Rotters

by Daniel Kraus

  “The money’s in a fund,” I said.

  He wagged the bottle. “It’s in a fund, it’s in a fund. I know it’s in a fund, I read my mail. What about the other money?”

  “What other money?”

  His free hand made a clenching-unclenching gesture. “The money, the money! The money from the auction, where did that go if not into your pocket?”

  I tried to remember what Claire had said. “It goes into the fund, too,” I answered hesitantly, reprimanding myself for forgetting the details of something of such importance. Impulsively I added, “And when I’m eighteen you’re not getting a penny.”

  His eyes bulged at my insubordination. He backpedaled toward the hearth, hoisting the bottle.

  “I don’t want your money.” He fell into his chair. The tower of books behind him swooned. “I don’t want any of this, and I don’t want you.”

  “I don’t care! I don’t want you, either.”

  “If we agree so damn much, then what the hell is the problem?”

  “The problem,” I said, “is that Mom wanted me here.”

  “But she was naïve. And so was I, agreeing to any of this.”

  “By law you have to take me.”

  He clutched at his skull. “I don’t want this.”

  “Stop acting like a baby.”

  “I DON’T WANT YOU!” The armrests popped within his grip. The bottle fell over on his lap, and only the contour kept the vodka sloshing inside. The cabin, home to nothing but silence for days, seemed to flicker in a supernatural wince.

  “I leave town,” he continued in a wavering voice, his hand flapping at the door in front of him, “all the time. For work—I go out of town to work on jobs. Three days? Kid, three days is squat. Try five days. Try seven days. Try two weeks. This is how I make a living. I am forty-five years old—and to eat, to buy food, apparently to feed us both? Leaving town is what I will have to do. Tell me how I am supposed to carry on if I’ve got to be here every day to change your diaper.”

  “Mom managed for sixteen years,” I said. “You leave me alone again, I go straight to Principal Simmons. He’ll have you in jail like that.”

  “Jail,” my father said under his breath. “Val, how did it come to this?”

  I was merciless. “You should’ve thought of that before you got her pregnant.”

  The sentence twisted a knife—even I felt it. Instantly my father hurled the bottle into the fireplace. It made a dull clunk but did not break, and this impotent gesture incensed him further.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Those things are between me and Val, no one else.”

  He closed his eyes and locked his chin against his chest. The black and gray bristles of his three-day scruff scraped his sternum. I saw his Adam’s apple hitch and bob.

  “Jesus, settle down,” I said. “We’ll work this out. There has to be a way.”

  “Jesus,” he echoed. “Val raise you religious? She always had a weak spot for that crap. If it’d been me, no way. You wouldn’t set one foot inside those places. If it’d been me—”

  Resentment shot through me: “It wasn’t you.”

  “If it’d been me, you would believe in no idols but those you can see and touch and lift with your hands like dirt,” he said, raising his claws before his eyes. “Val’s churchgoing worked against us from day one, and if it had been me there, your little Jesus and your little angels—”

  “It wasn’t you!” I shouted. “You weren’t there. You weren’t there and we didn’t care, neither of us. I didn’t give one thought to where you were my entire life! I was just glad you were gone. And believe me when I say she didn’t care either. She didn’t miss you. She didn’t talk about you. All she mentioned was her messed-up ear, and she only did that because she couldn’t hide it. So you don’t get a say in what I believe or what she believed, and if I want to say Jesus this and Jesus that all night long, then you’re just going to have to live with it or get back in your truck. I dare you. You know what you were to us? You were nothing. Just like you are to everyone in this shitty town. Nothing—the Garbageman.”

  Outside the cabin, limbs flogged themselves softly with leaves. Crickets expressed their eternal agitation. My father, his head cocked as if hearing words in this nature, lifted himself from his chair and took the three steps to the door. Instead of leaving he reached up and locked us in. My eyes shifted to the drawer where, among utensils, there were knives.

  With eerie languor, he maneuvered around obstacles until he was at the bedroom door. His face was scary with resignation. “The Garbageman,” he murmured. “That is exactly who I am.”

