Rotters (42 page)

After Celeste adjusted to her blindness she became aware of another lack—there was no crowd noise. Then again, it made sense. The theater representatives were probably few in number and, after all, they were captivated. She was a pro, so she kept on dancing. Somehow her eyes began to adjust and she was encouraged by the smiles shining white through the darkness. The end was near now and she tried to concentrate on her routine. She became aware of a sound, a strange whirring and clicking. Applause? Could it be applause already? She executed the bravura ending, falling to the stage like a cut flower, and convinced herself that, yes, that crackling sound was applause, it had to be. She stood and bowed and, receiving no further instruction, shaded her eyes and stepped forward out of the spots. The white she had seen was indeed teeth. The noise, though, was rats. A gang of skeletons sat in the chairs, their skulls and rib cages wired shut so that each had a rat for a brain and a rat for a heart. The sound was that of the animals chewing for their freedom. Some had already escaped and, fat with marrow, slugged their bodies up the center aisle. She did not scream. She met her audience head-on. Maybe I mentioned it before, but Celeste Carpenter was a pro.

My revenge on Gottschalk did not have the tawdry exuberance of my other efforts, but in its relative subtlety it was my favorite. His desk, from behind which he had unfairly
butchered my A and beside which he had whipped me with his wand, had been cleared. Upon it sat a tombstone. Chipped into it was his name and the date. Gottschalk was not dumb. He knew right away it was over. There was a fucking tombstone in his fucking classroom. The clinging sod and clay proved it as the genuine article. After registering the sound of the door locking behind him, he squeezed himself into one of the student desks and speculated on what other horrors laid hidden in his school and what kinds of disgrace they would herald. When he heard the faint reverberations of a young man’s screams from the direction of the gymnasium, he began to cry. Against his sobbing gut the chair hurt and so he stretched out on the floor, right under his tombstone. Even that close, he probably didn’t recognize how much it smelled like the student he had tormented for months. He bawled until his body ached. Eventually he felt like a medical school cadaver, or even one of those pictures in his textbook, flayed open to show his undersized heart and oversized lungs and stringy intestines. He felt eviscerated, dissected, and alone. Finally he knew how it felt.

He didn’t have to wait long. I had already called the cops. It had been a risk, but Harnett had said it the first time he buried my homework in the backyard:
Time is always against you
. He was right and I wanted it no other way, because for me that was how it had always been. I hitched a ride from the highway, took a bus west—that was the direction the most recent Polaroids had suggested—and began to ask questions of the homeless people who hung out near bus stations. Over the next few days, I moved from town to town, reading local papers and, when the trail felt hot, following Harnett’s old advice of getting a trim from a local barber. There had been incidents, I learned, just a couple of towns over. I investigated those cemeteries in person. As I boarded another bus and
crossed the Missouri River on the state’s western border, I could feel him like knives in my gut.

As I approached the highway underpass, I thought of my mother. I told her that I was sorry I had left Harnett, I was sorry her plans for me had failed, but at least she would be avenged. Up ahead, I saw a shabby lean-to lit by a paltry fire. My veins pained me with each heartbeat. My muscles convulsed in expectation. I had taken care of Woody, Celeste, and Gottschalk, but I was not done.

I stood at the edge of the fire. I felt as if I were standing at its center. A man used his fingers to scoop baked beans out of a can, sucked them clean, and then motioned his head at another can.

“There’s beans,” Boggs said. “Just don’t eat too many.”

S
TALACTITES BIT DOWN FROM
the overpass above us like teeth, salivating when semis thundered overhead. The clammy corners seemed to squirm toward the fire like slugs, craving the heat of the wan and ribboned flames. Boggs passed another finger across his lips. The tongue that licked at the gloppy residue was red and suppurating.

“I don’t mind sharing.” He shrugged. “You look hungry.”

He leaned and his half-grin tipped from shadow. Something was horribly wrong. His face, merely ruddy when I had met him back at the diner in West Virginia, had progressed through some calamitous change. Patches were eaten away as if by acid, revealing layers of abraded flesh that winked wetly in the changing light. His thin hair had receded
unevenly in all directions, leaving isolated crests of orange silk that flapped with every breath of wind. His nostrils and lips were crusted over and pulled so tight at the surrounding skin that it looked as if he were inhaling his own face. Worst of all were his eyes. The left was still a thing of pure and cerulean beauty. But the veiny tendrils that had threatened months ago had taken full hold of the right, and the infected orb poised on the edge of its lids. It moved not at all while his good eye whirled, taking in my fists, my larger and stronger biceps, the explosions contained within my bearing.

