Rotters

by Daniel Kraus

  Love or hate: I couldn’t decide which I feared more. After these bizarre nights of tenderness I would often receive apology by way of gift. Boggs would stash the cart, march the two of us to an upscale Beverly Hills eatery, and wave a wad of cash in the maître d’s face until we were seated, usually as far away from other patrons as possible. There we would bask in the splendor of a dim dining room’s live pianist or an outdoor veranda’s warm Pacific air. Instinctively Boggs would dial back his persona just enough to fool diners into believing he was a garden-variety meth-head. Even I’d be fooled. Sitting there with my ranks of silverware and heated towels, I would look around at the businessmen with their PDAs and the shiny newborns in beechwood high chairs, and I would fancy myself one of them until hearing the slurps of Boggs licking the inside of his wineglass. One meal we’d be eating decadent dishes like candied bacon suspended from piano wire and the next we’d be crapping ten feet from where we wiped the ants from our pizza crusts.

  His grudge against the Monro-Barclay Pact began to make sense. The West Coast had indeed quickened his corruption. These furloughs among the very rotters he most despised—actors, agents, celebrity chefs, even snooty waitstaffs—proved how nevertheless desperate he was to gain their attentions, which was precisely the larger purpose of the Rotters Book. Each time he turned his camera upon a Californian corpse, it was as if he were a paparazzo taking unauthorized and unflattering shots of unsuspecting subjects. But such was the tabloid photographer’s charge—to expose how everyone looked the same once the makeup was off and the lights were out.

  Five-star restaurants were not the only strange places he took me. At least once a week we’d visit a public library. Like Lionel and Harnett, I, too, suspected that the ultimate distribution of the Rotter Book would be online, and Boggs was indeed a savvy user of the Internet. He’d lock his shopping cart to the bike rack or book drop and weasel his way in front of a monitor along with myriad other homeless patrons. Sometimes I would look quickly enough to find him salivating over the website of some Iowa newspaper. I didn’t need to read along to know that the aftershocks of my revenge were still being felt.

  It was while he was in one of these libraries that I made an important discovery. Not wishing to be party to his inevitable expulsion, I sat against the cart beneath a palm tree. The twine used to secure the quilt over that long-hidden cargo scratched at my sweaty neck until I impulsively pulled it down, ripped free the bindings, and unrolled the blanket. Beneath was not the termite-riddled lumber I had expected, but history’s finest instrument: Harpakhrad.

  Everything Lionel had said was true—the multi-beveled blade of iron and gold, the braided handle of petrified branches, the fantastically bejeweled scarab—but no poetry or paean could convey such splendor. If Lionel’s mythic stash of riches truly existed, nothing in it could rival Harpakhrad. The only indication of wear was a delicate shading where Boggs’s hands had once fit. It wasn’t difficult to guess why he no longer used it. This was a tool of the gods. Even Boggs, in his delirium, questioned whether his current work fit that description.

  Yet Lionel and Harnett had been wrong about Harpakhrad’s fate. Boggs had resisted selling it. Instead he clung to his master’s greatest gift. Suddenly I saw Harpakhrad and the Rotters Book as two halves of the same whole, the former exemplifying what Boggs could have been and the latter epitomizing what he was. I concealed the instrument with the blanket and twine and slumped into its shade, covering my face with fingers of both flesh and wood. I, too, had two halves and this was the one I had chosen.

  30.

  DESPITE THE ABSENCE OF my sink calendar, I knew that I had been with Boggs for a long time. It was summer—even in California, I could tell the difference. The bikinis got smaller, the convertibles went topless, and the grave dirt sweated loose to such a degree that it seemed to leap out of our way.

  And just as I became inured to the textures and temperatures of the West Coast, it was over. I awoke to the sputtering of a rusty hatchback filling our alley with exhaust. My discombobulated brain scrambled to make sense of the threat. We were near Colma, California. Located about twenty minutes outside of San Francisco, it was well known as a place where the dead outnumbered the living thousands to one. Known as the City of the Silent and slapped with the ironic slogan It’s great to be alive in Colma, the town was home to eighteen cemeteries, and the celebrities buried there ranged from Wyatt Earp to Joe DiMaggio. Boggs, in one of the fugue states that typically followed a frenzied night of digging, had ranted all night about his many adventures in Colma, despite the fact that we had spent the evening in an anonymous corner of one of the lesser grounds. But perhaps we had taken photos of someone famous, after all, because here was a person, maybe a relative, gunning his engine for revenge. Vengeance: it gave life purpose. Something about this rang familiar to me, though I didn’t know why.

