Rotters

by Daniel Kraus

  Boggs was Baby—I had figured out that much. In the chilling pause that followed I investigated a scar that cauliflowered the skin at Under-the-Mud’s elbow. The hair at Fisher’s temples was streaked with an ancient white slash and he was missing a pinkie. There was violence in this life that I had only begun to appreciate.

  “The Resurrectionist can’t be blamed for Baby,” Fisher said at last. “Nobody can.”

  “We just ought not to forget the danger of working in pairs,” Under-the-Mud insisted, turning away from me. “That’s all I’m saying.”

  As the men kept talking, I basked in the respect they gave my father. In Bloughton, Ken Harnett was only the Garbageman, but here he was legend to legendary men. As the room grew darker and louder and smokier, other faces manifested through the gloom—Screw (Southwest), Brownie (Lower Midwest), the Apologist (Central East), and even Crying John and Fouler—and every one of them paid tribute to the great Resurrectionist and grasped happily at the few words he offered.

  I tried to hide my surprise following each introduction. They were ancient, every one. It should have been cartoonish how their storied personas clashed with the gnarled and wrinkled reality. Perhaps once they had been dashing adventurers brimming with vitality, but now they had hairy ears and liver-spotted hands and swaying jowls. They were well muscled but unhealthy-looking. Scars and disfigurements were rampant. They each smelled bad, the same kind of bad; waitstaff kept their distance and nearby stools remained vacant. They used obsolete jargon that slowly I deciphered: graves were “bellies”; tombstones were “heads”; corpses, depending on their circumstances, were “swimmers” or “risers” or “sleepers.” They spoke with reverence of something called the Monro-Barclay Pact. Their smiles were genuine, but their eyes were haunted and preyed upon me at every opportunity. Uncomfortable though it was, I preferred it to the dismissive cruelty of the Congress of Freaks. At least here I was being judged as a potential equal.

  Beneath chatter, Harnett would murmur asides. They were good men, he told me, but almost every one of them relied on tricks: video cameras, aerial photography, global-positioning devices, mechanized telescoping shovels, ground-penetrating radar that emitted electromagnetic pulses. According to Harnett, these techniques were risky and unreliable. Sensory awareness, memory, gut feelings, and a good shovel: these were the only tools he advocated.

  Their war stories, though, were astonishing. Fisher asked me about the 1878 death of Ohio congressman John Scott Harrison, son of our ninth president, father of our twenty-third. When I admitted ignorance, everyone took turns telling the tale. Crying John set the scene: at Harrison’s funeral, family members noticed the disturbed grave of a family friend named Devin; when they investigated, they found Devin’s body to be missing. Brownie picked up from there: afraid that John Scott would suffer a similar fate, the family bricked and cemented the grave, laying atop it a ton of marble slabs and hiring two watchmen. Screw jumped in next: after the funeral, the dead congressman’s son, John Jr., traveled to Cincinnati to search the medical college for Devin’s body. Under-the-Mud took the good part for himself: John Jr. found a hidden body, all right, dangling from a rope in a hidden chute, but it wasn’t Devin—it was Congressman John Scott Harrison, buried just one day earlier beneath every known armament. The Apologist, the quietest and most mysterious of the group, deferred his turn, leaving Fisher to claim the denouement: it was determined that an anatomist at the college, Dr. Christian, had worked in association with a janitor to procure bodies, and in fact, Devin’s corpse was ultimately discovered bobbing within a vat of brine. The Resurrectionist broke his silence by asking me the only remaining question: the accused were tried and convicted, the bodies successfully reinterred. But who had actually done the deed? Who had found a way to break into an unbreakable grave?

  “You notice,” he said, while the others hung on his every word, “that no one even asked the question.”

  “We’re invisible,” agreed Under-the-Mud with audible pleasure.

  Just like Foley, I thought. Maybe it truly was the key to survival.

  Fisher winked at me. “Out of the pot and into the kettle,” he said.

