Rotters

by Daniel Kraus

  There was nothing in the refrigerator. I threw the door shut in irritation—Harnett’s erratic behavior meant that once again it would be up to me to fill the shelves. Distantly I recognized the unjustness of such an arrangement. In my former life it had not been up to me to plan the menus of two people. I threw open a cabinet.

  “The Golden Spike’s in a museum,” I muttered. It was about the only thing I remembered about the story and I hoped it would shut him up.

  Harnett’s eyes blazed. “Right. But read here. Right here. In the last months of construction, Peter and Paul Eccles were hired—hired by President Ulysses S. Grant himself, who’d just taken office. You know why?”

  I banged through empty cupboards. “Because they were cute?”

  “Because Grant had gotten word of an Indian uprising that was going to bloody up the completion of the railroad. The Eccles brothers had fought with Grant about five years earlier at Shiloh, and they’d been living out West with the Indians ever since. When Grant hired them to keep the peace, they took the job—he was their friend and their president—but they didn’t know what taking the job really meant. You know what it meant?”

  Slowly I faced him. I had some idea.

  “It meant they had to kill Indians,” he said. “Lots of them. Hundreds, maybe. These Indians were their friends. Men they had hunted with, passed the pipe with. And now they were turning around and raising their government rifles and slaughtering them.”

  I slumped against the counter, waiting for the inevitable grave at the end of the story. My hand crept to the side of the sink, where I could feel the scars of my calendar: five days, ten days, one month, two, four, six.

  Harnett lifted the newspaper. “This is Thursday’s paper from Dundee, Iowa, and this here is an article about the town’s links to the Civil War. It talks about how Grant showed his gratitude by giving both Eccles brothers a replica of the Golden Spike with his personal thanks carved into the gold. Each spike was worth a small fortune then; what a museum would pay for them today, I don’t even know. Peter Eccles is buried in Dundee, and the town rumor is he took that spike to his grave.”

  “Just Peter? What about Paul?”

  Harnett snatched up some crumbling newsprint from the counter. “This is an issue from October 1988, from Miller’s Field, Illinois, where Paul Eccles is buried, just across the Mississippi, and it repeats the same rumor. That’s independent confirmation, kid. It’s true, all of it, I know it is. After the railroad was built, after they’d killed all their Indian brothers, after their president had given them these spikes that, in their eyes, were soaked in blood, they gave up on life, both of them. They put the length of Iowa between them and never spoke, and never, ever displayed the spikes, but they both kept them until they died, or so go the stories. Both the stories.”

  He stood with the two papers in either hand, gloating over his discovery. My anger was dimming; I felt a familiar tingle of excitement and my eyes found the Root where she waited pensively in a darkened corner. “Which one do we go for?”

  “If Boggs is doing his homework, he could be reading the same article about Peter. But he won’t have the Miller’s Field story to cross-reference. He’ll suspect it’s just rumor; he’ll hesitate. We won’t. We go now, to Dundee, and we get President Grant’s spike.”

  Harnett was nearly slavering. The fact that my new semester had just begun didn’t even enter his mind. It was just as well.

  I fit my fingers over the Root. Harnett kneeled to lace his boots.

  “We got him on this one,” he whispered to the floor. “We got him.”

  Hours later he was proven correct. There was no picture pinned to the patchy remnants of Peter Eccles’s burial coat, but sewed into a hidden pocket beneath his left armpit was the spike. As Harnett funneled dirt that was no different from any other dirt, I fondled the two-of-a-kind artifact; it made white lines of the moonlight. In my hand it felt as lethal as Gottschalk’s pointer, as rigid as the faucets in the boys’ shower room. Even here, miles away and half buried in history, I could not escape Bloughton.

  My father was still bursting with pride when we got back home. Without killing the engine, he ran inside with the spike and our bags of gear. I followed and heard him lock his safe. He emerged a couple of minutes later with some extra clothes stuffed into a garbage bag.

  “Sensitive stuff.” He scratched at his beard and took a quick look around the room. “Requires a special buyer. Got a man in mind, but he’s a full day away. He’s just the right guy, though. Knows how to unload something like this, wash his hands so that it can’t be traced.” He paused and looked at me. “That okay? It could be Saturday until I’m back.”

