Rotters

by Daniel Kraus

  My last step hit cement and then I was inside the station. Two empty wooden benches contemplated each other. There was a snack machine with a yellowed OUT OF ORDER sign applied over the coin slot with masking tape. I turned toward the drone of an electric fan and crossed the room to the ticket window. There was an old man inside and I knocked on the glass. He looked up from his book of word jumbles. He wore thick glasses and had a bandage on his forehead.

  “You Joey?” he said.

  My heart skipped. I felt myself nod.

  “Got something for you,” he said. He set down his book, his eyes lingering on the puzzle for several seconds more, and then retrieved a piece of paper and pushed it through the slot. It was pencil on rumpled notebook paper. It read:

  Hewn Oak Rd.

  Dead End

  Off Jackson

  That was it. No names—not mine, not his—and no map. I looked again at the old man. He was back at the jumble, his glasses sliding down his nose. I knuckled the glass.

  “You know where this is?” I asked.

  He didn’t look at me. “Off Jackson,” he said.

  At least finding Jackson was not difficult. It appeared to be Bloughton’s key thoroughfare. I passed a grocery store called Sookie’s Foods, a gas station, a sewing shop, a Christian bookstore, two churches, something called the 3-D Chow Box, a consignment shop, a hardware-store-slash-pharmacy, a bank, a library, and sparse rows of aged houses. But I passed no one who might point me in the right direction. Night was falling and I had been walking for thirty minutes. There were limited ways to rearrange my heavy load, none of them good. I thought of my mother. Had she known these streets? Had she ever traveled them? How could I know so little about this part of her life, how could I have asked so few questions? I forced determination into my gait. For her sake I would find the answers.

  I came upon a building larger than most. I was almost past it when I realized it was a high school. I was fully past it before I realized that it was my high school. I stopped to give it another look. Beige brick marred by an old CLASS OF 99 RULEZ tag above the auditorium, white sidewalks spotted with bubble gum, yellow lawns striped by the shortest distances between any two popular points: it was a school, all right. How hard could it be to walk inside tomorrow morning? I could be anyone I wanted. I could remake myself. I told myself this over and over as I passed the dark football field, two tennis courts, and an empty parking lot.

  Hewn Oak arrived long after I had given up hope. Sidewalks had given way to grass shoulders. Corn had swept up from distant fields and met the road. Still I trudged down Jackson, my bags spinning, the sweat from my palm lifting the words from my father’s note. Soon there would be no directions there at all, no proof of his existence, no proof that I belonged here. Then the turnoff appeared and I took it—a winding dirt path through the woods.

  After a few minutes I saw a light. I kept moving, my heart now heavier than all my bags put together. A house, little more than a cabin: I could see it now, small, square, and silent. Beyond the cabin, the bright twinkling of a river. My shoes parted the long grass of an unkempt lawn. My father’s home, at last—my home. This was where my mother wanted me.

  It was full night. The stars above me, far from Boris’s facsimiles, shone with a fierceness I’d never seen in the city. I made a fist, knocked on the warped wood of the door. I felt my face curling into a defensive grimace and tried to twist it into a smile. There was a long pause. I counted to one minute, then two. Time lost track of me. I listened to the river.

  After a while, I pushed open the door and directly inside was a man on a chair staring at me. He spoke in a voice like gravel and hay.

  “Tell me how this happened.”

  5.

  HE WAS BROAD-SHOULDERED and brown from sun. His bloodshot eyes focused somewhere over my head while his large hands held down his dirt-stained knees. Shadows from an unseen fire mottled his skin.

  “They told me a bus,” he said. I was still standing outside the doorframe, the weight of my luggage forgotten.

  “They told me a bus,” he repeated with a wince, lifting one of his hands and pushing it through the wild gray hair that flew from the back half of his head. “But I need more information. Which way she was heading. The route of the bus. North? I always picture her heading north.”

  A pop quiz, my specialty. I conjured a mental map of the fateful intersection. After some calculation, I shook my head.

