Rotters (22 page)

It was a question that the rest of Foley’s discs tried to answer. He had meticulously labeled each CD with artist, album, release date, and one of a dizzying array of genre variations that more than satisfied my itch for specificity: heavy metal, black metal, atmospheric black metal, doom metal, death metal, sludge metal, gothic metal, Viking metal, Celtic metal, speed metal, thrash metal, power metal, progressive metal, industrial black metal, industrial post-black metal, symphonic extreme metal, pagan folk, grindcore, goregrind, dark ambient, experimental ambient, ritual drone, noise drone, ritual rhythmic noise, and depressive rock. They included bands like Opeth, Moonsorrow, Pentagram, Motörhead,
High on Fire, Type O Negative, Hammers of Misfortune, Wolves in the Throne Room, Primordial, High Tide, Waldteufel, Ulver, Nachtmystium, and Agalloch. The musicians in these bands often credited themselves by mysterious aliases like Necroabyssious, Panzergod, Defier of Morbidity, and He Who Gnashes Teeth. When I asked Foley where these bands were from, he listed countries all over the world. My life, for so long confined to Chicago city limits and now to limits even more constrictive, suddenly felt part of something expansive. Sometimes at night I was saddened that the music of my trumpet was being replaced, but I covered up those old tunes, as well as the memory of my mother’s needling, by thumbing the volume button on the Discman and letting the metal rattle me until I was numb and sleeping.

Foley was particularly passionate about a band called Vorvolakas; when he told me they were from Chicago I rushed home to listen. The album was called
Greifland
, and from the first moments of sonic wash and grinding guitar I found a fearless embrace of the dark and doomed that mirrored my present life. The chorus of the title track gripped me by the throat and I pressed back on the Discman again and again until I had it fully memorized. The words offered no escape; instead they dared darkness to do its worst. As the night overtook the cabin and the batteries ran out on the player, the words crashed through my memory over and over:

For the first time ever, I had not been able to wait for lunch so that I could somehow express to Foley the inspirational effect of these lyrics. My hands had trembled around my fork and spoon—I had so much to say and no way to say it. Was chanting
We became oblivion
the key to vanquishing myself until I was a perfectly anonymous nothing just like Foley? I had watched Foley stuff his face until finding the courage to stammer these important three words.

Foley had grinned, showing me the corn dog ground by his teeth. “You listened,” he said. Then he’d hunched in and spun the most amazing tale—the time when his mother had taken him to Chicago to visit his aunts and he had been introduced to Vorvolakas by an older cousin who knew a doorman who didn’t bother with IDs. When the band took the stage the crowd coalesced into a single rippling beast. The peal of the guitars was deafening, ratcheted along by the machine-gun fire of the drums. The front man screamed as he played, his head banging so ruthlessly that each whip of his long hair terminated in an explosion of sweat. It was astonishing and staggering; it was the only real metal show Foley had ever attended. “I’m going back sometime soon,” he’d vowed. “I check their website. I know when they’re playing. One of these days I’m heading back if it means I have to hitchhike. You bet your ass.”

It was a delirious fantasy, this escape to Chicago, but Foley’s firsthand details made such an escape seem almost possible. Suddenly there was a path back to my mother’s home, only the road was treacherous and required acceptance
of a frightening oath:
We became oblivion. Caused our own extinction
.

“I checked their MySpace last night,” Foley said, “and they’re playing up there in like six weeks. Now, driving’s out of the question. And I don’t have the money for Amtrak, and I know you sure as hell don’t. So I was thinking Greyhound. If we can get over to Monroeville, we can hop a Greyhound. Those things are cheap as shit. You ever ridden a Greyhound?”

I’d ridden a million buses in my life but never one that went any farther than the suburbs.

“Fair warning, then, it’s supposed to be pretty much the worst possible way to travel. I read that there was this Greyhound heading up to Canada and right in the middle of the night this guy takes out this knife, this big fucker of a Rambo knife, and starts
chunk chunk chunk
, decapitating the guy sitting next to him.” Foley shrugged. “I bet they barely blinked at Greyhound headquarters. I mean, it’s just reason number seven thousand and thirty-three why Greyhound sucks, right? Anyway, we’re taking Greyhound. But you get the aisle.”

