Rotters

by Daniel Kraus

  Harnett recounted the relocation, Boggs’s surprise appearance, and the contents of the Rotters Book. As he spoke I tried to envision my father as a little boy, looking up to his teacher much as I looked up to mine. Lionel took the news stoically, his brown eyes squinting through the fading light.

  “And he looked bad,” Harnett finished. “Really bad, and he wasn’t making sense. He might be on something.”

  “His has always been an addictive personality. It’s what made him such a Digger.” Lionel kept his eyes on the trail. “Part of me isn’t surprised he’s acting out. He blames me for a lot; blames you for even more. But the way he’s chosen to go about it, it’s the worst thing he could do. You know what would happen if that book got out? Or, how do you say it, computerized? And sent out through the computers?”

  “He’s left evidence in every single coffin,” Harnett said. “Someone gets exhumed for an autopsy and they start finding these? Hundreds of years of history up in smoke.”

  “It’s just another sign,” the old man said. “You can only fight so much, Ken. Are you going to fight the turning of time? Not sure I see the use of it anymore. How many of us are left now? Less than a dozen?”

  “We need to do something. Don’t we?”

  Lionel paused. “What exactly would you do?”

  The prospective murder of Boggs, their brother and son, hung in the air.

  Harnett kicked at the ground. “I don’t know.”

  “If you’re expecting me to issue some magnificent edict, I’m afraid I will disappoint,” Lionel said. “No Monro-Barclay Pact would work now, not with what Baby has become.”

  I interrupted. “Everyone keeps talking about that Monro-whatever. No one ever says what it is.”

  Lionel missed a beat; his foot landed awkwardly and Harnett was there with both arms. Lionel fought free. “He doesn’t know?”

  Harnett let go and dropped back. “No. But it’s time.”

  Exhilaration filled my chest; I quickened my step, passed Harnett, and came almost even with Lionel.

  “When Ken and Baby were your age,” Lionel explained, “and still my students, it became clear to me that Diggers were at a critical moment. Boundaries were custom, not law. Bellies were being dug only to find they were already harvested. There were ambushes, one Digger taking from another. Even Knox had almost wiped his hands of us. And then the inevitable happened. Well. Now I’ve forgotten his name.”

  “Boxer,” Harnett called out. He had fallen even farther back.

  “Boxer, that’s right, and he wasn’t one of the troublemakers, according to Knox.”

  “What happened to him?” I asked.

  “He was killed! By another Digger! Over what—territory, property, money, who knows. But tragedy so often brings with it rare opportunity. So I sent out through Knox the call to meet, all of us, just once, right out in the open, where together we would set down rules, laws, best practices. And out of it came the territories. It took days to finalize. Everything was taken into account. Geography, climate, types of soil, centers of population. Valuable assets, too: the Civil War graves of the South, the pioneer and Indian burials of the West. The lines were drawn with precision and care. And we called it the Monro-Barclay Pact. You remember why, Ken? Your father was always a good student. I bet you’re a good student, too.”

  My voice was small but confident. “I am.”

  Harnett had dropped so far behind his response was inaudible.

  “I presume you know that Edinburgh, Scotland, was the front line for body snatchers. In 1818, two surgeons, Dr. Monro and Dr. Barclay, each of whom employed resurrection men to obtain cadavers, decided all the rough-and-tumble stuff out there was senseless and so decided to divide the local cemeteries between them. Our pact was in that spirit.” Lionel smiled to himself. “Of course, Monro and Barclay’s deal went south when Dr. Liston came to town. But that’s a story for another time.”

  “Boggs said you banished him,” I said. “Like he wasn’t happy with the West Coast.”

  Lionel wiped sweat from his face; I noticed that I wasn’t warm. “His predecessor did very well with it. I don’t know. I tried to be fair. To Baby especially, I’ve tried to be more than fair. He made all of us nervous with his—I guess you could call them innovations. The rest of the Diggers wanted him out, end of story. I couldn’t do that. So I gave him the West. I honestly believed he would thrive out there. And he has, at points. There are times when he does the work of ten of us. And other times …” Lionel paused and unstuck his cane from the mud. “I can’t help but feel I’ve failed him in some regard.”