  The door closed behind him. Barely audible were the thuds of his boots; later, the muted chimes of fingers fanning across bottles. I didn’t want to hear it. I turned to the kitchen counter and interpreted the miniature cityscape of food: Marina City, Trump Tower, Hancock, Sears. Cresting from the imagined Lake Michigan was a bag of pretzels. My hunger had abated, but I snatched the bag and tore it open. I fished out a pretzel, placed it in my mouth, and leaned back against the sink, lacking the energy to chew. I reminded myself that I had faced Ken Harnett on his own turf and won. It was a victory, something uncommon for me in Bloughton, and yet I felt only further loss.

  15.

  ONE WEEK LATER I gave him my conclusion. “You’re going to kill me,” I said. It at least felt true. He did not respond, instead turning upon me the vicious emptiness I had grown to expect. There was murder in that hopeless countenance—this I had finally decided—and perhaps it was only a matter of time before he dispatched the son he had mistakenly created.

  Chained to Bloughton by Simmons’s threat, he paced the woods near the cabin. Most days when I returned home from school I saw him a hundred yards away perched on the riverbank, hands in pockets, watching the water. Other days he and his truck were gone when I got home, only to return in the early evening, gray sacks jostling, clothes scored with dirt. On these occasions, he dove without a word into the shower, where the next morning I would find a perimeter of mud. We ate separately and the sleeping arrangements did not change. At least I finally had my textbooks—he stripped them from a stack one morning and tossed them in the middle of the floor.

  “When are you going to do it?” I asked him one day as he shoved peanut butter across torn bread.

  I did not expect an answer, but I got one. He was gazing at the setting sun through the windows above the sink. “At dawn,” he whispered. The news, while interesting, did not compel me to ask which dawn. I did not want to pry.

  So I expected my demise each morning as I dressed for class. The school days during these weeks passed with increasing quickness; only snared within some moment’s torment did time decelerate to an agonized crawl. Gottschalk did not renege on his sentence. Our first unit was on skin and the endocrine system, and almost every day I was called to the front of the class to be used as a real-life model. He had a telescoping metal pointer and sometimes struck my arm or neck or face hard enough to make me flinch. “Notice the damage to multiple layers of epithelial tissues,” he said, prodding a patch of pimples. “The sebaceous gland that surrounds each shaft produces sebum, made up of lipids—that’s fat to you. Outer layers of the epidermis flake away and the dead skin becomes glued together by this sebum, causing a blockage that can produce quite unpleasant results—as seen on Mr. Crouch here. The silver lining for Mr. Crouch is that sebum itself is odorless. This is not the case, however, for Propionibacterium acnes, a bacterium that sebum harbors. Based on the smell coming off Mr. Crouch on a daily basis, I’ll wager that his skin is swimming in the stuff. Ten-to-one odds. Who’s in?”

  Gottschalk paused for the laughter. I never responded. The first time he did this to me all I could see was Celeste Carpenter sitting ten feet away with her gorgeous skin, propped cleavage, and resolute detachment. As days wore on, I let my vision lose focus so that the entire class merged into a multicolored blur. Yes, it was true that I smelled terrible, though I doub
ted it was the fault of my sebaceous glands. It was the third week of school and I was wearing unwashed clothes for a third or fourth cycle. There were no laundry facilities in my father’s cabin, and I had yet to see how he washed his own clothes, if he ever did.

  In the first month of school, I was kicked in the crotch roughly once a week and faked out dozens more times. Though Woody himself never resorted to physical contact, the attacks were clearly done at his pleasure, and he still called me Crotch when the opportunity arose—though he took care not to do it in front of adoring teachers and coaches. On those rare occasions when he was caught contributing to my debasement, the reprimands were superficial and his wide-eyed apologies held up as paragons of heartfelt atonement. More than once I was encouraged to shake his hand.