  He was abuzz with success, and little I said would stop him anyway. I shrugged. “You don’t want to take the spike?”

  “No. No way. Terms first. Always terms first, get that through your head.”

  He slapped his pockets and nodded.

  “Okay, then,” he said, and left.

  Five minutes later I had the spike out of the safe and was turning it in my hands. President Grant’s inscription, done by hand if the penmanship was any indication, was short and somehow ominous:

  GOOD FEELING.

  WITH GREAT RESPECT,

  U. S. GRANT

  Hundreds of Indian carcasses—I pulled my covers to my chin and pictured their brown and feathered bodies strewn across the desert before they were eviscerated by scavengers or buried by surviving kin—and all that was left in memorial was this block of gold no bigger than my forearm. Part of me was glad that it would soon rest beneath temperature-controlled glass for tourists to reckon with. Another part of me wondered if it had been better off where it had lain for over almost one hundred and fifty years.

  When I awoke the spike was gone.

  At first I didn’t believe it. I rolled over, patted the ground beside my bedding. I looked under my duffel-bag pillow, wondering if I had unconsciously stashed it there for safekeeping. I bunched my sheets and flapped them. I ran my hands between nearby stacks of Harnett’s archive, wondering if perhaps the spike’s golden hue was similar to yellowed newsprint. I stood up and the smell hit me.

  Like a Digger, but dipped in the faint turpentine of insomnia.

  I swiped a paring knife from the counter and backpedaled into the wall. My heart hammered. He was here. His stink was over everything: the sheets I had escaped from, the knife I wielded, the wall behind me, my clothes—my clothes.

  Mixed in with his scent was a malignant sweetness. Harnett had been right when he had told Lionel that there was something unwell about Boggs. For the first time I wondered if Boggs was actually rotting, and if it was from the outside in or the inside out.

  The bedroom and bathroom doors—both were just barely ajar. Boggs would emerge running, or perhaps sauntering with predatory sloth, and the ice of his blue eyes would freeze me in place as he did what he needed to do before he could photograph me. My body arrested and I began specifying wildly, senselessly—

  —shadow shards black spider ribbons—

  —glaze of floor smacking for fallen flesh—

  —cricket hiccups snake rattle frog croak door hinge—

  —downward upward downward twist gush gush gush—

  —gleeful dust suckling for a bloody soak—

  —and I had to grip my skull to stop it, the paring knife clattering to the floor and somersaulting perfectly in place before the bedroom doorway. Tiny fingers reached out and seized it. No, it did not happen, but nevertheless I witnessed it repeatedly, until its hundredth repetition transformed it to fiction. Boggs was gone. His smell was melting into the morning thaw. I pushed open Harnett’s door and then, braver, kicked open the bathroom. There were no signs anywhere.

  Except for the missing spike. I threw open a window and let gusts from the Big Chief numb me. I retreated to the hearth and only then dared look back at the sink. Boggs was not just in Iowa, not just in Bloughton, but had been right here, in our home. He had stood ov
er me as I had slept. He had measured my exhales, gauged my hypnagogic twitches. I wondered if this man, who had repeatedly misidentified himself as my father, had watched over me as if I were his baby boy.

  My eyes found and drew strength from the Root. I’d lost the spike, yes, but there was a twin. If I acted decisively, the second spike could beat Harnett back to the cabin. I looked for the newspaper that had the details of its location, but I couldn’t find it. All I remembered was that it was close—just across the Mississippi, Harnett had said. I grabbed some of my father’s maps. I would have to figure it out as I went. Everything else I needed was here: digging gear, the tarp, the spade, the pickaxe, the Root. I had everything but the truck. Well, then I would steal one. I dressed warmly, packed my pockets with emergency gas money, took up the sacks, and stepped outside.

  Parked on the front lawn was a car. I felt the fleabites of my hysterical specifying return—shadow, spider, flesh, snake, twist, soak—and fought them back. Slowly I swept my eyes over the gently swaying trees. I circled the vehicle. It was a Hyundai. Key in the ignition. Backseat brimming with fast-food detritus. Dented fenders. Rusted rims. Mud-splashed doors. Missouri plates.

