Rotters (25 page)

“I’m afraid you can’t speak to either of them,” she declared. “They have been removed.”

There was motion behind her. In the office, a row of adults were exiting the principal’s office, unfurling scarves and pulling gloves from pockets. Neither Simmons nor Diamond was among them.

“Why?” I asked Laverne.

“Inappropriate relations,” she enunciated with relish. “Ms. Diamond should have known better. Mr. Simmons is a married man, after all. And on school grounds, no less.”

Laverne’s wink informed me that what she said next was just between friends. “Mr. Simmons,” she whispered, “really should’ve done something about those scratches on my car.”

I saw again the
FAT BITCH
scraped into metal. In a roundabout way, I had been responsible for that, and now
that
was responsible for
this
. Everything, how the world toppled like dominoes, it was all my fault.

Movement in the office caught my attention. There was one adult among the group not draped in winter clothes, someone who in fact was accepting curt handshakes from each of them in turn. When I saw who it was, everything fell revoltingly into place: an interim principal had to be appointed, someone with a reliable and distinguished tenure, someone who knew the ropes and was unafraid of tightening them.

“Mr. Gottschalk will make a fine principal,” Laverne purred, patting me on the damp arm. “I bet he’d meet with you right now.”

I ran. Past Laverne, through students, across the spot on the lawn where months ago Celeste had slapped me. I was on the sidewalk, my lungs scorching, before I heard the shout.

“Kid! Kid! Hey, kid!”

Harnett was behind the wheel of his idling truck, leaning over the passenger seat to yell from the lowered window. I drew to a halt, sucking in icy air with each gasp. Snow spun in dizzying loops.

He gestured impatiently. “Get in.”

I stopped several feet from the truck. Gray air mushroomed from my lips.

“The hell you doing?” He smacked the seat. “Forget it. Tell me about it on the way.”

I was shaking my head and hadn’t realized it at first; I thought it was a trick of the swirling snow.

Harnett scrabbled through the junk in the front seat and came up with an envelope. “This is from Knox. There’s a relocation in West Virginia. It’s a ten-hour drive and we’re already late.”

The snow burned as it dissolved against my wet skin. My head continued its mechanical refusal.

“I told you about these. Kid, relocations are one in a million.” He threw up his hands. “Why are you just standing there?”

At that moment he finally began to take it in: the wet hair, the lack of any winter clothing, the biology text dangling from one pale hand, the blank look of rage fixed upon my shivering face. He dropped the envelope. His expression sharpened and with each uptick of his anger I felt an ebb in my own, as if he were drawing it from me and taking it upon himself. For an instant I tried to keep what was mine—
he
did this to me, after all; it was
his
fault I stank so bad that I had ended up in the locker room shower. But at last I let it go, let all of them go: Boris, Foley, Laverne, Simmons, Diamond. The departure of such a group made Harnett my sole protector. My father, the Garbageman, Bloughton’s outlaw, here at the Congress of Freaks, armed with sharp tools and an accelerating anger—blood would spill from school windows and dribble down stairs unless I prevented it.

The truck door handle was icy, the seat stiff. I tossed the biology text to the floor, picked up the envelope, and studied each palsied squiggle. Droplets from my hand smeared the ink; my vision was similarly blurred. The engine coughed and the wipers began pushing snow. Knox had been right. It was going to be a brutal winter.

S
OMETIMES THE DEAD STAND
in the way of progress. Perpetual-care funds are mismanaged, cemeteries change hands or become orphaned, state or government agencies rezone the land for new purpose, or private owners simply do with the property what they wish—and often what they wish for is money. New condo buildings. A bigger Walmart. So the decision is made. The cemetery ground will become something other than a cemetery. Every single casket will be disinterred from the earth and reinterred somewhere else.