  Then washer fluid squirted from the hood and the wipers fanned sludge. Boggs grinned through a crescent of cleared window—another stolen car. He honked the horn in a pattern probably intended to be recognizable and tipped his top hat out the window.

  “Let’s get a move on.” He honked some more. “Move it or lose it.”

  A trash bin helped me up. My legs shook and I looked down at the emaciated bones, the emphatic bands of gristle. They did not look ugly to me; rather, I took pleasure in my increasingly whittled shape. Day by day I looked more like the characters in the Rotters Book. It felt very Hollywood, this desire to be shapely and famous. Everyone out here felt this way. At long last, I was normal.

  “Giddyup, son. We’re already packed.” I noticed in the car’s rear compartment the rickety shovel, our sacked belongings, the canisters of film, the quilted cradle of Harpakhrad. “Me and you, we got a book to finish.”

  Light-headed with equal parts unhealth and excitement, I stumbled to the driver’s side window. Boggs had already crawled aside so that I could take on the role of designated driver. He patted the seat. Flakes of dead skin salted the stained fabric. Boggs brushed it away and chuckled.

  “Dig the Diggers.” His voice gurgled with the sludge of meth. “Final chapter. What do you think? Ain’t that poetry for a poet?”

  I followed orders. Miles peeled away like meat from bone. There were as many variations of landscapes as there were colors of decay. A wasp zipped into the car as we crossed the Columbia River and Boggs let it bite him twice so he could suck out the poison and rub it into his gums. Mostly he hummed and stole one-eyed glances that I didn’t like. There was one Digger, after all, whose inclusion in the Rotters Book had not yet been discussed.

  Our first stop was near a military training center in the state of Washington, and as I dug Boggs curled himself against a nearby tombstone and paged through a battered Ray Bradbury paperback that he had peeled from the bottom of a Dumpster. I didn’t protest; after overindulging on the drugs he’d stockpiled for the trip, he looked worse than ever. Half of his face had been swallowed by a raw-looking rash erupting with yellow pustules, and he mumbled incessantly as he pushed his nose into the book. My impression of Bradbury was that he was not a humorist, yet Boggs chortled until his blue eye gushed water.

  I unearthed a Digger named Aberdeen. Boggs was too preoccupied to operate the camera, so I took over those duties, too. Aberdeen looked bad in the photo, the leathery hood of his head shriveled in defeat. In Utah, I looked upon the remains of Copperhead and my finger paused over the camera button, hazily recalling the photo I had taken long ago of Harnett and the severed hand. That photo had never seen the light of day, and this one shouldn’t, either. Its alignment in the book ended up crooked; I couldn’t bear to look when pasting it in. This was not right. Something about this was not right.

  Next we went to Texas to disinter the man known as Boxer. Standing above his grave with the shovel, I started coughing and continued until I choked. Boggs looked at the tears the coughs brought to my cheeks and laughed until he too was sputtering. Only a day away was a man called Wolff. His grave was
well fortified: a steel casket sheathed within a concrete vault. I chipped at the caulking with a fastidious patience I did not feel. Behind me, the flipping of Bradbury, page after page. While I coughed, Boggs vomited, and I smelled the familiar scent of urine when he became too absorbed in his reading. Yet his good eye danced, and he laughed even while sleeping.

  With Wolff’s photo pasted into the book, we took after a man called the Dragon. Pennsylvania, however, was a long way away. My cough turned into a phlegmy hack that lived deep in my lungs. It was soon joined by diarrhea. It felt like the return of the boneyard blues, and we had to pull to the shoulder repeatedly. Days were spent flinching from the imagined threat of Harpakhrad, nights were defined by the size of the headache that crowded my brain. Sunlight scared me. Human voices threw me into a panic. Hallucinations of hideous beasts resolved themselves to be people on bikes, dogs on leashes, kids on swings. When I cried out at some macabre vision I saw racing up to the side of the car, Boggs raised his head from his book and nodded as if it were progress.

