Rotters

by Daniel Kraus

  Blood gushing from his nose and a chunk of flesh missing from below his ear, Harnett came. The gas-station shovel was still clenched in his convulsing hands. He coughed mud and he walked as if one of his knees was broken. But he was there, he had heard and followed my call, and now he held my head between his hands and smiled. He was missing teeth. I pressed my hands over his and laughed.

  The hurricane whipped us as we dug. The shovel was a boon, but the earth was so loose that I did nearly as well with my bare hands. I dug as never before. I burrowed into it headfirst like an animal. And even in the pitching storm Harnett’s aim was true: he lifted away piles of earth bigger than either of us.

  Lionel’s coffin was a simple wooden box. Together we dragged it to the island and fell across it in an exhausted embrace. The rain washed away our fatigue, our pain, and our blood, until we were two men cleansed of all misdeeds. For this moment only, we were incorruptible.

  He looked at me. I nodded. He jammed the end of the shovel beneath the lid and then looked at me in surprise when it opened without a fight. Perhaps considering for the first time the man who laid inside, Harnett hesitated. He peeked at me again as if asking permission.

  “Open it,” I said.

  He pushed the lid partway aside. Even in the blackness it shone. On top was an urn—Lionel had been cremated after all, the liar—etched with an inscription from Lahn. This wasn’t for us to read, and we rolled it to the side. Beneath were the first few inches of unearthly glows and galactic sparkles. Gold, priceless jewelry, artifacts of unbelievable origin—it was all here in an ordinary box, a self-contained Digger museum. If only my mother had been with us to see it.

  “Father and rotter, rotter and son.”

  Grappling from the mire was Boggs. Mud plopped from his empty socket like a deranged wink. He drove a small fist, then Harpakhrad, into the earth and pushed until his raw face and ruined frame rose from the depths, dripping obsidian. His top hat was gone, his ears notched and bleeding like a dark mirror version of my mother. He was giggling, spewing things he’d chewed from the floating dead.

  He stood; he fell. Snarling, he stood; again he fell. The festering bulb at the end of his left leg bent like a water balloon with each step. Even with Harpakhrad as a crutch he could proceed no farther up the unreliable bank. Frowning, he stuck out the dead foot as if to merely observe it and then plunged his shovel with brutal precision.

  The cut was clean. The lopped appendage landed upright, then slid until it touched the lapping waves. Boggs scowled at his new stump, as if the sight of exposed bone reminded him of the rotter living inside him, but instead of extracting the invader he raised his head and beamed through the quilt of rain.

  “LOOK WHAT BABY’S BRAIN MADE HIM DO!”

  His dangling suit coat tripped him. Easily he shrugged out of its tatters and let it smack wetly into the mud. Beneath he was shirtless and emaciated; the scrawny wreckage of his chest muscles twitched like subcutaneous slugs and his arms were blistered by the blast marks of hypodermic incisions. A single object bounced from a strap around his neck: the Polaroid camera, loaded for its final shots. Harpakhrad whirled in his hands and the sharp edge was aimed at us. He hopped and the edge was closer.

  Harnett raised his own shovel and tried to stand. His knee gave out and he crumpled. I rushed to assist him but suddenly panicked. Lionel’s coffin, where was it? I turned and peered through the storm. There, three feet away, four, five—it was gliding down the muddy embankment and heading for the cliff and the waiting ocean.

  Monstrous winds lashed me for my indecision. Boggs was hopping toward Harnett, who had forced himself to a sitting position against Lionel’s stone. In the other direction, the casket of treasure was still sliding.

  Boggs swung. Harpakhrad came down like a missile. Harnett raised his shovel like a crossbar. The Egyptian instrument was too powerful and split Harnett’s tool in half. I lunged at Boggs but instantly he jutted out with the scarab handle, which thumped me in the chest and sent me skidding down the hill on my ass. I found myself within reach of Lionel’s coffin and instinctively gripped the edge. It was heavy, so heavy, and began to tip into the ocean.

  More lightning—we were spattered with the butchery of the cemetery’s dead as well as our own. I dug my feet into the slick earth and pulled at the coffin. I heard a war cry—even through the cacophony I heard it—and turned to see Boggs strike once to the left, knocking away half of Harnett’s shovel, and once to the right, knocking away the rest. A third strike Harnett managed to fend off with a cunning twist of his elbows. Panicked, I lugged the coffin a matter of inches up the incline and prayed that it would hold. I tumbled into battle but was too late.