“I don’t know about this we,” I said, thinking about how many slashes I would be adding to the sink between now and then, and how many of those slashes would correspond with late-night digging—unscheduled events that didn’t fit comfortably around trips out of town.

Foley turned on me instantly. “Take it or fucking leave it.” He rounded his shoulders and picked up the pace. “I’m seeing Vorvolakas on December tenth in Chicago. You want to stay home jerkin’ off your dad, hey, have fun.”

Foley had been volatile all night. In the locker room after Ping-Pong, I had been dizzy with the perfume of Celeste’s attentions; diminishing beneath those feelings were shame and
fear over what had really happened to Heidi—the imagined manners of her debasement were numerous and graphic. Foley didn’t give a shit about either girl. He had pushed past me out of the gym and ignored me the rest of the day. I couldn’t be certain that he trailed me to rehearsal room B, but in the parking lot a half hour later he had savagely unleashed every rumor he’d ever heard about Celeste, most of them involving the maniacal measures she took to protect her triumphant future (example: she made Woody wear two condoms at once). Foley couldn’t understand why I would risk my burgeoning invisibility by interacting with
Celeste Carpenter!
and courting the wrath of
Woody Trask!
I needed Foley worse than he needed me—we both knew it—and so I choked out an apology. Appeased, he suggested that we walk around that night and scare trick-or-treaters—after all, he said, Halloween was a metalhead’s favorite holiday. Desperate for his good graces, I had shown up at eight o’clock in front of the school as promised, and we’d begun slouching through Bloughton, not attempting to scare a single kid.

And now I had pissed him off again. “Maybe I’ll be able to go,” I lied. “I’ll just have to check with my dad.”

A woman passed us, holding hands with two little boys, one in a Darth Vader getup, the other one wearing the forked tail and horns of Satan. Both Vader and Satan were sobbing, their night of sugar prematurely curtailed. I remembered being that young and ungrateful.

Foley hit me on the arm.

“The graveyard,” he said. “Oh, man, we should go to the graveyard!”

For reasons unknown, I had never considered that Bloughton might have its own cemetery. I wanted to keep everyone at school as far as possible from my life with Harnett,
and the idea that there was intersecting territory was unnerving. I opened my mouth to protest, but Foley was walking and talking too rapidly.

“If you want to be metal, hangin’ in a graveyard is like a prerequisite. Oh, shit, I should’ve brought my speakers! Have you seen
Return of the Living Dead
? It’s basically about a bunch of metalheads and there’s this one part where they go hang out in the cemetery and they’re blasting music and getting wasted and this one chick gets naked and starts dancing on top of the graves. It’s awesome. It’s like the best scene in the movie. This is before the chemical rain starts and turns all the bodies zombie.”

I recognized the shapes long before Foley: the telltale trees spaced like weight-bearing columns, the banner of purple lawn speckled with stones like a sprinkling of snow. By the time Foley pointed, I was already counting rows of markers and using multiplication to gauge the property’s size.

“You haven’t seen
Return of the Living Dead
?” He shook his head and stopped at the edge of the chest-high fence. “I don’t understand what’s wrong with you.” I gripped the iron with one hand and liked how it felt, cold and quiet. Beyond, the necropolis was even colder and quieter. That was good; I felt myself nodding approval. This was a place that held its secrets.

My palms itched for the Root.

I wedged my foot between the bars as my father had taught. Already I could see the Johnson grave that figured into local lore. Years ago a hit-and-run driver had killed two local middle schoolers in separate incidents; it would be fascinating to see the damage for myself. But halfway over the edge I caught Foley’s expression and stopped. Now that he was faced with the reality of stone and shadow, his fantasies of
grave dancers and toxin-fueled zombies were being devoured by the same fear that seized so many.