  It was obvious they knew the culprit, but even huddled in confederacy they would not utter the name. Instead the exchange moved fluidly to the actor Charlie Chaplin, buried in 1978 in Switzerland. “Born in Britain, but he was America’s and everyone knew it,” Under-the-Mud said as he rapped his bony knuckles. Ten, twelve, fourteen eyes blinked my direction and I understood that, in this particular case, all territorial restrictions were moot. Chaplin’s coffin, Fisher continued, disappeared a few months after it had been planted. Some thought it was so that he could be interred in his native England; others thought it was so that he could be given a proper Jewish burial; most, however, figured it was the work of a crazed fan. A group of mechanics, concluded Crying John, claimed responsibility and demanded a ransom that went unsatisfied. Eleven weeks later, Chaplin’s coffin was found in a cornfield and placed in a reinforced concrete vault.

  “You wonder what a man like that is buried with,” mused Brownie.

  “Yes,” said Screw with a smile. “You wonder.”

  They all looked at their drinks for a moment and a thrill ran through me. One of these men did it, I thought. One of the men at this table.

  “But the big one,” Crying John continued, “was one year earlier.”

  “Memphis,” said Screw.

  “Forest Hill Cemetery,” added Fisher.

  Under-the-Mud mulled me over for a long moment.

  “Elvis,” he said.

  My mouth fell open. “No.”

  Harnett raised a hand to calm me. “Don’t get too excited, kid. Look, the guy died and things got a little crazy. They put him in a mausoleum and on the day of the funeral a drunk driver took out a couple onlookers. The kind of security they needed around his grave, they just weren’t able to provide it.”

  Crying John offered a handful of peanuts to Fouler, popped the slobbery leftovers into his own mouth, and spoke as he chewed. “Couple weeks later, cops arrested a few guys for trespassing near there and one of them said something nutty, that he was a police informant planted to expose the plot to steal the King. Somebody—somebody who was never named—had promised these guys forty grand if they pulled it off.”

  “But they didn’t,” Harnett said.

  “No, they didn’t,” Crying John admitted. “And four days later, at night when no one was looking, they moved the King’s body to Graceland. You can see his grave on a tour if you want.”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” I said. “I saw a show that said his middle name was misspelled on the gravestone.”

  “The icing on the camel’s back is this,” said Fisher. “If Elvis had been ransacked at Forest Hill, everyone would’ve known. People around the world would’ve heard of it. Diggers know better. But if he was dug up at Graceland, different story. You think the Presleys would want that news advertised?”

  “Are you saying …,” I started.

  Fisher held up his hands. “I’m not saying anything.”

  I looked around at each Digger in turn.

  “Whose territory is Memphis?”

  Slowly all heads turned to the Apologist, a man so innocuous it took me a few seconds to remember why this kindly-looking fogey was sitting at our table. The wan smile that had graced his face all night long did not alter.

  My throat burned. My eyes stung. I hailed down the scarred waitress and begged her for more water. The pub had become an asylum, a holding pen for the mad, and there was no way for someone as steeped in extra-credit practicality as I to accept such outlandish and unsourced claims. Yet I did. These men were reminiscing; they were not out to impress me.

  Brownie waited until the waitress was gone. “Aberdeen’s dead.”

  “Natural causes?” asked Crying John.

  Brownie shrugged. “What’s natural?”

  “The Inca Prince has the Big C,” Fisher said. “He won’
t last another six months, that’s what Knox says.”

  “And what happened to Poe? And the General?” Screw sounded like he didn’t really want to know.

  “They’re done,” Under-the-Mud said. “Knox has them attending church five, six times a week, praying as fast as they can to make everything right. Too old to dig worth a fig anyway.”

  Crying John stroked the sleeping Foulie. “We’re all too old.”

  At this, they began tugging at their sleeves and checking their watches. In almost perfect synchronicity they lifted their beers and drank, as if honoring their fallen comrades. Even Harnett chewed the ice from the bottom of his glass.

  “And Baby? What about Baby?” asked Screw. “We can’t sit here and pretend he doesn’t exist.”

  Fisher raised his head from his glass and looked directly at me.

  “Wake up and smell the butter, Screw,” Fisher said. “We got a new baby now.”

