Rotters

by Daniel Kraus

  Woody’s breath warmed my ear.

  “Stick to your own kind, Crotch. Or we can do this again next semester.”

  Footsteps splished through puddles and they were gone. I traced their progress and noticed other faces poking around the corner. There were four or five of them, their jaws agape, and not just boys, but girls, too. I scooped a mountain of bubbles from my lap and spat the synthetic tang of cheap soap. Woody and Rhino had succeeded—I was nothing if not clean.

  I tried to stand but slipped in the turquoise lather. There was laughter. More voices now, too many. I reached for the knobs to pull myself up but they too were slick. It was getting darker; more and more heads blocked out the locker room lights. I barely heard the noise of someone pushing through the throng, and even when he was kneeling at my side and tugging at my arm I barely saw him. It was Foley, trying to help me up, his black pants soaking blacker, and all I felt was jealous rage that, even here, almost no one saw him. “Joey, come on, man.”

  I slapped away his hands and lurched. The nearest onlookers shrank back as my shoes fanned water. I tromped through the shower and past the red rows of lockers, meeting no one’s eyes, concentrating upon the squish of my socks. I had the door pushed open before I felt Foley’s dry fingers take handholds of my soggy clothing.

  “Joey, man, I told you to stay away from them—”

  “Move.”

  “Joey—”

  “Move.” I wrestled against his embrace. He lodged himself into the doorframe for leverage.

  “Joey, what the hell?”

  “Move.” I lowered my head and bulled forward, knocking him aside even as he tried to keep hold. I shouldered the door. It smashed against the far wall and rocketed back. Foley screamed, a high girlish noise that I instantly hated him for, and I looked over my shoulder to see blood patterned across the brick. The door had slammed his finger, and he held the misshapen purple thing in front of his face in disbelief.

  Keep moving, I told myself. Up the steps, up the steps.

  Three bounds later the stairs were history and I was through the door to the gym. While I trailed shower water across the floor, Stettlemeyer showed Gripp funny snapshots she had stored on her phone.

  I made it to the cafeteria right as the bell was ringing. An excess of quarters hung heavy in my sodden jeans and I plunged the coins home, stamping out Boris’s number. It rang and rang, burying the last echo of Foley’s pain.

  An automated message picked up. Somehow I waited until the beep.

  “Boris, call me now. Right now. This is Joey.” I recited the number. My voice was all over the place, wild.

  Students passed on their way to the day’s last classes. I eyed them, shifting my feet in a growing puddle.

  Twenty minutes later, I deposited more money and called again to the same result.

  “I’m not screwing around, Boris,” I said. “Call me back. Call me back.” I gave the number again and hung up.

  Fifteen minutes passed.

  “Boris, where are you?” Bound by the cord, I paced in a tight circle, my wet clothes clinging uncomfortably. “Don’t tell me you have this thing off. You don’t ever have it off. You’re avoiding me. Stop avoiding me! You have the number. Call it.”

  Ten more minutes.

  “What the fuck is your problem?” I shouted into the phone, my voice breaking. “You’ve got no right to treat me like this! I need you! I need you to call me! Pick up your fucking phone and call me!”

  Five minutes later the pay phone rang. I jammed the receiver against my lips.

  “Boris!”

  “This better be good,” he said.

  “I’m coming home. Now. I mean it. Right now. I’m heading to the train station right now.”

  He groaned.

  “I don’t believe this,” he said. “You need to learn how to keep it together.”

  “Can you wire me money? I’m heading there now and I don’t have a dime.”

  “Wire you …? What does that even mean?” He was speaking softly as if from a public place. “Of course you don’t have a dime, you’ve spent it all dialing my number three thousand times.”

  “Find out the number to the Bloughton station,” I said. “Call them. Arrange it. Put it on Thaddeus and Janelle’s card. I don’t care how you do it!”

  He paused. “I’m not putting anything on anyone’s card.”

  I could barely keep my voice down. “Why the fuck not? You’ve done it before! Boris, I need this!”

  “What you need is help, Joey.”

