Rotters (29 page)

“They
are
old,” I offered.

Boggs snapped his fingers and pointed at me. “My boy’s a sharp one. That’s right. They’re geezers, ain’t they? All but me and Kenny. And you too, son. I think that’s why I trust you. You’re not set in your ways. You’ve got an open mind. That’s the most important thing in the world, an open mind. Your mom had one. Kenny, too. I bet that’s hard to believe. He’s a rule follower, that one, an order giver. Be quiet, be still, be invisible. He wasn’t always that way.”

I took the opportunity to resolve a controversy:
“I can get anyone.”

He laughed. “That’s right!
I can get anyone
—now, that’s the old Kenny. Back when he had a pair, right?”

Loyalty tugged at me. Harnett wasn’t as bad as Boggs said, he couldn’t be.

Boggs picked up on my hesitation. “No, see, you’re right to defend him. A good son protects his father and vice versa. You were my son, no one would hurt you, not ever, they wouldn’t dare. Lord, you’re a sharp one. May I ask you a question?”

“I guess. Yeah, okay.”

“It’s kind of personal.”

“That’s fine.”

“Okay.” He took a deep breath. “You ever wondered what would happen if they knew?”

“Knew what?”

“What you do at night.”

I glanced around. Just the words made me sweat. “Who?”

“I don’t know. The people you see every day. You go to school?”

“Yeah.”

His head bobbed with enthusiasm. “There you go. Kids at school. The jerks who shove you around. The teacher who treats you like dog crap on his shoe. The little lady who gives you a hard-on the size of Canada and then breaks it in two.”

Just like that I was hanging on his every word.

“What about them?”

“Well, what if they knew? All of them.” A smile fluttered the edge of his lip. “Every single last rotter.”

A thrill burned through my chest and up my spine. I saw the Root dripping dirt as she rose victorious from a hole, and the awed and submissive expressions of Gottschalk, Woody, and Celeste.

Boggs slid a few inches closer. The cuff of his overlong sleeve was held back with what looked like rusty diaper pins.

“Correct me if I’m wrong. But I sense something here. A commonality. A special bond between father and son that no one else—”

“I’m not your son.”

“My brain, it’s my brain, I swear earlier it was coming out my ears. The point is, you and me? We’re the same. Can’t you feel it?”

“No,” I said automatically, but even I heard the lack of conviction.

“No? Really? We’re not related by blood, I give you that. But look. You don’t have a mom or dad. You could make an argument on the dad part, I realize; it’s an open question whether Kenny fulfills the requirements of fatherhood. That’s for you to decide. Now, take me—I don’t have a mom or dad either. You want to know what happened?”

How could I not? I tried to sound disinterested. “Okay.”

“Originally I had both,” he said. “I was born in Atlanta.
But when I came out … well, look at me. Surely you noticed I’m a little different.”

I shook my head. It was a weak and futile gesture.

“I appreciate that,” he said. “But there ain’t any hiding physical facts. I wasn’t born right. I guess you could call me deformed. So they sent me off. Foster homes. Nine of them. Largely unpleasant memories, if you want to know the truth. Stuff you don’t want to know about, like what happens when you pee the bed too many times or accidentally kill the new kitten. You wouldn’t believe how many daddies touched me in inappropriate ways. I would never do something like that to you, son.”

I’m not your son
—I wanted to say it but couldn’t for fear that it would shatter the wide, clear glass of his eyes.

“There were good things about it, too. I got strong, real strong. I found out that there’s things in the dirt you can live off if you need to. Eventually the orphanages got me, but I kept breaking out until they stopped chasing. That’s when I fell in with the rotters. I mean the Diggers.”

An even smaller Antiochus Boggs happening upon those strange and secretive old men—it was hard to imagine their acceptance of him until I remembered how I first came upon Ken Harnett, hostile and uncommunicative in a darkened cabin.

“The point is,” he continued, “I’ve never fit in. Just like you. And I don’t mean any offense by that. Not fitting in? In my book, that’s a good thing. You can’t make a mark on the world if you just vote the party line. So can you see it? How we’re the same? Am I making any sense? My brain isn’t exactly right.”

He looked aggrieved. I felt a need to reassure him. “I guess it makes sense.”