I lowered myself back down, my heart pounding. What had I been thinking? What exactly had I been planning to do? I felt Foley’s hesitation burn toward shame. The next thing he’d do would be to lash out. I moved quickly to rescue us both. “I don’t know about this. The whole thing kind of creeps me out.”

“Really?” He looked relieved. “I guess we don’t have to do it. I mean, if you don’t want to.”

“Yeah, let’s not,” I said. But my longing remained. Right there, over that gentle rise, under cover of that towering oak—the perfect spot.

He turned and leaned his back against the fence. I followed suit, grateful to cleanse my vision of the underground temptations. Even masked, children did not venture this close to the town graveyard, but we could hear them booing and giggling from nearby sidewalks.

“You watch out for Celeste Carpenter,” he said finally. “She’s just going to get you into trouble.”

“I know.”

“And you ask your dad about that Greyhound.”

“I will.”

He shook his head, his blond hair catching the moonlight. “Can you imagine it?” He grinned at me. “Vor-fuckin’-volakas?”

I smiled and nodded.

He made devil’s horns with his fingers and shouted the opening lyrics to our favorite song. Instinctively I shrank away. Such loud noises so close to the dead—Harnett would not approve. But Foley continued and after a moment I laughed and joined in. We charged forward to find ears to hear our song, bellowing at a volume only Halloween made acceptable.
“We
became oblivion,”
we screamed, managing to scare a few kids after all. The words were true: this nothing, this absence of pain, was all I had ever hoped for in Bloughton, and here it was.

T
HE NEXT LINE:
CAUSED OUR OWN EXTINCTION
.
It’s the opposite of the self-esteem crap they feed you at school, but it works just as well—as soon as I embraced the fact that my existence mattered little to anyone, including Harnett and God and Two-Fingered Jesus, I stopped hurting. I walked into the cabin insensate to pain and told Harnett that the place was a dump. He swallowed down the last of his onion and started pushing stacks of paper against the wall. Moments later, I joined him, and he gestured to indicate his preferred order. It was the beginning of a great change. Day by day, the state of the cabin improved. The cleaning products under the sink were put to use. Dust was swept from horizontal surfaces. The smoky blot of the hearth was scrubbed vigorously in turns by both of us. The upside-down bucket formerly used as my barber chair was righted and filled with solvent for mopping. I went over the floor once; when I returned home from school that day my father was emptying out the bucket for what he said was the fourth time. The floor, though it was cement, shone.

I had not seen a bottle of liquor in weeks. Harnett appeared to exist on a diet of water and onions, though now when he did cook he usually made a portion for me. I still was not crazy about how he tossed me steaks and sandwiches I was expected to catch with bare hands, but it was a minor complaint. Even
better, he had taken to giving me an occasional allowance, and with the money I made weekly hikes to the grocery store and bought things like Stouffer’s frozen pot pies, Cocoa Krispies, and Cool Ranch Doritos. Seeing these for the first time, he slammed the cupboard in derision and grabbed an onion. That night I awoke to a crackling noise and saw him huddled by the fireplace with gutted Doritos bag in hand, licking Cool Ranch dust from his fingers.

The more he offered to me, the more I gave back. After returning home one afternoon to find him cursing about a noteworthy pawnshop that had relocated without a forwarding address, I told him that he should get Internet access. It wasn’t the first time I had said it, but it was the first time he didn’t sneer. He sat in his rocking chair with arms crossed while I struggled to explain the Web. Harnett waved at his wall of books and insisted that he had all the research he needed, and besides, no Digger wanted anyone to be able to trace their activities—why else did I think they relied so heavily upon an elderly reverend in an unreliable jalopy?

Somehow, though, I coaxed him to drive us to the public library, where we waited in the computer line for ten embarrassing minutes while staff and patrons wrinkled their noses. Once seated, I opened the browser and I entered the information about the missing pawnbroker. Within seconds I found the reopened location, just a couple of towns over. Harnett pulled a crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket and began plotting the theft of a librarian’s pen. I told him to cut it out, then hit print. Harnett handled the Google Maps page like a rare document. I smiled to myself, reminded of how my mother had carefully stapled and filed her “important” e-mails.