Rotters (20 page)

We quietly returned to the truck, sat in the cab for ninety minutes until the sun had sunk, and then grabbed our gray sacks and moved quietly back through the cemetery. When we reached Oliver Lunch, Harnett again put on the brakes. My hand flew to my abused nose; he gripped my arm and pulled me from the path.

“Well,
shit
.”

“
Damn
, Harnett,” I complained, checking my nostrils for blood. “What, she’s still there?”

His shape in the darkness nodded. Nearby was a mausoleum the size of Harnett’s cabin, and together we squatted against a wall. Once my eyes adjusted I found the grieving woman, still draped across Nathaniel Merriman’s marker and uttering occasional soft noises.

“She can’t stay there all night,” I said. “Can she?”

Harnett did not respond.

I crossed my arms and snuggled my head into a thin cushion of moss. “Some anniversary.”

Harnett locked onto the Merriman mourner. “Sometimes the digs go easier than you’d expect, too. Once I drove across three states to find a diamond tiara a beauty queen had been buried in. The graveyard, when I found it, was going through some sort of septic situation. Ground overrun with mud and sewage. Stones overturned and sinking. It was so bad her skeleton had floated up and she was just sitting there waiting for me, the tiara right on top of her head.” His forehead knotted. “Spent all night trying to give her a proper burial, but in that muck? I was just wasting my time.”

He settled back against the crypt with a sigh. “This is right where we want to be. Good sight line, a posture we can hold for as long as necessary, up against a structure we can depend on.”

“Depend on for what?”

He glanced at me. “Depend on not to fall down.”

I laughed once, quietly, but he was dead serious.

“You think anything in here is kept to some sort of code? You lean against a stone like that woman out there is doing, and you’re gambling. Some of them are just barely nudged into the dirt. Some of them, if you haven’t noticed, weigh
several tons. Things of such size fall over. That’s what happened to Copperhead.”

“Copperhead,” I said. “Was he a Digger?”

Harnett nodded and pointed at a massive twenty-foot cement monolith. “Decided to take a breather against one of those. Crushed his skull. Crushed everything. This was just three, four years ago. Knox told me the police report wrote him off as some kind of drunk.” Harnett looked at his hands. “Copperhead never took a drink in his life.”

The night stretched on. The clouds wore thin in spots and the thousand points of the Milky Way reflected each one of the markers below. Still the Woman in Black slumped and moaned. After a while her noises were joined by another: my stomach.

“Suck on a stone.” Harnett tapped the loose rocks at our feet. “It’ll help.”

I picked one up and examined it.

“But it’s a rock,” I said. “It’s a dead-person rock.”

“Christ almighty.” Harnett sighed. “Either your stomach or your mouth is going to wake up every corpse in this yard. Go find some food.” He jabbed a thumb toward the cemetery entrance. “Get going.”

The darkness in that direction was absolute. Maybe I had misunderstood. “What?”

“We passed a little place. Just around the corner from the truck.” He reached into his pocket, rustled around for a moment, and then pressed a twenty into my chest. “Here.”

“But, hey, wait.”

“I’m serious, kid.” He kept his eyes on the woman. “It’s going to be a long one.”

The place, when I found it, was a tavern barely bigger than the single pool table it housed. A fat man with a ponytail
pocketed stripes by himself while a woman with tattoos covering her neck watched sitcoms behind the bar. I coughed to get her attention and asked if they had any food.

“We don’t sell food here,” she said.

“We got peanuts, Eileen,” said the man.

“We don’t got any peanuts, Floyd!” she yelled with surprising ferocity.

“We got pickles,” he said.

“Floyd!” She picked up a baseball bat and shook it at him. “We don’t got any goddamn pickles!”

He shrugged. “We got jerky.”

Eileen set down the bat and looked at me proudly, gently brushing her hair back from her forehead.

“We have
lots
of jerky,” she purred.

My pockets crammed with twenty dollars’ worth of Slim Jims, I escaped from Floyd and Eileen and plunged back into the purple gloom of the cemetery. I was back at my father’s side in minutes and together we peeled cellophane from greasy tubes of meat and chewed. Between swallows, Harnett continued his lessons. He told me about barbershops, next to newspapers the single best source of information on the recently deceased. Whenever possible, he told me, he would get a haircut in an area where newspaper coverage was thin; no self-respecting barber could resist listing everyone he knew who was ailing or recently dead. Before I could complain that I myself would’ve preferred a barber job to Harnett’s home-salon butchery, he continued. “Barbers and Diggers have been intertwined for centuries,” he said, noting something called the United Company of Barber Surgeons, begun in sixteenth-century Britain. “Together they were able to get from Parliament the exclusive right to conduct anatomical dissections.”

