Rotters (28 page)

T
HE NEXT DAY WAS
Sunday, and when we made our morning loop of the cemetery I had my biology text under my arm. Forty-five minutes later, upon resuming our positions at the coffee shop, I opened the text but couldn’t concentrate. Harnett had dug out binoculars from his glove box, and in between moments of spying he kept staring at me. “What?” I finally demanded.

“This thing you do,” he said. “Where you space out. What is that?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know,” he said. “Out at a dig or when you’re upset. That thing where you space out.”

“Specifying,” I sighed. “Mom called it specifying.”

“All right,” he said. “So what is it?”

“What do you care?”

“Are you having some sort of mental break? Or some kind of fit?”

“A fit?”

“It’s best if you tell me,” he said. “We’re out on a dig and you have some kind of fit, it’s both our asses.”

“Dude,” I said. “I’m not having a fit.”

He crossed his arms and settled back into his chair, ready to listen. I checked around the shop to make sure no Diggers were nearby, and then I realized I could not remember their faces. The guy rifling through the utensils—was it possible that was Brownie? The old man outside the window hunched before the newspaper kiosk—it might be Under-the-Mud,
but really I had no idea. These men were so good at disappearing that only their colorful nicknames stuck with me.

I rounded my shoulders and in low tones told Harnett everything: when the specifying had begun, the stressful situations that set it off, the near-blinding clarity. When I finished he toyed with the binoculars.

“And you remember these things,” he said. “These things you specify.”

I closed my eyes and let my mind shuffle through the past few months in reverse order—

—and it was as if brand-new, every shimmering, electric, frozen instant.

“Yeah, they’re there,” I said breathlessly. “They’re all there.”

“Can you do it at will?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, can you … specify whenever you want?”

I thought about it for a moment. Specifying had always been for me an unpleasant defense mechanism, never something I would willingly invoke.

“I don’t know,” I said honestly.

Harnett grunted.

“You might think about that,” he said at last. And there it was—an idea so simple it had never occurred to me. Despite doctors’ labeling of the technique as some
sort of handicap, it had the makings of a powerful tool, particularly for someone needing to memorize bits of newspaper, details of caskets, locations of graves, the contour and texture of grass before the first incision. I couldn’t help wondering whether my mother, who had shrugged off psychologists’ recommendations and indulged my near-photographic recall, had anticipated that one day I would find a good use for it.

It was too much to consider, and I rose from the table.

“Where you going?” Harnett asked.

“I can’t study here. I’m going next door to get a snack.”

“I was planning on doing another walk-by,” he said, adjusting the knobs on the eyepieces. “Maybe even try cutting through the cemetery—as a local history buff, that sort of thing.”

“Do it yourself,” I said. “This test, I can’t tell you how important—”

“Yeah, okay.” He sounded a little hurt. “Straight As, I know. Fine. Go eat.”

I put on my coat, picked up my book, and headed for the door. I paused.

“You want me to bring you back anything?”

He leaned forward so that the binoculars touched the window.

I
ORDERED A BASKET
of fries and settled onto a stool at the end of the counter. Oldies were screaming from a speaker directly above my head, and the familiar melodies made it somehow easier to slip into the rote patterns of memorization. It wasn’t
as inspiring as Foley’s CDs—not even close—but by the time the Four Tops segued into the Monkees, I was beginning to understand DNA storage in eukaryotic versus prokaryote organisms.

Halfway through the fries I shook the salt too enthusiastically and it went everywhere, dull sparkles bouncing across the book and lodging in its crevice. I pounded it against the counter, and with the side of my palm scooped up the salt. Remembering an old superstition of my mother’s, I took a pinch of it, said a prayer to Two-Fingered Jesus about acing Gottschalk’s exam, and tossed the granules over my shoulder.

“Devil’s after you,” said a man sitting on the stool to my left.

I glanced over at him. He was abnormally short. A long-tailed black coat draped to the heels of his dress shoes, yet strained against the horizontal shove of his Goliath shoulders. Beneath was a magenta vest and a ruffled shirt. Nearly everyone in the diner was wearing their Sunday best, but even among the tie clips and flowered hats this was an especially dapper ensemble. Its condition, though, was shabby. The sleeves were pilled and the elbows shiny with wear. The vest was so threadbare it was iridescent. Patterns in the black tie revealed a previous wadding, and the shirt ruffles carried similar triangular motifs.

