Rotters (51 page)

The mustache twitched again. “There is sympathy.”

Maybe because he, too, had once lived in a big city, Ted had the necessary distance to divine the patterns of smalltown behavior. At any rate, he was right. As eager as the town had been to ostracize me when I had arrived, they were twice
as eager to take me back into their arms. It was surreal. Ted took me to lunch as an experiment and the waitress put her hand on my neck and looked like she wanted to cry. We went to Sookie’s Foods next and the manager himself met us in the cereal aisle and squeezed my shoulder and told me he had a stock-boy position open if I felt that would help get me back on my feet. Everywhere we went, the same thing.

At night, in front of the hotel room’s television, I reported to my father how the entire town was granting me a forgiveness I did not deserve. “Look,” I whispered. “People aren’t as terrible as you thought they were. As I thought they were. They want to be good.”

Even in death, Harnett was cynical. I pictured his exasperation at my undying naïveté. He told me to look more closely at their pinched and sweating faces. See the shame? They are ashamed at how they treated us. See the desperation? They are desperate to salve that shame with generosity. Their swift acceptance of you, said Harnett, has nothing to do with you. It’s about them.

“Whatever,” I said to him. “I’ll take it.”

And I did. I took that stock-boy job, and within six weeks I had moved up to checkout clerk. The first day at the register I was trembling. Conversation was the latest ritual I had to relearn; I’d already tackled how to wake up at dawn instead of dusk, how to wear bright white shirts and khaki pants without fearing exposure. For so long I’d angled my face so that people couldn’t memorize my features and mumbled so they couldn’t identify my voice—old Digger tricks. This didn’t fly in the checkout lane. Soon I discovered that nothing normalizes a person faster than seeing him scan your pudding cups and economy-size diapers. Everyone in town patronized Sookie’s, and people would wait an extra ten
minutes just to go through my line, just to be able to impart two or three words of sympathy or understanding. I’d smile and nod my thanks and ask them cash or credit, paper or plastic?

There were challenges. For a while it was hard not to calculate the post-mortem value of their earrings and watches and cuff links. But eventually I learned to quit the habit, or at least stow it away. The forced conversations became less forced. I found myself inquiring about ailing spouses and troublesome pets because I honestly wanted to know. Without noticing the moment when it began to change, I started valuing each person’s life rather than their death.

Ted helped me find the cheapest one-room apartment in town, a former office space over Fielder’s Auto that stank of oil and cigarettes. I loved it. I worked forty or fifty hours at Sookie’s and paid my rent proudly. Ted didn’t let it go at that, either. Soon he was insisting I get my high school diploma.

“You’re psychotic,” I told him. “They’re not ready for that. I’m not ready for that.”

“After everything you’ve been through, you’re going to let a few little high schoolers scare you off?”

“You’re goddamn right I am,” I said.

This was one battle he could not win. How could I shut out the phantom screams coming from the weight room, the theater, or the biology lab? Instead I agreed to take my GED. Ted brought me study materials. It only took me a few hours of review to realize I was going to ace that thing. I hadn’t been a straight-A student for nothing. Twitching somewhere deeper now was another notion, one regarding a career, a real one, one involving the higher education so prized by my mother, one having nothing to do with the sacking of milk and eggs and produce.

The day before I took the GED was my eighteenth birthday, and the bank opened to me the contents of my mother’s savings account: $11,375.02. To me the figure seemed more than substantial, numerical proof of my mother’s noble squirreling of her every spare cent. I would not let her down. This sum, right down to those last two goddamn cents, would deliver me my future. This job of mine, it was just training. A few more thousand groceries and my emotions would be caught up with my mind. I folded up the bank statement and told my mother to hang on. I told myself the same thing. It wouldn’t be long.

Never would I have guessed that there were lessons to be learned not by fleeing Bloughton but by staying put. By the end of October I was happy. It was a feeling I distrusted and I was careful not to embrace it too heartily. There were lives I had almost destroyed, after all, and that was something still requiring atonement. Gottschalk had not been fired after the gruesome events at his school—he had resigned immediately. My coworkers at the grocery—enthusiastic gossipers, all of them—told me that there had been a farewell dinner for him at the local Elks’ hall and that many people had attended to toast his years of service. He and his wife—he had a wife, a fact that shook me up more than a little—moved to Florida and were gone before the Gatlins ever came to town. His portion of my revenge, the tombstone on the desk, was the only part incorporated into Bloughton record. What had happened to Woody and Celeste had been obscured by authorities, either because the victims were minors or because the acts were simply too gruesome, and survived now only as wild and specious legend.