  The memory came slithering back: Boggs at the diner in West Virginia entreating me to grant him a moment’s conversation: That’s two thousand five hundred seventy-five miles I came, and I had to jack a Hyundai in Missouri when my first ride up and died on me. Just another foreboding clue that made no sense until I saw the newspaper rolled up and poking from the steering wheel.

  I winced as I opened the driver’s side door and tossed my gear in the back, the maps in front. I lowered myself inside and pushed the seat back from where it had been ratcheted to dwarf proportions. I slammed the door and retracted the locks. The newspaper was warm; even before I unrolled it I knew what it was. It was the October 22, 1988, Miller’s Field Journal, opened to the story featuring Paul Eccles. Boggs was guiding me as surely as if there were strings tied to each limb.

  Placing my hands at three and nine, I inhaled a concentrated blast of his stink and then watched my gray exhalation adhere to the windshield. He’s watching, I thought. The engine spat but turned over with more juice than Harnett’s truck. Trying to summon driver’s ed, I buckled my seat belt, adjusted the rearview mirror, and put the car into gear. There was no way to measure this fear against that I had once felt while skirting the halls of BHS. But I reminded myself that just one day ago I had beaten Gottschalk at his own game. Maybe I could win this game, too.

  13.

  IT TOOK ME TOO long to find the grave. It felt as if the entirety of Bloughton were watching and judging. I had to repeat to myself my father’s teachings, remember how cemetery quadrants were arranged old to new. My hands shook and dropped tools. The first incision was ragged and I blamed myself until I peeled back the grass to reveal the sickest patch of earth I’d ever seen, spongy and irregular like healing skin. I took a handful and could smell the sour lumps of coffin wood commingled with the muck.

  Digging it proved to be like scooping manure—it was heavy, wet, stringy, and smelly. One hour became two, then three, and though brutally trained, my muscles screamed in complaint. When I reached the vessel, I found that decay had turned the lid into mulch. I squatted and extracted the remains that slivered the dirt. Thankfully, Paul Eccles had been interred within a shroud, and I unwrapped it, fully expecting to find the golden spike gleaming among bones dull as kindling.

  There was nothing. I unraveled the sheet and a rib or two shook free. I pulled the flashlight from my coat and turned it upon the grave. In the yellow spot of light I saw that the bottom of the coffin had long since cankered as well, and several more nubs of bone nosed from the soil like toadstools. My shoulders sank. I would have to keep digging, and there was no telling how far.

  And then I saw a flash of gold. I moved the beam to the head of the coffin and noticed movement. I shrank back against the dirt. Rats—lots of them. I steadied my hand and looked again. My stomach lurched. They were everywhere, fifty, maybe a hundred of them, churning through the dirt like maggots, their wriggling feet capering upward, their red eyes flashing from inside the very walls of the hole. The ray of light alarmed them and they hurtled toward a burrowed tunnel that ran directly over Eccles’s head—I could see the yellow dome of his skull beneath their frantic feet.

  Whiskers tickled my neck; I gasped and swatted with my flashlight. The swirling beam caught the rats as they streamed away, their motion inadvertently carrying the golden spike straight into their tunnel.

  “No!” I shouted. A rat, shockingly heavy, landed on my shoulder, and I felt its dry pelt slide past my ear before it tumbled and raced across my feet. I dropped to my knees. The tunnel was nearly two feet across and sloped downward. The spike balanced upon the precipice. I shuffled forward, my knees pinning to the dirt several fat and screaming bodies, and reached with my free hand. A cold current of rats slid down my arm.

  Dozens of tiny feet scampered and the spike spun farther into the tunnel. An image of my father flashed through my mind—by now he had probably finished sealing a deal to sell the artifact and was en route to Bloughton, radiating with a pride he had not felt in years. I had lost Peter’s spike; I had no choice but to bring home Paul’s.

