Rotters

by Daniel Kraus

  “Harnett.” I held my hand higher as if he hadn’t already seen. Blood twined down my wrist and arm and heavied my sleeve.

  There was a blur as Harnett moved. I felt disconnected from my body. I pushed myself away with my heels until I ran out of breath and let myself fall back against the cool grass. Above me was a gorgeous canopy of stars. Each one of them, I marveled, would correspond to a piece of Harnett’s body after his celestial burial. It was beautiful after all.

  At no time did I entertain illusions of reattachment. There was a grave to be filled, and Diggers have priorities. Back at the cabin, Harnett ransacked the sink cabinet until he found a dusty bottle of peroxide. He shoved a handful of aspirin at me and a glass of lukewarm water, then unwrapped the bloody cloth from my hand and dumped the peroxide. I screamed, then laughed at the girlishness of the sound, then screamed some more. My other arm toppled books. My legs sent newspapers flapping like descending gulls. I barely noticed when the front door opened and a man tossed his crutch to the floor and dropped to his knees in the sizzling lather of water, blood, and disinfectant.

  Knox cupped my cheek with a cool palm.

  “Jesus wept,” he said. “Jesus wept. Jesus wept.”

  20.

  AS HE HAD DURING my bout of boneyard blues, the one-legged reverend nursed me back to health. He sutured my wounds with a white-hot needle and kept me afloat in liquids. Somehow he found time to make coffee on the stove. He had to wrap Harnett’s fingers around a mug before he would take it. My father sipped the stuff while perched near the sink, refusing to look at either of us. For once I had the rocking chair, although it felt all wrong—it was all I could do not to insist Harnett come take it back.

  Knox’s arrival had not been coincidence. He had heard of the maiming of Under-the-Mud and the suspicious disappearance of Crying John and was on his way to Virginia to visit the hospital where the Apologist hovered just north of demise. To this already crowded list Knox added Brownie, who had suspended all digging to undergo an intense three-month religious study in hopes that Jesus Christ might save him. Knox had been guiding Brownie’s studies when word of Harnett’s Bad Jobs had finally reached Texas.

  It was not like last time. There was no conversation between the men. Their wordless exchanges said it all. Knox was angry and distraught. Harnett was consumed with shame and self-hatred. Though overwhelmed with pain, I felt like the one in charge. These two could fight their little fight all they wanted; regardless, the Son would continue digging even faster and better than before, just wait and see.

  The secret smiles Knox had shared with me during his previous visit were similarly absent. I wanted to attribute it to his fatigue and the long drive still ahead of him, but I knew that wasn’t it. I had changed. Knox could see it in my every sound and movement. Only occasionally did he ponder me in a way that stirred sensations of hope. While I had no desire to be a part of Bloughton or the wider world, Knox’s approval still meant something.

  The reverend sent Harnett out for firewood, and after my father had returned and retreated to his corner, Knox spent the next few hours whittling away at the choicest log. I watched him from where I was curled up on the chair. Soon he was sanding three wooden pellets. His total absorption was itself absorbing, and I rearranged myself within the blanket that swaddled me. He winced as he adjusted himself on the bucket; it was a difficult balance to maintain with only one leg.

  “You want the chair?” I asked.

  He frowned at his sanding. The repetitive whisper began lulling me to sleep. Knox’s voice was of the same soft and shifting quality; at first it was difficult to differentiate it from the noise.

  “Hundred years old I am,” he said quietly. “Sometimes feels like two hundred. Two thousand. Feel it most at times like now, when I’m not movin’. I’m always movin’. Made my life out of movin’. You folks name your shovels; I name my cars. Bethany, there was a beaut. Jacqueline, strong as a tank. Patty—Patty didn’t last long, but she was fast. Back when I had hair it would crunch flat when I was drivin’ Patty. And where do I go? Where do all these fine ladies take me? I ask the good Lord each and every night: ‘Where you takin’ me, Lord?’ Feels like a hundred years I been askin’ that question and a hundred years I been gettin’ no answers. Now I’m tired. But I keep movin’. You want to know why? Because I’m scared. Me too, hallelujah. I’m scared if I turn off that engine for good, my ears will finally hear and then I’ll know for sure there aren’t no answers, not for me. Because I’ve done Him wrong. That’s the kind of silence I don’t know if I’ve got the strength to bear. That’s a forever kind of silence.”

