Rotters

by Daniel Kraus

  “Sorry,” I mumbled. Woody’s grin broadened.

  “Go away?” Tess said, her brow cleaving so abruptly her curls bounced.

  “Sorry,” I said again.

  “Shut the door, Crotch,” she commanded. I saw her fingers grab Woody’s hand, which had unconsciously drifted away, and secure it back on top of her breast. The knob was in my hand, my face turned away, the door shut. Muffled noises resumed but I walked away so that I did not have to listen. I watched my reflection split and scatter across the embouchure mirrors. Ted’s closet—I felt bad for him. Those two making out, they would knock things from the walls and disrupt the shelves. They would not put back fallen objects. They had no respect for Ted, not either of them, and after hooking up they would mentally mock him every time they saw him: We got it on in your closet and you don’t even know.

  Exhaustion had left me hollow and dry, and the spark of anger took quickly to flame. Tess I could care less about; we would just resume ignoring each other at band practice. But Woody, that fucker—he could get away with almost anything, but not this, not this disrespect of Ted. And not just Ted—never far from my mind was Celeste. Although she occasionally had been present as Woody taunted me, she had always seemed as if she were waiting for permission to leave that asshole and reach out to somebody, no matter their social status. Somebody, for example, like me.

  I had to find her, she had to know. The final twenty minutes of study hall felt like two hours. My mind shoved aside everything that had happened the night before so that focus could be applied to this mission of utmost importance. Punishing Woody, winning gratitude from Celeste: if I pulled off these things before returning home, somehow the ensuing lightness would push away some of the dark.

  Two more classes, the final bell. Students sprang from their chairs and I fought to be in their numbers. I was due on the football field for marching band practice but dismissed it. Two floors, six hallways, and exits everywhere: how would I find her? I scanned my surroundings for packs of girls, carefully done hair, short skirts, the most stylish shoes one could buy near Bloughton. I made it down one hall—nothing. Another hall, one hundred faces, none of them hers. A third wing and still nothing: I could feel, like blood from my veins, students leaving the building by the dozens.

  Around a corner toward the front entrance and there was familiar raven hair tied in exotic fashion and barretted flat in crisscrossed layers. I leapt down the stairs, squinting in the afternoon swelter. I was behind her; I was at her elbow; I gave myself a final push and I was in front of beauty and grace herself, Celeste Carpenter.

  “Celeste,” I panted. She had to stop—I was blocking her path. I held up a hand to buy myself a moment while I gasped for air. My smell: too late, I thought of it and hoped that any unpleasant whiff would lose itself in the outdoor air.

  How to begin? My brain labored for an opening statement. I didn’t think you’d be outside, I considered. It was at least true. From what I understood, Celeste was involved in numerous activities, and was particularly noted in theater and dance. I had overheard that play rehearsals were going every single day after school. Yes, that was it—I could ask her if she was skipping rehearsal or just getting some air before they began.

  Instead it came out like a belch: “I saw Woody with Tess.”

  The delicate shadow between her eyebrows darkened. Her expression remained enigmatic, though I sensed a slight angling of her head. At this moment I realized she was not alone. Three other girls were a half-step behind. Though farther away, their faces were much easier to read.

  “In the band room,” I managed, still wheezing. All I could hear was the pound of blood shooting through my ears. “I was in the band room and looked in the closet and there was Woody and Tess. They were kissing. Her shirt was mostly off. I thought I should tell you. I thought you should know.”

  I waited for her face to register astonishment, possibly heartbreak. If she started crying what was I obligated to do? Console her? Embrace her? I did not know if I could. Deep inside, a hardening conviction: I could.

  A jet of wind swirled her hair into a halo of daggers as her arm lashed out. The sharp nails of her hand cracked against my cheek, and in that instant I knew my mistake. She already knew Woody was a two-timer—this thing with Tess probably wasn’t his first—but such facts were not for public consumption. My gossip within earshot of other students was hateful and willful destruction of the persona she had so carefully constructed. My cheek blazed with pain; I felt wet pinpricks where her nails had punctured the skin. I looked down at her hand, calm again against her skirt, cutely painted and tastefully adorned, but transposed on top was the severed thing from the night before. A chilling certainty filled me that it would be that bloated dead hand that I would one day be holding, not Celeste’s.

