Rotters

by Daniel Kraus

  Moments later, they were both sprawled like toddlers, pawing at Nathaniel Merriman’s grave and pushing up tufts of sod with their feet. Harnett cursed and stood, lifting me by my collar and pushing me onto the path ahead of him.

  “Where’re we going?” I said.

  “Breakfast,” he growled. “Until these basket cases get their shit together.”

  We left the cemetery, checked on the truck, passed the bar where I had bought the jerky, and walked down a main street even less exciting than the one in Bloughton. Harnett moved as if he could smell the bacon in the air. I yawned and struggled to keep up. Within five minutes he had sniffed out a diner, and we pushed through the door and fell into opposite sides of a booth. A waitress approached.

  I recognized the tattoos instantly. I looked past Eileen and into the kitchen, where the ponytailed Floyd was jabbing a smoking grill.

  Eileen’s red-painted lips split to reveal two rows of false teeth.

  “It’s our jerky boy!” she cried. “Floyd, it’s our jerky boy!”

  “We don’t got any jerky,” he muttered over the sizzling.

  “It’s the boy who bought the jerky!” she shouted.

  “We don’t got any jerky, crazy woman.”

  Harnett rubbed his temples. “Two coffees. Two of everything: eggs, bacon, toast, but coffee first.”

  Eileen made a squiggle on her pad. After some bickering between Floyd and Eileen over Eileen’s penmanship, the caffeine arrived and I sipped while Harnett gulped. The whiskers around his mouth darkened.

  “Now what?” I ventured.

  “Now,” he said, swallowing. “Now we wait. We see what kind of rain clouds move in. Or we wait for night. She can’t make it another whole night.” His hand shook and the surface of his coffee swayed. “No way she can.”

  For a while nothing interrupted the listless sputter of the grill. No customers came in or out. Eileen and Floyd were silent and unseen.

  “So.” He eyed me briefly before staring out the window. “School going okay, I guess.”

  I marveled at his ability to avoid asking a real question. All sorts of responses bubbled to the surface. Yeah, it’s going okay. Only I get drop-kicked in the balls about once a week and an insane teacher stabs me with a metal poker on a routine basis and I’ve been forced to take trumpet lessons in secret and the only person who even remotely resembles a friend recently suggested that I start referring to myself as Crotch. Aside from that, yeah. It’s going great.

  Instead I held my tongue as Harnett rubbed at his pink eyes. I realized that while I had slept and drooled, he had kept watch on both me and the Woman in Black. All at once I felt weak and discouraged—I didn’t have it in me, this man’s mental and physical stamina. But when he scraped an unsteady hand over his weary face, I also saw that he was getting old. His muscles would soon lose definition. His bones would winnow and weaken. My mother was already gone; I wasn’t sure I could take another desertion.

  “Yeah, it’s going all right,” I said.

  He nodded out the window. “We’ll get you back by Monday morning, don’t you worry,” he said. “No way she can lie there another whole night. No way.”

  But after another seven hours spent pacing the stacks at the Lancet County Library, wandering around a hardware store for so long the proprietor began dialing his phone, grabbing another meal from Eileen and Floyd, and sitting silently beneath a gazebo in the town square to watch the ceaseless downpour, we returned to the soggy cemetery at dusk to find the Woman in Black still there, alone and slumped against Nathaniel Merriman’s stone. I didn’t have to look at Harnett to feel his frustration, nor did I want to—after all, this was all my fault. If Simmons and Diamond hadn’t created a situation preventing Harnett from abandoning me, he could’ve visited Lancet County weeks ago.

  We stood against our mausoleum for a minute, our shoes submerging into mud.

  “Stay here,” said Harnett. “I’m getting our bags. Another hour and she’ll be gone. No one lies in the rain at night. I don’t care how crazy they are.”

  It didn’t sound as though he believed what he was saying, but regardless, he took off, his narrow shape parting silver curtains of rain. I turned my attention back to the Woman in Black and after only a moment’s hesitation began to approach.

