Rotters

by Daniel Kraus

  15.

  WEEKS FLEW BY. SCHOOL was worthless. I showed up on occasion just to spar with Gottschalk, absorb Celeste’s hints about the approaching Spring Fling, and wait for Ted’s Next lesson, then to notify me of the day’s end. Then came night and the Polaroids. We tracked Boggs by boot prints and finger smudges and gossip and intuition, and shoveled with ferocity. Each morning Harnett sharpened his Scottish blade.

  Our task was becoming increasingly hazardous. Police patrolled cemeteries, sometimes on foot with flashlights. Too often we returned empty-handed to a cabin filling with newspaper accounts of Boggs’s activities. Harnett’s neurosis became uncontrollable. Everyone was a Gatlin, materialized from the ether to chase him from his home for the seventh or tenth or fifteenth time, depending on how many photographs we had found that night.

  He barely ate. Sometimes I had to put the food in his hands. It was on the way home from two consecutive digs—the former unsullied, the latter ornamented with another of Boggs’s portraits—that we passed Sookie’s Foods and I impulsively turned into the lot. The area buzzed with routines of such harmlessness that it seemed a perfect cure-all. Ambling past the bakery and shuddering in the frozen foods aisle would fix us, I just knew it.

  Harnett was too distracted to put up much of a fight. He came into the store with me, a rare event. To push my luck I made him steer the cart; I hoped the task might steady the hands that had been shaking for weeks. It was prime shopping hour. People still wore work clothes and ruthlessly sought out milk with preferable expiration dates. Kids picked up from school were dragged along. Those recognizable from the Congress of Freaks offered beseeching half-smiles. Maybe it was the pitiable presence of the Garbageman; maybe it was my heroic sparring with Gottschalk; maybe it was the cumbrous burden of their culpability. I didn’t let myself care. They were not the kinds of friends I needed, not anymore. I dawdled by the Doritos but Harnett did not reach for a bag of Cool Ranch. Not a good sign.

  We were in the checkout aisle when a man asked if he could go ahead of us—he only had one item, a bottle of whiskey. Harnett wouldn’t look at him. I shrugged and said it was fine. The man squeezed past. We all stood quiet for a moment, the bleeps of scanned items the only interruption of the piped-in Muzak. At last Harnett sighed in irritation.

  “Just put it in the cart,” he said.

  The man didn’t respond.

  “Something tells me we’ll need it,” Harnett said. “Put it in the cart.”

  As the man did as he was told, I felt a twinge of recognition. The large frame, the long beard, the burly forearms—it was Crying John. He smiled a smile so sad he didn’t have to say anything. I knew what had happened. Twenty minutes later he was in our cabin, on the overturned bucket, his bawls ringing metallic against the concrete floor.

  “She was old,” Harnett said.

  Crying John cried harder. “She waited until I’d dug a hole so I didn’t have to dig her one special. I would’ve gladly done it. Gladly. But that’s not what she wanted. She circled and lay down and breathed real heavy and then—and then that was it. My little Foulie was gone. My little Foulie was dead. Oh, god, my little baby Foulie is gone!”

  Great sobs shook the momentous shoulders. Harnett reached over and poured him another whiskey. Then he poured one for himself. They were the first drinks I’d seen him pour in many months; I squatted in my safety zone by the sink. The late-day light stretched the barred windows into a cage.

  Crying John wiped at his cheeks. “So I did what she wanted. Wrapped her inside a blankie. Kissed her on her nose and told her I was so sorry I couldn’t’ve been a better daddy. And then I put her in the dirt. I did it because that’s what she wanted. She’s buried in Wyoming. In a grave with someone else’s name. No one will ever know my doggie’s there. No one will ever, ever know.”

  “We’ll know,” said Harnett. “You, me, Knox, the kid—we’ll make sure everyone knows. They’ll talk about that dog forever.”

  “What’s forever?” Crying John snarled. Spittle swung from his bottom lip. “There is no forever anymore and you goddamn well know it!”

  Harnett took a sip of his drink. I looked away.

  “Don’t bullshit me, Resurrectionist. You’ve seen them. Don’t sit there and tell me you haven’t seen them.”

  My father took another drink, this one a bit larger.

  Crying John plunged his hand into his pocket and withdrew a handful of Polaroid scraps. A few of them fluttered to the floor, serrated triangles of flesh and bone.