  Harpakhrad was buried in my father’s chest. Boggs took the handle of the shovel beneath his armpit and squirmed down its length until his nose touched Harnett’s. The downpour shredded like metal against his rigid scream.

  “I LOVED HIM!” Boggs bashed his fist against Lionel’s tombstone with each word, crushing his knuckles into gristle. “I LOVED HER! I LOVED YOU! IS THAT SO HARD TO UNDERSTAND? ALL I WANTED WAS ONE OF YOU, ANY ONE OF YOU STINKING ROTTERS, TO LOVE ME BACK! ME! ME, YOUR BABY! YOUR BABY BOY!” Boggs raised his face to the black sky and bellowed, the gales funneling his tears back into his eye. “AND THEN YOU, YOU GREEDY ROTTER, YOU WENT AND TOOK HIM FROM ME, TOO!”

  He waggled a mangled finger in what he thought was my direction. But I had moved.

  Boggs collapsed, his wet face grinding against Harnett’s, his small, sharp teeth scraping down my father’s flesh. The mud and blood and tears flowed from one brother to the other. Harnett’s hand fumbled over Harpakhrad and cupped his brother’s cheek. Boggs tightened his fingers around the slippery twists of his instrument’s stem.

  “I GET THEM NOW, ALL RIGHT? ALL OF THEM! OKAY? GOOD NIGHT, BROTHER, MY ONLY BROTHER! AND FORGIVE ME, ALL RIGHT? OKAY? WILL YOU PLEASE FORGIVE ME?”

  Harnett’s lips: I will.

  Boggs reared back for the fatal shove.

  He never made it. I struck first. His cherubic face distorted. He opened his mouth in complaint and a bucket of blood splashed across his chest. He groped with one mutilated hand and found the sharp fragment of my mother’s leg bone driven into his neck. Boggs stood up on his one foot and spun. I could see the end of the bone through his open mouth. With a harrowing yowl, he tottered toward the ocean. I followed on my knees.

  I found him lying on top of Lionel’s coffin, his head ducked deep into treasure. When he lifted his face there were diamonds embedded in his socket, gems sunk into his spongy cheeks, gold lodged in his gums. He chuckled and some of it disappeared down his throat. Leaning forward again, he embraced all that was left of Lionel, the modest urn, and cried and blubbered and sang.

  The coffin tipped over the edge and dove into the ocean. Waves the size of worlds devoured him. Salt flooded through my sinuses and pushed me back. I wiped at my eyes and saw Boggs once more, peaking at an oily crest, still locked to Lionel’s coffin in undying apology, glimmering with riches, his mouth torn into an unnaturally oversize grin, his laugh the sick whistle of the busted sky.

  The winds began to lessen. The placid eye of the storm was approaching. I tunneled through the ooze and flopped myself next to Harnett. His eyes were locked on the incandescent sky. His fringe of gray hair was matted into a crown of mud. Harpakhrad still extended from his chest; I reached for it. Bubbles of air sizzled from the wound.

  “Wait.” The word flew inward.

  I misunderstood his concern. “No, look, I have it,” I said. I patted the soupy ground until I found Boggs’s coat. Inside the coat pocket, as always, was the Rotters Book. It shook free from its buckles. “It’s here, look, see, we can get rid of it.”

  Harnett’s eyes closed. Inadvertent tears squeezed out and went blasting upward.

  His hand clutched at the air. I snatched it and his fingers crushed mine. With unexpected strength he pulled me in until my head fit into his shoulder. His lips were at my ear. I felt his f
ace’s harsh bristle. I waited for words. Nothing. But there were fingers in my hair. His rough hands, stroking, stroking. I grabbed his hair, too, and pressed my cold eyelids into his warm neck. The hands continued to stroke and they were like my mother’s hands. His body began to fold and I guided him so that his head rested against Lionel’s stone. He fell asleep. I sat up. Rain pressed him into the earth. At some point he died. I didn’t notice, I was busy measuring the stone. The Garbageman, the Resurrectionist, Digger, Rotter, Kenny, Harnett, Father, Dad: he had been called so many names, but only one of them would fit.

