Rotters (32 page)

“Easy now, right foot.” Harnett steadied Lionel. “Boggs and I were away a lot on digs. He’d dig faster and better than me. Left foot, come on. And when we came home—It was a small place. Things got uncomfortable. Boggs would look at her. There were tensions.”

“Tensions,” Lionel scoffed. “He wanted Valerie for himself.”

Harnett scanned the murky horizon. “We have to get moving. Right foot. Come on, step.”

And between encouragements my father told the only story left to tell. Once upon a time there were two men who loved and hated each other as only brothers could. One brother did things according to tradition; the other craved glory at the expense of all else. One night while unearthing a coffin, Ken Harnett told Antiochus Boggs that he needed to go his own way. Seconds later, Boggs shrieked. He had discovered a dead Rat King. A terror most consider nothing more than myth, a Rat King is a number of rats whose tails have become tangled and sealed with dirt, blood, and shit. Joined as one, they move and think and die as a single creature and their discovery has always portended bad things: war, the plague. Boggs became agitated. He took up Harpakhrad and demanded that Harnett retract his words—the omens
were telling them they must stay together forever. Boggs stomped and screamed and cried. Lights were turning on in nearby houses. Harnett did not know what to do except strike him down with Grinder.

After placing Boggs’s unconscious body carefully upon a park bench, Harnett hurried home to Valerie Crouch. It was three-thirty in the morning and yet she was up. She greeted him with a strange look.
It’s fine, he’s sleeping it off in the park
, Harnett said, but Val said that wasn’t it. She was pregnant. The first thing through Harnett’s mind: the Rat King.

The second thing: panic. What did a child mean for a Digger? He was fearful and didn’t like the feeling. The only remedy was to dig and dig boldly, and so he got into his truck and went to uncover a man named Phineas Gatlin. It was a tricky dig that he and Boggs had been contemplating for months. The belly was in a family cemetery just outside a bedroom window and within sight of unchained dogs. Harnett rushed and failed. Dogs barked. People awoke. They pursued him. Harnett made it back home long enough to throw Val into the passenger seat and then they were on the run.

When Harnett one day settled in Wisconsin, it was Elroy Gatlin who split his door with an axe. A year later in Michigan, it was Wentworth Gatlin who shattered his windows, hollering for justice. Then it was other sons and other grandsons, spread across vast stretches of time and geography. Sixteen years would pass until the day I arrived at Harnett’s door, and though Bloughton had served as his best hiding place yet, he was confident that the Gatlins would one day be the end of him. It all made sense now: the cabin’s disarray, the refusal to engage in a community. For a decade he’d expected every day in Bloughton to be his last.

No one could track like Boggs. He loved Harnett, and Valerie, too, but if he could not be part of a family, there would be no family at all. It was just a few weeks after the Rat King’s discovery that Boggs was able to lead the Gatlins right to them. Harnett and Val were sleeping in a barn when the ambush came. Three attackers, shouting the Gatlin name and swinging shovels and picks. Harnett was terrified. Not because they could kill him but because they knew what he had done. Seeing the Gatlins with raised tools? For Harnett it was like looking in a mirror. He didn’t think about Val. He didn’t think about the baby inside her. He thought only of himself, and when one of the Gatlins swung a shovel, he ducked. The blade ripped through Val’s ear. It sounded like a rubber band snapping. Then Harnett heard the blood. Even then he didn’t move to protect her. He ran. When Val pulled herself up, the Gatlins, perhaps not expecting a woman, were startled and backed off.

My mother had saved Harnett, not the other way around, and now that it was spoken aloud it didn’t surprise me. What did surprise me was the depth of Harnett’s regret and the tsunamic force of his love, which had not only survived sixteen years but threatened to usurp even my own. Everything about him, every impressive quality, every deplorable routine, stemmed from his failure to save the one person who had saved him.

“Forgive,” Lionel gasped. “Yourself.”

