Rotters

by Daniel Kraus

  “Don’t talk about her. Don’t talk. I’ve got nothing to say to you.” But Harnett couldn’t resist. “Go back to your hellhole. Your ditch. Wherever you’re squatting now.”

  The words were like bullets. Boggs flinched at each one. He hid his face, turning to the dirty dishes for guidance. When at last he spoke, the syllables were tentative and imploring. “She’s gone now. I know it, I heard. And I’m so sorry, Kenny. You don’t know how sorry. But you don’t need to be like this. I’ve done nothing to deserve it. I’m trying to make things better with us. You’re my brother and nothing can change that.”

  “We were never brothers.”

  Boggs’s voice shattered. “How can you say that? Of course we are! All those years growing up—what was that? Did that not happen? You need to remember it, Kenny. One of us has to, and my brain is falling out my head. Did I tell you that? It’s true. You’re probably glad. But you shouldn’t be. No one should feel that way about his brother.”

  “Don’t worry. I don’t feel anything at all.” He glanced at the clock. “Time’s up.”

  “Wait. Now you just wait. I know you like I know me. We think the same. You may not want to admit that, but it’s true. We both know, for instance, that when a rotter dies, that’s it. There’s no fantasy land of heaven or hell. It’s like that old saying we used to say: You can’t take it with you. Except here’s the thing. You ready? You ready for our business transaction? Turns out they do get away with something. Don’t they?” He shifted his despairing gaze to me. “Don’t they, son?”

  “Do not address him,” Harnett said. I barely heard. I could not take my eyes from the unnatural thickness of the book.

  “What the rotters get away with is dignity. Dignity. And that’s wrong. And you know it. They had their time. They had their degrees and careers and portfolios. All so they could buy themselves a diamond ring and die with it on, all so they could get themselves buried wearing it—and what’s the point, Kenny, seriously now, of a diamond, which is designed to reflect light, what’s the point if there ain’t no light to reflect? You and me can steal that ring, sure, but that doesn’t get down to the real issue, now, does it? Brother—you know I know you know it.”

  Boggs sank his fingers into the soft flesh of the book and with deliberation slid it across the table. It made the sound of ice being shaved. Boggs twisted his wrists clockwise and the book was suddenly facing my father and me with all the malice of a darkened cellar.

  I stared at it. Harnett did, too.

  “This is a gift. If you want it. I began it when I heard about our son.”

  I found myself drawing back the front cover.

  “I started it alone but we can finish it together.”

  When I saw the first Polaroid it was as if I had known all along. My heart did not accelerate; rather it seemed to slow and slug thickly against either lung. I turned pages. More.

  “I call it the Rotters Book, Kenny.”

  More. More.

  “My Rotters Book. Our Rotters Book.”

  More. More. More.

  “A bunch of filthy stinking rotters.”

  On each wrinkled page, nestled between the claws of scrapbook photo corners, were four instant photographs, each one of a corpse smashed flat by the unkind swat of a cheap flashbulb and slathered a garish green by the yellow snot of developing liquid. They were old men, their translucent skin stretched and pocked like moth-eaten fabric. They were little girls, their lips strung with purple pearls of rot, their cheeks appled with rupture. They were genderless skulls, a thousand years old, the dried jelly of what used to be flesh crusted to gray bone. Caught in explosions of white light, once-severe brows were erased, once-regal cheekbones whittled to kernels; they were pink, white, blue; they were the color and texture of afterbirth. And there were hundreds of them, these cold and bent photos, each one stamped with Boggs’s muddy fingerprints—the autograph of this intruder who had come at them with chisel and shovel, smashing first their caskets and then their sanctuary. It was sickening and dazzling, this litany of trespass.

  I could feel the heat of Harnett’s armpits, see the sweat spreading from his hands.

  “No one’s ever seen anything like it, Kenny. I can promise you that. You know what this is? It’s a communication. It’s going to tell the whole wide world that we’re watching. There’s not going to be any more creeping around like cockroaches. No one anywhere is going to even think about dying without having to go through us first.”

  Page after page—it was as if someone had done my specifying for me.

  Boggs’s voice was bursting with joy. “I still haven’t told you the best part.”

