Rotters (33 page)

“Ice those muscles,” Harnett said. “Stay off your feet.”

“Will do.”

“We’ll be back.” Harnett looked at his feet. “It won’t be long.”

“Sure, sure,” Lionel said, nodding. He inhaled sharply and struck out with his cane. Briefly a hand clutched Harnett’s shoulder.

“You drive safe, now,” Lionel said.

The shoulder was released. The floor shook with the minute trembles of two feet, one cane, two feet, one cane. Gentle ripples disturbed two cooling cups of coffee. Christmas music continued. A distant bedroom door clicked shut. Moments later came the sounds of water hitting a sink, medicine-bottle clatters, mucus risen by a series of violent coughs. In his absence, the colored bulbs revealed everything.

T
HE CAB LIGHT HAD
long since been disabled, but Harnett let me rig the flashlight so it burned directly onto my textbook. The letters of each sentence scattered like insects.

“All those phone calls Boggs made, I know what he really wanted.” Harnett had been edgy since we left. His left knee bounced incessantly. I could see perspiration drying upon the steering wheel. “He wants the treasure.”

As determined as I was to study, some lures are irresistible. “Treasure?”

Harnett smirked, but kept his eyes on the road. “A career
like Lionel’s, he could be living in a mansion right now. Two mansions. It’s just not his way.”

“He kept it all?”

“Remember who we’re talking about. The man used to own the East Coast. You heard him talk about Scotland. His time in Egypt. He could fill a museum.”

“Where is it? Did you ever see it?”

Harnett shrugged. “Occasionally I saw things. Where it all went to, I have no idea. But everyone knows it’s out there somewhere.”

“So he’s just sitting on it?”

“What would you expect him to do?”

“Give it to someone, at least.”

“To who?”

“You.”

“Me? Why me?”

“Because you’re practically his—”

The word hung unspoken, tossing in the chilly air like our breaths.

Harnett’s expression, troubled for so many miles, loosened with a mild amusement. “Even if that were true, you’re forgetting that there were two of us.”

The pavement thumped beneath our tires with lulling regularity. Through the windshield, the enduring procession of painted road dashes. Beyond my window, the vacuum of night.

“I took your mother to a drive-in once. The movie happened to be about a cemetery caretaker. We thought it was pretty funny at first. This guy found out that if he put black pins in his cemetery map, the people who owned those plots ended up dying in freak accidents. He’s got all the power in the world: a black pin means death. I didn’t think much of it,
it was just some stupid little movie. But afterward Val was quiet, like it really shook her up. She said, ‘Didn’t you see the white pins?’ I didn’t know what she was talking about. She said, ‘There were white pins. He had white pins, too. If the black pins killed them, what do you think the white pins did?’

“She wanted me out of digging. It took some dumb movie for me to see it. If she could, she would give me a million white pins and I would just go scattering them like Johnny Appleseed. After we got away from the Gatlins and got her ear fixed, things were different. She started to not hear things. That included confessions and apologies. There are things I tried to tell her, I swear, only now she couldn’t hear. Or wouldn’t. The injury seemed rather convenient.

“You were too perfect when you came out. It was like you had nothing to do with me. Like you were something molded from the stuff I brought home on the bottom of my boots that somehow got mixed up in our bedsheets and that’s what impregnated her—a million dead men, not me. I know I’m not making any sense. But when I saw you it was like you were a white pin from that movie. You were life.

“She knew it, too. She packed her bags and wrapped you up. She just had that one demand. ‘You give me Chicago as a gift.’ That’s exactly what she said. What else had I ever given her? Or given you? I had to be happy I could give anything at all.”

Boggs had confirmed
I can get anyone
as my father’s slogan, but this, as much as anything, was proof of its falsehood. I could see her so clearly now, alone in an unfamiliar city, clutching a bawling infant and hobbled with a disfigured ear. Why had it taken me this long to recognize the tragedy of her solitude? She had been young and pretty and brilliant, yet
to protect me she had gone into hiding. And not just from Antiochus Boggs and the Gatlins; she couldn’t risk landing another Ken Harnett, either.

As we sailed from one interstate to another, the words of the biology text imprinting themselves into my brain like grit into eyeballs, I began to think that my mother’s final act had been something inspired. North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa: by giving me to Harnett, she had released me from our shared reclusion, and now each state I passed through became my home, because home was anywhere with grass and dirt and stone, and my compatriots, my family, were those who waited beneath to greet me.

