Rotters

by Daniel Kraus

  With no solid proof otherwise, I found it surprisingly easy to pretend that these abuses had nothing to do with me. Besides, my mind was on Fun and Games, where, to Foley’s dismay, Celeste continued to nab me whenever there was pairing up. A couple of times, she and I were even forced to touch. As she did so, she would ask for updates on my theater connections while telling me how her Spring Fling rehearsals were progressing. I ignored the shadow of someone who might be Woody watching from the weight room doorway and convinced myself that Celeste was not repelled by my odor of onions and death. She, after all, was Incorruptible, only she.

  39.

  HUNDREDS OF FLIES EXPLODED from the casket as soon as the lid buckled. I shielded my face with my arms. Harnett ducked. Their small black bodies bounced off our cool skin and wiggled through our hair before they oriented themselves and dispersed. It was several moments before the buzzing noise was gone.

  “Is that normal?” I whispered.

  “Yes,” Harnett said. He paused. “No.”

  There was no normal—if anything, that was what I was learning. No body decomposed like another. Some bodies bleached until they became rice-paper skin against twig skeletons; others bloomed into extravagant deformities of rainbow colors. No two cemeteries were alike, either. Each had its own challenges of scouting and approach; some had sight lines that provided a feeling of security while we were digging, though in truth there was no security, not ever, so said Harnett. This cemetery, for instance, extended flat as pavement for miles, with stones filing all the way up to the highway before resuming on the other side of the street.

  We were at one of Kansas City’s largest funeral grounds—the southernmost point of my father’s territory—and though it was a place Harnett had visited several times in the past, it made him jittery. There were fifteen-foot fences topped with razor wire, night watchmen and motion-controlled lights, security cameras that had to be fooled with mirrors. Our pace dragged. My father had yet been unable to find a suitable replacement for Grinder, and I could see the mismatch in each swipe of his shovel, the way the handle wanted away from his fingers.

  Overall it was a well-kept corpse.

  “The flies.” My breath made spirals in the air. “How do they stay alive down there?”

  “The human body has everything,” Harnett replied. “It’s a world unto itself. It has pockets of air, areas of warmth and cold. Plenty of fat and meat. All it takes is one fly to start a colony.”

  He tore his gaze away from the highway long enough to frown at me.

  “Remember what I told you about being buried alive? Things live underneath longer than you’d think. That includes people. There’s a condition called locked-in syndrome—the Germans call it Eingeschlossensein—where the nerves, they shut down; to someone who doesn’t know better it looks like brain death. You still hear, you still see, only you can’t communicate. They take you to the slab and you’re aware of every minute of it.”

  I felt a flare of irritation. We’d been over this before, and once he got going on the subject he would not stop. Sometimes his voice even rose to unsafe levels. I could see his excitement as he patted the corpse’s pockets, searching for a golden watch he was certain was there.

  “An EEG would tell you if someone was really dead.” I sighed. I loathed hauling out a Gottschalk fact, even in an attempt to end this tiresome conversation.

  “Maybe so.” He had the body on its side and I could see where the man’s suit had been scissored up the back by the mortician for easy maneuvering. “I’ll tell you what they used to do, to make sure you were dead. They had lots of ways.”

  “You’ve already told me.”

  “They’d slice your feet with razors. Or use nipple pinchers.”

  “They put needles under your fingernails, I know, I know.”

  “Boiling wax on the forehead,” he said. “Tobacco enemas, urine in the mouth.”

  “They stuck pencils up your nose and pokers up your butt. What’s your deal with this stuff?”

  He squatted next to the dead man. The golden watch was already rolling around his palm—he had it, yet still he sat there absorbing the odor. Finally he looked up.

  “I have my reasons,” he said. “Let’s go through it once more.”

  Not far away, a heavy transport vehicle—maybe a garbage or cement truck—thundered past the cemetery. Small avalanches of dirt streamed from the side of the hole, pattering against Harnett’s shoulders. My pulse accelerated. I wasn’t used to digging in the presence of headlights.

