Rotters

by Daniel Kraus

  “Hazel,” she said. “Hazel Geraldine Gatlin.”

  She held out her hand but I was already running down the same roads that had guided me to and from my reckless revenge. Now the revenge was theirs. This was what Boggs had been laughing about each time he had read Bloughton’s online news. What I’d done at the school had led to a manhunt, which had likely stagnated until yesterday, when a family by the name of Gatlin had shown up in town muttering an accusation that local citizens were all too ready to believe. It was not difficult to guess who had finally tipped off the Gatlins.

  The blaze was evident before I hit Hewn Oak. I hurtled through woods made rapturous by the red glow and burst into a clearing where everything was rippling with fire—the woodpile was on fire, Harnett’s truck was on fire, and flames shot from the cabin with waterfall velocity.

  The yard lamps, the nailed windows, the extra locks—every feeble attempt to keep out the world’s dangers now melted and stewed. I shot through a wall of men made mute by their own savagery and slung aside a stranger who held in one loose palm a container of gasoline. Seconds later the hot gusts became scorching and my own hair felt like searing tendrils of steel. With a shoulder I rammed the door and it exploded inward and I went tumbling into a fortress of burning books. I felt fire biting like ants across my arms and brought myself to all fours. Black smoke churned like the fur of a thousand beasts being pushed to slaughter. The molten lead of sweat rolled down my back.

  Direction no longer existed. I kicked through flaming books, shoved past smoldering bundles of crackling newsprint. I was at the window, the glass bubbling and slopping over my wooden fingers; I was at the counter, where fire poured upward from the sink; I was at the fireplace, where, strangely, there was no fire, just a noxious cloud of embers pouring down the chimney’s chute.

  My toes, blistering. Boiling liquid smoke, pouring down my throat by the pint. I lurched through a ring of flame and bounced off the side of a mattress that was partially engulfed, and there was a shape curled up near the wall, the Resurrectionist, in position for the cremation he’d always wanted. I fell upon him and hauled him up the way I had hauled so many Diggers over the past few nightmarish weeks, only this one I treated with far less care, slinging him over my shoulder while I made for the window.

  The bars, the ones we had foolishly installed, blocked my way. I took hold of one and immediately drew back—it was white hot. I dropped Harnett and spun around but there was no escape. The doorway through which I had entered was a stream of liquefied ceiling. I felt Harnett spasm against my shin and I crouched to protect him from the firestorm that was coming.

  A red flash of light caught my eye. On the bed, where Harnett must have curled next to it in his sleep, was the Root. I had her in my hands in seconds. She felt wonderful; I felt whole. I pressed her warm metal to my cheek and laughed. I hurried back to the window and lodged her between the bars. Harnett had installed them well, but this was no regular shovel and I no regular shoveler. We worked together in a sublime madness. I saw one bar snap from its lodging. I heard the Root cry out as she irreparably warped. Another bar was knocked loose. The instrument’s handle fractured; the wood began to grind into shavings against the head. A cloud of fire licked at my neck. My laughter turned to the sobs of goodbye. I had destroyed the Root, but the bars were gone.

  Her gnarled remains disappeared into the smoke. I struck the window glass with my fist. It detonated on contact. I lifted Harnett and crammed him through the opening, heedless of shards, and punched at his shoulders and hips and knees until he slipped from sight. Behind me half of the house collapsed with a sound like a massive felled tree, and the blast of fiery air tossed me to the wall. Things all over me were ablaze. I looked up and saw the suck of poison air coursing through the busted window. I followed its path.

  It was no cooler outside. I landed on top of Harnett. The cabin shuddered and leaned over us. The roof began to slide. A thousand nails pinged as they snapped in two. My hands took Harnett’s shirt and hair. I felt his hands moving, too, and his legs cycling senselessly. We ran. The cabin flattened somewhere at our heels and hot shrapnel glued itself to our skin. I was still on fire. But running. I steered us over the tumorous terrain of a backyard hollowed and filled a million times over. Random patches of grass were burning. There was a slope; we stumbled. There was water; we clawed our way into it.