  Harnett shouted from behind. “We should be turning back.”

  Lionel shook his head forcefully. “We keep going. I’ve got something important to show you.”

  “It can wait. It’s getting dark.”

  “It cannot wait.” Lionel struck a low-hanging branch with his cane. “Not this.”

  So we walked. With each step, I gathered courage. “You knew my mother,” I said.

  “Indeed. I consider it one of the rare pleasures of my life.”

  “How did you know her?” I pleaded. “I don’t know any of it.”

  “I will tell you,” he whispered.

  Transferring his cane to his left hand, he pulled me closer and clamped his hand to my shoulder. I felt him give half of his weight to me—the price of his story.

  “There is no handbook for what we do,” he began. “There is no university, no library. You cannot seek us out because we don’t exist. The trade is passed down, master to apprentice. That’s it. For all these reasons and more, finding a suitable trainee is nigh impossible.”

  “I wasn’t that hard to find,” I said.

  “You’re different. You’re blood of a Digger. And not just any Digger, but the Resurrectionist.”

  “They don’t like it,” I said. “I could tell when I met them.”

  His breaths were becoming shallower. A squiggly blue vein pulsed at his temple. “That was the real revelation of the Monro-Barclay meeting. We saw each other for what we really were. Not beasts, not phantoms. Just sad, lonely men. Men who knew, from the first time they took hold of their instruments, that it would consume their lives, repel any hopes they had of friendships, of wives, of children. You are the first son to become an apprentice because there have been no other sons.”

  “And they hated him, right? Because he had both, a wife and a son.”

  “But then they came to know her. Just through stories, true, but that made it all the better, made it into something like a fairy tale. She was a miracle to them, this mother of yours. She came into this world, where no woman had ever trod, and did not flinch. She didn’t entirely approve, either—she was like Knox in that way—yet she understood what we did and why we did it, and she brought something to our lives that no one has ever brought, not before, not since.”

  He stopped. Far behind, I heard Harnett’s footsteps also stop, allowing us our privacy.

  “Light.” The golden dusk glimmered in his eyes. “Happiness. Warmth. Hope. Diggers had never hoped. But now your dad would come home soaked with dirt and smelling of death and she would wrap her arms around him. I saw it; Knox saw it; and then he passed word of this unbelievable thing that we’d seen. And vicarious though it was, we lived. My stars, for a few years there we were alive. Do you have any idea what that was like for us? I imagine you do. Then you can also imagine what it was like for us when she was gone.”

  We were heading downhill.

  “Tell me why she left him,” I said.

  “There are plenty of reasons to blame myself. Let’s face it, somewhere along the way I got it in my head that I was special, that I could effect change. And so I did things differently. I found new ways to dig holes and made sure Knox spread the word. I organized Monro-Barclay. And, Joey, truth be told, I took great satisfaction from it. I was vain and reckless. Joey, in my own way, I was not unlike Baby.”

  “They say you are the greatest Digger ever,�
�� I said.

  “Was,” he corrected. “And the reason I quit wasn’t just that I was getting too old to lift Gaia. Oh—she’s my—”

  “Shovel,” I guessed. “I mean your instrument.”

  Lionel nodded. “I quit out of guilt. Guilt that what happened between Ken and Baby was as much my fault as anyone’s. I took on two apprentices at once. I took them to Scotland for two years to learn their history. I treated them both as sons. That’s how headstrong I was. No matter that half the stories in literature have the same plot: a king has one kingdom to bequeath and two sons, and therein lies the ruin of all three.”

  The dimming light lent the conversation an added urgency. “Her ear.” I trembled at the nearness of the answer. “My mother’s ear was all messed up. She could barely hear out of it, and that’s how she died.”

  Lionel’s chest was beating up and down, too fast. With a valiant grunt, Lionel pushed off from my side and we were moving again.

  “I’m getting to that. Now, Knox was the one who found me your father. Your dad’s dad, your grandpa, sold a church to a black congregation and ended up dead. Didn’t pay to cut blacks a square deal back then. Anyway, Knox was starting out at that church as a preacher and befriended your father, who was hanging around services begging for food and swiping wallets. Before I knew it, Knox had me raising the kid. Naturally I didn’t tell Ken about my profession until he was fifteen.”

