Rotters

by Daniel Kraus

  TIME PASSED LIKE LABORED breaths: two days became three became four. I didn’t know when Boggs slept—his blue eye put me to bed and greeted me each morning. This unblinking sentry never faltered; I continued to bide my time until time got lost. It became progressively easier to forget Bloughton. Like any writer, I was completely absorbed in the creation of a book. Everything else paled in importance.

  During our time near the Missouri River, no holes were dug. It pained him; I saw him press the book into his chest as if it were his failing heart. When it became clear that each of us would extend the other’s life a little while longer, the first thing we did was return to his home base of California. The instant we left we eliminated the possibility of Harnett’s hunting me down. In his disheveled state, he wouldn’t be able to track me past Iowa’s borders. I tried not to care. Harnett was a lost cause; Boggs was the only Digger alive who sustained the same degree of passion as I.

  Our Hyundai ditched on an L.A. freeway and our various bundles transported to a new shopping cart, we took to the streets. Geographical separation from his brother affected Boggs in unpleasant ways. He became more irascible with each push of the cart. He sneered so hard his lip split up the center. He rushed around as if he were keeping us to some set schedule, disappearing sometimes for hours and coming home adrenalized and red-faced, coat pockets rustling with what I suspected were drugs. The only items he showed me, however, were frivolous. One afternoon he returned with a top hat he’d found rolling around a parking lot. He described how he had chased it for twenty minutes. He screwed it onto his pink and flaking scalp with obvious relish, his costume completed at last.

  Thus attired, he hastened us to his favorite marble farm and demanded from me a demonstration of what I had learned. It was our first dig. The western dirt was unfamiliar, but it didn’t take long to make adjustments. Nevertheless I longed for the Root. I hoped Harnett was getting some use out of her. I hated to think of an instrument of such quality sidelined.

  So I worked in the balmy California night with Boggs’s battered piece of junk. He squatted several feet away, tearing through my backpack in search of food. He pulled out the trumpet and with it blew a few flatulent noises.

  “I hope you’re not counting on morning reveilles,” he said. “I sleep late.”

  I was deep enough to not have to see his face when he withdrew the femur.

  “Now, what in the world is this?” He moaned softly. I imagined him stroking it with his small, dirty fingers. “That’s some leg, and I’ve seen my share. That’s a starlet leg, there. A runway model leg. No wonder you tote it with you. A leg like that could make you feel less lonely on a cold night, I bet.”

  The truth was that it did, but he was already chuckling enough without my helping out. Murderous throes gripped my shoulders, but I told myself one more day, one more day, and then I’d have learned enough. I sank myself in the soothing repetition of shoveling and was nearly four feet deep when a fist tangled itself in my collar.

  I spun and saw the surly mug of a toddler centered within the darker globe of a top hat. His tiny fingers channeled the iron strength of his entire physique. “What in creation are you doing?”

  I wasn’t shy about my skills. “I’m digging a hole, and a damn good one.”

  “A hole? As in singular? Son, I could dig three while you monkey around with this one. Come on. Out, out.”

  He lifted me by the collar. It was as if I weighed nothing. My legs pinwheeled and at last found footing enough to buffer my landing. I heard the distant thump of his feet, the sharp noises of his tunneling. I leaned into the hole with visions of hooking his throat with my arm but was stilled by the unparalleled frenzy of his motion, how speedily he sank into the earth, how his boxy shape expanded from a core of muscles even more grossly exaggerated than Harnett’s. Within moments he was obscured in a hailstorm of dirt, and all I could perceive was the surface of his top hat and the pig snorts of his breath.

  All at once he stopped. Soil still suspended in air came down in an orderly pattern. He pressed his palms into either wall. The muscles of his neck and torso thickened and he raised from the hole as if by hydraulic lift. He stood toe to toe with me and pointed downward. The brim of his hat tipped loam onto my face. “Destroy that dirt, son. Fuck it up. I know you can do it.”

  He pressed the tool into my chest.