B
ACK IN
B
LOUGHTON
, I felt physical whiplash. Here, once more, was the cruel reality of a shabby two-room cabin off Hewn Oak Road, even smaller and quieter now beneath three inches of unblemished snow. It was Monday morning; we had made it back in time. Harnett collapsed into bed. While I changed clothes for school, I stared in disbelief at the calendar on the side of the sink. I had imagined millions of hatch marks and thousands of slashes, but it had only been three days since the incident in the shower room, not several lifetimes.

There was no point in bothering with first and second periods. I sat and washed down an onion with two cups of coffee before finally making that long walk through the snow. I waited until I heard the third-period bell ring and
then entered the Congress of Freaks, keeping my head low to avoid the sight of anyone who had ever hurt or been hurt by me, and slipped into the classroom, where the celebratory mood of the rest of the building gave way to last-minute cramming and general disgruntlement. There was only one villain to grapple with today. I took my usual seat near the back.

Gottschalk, the new acting principal of Bloughton High School, bent his rubbery features into a smug leer as he passed out the tests. I set the paper in front of me and watched the characters rattle across the page. My body surged with caffeine and adrenaline. An absurd confidence settled over me. I picked up my pencil and began.

Some of the questions made me flinch: I felt the sting of Gottschalk’s pointer as it struck various points of my body. Other questions seemed totally foreign and yet I found the answers spilling from the graphite in quick, neat letters. The giddiness that overtook me was so unanticipated I didn’t know if I was about to laugh or vomit.

Fifty questions, fifty minutes. Gottschalk clapped and there followed the cracking of a dozen pencils hitting desks. Not mine, though—I was done, and had been for a long time.

We passed our tests up the rows. Gottschalk took them, pounded them into order, and took his seat as the bell rang. Cheers erupted; the real party could now begin. As the class left, whooping, I thought I saw the raven hair of a beautiful girl. No matter; I turned my gaze to Gottschalk. He had on his glasses and was already scratching away with a red pen. He glanced up. Our gazes met.

Very slowly I approached. As I passed each desk, my heart leapt at the prospect of never again entering this room. I arrived at Gottschalk’s desk and stood silently as he ran a finger
across handwriting I recognized as my own. I glimpsed red ink on the previous page, but not much. His pen stood poised to mark, swaying like a rattlesnake.

Page two: no red marks. Page three: his fingers regripped the pen, but nothing. Page four: a red circle and
-2;
a crossed-out sentence and
-4
. Page five, the final page: his plump finger smudged lead as it tracked each line. Finally he flipped through the pages in reverse order, adding up the tally, and marked the final count upon the front page:
-8
.

By his rubric, it was an A. I was too stunned to react.

Gottschalk set down his red pen and removed his glasses.

“I appreciate, Mr. Crouch, your powers of memorization. It’s possible you possess a savantlike ability in this regard. It’s also possible, I suppose, that you actually gave time and effort to the task. There are certainly many correct answers in these pages. Yet I find myself curiously unmoved. Allow me to explain. On Friday I was asked to lead this school, and over the weekend I spent a great deal of time pondering that responsibility. Those now under my purview are teachers. Teachers, in theory, teach. As acting principal, I am charged with ensuring that, at the end of the day, lessons have been learned. I cannot cut my own teaching any slack in this regard; to the contrary, I must hold myself to the highest standards. At the beginning of the semester you walked into this room unwilling to learn. I was adamant in involving you. Countless times I have pulled you to the head of the class to immerse you in the lessons to the best of my ability. The results have been discouraging. Oh, you’ve managed to regurgitate well enough. It’s a trick you have learned. But I do not condone trickery; I demand engagement. And this is where my meditation over the past weekend has brought me. Teaching is not about facts, it is about the building of character, and facts are merely the
tools, as a dumbbell is a tool for building muscle. You have been the teacher today and I the student. You have taught me that an A on this test is not what you need. What you need is the maturity that will come only from engaging with that which you have so flippantly tossed aside. This, what you have handed me, was intended as a slap in the face, and I take it as such. I’m afraid I cannot turn the other cheek, Mr. Crouch. The previous principal, perhaps, but I am of different quality.”