  She remade herself, placid and untroubled. Her lips twitched in a smile and she and her friends flitted away, leaving me there with the new disgrace of four thin stripes of blood hardening against my face.

  19.

  THE PHONE SWALLOWED MY change. My forehead felt the coins rattle all the way down. “Boris here.”

  “Boris!” I cried. “It’s Joey!”

  There was a pause. Without planning to, I timed it. Five entire seconds.

  “Joey,” he said. “Hey.”

  “I’ve gotta get out of here.”

  There was another pause. Five more seconds, at least.

  Boris sighed. “You call me right in the middle of the day for this?”

  “You’re not listening,” I said. My voice was shaking a bit. “And it’s not the middle of the day. It’s the end of the day.”

  “And jazz band is in like two seconds. I’m just about to go in. I’m in the hallway. Hey.” His voice suddenly rose with interest. “Did you know Mac Hill played trombone?”

  “Mac Hill? Boris, listen to me.”

  “You remember Mac. He’s actually pretty good, he’s been blowin’ the bone in private for like four years. Hey, here he is. Mac! Hey, Mac!” There was laughter, another voice close to the phone. “I told you that shit would never hold,” Boris said to Mac, and they both laughed along to a joke I would never understand. I rubbed my temples. It was hard to imagine that, for Boris, life continued to move along the same track it always had. The injustice of it brought tears to the corners of my eyes.

  “Mac Hill,” I droned. “I remember him.” Mac Hill had been an outcast, far more so than Boris or I. The idea that he had reinvented himself as a trombone player and a compatriot of Boris bewildered me—how could anyone pull himself out of such a hole?

  “Yeah, well, he’s kicking ass with the brass now. I think we’re going to kill at state.” He paused. “You could call me sometime when you’re not having an emergency, you know. I’m not nine-one-one.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Just say no. Dope is for dopes. We don’t need another Charlie Parker on our hands here.”

  It took me a long moment to unpack the jargon. “You think I’m on drugs?” It was more than I could handle, this telepathic suspicion shared by my principal and best friend.

  “No.” He sighed in frustration. “You just act like it. Look, it was a joke. Forget it. Just, you know. Call at a better time. The folks, they’re dying for news—how’s Joey, what’s Joey doing, what’s going on with Joey’s dad? It’s a broken record with those two.”

  “Tell them I said hi.” In the short time we had left, how could I even begin telling him the truth about my father or the severity of my persecution? Nevertheless, the sound of Boris’s voice was the most comforting thing in the world, and I didn’t want it to stop. “What else is happening?”

  “I’m walking into jazz band, that’s what’s happening,” he said, and sure enough I heard the cacophony of a bunch of showboats tuning up. “And I’m getting looks. So I’m out of here. Call me whenever, just not during rehearsal. All right?”

  20.

  THE TWO-DOLLAR MIRROR I bought at the pharmacy fit well enough behind the
knobs of the bathroom sink. I stood shirtless before it. The single bulb above me, already half filled with dead houseflies, was malfunctioning, causing the yellow light to flicker. I was there, I wasn’t there. I existed, I did not.

  It looked like four tiny bullets had nicked my cheek. I rubbed water over the surface to clear the gummed blood, and fresh bulbs began to grow. I tried to focus on which drop would fall first, and not on what Woody would do to me when he heard what had happened.

  I was Ken Harnett’s son. I told myself this over and over. By refusing to kill me with his Scottish blade, he had given up his right to deny my sole request. I applied bits of tissue paper to my face. Red starbursts clotted. Yes, I would ask him when he got home. Wait, no—there would be no asking. I would demand. The light strobed, failed, revived. I existed, I did not.

