Rotters (43 page)

“Relax—doctor’s orders.” He hummed with renewed vigor and chuckled as the cart crunched through some sort of grit. “This ride is complimentary. Just my way of saying thank you for allowing me and my brain to enjoy one more resplendent day.”

I clutched the sides of the cart and tried to tell myself that
it was okay that I had crumpled into sleep last night, okay that he had not in fact taken the opportunity to kill me. That had been his choice, not mine. One night was what he had asked for and, all right, I would give him that. Only that. There was an orange hue to the horizon; night was coming soon, and when it was through, so was Boggs.

With rubbery legs I rolled myself out of the cart. Boggs watched with some amusement as I hobbled and tried to parade feeling back into my extremities. I didn’t like looking at him. His stature made him look too much like a child suffering a full-body burn. It had to be drugs, or disease, or the corrosive cocktail of both. I didn’t have time to think it out—that unbearable squeak told me he was moving. I tried to keep up, but the waving of his coattails revealed the disquieting speed at which he traveled. I limped along, almost losing him in the gray mist of dust. We exited the alley, crossed an unmarked two-lane, and entered another alley. His lead on me grew. He steered his cart through the parking lot of a housing development. With no regard for the safety of his hands, he ripped aside planks before forcing the cart through a gap in a fence. We kicked through the mangled remains of a chainlink fence and booted aside dismembered chunks of easy chairs and TV sets. The wheels shimmied over gravel. The bent and beaten shovel that lay on the cart’s lower tray thrummed with pretend life. We were lost in some netherland maze. Caught between the long-forgotten inner walls of structures built too close together, gusts of wind twisted themselves into miniature tornados, and piles of refuse levitated.

It was twilight before we emerged again into open space. A large graveyard awaited us. Boggs tucked his cart into the sheath of a drooping barn and emerged from it with the rusty
shovel. From far away, the tool looked like a cane, and when he paused at the cemetery gate to beckon me, the darkness momentarily turned him into Fred Astaire—cane tapping, vest peeking smartly from the slant of his suit, playful grin anticipitating the fancy footwork soon to come.

I followed but kept a distance. I didn’t trust myself to get too close. Once the dead had us surrounded, Boggs pirouetted and motioned to a line of small stones. They were as identical as school desks. Carefully I perched upon one while Boggs rushed forward to wipe the cobwebs from the side of a crypt the approximate size of a chalkboard. He tapped the board with his shovel to call the class to attention. I flinched—he was going to call me to the front of the classroom, I just knew it.

“Pop quiz.” He sniffed the air. “Tell me what you smell.”

Keeping my eyes on him, I raised my nose. I smelled graveyard—treated grass, tilled soil, wilting flowers, the mildew of stone.

Boggs nipped at his lips with tiny teeth.

“High school’s over, son. You’re going to need to work harder.” He stuck the shovel into the dirt and lifted his nose to the air like a starving dog. “That’s ZadenScent. That’s a name-brand grave disinfectant. I’m not placing blame, but you ought to know this. There’s also Garden Fresh, Chitterwick Original, and Poloxy Plus. Each one has its own special bouquet. ZadenScent always smells to me like apple pie and ammonia. You can’t smell that? There’s probably a million gallons of it pumped into this mud. They use it to tamp down odor. Folks at funerals don’t tend to like the smell of corpses. Of course, once it gets in the groundwater it’s worse than embalming fluid, but that’s not our concern. That’s fine by me. Rotters don’t deserve much better.”

Apple, ammonia—could I detect the hints? With a start, I realized my eyes were closed in concentration and I shifted from my gravestone desk, half expecting the shovel-edge to be at my throat. It remained plugged in the dirt; Boggs remained at his chalkboard. I admonished myself for taking my eyes from either of them. Never again.

“Lord, son. You don’t smell it. You honestly don’t smell it. What kind of trash has that brother of mine been teaching you? ZadenScent?
ZadenScent?
Son, you should’ve smelled it a half-mile away.”

I blinked at him, an unexpected feeling of shame creeping up my neck.

His compact body paced the front of the makeshift classroom. His live eye flashed at me with every quick lap. Without warning he wrapped both hands around the shovel and began pounding it against the crypt. Sparks dove into the grass, chips of stone flew; I recoiled. The clamor shot through the cemetery, stone to stone, as the shovel contorted and dulled with each strike.

