Rotters

by Daniel Kraus

  I kept moving. The clatter of lockers buried much of the guttural laughter. “Where’s the fire, Crotch?” called someone else. I stopped at my locker to dump off some of Ted’s paperwork. They swept toward me, a male chorus: “Crooooootch!” A hand swatted my locker door shut; it barely missed my nose. I focused on my shoes and made them move, right, left, one foot after another. A girl’s voice, now, apprehensive but bubbling: “How’s it hanging, Crotch?”

  One foot after another, around the corner, my unfortunate nickname chirping in my wake. From the corner of my eye I saw the wall of flesh called Rhino. I watched my feet pick up speed.

  “Crotch,” Rhino purred pleasantly. There was a blur of motion. Then my testicles seemed to explode. My folder dropped from my hand; distantly I saw multicolored paper, including Laverne’s salmon packet, fan across the tile. Heat knifed my gut. Cold tears sprang from my eyes. My hands instinctively clasped at my balls. There was laughter but it was muted in a storm of pain. I took a shuddering step to the side and my foot landed on one of the salmon-colored papers and slid out from under me. I fell to my knees. Blood: I swore I could feel it pumping from my ruptured scrotum. My body curled in on itself like a worm.

  The bell rang. Somewhere a class was beginning without me. My hot forehead pivoted against the cold floor. “Crotch”—I should have seen this coming. The rest of the week, the month, the year: the horror film of my life played out before me. I would never be safe.

  I hauled myself up with help from a fire extinguisher. Not caring who might be watching, I stuck a gentle hand down the front of my shorts and checked for damage. There was only swelling. I limped down the hall and gingerly lowered myself down twenty stairs. The cafeteria, the pay phone—it took me five more minutes to get there. I prayed for enough money in the return-change slot to augment the change in my pocket. A miracle: it was there. I gripped the icy coins in my sweaty fist and almost cried.

  Quarters and dimes rattled home. My finger banged through a familiar sequence.

  “Boris here.”

  “Boris!” My voice sounded throttled. “It’s Joey.”

  “Joey, shit. I didn’t recognize the number,” he said. “How you doing? You’re in luck, they let us sit outside for study hall. Everyone’s texting and shit. Mr. Tepper doesn’t even care, it’s great.”

  “Great,” I said, my shoulders quaking. Boris did sound great, so normal, so happy. I knew the meager hill of sun-blasted grass that he was sitting on and could almost feel its dog-pelt texture.

  “So what’s up? How’s Iowa?”

  I snorted back tears and tried to focus on the doodles of penises and breasts that covered the base of the phone. “It’s bad, Boris. I want to come home.”

  “Don’t give me that. How bad can it be? I bet you can play circles around those Glenn Miller jackasses.”

  “Boris, I’m serious,” I said, and something in my voice shut him up. “Things are going real bad. I don’t know what’s happened. It’s like … Boris, no one here likes me.” This was grossly inadequate, but I found myself unable to put it any better.

  “Okay,” Boris said. “Okay, take it easy. How can you say no one likes you? No one likes anyone after two days.”

  “Boris, you know the kind of kids … the kids that get tortured? Pushed down the stairs and stuff?”

  “Alfie Sutherland,” Boris said instantly. “Mac Hill. I haven’t seen Alfie, though—I think he might’ve transferred.”

  “That’s me,” I said urgently. I eyed a teacher who was passing the cafeteria. He glanced at me and slowed. It had to be obvious that I was ditching class. I angled myself toward the wall. “Boris, that’s me. Like Alfie, worse than Alfie. Things have gone all crazy.”

  There was a pause on his end. Through the receiver I heard an unmuffled car rip by and girls scream in delight. “Look, let’s not go overboard here,” he said. “It’s been two freaking days, man. I think you’re getting a little worked up.”

  Rage enveloped me. “Fuck off. You don’t know. I haven’t eaten in two days.”

  “Wait, what about your dad? He’s not feeding you?”

  “My dad? This is all his fault!” It came out loud and shot across the cafeteria. “I saw him for like two seconds when I got here and now he’s gone. There’s no food anywhere. I don’t have any money. I don’t know when he’s coming back. I’m sleeping on the floor. I tried to get money out of a purse and got caught.”