  Together my father and I looked up.

  “Two pictures,” Boggs said. “I take two. One goes in the Rotters Book. The other I leave down there with them.” He beamed proudly. “Pinned right to their chests.”

  Harnett went over the table. Condiment bottles spun and clattered; I saw a white line of salt and felt a familiar urge except this time didn’t know in which direction to throw. Harnett’s hands squeezed at Boggs’s throat. The smaller man gurgled in surprise and cranked his foreshortened arms as if he were drowning. His frenzied feet nailed me under the table—my foot, my shin, my thigh—and for a flash I was back within the Congress of Freaks, not son of the mighty Resurrectionist, just Crotch, and these kicks were what I deserved.

  I rolled from the booth and hit the floor. Above, Boggs pushed at my father’s eyes with his thumbs. Harnett twisted and tried to toss him away, but Boggs had already taken firm hold of my father’s coat and they both went crashing. Harnett’s head struck the hanging lamp and it whirled.

  Knees knocked me; normal people were closing in. Their hovering presence yanked me back to a world I had somehow forgotten. From my sunken vantage I saw beer bellies and holstered cell phones and practical purses, and I wanted it back, all of it. Take me, I begged of them, but to their eyes I had long since become oblivion. They only saw strange, faceless men wrestling on top of cheap tableware. Reluctantly I returned to my newer world and within the bedlam saw my father attempt to grab the steak knife still spinning upon the unbused table.

  Blood was streaking down his forehead—the lamp had slashed him good. He tried to wipe away an eyeful and Boggs, his compact torso contracting ferociously, took the opportunity to slam him to the table. Plates vibrated and silverware floated in midair; the steak knife twirled and Harnett’s hand pinned it to the wall. One second later it was clutched in his fist, the blade flashing.

  Finally there were arms everywhere, pulling the two fighters apart, and in the tangle of bodies I saw faces that triggered recognition: here was Brownie, lifting Boggs in a backward bear hug; here was Under-the-Mud, prying Boggs’s fingers from a bloodied neck; here was Screw, restraining Boggs’s thrashing legs; here was Fisher, doing the same to Harnett; here was Crying John, already hoisting Harnett by the coat collar; and here, like a ghost, was the Apologist, gently coaxing the knife from Harnett’s fingers.

  Through it, the two men roared.

  “Kenny! Kenny!” Boggs cried. “What did I do?”

  “We should’ve taken care of you years ago!”

  “Was it my brain?” Boggs clawed desperately at the sides of his head. “Did my brain do something wrong?”

  “You’re no brother to me and no son to Lionel.”

  “I am! I am!” Boggs shook free from his captors and snatched up the Rotters Book. Panting, he regarded each old man in turn. The pale grief drained from his face and replaced itself with a florid loathing. “Why are all of you looking at me? I don’t exist to you, remember? Don’t any of you remember? You banished me. All of you agreed to it. That’s how much you all loved your Baby. You banished me and you want to pretend that you’re blameless. Well, go ahead. Pretend. Act like I don’t exist. Pretty soon you’ll change your mind. I swear it. You see this book?”

  “Get out!” Harnett boomed. Crying John took handfuls of his clothes to keep him at bay.

 
“Yes, brother—oh, sorry, Mr. Resurrectionist, sir. Anything you say. Resurrectionist tells Baby what to do and Baby does it. Those are the rules, right?” He futzed with his suit until he recognized its hopeless condition. The tie slopped in an inebriated loop; the vest was missing buttons; the shirt was bedecked with food. The violation of this façade of respectability infuriated him. He grated his tiny teeth and glared at Harnett. “You’re no different than the rest of these rotters.”

  “You stay in your territory,” Harnett said. “You remember Monro-Barclay and stay the hell away.”

  “The pact?” Boggs laughed and a mist of blood painted his ruffles. “If I’m not your brother and I’m not Lionel’s son, then guess what? I’m an orphan again! I’m an orphan and I belong to nobody. Any pact you rotters have ain’t my concern. I plan to finish my book on schedule. And if that takes me into enemy territory, I don’t know what to say. I have no enemies. I love all of you. You know that. It’s you who don’t love me.”