  Many of the kicks occurred in gym, which had proved to be life’s most harrowing regular event. The class, which came two days per week in alternation with study hall, had yet to move beyond tedious but nerve-wracking preliminaries. One week we did sit-ups. The next, push-ups. This left plenty of time for worrying about my genitals. Woody and Rhino were both in my gym class—Celeste was, too—so I kept my hands at a defensive belt-level until we were sent to change out of the compulsory dark shorts and white tees.

  The muffled noise of teaching provided the bridge between these more vivid events. I took notes and read my assignments, and even studied for quizzes. I didn’t see any reason to let my A average slide into the trash along with the rest of my life. Around the fourth week, important tests were doled out in several classes, and I scored perfect on all of them. While handing back the exams, a couple of the teachers took a moment to give me their best imitation of approval, though it was clear they considered the accomplishments flukes. They didn’t know that I was my mother’s son, not my father’s.

  There was no official chair rank at Bloughton, but it took only one practice with the entire band to glean that Ted sat the most talented players closest to the center, while the less gifted fanned off to the edges. I was pleased to find that the dividing line for the trumpets fell directly between me and a girl named Tess. She had tight curls of blond hair, pointy features alleviated by makeup, and a robotic technique probably acquired through a lifetime of detested lessons. As was often the case with the female brass players I had known, Tess seemed embarrassed by the forceful blowing required by the instrument—it messed up her lipstick and forced her to relinquish her carefully crafted smile and posture. She could play better than I when forced, but lazed through most of the practices, absently running her painted nails along her necklace. The only time she spoke to me was one afternoon when Woody entered the room to hand Ted a note. As resident superhero, Woody was often enlisted by teachers to run errands. This roaming naturally made him even more unpredictable and dangerous, and on this particular day it brought him into the soundproofed confines of the band room.

  “Isn’t he hot?” Tess whispered to me, pulling on her necklace faster than usual.

  In better days I would not have dignified such a statement with a response, but it had been weeks since someone had addressed me in a manner other than hostile, so I reluctantly took the bait. “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess, if he’s your type.”

  “He is.” She moaned through a pouty frown. “I can’t believe he goes out with Celeste Carpenter.” She looked at me. “You know who she is?”

  Every time I turned a corner at school and saw a female, my heart leapt to my throat in the thrilled certainty that it would be Celeste Carpenter. I saw her face in my notes, in my books, in my dreams. “Yeah, I know who she is,” I responded.

  “Yeah, well,” Tess said, shrugging. “You probably think she’s hot, too. It’s not like we don’t all know it; she’s on homecoming court every year. But seriously. She’s put on a little ass-weight, I think. I mean, she’s not that hot. Is she? Do you think she is? Hot like Woody Trask hot? I heard she’s a prude, too. I just don’t think they make sense.”

  “What do you mean?” I fantasized that others were watching Crotch as he conducted a perfectly normal conversation with a perfectly normal student.

  “As a couple,” she said. Across the room, even Ted seemed subject to Woody’s charms—he was nodding and laughing as Woody patted him jokingly on the belly. “I’m not sure they’re very yin and yang as a couple. You know what I mean?”

  Although it was clearly difficult, she broke her gaze from Woody to look at me. Unaccustomed to such attention, I blushed and looked down at the instrument in my hands. “Not really, I guess,” I answered. “I mean, I don’t know them very well. Not as a couple. Or separate. They seem all right to me. I don’t know. I can’t comment on her ass-weight. Or his. I don’t know. I guess I can’t really comment.”

  Her exasperated expression was exactly what my inane remark deserved. After a moment Ted took up his baton and we launched into the worst dry run of “Flight of the Bumblebee” in human history. Halfway through it, Ted tossed the baton over his shoulder and gripped his shaking head with both hands. The instruments blurted to sudden halts, and the music, such as it was, was replaced by peals of laughter. The band instructor beamed at the talentless fools he called Ted’s Army, and he flipped back a page of his music. “Let’s not ever play that again,” he said, giggling.

