by Daniel Kraus
The brutal motions I had been ready to execute caught in my joints. This was not the man I remembered. From the look of things, he was barely alive. My pause was lengthy; his grin widened, and among his miniature teeth I saw absences—two, three at least.
“You look mad, too.” His Southern accent seemed to have thickened. He still wore the three-piece suit, only now it was a lattice of tatters, and he pulled the flimsy lapels across his chest as if he was cold. “Not that that’s a bad thing. You need that mad-as-hell feeling. The rest of the rotters don’t have it, but it’s pouring off you like sweat. I knew it. From the moment I laid eyes on you.”
Cheetos bags, yellowed ad sheets, and condom wrappers melted into a wad that stank of burning rubber. My mother, my mother—I forced her back to the forefront. She was why I was here. As weak and infected as this man looked, he had done awful things to her.
“I only wish I could’ve spruced up a bit before you came. Still got my suit, but the rest of me—I’m ashamed. I know I don’t look so well and I’m ashamed.” He leaned back so his face slipped from the light. “There, now. Does that make it easier?”
Minute cusps of light still caught flaps of skin and lumpy growths.
He shook his head, scattering a minor constellation of sparks. “You’re not here to talk, that’s plain as day. You’re here to kill me. That’s really—I guess that’s really interesting. I guess I’m interested to see how you go about it.”
The words felt repugnant to me. Kill him? Never had I admitted such a thing. Killing had never been part of Harnett’s teachings, or Lionel’s, or any Digger’s of the modern age. But what else could I be doing here?
“Take your time,” he said. The throaty buzz of his voice, doubled and tripled by the concrete chamber housing us, felt like warm blankets. He leaned back against a shopping cart piled with indefinable objects. Blissfully the carnage of his face lost all definition. “It’s a big moment. You want to make sure you do it right.”
This was not at all the same as facing Woody, Celeste, and Gottschalk—as facing Bloughton itself. Those people and that town knew nothing about any underworld and could not possibly hope to defend themselves when that world overtook their own. Antiochus Boggs, on the other hand, was under the underworld; he moved in the shadow of shadows, in the margin of margins. There was nothing I could envision that the twists of his mind hadn’t already considered.
“Don’t feel bad. It’s hard. I know it is. It won’t be easy. And I can’t guarantee success. You gotta figure you’re going to at least lose a chunk or two. Might end up looking a little more like Uncle Antiochus than you planned. But what’s a chunk or two? Already down a few fingers, I see. What’s a few more?”
Even in the darkness, even reduced to one eye, he had not missed the wood supplementing my right hand. I imagined those impervious new fingers pushing into the rotten skin of his neck, past the supple perimeter of his extruding eye. Oddly there was no joy in the fantasy, only the disparaging sense that I was doing exactly what a dying animal wanted me to do.
“Did I make it worse? Son, forgive me. I’m new to this—having a son and all that. My brain and I are doing our best, I swear. Let’s make it real easy. Just follow my instructions and we’ll be under way. You want to have at me? Raise your hand. That’s all you have to do. Just raise your hand so I can see.”
Before I could stop myself I heard my wooden fingers scrape against the slanted ceiling of the underpass. Settling into my gut was an uneasy feeling that by following this simple instruction I had somehow fallen to distinct disadvantage.
“Excellent. Good. Now take a step. All right? Take one step forward if you want this to happen right now.”
Following these orders felt wrong, all wrong, and yet it was direction in a directionless moment. My foot came up and forward. I took a step. He was suddenly much closer. The blue ghost of the heart’s fire tickled my toe.
Boggs clapped once. “Look at that. You have expressed yourself, son. Now we know where we stand, you and I. That’s teamwork. That was satisfying to me. Was it satisfying to you? That’s fine, that’s fine, don’t answer. There’s no tricks here. No rotter bullshit. I’m all yours, son. Come and get me.”
Now, it had to be now, one second longer and I would be crippled with the fear of movement that had marked my life before becoming the Son. I swooned in a long, slanting step around the fire. I heard the distant note of a wooden finger ringing off of a shopping cart. The distance closed halfway; I raised fists.