  Boggs limped in the direction of the door. He muttered as he passed me.

  “Ask Daddy about the Rat King,” he said. “Ask Daddy about the Gatlins.” He turned up the volume so that everyone—Diggers, diners, cooks, everyone—could hear. “The Rat King? The Gatlins? Your memory, old men, is selective!”

  At the mention of these curious oaths, Harnett pulled against Crying John’s embrace. Boggs ducked and crabbed sideways. After his stubby fingers hooked the handle of the front door, he scanned the crowd until his eyes found mine. “Your first hole, son. Remember the feeling? Now imagine it times a hundred. Times a thousand. Imagine how a gentleman of breeding raises his little Digger.”

  Boggs slipped the Rotters Book inside his coat and I felt a stab of loss. He pushed open the door and a sparkling cone of snow turned him into some dizzying dream. A jingle of door bells, a flare of coattails, and he was gone.

  Already the Diggers were threading into the crowd and loosening from my memory. The worst possible thing had happened. They had been seen, addressed in public, and now, thanks to my father’s rash behavior, would have to disperse far sooner than they had hoped. As the interlopers withdrew, the surrounding gawkers took on even finer dimension. I wanted so badly to run into their arms and join their routines of afternoon casseroles, evening board games, school-night early bedtimes. Any quiet mundanity—I’d take it and love it and never want anything else, I’d swear to it.

  But even these people were scattering, half grinning with the anticipation of the stories they’d tell about the outrageous dispute they’d seen at lunch. Only Crying John remained at my father’s side. He took a clean towel from a cook and placed it in Harnett’s hand, then lifted that hand so that it applied pressure to the wound. Harnett shook off the man’s grip and looked away in shame. With nothing but a lugubrious frown, Crying John slipped through shoulders and became just another plaid shirt receding from spilled food and broken dishes. I thought, but wasn’t sure, that I heard a distant muttering: “C’mon, Foulie.”

  Braver legs approached. “You okay, mister?”

  Harnett checked the towel. It was deep red. At his feet, blood made moth blots across the tile. He wiped his slick face and neck and tossed the towel onto the destroyed table.

  “The truck,” he told me.

  “Good,” I said, tearing my eyes from the gore and scooping up my biology text. “Let’s go home.”

  We pushed through the crowd and were outside. Boggs was nowhere.

  “We’re not going home,” Harnett said as we carved the cold morning air. The sidewalk behind him was spattered with red.

  “What? But school. My test.”

  “Lionel.” For once he ignored the caskets tasting fresh air across the street. “We talk to Lionel.”

  5.

  BLUE MOUNTAINS, YELLOW FORESTS, black miles of scorched highway—landscapes metamorphosed in ways I’d never imagined as we barreled through West Virginia, then Virginia, and on into North Carolina. Harnett drove so fast I could feel the tires battle their axles.

  As we neared Lionel’s home in the Outer Banks, the landscape adjusted yet again to long, shimmering inlets and grassy flatlands giving rise to tall fronded trees and spiked bushes. Houses were built on stilts. Storefronts were pink and turquoise and waved flags that looked beaten by centuries of sand. And yes, sand—it was everywhere, shifting in random patches along the shoulder, rippling across the highway, piled intentionally in front lawns and speared with novelty flamingoes. I lowered the window and tasted fish. Harnett cranked the wheel, and for the next half hour we traveled parallel to an ocean I wanted badly to see. The surf shops and seafood restaurants ebbed. Only when there was nothing left at all did Harnett turn down an unmarked path.

  He killed the engine a respectful distance away from a charming, if crooked, white house with pink trim. For a moment we sat listening to the overheated engine. Then he got out and I followed, and the ground was so solid I nearly fell.

  The front door squealed and a cane stabbed its way into the driveway. It was an elderly man sporting a floppy beach hat, sunglasses, and an unbuttoned shirt that revealed a gaunt torso and sparse curls of white hair. Harnett met him in the middle of the yard. They stopped a few feet from each other.

  “It’s Baby, isn’t it?” Lionel’s voice broke into octaves almost musical. “Baby’s dead. Baby’s dead.”