  She was older than I had guessed, at least my father’s age. Up close her body revealed itself to be more bony than slender, and what had looked like fair skin instead was blue and veined. Her black dress clung to some sort of cream-colored undergarment that flopped from below her disheveled hem. Everything she wore was stained; even her hands and neck and face were spotted with mud.

  I gripped the cold stone and lowered myself to both knees.

  “Hello,” I said. The rainfall made it practically inaudible.

  Her eyes opened, releasing either rain or tears. Both of her hands automatically contracted, raking in handfuls of mud.

  “Daddy,” she croaked in a voice coarsened by days of continuous sobbing. Almost magically all the relationships became clear. Nathaniel Merriman was the vaunted patriarch; here writhing on his grave was his daughter. The man who had briefly joined her had been her brother, Merriman’s son, though his sorrow had reached limits more quickly. There was no telling why she suffered as she did. Perhaps her father had been tremendously kind to her and the world was repellent in his absence. Perhaps he had been cruel and her lament was for the amends she had been denied. Perhaps he had been missing and she grieved for being cheated of shoulders to grasp and cheeks to kiss. Or perhaps she was lost in pain entirely her own and so reached for a parent as does a small child, as if physical contact, no matter how it is accomplished, will dull the knives.

  I reached for her before I knew what I was doing. I withdrew her fingers from the mud and used a palm to wipe grass from her clammy cheek. I felt my heart open to her as it had opened to no one since my mother; I felt a lightness in my chest, releasing me momentarily from the death grip of my current life. Her hands fumbled to my waist, then my shoulders. I felt my lips moving and though I could not hear the words, I knew I told her of Valerie Crouch, also dead and capped with stone like Nathaniel Merriman. I told her of the wonderful arms of my mother, her infinite freckles, the red flip-flops she wore to translucence. I told her of crying on our doorstep when I was ten, afraid that I was going to flunk out of fourth grade, and how my mother had rocked me in her arms like a baby so expertly that I didn’t care about the passersby who saw. I told her of pretending to talk in my sleep so that my mother would hear and peek her head in, allowing me to see her face one more time.

  The Woman in Black embraced me and shuddered. We might have cried; there was too much rain to tell. When I stood, her frail body rose with me. When I walked, I felt the unsteady pivot of malnourished legs within oversized sockets. When we passed the mausoleum and the hidden figure holding two gray sacks, I held her tighter and felt the brittle cage of her ribs interlock with mine.

  Together we left the cemetery. I pushed open the tavern door with my foot and for some reason was not surprised when both Eileen and Floyd glided toward us with open arms and sympathetic smiles. Eileen took the dripping woman from my arms, while Floyd pulled out a chair for her and went for a towel, clicking the coffee maker on the way. I receded until the holiday glow of the bar lights was replaced with the underwater luminosity of a rainy dusk.

  My father was four feet deep by the time I returned. I followed the small rivers of water that fell in waterfalls upon his laboring back. He dug with the Root—somewhat awkwardly, as the tool was not his own—and said nothing as pound after pound of mud fell in place on the unfurled tarp. When the top of the casket was uncovered and breached my father held out a hand, which I took because the ground was slippery. We pored over the two-year-old remains of Nathaniel Merriman, a man Harnett knew everything about but wisely kept from me, only pausing to point out the valuables, which I removed, and the particularities, which I noted, like the PVC piping the morticians had used to
replace organ-donated bones so that the body held up better for mourners as well as mortuary staff leery of manipulating a flaccid corpse.

  Rain made soup of the coffin. Harnett said we needed to move fast. It was too dark to read his face, but I knew how to decipher his pauses: I had done something good, maybe even impressive enough to tell Knox the next time he came through so that the reverend could pass the story along to Diggers everywhere. I allowed myself only a short moment of pride before holding out my hand for the Root.

  36.

  MY MAKESHIFT CALENDAR CONTINUED to devour the side of the sink, each groove in the plywood evidencing yet another day of unspeakable things. Horizontal slashes finished off sets of five. I counted them. Today was Halloween.