  The next morning I was still alone. I peeled the tissue from my face. The black scabs alarmed me but looked better after a shower. The shiner, however, was impossible to conceal, and spread nearly as quickly as word of the Woody/Tess scandal. Even I heard the reports of the big man on campus seen groveling before Celeste and how she was making him sweat it out. She gracefully ignored his entreaties in gym, and afterward in the guys’ locker room his glares had lost any iota of playfulness. He said the holes in my face looked like a second crotch, an asshole, a pussy, or all three. It was said with such ruthlessness that the laughter from his crew sounded uneasy. I changed and went directly home, giving no thought to my last two classes. My father remained missing.

  The bruise on my cheek flowered into purples and yellows and reds. Wednesday morning Gottschalk excitedly hovered over me with his pointer—we were skipping ahead a few chapters, he confessed, but this beauty on Mr. Crouch simply could not wait. I closed my eyes and let Gottschalk’s ad-lib sermon on capillary damage fade to a blather. I felt certain my father would return in the early afternoon. I left school at lunch. He was not there.

  Thursday: surely this had to be the day. I skipped school entirely and sat around the house, picking at the dwindling morsels of food, poking a finger into the strange kaleidoscope of my cheek. The bathroom light had worsened. I was there, I was not. I was not. I was not.

  I sprinted outside at the first sign of his truck. It was nine at night. The bounding headlights were bisected and trisected by trees. As my father pulled the truck into its usual spot and cut the engine, I realized that “all week” had not led me to this moment. It was all year, all of my life.

  He stepped from the cab. A week’s growth of beard swallowed his face. He had a clutch of newspapers in one hand. Without looking at me, he took both gray sacks from the bed. The larger rang with metal tools, the smaller knocked at his heels, not full, yet plenty heavy.

  “I want to go with you,” I said.

  He did not stop until he reached the front door, where he turned.

  “No,” he said.

  “No is not acceptable.” The words I had practiced for days sounded flimsy.

  “No, this is unacceptable.” He gestured across the patchy lawn. “This whole arrangement is unacceptable. You living with me, at your age, associated in any way with what I do. Val would have killed me. Lionel would kill me.”

  I didn’t know what my age had to do with it and had never heard of a man named Lionel. None of that mattered.

  “I’m all alone,” I said. “I’m your son and I’m all alone.”

  “That might mean something to you. It might not. Regardless, it isn’t enough. You’re not going to be little Jerry to my Jerry Cruncher.”

  I was even more confused. “Who’s Jerry Cruncher?”

  “Dickens,” he muttered, kicking at the ground. “What are they teaching you at that school?”

  “Nothing.” I took a step toward him. “They’re not teaching me anything. I want you to teach me.”

  “You don’t know what you’re asking.” His voice quavered. “You don’t know what’s entailed. You think you do but you don’t.” He shrugged unhappily. He looked weary and old. “Lives get eaten.”

  “I’m not giving you an option.” I took another step. “You teach me or it’s Simmons and Diamond. Or worse, the police. What you’re doing, it can’t be legal.”

  “You sure have a lot to say tonight.”

  “You too,” I said.

  The night pressed in around us. October leaves were beginning to fall. Even at night you could see the vanguards, lazing in circuitous routes. In mere weeks, the yard would be covered. Footsteps would crunch. Rain would turn the dry matter into mulch. The mulch would decompose and become part of some new growth. All these miracles would occur around us in rapid succession, and in that time my father and I would remain stationary, strangers, unless someone did something right now to alter our courses.

  “When you’re stronger,” he said. He set his jaw, decided he liked the irrefutability of his answer, and nodded. “When you’re stronger, then we’ll see.”

  I felt the slap to my face, the kicks to my crotch, Gottschalk’s interrogative stabs. “I’m strong now,” I insisted.

  “Prove it,” he said. He lifted the heavier of his two bags, loosened the drawstrings, and reached inside. It was like the unsheathing of a longsword: he withdrew a beaten old shovel and rolled it in his palm as if it were something priceless.

  “This is Grinder.” He caressed the beaten wood.

  “Your shovel has a name?”

  He tossed it across the four feet that separated us. I overreached and it cartwheeled to the grass at my feet. We looked at the fallen tool, the verification of my worthlessness. Without another word he entered the cabin and shut the door.