  “South,” he said grimly. I nodded. “And the bus. Eastward? It was heading along an eastward course?” His sight line changed; for the first time, he met my eyes and I felt his agony. The answer he craved—if I knew it, I would give it. All I had was the truth, so I shook my head. No, she had just stepped onto the street when the westbound bus struck her square.

  He nodded slowly, as if this was the answer he had feared. He turned toward the fireplace, his face blasting yellow. I took advantage of the moment, took a half step closer, and squinted. So this was my father. I scanned for physical similarities and was taken aback: he was me, only dragged through hell. I felt a mixture of revulsion and excitement—part of what made this man so unnerving also existed within me. A quick glance around gave me only the slimmest hints of his life: a low ceiling, rough wooden floors, a creeping darkness. Firelight flickered strangely over a multifaceted brick wall; no, not bricks but books of all shapes and sizes, hundreds of them, stacked from floor to ceiling. I grasped at it—an intellectual garbageman, that wasn’t so bad. Perhaps he rescued these volumes from trash cans and brought them back here. That would explain the pungent odor.

  His hands pushed down at his knees and he was up. Fully unfurled, he dwarfed me. His forearms split the flaps of his shirtsleeves. Wires of gray hair filled in the V at his sternum. Like me, he buckled his belt on an inner notch, but his thighs left little room inside the battered pants. All I could see of his boots was that they were black and big.

  There were two large gray sacks at his side, and he strapped them to his shoulders. He took a step forward, halted, and focused his eyes on my chest, as if he would rather wait me out than continue speaking. Wood crackled and snapped. We stood six feet from each other, both of us planted to the ground with added weight.

  He drew snot through his nose and spat, presumably into the fire. Head down, he came right at me. I stumbled backward, outside of the cabin once more. Wrenching a ring of keys from his hip pocket, he passed me, the rotten smell briefly intensifying. His fingers nimbly isolated a key as he walked. I noticed for the first time the outline of a pickup truck at the side of the house. He was leaving. I had just arrived and he was leaving.

  “Dad,” I said, realizing too late that it was my first word. In a way, it was also my last: it was a name I would never call him again.

  He reached the truck. His right arm fell; the key ring jingled. After a moment he turned his head halfway, the fingers of light from the house barely kindling his cheek.

  “You want someone to blame? Blame me. I killed her.”

  His chest expanded, daring me to draw out the moment. I just stood there, gnats bumping against my face and neck. Satisfied that we were finished, my father tossed the cloth sacks into the truck bed. I saw a glint of keys, a hint of his clownish hair, and the moonlight shimmering from the opening and closing door of his truck. The engine coughed and headlights gave acute dimension to the trees. Tires turned. Branches snapped. I was left in dissipating exhaust lit by brake lights of diminishing red. He was gone.

  A gnat made contact with my naked eye—only this woke me from my trance. I lunged inside and shut the door, releasing my green backpack and duffel bags to the floor. I closed my eyes, rolled my aching shoulders, and took deep breaths. The odor was persistent. He was a garbageman, I kept telling myself. Stinks were part of the job. So were odd hours. Maybe right now he was picking up an extra shift in the next town over. That bag he carried was his gear: pokers for loose refuse, shovels for scraping Dumpster bottoms, sanitary jumpsuits, plastic gloves. This is norma
l, I told myself, while my heart hurt itself against my ribs. This is exactly how a father and son interact.

  There was indeed a fireplace, and I sat down where my father had been sitting. The seat was still warm and I shifted, disturbed by his alien temperature. I looked around. The cabin was dominated by this single room, anchored at one end by the ashy hearth and at the other by a sink, a stove, and a refrigerator. Between the two ends was a random topography of cardboard boxes, half-zippered bags, buckets brimming with trash, and mountains of books. Overwhelming everything else were newspapers, stacks upon musty stacks. From a glance I could see that each pile consisted of a different publication; I saw headers with words like Journal, Sentinel, and Herald. Mixed with the cabin’s odor I could detect the ancient ink.

  I reached down to remove the shoes from my aching feet, and my knuckles grazed glass. It was a bottle of whiskey. I picked it up. It was empty. I remembered my father’s red eyes and imagined his hunched figure emptying this bottle while I arrived at the train station, as I stumbled helplessly through town. Irresponsible was the word that settled in my mind. My mother had been far from perfect, but irresponsibility was something I had never had to deal with, much less live alongside.