  Harnett shook his head. “We just spoke to him.”

  With a liver-spotted hand he flipped the clipped-on shades from his bifocals and examined the brown rings of blood encircling Harnett’s skull.

  “Must’ve been some conversation,” he said.

  “He’s up to something and I don’t know what—”

  Lionel waved for silence. “Please. You’re tired and hungry. We’ll save unpleasantness for a bit.” He stretched his neck toward the truck, a smile playing at his lips. “Where’s Grinder?”

  The remorse was overwhelming.

  Harnett faked indifference. “She broke.”

  Lionel’s face fell. There was a complicated moment of give and take between the men, hard emotions fought down and painted over with softer ones, possibly for my benefit. “I’m sorry, Ken. She was a good instrument. You’ll find another, I’m sure of it.”

  Then he looked at me. Even swaddled in folds of skin, the brown eyes sparkled.

  Harnett hooked a thumb my direction. “The kid.”

  Lionel took an unsteady step, poked my foot with his cane, and laughed. He reached down and took up my hand. His palm was dry and his bones, as they squeezed, felt fragile. Still I could see the ghost of his former physique.

  “Don’t fret,” he said softly. “All instruments break. All it means is that they have served their purpose. It’s all any of us can ask, really.” I found myself nodding, strangely heartened by how the term instrument could refer to both my trumpet and the Root.

  Lionel’s other hand sealed our handshake. “My stars! He looks like Val, Ken. My boy, you look just like your mother.”

  These unexpected words, this warm welcome—it was all I could do not to start sobbing. As if in sympathy, his own eyes filled with tears. His arthritic hands gripped harder.

  “Honored,” he said. “Honored.”

  “Lionel, easy,” Harnett sighed. “He needs that hand for digging.”

  Lionel chuckled. He took a step back and regarded us both. He drove his cane into the dirt.

  “What a treat! Come in, come in!”

  He began hobbling back toward the house. Harnett and I followed.

  “I’ll have Lahn make up the spare room,” Lionel said.

  “We can’t stay,” Harnett said.

  “What? That’s idiotic.”

  Harnett glanced at me and again I felt guilty. “The kid’s got school.”

  “Hmm.” He yanked at the ungreased door. “Well, I’ll have Lahn make up the room just in case.”

  The normality of his home was heartbreaking. There were no stacks of papers, no ash-stained hearth, no hastily assembled be
dding alongside the sink. There was a sofa and end tables with coasters. There were framed pictures. There was an aquarium in which bright fish waggled. There was a TV. With a grunt, Lionel leaned over and picked up a phone. A phone! I shot a yearning look at Harnett, feeling like a little kid inside a pet shop.

  “Lahn, two very special guests have arrived at my home,” Lionel said pleasantly. “Would you mind terribly coming by and fixing up the spare room?”

  “Lionel, look—” Harnett began.

  “Oh, thank you, Lahn. We won’t be here when you arrive, so just let yourself—That’s right. Oh? That might be nice, too. Yes, let’s plan on it. We’ll see you then.” He hung up the phone. “Lahn will be fixing us dinner. You remember Lahn’s dinners.”

  Harnett swallowed his protest. “Fine. Dinner. But then, really, we have to leave. The kid’s got some test he says is important.”

  “Then I’m certain it is.” Lionel gave me another long look. “Well. We can discuss it during our walk.”

  “What walk?”

  Lionel indicated a closet. “Joey, get yourself a good coat. It gets cold on the beach.”

  The ocean—it was impossible to conceal my grin. I sorted through the coats, only for a moment remembering the one I had abandoned in my locker before fleeing the school.

  “You shouldn’t be walking,” Harnett said. There was a note of genuine concern in his voice. “You can barely make it across the room. We’ll drive.”

  “Hogwash.” Lionel rapped his cane against the floor. “And where we’re going you can’t drive.”

  Properly gloved and hatted, we exited through a rear door, passed through a backyard dominated by off-season flower patches and a freestanding porch swing, and picked up a faint trail leading into the trees. Harnett hovered over Lionel, tensed to catch the old man’s fall, but the probing cane seemed to know the location of every rock and root.