  There wasn’t much left of Bradbury. Boggs had used most of the pages to light our fires and wipe his ass, and all that remained was a single story printed on just nine pages. The story was about a man who begins believing that his own skeleton is plotting against him. I knew this because every day in the car and every night in the cemetery Boggs read it aloud. At first he mocked it as he did everything else, but after a while he read it with the piety of the reborn, marking paragraphs with a thumb as he flipped and compared them to previous passages. I began to notice him prodding his torso and limbs with his fingertips, pushing aside muscle so that he could feel the skeleton beneath.

  One day he found a knife inside a half-empty bucket of fried chicken.

  I’ve got to get out of here, I told myself.

  At first he only used the point. He bunched his pant leg at his knee and made tiny perforations up and down his shin.

  “It doesn’t hurt,” he whispered to himself. “It doesn’t hurt, that’s incredible.”

  A few nights later I was pulled from sleep by squealing noises. I rolled over and squinted through the fire until I saw the flash of flame on steel. The knife waved hello from where its point was inserted between two of Boggs’s ribs.

  Each tiny tooth was a spark.

  “Look, son.” He breathed quickly through his nose and further peeled back his ruffled shirt. “It doesn’t hurt. You know what that means?”

  I squeezed shut my eyes. Day by day the shocks dulled into nauseating routine. He read his nine pages and bled all over them. Brown wreaths of blood stained his clothes as well as the car’s passenger seat. Meanwhile he became impatient for the rest of the Diggers to meet their ends. The Apologist, who remained in a vegetative state in Virginia, irked him the most. “Maybe we can help him along,” Boggs suggested often enough for me to know he wasn’t kidding. We could aid the downfall of Brownie and Screw and Fisher, he enthused, by raising the suspicions of their local coppers, just like what happened to Under-the-Mud. Harnett and Lionel he appeared to be saving for last.

  At last we reached Pennsylvania and photographed the Dragon. We set up camp nearby and waited for the Diggers to die. I waited for Boggs to die. He kept both eyes on me, too, until one night he popped the lame one out with his thumb. I saw it bounce once and land sizzling in our fire.

  “Oh,” he said. He leaned forward, withdrew the organ, and set it in his lap in order to waft away the smoke. After a while, he became very sad and held his face in his hands, crying softly. It was nearly an hour later when he heaved a brave sigh, stood, and buried the eye in a shallow hole at the edge of the woods. There was something about the ritual that reminded me of Grinder’s burial. It wasn’t something I was supposed to see; I rolled over and told myself that none of this could be happening. But then daylight came and his right socket was like a child’s mouth, happy and cavernous.

  31.

  IT WAS THE BASEST cruelty that led us to Wyoming. Crying John had long ago disappeared into the mountains, probably to die, but defiling the corpse of his mutt was still within our power. The idea of the camera’s flash documenting her transformation from beloved companion to thing of grime and bone—it was too much. Upon entering the alleged graveyard, I wondered if my heart would hold out. I prayed for cardiac arrest, that simple biologic state that should have claimed my mother instead of a city bus. While I looked for a Two-Fingered Jesus to hold me, Boggs got down on all fours. He wasn’t sure where Foulie was buried, but he gnawed the grass of a hundred graves and made educated guesses. Each one was incorrect, but we photographed bodies all the same.

  He read, I dug. I had mastered his hook-and-pull method, but when he wasn’t paying attention I still liked to do things the old-fashioned way. I pried the casket lid in a method one part Boggs, one part Harnett, and leaned in to examine the body.

  A Rat King—right there in front of my face. I only barely held in the scream. This could be another delusion. I leaned forward. It certainly looked real. The corpse’s face and upper body were entirely obscured by gray fur, yellow claws, russet tails. Breathless, I leaned closer and tried to count the number of intertwined bodies but got lost at twenty-two. I saw razor teeth larger for the decomp that ate their faces. Hundreds of ribs like lace. Dozens of claws like embroidered fringe. It was complex and magnificent and monstrous.