  “Let’s not go through it,” I said. “Come on, get out of there.”

  “Tell me the three things.” He shifted so that his knee blocked the corpse’s face from the falling dirt. Again I was struck by the strange courtesy he showed the dead.

  “The three things,” I repeated, thinking. “Calm? You should try to stay calm?”

  “C-A-S,” he recited impatiently. “C. Calm, remain calm.”

  “Right, right,” I said. “That’s what I said, stay calm.”

  “A,” he said.

  “Air. Conserve air.”

  “Which means.”

  “Which means,” I said, pressing shut my eyes. “Don’t hyperventilate. Don’t scream.”

  “And whatever you do.”

  “Whatever you do, don’t light a match because it’ll suck away all the air.”

  “S,” he said.

  “Shallow. A shallow grave. Remember that if you’re buried alive most likely you’re in a shallow grave. The reason is—”

  “The reason’s not important,” he said.

  “It’s important to me,” I said. “The reason is that if someone is burying you alive, chances are they’re probably in a hurry and doing a half-ass job. So you’re probably just a few feet deep.”

  “Which means.”

  “Which means,” I said, ducking beneath the flash of passing headlights, “that you can get out. If you can find the coffin’s center of balance, figure out which end is resting higher. You can break through.”

  “This is difficult because.”

  “This is difficult because you can’t gain enough leverage. You can’t swing your arms. Why is this so important to you?”

  He ignored me. “If the coffin is wood.”

  “If the coffin is wood, you’re going to have to bust the shit out of your hands, maybe even your head. You have to use focus techniques. Find the lid’s weak point, probably along the seam, and bash it in. Get ready for a mouthful of mud and remember that you can breathe through it. It won’t seem like it, but you can. All right? A-plus?”

  “And if it is a metal casket.”

  “We can go over this while we fill the hole.”

  “And if it is a metal casket.”

  I clenched my teeth. “If it is a metal casket you need to disassemble it. Sometimes there’s runners on the inside you can take off and use like a crowbar. If the casket is lined you can use the fabric to protect your hand while you punch. You can also use the material for a hood when the dirt starts coming in.”

  “Which it will.”

  “Which it will,” I repeated. “Right. Okay. Got it.”

  “ ‘To die is natural; but the living death / Of those who waken into consciousness.’ ” I was lost before realizing that he was quoting poetry. It was not the first time. “ ‘Though for a moment only, ay, or less, / To find a coffin stifling their last breath …’ ”

  “Huh,” I said.

  “ ‘How many have sustained this awful woe! / Humanity would shudder could we know / How many cried to God in anguish loud, / Accusing those whose haste a wrong had wrought / Beyond the worst that ever devil thought.’ ”

  “Just beautiful,” I said. “Now get out of there.”

  “Percy Russell.” He nodded at the attribution.

  The casket lid was reassembled with fast, dexterous fingers, and moments later Harnett surfaced. Together we gripped the tarp and portioned it back in segments, pausing between strata to pack the clay. Wh
ile Harnett stowed our tools, I replaced the sod, kneading the sutures with my fingertips until the blades of grass clung to one another in natural affect. I lost myself in the task; after a few minutes I looked at my work in some astonishment. Suddenly I yearned to show Harnett what I had done. Even more, I wanted to show him how my life was being patched back together: the new friend I had; the beautiful girl who did not seem to mind touching me; the fact that I was just a few measly grades away from getting straight As—my mother’s goal, but maybe one he could care about, too.

  He did care, in his own way. That night, in that cemetery, it became clear to me. He taught what he felt I needed to know in order to survive. His obsessions, then, were worth understanding.

  “Being buried alive,” I said. “It has something to do with being a Digger.”

  Harnett paused halfway through a motion of sliding the Root into one of the sacks.

  “It’s something they do?” I ventured. “Or it’s something done to them?”

