Rotters

by Daniel Kraus

  Nighttime—a new coolness turned my hot sweat to a stinging chill. I found myself laughing and wondered what was so funny. Seven feet, eight: when did I stop, if ever? I shoveled now as if the act fueled my very heart and lungs. Far away, inside the cabin, I heard my father rustle through newspapers, piss with the door open, shut his bedroom door to sleep, but of course all I saw was a small rectangle of sky.

  I tried to calculate the amount of time I had been down there and couldn’t do it. Hours and minutes had lost meaning—only feet and inches mattered now. I dug. My body revolted. My aim was becoming hazardous. Grinder struck my right foot repeatedly, once slicing into my big toe. I tried to ignore it but saw a patch of canvas soak red. I reached to brush dirt over the blood so I didn’t have to look at it; I lost my balance and was on my back, my head cooling in the puddle, watching a pale worm poke from the clay. I could not get up, and even if I could, I sensed that I had finally dug too deep. The walls were too sheer to climb, and what if my father left in the morning? I began to formulate a rescue plot involving the assiduous use of the shovel, but the ideas were too glorious, too strenuous. I welcomed the void.

  22.

  SOMETHING WAS TAPPING AGAINST my face. A clear vision of my mother waking me for church darkened into the mud of reality. I blinked into the Sunday sun and spat to rid myself of the earthen taste. I sat up. While I had slept, the thousand aches of my body had merged into a single heaviness that was somehow easier to bear. Sunburn made my forehead and nose feel plastic and inflexible. Something batted my face again. I blinked and focused upon it. It was a noose.

  Here it was then, my death. This was no Scottish blade, but I could not blame him for the change in plans. It was so convenient, with me already so deep inside my grave. I leaned my head at the rope.

  “Your foot,” came my father’s voice from far above. “Stand up and insert your foot.”

  Hand over hand, I used the rope to raise myself. When I was high enough I wiggled my right foot through the noose. Half of the shoe was brown with dried blood. Without warning my body jolted skyward. I snatched up Grinder with one hand and rose and spun and felt cool soil paint across my neck and face. After I was dragged over the edge, I collapsed next to my father, who panted atop of a pile of dirt with the other end of the rope tied around his waist. I felt his fingers press into my face. With a thumb he pulled open my eyelid. He studied my pupil for a moment before moving aside, apparently satisfied.

  “It’s eight in the morning,” he said. “Go wash off. And we’re going to need to cool those muscles—I’ve been making ice since yesterday. Then you sleep. Tonight you and I have an appointment.” He stood up and leaned over, grasping my wrists in his large hands and hoisting me to my feet. Distantly I recognized victory, some claim of respect my madness had won from the mad. Even more distantly, I seized upon the importance of the mentioned appointment. My father had lifted me from one grave so he could take me to another.

  23.

  HE MOVED WITH SPEED. He wore a sack across his back that he had strapped to himself with belts to quiet the noise. I carried an empty sack, the drawstrings pulled too tight around a wrist. My hand was already numb and I imagined it separating from my body, a disembodied thing that my father could one day attack with wire cutters. We kept low.

  The fence was classic nightmare: lustrous, bladed wrought iron, taller than me. This is where ninety-nine percent turn back, my father told me: Halloween pranksters, homeless addicts, amateurs giddy with fantasies of gravestones used as coffee tables and skulls as bongs. The fence, said my father, is teeth to a mouth.

  He looped his bag by both straps over two fence points, the shovel and hoe within arranged to lean into the fence’s crossbars. The effect was like a ladder: my father stepped on the shovel heads and climbed the handles. My bag was draped to blanket the fence points. Once the toe of his boot was wedged between the top spikes, he let himself fall to the other side of the fence while taking hold of the straps of the bag. He went down; the bag on my side rose. It was complicated and impressive.

  Once over, I stubbed my toes on markers hidden low in uncut grass; short stones knocked my shins; larger ones rushed me at crotch level like the ancestors of high school tormentors. I kept moving out of fear of losing my father’s trail but was impeded by the things that kept appearing at my eyes’ edges: faces, outstretched arms, wings, all of which were fashioned from stone. Motionless, my feet began to sink. The ground was lousy with growth.