  The Big Chief River, where Harnett had once caught fish with his hands, now caught two new wiggling creatures. Knees, waist, ribs, neck—suddenly the water was over my head. The fires on my clothing turned to gray clouds. A mouthful of wet soot, the weight of my backpack dragging me down. We were moving. A current now pulled us. I wrapped an arm around Harnett’s shoulders. He had me by the neck. The sinewy ripples of the water were black, red, gold, blue, purple, yellow. Somewhere behind us an inferno drew white outlines around the faceless men gathering to see us drown. In their fixed postures I saw not just the horror of what they had done to us but what we had done to them, the befuddling inhumanity of what we’d done to those they’d loved. It hit me like loss. No other loss compared. The Root, reduced to cinder. The irreplaceable archive of newspaper and books, now ash. The scores of Foley’s metal CDs, now puddled plastic. The locked safe containing our every last asset, now dividends for bickering arsonists. The sink calendar, all those days made irretrievable. And the garden, the beloved onion plants, shriveling to wire, the pungent white smoke weaving with darker threads.

  35.

  SCOTLAND WAS A GIANT cemetery. Each patch of grass was a plait of knolls—filled holes, that was what it looked like to me, an entire country seeded with bodies. We were just two more, moving above the ground but just as dead.

  And then we came back to life. I saw it in him first, the way he looked to the skies in the morning astonished as an infant; the small smiles of genuine pleasure as he purchased pasties from a bakery and self-consciously murmured “Cheers”; the bottle after bottle of water he gulped down and peed out, as if flushing all venoms from his system. We spent the first week in Glasgow, walking slowly through streets smelling of rain, and with each day the creases in his skin loosened and dirt fell out. Sometimes I’d brush it from his coat while he slept.

  We had little money. After escaping from the Big Chief we had spent a silent night shivering under thorned bushes, huddling against each other and holding our breaths each time we heard a distant noise that might forewarn men or dogs. When morning came, Harnett led us south. By dusk we were at an isolated intersection somewhere near the Missouri border, digging with our hands exactly fifteen paces from the base of a giant, three-forked tree. Four feet down was a metal box, and inside, wrapped in a towel, was a secret reserve fund of nearly five thousand dollars.

  I had never been on an airplane before, but forty-eight hours later I was on the last and longest leg of an overseas flight. The passport I had kept updated my entire life finally found use; I peeled it from the bottom of my green backpack and presented it to the agent sopping wet. The backpack and trumpet were our only carry-ons, and the surviving half of my mother’s bone I hid inside my pant leg before cruising through security. The plane was full and I sat in J, he in M, each of us wearing XXL tourist tees we had purchased from an airport gift shop in Detroit. A flight attendant gave me headphones and I watched sitcoms I’d never heard of. I fought to control a urine stream in a tiny, jostling lavatory. I fell asleep wrapped in a thin flannel blanket, luxuriating in the safety of knowing my father could see me from where he sat.

  The cash wouldn’t last. We both knew it. Discussing eventualities would get us nowhere, so we didn’t bother. That first week in Glasgow we slept in hostels and ate at pubs, filling our bellies with jellied breads and mushy peas. Harnett looked like a drinker and they never stopped offering him pints. He smiled and waved them off and the silence continued.

  We tended to our wounds. My cough wasted into a sore throat that left its mark in a new coarsening of my voice. The cuts on my hip and shoulder probably neede
d stitches, but we survived with storebought pharmaceuticals. Miraculously I had no serious burns, though every inch of skin that had been exposed during the fire went pink and peeled. Harnett’s smoke inhalation had left him with a bronchitis that would not quit, but day by day his cricks and limps resolved. With time, our worst traumas scabbed over.