“One thing.” He spoke quickly. “My brain’s got just one thing to say.”
The organs in my body continued forward and for a moment pushed against my ribs and belly. I swayed drunkenly and clutched at the air to keep from falling on him. Boggs was a small, dark creature scuttling somewhere below.
“That whatchamacallit,” he said. “That golden spike. I’d be remiss not to mention the spike. Oh, son. That there was a mighty difficult test. I’m sorry I had to do it—I’m sure you get plenty in school. But lord. Joey. Son. You did not disappoint. No one I ever known could’ve done that any finer. You probably didn’t even think of it that way. It was just a rotter you had to dig, some rats you had to rearrange. But there’s beauty in labor done right. I just want you to know that. Before we tangle. You’re a poet of the dirt. That’s what you are, son. A poet.”
It wasn’t the many-clawed feet of Millers Field’s rodent army that I felt. It was other hands, absent ones, my father’s, perhaps, that had been withheld from me after every dig. A distrustful glare—that was all Harnett had deigned to give me after I handed him the replacement spike.
“One night,” Boggs was saying. “Just a crazy thought, hear me out. I wonder what would happen if you gave me one night. The things I could teach you—I wonder if it’d be worth your time. Hard to say. Interesting thing to ponder, though, ain’t it?”
I shuffled sideways until I had a grip on the cart. For months, all those digs done without my father; for a sleepless weekend, my extravagant revenge; for days on end, the traveling and tracking that had led me here—I had worked so hard for so long, and had been so alone. An adult guiding my way again, it was all I wanted.
A swollen palm entered the firelight. “Easy does it, now.”
My collapse obfuscated the fire with dirt. Tiny embers melted upon my slick skin. A cockroach scampered over my knuckles.
“I’m not going anywhere, son. You have at me whenever you’re ready. But anyone can see you need rest. You look right tuckered.”
Crushing fatigue fought against the craving for revenge that had powered me so far. I would sit for a moment, fine; I would rest my muscles for a stretch, all right; I would crouch here and keep watch by the flames that reflected differently in his live eye than in his dead one. When both reflections dimmed, he would be asleep, and that was when I would strike.
A strange question came to me.
“What did you do with it?” I asked.
“What did I do with what?”
“The spike. The first spike.”
I heard the slither of a slow smile. A scabbed finger gestured at a battalion of generic canned foods. The glowing discs of their lids appeared to float.
“What do you think funded this feast?” he asked. “You get hungry, you just help yourself.”
27.
WHITE LIGHT—SHUTTLING CLOSER—THE sensation of floating—this was heaven and I had lost, fallen asleep first, and though I had failed my mother at least I would see her soon. A jolt ripped my eyes open. Sunlight. A rusted satellite dish. Shreds of plastic bags straining from barbed wire. Graffiti tags. A sky, cloudless and blue. A squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak.
Another jolt and I looked around me. I was moving. Bars on either side, the earsplitting shriek of an ungreased wheel—the shopping cart, I was folded inside the shopping cart. I tried to stand but my knees and elbows exploded into the pinpricks of sleep. My head was crammed beneath the push-handle, my body deposited atop various grungy bundles. My
knees popped above the top of the cart like those of a child too big for his stroller, and my feet fought for room with a tall pole of some sort propped at the end of the cart, swaddled in a stained quilt and cinched tight with twine.
Above the incessant squeaking, there was music. Boggs’s Adam’s apple made paroxysmal patterns as he hummed a jaunty tune and pushed me down the alley. From this angle I could see his scraggly black tie snug against his neck. Below, the ruffles of his shirt were sharp and hardened with filth.
His left eye rolled downward.
“Top of the morning, son,” he said.
An insistent pulse pushed against the spongy underside of his jaw. My gut cramped as I felt a nearly uncontrollable desire to strangle. I pistoned myself a few inches and reached forward with one claw. Then the cart jounced again—another stone passing beneath the wheels—and I dropped cruelly against the metal grate.