I wagered a guess: “And the Diggers supplied the bodies?”

Harnett just smiled. “In time,” he said, though I didn’t know if he was responding to my question or just delaying the answer.

Harnett described other important systems, too: the worlds of pawnshops, jewelry brokers, and antiques dealers, and the risks and rewards of associating with each. He told me of brokers who routinely abused Diggers with piddling offers and veiled threats. Reverend Knox—who wanted the Diggers saved and in church, not damned and behind bars—passed along warnings of these blackmailers. The day Knox died, Harnett lamented, the road would become much more treacherous. How would they know, for example, which buyers would purchase gold teeth without asking questions? Or which curio dealers traded in vintage Bibles?

“When Knox is gone,” Harnett said, “the money will dry up. And then, for most of us, there will only be Bad Jobs.”

“What’s a Bad Job?” I asked.

“There are things,” he said, gesturing into the blackness, “that people out there will pay you to do. Pay good money for you to do. There are things people want and we are the only ones who can get them. There are other things, too, even worse.”

“Like what?”

Harnett ignored the question. “Any Digger who starts down that path, he’s pretty well near the end. You can’t do those kinds of jobs and live with yourself. I’ve seen it again and again, Diggers who thought
Just this once, I need the money
. And that was that.”

“Suicides?” I whispered.

My father spat out a hunk of bad jerky. “Many.”

L
IGHT FOUGHT RUDELY TOWARD
my pupils. I tasted dirt and cloth—Harnett’s shoulder. I sat up quickly, wiping at the drool and tasting the sour crud of Eileen and Floyd’s rations.

“Shh,” Harnett said.

I rubbed my eyes; pebbles, embedded for hours within the heel of my palm, dropped into my lap. The Woman in Black was still there, curled like a dog on Nathaniel Merriman’s plot. An edge of morning sunlight warmed the tops of gravestones and threw black stripes across the gentle slope of the cemetery, but churning across the sky were storm clouds.

“Don’t we need to get out of here? It’s light; people will see us.”

“I’ve waited too damn long. I’m getting in there.”

“But people will see,” I insisted.

He looked at me. “People don’t see as much as you think.”

I opened my mouth to call him on his portentous bullshit, when suddenly he wrapped both arms around me and threw me to the ground. The stink of jerky from his breath filled my sinuses.

A man was walking up the path. Seconds later he glanced our way, but Harnett had successfully concealed us in the shallow ditch at the mausoleum edge. The man continued up the path, his crisp and metered footfalls sounding like Ted’s metronome.

Harnett rolled off me and crouched low. I followed suit. The man left the path and crossed over to the Woman in
Black. He got on one knee beside her and shook her gently until she raised her head.

“Okay, that’s more like it,” Harnett whispered, nodding.

Together, the man and woman looked up at the brewing storm, then appeared to exchange words. Still kneeling, the man stretched out his arms and took the woman into a furious embrace.

“Oh, no,” Harnett said.

The man and woman clutched at each other, and their backs shook with the force of their crying.

“You have got to be kidding me,” Harnett said.

Moments later, they were both sprawled like toddlers, pawing at Nathaniel Merriman’s grave and pushing up tufts of sod with their feet. Harnett cursed and stood, lifting me by my collar and pushing me onto the path ahead of him.

“Where’re we going?” I said.

“Breakfast,” he growled. “Until these basket cases get their shit together.”

We left the cemetery, checked on the truck, passed the bar where I had bought the jerky, and walked down a main street even less exciting than the one in Bloughton. Harnett moved as if he could smell the bacon in the air. I yawned and struggled to keep up. Within five minutes he had sniffed out a diner, and we pushed through the door and fell into opposite sides of a booth. A waitress approached.

I recognized the tattoos instantly. I looked past Eileen and into the kitchen, where the ponytailed Floyd was jabbing a smoking grill.

Eileen’s red-painted lips split to reveal two rows of false teeth.

