Rotters (15 page)

I opened my mouth to tell him I didn’t know any Mr. Boggs, but then Harnett’s steps thundered inside and I heard
the crash of firewood spilling upon the hearth. Knox stood, swaying for a moment before catching himself with his crutch.

“You know what my great-great-grandma would’ve prescribed this child?” Knox called loudly to Harnett. “Another whiskey, probably.”

“A mellified,” said Knox. He glanced at me. “That’s a mummy been steeped in honey a good many years. There are those who believe eating a mellified has great medicinal value. Kind of like that drink I fixed you. Mite bit stronger, though.”

“Stop messing with the kid.” Harnett kicked the firewood against the hearth. “That crap never left sixteenth-century China.”

Knox began limping across the floor. I panicked at the thought of his exit—I felt certain that Knox and the strange knowledge he was privy to were key to explaining so much about Harnett, my mother, and me. “If you don’t think they were practicing that stuff on the bayou in my great-great-grandmother’s day, then I don’t know what to tell you. Called it mummy honey, she did. Ha!”

His breaths were labored as he hopped to the door and reached for his things. He draped a scarf over his bony shoulders and pulled a hat so low it flattened the tops of his ears. He sighed and hesitated at the open door, fishing a small set of car keys from his pocket.

“Not sure when I’ll be through again,” he said. “Plenty of Diggers to see, though, and I’ll keep sending along news.”

“And telling us all how damned we are,” Harnett said.

“That too, that too. By year’s end I hope to’ve brought a couple more into the fold. Maybe you too?”

Harnett looked grim. “Maybe.”

Knox patted my father’s shoulder. “Well. I hear tell there’s
a relocation coming up this winter. Could be before year’s end. I’ll send word.”

“I appreciate it.”

“And I don’t have any real news about—” Knox paused with his mouth open, then closed it. He shrugged. Somehow I knew who he meant: Mr. Boggs. “But what I do hear, it’s not good.”

“Okay. Appreciate it.”

Knox pointed at me but kept his eyes on my father.

“I know. I will. I will,” Harnett said, nodding.

Knox sighed again and nodded. He pivoted on his crutch and turned to face the dusk. He inhaled deeply before leaving.

“It may be a warm October,” he said, “but it’s going to be a hell of a winter.”

I
T WAS CALLED
F
UN
and Games. How something so innocently titled could end so badly, I don’t think anyone could have suspected. With the semester nearly half over, the boring but predictable fitness tests had finally run their course. That these mindless time-killers were finite seemed to befuddle the gym coaches, Mr. Gripp and Ms. Stettlemeyer, both of whom had spent most of the previous seven weeks relaxing on the bleachers.

“Starting today, we’re going to be splitting up the class,” announced Mr. Gripp. He was a tall man who went everywhere in a sweatshirt and gym shorts and had the drowsy bad temper of someone who had been doing this for way too
many years. “Girls are staying with Stettlemeyer here in the gym. Guys, you get your pick. You can do this unit Ms. Stettlemeyer has planned or you can come with me to the weight room and, you know. Do weights.”

We were scattered across the floor. Ahead of me several feet was Celeste. A circle of females kept her sealed off from Woody, who nonetheless beseeched her with puppy-dog expressions. I kept my eyes down and repeatedly told myself the same thing: Incorruptibles existed, all right, and Celeste was one of them—nothing anyone could do could damage her. My hand crept to obscure the yellowish remainder of my bruise.
Keep your distance
, I reminded myself, but it wasn’t because I feared her wrath. It was because I was afraid she would smell my cemetery reek, and that the wrinkling of her fine features would telegraph to everyone in the room what kind of monster I really was.

“Listen up, people! I’m calling my unit Fun and Games!” Stettlemeyer shouted from around the rubber-cased whistle she kept clenched in her teeth. She delivered everything in this fashion, which was funny enough when she was urging us to “Push it!” but downright hilarious when she was caught attempting to compliment someone’s hairstyle. There was snickering, but as usual Stettlemeyer was deaf to it. “Here’s what we can look forward to! Various light athletics! Volleyball! Badminton! Table tennis! Scooter ball! And we’ll change it up almost every session! I think you’ll be pleased by the wide variety!”