My father called such an event a relocation. Old graves, new graves, mausoleums, aboveground tombs—like a going-out-of-business sale, everything must go. Aside from even rarer events (like a grave-digger strike and the resultant stacks of unburied caskets), there was no better way to study up on decomp and burial techniques in a concentrated span of time. For these reasons, said Harnett, relocations became impromptu conventions. No Digger could stay away. My stomach stirred in anticipation of meeting these men of the night.

We sped through southern Illinois; by the time we hit
Indiana I was asleep. When I awoke outside of Cincinnati, Harnett picked up right where he had left off, babbling about legendary relocations, like the six-hundred-year-old Cimetière des Saints-Innocents in Paris, which was dug up in 1786, razed, disinfected, and covered with cement while its human remains were squirreled away in underground catacombs. It was the middle of the night when we stopped for fuel and coffee near Kentucky’s Daniel Boone National Forest, and over the ticking of the pump Harnett droned on about the ten years it took to relocate ninety thousand remains from San Francisco in the 1930s, and how the ground itself was then built upon by a college. Little did school administrators know that the cemetery relocation itself had served an educational purpose.

My clothes had long since dried, but I was still cold. I used my biology text to block a crack in the door and shut my eyes. Only lack of movement jolted me awake. Peach morning light textured the dusty office windows of a roadside motel. I heard a crackle—the last of several bags of Cool Ranch Doritos that Harnett was polishing off. He sucked cheese from fingertips that smelled of kerosene and turned off the motor.

“We’re here,” he said. “Let’s drop our gear and get to town.”

“Will
he
be here?” I asked. I didn’t have to speak his name.

He crumpled the bag. “You read the letter.”

Indeed I had. Knox’s writing style was overreliant on abbreviations, but communicated well enough a greeting (
K./J
.—), the details of the relocation (
Dec. 15–24, Mt. Rgn., WV
), an apology for the letter’s lateness (
lately tkn w/brnchitis
), and, in a postscript, the admission that it had been over two years since he had last seen or heard from Boggs (
B. MIA. 2+ yrs
). In all likelihood, Knox wrote, Boggs was dead (
B.—prbly
.
dec’d
). Harnett’s feelings on the matter were unclear. I thought about my mother’s death—quick, brutal, and unexpected—and wondered if a gradual destruction was even worse.

The relocation itself seemed improper, big machines rattling crypts and sneezing black exhaust across gravesites while dozens of men stomped and hollered and crouched with their sandwiches and coffee. Harnett planted his fists in his pockets and strolled down the bordering sidewalk, his eyes bright and watchful. I imitated him and absorbed what I could. There were cranes and dozers and backhoes and dump trucks. A foreman used spray paint to mark a number on the side of an exhumed coffin. There was a cordoned lot full of caskets parked like miniature cars. Harnett’s eyes spun over the bounty and his lips moved in silent memorization.

Once we had circled the cemetery, Harnett turned his attention to the neighboring storefronts.

“Here,” he said. “We want to set up camp right here.”

Across the street were an insurance office, a shoe store, a VFW hall, a diner, and a coffee shop.

He grimaced. “I hope you’re thirsty.”

In truth it was shoes I really needed—some more insurance probably wouldn’t have hurt, either—but after the long drive the need for coffee trumped both. We skipped across the asphalt, entered the shop, and stood in line. Once I was enveloped within the warm and spicy atmosphere, my stomach growled and I tugged on Harnett’s sleeve to point out the muffins and scones. He shrugged noncommittally and then, when it was our turn with the barista, I hid my face while she monotoned the definitions of tall, grande, and venti. “I just want a large coffee,” Harnett pleaded after almost a full minute of negotiation.

“And a cranberry scone,” I added. “No, blueberry.”

The shop had plenty of window space, and we situated ourselves at a table allowing an unobstructed view of the excavation. On one side of us, a kid my own age moused languorously at a laptop. On the other side, an old man dominated by a beard hanging halfway down his chest looked listlessly at a newspaper while an old hound dog slept at his feet. I inhaled the scone while Harnett sipped his venti and watched coffins rise.