  “He figured it out long before then,” I said, thinking back on my own sleuthing. “Believe me.”

  Lionel laughed. “You may be right. So Baby came a few years later. He tracked us. No one before or since has been able to do it. He tracked us to multiple digs. By the third or fourth time I knew we were being followed, so I set a trap. We caught him just inside a cemetery fence and he tore up Ken something fierce—broke his nose, dislocated a finger, practically sliced an eyebrow clean off. Didn’t get a good look at him until after we had him pinned. Smallest little fella I’d ever seen, the strangest little body, and a couple years younger than Ken, to boot. But he wasn’t scared. He didn’t beg to be let go. He just begged to come with us.”

  “Yeah, he kind of tracked me down, too.” I looked down and saw traces of sand beneath my shoes.

  “I didn’t know what the hell to do. I put the fear of God in him, smacked him on the ass, and let him go. Couple weeks later, we had a cat die on us, got hit by a car. Your dad was fond of this animal. Used to sleep with it sometimes. Went by some stupid name like Pookie. Or Scoobie. Something like that. Hey!” I jumped as he yelled back over his shoulder. In the distance I saw Harnett take notice. “What was the name of that cat? The one who got run over?”

  Harnett’s response was immediate and morose. “Fred.”

  Lionel shrugged. “Anyhow, we buried the animal in the backyard. Next morning the carcass was sitting on top of its grave. Understand that the reconstruction was flawed, but for someone without a day of proper instruction it was astounding. When Ken told me he didn’t do it, I knew it had to be that shrimp who punched like Joe Louis. I knew it was risky. I knew that. But the boy had raw talent like I’d never seen.”

  I eased him over a patch of loose gravel. “It’s hard to believe they ever got along.”

  “They were all each other had. Don’t be mistaken, there was plenty of one-upmanship. Ken could set him off with the wrong word about any number of topics. Baby had a complex about his lineage; thought he belonged in high society and it was just bad luck that he’d gotten kicked to the curb. He wouldn’t dress for the work; he liked to look like some kind of silver-screen playboy. He wanted constant credit, constant. But my stars, could that boy move dirt.”

  Suddenly the trees were behind us.

  “Ah, here we are,” he said.

  A red gash dove through the purples and blues that feathered the sky. After a moment I looked down at the steep slope at our feet. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. At the bottom was a cemetery.

  “Ever seen the ocean?” Lionel asked.

  I shook my head.

  He smiled at me. “We’ll get closer,” he whispered. “Let’s wait for your dad.”

  When Harnett joined us, he wasn’t happy. “What’s this?” he asked. “I don’t see why we’re here.”

  “Look at how the light hits the water,” Lionel mused.

  I had not been aware the ocean was already in view. “Where?”

  Lionel pointed. “Through the trees there. See the motion? How the rays shoot out in all directions? Ken, what does that remind you of?”

  “Harpakhrad,” Harnett said. He glanced at me.

  “It’s a perfect example, really,” Lionel said, “of the differences between my two pupils. I acquired Harpakhrad for Baby while I was in Egypt. Her stem was made of lotus, mulberry, sycamore, and something called the doom palm, braided together while the branches were still growing and then petrified—the stem alone must have taken fifteen years to fashion. The blade was beveled iron and gold; the handle was encrusted with jewels and topped with a palladium scarab. It was the most marvelous thing I’d ever seen.”

  “How’d you afford it?” I asked.

  Lionel’s dismissive shrug recalled the demurring of the other Diggers. “I was in Egypt. There are tombs in the Valley of the Kings that remain unknown to most.”

  Images from history class crowded my mind: priceless statues, bejeweled thrones, golden death masks, chests and sarcophagi of infinite value.

  Lionel cleared his throat. “Story for another time. The point being that there was never any question whose instrument it would become. Most Diggers, they don’t care if they find their instrument in a dump. The pedigree shouldn’t matter—when you have the proper instrument in your hand, you know it. Baby, though, I knew he would force Harpakhrad to become his own. He would bend her to his will. And when he dug at dusk the light would hit the scarab and the legs of the beetle would scatter the sun, just like this. I’m sure it still does.”

