Rotters

by Daniel Kraus

  “I didn’t say you should drizzle it on your ice cream. But if you’re looking to neutralize your odors, you could do a lot worse. Only problem is once I got it in, Fouler spends the rest of the week trying to eat my hair.”

  At the mention of her name, the old hound raised her chin from the ground, leaving behind a dollop of slobber, and swung her droopy lips in my father’s direction. Harnett lowered a hand and scratched beneath the dog’s paisley kerchief.

  “Hey, Fouler,” he singsonged. “Hey, girl.” He opened his palm and let the dog lick it. His nod toward the bearded man was almost imperceptible.

  “Crying John,” he said.

  The man lowered his newspaper so that our eyes could meet.

  “Morning, Joey,” he said.

  I could not conceal my surprise. Tufts of the man’s massive beard rearranged as he laughed. “That’s right. I know you. You’re the new Digger.”

  “Don’t scare the kid,” Harnett griped. “And I’ll let him know when he’s a Digger, not you.”

  “Oh, he’s a Digger, all right.” The man examined me as if searching for flaws. “Knox said how you handled yourself with that woman. Now, that was something. Something like that takes a special touch.”

  “Kid doesn’t need a big head.”

  “You think you could’ve sweet-talked a lady like that? I know exactly what the great Resurrectionist would’ve done. He would’ve taken his shovel and gone bang. And dragged her out by the hair. There’s your sweet talk for you.”

  The man guffawed. Fouler whined in concert before dropping her chin between her paws. Harnett studied the cemetery.

  “Right.” The man sighed. “Well, Joey, I’m Crying John. And this slab of fat down here is the Befouler.” He nudged the animal’s ribs with his toe and she bared her grimy canines in a lazy display of irritation.

  I didn’t know what to say. I cleared my throat.

  “How old’s your dog?”

  Crying John’s voice flipped into falsetto. “Who, old Fouler here? Ole Foulie? Aw, she’s just a baby. Just a big old fat baby-cakes, ain’t you, Foulie?”

  “Sixteen,” Harnett said. “Give or take.”

  “No, sixteen’s exactly right.” He slapped the dog’s flank. “Raised her from a pup. Best Digger working today, present company included. Ain’t no one better than old Foulie. Ain’t no one feistier, either.”

  Fouler’s tongue curled in a yawn.

  “I’m sure you’ve already seen plenty of things you never thought you’d see,” Crying John said. “But you haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen Fouler here run out into a mess of twenty thousand stones and go directly—directly—to the hole that needs diggin’.”

  “That’s an old wives’ tale,” Harnett said.

  “Then I’m an old wife. What she’ll do, see, is start sniffing around the premises, over and over in smaller and smaller circles, until she gets dizzy and sits her butt down, and that right there is where you want to make the first strike.”

  Harnett offered an indulgent half-smile. “That’s not exactly true.”

  “You’ve never seen it!”

  “That’s not how you’ve told it in the past.”

  “Well, that’s how I’m telling it now!”

  Harnett shot me a look. “Take one guess why he calls her the Befouler.”

  I looked at the sleeping hound. Her paws twitched.

  Crying John pulled at his beard and looked out at the cemetery. “Okay, so sometimes she poops.” He raised a defiant finger. “But if she poops, then we’re really in business! Anything in Foulie’s poop zone is A-one material. Pee zone somewhat less so.”

  “So,” I said, gauging the distance between the men. “You two are friends?”

  The word made both men fidget and stare even harder through the window. With a shiver I remembered C-A-S: Remain Calm, Conserve Air, Shallow Grave. As amiable as Crying John seemed, he belonged to a group that held to a grisly code. Harnett and I were both risking something by being here, I had to remember that.

  Harnett cleared his throat. “Haven’t seen John in, what?”

  “Four years?”

  “Four. Or five. The relocation in, where was it?”

  “Texas.” Crying John sighed and flexed his fingers. “It’s been some time.”

  In the cemetery, workers were breaking for lunch, some moving in groups toward the diner.

  “Why does he call you Crying John?” I asked.

  Crying John shrugged. “I’m not sure it’s something to talk about.”