He lowered the tool, the ruffles of his shirt spreading with each massive inhale. His eye found mine and mirrored my shock. He patted his free hand over the twitching muscles of his neck, the slobbery rim of his mouth. One finger found its way to an ear and probed as if expecting brain.

“Apologies. Lord. That ain’t right. That ain’t no way to teach. So you don’t know your ZadenScent. There’s worse crimes. I’m not mad at you. Honest I’m not. It’s that rotter I can’t forgive. He’s put you in danger. At risk. Those are rotter ways that I shall reverse. Mark my words. You’ve spent too much time tiptoeing through the tulips when you should be tearing holy hell through the mud.”

Partially settled, Boggs resumed his lesson. The
concentration of grave disinfectant can tip you off to the caliber of any marble farm, how tightly the bodies are stacked, how packed the soil, the overall level of decomp. The brand is instructive, too; any caretaker worth his salt is using Chitterwick Original, which bodes well for the pedigree of the clientele. If you detect the lowly Poloxy Plus, the night might still be fruitful—the rotter who runs that marble farm clearly don’t give a flying fuck. Dig like a wild man because varmints will shoulder the blame.

Boggs was far more impassioned than Harnett. I couldn’t help it; I was thrilled. When he demonstrated how the different brands of turf could be judged by plugging them into your cheek like chaw, his animation was intoxicating. Behind his enthusiasm, however, awaited mania. When an idea wasn’t easily articulated he raged, usually at Harnett, sometimes at me, but always ultimately at himself, raking at his head and tearing loose petals of dead skin. He tried to tell me about using backhoes and I balked. Noisy machinery? On a dig? He bounded at me, staying just out of arm’s reach, and spat about how this was exactly what was reducing the Diggers to obsolescence, this unwillingness to make use of a machine when it
just happened to be sitting right there
, keys in the ignition. He raved on about “dynamic loads” and “impact loads,” terminology having to do with how much weight a typical casket can bear before it buckles. When he saw that I still wasn’t going for it, a flash of panic arrested his infantile features. Maybe he was as bad as they said, maybe his methods were offensive, maybe he was a rotter among rotters—all of these insecurities and more in a single twinge of his bulging red eye.

By the time he tackled etymology—why Shadygrove Eternal was a better bet than the Garden of the Holy
Crusader—he was trembling in the glowering dawn, barking brilliant but half-formed theories through a nonstop muddle of accusations and self-incrimination. He was crying and shouting and laughing, and the storm from which it all came seemed to push like tumors against his waxy flesh. My mind raced to catch the nuggets of knowledge before they were doused in the stew of his affliction. Then he abruptly quieted. He stood straight and lifted his chin. The rustle of the trees and the ringing of the crickets became as noisome as the din of a cafeteria.

“This is no fun. That’s the problem. This is no fun at all.” The blazing blue of his good eye resisted the warming dawn. “War medals? Rosaries? Toupees? Those aren’t why I dig. Those aren’t why you came to me, either. It’s because of that other thing. My purpose. Your purpose, too, maybe. You want to see it?”

He took hold of his lapel. Through the frowzy and time-worn fabric I recognized the rectangular impression of a book. My heartbeat accelerated. It was with abstract disappointment that I felt the nodding of my head and the dryness of my lips. Perhaps just a glimpse of the thing would slake my thirst.

The lapel settled flat. He smoothed it back into place.

“Not tonight,” he said. “It’s getting late. Maybe tomorrow. You think it’s worth it? One more day? How about it. One more day. Then you can have me. Fair trade, even steven. What do you say?”

Even then I knew that my revenge would wait. If I wanted to be the greatest Digger of all time, I could not be like the others, terrified of what Lionel called Boggs’s innovations. My head was already nodding as if yanked by a noose. He had me.

T
IME PASSED LIKE LABORED
breaths: two days became three became four. I didn’t know when Boggs slept—his blue eye put me to bed and greeted me each morning. This unblinking sentry never faltered; I continued to bide my time until time got lost. It became progressively easier to forget Bloughton. Like any writer, I was completely absorbed in the creation of a book. Everything else paled in importance.