  All at once I was exhausted. I dragged myself to my socked feet and shuffled across the cluttered floor. Behind one door were a toilet and a tiny sink shoved against a curtainless shower. Through the remaining door was a bedroom barely big enough for the mattress wedged between its walls. The sheets were knotted. Filthy clothes wove a strange carpet across the floor. This room belonged to my father.

  I dragged my bags to a far corner of the main room, near the sink, and with aching muscles slid a couple of waist-high stacks of newspapers out of the way. I removed my trumpet case from my pack so that the clothes inside could function as a pillow. I put a jacket over my legs, a hooded sweatshirt over my torso. I lay back and crooked an elbow over my eyes, the popping of the firewood the only sound. I began to pray, as my mom had taught me to when I was little, but the sentences scattered and I forgot to whom I was speaking—God, Jesus, or her.

  Sleep came pulling, but one thought would not let me go. I killed her, he had said. It was a horrific statement. It was an invitation for me to loathe him. I couldn’t resist. I did. It was arrogance, his certainty that despite not having spoken to my mother in sixteen years, he still mattered enough to have figured some way in her passing. You fucking bastard, I thought. You don’t get to be a part of her death, no matter how bad you want it.

  In semiconsciousness I saw the wedge-shaped nicks in my mother’s left ear and heard my father ask me about the direction she was walking versus the direction of the oncoming bus. She had never heard very well out of her left ear—why had it taken me this long to remember that? She had not mentioned it in years, that was true, but it had been evident every night in the cocking of her head when she watched TV, and in the way she had held the phone to her right ear, never her left. She had not heard the bus because it had come up on her left—her left ear, the one her ex-husband, my father, had somehow maimed. This direct line drawn between my parents, the first I’d ever witnessed, was startling. Their lives did connect, and violently; her death was along that line, too, and somewhere along the line was an intersection that was me.

  6.

  WHEN I AWOKE IT was morning. The taste of charred wood burned my throat. I stood with the aid of the closest block of newsprint. I needed to pee and hobbled across the floor, stubbing my toes on any number of objects and sending one tower of papers wobbling. I urinated into the shallow yellow basin of the toilet and blinked around the dank bathroom, wondering at what seemed missing. It took my splashing cold, sulfurous water over my face before I realized. There was no mirror.

  I poked my head outside. The trees were bright green and lined with gold from the rising sun. The lush forest scent temporarily rinsed my body of the cloying odor of the cabin. My father’s truck was still missing.

  The first day of school—it was today. The realization crashed upon me. I had counted on an evening full of discussions with my father about my classes, my textbooks, my teachers, my schedule, what time I needed to get to school and how I would be getting there. Nothing of the sort had happened and it was Monday morning in Bloughton, Iowa, and I had no books, no ride, no instructions, nothing.

  I checked my watch. It was just after seven. In Chicago, classes had begun at eight. Based on yesterday’s trek, I figured the school would be a thirty- or forty-minute walk. I could make it if I hurried. I ripped off my clothes and dove into the shower. The dribbles fell ineffectually about my hair. There was a nugget of soap on a shower ledge and I glided it through my pits and across my neck, and seconds later I was drying with the dingy towel that had sat wadded atop the toilet. The shorts I had worn yesterday smelled of smoke, but there was no time to find an alternative. I unzipped a bag and put on the first shirt I saw, some atrocity printed on both sides with a cartoon duck in sunglasses. Textbooks—Claire had assured me that my father would have them. My eyes spun across the room: a million books, none of them likely to be mine. I tied my shoes and stepped outside, opting not to lock the door behind me, and stood on the grass feeling naked and unprotected without the usual first-day arsenal of notebooks and folders and pencils.

  I wove through the twists of Hewn Oak Road. By the time I made it to Jackson it was seven-forty. I ran.