  The fence crooked and so did we. I sailed between two crypts and the entire cemetery presented itself as a sweep of white dominoes. To be alone in a graveyard is to be outnumbered; I hurried to find my father. I discovered him stationary in the middle of the yard, barely distinguishable from the angels and saints surrounding him. He told me the stones were our compass and their faces pointed east. With his toe he exposed the tiny numbered cornerstones caretakers used to identify plots. They glimmered everywhere once we resumed moving. Dark birds, maybe bats, circled in escort. I watched them, entranced, and fell facedown on somebody’s deathbed. I have no business here, I thought frantically, inhaling the sharp, grassy odor of the too-green lawn.

  A hand on my back—I barely held back a scream. It was my father, lifting me by the waist of my jeans like just another clattering sack. I brushed from my elbows grass and mud that felt more like hair and gristle. A right turn, a left: these roads were poorly marked. I knew we had arrived by the bulge of earth that had not yet settled to the depth of the connecting properties. The burial was recent, but not too.

  Don’t look at the name, my father said, and I listened. It’s not a person, he insisted, it is meat spoiling inside a box. He ran his hands over the plot as if feeling for a pulse. The handheld spade was out and so was a backsaw. He marked out corners, a square four feet wide, four feet long. I took a step away and someone took hold of me. Oblivious, my father made an incision with his saw, then used the spade to strip the sod like rind from orange. I dared to look over my shoulder and saw Jesus gazing down at me with smooth white eyes and open arms. Three of the fingers on his right hand were missing, and I wondered if he could still bless me with those gone. And even if he could, given what I was there to do, would he?

  A bedsheet was unpacked and unfolded. It looked to be a twin of that knotted across my father’s bed. He slid the segment of sod onto the sheet and slid it away. Exposed now was a perfect square of dirt—skin peeled from a torso in preparation for surgery.

  Thirty to forty minutes for a fresh grave, he told me; two hours for an old one. Waterlogged it can take upwards of four. There was a flashlight but he didn’t use it; to prevent accidental illumination the batteries were kept in a separate bag. Come closer, he gestured. I didn’t want to leave Two-Fingered Jesus. My father used his voice now. Come closer if you want to learn.

  Experimental jabs were made. They were nearly silent and my father approved. Lessons began. Five feet, he said, leaning into Grinder. That was all we had to go. There was something funny about this, and it took me a moment to remember: my hole, back at the cabin, really had been too deep.

  The scooped dirt landed precisely upon a bowled tarpaulin stretched across the adjacent plot. When it came time to return the dirt, I realized, we could fashion a funnel and pour it back in. The chunk of the shovel, the splat of clods shattering against tarp—the volume was excruciating. Perhaps it was due to all the hard surfaces, because everything else was louder, too: that skittering leaf, that squirrel, those branches ticking past one another overhead.

  The only thing that whispered at an appropriate volume was my father. The taking from graves, he said, is the oldest profession there is. Early man took what he needed from the mounds of his fallen fellows. Egyptian masks and sarcophagi, Chinese jade burial suits, all were useless to the soil and therefore recycled back into the world. Da Vinci stole bodies from the morgue to study anatomy, he told me. Michelangelo, too, though he didn’t have the stomach for the necessary dissection. My stomach lurched—two
feet more and the unwilling stomach would be my own.

  He was deep now, three feet. After a brief period of rest, said my father, Michelangelo resumed his studies, and this is the mark of a true artist, to have the mettle to see what truly lies inside of man. I inched forward so as to not miss a word. He was a better teacher than any at Bloughton High, better than any I had ever had. The mess of his life—maybe it was only a mess when seen from a limited perspective. The possibility suddenly existed to me that there was other knowledge of such importance that it overwhelmed the world’s quotidian concerns, and such knowledge came from the inside: bodies, bones and tissues, and maybe even another layer deeper, souls.

