Rotters (19 page)

“Dick,” he muttered. But he was smiling.

We ate in silence for ten minutes, the best ten minutes since a bus hit my mother.

“I’m glad you quit band,” he said at last, picking at his teeth with a pinkie.

Trying to quit had felt to me like kicking nicotine must feel to smokers. It also had the same conclusion: it didn’t work. The weather had not improved since homecoming night, and by the time I had walked into Ted’s rehearsal room earlier that morning, I was cold and wet and shivering. Ted had been there, early as usual, deep in his supply closet.

“I quit,” I had told him.

It had been dark in there, yet light had caught his round glasses.

“You’ve got heaps of talent,” he said.

Of course you’d say that
, I thought.

“You’re a good performer.”

So are you
.

“I hope your father didn’t put you up to this.”

You wish it were that easy
.

“This saddens me, Joey.”

You don’t know sadness
, I thought, remembering what the trumpet had meant to my mother. It was a sentiment worthy of someone ancient and weary. Yet my outward reactions were those of a child: I shrugged and tried to flee.

“Don’t take another step.”

Ted’s voice had deepened considerably. I turned around at the entryway.

“You don’t want to be in Ted’s Army, fine,” he said. “You might have your reasons, and I suppose it’s even possible those reasons are valid. But I’m not going to have it on my conscience that something I did drove away a player like you. So
here’s what’s going to happen. You and I, we’re going to keep practicing.”

I blinked at him.

“Nothing to say? Well, that’s just as well. I’m prepared to say everything. You come in when you can make it. Most days I’m here from six-thirty in the a.m. until six-thirty in the p.m. You show up at either end of that spectrum and I’m all yours. We’ll practice. You and me. Just to practice. All unofficial, whenever you have the time. If there’s some peer pressure involved in your decision, forget about it—they don’t have to know. If you’re following some parental edict, Joey, listen to me. Parents don’t always know best.”

Boris would have insisted I take the offer, but I doubted that I could any longer achieve a song other than F, F, F, F, F.

Ted nodded. “It’s settled, then. You come by when you can. I’ll be here. And if anyone asks either of us, we just tell them the truth: Joey Crouch quit.”

He raised an eyebrow and waited. It was beyond my powers to disassemble such an unimpeachable plan, so I just nodded. He made a shooing gesture, returned to restocking his closet, and then spoke with his back still turned.

“What are you still doing here? Go, go, go, go, go.”

So, yes, I had quit, though only in a manner of speaking. I hated to begin my friendship with Foley with a lie. But what other options were there?

“Because, no offense, but band was part of your problem,” Foley continued. “Everyone goes to your stupid football games, we’re all required to attend your gay pep rallies and supergay assemblies, and you’ve all got those megagay costumes and big-time-gay hats. That ain’t helpin’. You don’t seriously like that music anyway.”

“I like jazz,” I said.

“I suppose you also like shuffleboard and prunes.” He closed his eyes and shook his head. “You don’t like jazz.”

“I do,” I insisted.

“You just think you do,” he said. “You don’t know any better. No offense. But no one’s shown you what real music is. I think you’re ready for something a little more aggressive. Welcome to high school, Joey Crotch.”

I thought about some of the jazz players Boris and I had listened to who had sounded plenty aggressive to me, like Peter Brötzmann and Mats Gustafsson, but I kept my mouth shut. The Judas Priest patch on Foley’s butt was my only clue. “Like Judas Priest?”

He shrugged. “For starters. There’s a whole underworld of bands out there that will smash your fucking face in with their fucking boots,” he said, his eyes shining. “Music that will rip out your rectum and stuff it down your throat.”

“Great,” I said.

He pointed a finger at me. “I’m gonna post you some tracks.”

“We don’t have a computer.”

“Then I’ll burn you some discs.”

“We don’t have a player.”

He ducked his head in exasperation. “I’ve got an old Discman. I’ll give you the damn thing. Just listen to the CDs. Keep an open mind. And prepare to kneel at the steel throne of the mighty bloodbeast.” He raised his pointer and pinkie fingers, both slick with po’boy grease, and attached the makeshift horns to his thrashing forehead, his blond locks swishing about his grimacing face. I couldn’t help laughing.