  With only minutes to spare, I made the front lawn. From a distance the students could have been my former classmates. As I drew closer, though, differences became apparent. Many wore baseball caps, something not allowed in my previous school. On average they were beefier. Every single one of them was white. The boys were red in the neck and the girls were tan, their deep browns segmented by the milky negatives left by tank tops and bikini straps. One of the boys was draining a mouthful of chaw. One of the girls had a Confederate flag patch on her backpack. An actual tractor was parked in the lot.

  A warning bell rang as I entered. I had a moment of panic when I realized I didn’t have an ID, not even my passport, but relaxed when I saw that there were no security guards or even a metal detector. Students scattered as though they knew where they were headed. More lockers were closing than opening. I wandered until I found the designation in faded wooden letters—PRI CIP L’S OF ICE—then waited in line behind a dozen other students. A few of them looked as confused as I felt; they continually referenced their schedules and checked the clock. The two women behind the counter communicated with the deadpan cheer of store clerks during a holiday rush. Through the clatter I heard information exchanged about switching study halls, prescription medications, erroneous locker combinations. A bell rang at 8:05. Classes were beginning; I felt another surge of apprehension. I could finally read a sign behind the desk: PRINCIPAL JESS SIMMONS/VICE PRINCIPAL ESTELLE DIAMOND. My turn had arrived.

  “What’s up, hon?” the woman asked. Cat’s-eye glasses were wedged onto a piggy face further undermined by excessive purple eye shadow.

  “I’m new,” I said.

  “Name?”

  “Joey Crouch.”

  She licked her thumb and fluttered through a few pages. “Okay, hon, I got you.” She glanced at me over her glasses. “You’re supposed to be with Pratt in English.”

  “I don’t know where that is.”

  “The room number is on your schedule, hon.”

  “I don’t have a schedule.”

  “You lose it? You got your log-in? Everything’s on the computer.”

  “No, wait.” She was already glancing over my head at the person behind me. “I don’t have anything. I just got here yesterday. I don’t have a schedule. I don’t have a locker. I’m not even sure if I have books. My dad wasn’t able to tell me what I’m supposed to do.”

  The woman paused and gave me her first real consideration. She pursed her painted lips and looked back down at her papers, her chin melting into the gelatin of her neck. “Joey Crouch?”

  “Yes.”

 
; “Parents are …” She looked. And blinked. Then, without looking up, she said, “Ken Harnett?”

  There was the blast of an exhale from behind me, followed by a mutter of amazement: “No way.”

  I had no recourse but the truth. I nodded. The woman wormed her tongue inside her rouged cheek. Then she started clicking her mouse.

  The other woman behind the counter, a younger redhead, called out, “Next,” and the boy behind me stepped up. He looked me up and down, a sly grin on his square and watchful face. He wore his blond hair in a military cut, and his tight shirt showed off his arms, thick with muscle and encircled with barbed-wire tattoos. His neck was irritated from a too-vigorous shaving routine.

  “Woody!” the redhead exclaimed. “I swear you keep getting taller!”

  “No, ma’am,” said the boy, dazzling her, and surprising me, with the size and ferocity of his grin. Over this blinding display of teeth, he favored me with another glance. “Bigger, maybe, on account of weights and stuff.”

  “Well, I don’t doubt that. We were all talking this morning how we expect big things from Woodrow Trask this season.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And did you know I just saw Celeste not two minutes ago? Just the prettiest thing I ever saw.”

  “You’re right about that, ma’am.”

  I was dimly aware of the sound of a printer. With a smack, the bespectacled woman in front of me slammed a paper to the counter.

  “That’s your schedule, Joey Crouch,” she said. She pointed a chubby finger at the first line. “That’s English with Pratt. Mr. Pratt. He’s in room two fourteen. That’s up the stairs and to the right. After that, you have calculus and biology and then lunch. That’s on this floor, but around back. You’ll figure it out as you go.” She pointed to where she had written in ink a few numbers on the paper. “This is your locker number and your combination. You have four minutes between classes, so after Pratt, go make sure it works. Some of those things are a million years old, and goofy. Half of them open without a combination if you just pull hard enough, but you didn’t hear that from me. Now,” she said, looking at me again. “You said you didn’t have books?”