  “I doubt it,” Harnett said. “Boggs would’ve sold it years ago. Probably for thirty bucks and a hot meal.”

  Lionel squinted into the sky. “She’s out there somewhere. I know she is. I would like to see her again. Just once more.”

  Harnett ran a hand through his hair and gestured back at the trail. “It’s late.”

  Lionel turned to him. “You have to let Grinder go. Look at your hands. They’re curled like she’s right here.”

  Harnett looked at his fingers as if they were strange objects. “They’re old,” he mused softly, turning them over. “They can’t learn to hold new things.”

  Lionel nodded firmly. “They will.” For some reason he looked at me when he said this.

  The end of Lionel’s cane disappeared into the unmowed grass of the hill. His feet shuffled as he began to descend. I heard Harnett’s frustrated sigh as I hurried to remain at Lionel’s side.

  “Just a bit farther now,” he huffed. “And such a pretty time to get there.”

  6.

  THE CEMETERY GRASS WAS neatly trimmed, yet still swayed in mesmerizing patterns cut from the ocean wind. Harnett assisted Lionel now, and the old man’s hand latched on to my father’s shoulder more confidently than it had mine. I had never moved through a graveyard so haltingly; between each step fell an interval of at least ten seconds.

  “At the diner Boggs said something about the Rat King,” I said. “And something called the Gatlins.”

  “Boggs and I worked together. Lived together,” Harnett said. “Then I met Val.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

  “How?” I demanded. The scrunching noise of dead leaves announced our entry into the final grove of trees separating the cemetery grounds from the ocean. The tide rasped like dying breath.

  “Not far from here. At the beach,” he said. The vision was madness—my mother in a yellow or pink bikini, tossing away her sun hat while my father chased her through seaweed and sand castles. “We got along. We spent
a great deal of time together. I felt compelled to confide in her.”

  “You were in love!” Lionel shouted. “Jesus Christ, can’t you say it after all these years?”

  “Easy now, right foot.” Harnett steadied Lionel. “Boggs and I were away a lot on digs. He’d dig faster and better than me. Left foot, come on. And when we came home—It was a small place. Things got uncomfortable. Boggs would look at her. There were tensions.”

  “Tensions,” Lionel scoffed. “He wanted Valerie for himself.”

  Harnett scanned the murky horizon. “We have to get moving. Right foot. Come on, step.”

  And between encouragements my father told the only story left to tell. Once upon a time there were two men who loved and hated each other as only brothers could. One brother did things according to tradition; the other craved glory at the expense of all else. One night while unearthing a coffin, Ken Harnett told Antiochus Boggs that he needed to go his own way. Seconds later, Boggs shrieked. He had discovered a dead Rat King. A terror most consider nothing more than myth, a Rat King is a number of rats whose tails have become tangled and sealed with dirt, blood, and shit. Joined as one, they move and think and die as a single creature and their discovery has always portended bad things: war, the plague. Boggs became agitated. He took up Harpakhrad and demanded that Harnett retract his words—the omens were telling them they must stay together forever. Boggs stomped and screamed and cried. Lights were turning on in nearby houses. Harnett did not know what to do except strike him down with Grinder.

  After placing Boggs’s unconscious body carefully upon a park bench, Harnett hurried home to Valerie Crouch. It was three-thirty in the morning and yet she was up. She greeted him with a strange look. It’s fine, he’s sleeping it off in the park, Harnett said, but Val said that wasn’t it. She was pregnant. The first thing through Harnett’s mind: the Rat King.

  The second thing: panic. What did a child mean for a Digger? He was fearful and didn’t like the feeling. The only remedy was to dig and dig boldly, and so he got into his truck and went to uncover a man named Phineas Gatlin. It was a tricky dig that he and Boggs had been contemplating for months. The belly was in a family cemetery just outside a bedroom window and within sight of unchained dogs. Harnett rushed and failed. Dogs barked. People awoke. They pursued him. Harnett made it back home long enough to throw Val into the passenger seat and then they were on the run.