  Once inside the hole, I expected attack. It didn’t come, and I was glad, for his furious descent had inspired me. I held the shovel as he had held it; I set my feet in his bowlegged stance; I worked my elbows in his curious star pattern. Nothing, no good, failure—and then powerful arms encircled me. I tensed for death but that wasn’t the plan. Ten thick fingers strapped themselves over my own and he moved his stubby arms atop mine. I resisted furiously; this man who had touched my mother could not be allowed to touch me, too. But then I began to understand his rhythms. They were the opposite of what I had learned from Harnett—these fitful movements felt as though we were trying to surprise the dirt with each attack. It was only when I saw the incredible results that his touch reminded me of Ted’s magical fingers. When Boggs backed off, I continued as if he were still there, gasping with excitement and hating myself for it.

  “You’re a gem.” His whisper was strangulated with emotion. “My boy. You’re a jewel.”

  But when I started to crowbar the casket and frisk the body for valuables, his proud humming constricted into shrillness.

  “The rotters were right,” he whined. The dirt walls around me jarred and crumbled from the impact of his pacing. “I’ve lost too much brain to be teaching. Son, look at you. It’s like you’re making love to the damn thing. It’s like you’re removing lingerie down there. Give me the instrument. Son, hand me the instrument. Now watch. Watch how I do it. You just got to be a man about it, that’s all.”

  I did a poor job of hiding my shock. There were two more graves that night, three the following evening, nearly two dozen by the end of the week, and it took every single one of them before my disgust changed to something like a grudging respect. Boggs didn’t bother uncovering the entire top third of a coffin. Instead he’d burrow a small shaft all the way to the head and use a noosed rope to garrote the corpse and reel it in. If the body got stuck along the way, Boggs had another tool: a long stick topped with a meat hook.

  “Abra-cadaver,” he’d say. “Apologies—was that in bad taste?”

  Once they were aboveground it got worse. California was filled with beautiful people who crossed the street when they saw us coming with our cart, and everything Boggs couldn’t say to these rotters with their boob jobs and hair transplants he said to their buried counterparts. He slung bodies so carelessly their extremities broke off. It was not rare for him to throttle the body lying defenseless before him. He’d punch it. He’d kick its teeth out. He’d yank out the transplanted hair and rip free the silicone breasts.

  “There’s a famous blonde,” he jabbered during one of these tantrums. “She’s about as famous as blondes get. I’m not going to name names, that’s not my way. But she’s not far from here, in a pink crypt that’s discolored from all the rotters who come to kiss it. Inside this pink crypt is a hell of a casket. Antique silver-finished bronze, champagne-colored satin. And if you were to peek inside you’d find that this blonde’s mortician had, well—how’s a gentleman to put it?—enhanced her for her funeral so her fans weren’t disappointed. Took me a while to get in to see it for myself. Took me years. But let’s just say that that blonde has been unenhanced.”

  During such routs, Boggs tore through shirts and coats and dresses with such fervor that he often came away with hunks of fetid flesh. It hadn’t always been this way—I could tell from the surprised look on his face before the expression curdled into something like glee. These handfuls of gore he’d whip scornfully into their faces, and I’d step forward to strike him down. Because what he did to the dead was too much like rape, too much like what he had done to my mother. This was a Bad Job, his whole li
fe was a Bad Job, and he was no better—or no worse—than Harnett. The shovel, if I had it, went up.

  And then he would haul out his camera.

  The camera—it took my breath away the first time I saw it. When he fumbled the rickety device to his dirty face it was all I could do to not grab for it. The button would click and the bulb would flash and moments later I’d be hunched in the grass, breathless over the developing image. Half the weight of the shopping cart was dusty old canisters of Polaroid film, and the sheer magnitude of his stock made clear the epic ambition of his project.

  It gave him great pleasure to see my interest. He’d stand above me curling his chapped and bleeding lips, and rub my shoulder with his little hand. “All the rotters, son, who piss on us and shit on us and expect us to ask for seconds? Me and you will take their bones and their meat. Their skin and their juices. Every last drop of their noxious effluvia. And we’ll make them look at it, won’t we? We’ll shove it in their faces. And for once they’ll see what they really look like. Isn’t that right?”

  In these moments I would forget his graveside atrocities and practically salivate. The book, I’d think. Show me the book.