  “Indulge him,” Harnett said.

  The man toyed with his cardboard cup. “It comes from a method. A method I haven’t used in years. I don’t need to, not with Foulie. But back in the day, you know, I’d do what I had to do. I don’t know if I’m really proud of it.”

  “You should be,” Harnett said. “It was genius.”

  Crying John shook his head. “Don’t be dumb. I just ended up being good at it. I’ve got, I don’t know, overactive tear ducts or something. Always been kind of a crybaby. When I was small I’d cry if there were too many clouds in the sky. Even in high school, when—Well, hell, I don’t have to tell you this. You’re a boy in high school and start crying, you got about ten seconds before the beatings begin, right? But the slightest provocation and bang, the waterworks.”

  “You turned a negative into a positive,” Harnett said.

  “Hey, I’m learning the trade and I’ve got these eyes that run like wild, so I just put two and two together. I remember the first time, I was scoping out a belly just outside of Glacier National Park, beautiful country, with these snowcapped mountains and pure, crystal lakes and skies so clear they hurt to look at.… ” His eyes began to shine.

  “John’s got the Upper Mountain territory,” Harnett said. “Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, some of the Dakotas.”

  “Anyway.” Crying John wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “I’m up there and it’s gorgeous and there’s a little funeral going on in the same cemetery where I’m walkin’. Just your standard deal: people in black standing around a coffin looking serious, but for some reason I keep walking toward it, closer and closer, until I’m right there standing next to them like I belong, like I know the dead person, too. Look, maybe it was the mountain air. It’s so cold and sharp sometimes it feels like it just gets inside you and cleans you out, and then you feel all new like you’re kind of reborn. And so I’m standing there feeling reborn and looking at this casket that doesn’t mean anything to me, not a damn thing, and I blink my eyes and sure enough I’m crying, and no one takes it as weird because everyone else is crying, too—and then I think about how my whole life I been crying and how people always get so weird with it and back away like I got a knife, but for once I’m crying and people don’t mind. Not only that, but some of them even reach out and tell me it’s okay. And so I start crying more. It’s not like I can even look away—it’s beautiful country up there, beautiful, every single thing that you see. Now I’m crying louder than anyone, and no one, not a single person questions it. I’m right beside the casket when it hits me.”

  “You get to see everything,” I whispered in awe. “I bet you don’t even need newspapers.”

  “I do. These days I do. I haven’t used that method since I got Fouler trained. But yeah. It was good work. And there’s no secret to it, either. People are sad. You just don’t see it until you’re inside it, every day, like me. These guys out here, running these machines and pulling up these sleepers—they’re sad. The young lady selling us coffees—she’s sad, too, you wouldn’t believe how sad. I can see it. I can’t not see it. Day and night, Joey, I tell you, it’s all I can ever see. ’Cause only a crier can really understand a crier. And it’s tough, seeing all these criers wanting to cry who can’t because they gotta be running a bulldozer or selling coffee. It’d be so easy for me to help. But hard, too. I’m getting old. My eyes hurt. It’s hard.”

  The small swath of skin visible amid all his hair was creas
ed along lines of age and sorrow. Harnett respected the silence before breaking it.

  “There was the will,” he urged gently. “Tell him about the will.”

  “It’s a wake, a regular wake, some Tuesday night, some suburb of Boise,” Crying John said. “The kind of thing I did all the time: pick one out on a hunch, mix with the mourners, drink from foam cups. Only this time I get there and I’m it. There’s just a funeral director and me and he’s asking me if I’m there for the visitation, and I say yeah even as I’m reaching for the door, but he starts nodding like he’s really grateful and gestures, you know, right this way, sir, and so I go on into the viewing room and there’s this fellow all laid out. Nice coffin, good suit, decent-looking old guy, but not a single mourner in sight. And the funeral director urges me to sign the guest book, which I never do, I never, ever do, but it’s just him and me and I can’t weasel out of it, and while I’m holding the pen and looking at the blank page I realize that there will be no one else coming. This guy is dead and I’m it. Look, I don’t know if this fellow was evil or if everyone he knew just sort of died off over the years. But at that moment, I’m all he’s got, right? I’m the best friend the guy has in the world. So I sign the register. I go on record saying this man will be remembered, and look. I was right. Here I am, all these years later, still remembering.”