  A bullet crack threw me to the ground. It was Grinder, striking her quarry. My father knotted a swath of velvet around the blade. The subsequent sounds were muffled. I crawled near and caught glimpses of neighboring coffins peeking through the dirt—buried too close together, my father complained. At the bottom of the hole, the casket’s surface shimmered through the dirt like water. I looked there and saw my reflection.

  His hand reached up from the grave, startling me, and grabbed a mallet and a crowbar that had been modified with a right-angle bend. There followed a blast of metal crunching through fiberglass, and to me it was the sound of my mother’s bones splintering a windshield and popping headlamps. Pay attention, said my father. Fragments of casket lid hopped through the air as he cranked the crowbar. It was amazing how cleanly the lid split in two. I was struck by the swift perfection of his motion, the exacting way he guided his tools. I was still marveling when he set aside the lid.

  A green thing that used to be a woman was screaming at me, jaw slung open to the neck and eyeballs flickering with animation. She was alive—I swooned and grasped at the headstone for support. The smell was to the cabin odor what being immersed in the ocean was to tasting a grain of salt. Somewhere my father’s lessons continued, narrating the horrors in excruciating medical detail. Bloat, he said, had already plundered the woman’s torso; her gut, having fed on itself for too long, had ruptured right through her clothing. Brown mud leaked from the mouth and ears. Brain, my father said stoically, an early victim to putrefaction. It was with great fear that I looked into the eyes that I had taken for alive, and in a sickening moment I realized that they were alive, in a manner of speaking—each socket was a writhing mess of maggots.

  I began specifying—

  —the dress bunching around the shriveled bags that used to be breasts—

  —tongue and lips inflated by bacteria into grotesque purple fruit—

  —but no, please, not here, not now. I concentrated on my father. He was dealing with another ring that wouldn’t dislodge from its puffy finger. He let the hand drop and it smacked into two inches of black slime. We call that coffin liquor, my father said as he reached for his wire cutter, and it’s the result of bacteria in the casket’s vacuum turning the corpse to mud. I watched him take the woman’s left hand. Most of the skin sloughed off in a single sheet like a translucent glove—slip skin, my father assured me, nothing more. He let the skin dissolve into the coffin liquor and regripped the moist green hand. I noted with dull astonishment that the woman’s nails were painted candy pink.

  With a brittle crack the finger was severed and my father removed the ring and placed it in his pocket. From his shirt he removed a tiny spool of wire and set about cinching the finger back onto the woman’s hand. The campground rule, he said, twisting tight the wire-ends with needle-nose pliers: leave them in no worse shape than you found them.

  To finish the repair he turned the arm over. On the woman’s wrist, a surprise: a gash, beaded with more maggots. It was a suicide wound; now the need to specify pounded at my skull. This boiling pile of meat that used to be a woman was not the result of natural causes but had come to be out of a belief that the world beneath the dirt was better than that beneath the sun. Not true, not true. I wished that Two-Fingered Jesus would hold me again with his ivory arms.

  I was ready to throw up. My father heard the choking and commanded me to count the stars. I felt the grass on my back and saw glimmers above but I had forgotten all of my numbers. Monks in the Middle Ages, explained my father, those who were said to have miraculous powers, could allegedly take the graves of saints and bishops and transport them from the subterranean to the celestial, and those stars you are counting are their bodies. I asked what this magic was called. Translation, my father responded, as he did something that caused the corpse to slosh noisily in its puddle. Eventually the term lost its meaning, he continued, and became just another word for what we’re doing right now. Translation.

  Why did she kill herself? I found myself asking the question aloud. There was no answer, of course, but my father’s voice was at least soothing. Long ago, he said, suicides were buried outside of town at a crossroads, so that when the tortured soul awoke there was a three-in-four chance she would choose the wrong path home. Even now, my father continued, there are suicide corners in cemeteries, ugly and unkempt areas with bad drainage. Then his tone sharpened. Shakespeare, he said, condemned his characters to death by suicide thirteen times in his plays, and if it was good enough for him, and good enough for your Jesus, then it’s hardly worth getting so riled up about, is it? I searched for Two-Fingered Jesus and wondered if his crucifixion had indeed been a suicide, and if my presence at this open grave was a suicide, too, the self-killing of something important inside of me.

