Rotters (34 page)

Back at the cabin, we studied newspapers as hard as I had once studied Gottschalk handouts. Harnett’s paranoia grew. There were reports from surrounding communities of sullied cemetery lots, busted padlocks, skewed headstones, muddy tracks. In his attempt to infect the earth with hundreds upon hundreds of photographs, Boggs was getting sloppy, maybe intentionally. Eventually, Harnett fretted, regular people would start noticing commonalities in police reports. Once that happened, it was just a matter of time before a disinterment led to a discovery of Boggs’s project.

“I can’t dig up every single grave he’s dug.” Harnett’s chair barely contained his rocking. “I can’t remove every single picture he’s buried.”

Even as he said this, I could tell that he was wondering whether, in fact, he could. Without its being expressly stated, our mission had changed. We would dig, and use the spoils to buy the necessary staples, but our primary objective was to erase the Rotters Book and hold accountable its author. More than ever before, Harnett would need a good shovel. He brought home dozens, some purchased, others found in landfills and alleys, and riddled our backyard with them before tossing the unfit instruments into the river.

T
HE SWEATSHIRT AND HOODIES
I had previously worn to school had gone stiff and black. Despite the cold, I donned the duck-in-sunglasses tee I hadn’t worn since my first day at BHS. I wasn’t sure why I even showed up to kick off the new semester—some remnant of decorum or habit?—but when I took a seat in my first-period class, the desk knocked against my knees and pinched my lower back. As I crossed my arms defensively, the duck in sunglasses pulled tight across my back.
I’m taller
, I realized.
I’m bigger
. Other students hastened away their gazes as I rolled my shoulders and correlated each strap of muscle to those I had seen on the Diggers. I was like them now, except that they grew weaker each day while I grew stronger. The teacher frowned when I laughed to myself.
Maybe it was all those goddamn onions
, I thought.

Biology, once again, came third period. I paused outside the room, dazed by how much smaller the hallways looked, how juvenile the students, how inconsequential the faculty. I wandered inside after the bell and took the only remaining seat, right in front. Gottschalk began by introducing himself as the new principal before praising himself for keeping his teaching gig, too. Then he began a spiel so familiar that I knew what came next—attendance, along with some mockery of people’s names—and I waited patiently through the alphabet for him to call me to the front of the class. He did.

“No,” I replied.

His thick lips swelled in anticipation of triumph. The words he used did not surprise me.
Don’t be greedy with your talent, Mr. Crouch. You were so useful last semester, Mr. Crouch. Come
help me illustrate the various units we will be covering this year, Mr. Crouch
.

I refused in silence until a curious thing happened. I heard snickering aimed at Gottschalk, not me, and in that instant I saw a flash of panic in the teacher’s eyes—if he didn’t wrest victory from me right away, his control of the entire semester might teeter. He banked by my desk and muttered to me in a low voice.

“Get up here and we’ll let bygones be bygones.”

Gottschalk was sweating. It was magnificent. He shuffled backward until his ass hit the chalkboard—more laughter.

“With or without the assistance of Mr. Crouch,” he shouted, his voice ringing with alarm, “we will be taking a journey from the beginning of our existence to the very end. It’s a long journey that will become ever longer the less you are able to control yourselves—quiet down, now. We’ll begin with sperm and egg. From there we’ll move to systems, in order: the integumentary, skeletal, muscular, nervous, cardiovascular, endocrine, immune, respiratory, digestive, excretory, finally ending with the properties of decomposition.”

“You know nothing about decomposition.”

It was my own voice. Perhaps emboldened by all my noes, I let these five new words escape in a snort. Gottschalk was left goggling, his arm floating in some half-finished gesture. I could see the flicker of deliberation: send me from the room or take me on in hopes of winning back his class? I never doubted his decision.

“If, Mr. Crouch, you’re referring to the fact that I am not yet dead, I’m afraid I have some relatives who would disagree.” Chuckles from the spectators, more polite than anything. “But I believe that even you, with your knowledge of biology so vast that you’re taking this class for a second
time”—more chuckling—“will learn an item or two about the factors affecting decay rate, how body mass affects the process more than environment, and so forth—”

“It’s not true,” I said. “Body size barely matters.”