The laughter became a choke. Someone was tapping on my shoulder. Black shirt, brown sweater, pale skin—it was
Heidi Goehring. I choked some more, for a moment imagining slobbery bits of my po’boy landing upon her thick glasses. Amazingly, instead of flinching she only smiled politely and swished her strange bowl cut at a nearby table.

“Joey, you’re the only one who could’ve possibly answered the bonus questions,” she said.

I shrugged in wretched bewilderment.

She arched her eyebrows. “Calculus?”

Yes! Calculus! I nodded with enthusiasm. Though we didn’t share periods, we both suffered through Coach Winter’s shaky stabs at education, and almost daily I saw Heidi poring over her textbooks during lunch. Usually she was with a few friends, other honor roll girls with their homework fanned alongside their food, but today the seats around her were empty. And I was being summoned.

I glanced at Foley. He eyed Heidi suspiciously but said nothing.

“Okay,” I said to her. “All right. Okay. All right.”

As if by teleportation I found myself sitting down next to her, and out of her mouth were spilling the letters and numbers that made up that week’s extra credit. She pointed and asked questions. I found myself shaking my head and correcting her. She groaned and called herself stupid. I told her not to feel bad, it was a tough one. Her thin lips twisted into a satirical smile and she peeked through the sides of her glasses.

“Okay, smarty,” she said. “Let’s do the next one.”

As I led her through the proof, I began to get the feeling that she already knew the answer. Twice I made nervous mistakes and she was quick to fix them. I thanked her sincerely for her assistance, which just made her chuckle some more.
The whole thing was making me feel dangerously relaxed. I glanced at Foley to make sure he still existed and that this whole day wasn’t a dream.

He was frowning in another direction. I followed his gaze and found Celeste sitting at a table, gabbing with friends. A few seats away, Rhino, demolishing food with his ponderous jaw. Next to him, Woody Trask, still cruelly separated from his girlfriend, cracking his knuckles over an ignored tray of food and staring directly at Heidi and me.

“What’s wrong?” Heidi’s finger hovered over a differential equation.

“No,” I said. “I mean, nothing.” I felt the focused heat of Woody’s concentration. “I should probably go eat.”

“Oh.” She sounded offended. “It’s not like Winter curves these things.”

She thought I was trying to protect my grade point? That was all wrong, but my tongue was inferior to the task of sorting it out. The chair coughed as I stood.

“Who are you looking at?” she asked. To my horror, she twisted herself around to search the cafeteria. I stumbled over the chair trying to extract myself from her table.

Heidi’s head whipped back to her homework. She removed her glasses and smoothed down her hair.

“Woody Trask is looking at me,” she said in hushed wonder. Whether this statement was meant for me to hear, I didn’t know or care. I tripped my way across the floor, my face burning, my chest stinging. I sensed something whip by my face. A mustard-slicked bun bounced off my chest. A brownie vaporized against the back of my head. I didn’t bother to check which of Woody’s lackeys had done the throwing. All that mattered was how Heidi’s kind eyes had lost all interest in me the second she removed those glasses.
I dropped into place across from Foley and pointed my face at my cooling po’boy.

Almost immediately Foley’s tray screeched from the table. I looked up and met eyes that had gone dark and guarded. I wanted to say something. He didn’t know what this single lunch had meant to me—tonight when I carved the day into the side of the sink it would be more than just another line.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he hissed. “You like getting kicked around? You want that shit to continue?”

“No,” I pleaded. “No.”

“I can’t help you if you ignore every fucking thing I say.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know he was watching, I didn’t know—”

“I’ll bring those CDs.” His formerly buoyant voice wilted with sarcasm and distrust. He peered down at me as he passed. “You got brownie in your bald spot.”

N
ATHANIEL
M
ERRIMAN WAS BURIED
in Lancet County, Iowa, just south of the Minnesota border. Harnett and I arrived at about four in the afternoon. We left our tools in the truck and wandered together onto the main path. The Lancet County Cemetery had no fence, but we paused at the sign stating the house rules: no pets, no littering, closed at sundown. Nothing at all about digging up bodies.