  Individual instruction, which took up one-third of study hall one day per week, represented the only scenario in which I could speak to a friendly face without the crowding of enemies. Ted was on a tight schedule—he had a flutist right before me and a drummer directly after—so there was not much time for chitchat. That was fine. We ran through pieces, he commented on and adjusted my performance, and every once in a while he even stood behind me to use his shadow-fingers to transmit each correct depression. Often after I sat down, while he busied himself lowering the music stand to my height, I would take a moment to relish the isolation of the cramped room and everything about it: the cheesy posters of Bobby McFerrin and Yo-Yo Ma, the embouchure mirrors on the back wall, the gap-toothed xylophones in the corner, the varnished autoharp for some reason mounted above the door, and the supply closet—a shallow nook that was always open and gleaming with a million mouthpieces, reeds, drumsticks, and miscellaneous spare parts. It was the breadth and versatility of the closet that proved Ted’s longevity and worth, not the buffoonery of his inept army.

  Separating each of these otherwise amorphous days were my doomed dawns. That pile of shovels, the charred poker beside the hearth, my father’s soiled hands: any of these would work as the instrument of my demise. Still I studied and spooned my cold food out of cans, and still my father wandered the grounds, staring into space and water as if listening for guidance.

  “How?” I asked one evening.

  It had been a few days since we had last spoken; the topic, though, had not changed. “A knife,” he said, looking at me for a moment before going back to reading the stack of newspapers that arrived each day in the mail. But now he was too distracted to read. He looked at me again, his eyes less scarlet than in the past, less hooded with anger. “I have a knife from Scotland,” he said softly, “with a blade so sharp there would be almost no pain.” The wounds of my mother’s ear: maybe it was the same blade, maybe it would be the last thing she and I shared.

  He was chopping wood two days later at dusk, strange helices of muscle thickening across his back with each swing, when I next approached. I stood watching for ten minutes. What had been trees divided and diminished, again and again; what had been dark and armored with bark became yellow, then white, until the pure heart of the wood shone with brilliance. Flecks stood out like white freckles against the brown of his skin. He exhaled loudly and wiped his forearm across his forehead.

  “Where exactly?” I asked.

  He gulped for air, licked his dry lips. “The heart.” He snorted and spat out phlegm thickened by sawdust. “If you can avoid ribs, the blade will move softly. Like through butter.”

  He glanced up at me uncertainly, as if he had said too much an
d needed my approval. I hastened to nod, and he seemed glad for my blessing. He faced the massacre of wood, weighing the axe in both arms, struggling to find something that could still be made smaller. It was then that I knew that he would not kill me. Our planning and scheduling of my execution had become something of worth, something that involved an increasing exchange of trust. The next day, when I asked him how long it would take to die from a stab to the heart, he was answering before the question was fully articulated, as if he had been making calculations all day and had been waiting impatiently to be asked. Murder: it was something to talk about and we embraced it, and soon other, more mundane exchanges were escaping our clenched jaws. “Here,” he said, tossing me half of a steak he had incinerated on the stove. “Sorry,” I said as we both banked into the bathroom at the same time. “I’ll be back around midnight, okay?” he asked late one afternoon, pausing at the door with two empty sacks looped over his shoulder. I nodded once and turned back to my homework, but inside I could barely breathe.

  16.

  MY FATHER CONTINUED TO disappear on weekends. In his absence I began reading the newspapers. They arrived every day in the mailbox located out where Hewn Oak hit Jackson, dozens of papers from towns all across the Midwest. When there were too many to fit, they were piled in a wooden crate nailed to the base of the mailbox post. Having nothing better to do, I began bringing these back to the cabin on my way home from school. Their mastheads touted towns big and small from Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Nebraska, Missouri, even a few from the Dakotas. Many of these papers originated in communities so small that the papers came out four days a week or fewer; some of them only published weekly. These I found the most amusing, with their exacting chronicles of crop growth, rambling columns referring to specific pheasants and raccoons by first names, personal accounts of exciting trips to Omaha or Ames, and dishy police blotters chocked with minor fender benders and loud noises after suppertime.