  I lunged and struck the pulpy dirt so that I lay atop Paul Eccles, our elbows interlocked, his pelvis pressed against mine, his skull lodged snugly beneath my chin. I muscled my head through the cavity. The rats were up my shirt, nuzzling my armpits. Another raced up my pants leg, shuddering against my thigh. I locked my jaw and heard the thump of tails against my bared teeth.

  It was a tight fit but I forced the flashlight to the level of my chest. The sight inside the tunnel was dizzying: swarms of rodents ran in loops, defying gravity. The spike was just ahead, and I squeezed my free hand into open space. The darkness flexed; three dozen rats hissed at the intruder and leapt, tussling and tangling into my hair, sinking their tiny yellow teeth into my fingers. I shrieked but could not recoil—I was stuffed too firmly. The entire weight of the cemetery pressed down.

  My fingertips touched gold. I heaved forward and my shoulders crashed against the winnowing tunnel. Dirt began to crumble. I made a fist and clubbed rats out of the way, left and right. A thick pink tail got caught between my fingers and the rat screeched and spasmed. My mother would not have hesitated, either: I squeezed the animal until I felt the convulsion of death. I tossed the body and snatched the spike. Nearly laughing, I brought it close to my body. Then I tipped the flashlight beam and saw stars twinkling from the underground night—eyes, hundreds of them, approaching, furious, and in their numbers unafraid.

  Moving backward through a tight enclosure is a slow process. For a surreal moment I weighed the alternative: continuing onward to explore this subterranean city, learning the strategies of the rat, and dying down here with my kind. Yet I removed myself from the tunnel inch by inch, shutting my eyes against a torrent of rats so dense I could feel each racing heartbeat against my eyelids and throat and lips. They did not give up on the spike, even when it was clear that I was going to win. It was as if the rats had become spirit animals, invincible where the Indians of the Old West had been sadly mortal, unwilling to let this symbol of their destruction be taken anywhere other than hell.

  I filled in the hole and watched the dirt drop heavily upon their tiny, obstinate faces. It was nearly dawn when I found myself once more behind the wheel of Boggs’s car, and when I checked the rearview mirror I recognized the look that greeted me: it was the glazed and sunken stare of the Diggers I had met only weeks before, men haunted by the inability to tell anyone of the dreadful things they’d seen.

  14.

  I DROVE STRAIGHT THROUGH the morning, the bone-crack of gravel waking me each time I started to swerve, and only when I had parked Boggs’s car in front of the cabin did I take a good look at the golden spike. It was indeed the mirror image of the one belonging to Peter Eccles, only Paul had possessed either less restraint or more
self-loathing and had furiously scratched out whatever message President Grant had inscribed. Numbly I wondered how much this decreased the value of the artifact. I scratched my own shames into the side of the sink and collapsed.

  Harnett’s reaction to the new spike and the violation of his safe was overwhelmed by his reaction to the news of Boggs’s intrusion. The Hyundai had disappeared long before he came home, but he did not doubt the veracity of my tale. Instantly his fevered gaze sought out the cabin’s many weaknesses: the door, the windows, the world of darkness contained within the surrounding forest. Instead of delivering the spike to his buyer, he took off to the local hardware store and lumberyard and returned with a truckload of raw materials. The rest of the day was a calamity of windows nailed shut, iron bars slotted over each pane, new locks screwed onto the front door, and photoelectric yard lights mounted on all sides of the cabin. Cables were secured to the roof with industrial staples, and while up there Harnett used binoculars to search the surrounding acreage. The afternoon was spent gutting as much underbrush as was physically possible. While he hacked and hauled and incinerated, I was given the task of disassembling the woodpile so that no one—not even one very short of stature—could hide behind it.

  Eventually there was nothing more to do. It was time to deliver the spike. Harnett’s heart was no longer in it; it was sad to see. His victory in finding it had led to the loss of a bigger battle, and now he had to leave me to this new and untested fortress. Stress carved every angle of his face. He was thinking of running away from Bloughton, I knew it, but with a kid in tow such an escape was less viable. As he drove away I turned my eyes to the trees. I wondered if Boggs was still close and if he was watching with frustration or amusement. Mostly I wondered what he thought of my performance. Part of me still hungered for straight As.