“Lord, that’s sweet music.” His rotund cheeks quivered. His lips made inchworm shrugs. He shut his eyes and I pictured the pure and exquisite ocean that might flow from such resplendent irises. When he regained control over himself he peeked up at me shyly. “Guys like you and me, we’re special. We have talents others don’t have, won’t ever have. Then why aren’t we happier? You ever ask yourself that?”

“Yes.” If there was one undeniable truth, this was it.

“Me too. Took me a lifetime to figure it out, but I won’t make you wait that long. You just have to ask yourself one question: What do we take from the rotters? Aside from trinkets and trifles, what possession of genuine worth do we win for our efforts? The answer ought to depress you, son. The answer is
nothing
. Deep down, that bothers you. Doesn’t it? Sure as hell bothers me. And those old men you met, they’re satisfied with nothing. With all their gifts—and I won’t bullshit you, they have gifts—at the end of the day, they’re satisfied with making circles. Over and over. Over and over.”

With that, he tucked his small hand inside his coat, eased unseen buckles, and withdrew a large black book.

“I’ve taken more,” he said.

A fist snared Boggs’s collar and shoved. He struck the counter, rebounded, lost his balance, and tumbled from his seat. His impact sounded like a gray sack dropped to cabin cement. The vacated stool made merry-go-round circuits. A few feet away, the book slapped down and Boggs lunged for it. The rest was blocked out—Harnett was in my face, hauling me to my feet and squeezing me with one hand while he dug for a ten-dollar bill and left it wadded on top of the check.

His face was bloodless. “Your schoolwork.”

Numbly I picked up my biology book and Harnett steered us away. Already Boggs was up and blocking our path, over a foot shorter than my father but, due to his fantastic breadth and the startling incongruity of his three-piece suit, just as imposing. Harnett pulled back, holding me in check with an elbow. Boggs’s pink face broke into a heedless grin.

“Kenny,” he said. “Lord, it’s good to see you.”

“Step aside.”

Boggs shook his head as if there had been some terrible misunderstanding.

“This is silly. We shouldn’t fight. If you could just give me a minute I’d be—”

“Get out of my face.”

A burly man in chef’s whites was leaning over the counter.

“There some problem here, folks?”

Oldies still blared from speakers, but beneath the music the dissonance of the diner was smoothing as families broke off their conversations and began to take note. Boggs straightened his vest and adjusted his rumpled tie. He gestured apologetically at a vacated corner booth. If there was anything a Digger feared it was attention, and the longer we stood there the more we got. With a single flex of his jaw, Harnett forced a tight smile at the cook, took three giant steps, and landed on the far bench of the booth. I wandered after and he tugged me down next to him.

Coattails rippling, Boggs slid onto the opposite bench. He pushed aside the uncleared plates and dirty utensils and smacked the book down before him. It was large and nondescript and bulged with its untitled contents. Boggs’s little hands stroked the faux-leather cover.

“Two minutes.” Harnett flicked his eyes at a nearby clock,
where a second hand lazed past bad caricatures of Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, and James Dean. “Time enough for these people to get back to their business.”

“You’re getting bent out of shape,” Boggs said. “There’s no reason. It’s just me, Baby. Do you know how far I came to see you? Two thousand five hundred seventy-five—”

“Tick tock.” Harnett kept his eyes on Marlon, Marilyn, and James.

Boggs sat back and frowned. “Right. Down to business. That’s how it always is with you. I guess I’d forgotten. Well, fine. We can make this a business meeting if you want. I do have some business to transact.”

“That’s up to you,” Harnett said. “One minute.”

Boggs spoke faster. “You’re going to be glad we had this conversation. You’re going to see that this is exactly where you belong. Right at this table with me. With me and Joey. The three of us—you remember how it used to be? With me and you and Valerie? We were family then, and the three of us here now, we can be—”

“Don’t talk about her. Don’t talk. I’ve got nothing to say to you.” But Harnett couldn’t resist. “Go back to your hellhole. Your ditch. Wherever you’re squatting now.”

The words were like bullets. Boggs flinched at each one. He hid his face, turning to the dirty dishes for guidance. When at last he spoke, the syllables were tentative and imploring. “She’s gone now. I know it, I heard. And I’m so sorry, Kenny. You don’t know how sorry. But you don’t need to be like this. I’ve done nothing to deserve it. I’m trying to make things better with us. You’re my brother and nothing can change that.”

