Rotters (16 page)

“Start when you want.” He shrugged in silhouette. “But you’ve got a couple hours till school and, like I said, there’s something you want at the bottom of a hole.”

He left Grinder and walked past me without a word. I
shivered and looked at the shovel. She still vibrated. Like a divining rod, I thought—and then it hit me. My calculus homework. Those questions about due dates.

The asshole had buried my homework.

“You gotta be kidding me!” I cried, clutching my head in panic. I whirled around and caught a glimpse of Harnett disappearing around the cabin’s corner. “Are you crazy? Wait! Wait!”

In the distance, I heard the front door open and close. The bastard was going back to bed. I was motionless for a moment, resolved to freak out but uncertain of the best way to do it, and then sprinted toward Grinder and wrapped both hands around her handle. The ground below was black and wet, barely visible.

“How deep?” I shouted at the cabin. I strained to hear past my heaving breath and pounding heart, but knew it was futile—there would be no response from my father. “Oh fuck,” I said, twisting the handle between my hands. “Oh fuck, oh fuck.”

I grabbed Grinder and pulled. She unstuck from the moist dirt and hummed in my hands. My mind was spinning. I had asked for this. I had insisted that he teach me. This was what I got for allying myself with a maniac. I kicked aside the more delicate tools of a backsaw and spade. Harnett’s rules could go to hell. I had no time for fussiness and no stake in anything beyond rescuing my calculus.

The digging hurt, but not as much as before. Four feet later I struck something and instantly dropped to my knees. I tore through the mud with my fingers and after five minutes of grappling dislodged a black garbage bag wrapped around something hard. I reached into the bag and withdrew a flat piece of wood, apparently inserted by Harnett so that Grinder
did not damage the homework tucked beneath. I removed the papers and shook them in a muddy, victorious fist.

Sunlight warned me that first period was just minutes away. Fine, I’d miss first period, but not the second, not if I ran. I examined the mud slopped across my clothes and skin, the wet soil oozing from my shoes. Maybe at school I could change into my gym clothes. The idea was so inspired that I felt a tuft of grass fall from my cheek when I grinned.

One hour later, we passed our calculus assignments up the row and I watched as Coach Winter flipped through them. It was obvious when he reached mine—from the back of the room I could see the muddy smears—and for a moment I thought he was going to reject it on standards of cleanliness. He glanced at me over the top of the papers, taking in the soiled shirt and jeans I had not found time to swap with my gym equivalents, and decided that berating me wasn’t worth the effort. He went back to shuffling assignments and I felt it for the second time that morning: victory.

Good luck continued at Fun and Games, which kicked off with an activity that was neither. Akin to a sack race, it involved standing back to back with a partner, locking elbows, and attempting to execute a number of ridiculous tasks, like picking up kick balls and ducking beneath a limbo bar.

Partners were switched up twice and both times I feared getting paired with Celeste or Foley. Instead my first partner was Heidi Goehring, an honor roll student with a questionable bowl cut but cool, chunky glasses. From what I had gleaned, Heidi kept her nose out of trouble and in the books; she would nevertheless appreciate the social darts that would fly her way if she mishandled her moments with Crotch. But she hesitated for only a moment before smiling and offering her elbows. We tripped around the gym like idiots, laughing
a little more freely each time we ended up on our asses, and though the whole thing was too stressful to qualify as enjoyable, there were moments when I forgot everything except that only two thin pieces of fabric separated me from a real live girl. I fantasized that, for those brief moments, Heidi Goehring might have shared similar thoughts. When we finally unlocked and rubbed feeling back into our muscles, she returned my embarrassed smile. Unable to hold her gaze, I looked away and saw Celeste across the gym, somehow looking dignified even through this debasement.

Any residual sensation of contentment vanished once we had adjourned to the locker rooms. Guys gave Woody hell about Celeste, wondering how sore his wrist was getting in her absence. “Guess she’s too busy spending all her time playing fun and games with Crotch here,” Rhino laughed.

Woody’s glare was ferocious.

“We’re starting to wonder what
kind
of crotch you got under there, Crotch,” he snarled.