Just enough daylight remained to make a pass of the plot. But as soon as we crossed the threshold I was deluged with memories of the suicide victim bloating in her pool of black liquor, and within instants I began specifying—

—and soon swirled within a heightened reality of such absurd levels that I began to totter. Harnett righted me by the collar and told me to look about solemnly as if I were hunting for a loved one’s grave. Eager for a good grade, I frowned and tossed my head in a frenzied search.

“Easy,” Harnett said. “You look like you’re having a seizure.”

The gravestoned horizon was an exposed jaw of foul teeth. We instinctively hugged a row of mausoleums, their barred doors allowing slivered glimpses of stained glass and locked drawers. Breaking into these, I realized, would not involve any digging. I whispered my brainstorm to Harnett.

“First off,” he responded in a fake conversational tone, “whispering like that it makes it look like we’re planning to rob a grave or something.”

“Sorry,” I whispered. He glared and I tried again more casually: “I’m sorry.”

He gestured at one of the crypts. “They’re usually not worth the effort. You chip a lot of cement and bend a lot of iron and break a lot of glass. There’s no time to repair that mess, and that’s the most important thing, kid, the most important thing of all: never let them know you were there.”

“Duh.” I said it because I could feel the security cocoon of my specifying wear away, and beneath, waiting patiently, was the dead woman, her maggot eyes, the chasms of her slashed wrists. Quickly I scanned the cemetery for Two-Fingered Jesus and thought I saw him proselytizing to huddled stones.

“You want to spend a few years in prison?” Harnett asked with a fake cheer that emphasized his ill temper. “Either of us gets caught and it’s third-degree criminal mischief. And that’s progress. A hundred years ago, you’d be strung up by your neck and publicly whipped. If you think something similar isn’t possible today, then you’re reading the wrong newspapers.”

The pathway forked. Harnett paused to gauge each path’s twists.

“How old is the Merriman grave?” I asked.

“Been under two years.”

“Why’d you wait so long?”

“Wasn’t listed in the obits. Had to piece it together from other sources.”

This meant there would be no fresh mound, no telltale bouquets. “So what, we’re going to read every single gravestone to find it?”

“Open your damn eyes.” He pointed at the ground. “See that?”

“Sure.” I paused. “I see grass and leaves.”

Harnett chose a path and charged ahead. He pointed at another seemingly random patch of ground. “Okay, there. See?”

I saw only more grass and leaves and told him so.

He pushed a hand through his hair. “New graves rise slightly. You know this. After some time, though, the opposite happens, they settle and sink.” He pointed yet again. “When leaves fall, they come right out and
tell
you where to look, they practically hand you the bodies. If you can’t see this then you better wait in the truck.”

The subtle clue, when I finally noticed it, was repeated all over: leaves caught in gentle depressions otherwise imperceptible to the naked eye. It would be the same with thawing
snow, I realized with a surge of excitement. This was what Diggers did—they used nature’s clues to solve mankind’s puzzles.

Encouraged, I picked up speed and unexpectedly collided with Harnett. Pain burst through my nose. He whirled around and dropped into a praying position before a random grave.

“Damn, Harnett.” I rubbed my injured nose.

“Get down here,” he said.

I read aloud the name on the stone. “Oliver Lunch.” I snorted. “Nice name.”

“Will you get down?”

I kneeled and dutifully tried to summon images of Sundays at church with my mother. Nothing came to me. Harnett sneaked a glance over his shoulder and then retreated to Oliver Lunch. “You never know what you’re going to get, kid.”

I took the cue to peek over my shoulder. In the fading light, at the top of a nearby hill, a woman in a black dress embraced a shiny obsidian gravestone, her posture of genuine grief putting our feigned sorrow to shame. Even at this distance it was clear she was sobbing. I blinked at Harnett.

“I thought you said it’d been two years,” I said.

“It has been. To the day.”

It dawned on me. “The anniversary.”

He shook his head and exhaled. “Well, shit.”