Woody Trask did not return to Bloughton High. If I had
hoped to end his reign as the school’s alpha dog, I had succeeded. That fall, his family sent him to live with an aunt and uncle in a neighboring state and I never heard of him again. In optimistic hours I imagined his senior year as prosperous, his natural athletic abilities purchasing him instant acceptance. But in my darker moments I found that scenario unlikely. I pictured him crying himself awake at all hours of the night, wetting the bed, phobic about touching female skin. What was more, I was sure that he knew I was the guilty party, not Harnett, no matter what the authorities had assured him. There had been a certain smell in the weight room that night, and he must have recognized it as the odor he himself had rinsed from me in the locker room shower. I couldn’t expect Woody to vanish entirely. He was too strong for that, and payback was in his blood. If one day he decided to have his revenge, I would have to accept it. The Trasks could become my Gatlins, and even that threat had its comforts; it was something you could prepare for and stand guard against; it was forever, life everlasting, religion itself.

Celeste Carpenter remained in Bloughton after graduation. For a couple of years I read her name in newspaper recaps of local concerts, but over time those mentions stopped. By the fourth year I heard that she was living in another town, married and pregnant with her second kid and doing community theater. Every night for years I prayed for her forgiveness and to be worthy of it if it ever came. I did not know if she remained traumatized by what I had done to her or if she wore it as a badge, but regardless I knew she was the biggest star her new town had ever seen and that she surely captured the affections and envy of all who laid eyes on her. At night I continued to dream about touching her perfect skin, but even in
dreams the sensation was weak. With three false fingers I could barely feel a thing, and no cheek that perfect should be scraped by weathered wood.

My grocery coworkers didn’t really remember Foley, but they looked into it and assured me that he was gone. For a while I imagined him suffering a fate similar to Woody’s, exiled to some strange town and left to suffer the repercussions of having known me. But then one of our butchers told me that Foley’s family had relocated to Chicago. My heart soared. I saw again his fingers splayed in devil horns, saw him swishing his hair to the nihilistic noise of Vorvolakas and insisting that he wanted oblivion when in fact he wanted everything but. The city held its own dangers, but somehow I knew Foley would make it. He’d find a Boris. Probably a boyfriend, too. I missed him but knew he was better off on his own. Unlike my parents, Foley and I had made no formal pact that I had to avoid Chicago, but I told myself I would. It was Foley’s now. He deserved it.

Ted, of course, is still Ted. When we get together over dinner he apologizes for our failure to see
Faust
at the Met but promises that he’ll make it happen soon—it’s an exciting prospect, as New York was never my territory. And when we run into each other at the store or on the street, he grumbles about the no-accounts filling up his band and how this will be the year that Ted’s Army officially goes down in battle. Then he’ll relent and his eyes will sparkle just a little. “There
is
this one girl,” he’ll say, or, “This punk walked in today, never picked up a sax, and started wailing like Impulse-era Coltrane.” He has also begun telling me about a used trumpet sitting in the window of the local consignment shop. I can see his old refrain prickling the edge of his mustache, waiting to come out.

Aside from Ted, the one person I still see is Heidi Goehring. She remembered me from our few Fun and Games pairings, and to my shock that remembrance was fond. She had graduated at the top of her class, went to Northern Iowa, graduated at the top of that class, too, and had returned to Bloughton to intern at a doctor’s office while saving money for med school. She comes into the store regularly and lately the items she brings me to scan seem pretty arbitrary—a wine bottle opener, a tube of Chap Stick. Sometimes she comes in late when we’re slow and lingers at the counter and talks to me for fifteen or twenty minutes. Once she even showed up on my break and we had coffee in the diner down the block. She doesn’t ask me about my father but she asks plenty about me. At first she wanted to know what TV shows I watched. I didn’t really watch any, so that night I picked a few and started watching them so we could have something to talk about. The next time she came in she laughed at my choices—a sitcom about four black women trying to find love in the Big Apple, a reality show where people vied for the pleasure of dating twin blond bisexuals, and a late-night politics roundup hosted by someone Heidi called “an insane right-wing nut-sack”—but nonetheless she had plenty to say about all three. She knows everything about TV and enjoys schooling me on the backstory of every program, the careers of its stars, the number of Emmys won, and so forth. I’ll never know as much as she does and wouldn’t want to. That wouldn’t be anywhere near as much fun.

