he regained control over himself he peeked up at me shyly. “Guys like you and me, we’re special. We have talents others don’t have, won’t ever have. Then why aren’t we happier? You ever ask yourself that?”

  “Yes.” If there was one undeniable truth, this was it.

  “Me too. Took me a lifetime to figure it out, but I won’t make you wait that long. You just have to ask yourself one question: What do we take from the rotters? Aside from trinkets and trifles, what possession of genuine worth do we win for our efforts? The answer ought to depress you, son. The answer is nothing. Deep down, that bothers you. Doesn’t it? Sure as hell bothers me. And those old men you met, they’re satisfied with nothing. With all their gifts—and I won’t bullshit you, they have gifts—at the end of the day, they’re satisfied with making circles. Over and over. Over and over.”

  With that, he tucked his small hand inside his coat, eased unseen buckles, and withdrew a large black book.

  “I’ve taken more,” he said.

  A fist snared Boggs’s collar and shoved. He struck the counter, rebounded, lost his balance, and tumbled from his seat. His impact sounded like a gray sack dropped to cabin cement. The vacated stool made merry-go-round circuits. A few feet away, the book slapped down and Boggs lunged for it. The rest was blocked out—Harnett was in my face, hauling me to my feet and squeezing me with one hand while he dug for a ten-dollar bill and left it wadded on top of the check.

  His face was bloodless. “Your schoolwork.”

  Numbly I picked up my biology book and Harnett steered us away. Already Boggs was up and blocking our path, over a foot shorter than my father but, due to his fantastic breadth and the startling incongruity of his three-piece suit, just as imposing. Harnett pulled back, holding me in check with an elbow. Boggs’s pink face broke into a heedless grin.

  “Kenny,” he said. “Lord, it’s good to see you.”

  “Step aside.”

  Boggs shook his head as if there had been some terrible misunderstanding.

  “This is silly. We shouldn’t fight. If you could just give me a minute I’d be—”

  “Get out of my face.”

  A burly man in chef’s whites was leaning over the counter.

  “There some
problem here, folks?”

  Oldies still blared from speakers, but beneath the music the dissonance of the diner was smoothing as families broke off their conversations and began to take note. Boggs straightened his vest and adjusted his rumpled tie. He gestured apologetically at a vacated corner booth. If there was anything a Digger feared it was attention, and the longer we stood there the more we got. With a single flex of his jaw, Harnett forced a tight smile at the cook, took three giant steps, and landed on the far bench of the booth. I wandered after and he tugged me down next to him.

  Coattails rippling, Boggs slid onto the opposite bench. He pushed aside the uncleared plates and dirty utensils and smacked the book down before him. It was large and nondescript and bulged with its untitled contents. Boggs’s little hands stroked the faux-leather cover.

  “Two minutes.” Harnett flicked his eyes at a nearby clock, where a second hand lazed past bad caricatures of Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, and James Dean. “Time enough for these people to get back to their business.”

  “You’re getting bent out of shape,” Boggs said. “There’s no reason. It’s just me, Baby. Do you know how far I came to see you? Two thousand five hundred seventy-five—”

  “Tick tock.” Harnett kept his eyes on Marlon, Marilyn, and James.

  Boggs sat back and frowned. “Right. Down to business. That’s how it always is with you. I guess I’d forgotten. Well, fine. We can make this a business meeting if you want. I do have some business to transact.”

  “That’s up to you,” Harnett said. “One minute.”

  Boggs spoke faster. “You’re going to be glad we had this conversation. You’re going to see that this is exactly where you belong. Right at this table with me. With me and Joey. The three of us—you remember how it used to be? With me and you and Valerie? We were family then, and the three of us here now, we can be—”