  The pellets of wood were fingers. He placed them in the crease of his thighs and picked up an old glove and pair of shears. He gathered three of the leather digits between the blades and began to saw.

  “There be a woeful darkness out there. I see it every town I pass through. I see it on the sides of the roads. I see it real strong when I visit any of y’all. But I see it most in the rearview mirror, in me. God is good. Least I think so. I pray ‘Talk to me, O Lord’ and there’s quiet. I pray ‘Show me, O Lord’ and there’s darkness. These old eyes have cried buckets, so many buckets I feel like a child, younger than you. ‘It’s not fair,’ I cry. You think God is fair? ‘I’ve worked so hard,’ I cry. You think Jesus checks my speedometer? Boxer, Under-the-Mud, Resurrectionist—I’ve watched so many of you pass, your names are like dust. But my life—this is my life. I’ve crossed into the most woeful darkness to bring y’all into the light. Maybe I’ve gone too far. Maybe I’m lost in the dark. Maybe this isn’t the story of your descent, Joey Crouch. Maybe it’s the story of mine.”

  Briefly he held greasy bolts in his lips while he traded the shears for pliers. He fitted the wood into the newly fingerless glove and clamped it in place. A knobby old thumb pressed the first bolt against the leather. He spat the rest of the bolts into a palm and began twisting the corresponding nut.

  “The number of sins I’ve let come to pass, it’s far too many to atone for. Did I assist y’all for the right reasons? I don’t know, He won’t tell me. When I look in the mirror, it’s black. When I press my ear to the ground, it’s quiet. That’s blindness and deafness. That’s hell. And every day hell nudges up a little closer. It’s in the tollbooth on the interstate. It’s in the backseat of my car. It’s in my glove box, it’s in my hip pocket. It’s my missing leg. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Sometimes I feel like I’m one of them, and you’re one of them, and Ken’s one of them, too. Can’t be true, though. Look at me. I got a deflated lung. I got issues with my prostate. My knee aches so bad some days I can’t press the brake. By the way, my new car is named Priscilla Beaulieu. You know why? Because I’m hopin’ she’ll take me to see the King.”

  He frowned and raised the glove until it was a mere inch from his nose. His face was a maze of lines spiraling from a point between his eyebrows. He flipped his handiwork and inspected the reverse side. A glimpse of teeth, the hint of a smile—it was like a wedge of light thrown into a darkened room by the cracking of a door.

  I reached out. He fit the apparatus gently over my hand and persuaded me to make and release a fist one hundred times. With each clench I imagined these new fingers gripping the Root. It would be different, but not necessarily worse. What I would lose in sensitivity I would gain in imperviousness to pain. I flexed my new fingers until Knox began snoring and the window bars segmented the morning light.

  The snores snagged. Knox coughed and sat up. He stoked the fire and checked his pocket watch. He looked incurably old. His clergyman’s collar was yellow and wilted with sweat. Coils of silver hair glistened against his scalp. He rubbed his eyes and took in the rankled state of the cabin as if in disbelief that his long life had led him to such a place. Then he arduously stood upon his leg, hopped three times, and lowered himself to my side.

  From some depths his voice found an orational energy.

  “Ken, join us in prayer.”

  The man in the corner s
huffled his feet.

  “Ken Harnett. Join us in prayer.”

  The reverend’s eyes were yellow and ringed in fire. Harnett did not move, his stubborn expression making clear his expectation of reaching the same end as Crying John and Under-the-Mud. The difference was that he didn’t care.