“They call this silt coffee,” he muttered a half hour later. Nevertheless he looked longingly into his empty cup.

“You should try the vanilla latte,” I suggested. “And these blueberry scones are the shit.”

He considered the intimidating barista before giving me a pitiful look. I sighed, took his money, ordered another scone and drinks for both of us, and returned, sipping my Americano while trying not to laugh at Harnett’s suspicious swishing of his vanilla flavoring. We settled into silence, watching heavy machinery jerk around tight cemetery spaces, tiny plumes of breath making the men themselves look like steam-powered machines. Occasionally something would happen—a backhoe would topple a headstone, a decrepit coffin would be draped with a tarp to protect sensitive onlookers—but mostly it was tedium. This, too, was school, I reminded myself, and as the hours wore on I became increasingly impressed with my father’s dedication. The hiss of cappuccino steam, the ringing of spoons to cups, the piped-in acoustic rock—these sounds clamored for my attention, yet Harnett was inviolable.

We were both on our fourth cups when the bearded man with the dog spoke.

“I found a way to get corpse-stink out of hair.”

I choked and spat; coffee spotted the table. Harnett, though, just stirred his cold latte and shrugged.

“That’s what you said ten years ago,” he said.

“True.” The man scratched crumbs from his beard. “But this way involves egg whites and Lemon Pledge.”

The two men sat nearly back to back, scanning different angles of the same cemetery. They did not turn to look at each other.

“Can’t say that sounds promising,” Harnett said.

“I didn’t say you should drizzle it on your ice cream. But if you’re looking to neutralize your odors, you could do a lot worse. Only problem is once I got it in, Fouler spends the rest of the week trying to eat my hair.”

At the mention of her name, the old hound raised her chin from the ground, leaving behind a dollop of slobber, and swung her droopy lips in my father’s direction. Harnett lowered a hand and scratched beneath the dog’s paisley kerchief.

“Hey, Fouler,” he singsonged. “Hey, girl.” He opened his palm and let the dog lick it. His nod toward the bearded man was almost imperceptible.

“Crying John,” he said.

The man lowered his newspaper so that our eyes could meet.

“Morning, Joey,” he said.

I could not conceal my surprise. Tufts of the man’s massive beard rearranged as he laughed. “That’s right. I know you. You’re the new Digger.”

“Don’t scare the kid,” Harnett griped. “And I’ll let him know when he’s a Digger, not you.”

“Oh, he’s a Digger, all right.” The man examined me as if
searching for flaws. “Knox said how you handled yourself with that woman. Now, that was something. Something like that takes a special touch.”

“Kid doesn’t need a big head.”

“You think
you
could’ve sweet-talked a lady like that? I know exactly what the great Resurrectionist would’ve done. He would’ve taken his shovel and gone
bang
. And dragged her out by the hair. There’s your sweet talk for you.”

The man guffawed. Fouler whined in concert before dropping her chin between her paws. Harnett studied the cemetery.

“Right.” The man sighed. “Well, Joey, I’m Crying John. And this slab of fat down here is the Befouler.” He nudged the animal’s ribs with his toe and she bared her grimy canines in a lazy display of irritation.

I didn’t know what to say. I cleared my throat.

“How old’s your dog?”

Crying John’s voice flipped into falsetto. “Who, old Fouler here? Ole Foulie? Aw, she’s just a baby. Just a big old fat baby-cakes, ain’t you, Foulie?”

“Sixteen,” Harnett said. “Give or take.”

“No, sixteen’s exactly right.” He slapped the dog’s flank. “Raised her from a pup. Best Digger working today, present company included. Ain’t no one better than old Foulie. Ain’t no one feistier, either.”

Fouler’s tongue curled in a yawn.

“I’m sure you’ve already seen plenty of things you never thought you’d see,” Crying John said. “But you haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen Fouler here run out into a mess of twenty thousand stones and go directly—directly—to the hole that needs diggin’.”