The brutal motions I had been ready to execute caught in my joints. This was not the man I remembered. From the look of things, he was barely alive. My pause was lengthy; his grin widened, and among his miniature teeth I saw absences—two, three at least.

“You look mad, too.” His Southern accent seemed to have thickened. He still wore the three-piece suit, only now it was a lattice of tatters, and he pulled the flimsy lapels across his chest as if he was cold. “Not that that’s a bad thing. You need that mad-as-hell feeling. The rest of the rotters don’t have it, but it’s pouring off you like sweat. I knew it. From the moment I laid eyes on you.”

Cheetos bags, yellowed ad sheets, and condom wrappers melted into a wad that stank of burning rubber. My mother, my mother—I forced her back to the forefront. She was why I was here. As weak and infected as this man looked, he had done awful things to her.

“I only wish I could’ve spruced up a bit before you came. Still got my suit, but the rest of me—I’m ashamed. I know I don’t look so well and I’m ashamed.” He leaned back so his face slipped from the light. “There, now. Does that make it easier?”

Minute cusps of light still caught flaps of skin and lumpy growths.

He shook his head, scattering a minor constellation of sparks. “You’re not here to talk, that’s plain as day. You’re here to kill me. That’s really—I guess that’s really interesting. I guess I’m interested to see how you go about it.”

The words felt repugnant to me. Kill him? Never had I admitted such a thing. Killing had never been part of Harnett’s teachings, or Lionel’s, or any Digger’s of the modern age. But what else could I be doing here?

“Take your time,” he said. The throaty buzz of his voice, doubled and tripled by the concrete chamber housing us, felt like warm blankets. He leaned back against a shopping cart piled with indefinable objects. Blissfully the carnage of his face lost all definition. “It’s a big moment. You want to make sure you do it right.”

This was not at all the same as facing Woody, Celeste, and Gottschalk—as facing Bloughton itself. Those people and that town knew nothing about any underworld and could not possibly hope to defend themselves when that world overtook their own. Antiochus Boggs, on the other hand,
was
under the underworld; he moved in the shadow of shadows, in the margin of margins. There was nothing I could envision that the twists of his mind hadn’t already considered.

“Don’t feel bad. It’s hard. I know it is. It won’t be easy. And I can’t guarantee success. You gotta figure you’re going to at least lose a chunk or two. Might end up looking a little more like Uncle Antiochus than you planned. But what’s a chunk or two? Already down a few fingers, I see. What’s a few more?”

Even in the darkness, even reduced to one eye, he had not missed the wood supplementing my right hand. I imagined
those impervious new fingers pushing into the rotten skin of his neck, past the supple perimeter of his extruding eye. Oddly there was no joy in the fantasy, only the disparaging sense that I was doing exactly what a dying animal wanted me to do.

“Did I make it worse? Son, forgive me. I’m new to this—having a son and all that. My brain and I are doing our best, I swear. Let’s make it real easy. Just follow my instructions and we’ll be under way. You want to have at me? Raise your hand. That’s all you have to do. Just raise your hand so I can see.”

Before I could stop myself I heard my wooden fingers scrape against the slanted ceiling of the underpass. Settling into my gut was an uneasy feeling that by following this simple instruction I had somehow fallen to distinct disadvantage.

“Excellent. Good. Now take a step. All right? Take one step forward if you want this to happen right now.”

Following these orders felt wrong, all wrong, and yet it was direction in a directionless moment. My foot came up and forward. I took a step. He was suddenly much closer. The blue ghost of the heart’s fire tickled my toe.

Boggs clapped once. “Look at that. You have expressed yourself, son. Now we know where we stand, you and I. That’s teamwork. That was satisfying to me. Was it satisfying to you? That’s fine, that’s fine, don’t answer. There’s no tricks here. No rotter bullshit. I’m all yours, son. Come and get me.”