  I clawed the plastic handle of the phone and took a deep breath. The teacher who had passed earlier now swerved back into sight, leading a woman in a stiff blue suit. They were heading straight for me.

  “Did you say a purse?” Boris asked. “Whose purse? And you’re sleeping on somebody’s floor?”

  “Boris, they’re coming, I’ve got to go.” The two adults bore down on me.

  “Wait, is this your number? I’ll call you back—”

  “No! Don’t call this number.” It was too easy to imagine Woody picking up the inexplicably ringing cafeteria phone only to find Crotch’s little friend on the other end.

  “Then how do I—”

  “Joey Crouch?” said the woman in the stiff blue suit.

  I hung up on Boris. Gears inside the phone whirred.

  The woman frowned and sized me up. “All right. You need to come with us.”

  13.

  VICE PRINCIPAL ESTELLE DIAMOND was the woman in the blue suit. She sat in an uncomfortable-looking wooden chair behind Principal Jess Simmons, tilted as if prepared to pounce. Simmons perched upon the front corner of his desk in a parody of youth, his knees battling for space with my own. Laverne made a brief appearance, handing Simmons the wrong file and turning red when told to try again; when she returned with the correct file he yanked it from her hands, gesturing impatiently for her to exit.

  “I happened across Ted Granger, our band instructor, this afternoon, and he expressed some concern,” said Simmons, opening the skinny file and glancing at its contents. He was a wide man with a thick neck that gathered above his collar—probably a former athlete. A pen in his hand rattled as he stabbed the ink button relentlessly. “Mr. Granger’s concern was health-related.”

  “You are also supposed to be in Mrs. Peck’s class right now,” Diamond added. “But instead we found you placing a phone call. From a pay phone.” Her emphasis on pay made me wonder if that phone’s anachronistic existence was merely a trap to catch kids up to no good.

  Simmons smiled and spread his hands, still clicking his pen. “Here at BHS, we try to make the well-being of our students our business. We know most of them by name, know their siblings, in some cases taught their parents. I want to explain this because you’re new. All of us in this building, we’re nearly family in a lot of cases.”

  I thought about Woody Trask and the effusive fawning of the front-desk woman with red hair. They were family, all right.

  “At the very least we’re your friends,” continued Simmons. “So please think of us that way. Now,” he said, the clicking of his pen reaching total frenzy, “about that phone call.”

  “Whom did you call?” asked Diamond.

  I scanned their expectant faces. There was something I was missing.

  “A friend,” I ventured.

  “Save some time and give it to us straight,” said Simmons. “Was it a drug connection?”

  “Give it to us straight,” echoed Diamond.

  There was nothing I could do but stare at them. The only contraband I had ever touched was a few vile swallows of peach schnapps with Boris. A wave of vertigo made me look away. In my lap I found my hands. They were trembling. Suddenly I looked up.

  “I’m not on drugs,” I blurted. “I’m just hungry.”

  Simmons and Diamond exchanged looks. I commanded my stomach to go ahead, growl, just like it had been growling all day. Nothing happened.

  “Hungry,” mused Diamond.

  “Yes, hungry,” Simmons added. “How’s that?”

  I paused. The precarious relationship
between my father and me might not withstand the truth. But an accusation about a drug connection? That was no small thing. If they thought I was using or selling, things could get worse fast, for both myself and my father.

  So I told them. Even leaving out my father’s assertion that he had killed my mother, the unholy stench of the cabin, and the creepy books that reached to his ceiling, there was still plenty to say. I told them about my lack of money, the scarcity of food in the cabin, the unknown fate of my textbooks. I spoke tentatively at first, but the words soon snapped with vitriol. He deserved this, the Garbageman, for mucking up the lives of both me and my mother, and the more bile I could land on him, the better.

  When I finished, the rattle of Simmons’s pen had stopped. He flitted his tongue across his teeth and examined my file again. Over in her chair, Diamond watched him with such intensity she seemed sexually aroused.

  “The saddest thing,” said Simmons, “is that this does not come as a total shock.”