The world had ended. The sharp salt odor made me sick. We were perched above the beach on an outcropping. I staggered to the edge. Sand coated my tongue. The bleeding razor of sun healed to smooth gray tissue. I sank to my exhausted knees and let the pounding waves become the blood in my veins. The image of my injured and bleeding mother was more
vibrant than any I’d had of her in months. I stretched until I was flat on my stomach. Icy patches of grass adhered to my cheeks. Something even colder met my outstretched fingers.

It was a single tiny gravestone reigning quietly over the entire Atlantic. The engraving promised a fittingly anonymous end to the life of a Digger:

Harnett’s voice: “Lionel, no.”

“Yes.”

“Don’t show me this.”

“Don’t turn away from it.”

“You can’t go through with it.”

Lionel’s voice was proud. “Your beliefs are not mine.”

“A burial, after everything you’ve seen?” Lionel managed a smile. “What a spot. What a world. Look at it.”

I drew myself up and did what he said. Lionel was right; it had been worth the long and painstaking trip, and I felt a debt to these men for taking me so far. Moments later I knew how to repay it. Lionel had insisted that this spot was important; Harnett had asked me that morning if I could specify at will. So I forced open my eyes, nose, mouth, ears, and fingers, and leaned backward until I fell onto the soft blanket of Lionel’s future bed, the thick ocean my sheets, my every sense dreaming with exquisite detail—

—all of it fading now, fading, darkening, darker, dark.

L
AHN WAS MAYBE TEN
years younger than Lionel and said very little. Words, however, were unnecessary—the older man knew by the rap of knife against cutting board which dish Lahn was fixing. Despite his exhaustion, Lionel rhapsodized about Lahn’s Vietnamese cuisine, and made us partake in his sweet-and-salty noodles despite Harnett’s suggestion that we just grab a couple of onions for the road. Lahn declined an invite to join us, instead smiling and bowing and leaving the room.

Harnett looked different to me, especially when the dinnertime conversation veered back to my mother. With each word I saw cords of pain pull at the corners of his eyes and carve at his forehead. These markings, previously unnoticed by me, lent his features a startling vulnerability. For the first time, I felt the urge to put my hand to his back and feel how similar his shudders were to my own.

“You hold her too high,” Lionel said. “You’ve made her out as an ideal, and that’s dangerous, Ken. Dangerous to you.”

“What am I supposed to do?” he said. “I remember how I remember.”

Lionel pointed a knotted finger at me. Under his nails, dirt.
Grave dirt
, my mind thought automatically.
His own
.

“The world’s foremost authority is right here! I bet he knows stories that would make you think you never knew her at all. All you have to do is ask. Go ahead.”

Harnett narrowed his eyes. “Why would I want to do that? Think that I never knew her? That makes no sense.”

“No, what you’re doing now makes no sense.” Lionel scooped up rice and tucked it inside his mouth. “Tell us something about your mother, Joey.”

“Like what?”

“Something not-so-good. Even bad.”

Harnett clanged his fork to his plate. “The kid doesn’t want—”

“And what’s with this ‘kid’ and ‘Harnett’ business? It’s not natural.”

Harnett shut his mouth and chewed. Lionel nodded at me in encouragement. Various scenarios presented themselves—my mother elbowing with unrepentant force a parent who was talking during my trumpet solo; unleashing a cyclone of expletives when refrigerator magnets succumbed to the weight of A-plus papers—but none of them fit.

“See, he’s got nothing,” Harnett said.

“No!” I opened my mouth and waited for words to fill it. “When … before seventh grade … I was just about to start seventh grade.” The details of the story were foggy, but I kept going, uncertain of where I was leading myself. “And she took me to the store to buy school supplies. Folders and pencils and that kind of stuff. But I was starting gym that year—”

I broke off. This was an embarrassing story. But Lionel was waiting, and even Harnett was unable to conceal his curiosity. I took a breath and continued.

“And we had to buy a jockstrap. For gym.”

Harnett swallowed. “You needed a jockstrap for gym?”

“Well, no,” I said. “Not really. But I didn’t know that. It was my first year in a real gym class. A jockstrap was on the list. I thought I’d get in trouble or something if I didn’t have everything on the list. So once we got done buying folders and stuff, we got to the jockstrap part and she goes back to the sports section and finds them, except she doesn’t know what size to get. So she takes out a size small and stretches it out in front of me.”