“Relax—doctor’s orders.” He hummed with renewed vigor and chuckled as the cart crunched through some sort of grit. “This ride is complimentary. Just my way of saying thank you for allowing me and my brain to enjoy one more resplendent day.”
I clutched the sides of the cart and tried to tell myself that it was okay that I had crumpled into sleep last night, okay that he had not in fact taken the opportunity to kill me. That had been his choice, not mine. One night was what he had asked for and, all right, I would give him that. Only that. There was an orange hue to the horizon; night was coming soon, and when it was through, so was Boggs.
With rubbery legs I rolled myself out of the cart. Boggs watched with some amusement as I hobbled and tried to parade feeling back into my extremities. I didn’t like looking at him. His stature made him look too much like a child suffering a full-body burn. It had to be drugs, or disease, or the corrosive cocktail of both. I didn’t have time to think it out—that unbearable squeak told me he was moving. I tried to keep up, but the waving of his coattails revealed the disquieting speed at which he traveled. I limped along, almost losing him in the gray mist of dust. We exited the alley, crossed an unmarked two-lane, and entered another alley. His lead on me grew. He steered his cart through the parking lot of a housing development. With no regard for the safety of his hands, he ripped aside planks before forcing the cart through a gap in a fence. We kicked through the mangled remains of a chainlink fence and booted aside dismembered chunks of easy chairs and TV sets. The wheels shimmied over gravel. The bent and beaten shovel that lay on the cart’s lower tray thrummed with pretend life. We were lost in some netherland maze. Caught between the long-forgotten inner walls of structures built too close together, gusts of wind twisted themselves into miniature tornados, and piles of refuse levitated.
It was twilight before we emerged again into open space. A large graveyard awaited us. Boggs tucked his cart into the sheath of a drooping barn and emerged from it with the rusty shovel. From far away, the tool looked like a cane, and when he paused at the cemetery gate to beckon me, the darkness momentarily turned him into Fred Astaire—cane tapping, vest peeking smartly from the slant of his suit, playful grin anticipitating the fancy footwork soon to come.
I followed but kept a distance. I didn’t trust myself to get too close. Once the dead had us surrounded, Boggs pirouetted and motioned to a line of small stones. They were as identical as school desks. Carefully I perched upon one while Boggs rushed forward to wipe the cobwebs from the side of a crypt the approximate size of a chalkboard. He tapped the board with his shovel to call the class to attention. I flinched—he was going to call me to the front of the classroom, I just knew it.
“Pop quiz.” He sniffed the air. “Tell me what you smell.”
Keeping my eyes on him, I raised my nose. I smelled graveyard—treated grass, tilled soil, wilting flowers, the mildew of stone.
Boggs nipped at his lips with tiny teeth.
“High school’s over, son. You’re going to need to work harder.” He stuck the shovel into the dirt and lifted his nose to the air like a starving dog. “That’s ZadenScent. That’s a name-brand grave disinfectant. I’m not placing blame, but you ought to know this. There’s also Garden Fresh, Chitterwick Original, and Poloxy Plus. Each one has its own special bouquet. ZadenScent always smells to me like apple pie and ammonia. You can’t smell that? There’s probably a million gallons of it pumped into this mud. They use it to tamp down odor. Folks at funerals don’t tend to like the smell of corpses. Of course, once it gets in the groundwater it’s worse than embalming fluid, but that’s not our concern. That’s fine by me. Rotters don’t deserve much better.”
Apple, ammonia—could I detect the hints? With a start, I realized my eyes were closed in concentration and I shifted from my gravestone desk, half expecting the shovel-edge to be at my throat. It remained plugged in the dirt; Boggs remained at his chalkboard. I admonished myself for taking my eyes from either of them. Never again.
“Lord, son. You don’t smell it. You honestly don’t smell it. What kind of trash has that brother of mine been teaching you? ZadenScent? ZadenScent? Son, you should’ve smelled it a half-mile away.”
I blinked at him, an unexpected feeling of shame creeping up my neck.