I pulled on my pants as quickly as I could. Rhino broke the silence by smacking Woody on the back and joking about how my menstrual cycle would probably align with the girls’ soon, while another guy flapped his wrist and tittered about what fun I’d have trading tampons with all of them. Usually such cracks broke the dark mood, but this time they hounded me back into the gym, where Celeste, Heidi, Foley, and everyone else got to observe the continued slurs. Retribution boiled in Woody’s throat; this was just the beginning of what he had planned for me. When at last the bell rang, the abuse spread through the halls like contagion. After such a victorious morning, it was a crushing reminder that I did not and would not ever belong.

Ted had cautioned me that I couldn’t miss another
practice and still play at Friday’s homecoming game, but compared to the memory of my mother’s take-no-prisoners tone, his warnings were ineffective. When I got home I leaned against Grinder and pretended the river was Lake Michigan and my mom was next to me, her arm angled protectively about my shoulders, her fingernails biting into my arm. Momentous sobs caught in my chest. Harnett could not protect me as she had. I missed her so much.

He arrived at dusk. After dropping his gear inside, he wandered around the cabin and approached, stopping ten feet away to cross his arms. I tightened my grip on Grinder and considered the dirt at my feet.

“Don’t start,” I said.

He shrugged. “It was a terrible hole and you know it.”

“Don’t fucking start with me, Harnett.” I swung the shovel. Grinder sliced at the hard ground and rang when she hit violently off-center.

Harnett narrowed his eyes in disapproval. “If you didn’t notice, our cabinets are empty. We need food. We need money. What we
need
is to get up to Lancet County and do the Merriman grave. But look at you. You’re not even close to ready.”

I made another frustrated stab with Grinder. Harnett winced at the clang of metal.

“You don’t know what I’ve been through,” I growled.

“You had to get up a couple hours early. You had to use a shovel. That qualifies as hard labor?”

“School!” My voice broke in half.

He paused. “School.”

“Yeah, school. The place where I go to get tortured every day? Ever heard of it?”

His puzzled, almost innocent confusion drove me mad. I
brayed and drove Grinder with all my might. The flat surface of the shovel hit square and a great jolt shook through my skeleton. The pain was instant and I backpedaled. Grinder fell into the grass, her wooden handle split into three shards.

My father sped forward and kneeled. He lifted the broken wood and tenderly rolled it across his palm.

“Grinder,” he said. “She broke.”

“It was old,” I said, trying to tamp down the horror. “It was old, it’s not my fault.”

He peered up at me as if incredulous that I could possess this kind of strength. “I’ve had her for a very long time,” he whispered. “Twenty-six years.”

I wiped my face with a sleeve. “Well, now you got me.”

He toyed with the wood for a moment longer, pressing together the edges as if harboring a fantasy of repair. Then his shoulders fell and the pieces dropped to the grass. He wiped his palms.

“Tell me,” he said.

“Tell you what?”

He blinked up at me. “School.”

The river roared.

I opened my mouth but had no idea what came next.

He watched me. The setting sun colored him red.

“It’s hard,” I said. Without the shovel to hold me up I battled collapse. “Every day since I came here. It’s so hard.”

“You study all the time.”

“That’s not what I mean,” I said. “Studying doesn’t matter. That’s not school. That’s something else. That’s … paperwork.”

“You’re unsatisfied in some way.”

I laughed once. “Yeah, I guess you could say that. I’m unsatisfied. That’s one way to put it.” I looked out over the
golden treetops. “Everyone there is against me. I don’t know why. They do things to me. They embarrass me. You have no idea. You have no idea.” I pressed my eyelids against the tears that wanted to return.

“Good,” said Harnett.

I peeked out at him in disbelief.

“These people at your school.” He shrugged. “They’re not supposed to understand us.”

“Us?”

He nodded. “Diggers.”

I sniffed up the snot the tears had thickened. “What does that have to do with anything?”

He clasped his hands. “The world is full of pain. Everyone you see there is hurting from it. That principal I had to speak to? And his assistant?”

“Simmons and Diamond,” I said automatically.

“They eat pain for breakfast. You can’t stand next to them without expecting it to rub off. You’re unhappy there. I’m not surprised. I don’t think it’s possible to be happy in proximity to such people. I’ve never found it possible. But beneath?” He touched a finger to the ground. “Beneath is a different story. There’s no pain down there. You remember that woman. You sat next to her. You touched her. Her life was pain, too, but down there all that was gone. Remember?”

