Rotters

by Daniel Kraus

  At the request of the Watsons, and with Claire’s recommendation to her department, I was placed with Boris’s family until other arrangements could be made. Boris stood beside me during the endless handshaking of the wake and sat next to me at the funeral. When the graveside service was over and people were filing away, Boris was the one who told me that I needed to touch the casket. “Just put your hand on it,” he said. I didn’t see why it was important. “Now, dumb-ass,” he hissed. “I did it when my grandma died. Trust me.” People were squeezing past us; it was my only chance. I leaned over and touched the casket with two fingers. The solidity of the hard surface was unexpectedly reassuring, and I pressed my entire palm flat against the beveled corner. I could feel through my hand the thunder of the exiting crowd. These vibrations were life, and for a moment my mother was part of it. I let it last for several seconds. It was the first time I had touched a casket and I presumed it would be the last. I was wrong, of course—I would touch hundreds, and soon.

  Ken Harnett was out there, but it was still two weeks before Claire would find him. Two duffel bags and my beloved green backpack in tow, I moved into the Watsons’ dusty ambiance of paperback books and vinyl records, all of which quivered with thatches of dog hair. My mother and I might have never crossed state lines, but going to the Watson condo was like traversing the world. Boris’s parents, Janelle and Thaddeus, were an interracial couple—he was from Vermont, she from Kenya—and their place was decked out with bizarre and frightening artifacts they brought home from their travels only to have them dutifully demolished by one of Boris’s hysterical little sisters. I moved through the familiar museum of masks and swords and sculpture, crashed onto an army mattress on Boris’s floor, and found myself staring at a scattering of glow-in-the-dark stars that we had stuck on his ceiling in third grade. As the sky darkened, I marveled at the number of years that had passed since we had placed the constellation, how little we must have been, and how those stars—little scraps of sticky paper—had outlasted my mother. “The stars are still there,” I finally said, unable to close my eyes and unwilling to start specifying—here, nested within the Watson home, it just seemed cowardly. “Huh?” Boris answered right away. He was awake, too. “What stars?” “The stars,” I insisted, and he responded, “Yeah, but where?” I thought I was going crazy. Then he said, “Oh, those stars. Wow, I guess I forgot about them. Huh. You sure are an observant bastard. I don’t know, I guess that’s just how my ceiling looks. You better get used to it.” I wiped the sweat from my face and peeled away the dog hairs. He was right. I had better.

  Boris wasn’t just my best friend, he was my only friend, really. By the time you hit middle school, one good friend was all you needed. We were not popular, Boris and I, but we were hardly Mac Hill or Alfie Sutherland. It was a big school, seething with nearly two thousand jocks and dorks and burnouts of every conceivable ethnicity and IQ. Within such pandemonium, it was blissfully easy to be overlooked.

  If the adults were to be believed, each one of us possessed some sort of special talent, though they were kidding themselves if they thought all talents were equal. My straight As, for instance, were hardly something I went around advertising. Fortunately, there was one other place Boris and I shined: we both played trumpet. Boris had been playing since he was little—trumpet lessons were but one of the dozens of cultural pursuits foisted upon him by Janelle and Thaddeus. My mom was uncomfortable with anything that kept me away from home, but I guilted her into buying me an instrument in sixth grade and naturally chose the same one as Boris. We were both pretty good. We could sight-read and even improvise over changes a bit. We played at school pep rallies, football and basketball games, and seasonal concerts, and between the two of us we had scored four or five solos. We spent a lot of quality time bitching about what an idiot’s contraption the trumpet was, how it barely rated above a first grader’s recorder, and how we both planned to melt the brass for money as soon as we hit college. In reality we loved it. The trumpet is, in fact, a pretty unimpressive thing, but it’s different when you’re playing as part of an eighty-piece concert orchestra or twenty-member jazz band. There is power there, and we both felt it after every performance, even as we rolled our eyes at the applause and made lewd gestures involving the bell ends of the trumpets.