“I’m sorry?”

“Devil. Salt.” Like many of the people around me, he had a Southern accent. “Sorry, I saw you throwing salt.”

Still he did not meet my eyes.

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Did I get it on you?”

“It’s to keep away devils, they say.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said. “It was just something my mom did.”

“That’s right.” He nodded to himself. “I had forgotten.”

He turned to me and offered a tentative smile. His eyes were the clearest blue I had ever seen, like glass, like pictures of Mediterranean waters. These gentle pools were captured within a face that looked edgy and exhausted, but a face that nonetheless did in fact resemble a baby’s, with everything cute taken to an uncomfortable extreme: rosy flush rendered eczemic, cherubic cheeks gone saggy, hair so tangerine and fine it floated like broken cobweb. Most discomfiting were his rows of tiny teeth, mere dots of white upon red gums.

My chest constricted.

“You’re Boggs.”

A fly hit him in the eye; he nudged it away with a knuckle.

“I’ve come such a long way to meet you, son. You wouldn’t believe how long.”

Everything told me to run. Knox had warned me about him; Harnett had refused to discuss him; the Diggers had offered to his name their ominous regrets. But I was rendered motionless by how utterly dissimilar he was to my mental picture of him. Though muscular, he was diminutive. He was soft-spoken, well-dressed, mannered. And he looked at me with an earnest hopefulness that was heartrending.

“I’m not supposed to talk to you,” I said.

He held up a nervous hand and licked lips that were dry and cracked from too many hours in the sun. “I know. I mean, I had a hunch. But hear me out, son. I came so far. California—that’s two thousand five hundred seventy-five miles I came, and I had to jack a Hyundai in Missouri when my first ride up and died on me. Maybe that was wrong of me. Maybe so. But I had to get here. I been dreaming of this day so long.”

He firmed his lips as if mobilizing himself for action, and
then thrust out his hand. I stared at it. The fingers were stubby, the nails purple and pulverized beyond that of any Digger I’d met. Either he was unusually clumsy or unusually busy.

Dejection flickered in his eyes. The hand floated erratically. I couldn’t bear it. Limply I took it and his warm fingers curled over mine. The shake itself was minute but as firm as granite. His crystalline eyes sparkled.

“Antiochus Boggs.” His voice clotted with emotion.

He had me by the hand; I shrugged and replied. “Joey Crouch.”

“Joey, son, I’m not your dad. But I should’ve been.”

I pulled my hand away. In an instant my textbook was stowed and I was on my feet. Boggs slid from his stool and veered to cut me off. He was shorter than I. I could see sunburn shine through the loose whips of his red hair. When he raised his hands to halt me, the suit strained over his shoulders and biceps.

“Apologies,” he said. “That was out of line. I’m tired. Been driving nonstop for three days. Haven’t slept. Barely eaten. My brain—it feels like it’s busted open. Earlier on I thought I felt it dripping out my ears.” He laughed once, tried to reel me back in with the admission. “I’m serious. Kept reaching up there and everything. Thought to myself,
Now, what’s that boy gonna think when he meets his uncle and sees brain dripping out his ears?
”

“You’re not my uncle,” I said.

“Is that what I said? Lord, my mind. No, son, no, I’m not your uncle. That’s true. Dammit, you’re right. But I feel like I am. Your dad and I grew up close as brothers. Closer, even. There was some unpleasantness, yes, and the unfortunate
result was that I did not get to make your acquaintance. Not then, not for sixteen years. But here you are. And here I am. Sixteen years later and I’m finally meeting my son.”

He shut his eyes and gave his head a brisk shake.

“Sorry. Sorry. My brain’s sliding right out my skull. Apologies?”

He turned upon me those spectral eyes. Specks of blood dotted his bottom lip.