  The stories didn’t begin until we were on the train to Edinburgh. Harnett craned his neck to watch exhaust pump from industrial columns. From the scrap metal lining the rails to the mongrel dogs lifting their legs against funny little shrubs, everything seemed to delight him. Even more vitality returned to him when we stepped onto Edinburgh’s cobblestoned streets. He pointed at the castle looming catastrophically at the top of the hill and laughed at my amazement. We ducked into a door among the zigzagging storefronts and bought cups of soup and carried them to a side road, where Harnett exclaimed happily upon finding an underground bookshop still in business. He rummaged among the dusty stacks and haggled with the portly owner and finally handed to me a clothbound stack of pale yellow pages: The Diary of a Resurrectionist, 1811–1812, To Which Are Added an Account of the Resurrection Men of London and a Short History of the Passing of the Anatomy Act.

  “If you’re going to start a library,” he said, “that’s book number one.”

  It had cost the equivalent of three days’ worth of food, and I metered the words out as if they were equally as essential. The complaint as to the scarcity of bodies for dissection is as old as the history of anatomy itself, it began. Harnett spoke aloud these words as I read them, and there was a pride in his expression I had never before seen. Maybe the Diggers were finished and maybe they should not have existed for as long as they did. But they had come from noble stock, and this was what he wanted to show me.

  We traveled by foot to Greyfriars Churchyard, where Harnett showed me the giant barred mortsafes erected to keep out the resurrection men, or sack-’em-up men, as they were also called. These cages, as well as wrought-iron coffins, cemetery watchtowers, and buried barbed wire, proved the mettle of these men—despite the unsavory work and the threatening mobs, they risked it all, for money, yes, but also for the snatching of life from the jaws of disease and injury. Their bravery was matched by those surgeons who hid the illegal remains in their flower gardens or beneath their floorboards. We were not the first victims of mob violence—that was what Harnett was trying to tell me.

  “And that’s how it began.” Harnett tested the mortsafe’s strength. “The sack-’em-ups over here became the Diggers over there. A few generations later you have Lionel, and one generation after that, you have me.”

  “And then me,” I added.

  Harnett stood and brushed his hands on his pants.

  “But it’s over now,” he said. “You have to know that.”

  I tapped my wooden fingers and surveyed the necropolis.

  “Just because there’s not as many of us anymore? That’s your reason?”

  “Because there’s no heroism,” Harnett said. “Not anymore.”

  So this trip to the beginning was really the end. I read my book and tried to come to terms with the feeling of emptiness. We slept in parks and took remainders of food that locals and tourists seemed only too happy to give us. One day Harnett led me to a farm and made me watch the cows eat from their trough until I couldn’t take the mystery any longer.

  “I give up.”

  “The trough,” he said. “Look closer.”

  We moved near enough to feel the heat of the bovines and hear the flies that zipped about their tails. The trough was coffin shaped. Further investigation proved it to be one of the legendary iron coffins, repurposed as a feeding bin so long ago that the farmer probably had no idea of the relic’s consequence. There were other examples: a former “putrefaction house,” built to allow bodies to fully rot before burial, was now a confectionary; those nicks in the side of the church were bullet holes from a gunfight between competing sack-’em-ups; those red stains betrayed a parking lot’s former life as a slaughterhouse before it was shut down when the overcrowding of graves led to pestilence.

  The mysteries of the past were solved in our every waking moment, and Harnett hoped that the knowledge might make giving up digging easier for me. As we walked away from the farm, I realized that my sense of loss could not possibly compare to his.

  “I only wish,” he said one night as we sat at a carnival erected in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle, “that I could’ve seen the pyramids. Dug there like Lionel. Now, those were tombs.”

  “Well,” I said, “we are in Europe. We could start heading that direction.”

  He shrugged. “Little low on funds.”

  “That’s nothing new.”

  We bought another corn dog and split it.

  “When the anatomy laws were finally passed here, common knowledge was that it marked the end of grave robbing.”

  “It was kind of the beginning,” I said.

  “That’s correct,” he said. “It was the start of the real work. But ours is a chapter they’ll never know how to write. We were the reason things were missing or misplaced. Lionel used to say we were the thieves of stillness.” He took a deep breath. The lights on the rides began flashing.

  “Can’t we ever go back?”