  I heard through the receiver someone saying “Shh,” followed by Boris’s muttered apology.

  “Where are you? You’re not in school?” I was surprised at my own accusatory tone.

  “What’s it to you?” Boris snapped. “Last day of school here was yesterday, moron. Thaddeus and Janelle took me out to a movie. Which I’m missing.”

  The image of something so cozily privileged as the graduate-degreed Watsons escorting their well-behaved son to a subtitled movie at an art-house theater that probably sold imported beer and gourmet coffee, and all as a reward for something as mundane as concluding another semester, consumed me with envy and spite.

  “Who gives a shit?” I howled. “We’ve been best friends for a million years and the moment I need you all you can do is complain about missing some movie? Are you kidding me? Get out of there.”

  “Were,” Boris said. “We were best friends. I don’t even know you, dude.”

  I closed my eyes and let the words sink in. Through the receiver I heard piped-in movie-theater smooth jazz, laughing strangers, the distant flutter of popping corn. My side of the phone was even louder—boys shouted as they bought vending machine food, girls in the hallway squealed, and their volumes increased as they pressed closer in their eagerness to confirm that Crotch was indeed hunched over the pay phone, drenched and crying.

  Crying—yes, I was. The tears felt different, oilier somehow, from the rest of the water beading my face.

  “Boris,” I said.

  “I don’t think you should call me anymore.”

  “Boris, please, listen.”

  “Don’t call me anymore.”

  “Please listen.”

  “Don’t call.”

  “Please.”

  “Don’t.”

  It was the last word he would ever say to me. The dial tone was deafening.

  I turned to face the gawkers. Their eyes were too bright, their postures too predatory, the smiles on their faces too ravenous—they were the freaks, not me. I fumbled the receiver at the phone. It fell and dangled, but by then I had plunged into their ranks. They parted to make way, their enraptured whispers like tires through wet pavement.

  My last hope: Simmons and Diamond. I didn’t care about the retribution I would suffer once Woody and Rhino had been suspended. All I cared about was that the principal and vice principal acted speedily on my behalf. Really they had no choice. The abuse had been vicious and the witnesses many.

  Passing my locker, I snatched my biology text but nothing else, not even my coat. Moments later I closed in on the familiar wooden letters: PRI CIP L’S OF ICE. Laverne was standing just outside the doorway, struggling to direct her second arm into a coat sleeve.

  “You’re wet,” she said, blinking at me in surprise. “Joey, you’re all wet. What happened?”

  “I need to see Mr. Simmons.”

  Laverne opened her mouth, then closed it.

  “That’s going to be impossible.” Her normally nasal tone was flattened with an unexpected coolness.

  “Ms. Diamond, then, I don’t care.”

  Laverne took a moment to adjust her hem before deliberately attacking the buttons, one after another. When she was fully sealed, she raised her chin proudly. I felt a twinge of distress at the smug set of her lips.

  “I’m afraid you can’t speak to either of them,” she declared. “They have been removed.”

  There was motion behind her. In the office, a row of adul
ts were exiting the principal’s office, unfurling scarves and pulling gloves from pockets. Neither Simmons nor Diamond was among them.

  “Why?” I asked Laverne.

  “Inappropriate relations,” she enunciated with relish. “Ms. Diamond should have known better. Mr. Simmons is a married man, after all. And on school grounds, no less.”

  Laverne’s wink informed me that what she said next was just between friends. “Mr. Simmons,” she whispered, “really should’ve done something about those scratches on my car.”

  I saw again the FAT BITCH scraped into metal. In a roundabout way, I had been responsible for that, and now that was responsible for this. Everything, how the world toppled like dominoes, it was all my fault.

  Movement in the office caught my attention. There was one adult among the group not draped in winter clothes, someone who in fact was accepting curt handshakes from each of them in turn. When I saw who it was, everything fell revoltingly into place: an interim principal had to be appointed, someone with a reliable and distinguished tenure, someone who knew the ropes and was unafraid of tightening them.

  “Mr. Gottschalk will make a fine principal,” Laverne purred, patting me on the damp arm. “I bet he’d meet with you right now.”