“It’s our jerky boy!” she cried. “Floyd, it’s our jerky boy!”

“We don’t got any jerky,” he muttered over the sizzling.

“It’s the boy who
bought
the jerky!” she shouted.

“We don’t
got
any jerky, crazy woman.”

Harnett rubbed his temples. “Two coffees. Two of everything: eggs, bacon, toast, but coffee first.”

Eileen made a squiggle on her pad. After some bickering between Floyd and Eileen over Eileen’s penmanship, the caffeine arrived and I sipped while Harnett gulped. The whiskers around his mouth darkened.

“Now what?” I ventured.

“Now,” he said, swallowing. “Now we wait. We see what kind of rain clouds move in. Or we wait for night. She can’t make it another whole night.” His hand shook and the surface of his coffee swayed. “No way she can.”

For a while nothing interrupted the listless sputter of the grill. No customers came in or out. Eileen and Floyd were silent and unseen.

“So.” He eyed me briefly before staring out the window. “School going okay, I guess.”

I marveled at his ability to avoid asking a real question. All sorts of responses bubbled to the surface.
Yeah, it’s going okay. Only I get drop-kicked in the balls about once a week and an insane teacher stabs me with a metal poker on a routine basis and I’ve been forced to take trumpet lessons in secret and the only person who even remotely resembles a friend recently suggested that I start referring to myself as Crotch. Aside from that, yeah. It’s going great
.

Instead I held my tongue as Harnett rubbed at his pink eyes. I realized that while I had slept and drooled, he had kept watch on both me and the Woman in Black. All at once I felt weak and discouraged—I didn’t have it in me, this man’s mental and physical stamina. But when he scraped an unsteady hand over his weary face, I also saw that he was getting old. His muscles would soon lose definition. His bones would
winnow and weaken. My mother was already gone; I wasn’t sure I could take another desertion.

“Yeah, it’s going all right,” I said.

He nodded out the window. “We’ll get you back by Monday morning, don’t you worry,” he said. “No way she can lie there another whole night. No way.”

But after another seven hours spent pacing the stacks at the Lancet County Library, wandering around a hardware store for so long the proprietor began dialing his phone, grabbing another meal from Eileen and Floyd, and sitting silently beneath a gazebo in the town square to watch the ceaseless downpour, we returned to the soggy cemetery at dusk to find the Woman in Black still there, alone and slumped against Nathaniel Merriman’s stone. I didn’t have to look at Harnett to feel his frustration, nor did I want to—after all, this was all my fault. If Simmons and Diamond hadn’t created a situation preventing Harnett from abandoning me, he could’ve visited Lancet County weeks ago.

We stood against our mausoleum for a minute, our shoes submerging into mud.

“Stay here,” said Harnett. “I’m getting our bags. Another hour and she’ll be gone. No one lies in the rain at night. I don’t care how crazy they are.”

It didn’t sound as though he believed what he was saying, but regardless, he took off, his narrow shape parting silver curtains of rain. I turned my attention back to the Woman in Black and after only a moment’s hesitation began to approach.

She was older than I had guessed, at least my father’s age. Up close her body revealed itself to be more bony than slender, and what had looked like fair skin instead was blue and veined. Her black dress clung to some sort of cream-colored
undergarment that flopped from below her disheveled hem. Everything she wore was stained; even her hands and neck and face were spotted with mud.

I gripped the cold stone and lowered myself to both knees.

“Hello,” I said. The rainfall made it practically inaudible.

Her eyes opened, releasing either rain or tears. Both of her hands automatically contracted, raking in handfuls of mud.

“Daddy,” she croaked in a voice coarsened by days of continuous sobbing. Almost magically all the relationships became clear. Nathaniel Merriman was the vaunted patriarch; here writhing on his grave was his daughter. The man who had briefly joined her had been her brother, Merriman’s son, though his sorrow had reached limits more quickly. There was no telling why she suffered as she did. Perhaps her father had been tremendously kind to her and the world was repellent in his absence. Perhaps he had been cruel and her lament was for the amends she had been denied. Perhaps he had been missing and she grieved for being cheated of shoulders to grasp and cheeks to kiss. Or perhaps she was lost in pain entirely her own and so reached for a parent as does a small child, as if physical contact, no matter how it is accomplished, will dull the knives.