  My path to school took me past lawns ornamented with foam gravestones spray-painted with novelty names like Dr. Acula and D. Ed Corpse. I saw little kids with backpacks and lunch boxes rush out front doors and pause to straighten these memorials and I almost laughed. For one day a year, even children pretended to cozy up to the dead. What everyone forgot was that beneath those fake stones were real graves—maybe eons old, maybe fresh. The dead were below everything and everyone and that fact did not change just because tomorrow these families would whisk these decorations into boxes and put those boxes into attics. They were fooling themselves. Eventually a man with a shovel would wait them out. Last night that man had been me.

  As Fun and Games began, these thoughts still seized and thrilled me. These teenagers loitering in their shorts and T-shirts were of little matter; I had lifted the Woman in Black from cemetery mud and delivered her back into living arms, the closest thing to a resurrection I’d ever seen. So I barely noticed when Stettlemeyer started shouting names. For the past two weeks, she’d succumbed to mercy and allowed Foley and me to pair off when possible, but today a tiff between two girls had incited her to assign partners based on nothing but the cruel mercy of the alphabet.

  “Table two! Carpenter, Crouch!”

  The Woman in Black turned into Celeste Carpenter. She was right in front of me, within slapping distance. I edged away. Her arms were crossed, and in the upper plane of her beautiful mask I sensed a lingering dislike.

  “We’re partners,” she said.

  “What?” I asked. “Okay.” I blinked. “What?”

  “Ping-Pong.”

  “Oh, okay, sure,” I said. “What?”

  She gestured curtly at the green table behind her. Her dark hair fanned as she made an artful pirouette and took her position on the far side. I toed into place and picked up the paddle, running my fingers over the nippled rubber. All around us volleys were crackling. I looked down the line of players and saw Foley a few tables down, slanting his eyes at me.

  “She’s not here,” Celeste said. Her paddle was propped against a cocked hip. “Heidi Goehring. She changed periods. That’s who you’re looking for, right?”

  For a moment I was confused, but another look around proved that Celeste was right. Heidi was gone. The memories of Lancet County peeled back like scorched paint, and beneath lay the lunchroom, calculus proofs, Foley’s disapproval. Mostly I saw Heidi’s reaction when she saw Woody looking at her. Although she was bright, I feared she would have done anything Woody asked. Even if it meant joining him inside a certain closet in the band room. But it was me he was interested in, not her, and such an event could not have ended happily for Heidi.

  It came out of me unwittingly: “What did he do?”

  She switched hips. “You don’t know how much trouble you’ve caused.”

  “Me?” To avoid her eyes, I took hold of the ball resting against the net. “All I did was move here.”

  “Yes, and maybe they handle social situations differently where you come from. But you have to learn. Here is not there. Maybe you came from a really small town. I understand how that might be. But you need to adapt.”

  “Small town?” I squeezed the ball in my fist. “I came from Chicago. It was like a million times bigger. A billion times bigger.”

  The paddle slid from her hip. Her torso sank back and her shoulders squared, as if seeing me for the first time. Her dark eyes glimmered.

  “You’re from Chicago.”

  I shrugged. “Yeah.”

  “Chicago has an incredible theater scene. Dance, too.”

  I shrugged again. “Okay.”

  “Steppenwolf? The Joffrey? Hubbard Street?”

  She leaned over the table and everything else was vanquished by the double swells of breast visible from her V-neck. “That’s right,” I mumbled. Quickly I dropped the ball and sent it across the table. She swiped at it, missed, and ended up smothering it against her chest. It squirted away and went clattering beneath the table. Instinctively, I took to my knees to retrieve it. In the shade below I located the ball rolling back in her direction. I reached for it and instead felt lotioned skin—a hand, not severed at all, but warm and electric—and then soft breezes, hair, conditioned and combed, not the wiry tangle of the grave—because she was there, right beside me, crouching and reaching for the same object, and for an instant she filled my vision—

  —the pale crescent of flesh glowing between shorts and shirt—

  —Ls and Ts and Ys of a complicated bra pushing through fabric—

  —the baby fuzz of hair on the swoop of her neck—

  —a pinprick mole dotting the exact spot of a necklace clasp—

  —regions of depth in her hair so black all detail was lost—

  —three strands of hair still charged by our static and reaching—

  “Oops.” She plucked the ball from the floor and then smiled at me. Dazzling, even in shadow. “Nice and quiet down here, huh?”