It was after one of these visits from Heidi that I began to think again about Harnett. By any rational assessment my life had improved without him. My apartment was clean, I took daily showers, I kept healthy hours, I had a steady job, I ate well, and I almost had a friend or two. I was calmer and
stronger and beginning to remember who I was: not the Resurrectionist, not Baby, not the Son—just Joey. Yet I missed my father. He had always seen a division in life, us and the dead on one side and the rest of the universe on the other, and he had died in search of a treasure he had thought I needed to survive. He had been wrong about that, but I couldn’t fault him for it, and soon I began to regret having buried him in a random plot in North Carolina. Almost five years from the day he died I began making arrangements to move his body to Bloughton.

I didn’t tell anyone, but somehow the story got out. At significant expense to me his coffin was disinterred and shipped to a holding office the next town over. I sent word to Knox and arranged for a local pastor to say a few words. I purchased the cheapest stone possible, a small square rock engraved with a simple
H
.

The night before his reburial I pushed my bed away from the wall and pried open a floorboard. From the hollow beneath I withdrew my only secret possession: the Rotters Book. The soaking it had taken five years ago had bloated it almost beyond recognition, and more recently mice and termites had found it delicious. It creaked when I pulled back the cover, and dust billowed as I ripped each page from its opposite. The stained and curled photos inside were still quite coherent.

I had intended to invent an excuse to spend a moment alone with my father’s remains, pry open the lid, and tuck the book under his arm as evidence of the life the Diggers had lived. Then I heard my father’s final word:
Wait
. It’s all too easy to ascribe meaning to someone’s last words, and I knew that; still, I took it as a sign. Looking at the book in my apartment, with the rock-and-roll sound track of another
reality show clamoring from the TV and the microwave beeping to alert me that my burrito was done, I changed my mind. Maybe there was a God, maybe there wasn’t, but on the off chance that He wasn’t looking, I figured it was worth trying to ditch some evidence.

My first idea was to bury it, but I knew too well that anything buried could be unburied. Instead I burned it in the sink. It took all night. A small part of me screamed that I was making a mistake, that it belonged in a museum, that it was the only record of its kind, a photo album of the largest family in the world. But I burned it anyway. I felt satisfaction when the pictures of my mother incinerated; I felt even better when my own picture was consumed and lost. The others cremated that night were no longer rotters to me, they were people, and if I ever wanted to rest in peace, they would have to rest in peace first.

So Ken Harnett was buried in Bloughton as he had been buried in North Carolina: alone. The pastor finished his mediocre reading and blessed us. Behind him, a Jesus with all of His fingers blessed us better. An automated device lowered Harnett into the machine-cut ground. Six feet, flat surface, no rocks, no roots, an easy score—I blinked and looked away. Ted was patting me on the shoulder and saying he’d bring over some casserole later. Knox was taking my hand and saying he would swing by and say farewell after he grabbed a nap. Soon I stood there unaccompanied as men moved in with a backhoe.

I got out of their way, and that was when I noticed the faces. They were still there, all of them, watching from the other side of the cemetery fence. I specified as many of them as I could and wondered if Harnett’s pessimism had been dead-on. Perhaps there would always be this division: they
on one side of the fence and we on the other. Perhaps the desire to dig still ached in my bones. Perhaps the age wasn’t over. It was just a few days earlier, after all, that I had been handed a shovel and told to clear an early snowfall from the sidewalk outside Sookie’s, and as I’d labored, the tool had suddenly locked into perfect synchronicity with my body. A name for her had even popped into my head, the perfect name, the perfect grip, the perfect instrument. Such a shovel, it seemed a waste not to use it.