  Diamond dove in. “We’ll file charges. Doesn’t this qualify as child abuse?”

  Simmons lifted a hand to quiet her, but it was clear that he was pleased by her enthusiasm. “That may not be the best way to go about it, Estelle. Joey, Ms. Diamond and I know who your father is. We don’t know him well, and we certainly didn’t know he had any children, but we’re aware that he leads a lifestyle that is, I guess you could say, atypical.”

  “He lives in a shack,” Diamond said. “Everyone knows it.”

  Simmons held up another indulgent hand; in it, the pen was back, clicking away. “Joey, say it was up to you. How would you like us to help you?”

  Throw him in jail, I thought. Charge him with the murder of my mother, the attempted murder of me. “I just want to eat” was all I said, knowing full well the endearment such a plea would earn me.

  “That’s not a concern of yours, not anymore,” said Simmons. He hit a buzzer on his desk. “Earth to Laverne.” There was an unintelligible reply, at which Simmons and Diamond rolled their eyes. “Please stop stuffing your face and get in here.” I winced on her behalf, but seconds later there she was, flopping the ripples of her upper body over the doorframe. “Laverne, fix it up so Joey Crouch here gets on our free-lunch list. Think you can handle that?”

  The hatred between the principal and Laverne was palpable; it crackled for a moment before Laverne bowed her head in submission and left.

  “I’ve heard stories,” Diamond said, “of Ken Harnett scrapping through people’s yards, stories of outright theft.” My mind moved instantly to the pink purse—like father, like son. “He lives way out there on the river, on a patch of ground that I wonder if he even owns, and if he’s ever even applied for work, I certainly have never heard of it. He’s been getting a free ride for too many years. It’s not like he contributes anything. Have you ever seen him show up to a single community event?”

  “He doesn’t even come to the homecoming rally in Bowman Park,” agreed Simmons, stealing an approving glance at Diamond as if she had just removed an item of clothing.

  The excitement of telling my story was wearing off like anesthetic; below, the spates of dull scrotal pain had given way to general soreness. The subtext of Diamond’s rant was becoming clear: it was my father they cared about, not me. I couldn’t help wondering how attending homecoming rallies had any bearing on someone’s value as a citizen.

  “I don’t know about any stealing,” I said. “I think he makes most of his money picking up trash.”

  Simmons studied me. His pen-clicking was so percussive that I longed to join in with my trumpet. Finally he sighed and shook my file. “We’re going to play this by the book,” he said, looking at me, though obviously the statement was meant for Diamond, who reacted by licking her lips. “It says here your dad doesn’t have a phone number, is that right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Fine, we’re going to write up a letter. This is by the book. We’re going to write it, right now, while you wait out there with Laverne, and then you take it home and put it somewhere where he will see it.”

  “Nail it right to the front door,” Diamond snarled.

  Simmons paused and shrugged. “Somewhere where he will see it. Thursday rolls around and he still hasn’t come in here for a powwow with myself and Ms. Diamond?” He leaned back on his desk and Diamond leaned forward in her chair. A few inches more and they could meet in a kiss. “At that point, then, we’ll talk about involving other parties.”

  They both grinned, but as far as they were concerned I was not there. To them I was just the Garbageman’s son. I wasn’t Joey. I wasn’t even Crotch.

  By the pen’s chuckling and the zipping noise of Diamond smoothing her skirt, I knew that both of the administrators were finished, and were gratified by what they had accomplished. “We do things here by the book,” Simmons said to someone.

  14.

  THE WOLF-PANT OF my father’s truck was a sound I would one day know intimately, but at the moment its presence was jarring. It separated itself from the din of river and forest and descended upon the house. Flakes of paint tossed across the windowsill. Exhaust fumes commingled with the tainted odor of the cabin’s interior. Then the noise and vibration cut away. A truck door creaked, and slammed. Heavy objects slithered from a metal surface and clucked against each other as they jostled toward the front door.