I said nothing.

Harnett fanned a hand through the grass like he was petting an animal. “There are things down there you wouldn’t expect, kid. Solace. A little bit of power. There’s so much to be had down there, and everyone,” he said, waving a hand at the sky, “everyone is reaching up, up.” His caressing fingers became a fist that pounded once upon the dirt. “They’re reaching in the wrong direction.”

He gathered the splinters of Grinder, the shovel he had used since long before I was born, and stood. We were an arm’s length apart and for just a moment I thought about reaching out.

“That hole you dug,” he said. “It was a terrible hole.”

“I didn’t have time.”

“The hell you didn’t.” He walked away. Near the corner of the cabin, he looked over his shoulder. “It was terrible and you know it.”

“Okay,” I croaked. “It was terrible.”

Late that night, as I tossed with nightmares, I thought I heard my father rustling through the forest and the halting sounds of lesser tools digging a hole; and finally, even later, the bone rattle of Grinder’s pieces being tossed into a shallow depression, the great burier buried at last.

A
ND SO THE LESSONS
began in earnest. I spent the next night writing a paper for Gottschalk, only to find it five feet under at dawn. Harnett was there, nudging my sleeping body with his toes and thrusting into my hands a brand-new shovel with a gleaming silver blade. The shovel was mine to name, he told me, if and when inspiration struck. When I complained that I had no clue what one was supposed to name a shovel, he told me only that I would know when the time came. He ceased complaining about the Merriman grave in Lancet County; instead he offered me an onion from the garden as he bit into one of his own. I declined. Fifteen minutes later,
I dug for my life while he squatted a ways away, staring into the trees and eating.

“Dying is a tragedy,” he lectured from the darkness. “Death, though—death is just science. When we’re dead, A happens, then B happens, then C. None of it’s pretty. When the embalmers, those crooks, when they get their hands on us, they do their worst. They suture our anuses to keep everything inside. Kid, I’m just telling you how it is. But they can’t stop science.”

Science—Gottschalk’s paper. I set my muscles to the rhythm of Harnett’s speech and doubled down.

“A wooden casket, six months after it’s gone under, we’re talking about some body discoloration, maybe some mold. An airtight job, same amount of time, and we’re looking at the kind of mess we saw the other night. Those caskets are ridiculous. The inner liner’s bolted, the outer liner’s cemented shut, and sometimes they put the whole thing inside a concrete vault. And then they bury it five feet down? You should be asking yourself what’s the point of all this nonsense. Who are they protecting the body from? It can’t be rain, it can’t be decay—they both find their way in anyway. It’s us, kid. After all these years, it’s still us.”

I found better ways into the dirt, new angles of attack, cunning trajectories.

“Was a time when the opposite held true. Everyone was scared of being buried alive and wanted an easy route out. Coffins had gadgets, little rods attached to bells above the earth, mausoleums with switches inside to activate lights and buzzers. You can sort of sympathize. Medicine wasn’t what it is today. Mistakes were made. Imagine disinterring a loved one and finding the underside of the lid covered with their scratches.”

There were animal bones down there, graves within graves.

“Why bury them in a box at all? Good question. Why put them in clothes? Funeral directors run up bills into the millions just dressing up corpses and poisoning the dirt with chemicals. We Diggers are ecologists by nature, kid; if I could, I would remove every body and plant it naked back in the dirt. Composting is the ideal. Instead we pay three thousand bucks for a four-by-five-by-seven plot, a plot that can get sold out from under us if the cemetery gets lazy setting aside their twenty percent for upkeep. There’s a funeral director in Michigan who held a body for four years while he sued the family over a late payment. It’s disgusting. Disgusting. Cemeteries are more profitable than farms.”

My homework was in my hands but it would not reach Gottschalk in time—I had another assignment still in progress, and had yet to erase my traces.

“It almost seems like revenge, then, doesn’t it, that heirlooms are buried to keep them out of the hands of others? But it’s not revenge. It’s pride. It’s belief in some awards-based system of afterlife. That is self-aggrandizement taken to fanatical levels. Sure, it has a historical basis. Fine. As do we. So they will keep giving and we will keep taking. It’s the natural order of things. The earth should be kept clean.”