  The stalemate took us through daybreak. The yard lights shut off and the silence was filled by the whistling of robins and the shushing of the river. The standoff reminded me of nothing so much as when Harnett and I had stood outside the cabin while I demanded lessons and he insisted that I wasn’t ready. The reverend had probably never looked so obdurate; his ability to outwait my father was never really in doubt. Harnett finally shambled across the room, dropped to his knees in defeat, and jerked his chin into the requisite posture. Without a second’s pause, Knox began.

  “Lord, hear our prayer. We have a young boy here who is injured; help salve his wounds. We have a man here who is lost; help find him his way. Out there in thy world is another man who lives in anger; help tamp his fury. Show them, O Lord, that there is light even in the darkest night. Remind them, O Lord, that though they may walk through the valley of death they should fear no evil, for thou art with them and thy rod and thy staff comfort them.”

  Thy rod: Grinder. Thy staff: the Root. Comforts, indeed.

  “Most of all, Lord, counsel to us thy servants that there is yet time. Time for us to confess what we have seen, to repent what we have done, to ask for thy help as well as thy life everlasting. Sacrifices for us have begun and they shall continue. We know this, Lord; in our deepest hearts, we know it. But please, Lord, show us that God is good—do not demand too harsh a sacrifice. We are thy lambs; lead us yet from slaughter, I pray.”

  Tears ran down Knox’s cheeks in two straight, dark lines. One of his hands pawed at Harnett until it found his forearm. The other reached out blindly until it snared my wrist. He held on with such ferocity that his thumbnail pierced my skin.

  “This I beg of you, Lord: ‘The Son of man is not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them.’

  “This I beg of you, Lord: ‘He that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved.’

  “This I beg of you, Lord: ‘He that hath suffered in the flesh hath ceased from sin.’

  “This I beg of you, Lord: ‘There is no man that sinneth not.’ ”

  The wrinkled pouches of his eyes unknotted and a curtain of tears washed clean his dusty face. His cheeks twitched and birthed a smile, a huge one, shocking and glorious, shattering the gloomy certainty of disaster that had clouded his countenance. It was as if a heavenly hand was upon his heart—perhaps he had finally broken through the darkness and silence. He dropped our arms and lifted his palms to the sky. A great weight of emotion struggled against his voice.

  “ ‘I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.’ ”

  Harnett choked on what sounded like tears of his own. He rose and turned away and wove through spinning bottles and littered newspapers until his unsteady groping came upon the bedroom knob. He swayed. I held my breath; Knox inhaled softly. The whole house seemed to tilt.

  21.

  NEWS OF MY FINGERS spread fast. Ted pulled me aside in the hallway before third period, pushing back the sleeve of my black duster—despite its fetor never for a moment dreaming that I’d stripped it from a corpse—to gape at the contraption Knox had fitted to my right hand. Ted was just the first of several teachers and even a handful of curious students. The strange thing was that none of them asked how it had happened, as if they suspected and feared that something they had done, or hadn’t done, had led to this sorry fate.

  Fuzzy memories existed of a promise I had made Ted, but all vows were void when I wiggled at him my three abridged fingers—the exact three fingers needed to play the trumpet. The last tangible connection to life with my mother had been cleanly and literally severed, and Ted was just some garbage that had gotten sliced away with it.

  “You can’t play anymore, can you?” He looked comically doomed.

  “No,” I said.

  He gasped and I swear I saw tears.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” I said. “The trumpet’s for pussies.”

  Every treasure in Lionel’s legendary stash—that was what I would’ve given to have a picture of Ted’s reaction. Or Laverne’s reaction when I told her to eat shit, preferably her principal’s. Or Heidi Goehring’s reaction when I told her to cram her condolences as far up her ass as they would go. It was somewhere between sickening and amusing, how three small nuggets of sanded wood were all it took to turn me into a celebrity.

  I pretended not to see Celeste in the lunchtime blitz, but her bright nails lanced my shirt and reeled me into a side hallway. The walls and floor and ceiling popped with the prim backpedaling of her heels; the students rushing past us sounded like the Big Chief River. For a few moments I avoided her expectant eyes, just as I had avoided her for weeks, banking down random corridors or even fleeing the school when her approach made a confrontation inevitable. Now I forced myself to meet her gaze. If my new fingers proved anything it was that I was made of sturdier stuff.