  He rarely removed it from his coat, and he never removed the coat from his back. But if I hid my hatred and was well behaved, there were rewards. Sometimes while we huddled around a makeshift fire in some abandoned warehouse after rifling through a bag of restaurant trash, he’d lick his fingers clean and withdraw the bulging volume from its hidden pocket, always caressing its stained and misshapen cover before handing it over. Paging through it was like seeing both my past and future: the many dead faces Harnett and I had met while chasing Boggs, as well as the empty pages I would help fill, the legend I would help create.

  Too frequently the moments of thrilled contemplation were ruined. Near the center of the book were pictures of someone I recognized. Sometimes it took several seconds for her identity to sink in. Boggs would observe silently, the fire flashing on his remaining teeth, as hate rekindled inside me and the ache for revenge brought me to the verge of tears. One more day, I’d tell myself. I’d repeat the words of another teacher: Next lesson, then. When that didn’t work I would snake my hand into my backpack and pat the smooth bone as Harnett had once patted a corpse’s shoulder: Shh, it’ll all be over soon.

  29.

  IT WAS THE FEVER of madness met with mundanity. California was cinder-block strip malls and cars inching down inter-states like glittering bugs and airbrushed faces winking at us from blockbuster billboards. Movies were everywhere: acting workshops, head-shot studios, camera rental shops, costume warehouses, independent film sets with their crews of baseball-capped hipsters. Nights took on the wild hopefulness of entering a darkened theater; days took on the disoriented surrealism of exiting back into a misplaced matinee sun. The metaphor gave me the only logic to grab hold of—it was only a movie, only a movie, although the makeup was too good and the lead performance rapidly losing continuity.

  Combat dragged on. Nightly I tried to outlast him. But too many hours were spent laboring, too few calories went ingested, and without fail exhaustion weakened the key joints that kept me upright. He’d smile and twirl his top hat in his hands as I began to dip into sleep. For weeks he waited until I was unconscious before reaching for his hiding places—certain crossbars of the cart, secret crevices of his coat, the inner liner of his hat—and removing his slavish array of drugs.

  It was how he bested me each night and got the drop on me each morning. It was how he had outdug Harnett and me for so many months. It was also how he obscured the anguish of failing me as a teacher, an inadequacy that reaffirmed yet again his status as the lesser son. His damaged brain rearranged its purpose. So what if he couldn’t teach me? He could still use me.

  “Twenty-one graves, one night.” His tongue poked experimentally at the sores that outlined his lips. His face was puffy and damp with the expectation of binging. “Barely past jerk-off age, and that’s what me and Kenny did. But me and you? Me and you are going to demolish that. Twenty-five, easy. Thirty, even. Son, we’re gonna dig until our fingers fall off. Oh, apologies. I guess yours already did.”

  Electrified as he was by the sour steroids that coerced his innards, the dead had no chance. We broke twenty-one in little over a month. We got stuck at twenty-nine, and the prime number aggravated Boggs to no end, but after he upped his illicit intake eventually we broke that record, too. Such milestones fall easier when you don’t care about bodies—the dead, yours, anyone’s. All that mattered was the book. We never stopped working.

  Ultimately need overwhelmed discretion and Boggs let his drug routines unfold in full view. He went from grave to pawnshop and from pawnshop to street corner. He smoked substances with improvised paraphernalia and injected junk into his body with bent needles and wire coat hangers. Some pills he dry-swallowed, and others he crushed and snorted. He huffed poisons from Wendy’s bags and swiped cough syrup when that was all he could find. Elements of his personality loosened until they unraveled to nothing; other facets were isolated with a cruel and unexpected vehemence. He emerged from these druggings wild-eyed and licking at the blood that came dribbling from his nose, and without warning he would clobber me and grab me by the throat with his midget fists.

  The first time he did this I almost killed him. It was nearly four in the morning. I was beyond tired. The beat of a nearby dance club made my heart palpitate. That night’s underpass was dribbling water and turning our fire into steam. I looked longingly at the oblong parcel in the cart wrapped in its cozy quilt and asked Boggs if we could unroll it to keep us dry. Without warning he palmed a pellet of busted cement and threw it at me. I shot it aside with an elbow, but behind it came other things—rocks, cans, broken bottles, his knobby thumbs over my trachea.