Now, it had to be now, one second longer and I would be crippled with the fear of movement that had marked my life before becoming the Son. I swooned in a long, slanting step around the fire. I heard the distant note of a wooden finger ringing off of a shopping cart. The distance closed halfway; I raised fists.

“One thing.” He spoke quickly. “My brain’s got just one thing to say.”

The organs in my body continued forward and for a moment pushed against my ribs and belly. I swayed drunkenly and clutched at the air to keep from falling on him. Boggs was a small, dark creature scuttling somewhere below.

“That whatchamacallit,” he said. “That golden spike. I’d be remiss not to mention the spike. Oh, son. That there was a mighty difficult test. I’m sorry I had to do it—I’m sure you get plenty in school. But lord. Joey. Son. You did not disappoint. No one I ever known could’ve done that any finer. You probably didn’t even think of it that way. It was just a rotter you had to dig, some rats you had to rearrange. But there’s beauty in labor done right. I just want you to know that. Before we tangle. You’re a poet of the dirt. That’s what you are, son. A poet.”

It wasn’t the many-clawed feet of Millers Field’s rodent army that I felt. It was other hands, absent ones, my father’s, perhaps, that had been withheld from me after every dig. A distrustful glare—that was all Harnett had deigned to give me after I handed him the replacement spike.

“One night,” Boggs was saying. “Just a crazy thought, hear me out. I wonder what would happen if you gave me one night. The things I could teach you—I wonder if it’d be worth your time. Hard to say. Interesting thing to ponder, though, ain’t it?”

I shuffled sideways until I had a grip on the cart. For months, all those digs done without my father; for a sleepless weekend, my extravagant revenge; for days on end, the traveling and tracking that had led me here—I had worked so hard for so long, and had been so alone. An adult guiding my way again, it was all I wanted.

A swollen palm entered the firelight. “Easy does it, now.”

My collapse obfuscated the fire with dirt. Tiny embers melted upon my slick skin. A cockroach scampered over my knuckles.

“I’m not going anywhere, son. You have at me whenever you’re ready. But anyone can see you need rest. You look right tuckered.”

Crushing fatigue fought against the craving for revenge that had powered me so far. I would sit for a moment, fine; I would rest my muscles for a stretch, all right; I would crouch here and keep watch by the flames that reflected differently in his live eye than in his dead one. When both reflections dimmed, he would be asleep, and that was when I would strike.

A strange question came to me.

“What did you do with it?” I asked.

“What did I do with what?”

“The spike. The first spike.”

I heard the slither of a slow smile. A scabbed finger gestured at a battalion of generic canned foods. The glowing discs of their lids appeared to float.

“What do you think funded this feast?” he asked. “You get hungry, you just help yourself.”

W
HITE LIGHT—SHUTTLING CLOSER—THE
sensation of floating—this was heaven and I had lost, fallen asleep first, and though I had failed my mother at least I would see her soon. A jolt ripped my eyes open. Sunlight. A rusted satellite
dish. Shreds of plastic bags straining from barbed wire. Graffiti tags. A sky, cloudless and blue. A
squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak
.

Another jolt and I looked around me. I was moving. Bars on either side, the earsplitting shriek of an ungreased wheel—the shopping cart, I was folded inside the shopping cart. I tried to stand but my knees and elbows exploded into the pinpricks of sleep. My head was crammed beneath the push-handle, my body deposited atop various grungy bundles. My knees popped above the top of the cart like those of a child too big for his stroller, and my feet fought for room with a tall pole of some sort propped at the end of the cart, swaddled in a stained quilt and cinched tight with twine.

Above the incessant squeaking, there was music. Boggs’s Adam’s apple made paroxysmal patterns as he hummed a jaunty tune and pushed me down the alley. From this angle I could see his scraggly black tie snug against his neck. Below, the ruffles of his shirt were sharp and hardened with filth.

His left eye rolled downward.

“Top of the morning, son,” he said.

An insistent pulse pushed against the spongy underside of his jaw. My gut cramped as I felt a nearly uncontrollable desire to strangle. I pistoned myself a few inches and reached forward with one claw. Then the cart jounced again—another stone passing beneath the wheels—and I dropped cruelly against the metal grate.