  It was Wednesday night. The night previous I had done exactly what Diamond had suggested and impaled their letter on a vacant nameplate holder on the cabin door. The letter had been sealed so that my father could not hold me accountable for its contents. Laverne, making sure Simmons wasn’t watching, had given me all the cash she had on her—ten bucks—and I had rushed straight down to the vending machine. Never in the history of humankind had a Three Musketeers tasted so good, and I knew that one day, if I was lucky enough to have sex, it would have that candy bar to live up to. After a lot more junk food, I went home, slept fitfully by the sink, awoke early, and made it through Wednesday without another physical attack. When I returned home, Simmons’s note was gone from the door. Boot prints provided clues: my father had found the note, read it, and gone directly to the school. My blood ran cold. What if he had driven right past me as I slumped down Jackson on my way to Hewn Oak?

  It was nearly ten. Footsteps paused at the door. All the windows were open; I heard a steady intake of breath. The knob rattled and a boot pushed open the door. Ken Harnett, in a sweaty work shirt and stained trousers, entered with his sacks slung over his shoulders and two large paper grocery bags balanced in his arms. He let the sacks slump to the floor. Things inside clacked and clanged. He turned his pale eyes to me.

  By now I had transformed the floor space in front of the sink into something resembling the cushion forts I had made as a little kid. The dust that had velveted the area had been, for the most part, peeled away. Four tall stacks of newspapers had been arranged into a sort of privacy wall, while an overturned bucket served as a bedside table where I set my cups of coffee or glasses of water. My duffel bags had been molded into a bed. A rolled up sweater was my pillow. A water-damaged cardboard box had been repurposed as my homework table. A cracked plastic bowl I had found filled with mismatched nails, screws, and washers now held the scraps of food that I ferreted home from school.

  He gave my handiwork only a moment’s attention, then walked over to the sink. The rancid odor spiked. He set down the paper bags stamped Sookie’s Foods and began slapping groceries to the counter with such force that his gray hair fluttered. I saw many things in cans: beans, soup, corn, beets, peanut butter, jelly, more beans. He gathered the few perishables and threw them into the refrigerator; I heard them bang around the cage even after the door smacked shut. Next I heard him enter his bedroom, pull open his closet, and make xylophone music with liquor bottles. Pride lifted my chin. I had done what had been needed to survive, and this odious drunkard would not make me feel bad about it.

  Moments later he was back, upending a half-empty bottle of
vodka. He winced and swallowed, his mad eyes sketching lines between seemingly random points of the cabin, cataloging each item that I had disturbed. He swung his muzzle toward me.

  “Aren’t you going to eat?” he barked. “They tell me to buy you all this food and what, you’re going to let it age?”

  “You’re a little late,” I said. The strength of my voice emboldened me. I stood up and felt acutely the lousy drape of my ill-fitting tee and wrinkled shorts. “Three days late.”

  “Three days,” he whispered to the wall. A large dirty hand wiped itself across his face. “Three days is nothing, kid.”

  I had forgotten how thick the bowed straps of his shoulders were, how braided the lines of muscle in his neck, how tall he was—his twists of hair nearly brushed the ceiling. The cabin was already too small for him; we could never share it comfortably. I considered the tiny segment of floor space I had dared to claim as my own. In the plastic bowl were the orange crumbs of chicken nuggets salvaged from lunch.

  “Three days is not nothing when you have no money,” I said. “I was starving.”

  “So I heard,” he said, taking another pull on the vodka. I pictured him sitting in the principal’s office opposite Simmons and Diamond and realized how completely his grubby appearance must have satisfied the expectations of those preening careerists. It must have killed him to suffer their ultimatums. I felt an unexpected, and not entirely welcome, pang of solidarity.

  “I didn’t tell them to write that letter,” I said. “All I wanted was something to eat. Is that too much to ask?”

  “And where is your money?” He hooked a scabbed knuckle into a frayed belt loop. “Didn’t Val think to leave you a little petty cash?”

  Val, Valerie: I didn’t remember ever thinking of my mom by those names, despite what was printed in the funeral program and the newspaper obituary, what was carved into the cemetery marble. Coming from my father’s mouth, however, it sounded breathtakingly natural. He had spoken this name before, maybe thousands of times, and the familiarity of his tone made me wonder for the first time exactly how well I had known her.