With that he raised the salvation of my grade point average, my mother’s pride, the sole hope of my future, and tore it in half. He put the two pieces together and tore again. Again. Again. Ragged rectangles fluttered to the desk. I thought of scooping them up in my hands and rushing to the principal’s office to reassemble and prove my score, but behind that door, too, was Gottschalk.

“You will repeat the class,” he said, gathering the scraps in a tidy pile and lifting a trash bin. With a flick of his wrist the remnants of my exam disappeared. I wanted to reach out but my limbs were completely numb. “I look forward to starting anew with you in January.”

Muscles in his face screwed and snaked and I imagined his smile rotted by decay into a ghastly shriek. Gottschalk replaced his glasses, straightened his papers, and picked up his pen.

“Merry Christmas,” he said.

W
E KEPT CLOSE TO
Bloughton. We chased a tornado and picked through the upchucked coffins. We graphed the smaller proportions of a pet cemetery before going after the remains of a dachshund. We turned up several uninhabited plots in the same graveyard before discovering a mass grave some fifty bodies thick, where the dead—mostly the city burials of welfare cases and unclaimed cadavers—had been moved to free up real estate. We struck an unmarked water pipe and by the time we patched it our corpse was floating. We peed in plastic bottles, unwilling to cease our motion. We had just three weeks before the new semester began. When we did sleep, it was in the truck.

Everywhere we went we found Polaroids. At first it was an anomaly, then it was a scattering, and by the time school began we were finding them everywhere—an impossible amount. There had to be a horrible toll to such an effort; I remembered Boggs’s whiff of sickness and wondered if it would soon overtake him. Freed from his territory, Boggs took over southeast Iowa, not just beating us to digs but repairing the ground so expertly he fooled even Harnett. When we reached the caskets, everything of value was already gone. What we did find, meticulously pinned to each body, was a recent photograph of the corpse. Harnett ripped off these portraits and mangled them in a fist, and together we imagined the matching photograph carefully pasted into the Rotters Book. As we filled in the grave, our pockets empty, Harnett seethed with fantasies of destroying the book. Me, though, I just wanted to see it one more time.

We shared tools, but I had some of my own. When something was misplaced, even in the black of mud or white of snow, I knew it. When something broke, I fixed it. The Root never broke. I was careful. I was responsible. I was stealthy. I wore appropriate clothing. Calluses built up on my hands, huge and flat and dry as sand. I knew when to hold back. I knew when to take a risk. I could work entirely by moonlight. I modified a junked DustBuster to vacuum flakes of leftover dirt from turf and used a barber’s comb to sift the rest. I used a battery-powered hair dryer to fluff patches of grass matted by our shoes. I created a rainproof undergarment made of trash bags and duct tape and stood in the shower for ten minutes to test it. Harnett watched and grumbled that he wanted one, too. My mother would have been proud.

Snow made an issue of footprints. We monitored weather reports and dug only before snowfalls. If the snow was thick enough, we dug in broad daylight. New graves were easy to find; heat from a corpse’s decomp could melt a blanket of snow in two days. For older graves we brought along a tin trash can and lit a fire inside and rolled it across the plot until the ground was weeping and soft. The bodies, when we reached them, were cold and less smelly, their evolution of decay momentarily halted. There was something innocent about how snowflakes touched their oblivious faces, as if they were children extending tongues to the first fall. This innocence was gutted with each flash of Boggs’s camera.

The snow stopped falling on New Year’s Eve. By the first weekend in January it had already melted, and every Iowa lawn looked like the site of a Christmas massacre, strewn with the toppled bodies of Santa and Rudolph and Frosty. We dug faster than ever before—we were coming up empty too often, and Harnett was nervous. A few nights before the first
day of school, Harnett dropped to his knees in a cemetery outside Meighsville and jabbed his finger at a scattering of rocks in the grass, insisting that Boggs had arranged them so that he would be able to tell if we dug up his Polaroid. To avoid touching the rocks, Harnett carved a slanted tunnel some fifteen feet from the headstone that allowed him to drag the coffin to the surface with ropes. It took all night and left us dangerously exposed. I watched the horizon impatiently. Harnett pried up the lid. There was no photo inside. The scattered rocks had just been scattered rocks.