  They came in maggot numbers. The bravest crawled through the cemetery in cars, while the others pressed their faces to the same fence where once Foley and I had spent a Halloween planning trips never to occur.

  I zipped up my coat and adjusted my sunglasses. There was a rustle of excitement when they saw my wooden fingers. I tried to focus on the scripture being read. The local pastor seemed to struggle with the telling; the gathering crowd, larger than any he saw on Sundays, was throwing him off. I threw a glance at Reverend Knox, who shrugged at the performance as if to say, What are you going to do?

  Knox and Ted were the only ones fearless enough to join me graveside. Everyone else was there for another reason. They wanted to see if Ken Harnett would go down in an ordinary coffin into an ordinary grave.

  I had to fight down a grin. Who could forget his Tibetan fantasy of being picked apart and crapped out by birds? Instead I was burying him and having a pretty good time doing it. Childish of me, perhaps, but I know the guy would’ve eventually admitted that he had it coming.

  Five years had passed since his death. But it had only been yesterday morning that Knox had shown up at my rented apartment. It was November and his jacket was insufficient. Feeling like Lionel outfitting houseguests, I demanded he take an old coat of mine and sat him down in a chair while I fixed coffee. The hand that gripped his crutch was gnarled and his single leg shook with uncharacteristic weakness. I considered the similar disfigurement of Boggs and my own missing fingers and wondered if for some reason God wanted Diggers so badly that sometimes he tore bits of them off.

  Knox was very old. His ceaseless travel would soon end. I gave him his coffee and listened to his melancholy epilogue. With the demise of Lionel, the Resurrectionist, Baby, and Fisher during the hurricane five years ago, the disappearance of Crying John, and the passing away of Under-the-Mud, not to mention the Christian rebirth of Brownie and Screw, Diggers simply no longer existed. Only the Apologist lived on, his comatose survival funded by an unknown benefactor. He had always been the quiet and crafty one. I entertained a vision of him escaping each night to dig only to creep back into the hospital each morning to reattach the tubes, the perfect crime.

  “You did the right thing, getting out,” Knox said. “God is good?”

  I nodded and took his rheumatic hand. He had written me periodically over the years in an increasingly illegible script, but we had never talked about the days directly following my father’s death. He eased the information from me as a good master can loose an object from his dog’s jaw. While the eye of the hurricane had provided cover, I had abandoned my trumpet and backpack and had tried to carry Harnett’s body away. Somehow I made it through the swamp and up the slippery hill but no farther. Instead I sought the highest ground I could find and buried him in a shallow grave that I specified until it was as familiar to me as my own reflection.

  A military vehicle picked me up a few miles away and I spent the next two days in an emergency shelter, sleeping on a canvas cot and washing myself in a portable shower. When the water levels had sufficiently receded, I accompanied a sheriff’s deputy to Harnett’s burial spot. He was still there. Over a dozen had died in the storm; there were few suspicions. I filled out questionnaires and consented to the interment of his remains in a local graveyard. I didn’t give it much thought. My mind was on my future.

  Eventually I traveled back to Iowa. I contacted Ted and he arranged for a hotel room and visited me the night I arrived. I explained my intent to return to Chicago. He didn’t try to dissuade me but suggested I take a few weeks to decompress in Bloughton. I told him he was crazy. Bloughton was where terrible things had been done to high school heroes, where arsonists had nearly killed both me and Harnett.

  “You realize they blame all that on your father,” he said. “And your father is dead. You understand what I’m saying?”

  There was something in Ted’s eyes that I couldn’t quite figure. Did he know the truth?

  “You’re saying they don’t blame me.”

  “That’s what I’m saying, yes.” His mustache twitched. “But what I’m also saying is there exists here a sympathy for you and your … situation.”

  “What, they feel bad for me?”

  The mustache twitched again. “There is sympathy.”

  Maybe because he, too, had once lived in a big city, Ted had the necessary distance to divine the patterns of smalltown behavior. At any rate, he was right. As eager as the town had been to ostracize me when I had arrived, they were twice as eager to take me back into their arms. It was surreal. Ted took me to lunch as an experiment and the waitress put her hand on my neck and looked like she wanted to cry. We went to Sookie’s Foods next and the manager himself met us in the cereal aisle and squeezed my shoulder and told me he had a stock-boy position open if I felt that would help get me back on my feet. Everywhere we went, the same thing.