I certainly didn’t welcome the uncertainty of a “wide variety,” but the other option, the weight room, worried me even more. Located at the top of a narrow flight of stairs off the gym, it was an ominous space more or less owned by Woody and his ilk. I visualized dumbbells and weight racks
and other more complicated machinery, all twisted to cruel use against me.

Gripp hitched up his shorts. “Okay, everyone who’s coming with me come with me.”

There was a tense moment during which no one moved, and then Woody yawned, slapped Rhino on the back of his shaved head, and stood. In seconds boys everywhere were scuffling toward the weight room door. After a moment of herding, Gripp scanned the remaining crowd until he found the straggler, me, all the way in the rear. My skin burned as every girl in the room turned to face me.

Then Gripp shifted his gaze to where one other boy sat, on the far side of the group of girls. Like me, he was short and slim, but where my features were small and dark, his were large and freckled, and he wore his blond hair to his shoulders. He looked only vaguely familiar. Was he in my biology class? English? If so, I knew absolutely nothing about him. Well, I knew one thing: I envied his ability to skate by unnoticed.

Gripp screwed up his face as if it were his sworn duty to call out such miserable pussies. Then, maybe too old for such shit, he changed his mind and was gone. “Okay! Everybody! Calisthenic formation!” Stettlemeyer clapped her hands. There was groaning and sighing and sneakers squeaking from shiny maple flooring, followed by the mechanized configuration of orderly rows. I lurched and scurried and finally landed in the last row. I noticed the blond kid choosing a spot far from me and I was glad—by ignoring each other’s existence, perhaps we could escape the mirror images of our failures. Up ahead, Stettlemeyer cranked up a boom box and shouted, “Superhits of the eighties! Oh, yeah! Superhits of the nineteen
eighties!” The Pointer Sisters were fading out; Kenny Loggins was fading in.

“Jumping jacks!” Stettlemeyer yelled along with the synthesized beat. “One, two, three, and four! One, two, three, and four!” She began strolling along the ranks, clipboard and pen in hand. I heard her shout, “Name!” and heard a voice lower than my own respond, “Foley.” That was the blond kid’s name—Foley. He glanced my way and I quickly averted my gaze, yet everywhere else I looked was even more inappropriate: ponytails swishing, boobs bouncing, the hems of shorts swishing dangerously close to buttocks. I aimed higher, at the basketball hoop, and unsuccessfully pushed away the thought gnawing like a bug on my brain: all of these bodies, young and smooth and sturdy as they were, would end up in the ground, where their bones would be sifted through by a man like my father. Maybe a man like me.

“One, two, three, and four! Nice! Nice! Keep it going, ladies!”

Giggles erupted around me. I located Stettlemeyer and she was already wincing at her gaffe. I returned my eyes to the basketball hoop:
Keep jumping, keep jumping
. But I sensed Stettlemeyer’s approach and felt her tap on my shoulder.
Go away
, I willed her.
Can’t you tell what I’ve done? Can’t anyone?

“Name!” she hollered as quietly as she could.

I halted midjump. My body parts jounced; I felt humiliatingly male. At least forty feet were pounding down in near unison. With the gymnasium echo, it sounded more like one hundred. Thundering over everything were the ripping guitar solos and computerized backbeats of superhits of the eighties. I should not have been able to hear anything over
this commotion, much less a whisper, but perhaps my hours spent on alert in a desolate cemetery had sharpened my senses. Hissing through the ranks of female bodies came Stettlemeyer’s answer: my name, my true name, the only one I would ever have at Bloughton High.

H
ARNETT CAME HOME AROUND
eight, long after I had eaten a wholesome dinner of peanut butter and crackers. He made as much noise as possible tossing his gear into his room and tromping around, and I shot him glares between every math problem. Soon he was at my side, throwing wide cabinets in search of food. I smirked; earlier I had gone through the same futile hunt. Eventually I heard the thud of peanut butter, the jangle of a knife, the rustling of the bag of crackers.
Bon appétit
, I thought.

Instead of slumping into his rocking chair, he took a seat across from me on a stack of newspapers. I rolled my eyes and returned to my math. Despite my many absences, I was threatening to get an A in calculus, and that was exactly what it felt like—I was making a threat against Coach Winter’s insulting presumptions. The fact that he was the football coach made it all the sweeter.