  “I’ve found ten or twelve now. Even Foulie knew we were done for. That’s why she gave up. She could smell the son of a bitch all over the graves.”

  Ten or twelve? Harnett and I had uncovered forty or fifty. Both of us kept quiet.

  “I’ve tried to keep going. I even gave the old routine a shot. Went to a wake, the funeral, the whole business. It was a disaster. An unmitigated disaster.” He appealed to us with swollen eyes. “Did you know they bury people with their phones now? I don’t know why. They must be somehow meaningful. But at this funeral I’m looking down at this sleeper and his phone keeps going off. It’s on mute but you can hear it vibrate, see it light up inside his jacket. He’s dead, and people are still calling him, leaving him messages. When we’re dead, Resurrectionist, who’s gonna call us, huh?”

  Harnett looked into his glass. It was dry.

  “Him?” Crying John pointed an unsteady finger at me. “Is that what you really want? Look at us. Look at me. I’ve got no one, nothing. No one to tell me everything’s gonna be okay. And this will happen to you, too, any day now. You’ll wake up and you’ll be old and alone, too.”

  Harnett cleared his throat. “Knox will help you.”

  Crying John stamped the floor. “Knox is a vulture! He circles until hope is gone and then swoops in and bites our heads off with salvation. And we listen to him, because what else choice do we got, huh? If you’re seriously suggesting Knox, then I know I’m through. We’re all through.”

  Bottle rang against cup as Harnett poured.

  “Now, listen.” Crying John wiped his hairy cheeks. “I came here because I got something to say. After Foulie … after Foulie passed, I packed it up, went to the Northeast. Wanted to show Under-the-Mud the pictures, see if he’d found any, too.”

  “Under-the-Mud.” Harnett blinked. “Why didn’t you come to me?”

  Crying John paused but did not respond. “I found him. Took me a while, but I found him. In Buffalo.”

  Harnett’s throat hitched. “Why didn’t you come to me first?”

  “Or I should say he found me. You know Under-the-Mud. The man did not make mistakes. Sixty years without a slipup. I’m walking around Buffalo one morning and I hear my name. ‘Crying John.’ I’m halfway down the sidewalk before I realize. First thing I see are feet sticking out of the alcove of some boarded-up store. Shoes all worn through, frostbitten toes. The man himself I don’t recognize. I’m telling you, Resurrectionist, I don’t recognize him. He’s a vagrant, all huddled up. He’s got a KFC cup with a few pennies in it and a sign, one of those cardboard signs—”

  He gnashed his teeth as if fighting through the tears that assailed him.

  “I get down there in the slush with him and he says, ‘I knew it was you.’ Kind of holding his head to the side like he hears music I don’t hear. And he smiles. Every other tooth is gone. Drool’s falling through the gaps. This can’t be Under-the-Mud. But it is.”

  I tried to reconcile this vile depiction with the aristocratic gent who had scoffed at me in that long-ago pub. Harnett’s harshest critic, Under-the-Mud was nothing if not erudite, exacting, and neat. Debased to scrabbling for change on a grimy sidewalk—it just didn’t seem possible.

  Outside, the automatic floodlights hummed to life.

  “Next thing he says is Baby. Says he knows it’s Baby. He heard about cemeteries being disrupted, everywhere he went, like someone was following him and trying to get him caught. He wasn’t afraid—sixty years, not
so much as a single complaint. But it happened.” Crying John winced. “They took his eyes, Resurrectionist. When he opened them there was nothing underneath.”

  Despite all I had seen, my stomach seized. It was too brutal and much too close to home. If Bloughton made a similar discovery, there was no telling what would befall Harnett and me.

  “He’d asked them to take his hands instead, but they didn’t listen. Not that there’s much left of his hands, either. All frostbitten and broken. He says other street people kick him down and steal his pennies. When I gave him everything in my wallet he stuffed it in his underwear. And you know what he said?”

  Harnett did not respond.

  “Historical precedent. He kept saying those two words. There is historical precedent for this, he said. The original resurrection men, their time ended, too. We’re next. We’re done. It’s our turn. Historical precedent.”

  Harnett’s cup clipped the arm of the chair. The sound was irate.

  “You should’ve come to me first.”