“We were never brothers.”

Boggs’s voice shattered. “How can you
say
that? Of course
we are! All those years growing up—what was that? Did that not happen? You need to remember it, Kenny. One of us has to, and my brain is falling out my head. Did I tell you that? It’s true. You’re probably glad. But you shouldn’t be. No one should feel that way about his brother.”

“Don’t worry. I don’t feel anything at all.” He glanced at the clock. “Time’s up.”

“Wait. Now you just wait. I know you like I know me. We think the same. You may not want to admit that, but it’s true. We both know, for instance, that when a rotter dies, that’s it. There’s no fantasy land of heaven or hell. It’s like that old saying we used to say:
You can’t take it with you
. Except here’s the thing. You ready? You ready for our business transaction? Turns out they
do
get away with something. Don’t they?” He shifted his despairing gaze to me. “Don’t they, son?”

“Do not address him,” Harnett said. I barely heard. I could not take my eyes from the unnatural thickness of the book.

“What the rotters get away with is dignity.
Dignity
. And that’s wrong. And you know it. They had their time. They had their degrees and careers and portfolios. All so they could buy themselves a diamond ring and die with it on, all so they could get themselves buried wearing it—and what’s the point, Kenny, seriously now, of a diamond, which is designed to reflect light, what’s the point if there ain’t no light to reflect? You and me can steal that ring, sure, but that doesn’t get down to the real issue, now, does it? Brother—you know I know you know it.”

Boggs sank his fingers into the soft flesh of the book and with deliberation slid it across the table. It made the sound of ice being shaved. Boggs twisted his wrists clockwise and the book was suddenly facing my father and me with all the malice of a darkened cellar.

I stared at it. Harnett did, too.

“This is a gift. If you want it. I began it when I heard about our son.”

I found myself drawing back the front cover.

“I started it alone but we can finish it together.”

When I saw the first Polaroid it was as if I had known all along. My heart did not accelerate; rather it seemed to slow and slug thickly against either lung. I turned pages. More.

“I call it the Rotters Book, Kenny.”

More. More.

“My Rotters Book.
Our
Rotters Book.”

More. More. More.

“A bunch of filthy stinking rotters.”

On each wrinkled page, nestled between the claws of scrapbook photo corners, were four instant photographs, each one of a corpse smashed flat by the unkind swat of a cheap flashbulb and slathered a garish green by the yellow snot of developing liquid. They were old men, their translucent skin stretched and pocked like moth-eaten fabric. They were little girls, their lips strung with purple pearls of rot, their cheeks appled with rupture. They were genderless skulls, a thousand years old, the dried jelly of what used to be flesh crusted to gray bone. Caught in explosions of white light, once-severe brows were erased, once-regal cheekbones whittled to kernels; they were pink, white, blue; they were the color and texture of afterbirth. And there were hundreds of them, these cold and bent photos, each one stamped with Boggs’s muddy fingerprints—the autograph of this intruder who had come at them with chisel and shovel, smashing first their caskets and then their sanctuary. It was sickening and dazzling, this litany of trespass.

I could feel the heat of Harnett’s armpits, see the sweat spreading from his hands.

“No one’s ever seen anything like it, Kenny. I can promise you that. You know what this is? It’s a
communication
. It’s going to tell the whole wide world that we’re watching. There’s not going to be any more creeping around like cockroaches. No one anywhere is going to even think about dying without having to go through us first.”

Page after page—it was as if someone had done my specifying for me.

Boggs’s voice was bursting with joy. “I still haven’t told you the best part.”

Together my father and I looked up.

“Two pictures,” Boggs said. “I take two. One goes in the Rotters Book. The other I leave down there with them.” He beamed proudly. “Pinned right to their chests.”

Harnett went over the table. Condiment bottles spun and clattered; I saw a white line of salt and felt a familiar urge except this time didn’t know in which direction to throw. Harnett’s hands squeezed at Boggs’s throat. The smaller man gurgled in surprise and cranked his foreshortened arms as if he were drowning. His frenzied feet nailed me under the table—my foot, my shin, my thigh—and for a flash I was back within the Congress of Freaks, not son of the mighty Resurrectionist, just Crotch, and these kicks were what I deserved.