  “About a month later,” Harnett prompted softly.

  Crying John took a great breath.

  “About a month later I get tracked down by a lawyer and he lays on me a document. That fellow left me everything. It’s not much—a bit of money, an old Cadillac, but also a little house, a little square of land. His instructions were to split it among his mourners. So now I got this house and land. I went out there maybe four or five times to see it, but I never really got a good look. My eyes were too blurry.”

  “So you live there now?” I asked.

  “What? No.” He narrowed his eyes at me. “I sold it, wiped my hands of it. A Digger has to keep moving. A house and land, that would just complicate things.”

  “But, Harnett …” I looked helplessly at my father, but he was cringing at my slipup and busying himself with the view. I felt doomed but blundered on. “He’s, you know. Been in the same place for, like, years.”

  Crying John’s lips thinned.

  “We don’t all have your father’s … talents.”

  Harnett groaned and rubbed at his eyes.

  “Luck, that’s all it’s been, and one day it will run out,” he protested.

  The bearded man leaned in. There were no tears in his eyes now.

  “Yes. It will. For all of us. And that’s why we’re here, right now, truth be told. To meet the future.”

  2.

  REAL EDUCATION CAME AFTER nightfall, when we prowled the emptied cemetery, pressing our knees into the dirt and aiming illumination only where it was safe, down holes. Harnett used the light to point out nuggets of bone, crumbled remains of cement liners, and even filaments of wood that hinted at an older coffin buried beneath the first, an old trick of miserly caretakers. We put our hands to dozens of covered caskets, Harnett whispering words to give each texture meaning: particleboard, softwood, walnut, copper, fiberglass, stainless steel, cultured marble; six foot three by twenty-two inches, six foot seven by twenty-four. At the same time, unseen others conducted their own studies, and all of them obeyed the accord of silence.

  Unburdened by takings or tools, I felt exceptionally light scaling the fence. It had been a long day-and-a-half for me, an even longer one for Harnett, and yet we did not return to the motel. Instead he led me through a sleepy downtown to a pub called Andy’s. I imagined my mother’s reaction to my hanging out in a bar and grinned. What else were fathers for?

  We slipped inside and moved past a bar held down by lumpy men in flannel shirts, a glowing jukebox, a scuffed pool table, and various sticky-looking surfaces, finally wedging ourselves into a booth in the farthest, darkest corner of the room. A woman with a scar running down the center of her nose slung a bored hip at our table and Harnett turned down her offer of three-fifty pitchers. Instead he ordered two burgers and Cokes. We wrapped our cold hands around warm meat, feeling the drizzle of grease and blood drip through our knuckles as we bit.

  My elbow bumped a bald, skinny gentleman with wireframe glasses resting upon sharp cheekbones. He was sitting next to me; how long he’d been there I had no clue. His lips twitched at my father in a kind of greeting.

  Harnett paused in his chewing and nodded at the man.

  “This is Under-the-Mud,” he said. “He’s got the Northeast.”

  “Oh,” I said. The man had to be nearly seventy. “Hi.”

  Slowly the man laced his fingers and angled his plated skull. I felt the race of his beady, bright eyes.

  “Son of the Resurrectionist,” he said. “That is a legacy.”

  I wiped my lips and pointed a greasy finger at my father. “Who, him? The Resurrectionist? He’s got a name, too?”

  Under-the-Mud hiked a slender eyebrow. “It’s not just a name, child. It’s an homage.” He paused for an apology or justification. When it didn’t come, the eyebrow rose higher. “To the resurrection men. Of old England, dear boy.”

  I didn’t like his tone—it reminded me too much of Gottschalk. The urge to tell him how ridiculous these cryptic code names sounded was nearly irresistible. But then I felt an unexpected rush: if I were given one of these names, I would be part of a club. I would no longer be alone.

  A new voice responded. “No sense getting your claws out already, Mud. It probably seems asinine to someone who wasn’t born in the Crustaceous period. You can take that to the bank and smoke it.”