  Kick, I urged myself. Punch, scratch, bite off his cheek. The objects he had used against me were close, and I could probably grab one and bring it to his skull. Deaths, his and mine, competed with each other for a few torturous seconds, but instead of welcoming the oblivion that would now become us both, I found myself despairing for one more day, one more lesson—I was a valedictorian to the end. As I began to black out, I felt a distant sorrow that I had forgotten the original reason for seeking out this monster. Something to do with a mother, maybe my own.

  “You’re watching me.” His face was as pink and moist as uncooked meat. “You think I’m doped up. You think I don’t see. But you forget, son: my brain’s out, it’s everywhere, and it’s watching from a hundred angles. You know what it tells me? That you talk rotter. You think rotter. That when I turn my back you’re the rotter there ready to stab it. You try. Hear me? You go ahead and try.”

  He let go. I tasted pavement. My hearing sealed off and my vision tripled. I saw three Boggses crouched near the road screaming at passing cars, three of him slapping themselves against the head and sobbing that they were the ones, they were the rotters. The entire incident was shocking. Less so the next time it happened. By the fourth or fifth of his abrupt assaults, I knew just to nod as best I could within the throttling. If it was during those moments that I felt most superior to this raving junkie, it was also when I most shamed myself with blubbering. No, I’m no rotter, I’m with you all the way. You’re going to be famous; all the rotters out there, they will bow to you before it’s over. You’re going to be the most sought-after man in the world and I want to be there to see it. Two-Fingered Jesus forgive me, I said all of this and more.

  One night after such an onslaught, I woke up to find myself inside an abandoned Burger King. A meager fire burned from the wreck of a napkin dispenser. Boggs was gathering scattered condiment packets for dinner and looking remorseful. When he saw me blinking he hunkered down close and tidied his gift of mustard and salt. He straightened his hat, fluffed dirt from his coat, and with great humility brought from his coat a grubby syringe.

  “Go on, son.” He brought it closer. I tried to look grateful but shook my head. He gritted his teeth
; he forced a smile and tried again. “I realized it ain’t fair, me taking all this for myself. Of course you can’t keep up. Apologies, straight from my heart. You’re my boy. My brain reminded me that. So go on.”

  I mumbled a distraction about Burger King, the smell of the grill, how I could still taste it in the air, couldn’t he? Embers flew as he swept his foot through the fire, took hold of the front of his cart, and sent it crashing into a barren soft-drink dispenser.

  “I can’t figure out what it is you want.” In the darkness I could only see his dwarf outline weaving through the remnants of conjoined plastic chairs, the dual pennants of his coattails, the jaunty slant of his hat. “You want to be like me? Able to dig ten holes, yourself, in half as many hours? Lift out big fat rotters with one arm? Or do you want to be like Mr. Resurrectionist—pushing around rotters like he’s planting daffodils? I give you everything, son, everything. Told you secrets I’ve never told anyone. Try to remember that. Won’t you? Won’t you try to be thankful? You know there’s nothing stopping me from leaving you behind.”

  One more abandonment was something I could not take, not so close to the book’s notoriety and our fame. I nodded in meek apology and made a show of enjoying a packet of mustard. The formerly backlit menu was still visible, and in my head I added up the meal deals, paid with cash, made change, and outlined a family scene starring a mother, a father, and a son—what a wonderful fantasy. Smiling, I curled up beside what used to be the fryer and feel asleep. An unknown amount of time later, I felt someone kneel beside me. I tensed for an injection from that filthy needle, but instead felt the tentative stroke of a thumb across my temple.

  “Don’t leave me.” His whisper was hoarse. “I’m trying so hard. There are things wrong with me, I know it. I think I told you about my brain, but, lord, it’s gotten worse. Something’s crawled in where my brain used to sit. It’s him, maybe. Both of them, maybe. They’re mad at me. I can tell because they’re holding on real hard. I don’t want them mad. I don’t want you mad, either. I just want to be their Baby, and you be my baby—see? See how it can be? We just need to stick together, do our job. That way we can show them what real love can do.”