  “Poor baby, is it true?” she whispered.

  When I didn’t respond, she carefully cradled my elbow and crept her fingers down my arm until her warm hands encircled my wrist. Slowly she turned over my hand and lifted the gloved apparatus to the level of her breast. Her circulating thumbs kneaded the prostheses. Body conquered mind; my breath caught in my throat; it should have been the sexiest moment of my life. But the deadness of wood and leather prevented me from feeling her touch.

  “Look at you,” she said. “Just look at you.”

  My head dipped back. What was this feeling? Was it ecstasy? If so, wasn’t that what I had always wanted from her? Couldn’t this be an alternate, less deadly escape route from Mere Reality? Above me, a spectacle of marvelous fluorescents and breathtaking water spots.

  “I’m worried about you, Joey.”

  “I know.”

  “Maybe you should get a physical therapist.”

  “Definitely.”

  “This thing on your hand doesn’t look all that sanitary.”

  “You’re right.”

  “Have you thought about seeing a counselor?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Teen suicide is an epidemic.”

  “Yes. Absolutely.”

  “You wouldn’t ever do something like that, would you?” I felt myself shaking my head—Anything you say, anything at all.

  “Good. Because I’m still counting on you, you know.”

  My hard parts softened; my soft parts hardened. My eyes eased open and my head rocked back into place. Funny—the movement of her fingers now recalled the death spasms of a rat I’d once crushed in a grave. I smelled something burning and it wasn’t cafeteria food. It was lies, both hers and mine. It was a bad smell and I wanted rid of it.

  “The Spring Fling,” she continued. “It’s on Friday. Poor baby. Probably the last thing on your mind. But you said you’d make some calls? See who you could get to come down? You can still do that, can’t you? Poor little thing.”

  She was beautiful on the outside, yes, but I had learned that true beauty had nothing to do with outsides. I gave her a once-over and wondered, How are her innards?

  It was funny. I began to laugh.

  The coaxing pressures against my hand ceased. Her fingers drew back like cobras. I didn’t care. My laughter bounced off the surrounding brick surfaces until it was swallowed by the cafeteria thrum. Her filed nails nicked away from sanded wood.

  “You haven’t called anyone.” Her words were torpid.

  My hand still hung elevated between us. It looked like a slap and she recoiled as if feeling the sting. Fury bloomed across her cheeks. Although I’d never been brave enough to attend one of her plays, something told me that these were not the exaggerated clownings o
f stage emotions, nor were they the controlled modicums of feeling she parceled out to teachers and friends. These were emotions, real ones created expressly for me, and they made her look, for a moment there, naked—a sight not exactly erotic, but nonetheless exciting. Her erect posture telescoped down, the encouraging angles of her face puddled, the youthful smoothness of her eyes and lips crimped into sour whorls. It was a horrific unmasking for sure, but for me “horrific” was a concept long since depreciated. Like the return of the boneyard blues, laughter spewed from my lips and got all over her.

  “Fucker,” she said. “I’m glad you ended up in the shower.”

  I only laughed harder.

  “You know what? It was my idea. I told him you stunk.”

  I wiped away tears with leather.

  “I was glad Woody did what he did to Heidi, too.”

  Reflected in her eyes was the hallway door and daylight behind me, an infinite and tempting channel. I exercised facial muscles to work out the soreness of hilarity and tried to refocus. It did not shock me that Celeste had been complicit in Woody’s persecutions—she had only been too prissy to dirty her hands—but I could muster little more than impatience. At the same time, her livid disfigurement rang inside me a note of caution. She was an enemy now, and there was no greater enemy to make than that of progress.

  “Freak.” Her red lips shone. “I don’t need you, freak.”

  “I have to go,” I said. I sniffed at the lunchtime odors and started away. There was a person of much greater importance I needed to see. When I reached the end of the hallway I looked over my shoulder. She looked good, even hunched in anger and panting with defeat. I nodded at her. “Hey, the Spring Fling—knock ’em dead.”