  I looked up and saw standing alongside the table a nondescript gray-haired man in his sixties wearing a gray cap, gray sweater, gray scarf, and gray pants, each item springing coils of gray thread. He reached out, thumped Under-the-Mud on the back, and stretched out a hand to my father. Harnett threw a look around the room to ensure we still went unobserved, then submitted to a brief shake.

  The man addressed me next. Even when I stared straight at him, he threatened to blend into the smoke. “Hello there,” he said. “I’m Fisher.”

  “I’m Joey,” I said.

  Fisher laughed. “That won’t do at all.”

  Under-the-Mud thumped the table with a scrawny fist. “He withholds from the child the facts of the resurrection men, he withholds his own name. I bet he withholds his old slogan, too. ‘I can get anyone.’ That’s what he used to say when he was young like the child here, and proud.”

  “Mud,” Harnett sighed. He picked up a napkin and wiped his fingers with meticulous strokes. “I never said that.”

  “It was your slogan. You can’t tell us it wasn’t.”

  “It was given to me, maybe.” He displayed his clean palms. “I never claimed it.”

  Under-the-Mud addressed me in a patronizing tone. “The quote was borrowed from Sir Astley Cooper. Sir Astley was one of the preeminent London anatomists of the eighteen hundreds and friend to the resurrection men.”

  “The resurrection men,” Fisher interrupted. He smiled at me patiently. “Body snatchers who provided bodies for classroom dissections before there was any other legal means to get them.”

  Under-the-Mud turned his skepticism upon my father. “We look forward to hearing your reasons for hiding this history.”

  Beneath snapping red neon, the two men sized up each other. The sound track switched from a caterwauling weeper to a boot-stomping ass-kicker. Barely audible from the drinkers around us, laconic chatter about sports and kids and jobs—nothing that remotely hinted at this underworld insanity. Yet I edged closer to the Diggers; there was self-confidence within this delirium, and I found myself hoping that Harnett had in fact used the brash slogan. In its own way, I can get anyone was just as powerful as We became oblivion, maybe more.

  “I’ll decide when he’s told what about what,” Harnett said.

  Fisher shrugged and l
eaned his body weight on the table; our Cokes slid treacherously. “Look, there’s more than nine ways to skin a cat,” he said. “That was long ago, back when we were all green behind the ears and the Resurrectionist was still working with Baby.”

  “Wait, stop,” I demanded from the corner. “Who’s Baby?”

  Now Harnett squirmed. He gestured at the man in gray and killed time with some backtracking. “Fisher here has the Gulf territory.”

  “ ‘And I will make you fishers of men,’ ” quoted Under-the-Mud. “Surely the child knows that one.”

  Fisher dismissed the comment with a gesture. “I’m sure Knox would love it if that was relevant. But mainly it’s because I like to fish. Got a little jar I keep with me on digs, fill it up with worms as I go. Grave worms are primo for fishing, absolutely primo. Bet you didn’t know that.”

  “There’s a lot he doesn’t know,” Under-the-Mud grumbled.

  “Those were the days, though, weren’t they?” Fisher said, yanking off his cap and patting down the gray tufts of hair. “When Lionel was still digging and it felt like it’d never end? And every time Knox came through he would tell tall tales of the younguns, Resurrectionist and Baby, and our jaws would hit the floor. What was the number? The two of you, how many?”

  “Twenty in a single night,” said Under-the-Mud. “That’s what I recall.”

  “I’ve always heard twenty-one,” said Fisher. “Even with two men, I still can’t imagine it. Was it twenty-one?”

  Harnett finished off the last bite of his burger.

  Under-the-Mud raised a finger for attention. “Working as a team—of course it had its benefits. Just look at us, all these years later, fawning over the numbers like they’re sports statistics. But let’s not forget that teams are by their very nature dangerous. Diggers work alone. That’s the way it’s always been. When Lionel was through teaching you and Baby, he should have forced a split. But you two stuck together, just so we could sit around a couple decades later and ask each other if it was twenty or twenty-one. And we all know what happened as a result. We all known what became of Baby.”