  Dozens of balls against dozens of tables sounded more like a hailstorm. “Sure is,” I said.

  “So, the theater scene, yeah. You know of it? Well, of course you know of it. How well? You have connections there?”

  It was a bad idea, but the second I thought of it I could not pull back.

  “Yes,” I said. “My mom knew someone at one of them.”

  Her eyes widened so that I could see how the green mixed with hazel. “From which theater? Can you ask her?”

  I shook my head. “She’s dead.”

  “Oh.” Her forehead wrinkled. I hated to see it that way. “You think you could still find out? I’m working on a routine for the Spring Fling. You know what that is? It’s a talent show. The biggest in the tristate region. They do it right here in the school auditorium. It’s no joke. People come from all over. And they give out awards, some scholarship-type stuff, but even better are the contacts you make. You wouldn’t believe who they get to show up to this thing. Hey, maybe you can send your contact a tape of my routine? Maybe even get them to come down for it? This is great news.”

  I wanted to punch myself. Yes, my mother had known someone affiliated with some theater, but only barely. Most likely that person was a volunteer usher or just some schmuck with season tickets. But Celeste was practically licking her lips.

  I forced a smile. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Oh,” she sighed, lacing her hands and leaning forward so that her head grazed the bottom of the table. It was like the first movement of a hug. I imagined the rest: the plump of her breasts, the push of her hips, the smell of her scalp. “After school. Today. Come to rehearsal room B just off the main chorus room. I’m practicing my routine. I’ve just worked out the steps. Wait’ll you see it. You’ll come, right?”

  She dragged me—by the hand!—back up above the table and the ghostly prickles of that contact steered me through the rest of Fun and Games, around the suspicious glares of Woody in the locker room, past the remainder of the day, and into rehearsal room B when school let out, where to my honest surprise I found her there, as promised, stretching in a silver leotard. Almost immediately she resumed the chatter. The talent show, she explained, wasn’t until May, but it didn’t pay to rest on your laurels, not ever, not even when an event was six months
away, especially when that event was the Spring freakin’ Fling.

  “Everyone involved practices like crazy,” she continued. “Especially me. We practice all the way up until the day of the Fling and then we all go out to a movie together a few hours before it starts. You know, to relax. We bring our parents and significant others and everything. It’s like a tradition, and it’s hilarious, because every year a couple people leave the movie to throw up, they’re so nervous. They should be. You know Shasta McTagert? She was discovered at a Spring Fling and joined the Rabbinger Theater and now she’s on that TV show about the ghetto school. You probably think it’s a fantasy.”

  “No,” I protested. “Fantasies are good.”

  “They are good.” She made a sound like a purr. Then she spoke as if what she said was confidential. “A fantasy world is the best kind of world to live in because if you don’t want it to end it doesn’t have to, and it can totally take over Mere Reality.”

  Her face brightened as she enunciated this phrase. Instantly I liked the sound of it. My trumpet lessons, my prayers to Two-Fingered Jesus, my specifying—all of these were escapes from Mere Reality. The only question was which half of my life was real: my fluorescent existence here in the this room with Celeste Carpenter or the dark nights spent with Ken Harnett.

  “If I do something really fantastic at the Spring Fling—win top prize and all that—then there’s a chance Mere Reality will become exactly what I want it to be. I can be a dancer. Everyone says that. But I really can, I know it. I just need the right people to see.”

  Finally she hooked her iPod up to a stereo, crossed her ankles, and twined her arms above her head. A Spanish theme began—a trumpet. My neck burned with jealousy. She was only running through the steps, hardly giving it her all, but if anything her casual drowsiness enhanced the titillation—it was as if her slow gyrations and sleepy spirals were being performed before her bedroom mirror. With each bend and stretch of spandex she fired more questions about my hometown theater scene—the neighborhoods, the ensembles, the directors, the wages—and I mumbled and lied my way through each of them. Eventually it became evident that I was the first real big-city kid she’d ever met. I convinced myself that I had a right, even a responsibility, to foster her fantasies. There would be no Mere Reality, not between the two of us, not if I could help it.