  At night, in front of the hotel room’s television, I reported to my father how the entire town was granting me a forgiveness I did not deserve. “Look,” I whispered. “People aren’t as terrible as you thought they were. As I thought they were. They want to be good.”

  Even in death, Harnett was cynical. I pictured his exasperation at my undying naïveté. He told me to look more closely at their pinched and sweating faces. See the shame? They are ashamed at how they treated us. See the desperation? They are desperate to salve that shame with generosity. Their swift acceptance of you, said Harnett, has nothing to do with you. It’s about them.

  “Whatever,” I said to him. “I’ll take it.”

  And I did. I took that stock-boy job, and within six weeks I had moved up to checkout clerk. The first day at the register I was trembling. Conversation was the latest ritual I had to relearn; I’d already tackled how to wake up at dawn instead of dusk, how to wear bright white shirts and khaki pants without fearing exposure. For so long I’d angled my face so that people couldn’t memorize my features and mumbled so they couldn’t identify my voice—old Digger tricks. This didn’t fly in the checkout lane. Soon I discovered that nothing normalizes a person faster than seeing him scan your pudding cups and economy-size diapers. Everyone in town patronized Sookie’s, and people would wait an extra ten minutes just to go through my line, just to be able to impart two or three words of sympathy or understanding. I’d smile and nod my thanks and ask them cash or credit, paper or plastic?

  There were challenges. For a while it was hard not to calculate the post-mortem value of their earrings and watches and cuff links. But eventually I learned to quit the habit, or at least stow it away. The forced conversations became less forced. I found myself inquiring about ailing spouses and troublesome pets because I honestly wanted to know. Without noticing the moment when it began to change, I started valuing each person’s life rather than their death.

  Ted helped me find the cheapest one-room apartment in town, a former office space over Fielder’s Auto that stank of oil and cigarettes. I loved it. I worked forty or fifty hours at Sookie’s and paid my rent proudly. Ted didn’t let it go at that, either. Soon he was insisting I get my high school diploma.

  “You’re psychotic,” I told him. “They’re not ready for that. I’m not ready for that.”

  “After everything you’ve been through, you’re going to let a few little high schoolers scare you off?”

  “You’re goddamn right I am,” I said.

  This was one battle he could no
t win. How could I shut out the phantom screams coming from the weight room, the theater, or the biology lab? Instead I agreed to take my GED. Ted brought me study materials. It only took me a few hours of review to realize I was going to ace that thing. I hadn’t been a straight-A student for nothing. Twitching somewhere deeper now was another notion, one regarding a career, a real one, one involving the higher education so prized by my mother, one having nothing to do with the sacking of milk and eggs and produce.

  The day before I took the GED was my eighteenth birthday, and the bank opened to me the contents of my mother’s savings account: $11,375.02. To me the figure seemed more than substantial, numerical proof of my mother’s noble squirreling of her every spare cent. I would not let her down. This sum, right down to those last two goddamn cents, would deliver me my future. This job of mine, it was just training. A few more thousand groceries and my emotions would be caught up with my mind. I folded up the bank statement and told my mother to hang on. I told myself the same thing. It wouldn’t be long.

  Never would I have guessed that there were lessons to be learned not by fleeing Bloughton but by staying put. By the end of October I was happy. It was a feeling I distrusted and I was careful not to embrace it too heartily. There were lives I had almost destroyed, after all, and that was something still requiring atonement. Gottschalk had not been fired after the gruesome events at his school—he had resigned immediately. My coworkers at the grocery—enthusiastic gossipers, all of them—told me that there had been a farewell dinner for him at the local Elks’ hall and that many people had attended to toast his years of service. He and his wife—he had a wife, a fact that shook me up more than a little—moved to Florida and were gone before the Gatlins ever came to town. His portion of my revenge, the tombstone on the desk, was the only part incorporated into Bloughton record. What had happened to Woody and Celeste had been obscured by authorities, either because the victims were minors or because the acts were simply too gruesome, and survived now only as wild and specious legend.