Slowly I sat. Keeping his eyes on me, he again mounted the stool. It took him several moments. When he was properly seated, he straightened his sleeves and attempted to tuck excess ruffles into his pants.

“You’ve been given what we in the South call sucker bait. A false bill of sale.” He gestured at the street. “I’m guessing those men you met sketched me out to be a monster. And you believed them, because why would you not? They’re your elders. They’re supposed to look out for you. But, son, look. Use your own eyes. Do I look like a monster?”

His wingspan, when he spread his arms, wasn’t much. Behind him, the place was thickening with families absorbed in their own lunchtime mediations. Next to these groups of combed and belted believers, Boggs just looked remarkably unwell—and alone. I felt an unwelcome but unequivocal surge of sympathy. I, too, knew loneliness.

“No,” I answered. The obvious pleasure the word gave him troubled me, and I forced an edge into my voice. “What do you want?”

“Want? Well, for starters—I’m a little embarrassed to be honest. Seeing how we’ve just met and all. But I’m a little low on funds since my ride up and died. If you’re not intending on finishing those french fries, I’d hate to see them thrown out.”

I blinked at him, then at the food. The smallest of shrugs was all he needed. He pulled the plastic basket until it was stationed directly beneath his chin. Small fingers fumbled through the salt and grease and came up with yellow slivers that he piled on top of his tongue. His shrunken teeth affected a horizontal motion to grind the food to mash.

“That’s it?” I asked. “Food?”

He paused midchew. “There is something else. A favor. It’s an embarrassment to have to ask it. I would’ve preferred to pass more pleasantries. But I feel like I know you, son. You feel it? It’s okay if you don’t. It’s not gonna hurt my feelings.”

I did not answer.

He swallowed and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. A moment later he winced at his behavior and wiped his sleeve with his fingers. Then he looked at his fingers and started searching around for a napkin. The holder was out of his limited reach and reluctantly I withdrew a napkin and handed it over. He nodded his thanks and wove it through his fingers.

“I’d like to speak to your dad,” he said. “If you think you can arrange it.”

I thought of the single wall that separated the diner from the coffee shop.

“I’m not sure I can do that.”

He fumbled inside his pants pocket and withdrew a dingy razor blade.

“Wait.” Panic hit me—the blade, chipped and pimpled with rust, was no equal to my father’s Scottish masterpiece and would hurt plenty and spread disease when it cut. “Listen. Maybe I can. At least let me try!”

He looked at me in confusion and then at the blade in his hand. He laughed.

“This is my shaving razor,” he said. “I ain’t coming to get
you, son, relax. I just wanted to show you that I’m taking this serious. Cleaned my suit at a BP back in Tennessee. Shaved this morning in the library up the road. Got myself a haircut, too.”

He licked his palm and tried to paste down the flyaway hairs. Looking closer, I could see the flushed evidence of newly shorn cheeks, as well as the survivors flitting like orange antenna in the ceiling-fan breeze. I tried to modulate my heart rate. “He doesn’t know. Harnett—he doesn’t know you’re here. None of them do.”

“That is by design, son,” he said. “Why would I announce myself? So they can make a spectacle of me? Had a lifetime of that already. How they’re creeping around that marble farm out there like they’re playing detective,
that’s
the spectacle. That fat, hairy one? The one with the rotter bitch dog? Fourteen times he circled that thing in one hour. What in blazes are you learning on your fourteenth lap?”

He leaned closer. The blue pouches beneath his lower lids swelled to prominence. At the circumference of his perfect eyes I saw root systems of broken vessels. He smelled like all Diggers smell but dipped in the faint turpentine of insomnia. The latter was a scent I recognized from my mother.

“That’s all they ever do,” he said. “They walk in circles. It’s like a metaphor. Once every blue moon they get together and slap each other’s backs and then get right back to walking”—and here he walked his fingers around an invisible track—“in circles.”

Somehow I held back from nodding. The Diggers were a clique as insular as any in high school. Why I hadn’t realized this before baffled me, but I felt gratitude at being trusted with such an observation. Few people since I had left Chicago had met me with anything but skepticism or outright hostility; I
wanted to reward him for that, as well as exercise the feeling of maturity it gave me.