  At my elbow I felt Under-the-Mud bristle.

  “Valerie,” Under-the-Mud rasped. Harnett’s tired eyes rolled upward once more. “Doesn’t the memory do anything to you? Doesn’t it give you pause?”

  “I didn’t plan any of this,” Harnett said. “Not her, not the kid.”

  “Because it does something to me. Goddamn if it doesn’t do something to me. Of course, I never met her. None of us did. But each report from Knox—why, it thawed the midnight dirt.”

  To such solitary men, word of a woman in their midst must have been electrifying. It had only been a few weeks ago that Harnett had told me of the prostitution that once ran rampant in graveyards, a practice that made a kind of sense when you considered how cemeteries were both public and private. These Diggers’ primary experience with females might have been with just such women. So stories of my mother’s open mind, ruthless intelligence, resourcefulness, and, yes, beauty—it might have been enough to shake any underworld. I felt a desperate happiness for her. She had lived some life, at least, before I came along.

  “She was something, all right,” said Fisher.

  “It was like she was all of ours, in a way,” said Brownie.

  The Apologist parted his lips as if to speak, then shook his head helplessly.

  “And then she was gone,” Under-the-Mud said. “You can try to place blame elsewhere, but you know where it lies. And look at you now. You’re off and doing it again.”

  “You just want me to fail,” Harnett said. “I don’t know why, but you want me to fail.”

  “No, I want you out.” For a Digger, the slight increase in volume was tantamount to screaming—everyone cringed. “She could’ve taken you away from all this. Given you a real life. Given you your son. I would risk death for such an opportunity, even today, right now. All of us would. Life, Resurrectionist! Life was handed to you on a platter! And what did you do? You pissed all over it. Now here comes your son and a second chance. And what do you do? What do you do?”

  I gripped my cranium. The dropping of mugs upon bar tops was like a stampede.

  “It’s late,” Screw said.

  Under-the-Mud rolled his tongue around his old teeth. “It’s later than you think.”

  Screw nodded for a moment, then stood up. He lifted his coat from the back of his chair and in a single motion flung it onto both arms and was gone without a word. Brownie downed the last of his beer and dropped into darkness. Fisher stood and gave me a concerned look before nodding curtly to both Under-the-Mud and my father. The Apologist rose next, limping over to the side of the table and holding out a brittle-looking hand. With a resigned frown, Under-the-Mud took it and was helped to a standing position, both men wincing over old bones and sore joints. The two of them shuffled away, parting to take opposite paths around the pool table and ignoring each other when they met again on the far side.

  Crying John slid into the booth beside me. Moments later I felt warm fur as Fouler made her obligatory rotations before settling. Crying John brushed peanut shells from his beard.

  “Everyone’s tired,” he sighed, while Harnett picked at his dirty fingernails in the dim red incandescence. “Everyone’s tired and everyone’s old and everyone’s scared. You just have to remember that.”

  “They complain about the end,” Harnett said, “how the end is coming, how it’s almost here. What do they think I’m doing? I know he’s my son and that carries certain risks. But he’s a hope. Am I wrong? He’s a hope for all of us. That maybe the age isn’t ending.”

  The jukebox track began to skip. In the jarring and intermittent silence, women’s frivolity transformed into desperation and men’s bluster into anguish. The normal world roared back and tried to dismantle the delirious fantasy that had been built up around our small, sticky booth. It frightened me, but Crying John seemed not to notice. He regarded my father for a long moment. The darkness made it hard to confirm the gloss that coated his cheeks.

  “Maybe that’s what they’re saying,” he said. “Maybe the age should end. You ever think of that?”

  3.

  THE NEXT DAY WAS Sunday, and when we made our morning loop of the cemetery I had my biology text under my arm. Forty-five minutes later, upon resuming our positions at the coffee shop, I opened the text but couldn’t concentrate. Harnett had dug out binoculars from his glove box, and in between moments of spying he kept staring at me. “What?” I finally demanded.

  “This thing you do,” he said. “Where you space out. What is that?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know,” he said. “Out at a dig or when you’re upset. That thing where you space out.”