  I ran. Past Laverne, through students, across the spot on the lawn where months ago Celeste had slapped me. I was on the sidewalk, my lungs scorching, before I heard the shout.

  “Kid! Kid! Hey, kid!”

  Harnett was behind the wheel of his idling truck, leaning over the passenger seat to yell from the lowered window. I drew to a halt, sucking in icy air with each gasp. Snow spun in dizzying loops.

  He gestured impatiently. “Get in.”

  I stopped several feet from the truck. Gray air mushroomed from my lips.

  “The hell you doing?” He smacked the seat. “Forget it. Tell me about it on the way.”

  I was shaking my head and hadn’t realized it at first; I thought it was a trick of the swirling snow.

  Harnett scrabbled through the junk in the front seat and came up with an envelope. “This is from Knox. There’s a relocation in West Virginia. It’s a ten-hour drive and we’re already late.”

  The snow burned as it dissolved against my wet skin. My head continued its mechanical refusal.

  “I told you about these. Kid, relocations are one in a million.” He threw up his hands. “Why are you just standing there?”

  At that moment he finally began to take it in: the wet hair, the lack of any winter clothing, the biology text dangling from one pale hand, the blank look of rage fixed upon my shivering face. He dropped the envelope. His expression sharpened and with each uptick of his anger I felt an ebb in my own, as if he were drawing it from me and taking it upon himself. For an instant I tried to keep what was mine—he did this to me, after all; it was his fault I stank so bad that I had ended up in the locker room shower. But at last I let it go, let all of them go: Boris, Foley, Laverne, Simmons, Diamond. The departure of such a group made Harnett my sole protector. My father, the Garbageman, Bloughton’s outlaw, here at the Congress of Freaks, armed with sharp tools and an accelerating anger—blood would spill from school windows and dribble down stairs unless I prevented it.

  The truck door handle was icy, the seat stiff. I tossed the biology text to the floor, picked up the envelope, and studied each palsied squiggle. Droplets from my hand smeared the ink; my vision was similarly blurred. The engine coughed and the wipers began pushing snow. Knox had been right. It was going to be a brutal winter.

  1.

  SOMETIMES THE DEAD STAND in the way of progress. Perpetual-care funds are mismanaged, cemeteries change hands or become orphaned, state or government agencies rezone the land for new purpose, or private owners simply do with the property what they wish—and often what they wish for is money. New condo buildings. A bigger Walmart. So the decision is made. The cemetery ground will become something other than a cemetery. Every single casket will be disinterred from the earth and reinterred somewhere else.

  My father called such an event a relocation. Old graves, new graves, mausoleums, aboveground tombs—like a going-out-of-business sale, everything must go. Aside from even rarer events (like a grave-digger strike and the resultant stacks of unburied caskets), there was no better way to study up on decomp and burial techniques in a concentrated span of time. For these reasons, said Harnett, relocations became impromptu conventions. No Digger could stay away. My stomach stirred in anticipation of meeting these men of the night.

  We sped through southern Illinois; by the time we hit Indiana I was asleep. When I awoke outside of Cincinnati, Harnett picked up right where he had left off, babbling about legendary relocations, like the six-hundred-year-old Cimetière des Saints-Innocents in Paris, which was dug up in 1786, razed, disinfected, and covered with cement while its human remains were squirreled away in underground catacombs. It was the middle of the night when we stopped for fuel and coffee near Kentucky’s Daniel Boone National Forest, and over the ticking of the pump Harnett droned on about the ten years it took to relocate ninety thousand remains from San Francisco in the 1930s, and how the ground itself was then built upon by a college. Little did school administrators know that the cemetery relocation itself had served an educational purpose.

  My clothes had long since dried, but I was still cold. I used my biology text to block a crack in the door and shut my eyes. Only lack of movement jolted me awake. Peach morning light textured the dusty office windows of a roadside motel. I heard a crackle—the last of several bags of Cool Ranch Doritos that Harnett was polishing off. He sucked cheese from fingertips that smelled of kerosene and turned off the motor.