  Somewhere above, I heard a page turn and a roll of chuckles.

  It had been a Rat King that had foretold the destruction of Harnett and Boggs’s partnership, the wrath of the Gatlins, and all else that followed. What annihilations did this uncovering portend? I lowered my head to its many faces. My heart seized when it spoke.

  Whispers, whispers, of things and people I had forgotten.

  One thing was for sure: if Boggs saw, there was no telling what he would do. I used the crowbar to try to push the omen toward the foot of the coffin, but the tails and legs were too ensnared in clothing and flesh. Clamping my teeth, I took hold of the network of creatures with my hands, but it held fast. Its whispers grew louder.

  “You fixing each other’s hair?” Boggs shouted.

  “There’s nothing,” I heard myself croak. “Nothing here worth taking.”

  “Then take the shot. Climb out. Refill the dirt. If you want, I can hold your pee-pee later when you whiz.”

  Another page turn, another giggle.

  I tore my eyes away from the Rat King and checked the Polaroid camera hanging by a strap from my neck. There was no way to take this photo without revealing to Boggs the presence of the many-tailed monster. Somehow I knew that would mean the end of me, and then I would never be able to respond to the whispers, whispers, whispers.

  I heard the paperback smack the ground. “Lord, son.” I heard him struggle to his feet. “Here I come.”

  It wasn’t something I thought out. I lay down on top of the corpse, obscuring the Rat King, slung my face to the side, and closed my eyes. Boggs only glanced at the photos anymore; maybe he wouldn’t notice. The camera’s flash was hot against my skin. Seconds later I pocketed the photo and was replacing the casket lid, bursts of phosphorescence fading from my field of vision.

  As I filled in the hole, I was surprised to find that I was crying. I scooped away the tears but they kept flowing from some mystery reserve. It wasn’t until I was mounting the evening’s Polaroids that I recognized the tears from the days following my mother’s death. They were mourners’ tears, only this time I mourned myself. It was my own face that I was pasting inside the Rotters Book. Joey Crouch was dead.

  The Rat King didn’t believe it.

  I continued to weep while Boggs wheezed through the delirium that passed for his slumber. I didn’t want to be dead; I wanted to live. The realization came as gently as the dawn. Boggs’s ultimate mission was one of suicide, and now that I had the blade poised upon my wrist I found myself unable to slash. I couldn’t go all the way with him. And if I couldn’t go all the way, what was I doing here?

  The Rat Ki
ng beseeched in multitudinous tones.

  I said no. It was persuasive. I said fine, all right. I flipped the pages of the Rotters Book until it fell open to the woman I recognized. Yes, the Rat King whispered, and I nodded through my tears and replied: Yes. How deep I had buried the truth. How rapidly I had reduced myself to another bullied coward. My mission had been so simple: find the photographer and punish.

  There was only one means to do it, and it was not by his knife nor my bare hands. There was a code enforced by the very Diggers whose old bodies I now photographed. These men themselves were the Rat King, come to correct my path, their tales eternally intertwined for my benefit. The sacrifice of it stirred more tears. It was their voices that whispered, whispered, whispered, to the misplaced Son that they had found.

  It was difficult to veil my excitement. We rose as usual during the sun’s highest point. “Iowa,” he said, dropping his inflamed and alien body into the car. The command told me all I needed to know. He was ready to skip directly to the book’s climax. I felt sorry for him that he wouldn’t live to see his project completed. Then, in the rearview, I glimpsed in his eye the insolence of new secrets. Had he heard the whispers as well? Did he know what I was planning?

  We made our way. We did not speak. He readied syringes on his lap, licked crushed powder from the dashboard, sizzled himself in uncut substances until his last nerve endings were cauterized. He bled and choked. The car smelled of burned hair. Yes, the end was coming. Together we retreated to the remains of an Akron, Ohio, roller rink and sat gauging each other across a fire fed with grubby tinsel and collapsed limbo bars. After a time, Boggs resumed poking at his skeleton. When the knife reappeared I was only mildly surprised. For the first ten minutes he wept, but when that was over he made a sound like he was soaking in a bath.