During our time near the Missouri River, no holes were dug. It pained him; I saw him press the book into his chest as if it were his failing heart. When it became clear that each of us would extend the other’s life a little while longer, the first thing we did was return to his home base of California. The instant we left we eliminated the possibility of Harnett’s hunting me down. In his disheveled state, he wouldn’t be able to track me past Iowa’s borders. I tried not to care. Harnett was a lost cause; Boggs was the only Digger alive who sustained the same degree of passion as I.

Our Hyundai ditched on an L.A. freeway and our various bundles transported to a new shopping cart, we took to the streets. Geographical separation from his brother affected Boggs in unpleasant ways. He became more irascible with each push of the cart. He sneered so hard his lip split up the center. He rushed around as if he were keeping us to some set schedule, disappearing sometimes for hours and coming home adrenalized and red-faced, coat pockets rustling with what I suspected were drugs. The only items he showed me, however, were frivolous. One afternoon he returned with a top hat he’d found rolling around a parking lot. He described
how he had chased it for twenty minutes. He screwed it onto his pink and flaking scalp with obvious relish, his costume completed at last.

Thus attired, he hastened us to his favorite marble farm and demanded from me a demonstration of what I had learned. It was our first dig. The western dirt was unfamiliar, but it didn’t take long to make adjustments. Nevertheless I longed for the Root. I hoped Harnett was getting some use out of her. I hated to think of an instrument of such quality sidelined.

So I worked in the balmy California night with Boggs’s battered piece of junk. He squatted several feet away, tearing through my backpack in search of food. He pulled out the trumpet and with it blew a few flatulent noises.

“I hope you’re not counting on morning reveilles,” he said. “I sleep late.”

I was deep enough to not have to see his face when he withdrew the femur.

“Now, what in the world is this?” He moaned softly. I imagined him stroking it with his small, dirty fingers. “That’s some leg, and I’ve seen my share. That’s a starlet leg, there. A runway model leg. No wonder you tote it with you. A leg like that could make you feel less lonely on a cold night, I bet.”

The truth was that it did, but he was already chuckling enough without my helping out. Murderous throes gripped my shoulders, but I told myself one more day, one more day, and then I’d have learned enough. I sank myself in the soothing repetition of shoveling and was nearly four feet deep when a fist tangled itself in my collar.

I spun and saw the surly mug of a toddler centered within the darker globe of a top hat. His tiny fingers channeled the iron strength of his entire physique. “What in creation are you doing?”

I wasn’t shy about my skills. “I’m digging a hole, and a damn good one.”

“A hole? As in singular? Son, I could dig three while you monkey around with this one. Come on. Out, out.”

He lifted me by the collar. It was as if I weighed nothing. My legs pinwheeled and at last found footing enough to buffer my landing. I heard the distant thump of his feet, the sharp noises of his tunneling. I leaned into the hole with visions of hooking his throat with my arm but was stilled by the unparalleled frenzy of his motion, how speedily he sank into the earth, how his boxy shape expanded from a core of muscles even more grossly exaggerated than Harnett’s. Within moments he was obscured in a hailstorm of dirt, and all I could perceive was the surface of his top hat and the pig snorts of his breath.

All at once he stopped. Soil still suspended in air came down in an orderly pattern. He pressed his palms into either wall. The muscles of his neck and torso thickened and he raised from the hole as if by hydraulic lift. He stood toe to toe with me and pointed downward. The brim of his hat tipped loam onto my face. “Destroy that dirt, son. Fuck it up. I know you can do it.”

He pressed the tool into my chest.

Once inside the hole, I expected attack. It didn’t come, and I was glad, for his furious descent had inspired me. I held the shovel as he had held it; I set my feet in his bowlegged stance; I worked my elbows in his curious star pattern. Nothing, no good, failure—and then powerful arms encircled me. I tensed for death but that wasn’t the plan. Ten thick fingers strapped themselves over my own and he moved his stubby arms atop mine. I resisted furiously; this man who had touched my mother could not be allowed to touch me, too.
But then I began to understand his rhythms. They were the opposite of what I had learned from Harnett—these fitful movements felt as though we were trying to surprise the dirt with each attack. It was only when I saw the incredible results that his touch reminded me of Ted’s magical fingers. When Boggs backed off, I continued as if he were still there, gasping with excitement and hating myself for it.