  “We’re here,” he said. “Let’s drop our gear and get to town.”

  “Will he be here?” I asked. I didn’t have to speak his name.

  He crumpled the bag. “You read the letter.”

  Indeed I had. Knox’s writing style was overreliant on abbreviations, but communicated well enough a greeting (K./J.—), the details of the relocation (Dec. 15–24, Mt. Rgn., WV), an apology for the letter’s lateness (lately tkn w/brnchitis), and, in a postscript, the admission that it had been over two years since he had last seen or heard from Boggs (B. MIA. 2+ yrs). In all likelihood, Knox wrote, Boggs was dead (B.—prbly. dec’d). Harnett’s feelings on the matter were unclear. I thought about my mother’s death—quick, brutal, and unexpected—and wondered if a gradual destruction was even worse.

  The relocation itself seemed improper, big machines rattling crypts and sneezing black exhaust across gravesites while dozens of men stomped and hollered and crouched with their sandwiches and coffee. Harnett planted his fists in his pockets and strolled down the bordering sidewalk, his eyes bright and watchful. I imitated him and absorbed what I could. There were cranes and dozers and backhoes and dump trucks. A foreman used spray paint to mark a number on the side of an exhumed coffin. There was a cordoned lot full of caskets parked like miniature cars. Harnett’s eyes spun over the bounty and his lips moved in silent memorization.

  Once we had circled the cemetery, Harnett turned his attention to the neighboring storefronts.

  “Here,” he said. “We want to set up camp right here.”

  Across the street were an insurance office, a shoe store, a VFW hall, a diner, and a coffee shop.

  He grimaced. “I hope you’re thirsty.”

  In truth it was shoes I really needed—some more insurance probably wouldn’t have hurt, either—but after the long drive the need for coffee trumped both. We skipped across the asphalt, entered the shop, and stood in line. Once I was enveloped within the warm and spicy atmosphere, my stomach growled and I tugged on Harnett’s sleeve to point out the muffins and scones. He shrugged noncommittally and then, when it was our turn with the barista, I hid my face while she monotoned the definitions of tall, grande, and venti. “I just want a large coffee,” Harnett pleaded after almost a full minute of negotiation.

  “And a cranberry scone,” I added. “No, b
lueberry.”

  The shop had plenty of window space, and we situated ourselves at a table allowing an unobstructed view of the excavation. On one side of us, a kid my own age moused languorously at a laptop. On the other side, an old man dominated by a beard hanging halfway down his chest looked listlessly at a newspaper while an old hound dog slept at his feet. I inhaled the scone while Harnett sipped his venti and watched coffins rise.

  “They call this silt coffee,” he muttered a half hour later. Nevertheless he looked longingly into his empty cup.

  “You should try the vanilla latte,” I suggested. “And these blueberry scones are the shit.”

  He considered the intimidating barista before giving me a pitiful look. I sighed, took his money, ordered another scone and drinks for both of us, and returned, sipping my Americano while trying not to laugh at Harnett’s suspicious swishing of his vanilla flavoring. We settled into silence, watching heavy machinery jerk around tight cemetery spaces, tiny plumes of breath making the men themselves look like steam-powered machines. Occasionally something would happen—a backhoe would topple a headstone, a decrepit coffin would be draped with a tarp to protect sensitive onlookers—but mostly it was tedium. This, too, was school, I reminded myself, and as the hours wore on I became increasingly impressed with my father’s dedication. The hiss of cappuccino steam, the ringing of spoons to cups, the piped-in acoustic rock—these sounds clamored for my attention, yet Harnett was inviolable.

  We were both on our fourth cups when the bearded man with the dog spoke.

  “I found a way to get corpse-stink out of hair.”

  I choked and spat; coffee spotted the table. Harnett, though, just stirred his cold latte and shrugged.

  “That’s what you said ten years ago,” he said.

  “True.” The man scratched crumbs from his beard. “But this way involves egg whites and Lemon Pledge.”

  The two men sat nearly back to back, scanning different angles of the same cemetery. They did not turn to look at each other.

  “Can’t say that sounds promising,” Harnett said.