Harnett was looking at me like he didn’t get it.

“I mean, there were kids everywhere! We were right in the middle of a store! People were staring! She flipped off like three of them!”

Tears were brimming from Lionel’s eyes as he tried not to choke on his rice. Harnett, meanwhile, knitted his brow. Finally he nodded curtly.

“She had to gauge the size of your manhood,” he concluded.

“My
manhood
?” I appealed to Lionel. “Who talks like that?”

Lionel pounded the table with a fist, flecks of rice shooting from his lips.

Harnett squinted at me. “And you found this embarrassing.”

“You are an alien!” I shouted. Harnett frowned. I shook my head helplessly at Lionel and found that I was laughing, too. I gave in to it and laughed until my back hurt. Lionel groaned and wiped his eyes with a napkin. Harnett shrugged, picked up his fork, and resumed stuffing in noodles as if the two of us weren’t there.

“Sounds like Valerie,” Lionel sighed. “Just as soon kick your ass as say excuse me.”

We adjourned to the living room. Lahn toyed with a power strip and I caught my breath: Christmas lights. Bulbs of red and green and gold gave the otherwise shaded room a cozy holiday hue. Moments later I heard the unmistakable tinkling of the only Christmas album my mother could listen to without pretending to retch,
A Charlie Brown Christmas
. The combination was too much; still weakened from my laughing fit, I had no defense to the tears that smeared my vision. I rubbed my face and looked away. Lionel pretended not to notice and extended a hand so that Lahn, squatting upon an ottoman, could massage his knotted digits.

“If what you’re asking me is should you do something, like go to California, try to steal the book, my answer is no,” Lionel said. He gave Lahn his other hand. “You know how Baby is. He might have already tossed the thing in a fire.”

“Not this time,” said Harnett. “And the book—Lionel, it was
thick
.”

Lionel flexed his fingers and smiled at Lahn. “You’re a godsend,” he said. “You’ll come by tomorrow morning as usual? There’s a ham we might as well cook.”

Lahn nodded to Harnett and me before exiting. Lionel watched him go and sighed.

“Baby calls me, you know,” Lionel said. “Somehow he got the number. Sometimes he’ll call, on my birthday or Father’s Day, even, and he’ll sound so happy. He’ll be laughing like a little boy.”

Harnett leaned forward. “He calls you? Here?”

“Then other times, it’s tears. Crying so bad I can’t make out a word. Not that I need to—it’s always the same few things. He wants compliments or attention. Sometimes he just wants money. What he really wants, of course, is forgiveness, but that’s one thing I can’t give.”

Harnett was practically out of his seat. “What else does he say?”

Lionel relaxed his limbs and closed his eyes. “It’s hard, raising boys. They want to become you, but also they hate you. Those are competing desires. Put them together and you have a form of suicide. Think of it. Generations upon generations of men killing themselves over and over, and for what? Because love and hate, both are too powerful, and no boy—and no father, for that matter—can live up to either.”

The music was melancholy. I heard the faint slap of palms to thighs.

“Well,” Lionel said. “Some of us are ancient.”

The cane was dragged across the carpet. Veins in his neck articulated as he brought himself to his feet. Harnett stood but did not approach. The cane gingerly tested the floor as if the carpet might conceal quicksand, and then Lionel proceeded across the room until the two men faced each other.

“Can’t you stay just one day?”

“The kid,” Harnett said. “School.”

Lionel’s eyes took on a faraway look, as if only now recalling. He winked at me.

“Test on the last day of school,” he said. “Must be a tough teacher.”

I cleared my throat. “He is.”

They looked nothing alike, these two men, but I could see how the mighty bow of my father’s back might one day collapse into Lionel’s stoop. There were other similarities, in their arms and hands and in the web of lines spiraling from their eyes. Harnett was becoming Lionel and Lionel was becoming oblivion.

“So long, then,” the old man said.

My father had carried this man from the ocean, across the
cemetery, up the hill, through the woods. Now he could not touch him.