  He wiped his hands against his pants and stood.

  “Oh, man,” I said. “It’s something they do to each other.”

  Harnett turned around, one sack thrown over each shoulder, a diamond of pale moonlight shining from his eyes.

  “Why?” I whispered.

  He hitched up the bags.

  “For punishment,” I guessed, and his dire expression told me that I was right. “Punishment for what? For screwing up? For letting people know that they exist?”

  We stood motionless in the dark. I was on the right track.

  Ice shot through my veins.

  “Me,” I gasped. “It could happen to me.”

  Once spoken, it was appallingly obvious. Among the Diggers there was no crime worse than revealing to the world their existence, and by taking me on, Harnett was accepting the greatest risk of all. A master who was also a father might be suspected of turning a blind eye to his son’s mistakes. Harnett drilled me mercilessly to save both of our skins.

  “It won’t happen,” I said. It was a promise to my mother.

  “No,” Harnett said. “It won’t happen.” His face, not hidden soon enough, told a story considerably less assured.

  40.

  FOLEY HAD TAPED INSIDE his locker door a picture of circus freaks. It was black-and-white, probably circa the 1920s, and featured an array of physical oddities, gathered on two levels of risers for a group portrait. In the back row dwarves in evening wear stood between a sword-swallower on one side and, on the other, a giant so tall that everything above the waist went unseen. Farther down, a tattooed lady stood next to a woman in a leopard-print dress who was covered in fine fur. In the front row, an obese woman sat next to a pretty girl missing her legs and balanced on a wheeled cart. Identical twins wearing cummerbunds, ties, beards, and what looked like white dreadlocks stood alongside two dark-skinned pin-heads draped in animal furs. At the right edge of the picture was a man in shirtsleeves whom I found far more disturbing than the rest. He stood with his hands on his hips, and his body seemed inexplicably conflicted—his chest too sunken, his belly too low, the bend of his arms and legs somehow misaligned.

  “That guy creeps me out,” I finally said.

  “It’s the Congress of Freaks,” Foley said. He pointed to the man I had mentioned. “His head’s on backwards.”

  From that day on, we adopted the phrase. No more did we attend Bloughton High. Instead we were but representatives of the Congress of Freaks, and moved among our fellow initiates, troubled and troubling, but no more so than anyone else. I thought of myself as the Backwards Man, always looking at the shit I left in my wake. Foley was the Manly Giant, and Celeste, when I saw her, was Legless Mite, the girl balanced atop the wheeled cart—beautiful and dark-eyed and powered with a grace frightening to those burdened by regular limbs.

  It was the last Friday of the semester, and I entered the school with almost breathless excitement. It had been a tremendous week. After returning from Kansas City, I had nailed every paper and exam the bastards had put before me, and a perfect score on my closing biology test was all I needed to claim victory. The final day of classes before Christmas break was Monday, which meant I had all weekend to prepare for Gottschalk. Most kids groaned; I celebrated.

  After lunch, I hurried to the final Fun and Games. I didn’t expect to remain friends with Celeste, if that was what we were, when classes picked up in January, and so felt an urgency to talk to her a final time, no matter how many lies I had to make up about theatrical agents who were this very moment booking tickets for Bloughton. But when I walked through the gymnasium doors, my hopes sank. Stettlemeyer and Gripp lounged next to each other on the bleachers as they had for the first half of the semester, and students gathered in loose assemblies, not a single one of them wearing gray shorts. There were a few basketballs and Frisbees lying around for those so inclined, but clearly the coaches had decided to let the final session function as a social hour.

  Stettlemeyer barked a reminder that we all needed to go empty out our lockers at some point. Half the crowd got the task out of the way immediately, including Foley, whose invisibility made him impervious to intimidation. When he returned with his sweats twisted into a rank knot, we situated ourselves on the bleachers and watched our classmates mingle. I was so used to seeing them in dismal gym wear that they seemed rather like sophisticates at a cocktail party. Stettlemeyer’s superhits completed the deception.