  Crying John’s disgust was brazen. “That’s what you say? That’s your response? Come to you, you arrogant prick? Why? This whole thing’s your fault. What happened to Foulie, what happened to Under-the-Mud. The end of the Diggers?”

  “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

  “The Apologist? You heard about him? Stroke. Waiting to die in a hospital somewhere with tubes in his face and down his throat.”

  “Give me your glass.”

  “He’s killing us.” Crying John’s eyes blurred with angry tears. “One way or another, he’s cutting our throats.”

  Harnett lowered the whiskey bottle and searched out the other man’s eyes.

  “I’m doing what I can.”

  Crying John ground the heels of his hands into his sockets. “I know. I know that. I’m sorry. I didn’t want to come. I didn’t want to have to tell you any of this. It’s Under-the-Mud, he made me promise. He made me swear that I’d find you and let you know. I’m sorry.”

  Harnett licked his lips and looked at the bottle.

  Crying John took to his feet so fast the bucket he was sitting on went spinning into the hearth. I flinched and stood. Harnett rose, too, the rocking chair groaning. Crying John swiped his winter coat and had it on in two curt movements. He swayed on his way to the door. He attacked it with clumsy fingers. It was locked and wouldn’t open. He threw one lock, but there were three more, still gummy with price tags.

  “John,” Harnett said. “Where are you going?”

  “The mountains.” Against the door, his tone was flat and clipped. “I’ll vanish. You could come with me, you know. Both of you could come with me. We could vanish into the most beautiful mountains.”

  Harnett’s expression was filled with such yearning that it was all I could do not to shout my opposition. Frantically I thought of the Rotters Book. Maybe Boggs was right and it did mean our salvation, the only way for us to survive in a new century. I could describe it to Crying John, try to make him understand.

  “You go,” Harnett said. “I can’t.”

  “I know, I know, the kid.”

  Crying John twisted and pushed at the locks but they were foreign to him and bit at his fingers until he laughed. It was a loud and unfriendly noise.

  “Locks, bars. You think this crap is going to protect you?”

  “John,” said Harnett.

  Crying John turned on him. “You were never this stupid! What’s happened to you? Can’t you see what’s in front of your face? Do I have to spell it out?”

  Harnett spread his arms, helpless.

  Crying John winced. The tears fled from the corners of his eyes into the escape channels of his wrinkles.

  “He told me to tell you. He made me swear. But I lied to him; I wasn’t really going to do it.”

  “Who? What?”

  “Under-the-Mud. He said you deserved to know. See? Even at the end, he praised you. He thought more of you than any of us did. Hell of a lot more than me.”

  Harnett was shaking his head. “The end? Wait. Is he—”

  “You still got your eyes, but you’re every bit as blind. So, fine, I’ll tell you.” Crying John gasped down his tears. “Anyone can see where Baby is leading you. Anyone can see where he wants you to go. I swore that I’d tell you, so, all right, here it is. But just because I tell you doesn’t mean you have to go there. You don’t have to do what Baby wants you to do. When are you going to understand that?”

  Everything became clear. I covered my face with my hands.

  Crying John saw me and his beard moved in silent apologies.

  “Oh, god,” Harnett said. He reached for the door. “Get out of my way.”

  16.

  WE DROVE LIKE WE were somersaulting down a hill. Cars honked and semis wobbled as we swept into their lanes, and still we rolled faster and faster. When the sign welcoming us to Chicago passed overhead, Harnett sideswiped an Oldsmobile that subsequently chased us for half an hour. Once spat out by an exit ramp, we were lost and it was all my fault. Landmarks had rearranged in my absence. Road signs had redirected. With every U-turn Harnett toppled more kiosks and cut off more pedestrians. We squealed into three different gas stations desperate for direction. Denizens who would have never noticed me one year ago now skirted away, sensing danger. Somehow the Pakistani with the baby stroller, the Haitian with the cab, the Mexican with the food cart, they knew.

  It was just a few hours to daybreak when we found Evan Hills Cemetery. And only when I touched the casket did I realize that I had done so once before, at her funeral, moments before walking away from the tarp-covered plot, so that now, eight long months later, my fingers recognized it. It was like touching anything else familiar from home—a doorknob, a banister.