  Since the beginning of summer, I had practiced maybe two or three times total, and each of those had been a reaction to my mother’s badgering. Now, bunking alongside Boris in weird imitation of the sleepovers of our youth, I couldn’t get practice out of my head—practice had been my mother’s final request. I sat up beneath the glowing green stars, the sheets clinging to my skin. I checked the digital clock. It was nearly two in the morning. I counted on my fingers. My mother had been dead for almost sixty hours. It was dark in Boris’s bedroom, much darker than my room at home, and I patted the carpet until I found my backpack, then dug past clothes, the flimsy folds of my wallet, the crinkled pages of my passport, until my hands felt the hard plastic of my trumpet case. Keeping my eyes focused on the phony universe six feet above my head, I removed the trumpet and ran my hands over the warm metal, slid my palm over the valves, gave a little tug to the water key. I settled my fingers onto the buttons and nested my thumb into its crook.

  “Shit, man,” came a voice from Boris’s bed. “If you wanted to play, all you had to do was ask.”

  “Oh, sorry.”

  “I’m sure you are.” He paused. “It’s a nice night.”

  “It’s dark in here,” I said. “I tried to be quiet, sorry.”

  Boris drew a long breath through his nose. “Sound always carries best at night anyway. Think about how we sound at football games.”

  “Boris,” I said. “It’s late. Real late.”

  “Hell, if this was Birdland, we’d just be getting cooking right about now.”

  “Your parents would kill us.”

  “Janelle and Thaddeus? Tonight? Tonight we can get away with anything, and I say we take advantage of it.” I heard rustling covers. He was out of bed. Next came the bang of his trumpet case hitting the desk, the crack of undone latches.

  “What about your sisters? They will go bat-shit,” I said. “Come on, forget it, let’s go to sleep.”

  I heard the soft squeal of his mouthpiece being inserted and saw his outline in the dark, blotting out star systems in silent laughter. “You want to play or what?”

  And so we played. The notes were tentative at first; “Blues by Five” never sounded so twiggy and fragile. Boris took the lead on “Salt Peanuts.” At what passed for the conclusion, I started “Oleo” without even thinking about it, and there it was, what we had been searching for: a true sound. He met me a few lines in, dodging around, finding the gaps before I could guess where they might be, and now we were playing, really playing, and Boris shoved open his window with an elbow. The night came inside, the music went out. Only after twenty minutes did I realize we were loud; we both played louder. I kept waiting for the pounding from his sisters or angry neighbors, the phone calls alerting us to the police who were on their way. Nothing—it was as if the performance itself imparted its magnitude. Boris kicked open his bedroom door and we snaked through the kitchen and living room, and I thought of the second-line funeral marches in New Orleans, the sepulchral celebrations in the streets of Mexican villages. Another window tossed open and we were on the fire escape, the sound taking on crisper properties in the night air, the notes electric at each apex. At some point I became aware of Janelle and Thaddeus standing behind us looking on silently, their hands gripping each other’s pajamas. Behind them, yawning dogs and the progressively shorter lineup of Boris’s bedclothed sisters, their perennially cross faces loosened with something like awe. Below us, faces on the street tilted our way. All this listening made me listen, too: our notes no longer made any sense. It didn’t matter and no one seemed to care. In the end, everything is noise.

  2.

  BLOUGHTON, IOWA, POPULATION: 4,000. Claire came into her office a
t the DCFS with this curse written on a piece of notebook paper printed with calico kittens. She collapsed into her chair and tapped the words with purple nails.

  “Okay, relax. Relax. It’s a nice place, Joey. Before you ask, no, I haven’t been there, but I checked it out online, and, you know, seriously, I want you to give it a chance here before you freak.”

  “Who said I was going to freak?” I asked. I squeezed my hands into fists beneath the table, well into the process of freaking.

  “Because I know I would,” she said. “In fact, I did. My family moved when I was in sixth grade, and that’s an even harder age to adjust to a new school, believe me.”

  I saw no reason to believe her.