  Celeste, Woody, Rhino—I kept tabs on them for ten or fifteen minutes, then let them slide from sight. Dwelling on any of them was not going to help the next few days of intense study. But Foley’s constant bitching—currently about how his grandparents always gave him noncirculating commemorative coins for Christmas, what the fucking fuck was up with that?—wasn’t interesting enough to keep my mind off the gymnasium’s missing character, Heidi. I stood up.

  “Hey, where you going? I haven’t gotten to the Limited-Edition Barack Obama Inaugural Series yet. Wait’ll you hear what those things are made of. You’ll shit a brick.”

  “Clothes,” I said. “Locker room.”

  “Oh, right. Well, hurry up.”

  Alone in the stairwell, I paused to relax in the cool darkness. Maybe next semester I could get out of gym entirely, I thought. The locker room door squeaked beneath my fingers. I had heard of such arrangements in Chicago, of being permitted to add an extra class in lieu of gym. I passed red benches, black lockers; my nose tickled at the fog of aerosol. Yes, I would ask the school counselor, maybe even today after school—I didn’t know why I hadn’t thought of it before. The first number of my combination was thirteen. I smiled. Maybe my luck would just keep getting better.

  Then impact—teeth rattled, cheeks and lip smashed against clammy brick. There was no air; I wheezed; great vises collapsed my lungs. The spice of armpit hit my nose. Far away I heard the skittering of my shoes and then the horrible absence of sound as they were lifted from the floor.

  I went horizontal. Blood rushed to my head. There was a splashing noise and I looked down to see two large Nikes stomp across a thin puddle of water; I was being toted like a suitcase. I wrenched my neck and saw Rhino and then there was a great blow to the top of my skull. All went black—and then I saw starbursts, tasted the blood from my lacerated tongue, and heard a chuckling from above.

  “Didn’t mean to hit that wall,” said Rhino. “Honest I didn’t.”

  I opened my mouth but my swollen tongue took up too much space.

  “It’s your lucky day, Crotch.” I didn’t need to look to confirm the identity of this second voice. “We’re performing a public service. Free showers to anyone who smells so shitty I can smell him all over my girlfriend.”

  “Trask, do they still count as girlfriends when they don’t even let you—”

  “Rhino, you’re going to want to shut the fuck up.”

  I was flipped through the air—my stomach lurched—and then I felt hard cement reverberate up my ankles. I blinked; everything looked green. I shuffled my
feet and heard water, and then slipped and felt against my back two twists of metal, hot and cold. I slid until the seat of my pants hit standing water.

  “You’ll have to forgive Trask,” Rhino stage-whispered. One of the metal knobs whined. Vibrating through the wall, the digestive squeals of plumbing coming to life. “When it comes to you, he gets a little agitated.”

  The water blasted. I gasped—it was freezing and every muscle in my body clenched at once. For a shocking moment I was the corpse and this was rain and I pleaded for my father’s shielding. Then I blinked and watched the puddle turn pink: proof of life. Rhino exclaimed in a mixture of shock and glee. My eyes saw through water. Soaking pants; fingers, my own, clawing blindly at the air; my shoe heels scraping senselessly at the drain in the floor.

  I caught a flash of Woody, leaning against the far wall, perfectly dry. “Soap,” he said.

  “Scrub-a-dub-dub,” sang Rhino. “No more stinky-winky.”

  A terrible taste hit my bleeding tongue and I became aware of a turquoise liquid, dribbling. Then more of it, appearing in splotches across my stomach and pants. I squinted through the downpour and saw Rhino pumping soap from a dispenser and flinging it at me in handfuls. My eyes stung. Suds slid down my face in foamy tears. The hard walls of the shower made it sound as if the entire school were laughing.

  God is good.

  “All purty,” Rhino announced. He daintily dipped his hands in the water stream to rinse them. I sensed his retreat and heard the dull thwack of a high-five.