His compact body paced the front of the makeshift classroom. His live eye flashed at me with every quick lap. Without warning he wrapped both hands around the shovel and began pounding it against the crypt. Sparks dove into the grass, chips of stone flew; I recoiled. The clamor shot through the cemetery, stone to stone, as the shovel contorted and dulled with each strike.
He lowered the tool, the ruffles of his shirt spreading with each massive inhale. His eye found mine and mirrored my shock. He patted his free hand over the twitching muscles of his neck, the slobbery rim of his mouth. One finger found its way to an ear and probed as if expecting brain.
“Apologies. Lord. That ain’t right. That ain’t no way to teach. So you don’t know your ZadenScent. There’s worse crimes. I’m not mad at you. Honest I’m not. It’s that rotter I can’t forgive. He’s put you in danger. At risk. Those are rotter ways that I shall reverse. Mark my words. You’ve spent too much time tiptoeing through the tulips when you should be tearing holy hell through the mud.”
Partially settled, Boggs resumed his lesson. The concentration of grave disinfectant can tip you off to the caliber of any marble farm, how tightly the bodies are stacked, how packed the soil, the overall level of decomp. The brand is instructive, too; any caretaker worth his salt is using Chitterwick Original, which bodes well for the pedigree of the clientele. If you detect the lowly Poloxy Plus, the night might still be fruitful—the rotter who runs that marble farm clearly don’t give a flying fuck. Dig like a wild man because varmints will shoulder the blame.
Boggs was far more impassioned than Harnett. I couldn’t help it; I was thrilled. When he demonstrated how the different brands of turf could be judged by plugging them into your cheek like chaw, his animation was intoxicating. Behind his enthusiasm, however, awaited mania. When an idea wasn’t easily articulated he raged, usually at Harnett, sometimes at me, but always ultimately at himself, raking at his head and tearing loose petals of dead skin. He tried to tell me about using backhoes and I balked. Noisy machinery? On a dig? He bounded at me, staying just out of arm’s reach, and spat about how this was exactly what was reducing the Diggers to obsolescence, this unwillingness to make use of a machine when it just happened to be sitting right there, keys in the ignition. He raved on about “dynamic loads” and “impact loads,” terminology having to do with how much weight a typical casket can bear before it buckles. When he saw that I still wasn’t going for it, a flash of panic arrested his infantile features. Maybe he was as bad as they said, maybe his methods were offensive, maybe he was a rotter among rotters—all of these insecurities and more in a single twinge of his bulging red eye.
By the time he tackled etymology—why Shadygrove Eternal was a better bet than the Garden of the Holy Crusader—he was trembling in the glowering dawn, barking brilliant but half-formed theories
through a nonstop muddle of accusations and self-incrimination. He was crying and shouting and laughing, and the storm from which it all came seemed to push like tumors against his waxy flesh. My mind raced to catch the nuggets of knowledge before they were doused in the stew of his affliction. Then he abruptly quieted. He stood straight and lifted his chin. The rustle of the trees and the ringing of the crickets became as noisome as the din of a cafeteria.
“This is no fun. That’s the problem. This is no fun at all.” The blazing blue of his good eye resisted the warming dawn. “War medals? Rosaries? Toupees? Those aren’t why I dig. Those aren’t why you came to me, either. It’s because of that other thing. My purpose. Your purpose, too, maybe. You want to see it?”
He took hold of his lapel. Through the frowzy and time-worn fabric I recognized the rectangular impression of a book. My heartbeat accelerated. It was with abstract disappointment that I felt the nodding of my head and the dryness of my lips. Perhaps just a glimpse of the thing would slake my thirst.
The lapel settled flat. He smoothed it back into place.
“Not tonight,” he said. “It’s getting late. Maybe tomorrow. You think it’s worth it? One more day? How about it. One more day. Then you can have me. Fair trade, even steven. What do you say?”
Even then I knew that my revenge would wait. If I wanted to be the greatest Digger of all time, I could not be like the others, terrified of what Lionel called Boggs’s innovations. My head was already nodding as if yanked by a noose. He had me.
28.