  “You told me you’ve never been outside Chicago. Which I still find hard to swallow, by the way, but fine, it was a quirk of your mom’s, whatever—you’re not the only one uncomfortable with the countryside, a lot of people are, the countryside gives them the creeps. But can I stress that Bloughton is not just a couple shacks in a cornfield? Now, it’s true, a town Bloughton’s size,” Claire said, shrugging, “their Web presence is minimal. A great way to get around that, though, is real estate listings, and I looked up maybe three or four homes, most of them with little slide shows. I don’t suppose you’re into woodwork? Of course you’re not, but regardless. It’s nice, Joey. Kind of idyllic, if you want to know the truth.”

  “So you’ve spoken to him,” I said.

  She paused for a moment, tapping her bottom teeth against her upper lip, then looked at the calico paper and made an ambiguous gesture with her head. “There have been communications,” she said.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Look,” she said, giving me her eyes, which she must have known were her best weapon. “He doesn’t have a phone.”

  “You mean he doesn’t have a land line.”

  “I mean the man does not own a telecommunications device.”

  I felt my pulse race. “Who doesn’t have a phone?”

  “You’re freaking, Joey. Don’t do that. You want a water?” She looked around her office. There was no water cooler, no bottles. I planted my fists on the table and made hands of them again, laying them flat. I inhaled and meditated upon calico cats.

  “He at least knows about me, though, right? There’s been some kind of communication. That’s what you said, right?”

  She reached over and laid a hand atop one of my own.

  “It has all been explained to him,” she assured me. “The old-fashioned way. With letters. We’ve received a response. It’s all set.”

  I shook my head. “This just sounds like a bad idea.”

  Her hand slid away from mine. She bit her lip, as if she were holding back words suitable only for more mature clients. This had not been an easy case for her, I knew that. There had been thrilling surprises and unexpected setbacks, far more than she had bargained for when she took the job, which, from the looks of her, couldn’t have been more than a few months ago.

  “We are out of options, Joey,” she said. “Unless you’ve remembered another blood relative.”

  “Blood,” I said, thinking of Janelle and Thaddeus, Boris, and his three shrieking sisters. “Why is that so important?”

  She shrugged. “It just is. In the eyes of the law, it is. In the eyes of a lot of people, actually.”

  I took back my hands and left parallel smears. We both regarded the moisture. She would have to wipe it up later, before the next sad sack took his seat at this table. Without looking at her, I got the impression of shoulders slumping. I heard her chair creak, a file cabinet squeak, and papers shuffle.

  “Ken Harnett,” she recited from the page. “He has been told that his son Joey Crouch will be arriving via Amtrak train on August twenty-fourth. On August twenty-fifth Joey will begin eleventh grade at Bloughton High School. By no later than August twentieth, Joey’s textbooks will need to be picked up at the school and all arrangements made for the transfer of credits. Mr. Harnett has been advised to establish a relationship with a local physician for Joey, as well as a grief counselor if a need presents itself. Contact information for Joey’s present general practitioner and dentist has been forwarded.”

  “Through the mail,” I added gloomily.

  “Mr. Harnett has been advised that Joey has not been diagnosed with any health conditions that require immediate attention. Mr. Harnett has been advised that Joey’s health insurance under his mother’s plan will extend to his eighteenth birthday. As is standard procedure, social services of Lomax County has been contacted to ensure that Mr. Harnett’s dwelling meets acceptable standards. Mr. Harnett works as a garbageman.”

  “Wait. What?”

  Claire flipped back a page. “Mr. Harnett works as a garbageman.” She raised her eyebrows at me, waiting for a follow-up. I said nothing. Again she lowered her head and turned the page.

  “As specified by Ms. Crouch’s will, her liquid assets transfer to a savings account for Joey accessible to him on his eighteenth birthday. Her physical assets, aside from those claimed by Joey by August twentieth, will be put up for public auction, the resulting funds of which will be placed into the aforementioned account.”

  Claire paused on the last page. A purple nail tapped the last paragraph. I didn’t like the look of it.