  “Kid, look at us. We’re down to nothing. So no,” he said. “Well, that’s not entirely true. You can, if you want. What happened at the school—you know they’re pinning that on me.”

  Seen from Edinburgh’s serenity, the boy who had wreaked such repugnant vengeance was a stranger. Giant waves of shame shook through me. It had been I who had chased Harnett from Bloughton, I who had burned down his home. Harnett let me twist in silence for several minutes, yet I felt no malice. If anyone was inclined to forgive Bad Jobs, it was my father.

  “So what about the Gatlins?” I finally asked.

  “Until they have my body, they might come after you.”

  “Let them.”

  “That’s easy for you to say.”

  “I know how to run,” I said. “I know how to fight.”

  “The fighting has to end sometime.”

  “It will,” I said. “With me, I’m the last one.”

  Harnett stretched and leaned against the rock ledge at our back. Pink clouds held back the rain and the air smelled like sugar.

  “Everything we learned from Lionel, this is where we learned it.” He scanned the sky and looked more placid than I had ever seen him. I knew instantly that if I returned to the States alone, this was how I wanted to remember my father. “What Boggs said was the truth. We were brothers. We were.” He looked at me, then at his feet. “I should have come for you. I should have found you.”

  Regret hurt so badly that my fingers, those that remained, went numb.

  “I’m sorry.” As insufficient as it was, it was all I could say. “Harnett, I’m sorry.”

  “Hey, kid,” he said. “Call me Ken.”

  36.

  WE DRANK OUR TEA on the front steps of an old church after awakening from a night in the park and laughing at the patterns the grass had left on our faces. Fog hung close to the ground, smearing the morning streetlights, and so it was a great surprise when a young man emerged from the haze. With his shoulder bag and secondhand jacket he looked like a student, but it was his American accent that all but confirmed it.

  “One of you Ken Harnett?” he asked.

  We glanced at each other over the steaming rims of our paper cups.

  “Oh, that’s awesome,” the man said. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”

  Harnett was instantly suspicious. “Really?”

  “Really! I’m an American!”

  Harnett and I shared another glance.

  The guy laughed a little. “I guess that’s probably obvious,” he said. “Anyway, I’m with the Study Abroad program. Engineering. That’s not at George Square, unfortunately. It’s over at the Kings Buildings, couple miles south of city center. You know it?”

  Harn
ett nodded.

  “Awesome, awesome. It’s always awesome to meet a countryman! I’m from North Dakota! But anyway, anyway. I have something for you.”

  He reached into an inside jacket pocket and withdrew an envelope. It was stained and wilted, as if it had traveled a long distance to reach us.

  “I’ve got a little job-type thing at the mail center and a few days back this thing came in, inside a bigger envelope, and it had these special instructions. It said it was for an American guy named Ken Harnett who was over here with his seventeen-year-old son. And it had a list of the places where you might be hanging out. And here’s the craziest part. There was money. Fifty bucks. I’m not kidding, like a fifty-dollar bill just taped to the bottom of the letter. Most guys maybe just would’ve pocketed the cash but I was thinking—”

  Harnett’s hand was out. “Give it to me.”

  “Oh, right.” The guy looked down at the letter somewhat forlornly. “I’ve been to every hostel and park within like twenty miles of here. The cemeteries, too, for some reason.”

  Harnett snapped his fingers. “Give it.”

  The guy shrugged. “Not that the British guys wouldn’t have done the same thing, but a fellow American—”

  Harnett swiped the letter from the guy’s hand and went about tearing it open. The student was too surprised to be offended.

  “I wish we could give you something,” I said. “But you got that fifty, at least.”

  “Yeah, hey, no, that’s cool, it’s just awesome I found you, you know? Now I got a story.”

  A few more niceties were offered, but it was clear that the conversation was finished. Eventually he made an excuse about classes and scooted away.

  Harnett looked like a dying man just informed of a cure. He pushed the note into my hand. In a familiar elderly squiggle, it read:

  K./ J.—

  Msg. fr. Lahn—Lio. dec’d. No funeral. Have arr. flowers.