Harnett began smacking his peanut butter and crackers. I gritted my teeth and faced my numbers again. Functions f, g, and h. The computation of the squeeze principal. Negative one is less than or equal to sine x is less than or equal to positive one. It was no use—his indulgent, expectant gaze weighed too heavy.

“Is there a problem, Harnett?”

“What’re you working so hard on?” he said through a mouthful.

“Calculus.”

“Calculus,” he said, swallowing. “That’s not going to be much help.”

“It’s going to be a big help to my grade point average, so if you don’t mind?”

He stuck a cracker into his mouth and ground it thoughtfully. “Now, geometry, we might find some use for that. When will you be taking geometry?”

I tapped my pencil in irritation. “Try two years ago.”

He nodded slowly. “That an important assignment?”

I shook my head in wonderment. “What? Who cares? You don’t care. Why are you asking me this?”

“Curious,” he said, picking at his teeth with a pinkie. “That an important assignment?”

I slammed down my pencil. The cardboard table did not give it the resonance I would have liked. “I don’t know. Yes? I guess so? I’ve missed so many classes now that every assignment is important.”

“When’s it due?” he asked.

I almost laughed at the absurdity. Since when did Ken Harnett become father of the year? “For your information, it’s due tomorrow morning. Second period. And if it’s not handed in precisely at the start of class second period, do you know what’s going to happen?”

He cocked his head in interest—a gesture I did not trust.

“What?” he asked.

“Well, I’ll tell you, Harnett,” I said, lacing my fingers in mock patience. “There are only so many assignments in a given semester, and each assignment is worth a certain percentage
of the final grade. Each time you are late, another certain percentage is taken off the grade for that assignment, no matter how well you do. And eventually, you end up like me, looking at the last eight weeks of class with absolutely no room for error.” I waved my paper. “Even if I nail this—which is more and more unlikely the longer you keep asking me questions—even if I nail it, if I turn it in any later than the start of second period tomorrow, the percentage taken off would make it mathematically impossible for me to get an A in the class.”

“And this is important to you.”

“What, getting an A?”

He nodded again.

I gave him a good hard stare. His eyes might have looked like mine, but the brain behind them could not have been more dissimilar. Good grades—no, perfect grades—were the only possible escape route from Bloughton. It had been my mother’s dream, and mine. I couldn’t expect the Garbageman to understand.

“Yes.” I snatched up my pencil. “It’s important to me.”

He planted his hands on his knees and gave me a sharp nod as if to say “Good enough,” and then rose and crossed the room, dropped himself into his chair, reached for the new stack of newspapers, and once again pretended that I didn’t exist.

I
T WAS A TRICK
. When I awoke, my calculus book was on the floor next to me—not where I had left it. I sat up and squinted at my watch. It was just past five-thirty. Harnett’s bedroom door was open and the fire had long ago died. I pulled on
some jeans and a hoodie, tiptoed across the cold floor, and peeked out the front door. The truck was still parked. Where was he?

The dewy grass darkened my shoes as I walked through the glossy violet of predawn. As I moved past the garden, I made out Harnett standing in the yard between the cabin and the Big Chief River, his right hand curled around Grinder.

The hole I had dug had been filled in. Indeed, its gentle rise looked uncomfortably like a grave. Harnett stood a good twenty feet to the west. It was too dark to see his face. I ventured another few steps. The water sounded like grinding glass.

“When you dig, time is against you,” he said from the darkness. “Time is always against you.”

Something about his tone made me think of my mother, his Val, and how time had thwarted all three of us.

“But you dig anyway,” he continued. “Because there’s something you want at the bottom of a hole, only it’s not a hole yet, because you haven’t dug it. Got it? Now. The Merriman grave up in Lancet County is just sitting there, waiting for us. We’re losing time and money every day. So let’s not drag this out.” With alarming quickness he drove Grinder into the earth. It made a sound like a sheathed sword and stuck there, wobbling gently against the dark sparkles of the river.

I squinted and yawned. Obviously the man was nuts. It was too dark to see much of anything aside from my breath. I hid my hands inside my sweatshirt and crossed my arms tight against my chest. “Can’t we do this later?”