  “It is the explicit wish of Ms. Crouch, as specified in her will, that Joey be placed into the sole custody of his biological father, Ken Harnett,” she said, with a tone approaching regret. Claire stopped reading and looked at me. “Not that there are any other options,” she said softly.

  I looked past the piles of papers that I had become so accustomed to during our twice-weekly visits and peered out the window. In the distance, I could see the Hancock Center and Tribune Tower, almost perfectly aligned. We had never gone to the observation deck of the Hancock, my mother and I, though we must have talked about doing it a thousand times. It’s easier to do those things as a tourist; you sweep into town with a bulleted to-do list and you get it done because the clock is working against you. It had worked against my mother and me, too; we just hadn’t felt it.

  There was packing to do.

  “There are always options,” I said.

  3.

  ON AUGUST 24 JANELLE and Thaddeus paid for a cab and with Boris accompanied me to Union Station. As Janelle practiced her Arabic with the driver, I stepped onto the curb like a newborn, into the shadows of giants, deaf with traffic, blinded by glass. Exhaust settled into my skin. Pedestrians brushed past too close and their shirtsleeves nipped me like mosquitoes. The scissors switch of businessmen’s slacks, the chalkboard squeal of a police siren, some sort of subterranean moan: all sounded to me like blood rushing through my ears. Blood, yes, it is important, Claire, and this is mine, all around me.

  Janelle and Thaddeus were the type of parents who hugged kids, any kids, whenever the opportunity arose. Their hugs hurt. When they’d had their fill, I turned to Boris and shrugged, and he gave me a hug, too, but just for posterity. What mattered was the handshake. His hand, frailer and bonier than even my own, clamped hard and shook with reckless assurance, and I experienced a surprising certainty that we would never see each other again. He would recede into the human morass of the train station, then the tangled skein of the city. Then it happened: they walked away and up an escalator. Alone for the first time since I had stood above my mother’s open casket, I thought again of the spider that had watched her from the funeral home ceiling. I imagined it swinging down on gossamer and catching a lucky breeze. I saw it dancing over her folded hands, racing past her necklace, and defying gravity to scale her upturned chin before disappearing inside her, where it would live out its life. We were all disappearing: the spider, my mother, Boris, me. The wind whips, even down here in the cellar of the city, and we swing from our invisible strings. The strings break and we land, and where we land is called home.

  4.

  EACH TOWN DWINDLED. FIRST, city suburbs with clean parks molded carefully from surroundin
g concrete. Then other towns, smaller, but with train stations painted a reassuring summer-camp yellow. Rust was next, abandoned tractors, followed by shirtless children who didn’t look up at the train. Finally, spoil: ancient barns swallowing themselves, paved roads crumbled, a bald man on a seatless bike listening to the radio duct-taped to his handlebars. Never in my life had there been no tall buildings to impede the view; the silos made but weak notches in the infinite blue. I peeled my neck from the brown vinyl of my coach seat and let the quaking train rattle me down the narrow steps toward the exit as one might shake a glass to settle a tower of ice.

  The train stopped at Bloughton for no more than five seconds. The attendant nearly pushed me out the door. On solid ground again, I swayed beneath the pressure of multiple shoulder straps and felt the square shape of my trumpet case knock against my knee. The station appeared deserted. On one side of the tracks was a small park, mostly barren of trees and rubbed to the dirt. The remains of a swing set sprouted against the late-day sun like the claws of a demolished building. A squirrel nosed at an overturned trash can, flinching each time the breeze snapped the inserted Hefty. On the other side of the tracks, an electrical cage and, beyond that, a light blue trailer home with a sunflower pinwheel spinning implausibly fast. Nothing else in this town, I was certain, moved with such speed.

  With each gravel crunch beneath my shoes, I expected him. Ten paces away, nine, eight. He would step from the interior of the one-room train station, the roof’s shadow slipping away like a robe lifted from above. Seven paces, six. He would not look like I expected; I expected that. Five paces, four. There would be shyness, possibly faked camaraderie. Three paces, two. Almost certainly a handshake, though I was willing to accept a hug.