“Thank you, Professor Crouch. Now if your lecture is complete—”

“Temperature is the biggest factor.” I could hardly believe it was my voice that was speaking, but I kept moving my lips and the words kept coming. “Second is access by insects. Third is burial conditions, and fourth is access by animals. Body mass is maybe seventh or eighth on the list.”

A purple color was creeping up his neck. I’d never seen his teeth before, but there they were, sharp triangles of yellow rising like shark fins. “Disruption by carnivore is hardly a major concern to burials in modern-day America, Professor Crouch.”

“You didn’t say burials,” I said. The tightness and heat that usually accompanied my public speaking had been replaced by an icy calm. “You said decay rate. These are well-known forensic results. Carnivores affect decay more than trauma, humidity, rainfall—”

“We will not be covering
carnivores
in a biology class,” he hissed. “We will be covering only natural decomposition, which does not involve fauna of any sort, with the obvious exception of bugs. Now, if you’d like to continue your lesson in the principal’s office—”

“Necrophages,” I said.

His threat to expel me from the room had given him away. He was losing and knew it. To everyone else it must have been a comic delight, but I was locked into the kind of focus Woody must have felt when the entire season was on the line. Gottschalk stood with his bottom lip quivering, trying in vain
to recollect a definition I had read a dozen times in Harnett’s lurid library.

“I …”

“Necrophages,” I repeated. “A species of arthropod that feeds on body tissue.”

Gottschalk blinked.

“Oh, sorry,” I said. “Arthropods are bugs.”

A whoop went up from the back of the class—
Oh, damn!
—and a thrill of laughter ripped through the ranks. Gottschalk looked suffocated. I rose before he had the chance to order it and met his beady eyes on my way out. There would be no more debasing me before my classmates, no more striking me with his wand. Perhaps there would be no graduation, either, but that was a possibility I was quickly learning to live with.

I celebrated by skipping the next two classes. Somehow Ted found me pacing a rarely used hallway and with a look directed me to the band room. Was Ted why I had returned to school? I wasn’t sure. I was too preoccupied with the steely coldness that had taken hold of me, and wondering if it had come from the Diggers, Lionel, or Boggs, or if it was simply the natural extension of my oblivion and extinction. Ted pointed to my trumpet case; it sat exactly where I had left it a month ago. I just stared at him—such things were no longer part of my life. To my surprise the dorky conductor had twice the grit of Gottschalk; he won the staring contest and our covert lessons continued. As usual we exchanged no words save his parting remark: “Next lesson, then.”

I stuck around for lunch because I was hungry. Gottschalk had wasted no time purging me from Simmons’s free-lunch list, so I paid cash. Foley was a few tables over and his presence threatened to disrupt my strange tranquility. I made a
silent promise to skip lunch from here on out—he was better off without me. Like Harnett, I knew when it was time to break from my partner. A tiny part of me mourned. I pretended it was a cockroach and did what you do to cockroaches.

There were other recognizable shapes at the edges of my vision—Heidi, eating with one hand, paging through textbooks with another; Celeste, tiptoeing through suggestions of her dance routine; Woody and Rhino, no doubt recounting the shower incident to the requisite rapt faces—but to me they were as inanimate as something at the bottom of a hole. They were, I was pleased to note, only rotters.

H
ARNETT WAS SHAKING NEWSPRINT
in my face as soon as I crossed the threshold.

“Peter and Paul Eccles.” He followed me with the page as I pulled off my shoes. “Twin frontiersmen hired to protect the last stages of the First Transcontinental Railroad. You know what that is?”

This was my father lately: red-eyed, jumpy, implacable. I turned away from him and stripped myself of my coat. “I’m in school, aren’t I?”

“It was the first railroad to connect the country,” he raved. “When the Central Pacific and Union Pacific lines met at Promontory Summit in Utah in 1869, they drove in a ceremonial spike to mark the final tie.”

“Big deal.” I moved toward the sink and he kept right at my elbow.

“It
is
a big deal,” he snapped. “They actually drove in four spikes that day to commemorate various rail lines, but the last spike, the so-called Golden Spike, was seventeen-point-six-karat gold, engraved on all four sides by various bigwigs. This was a major event. Do you understand the significance? The conquest of the West. The annihilation of the Indians. It’s huge, monumental.”