  Inside, the usual noises: the sacks being placed in the bedroom, the kicking off of boots, the rush of water hitting drain. I reached to the ground and gripped Grinder’s handle. The weight was unexpectedly satisfying. I moved into the backyard, seeing through a window my father at the new bathroom mirror, pawing his beard and peering intently at the foreign object of his face. The light above him flickered out and, for me, for now at least, he stopped existing. I aimed the shovel.

  21.

  SEVEN HOURS LATER THE first light of dawn lit up my work. I stood up to my knees in an ungainly depression six feet long, four feet wide, and two feet deep, located halfway between the back of the cabin and the river. My leg hair was matted with mud. Soil had found its way everywhere: my underwear, armpits, ears, and eyes. Every time I shook my head, dirt scattered like black dandruff. Each time I swallowed, it tasted of the bitterest coffee. My arms sang in agony. I sat on the edge of the hole, using my thumbs to poke at the runny blisters on my fingers, and considered the forty-eight cubic feet of dirt I had displaced.

  Eventually my father ambled around the corner, yawning and raking a hand through his hair. He stopped at the garden and pulled an onion. He peeled away the skin as he approached. I watched and waited, flexing my cramped hands, my weariness overcome by the pride I felt in my overnight achievement.

  “Onions shore up the immune system, lower cholesterol, and prevent cancer,” he said. Onions—this was what he chose to speak about? I was at a loss for words. He brushed off the vegetable and took a giant bite while toeing the edge of the hole, evaluating its various dimensions.

  He grunted. “So that’s the best you can do.”

  He turned and started back toward the cabin. Rage gripped me and I snatched Grinder from where I had speared her. I jumped to my feet and drove wounds into Bloughton. I did it again and again, the dirt flying, so that my father would hear the patters before he rounded the corner. I wasn’t done, I wasn’t even close.

  Four more hours, five. I could no longer hear the river through the dirt in my ears. The sun rose to its apex and blazed; I felt my skin sizzle and wiped dirt on my neck as shield from the burn. The ground was changing. Grinder struck rocks, vibrating so hard upon contact that my teeth hurt. I fished out larger stones by hand and hurled them over the edge, where they disappeared into the till of ousted earth.

  A here
tofore unknown muscle that spanned from my armpit to waist convulsed. Reaching for it, I tripped and fell to my knees. The grass was at eye level. I exhaled slowly and investigated my unsteady limbs. Mud provided unexpected definition to my body and showed me, better than Gottschalk ever could, how groups of muscle worked together. The unusual construction of my father’s upper body made sudden sense: I could feel knots burning in the corresponding parts of my own musculature. I fantasized about returning to the Bloughton High hallways in search of Woody Trask, my neck tapering into bulging shoulders, my shirt straining over slabs of chest, back, and arms. That could be me. All I needed to do was keep digging.

  Sometime around noon something dropped into the hole. I reached over and picked it up. It was a thermos. I unscrewed the lid and poured the contents over my face, gobbling up as much water as possible—it tasted almost sugary. I shook the last drops onto my tongue. I kept my eyes closed so I did not have to see him.

  “You’re too slow,” he said. I felt the coolness of his shadow give way to heat.

  The day darkened. Hunger burned somewhere inside me but it could not compete with the million other pains. Five feet, six. The sequence of motions that made up the act of digging became as rote as breathing. The hardest part now was tossing dirt high enough to clear the rim—when it didn’t, it hailed back down on me. Around dusk I struck water. A shallow puddle gathered in the deepest corner of the hole. I fell to my knees and cupped my hands.

  I woke up blinking. It was twilight. Something had just landed on my chest. I patted around and felt wax paper. It was a sandwich, crudely assembled and bound. The scarecrow outline of my father towered stories above. I tore through the wrapping. Stale crust and dry meat were pushed around by my arid tongue. I chewed and choked, then chewed and choked some more. My father’s face was backlit and hidden. “You’ll never finish this hole,” he said.