  She’s beautiful, said my father. In general suicides are unusually beautiful or unusually ugly—come closer and see. I pressed shut my eyelids. How he could find beauty through the squirming disorder of her face confounded me—but it also humbled me, just a little. I peeked at him and he was waiting with an outstretched hand.

  I would not have believed there was room enough for both of us, but somehow my father spidered his body to the woman’s right while I squatted to her left. The smell down there coated me like a syrup and began shrugging its way across my tongue. I could not let this spoilage inside me; I held my breath. My father pointed. The necklace, he said. He had left it for me to remove.

  It was not that different from sticking your hand into an opened pumpkin. On the way to her neck my fingertips dug tunnels through her cheek; for a second her face was Celeste’s and the wounds were revenge for those she had given me. The set of my father’s lips told me that we were lingering too long. I clenched my teeth and yanked at the necklace. It didn’t come free. Beside me, my father patted the woman’s shoulder. I don’t think he realized that he was doing it. He patted her with more gentleness than he had ever shown me, as if saying to her, shh, it’ll all be over soon.

  The clasp, of course. I reined it in, and with each inch of progress the strand plowed deeper into the ulcerous neck. Finally I had it but felt faint and realized that I was still holding my breath. I drew a heaving, ragged gasp and contaminated air slid down my throat. It was inside me now, death was inside me. Somehow the necklace came free and I fumbled it over to my father. My knees pistoned; one foot dipped into coffin liquor. Then I was wriggling like a worm over the hole’s edge, gasping upon the tarpaulin, translated to the stars.

  Somehow the casket lid was put back in some semblance of order. I didn’t watch. I rolled off the tarp to allow my father to refill the grave. He was still talking, but it was hard to hear him over the sickly rattle of my lungs. Decay was claiming my entrails. Over the snowy thump of dirt, I detected my father speaking of something called the Satipatthana Sutta, a passage called the Nine Cemetery Contemplations. It was one of the books in the cabin, I knew it, and I wondered if he would later assign the reading. The passage, he said as he tamped down the earth, details a process wherein apprentice monks meditate upon bodies in various states of decay until they overcome disgust and embrace the serenity of the body’s ephemeral nature. I knew this was meant to comfort. But there was fetid mortality swelling inside me, I was certain of it—I could feel its long claws thread my organs.

  We were up and m
oving. A heavy sack skipped across my vertebrae. Still my father spoke, and still I tried to listen, but my ears buzzed with the low hum of disease. He told me, and I tried to understand, that what we had done was something ancient and possibly noble, but also vilified and to be undertaken with the utmost solemnity; and that, most importantly, it was a craft passed down for generations, teacher to student, and as of tonight this group included not just my father, not just a clandestine group of men spread all across the country, but also, horrifyingly, me.

  “We’re called the Diggers,” he said.

  24.

  MONDAY, SCHOOL—THERE WAS no way I was going, they would smell my sin all over me. I prayed to the placid and forgiving Two-Fingered Jesus: Save me. Even though I didn’t deserve it, my prayers were answered. Five minutes later, I pushed to my feet to vomit into the sink. I would not suffer school today. I was sick for real.

  Consciousness was sporadic. My eyes ached, so I closed them and fixated on the sweat that slopped my shirt and boxers to my skin. I had read about fevers so severe that people’s brains were literally cooked, and I remembered the dark liquid pooling from the dead woman’s mouth and ears. I coughed and spat until everything came up, corpse-tissue mush, coffin liquor, all dredged up from my guts and sent back through sewer pipes and returned to the earth. I glimpsed myself in the bathroom mirror and saw a corpse.

  Harnett’s hands were icy. I realized he was lifting me from the toilet. Then I was moving through the air and set back upon my bed, feeling moments later a rag draped over my forehead. There was ice wrapped inside, but a few minutes later it was water. My head pounded and I took advantage of the noise and hid inside. No cemetery, no woman, no maggots, just a fire in which I alone burned.