There was nothing in the refrigerator. I threw the door shut in irritation—Harnett’s erratic behavior meant that once again it would be up to me to fill the shelves. Distantly I recognized the unjustness of such an arrangement. In my former life it had not been up to me to plan the menus of two people. I threw open a cabinet.

“The Golden Spike’s in a museum,” I muttered. It was about the only thing I remembered about the story and I hoped it would shut him up.

Harnett’s eyes blazed. “Right. But read here. Right here. In the last months of construction, Peter and Paul Eccles were hired—hired by President Ulysses S. Grant himself, who’d just taken office. You know why?”

I banged through empty cupboards. “Because they were cute?”

“Because Grant had gotten word of an Indian uprising that was going to bloody up the completion of the railroad. The Eccles brothers had fought with Grant about five years earlier at Shiloh, and they’d been living out West with the Indians ever since. When Grant hired them to keep the peace, they took the job—he was their friend and their president—but they didn’t know what taking the job really meant. You know what it meant?”

Slowly I faced him. I had some idea.

“It meant they had to kill Indians,” he said. “Lots of them.
Hundreds, maybe. These Indians were their friends. Men they had hunted with, passed the pipe with. And now they were turning around and raising their government rifles and slaughtering them.”

I slumped against the counter, waiting for the inevitable grave at the end of the story. My hand crept to the side of the sink, where I could feel the scars of my calendar: five days, ten days, one month, two, four, six.

Harnett lifted the newspaper. “This is Thursday’s paper from Dundee, Iowa, and this here is an article about the town’s links to the Civil War. It talks about how Grant showed his gratitude by giving both Eccles brothers a replica of the Golden Spike with his personal thanks carved into the gold. Each spike was worth a small fortune then; what a museum would pay for them today, I don’t even know. Peter Eccles is buried in Dundee, and the town rumor is he took that spike to his grave.”

“Just Peter? What about Paul?”

Harnett snatched up some crumbling newsprint from the counter. “This is an issue from October 1988, from Miller’s Field, Illinois, where Paul Eccles is buried, just across the Mississippi, and it repeats the same rumor. That’s independent confirmation, kid. It’s true, all of it, I know it is. After the railroad was built, after they’d killed all their Indian brothers, after their president had given them these spikes that, in their eyes, were soaked in blood, they gave up on life, both of them. They put the length of Iowa between them and never spoke, and never, ever displayed the spikes, but they both kept them until they died, or so go the stories.
Both
the stories.”

He stood with the two papers in either hand, gloating over his discovery. My anger was dimming; I felt a familiar tingle
of excitement and my eyes found the Root where she waited pensively in a darkened corner. “Which one do we go for?”

“If Boggs is doing his homework, he could be reading the same article about Peter. But he won’t have the Miller’s Field story to cross-reference. He’ll suspect it’s just rumor; he’ll hesitate. We won’t. We go now, to Dundee, and we get President Grant’s spike.”

Harnett was nearly slavering. The fact that my new semester had just begun didn’t even enter his mind. It was just as well.

I fit my fingers over the Root. Harnett kneeled to lace his boots.

“We got him on this one,” he whispered to the floor. “We got him.”

Hours later he was proven correct. There was no picture pinned to the patchy remnants of Peter Eccles’s burial coat, but sewed into a hidden pocket beneath his left armpit was the spike. As Harnett funneled dirt that was no different from any other dirt, I fondled the two-of-a-kind artifact; it made white lines of the moonlight. In my hand it felt as lethal as Gottschalk’s pointer, as rigid as the faucets in the boys’ shower room. Even here, miles away and half buried in history, I could not escape Bloughton.

My father was still bursting with pride when we got back home. Without killing the engine, he ran inside with the spike and our bags of gear. I followed and heard him lock his safe. He emerged a couple of minutes later with some extra clothes stuffed into a garbage bag.

“Sensitive stuff.” He scratched at his beard and took a quick look around the room. “Requires a special buyer. Got
a man in mind, but he’s a full day away. He’s just the right guy, though. Knows how to unload something like this, wash his hands so that it can’t be traced.” He paused and looked at me. “That okay? It could be Saturday until I’m back.”