  It was undoubtedly the worst digging of Harnett’s life. He was crazed. Each particle of dirt was like a speck of his sanity tossed away. It rained over me, the dirt and the delirium, and I swallowed too much of both. There existed in the cemetery a vague impression of spaciousness and cleanliness, stones kept clean from weeds. For this small favor I was thankful. Night crashed down.

  Two feet, three feet—misplaced excitement over the role reversal of checking on a mother tucked into bed. Four feet, five feet—would her grin at seeing me again be wide enough to eat her face? Six feet—the clang of shovel meeting casket. Don’t be noisy, Daddy, let Mommy sleep.

  I sat cross-legged at the edge of the hole, facing a dark, icy cemetery I had last seen on a bright summer afternoon. Below, Harnett slaughtered the lid—it crunched like broken bone. There followed a moment of silence the length of a single breath, and then the sounds began. I shut my eyes and covered my ears. His throat had burst—it was the only explanation for the whirling, splattering sobs that tore around like cyclones.

  A hand groped for the grass; I saw bloody knuckles and snapped fingernails. A second hand joined the first and this one held not one but a fistful of Polaroids, and as Harnett floundered over the edge and writhed through the cold mud, several of these pictures fluttered free. My eyes were too well trained. I saw an image of a body, nothing I could yet recognize as my mother, lying inside a coffin; in another photo, she was outside the coffin; in another, sprawled aslant next to her plot; in another, doing the splits across the stone that bore her name. She was positioned like a bloated rag doll in dozens of ridiculous and impossible poses—I cataloged each image as Harnett, still screaming, peeled them from the mud—and in several photos she was joined by the man who had lusted after her while she was alive. In these photos Baby held her body to him and kissed at her puffy face and more—but Harnett had peeled these last photos away and before I knew it was tearing them to pieces and chewing them and choking as the sharp corners split him down his insides.

  He squirmed in the mud until every last piece was ingested, and then he clutched his gut and screamed. I winced as something inside me smothered. Coldness took over. All at once Harnett’s behavior struck me as unseemly. “Stop crying,” I sa
id. He didn’t listen. I stood and walked over to him. “Stop crying,” I said again. He wailed and banged his forehead against the frozen ground. It was so loud that it scared me; then I became angry that I was scared. I kneeled and poked him in the side. “Stop crying.” I pushed him. “Stop crying!” I kicked him in the hip, in the knee, in the neck. “Stop crying!” I shoved at him until he was faceup and then I punched, knuckles into open eyes and streaming nose. “STOP CRYING! STOP CRYING! STOP CRYING!” He screamed until my face was covered with his blood. I wiped it away with an arm. I would act properly even if he wouldn’t. I stood, leaving him snaking in blind circles, and tucked in my shirt and patted down my hair.

  “Hi, Mom,” I said, kneeling beside her.

  Boggs had at least returned her to a funereal pose. I searched her swollen and purple face for signs of the woman I had known, and after a minute or two I smiled in recognition. There: the broad cheeks, the longish nose, the disfigured ear.

  The ear—I leaned over and took a closer look. Typically ears were one of the first features to deteriorate, yet her left one was miraculously intact. I examined the old wound, imagining the Gatlin shovel strike that had so crudely carved it. Harnett had undoubtedly seen it, too; above, he was still blubbering in the moonlight. I knew he was upset about what Boggs had done in this grave. I knew he was rabid that a copy of each picture was safely nestled inside the Rotters Book. Still, I wished he’d shut up. He was just jealous that another man had touched her, no matter that it had been his failures that had denied her any man’s touch for sixteen years.

  I was the only one in that graveyard deserving of Valerie Crouch. I remembered the soft fuzz of her cheeks; I reached out and touched taut and mealy skin. I nuzzled into her neck in search of her scent of wood and milk; I smelled only the grave’s usual potency.

  Why was she withholding herself? I felt a flash of irritation. I had come too far, across two states, down six feet of earth, for her to ignore me. I put an arm around her shoulders and threaded another around her waist. Carefully I gathered her in my arms. Her head rolled against my cheek. Before I knew it she was in my lap, her body blue and turgid and squeaking like rubber. I said shhh and rocked her and petted her cold straw hair. One arm was missing and one of her legs was just a sleeve of skin, and the amount of PVC pipe inside the coffin brought home just how catastrophic her injuries had been, how hard the mortician had slaved in his effort at reassembly.