  “Specifying,” I sighed. “Mom called it specifying.”

  “All right,” he said. “So what is it?”

  “What do you care?”

  “Are you having some sort of mental break? Or some kind of fit?”

  “A fit?”

  “It’s best if you tell me,” he said. “We’re out on a dig and you have some kind of fit, it’s both our asses.”

  “Dude,” I said. “I’m not having a fit.”

  He crossed his arms and settled back into his chair, ready to listen. I checked around the shop to make sure no Diggers were nearby, and then I realized I could not remember their faces. The guy rifling through the utensils—was it possible that was Brownie? The old man outside the window hunched before the newspaper kiosk—it might be Under-the-Mud, but really I had no idea. These men were so good at disappearing that only their colorful nicknames stuck with me.

  I rounded my shoulders and in low tones told Harnett everything: when the specifying had begun, the stressful situations that set it off, the near-blinding clarity. When I finished he toyed with the binoculars.

  “And you remember these things,” he said. “These things you specify.”

  I closed my eyes and let my mind shuffle through the past few months in reverse order—

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

  —golden specks of pyrite embedded in the stony path—

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

  —the unnatural shrug in the neck of my fork—

  —and it was as if brand-new, every shimmering, electric, frozen instant.

  “Yeah, they’re there,” I said breathlessly. “They’re all there.”

  “Can you do it at will?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, can you … specify whenever you want?”

  I thought about it for a moment. Specifying had always been for me an unpleasant defense mechanism, never something I would willingly invoke.

  “I don’t know,” I said honestly.

  Harnett grunted.

  “You might think about that,” he said at last. And there it was—an idea so simple it had never occurred to me. Despite doctors’ labeling of the technique as some sort of handicap, it had the makings of a powerful tool, particularly for someone needing to memorize bits of newspaper, details of caskets, locations of g
raves, the contour and texture of grass before the first incision. I couldn’t help wondering whether my mother, who had shrugged off psychologists’ recommendations and indulged my near-photographic recall, had anticipated that one day I would find a good use for it.

  It was too much to consider, and I rose from the table.

  “Where you going?” Harnett asked.

  “I can’t study here. I’m going next door to get a snack.”

  “I was planning on doing another walk-by,” he said, adjusting the knobs on the eyepieces. “Maybe even try cutting through the cemetery—as a local history buff, that sort of thing.”

  “Do it yourself,” I said. “This test, I can’t tell you how important—”

  “Yeah, okay.” He sounded a little hurt. “Straight As, I know. Fine. Go eat.”

  I put on my coat, picked up my book, and headed for the door. I paused.

  “You want me to bring you back anything?”

  He leaned forward so that the binoculars touched the window.

  4.

  I ORDERED A BASKET of fries and settled onto a stool at the end of the counter. Oldies were screaming from a speaker directly above my head, and the familiar melodies made it somehow easier to slip into the rote patterns of memorization. It wasn’t as inspiring as Foley’s CDs—not even close—but by the time the Four Tops segued into the Monkees, I was beginning to understand DNA storage in eukaryotic versus prokaryote organisms.

  Halfway through the fries I shook the salt too enthusiastically and it went everywhere, dull sparkles bouncing across the book and lodging in its crevice. I pounded it against the counter, and with the side of my palm scooped up the salt. Remembering an old superstition of my mother’s, I took a pinch of it, said a prayer to Two-Fingered Jesus about acing Gottschalk’s exam, and tossed the granules over my shoulder.

  “Devil’s after you,” said a man sitting on the stool to my left.

  I glanced over at him. He was abnormally short. A long-tailed black coat draped to the heels of his dress shoes, yet strained against the horizontal shove of his Goliath shoulders. Beneath was a magenta vest and a ruffled shirt. Nearly everyone in the diner was wearing their Sunday best, but even among the tie clips and flowered hats this was an especially dapper ensemble. Its condition, though, was shabby. The sleeves were pilled and the elbows shiny with wear. The vest was so threadbare it was iridescent. Patterns in the black tie revealed a previous wadding, and the shirt ruffles carried similar triangular motifs.