Rotters (11 page)

Thirty minutes, tops—that was what I expected. I used the moon’s glow to monitor my watch, and thirty minutes passed. Then one hour, two hours—now it was after midnight. I slumped against the fence, clicking my thumbnail across the plastic slats of the film-advance wheel. Combined
with the incriminating shots I would collect later at the cabin, one shot of a theft-in-progress was all I needed, although I planned to take as many photos as possible before once again stowing myself in the back of the truck. Unrest mixed with anticipation. Perhaps kids at school would hear about this, the news that Joey Crouch was not like Ken Harnett at all; that he was, in fact, the direct opposite, a crusader, a young man brave enough to defend Bloughton against his own flesh and blood. My mother, how proud she’d be.

There are a million noises in the night, and by the time I noticed his footsteps he was almost upon me, moving fast, making less racket than seemingly possible. I sat up from the fence and coiled my legs beneath me. My fingers, instantly sweaty, gripped the camera. My father sailed toward the truck. One sack was slung over his left shoulder. An object was clenched in his right hand. The bag was swung high over the truck bed and lowered soundlessly. He opened the passenger door with his left hand, while still holding the object with his right. I leaned my upper body past the tree, moving the camera to my eye. I saw him dislodge something from under the seat; moonlight glinted on wrenches and hammers as he unlocked a toolbox. There was the soft sigh of stirring metal as he dug and found what he was looking for. He turned around, wielding the tool of his choice, and leaned against the truck.

The moment was perfect. I pressed the button on the camera, realizing a split second too late that, in all my planning, I had forgotten the simplest of facts: this was an automatic camera and it was night and cameras at night use flashes. White light shocked us. Everything was illuminated in one instant of motionless clarity: individual blades of tall grass, bugs caught in the air like thrown pebbles, the mirrored surface of the
truck, my father, his stunned expression, the handheld wire cutter, the sparkle of multiple jeweled rings, and, clenched in my father’s fist, wearing these rings, a severed human hand.

O
N THE WAY HOME
I sat up in the truck bed. There was no more reason to hide. As we pulled away from the tree, I noted with dulled surprise that the wooden fence I had leaned against marked the outer confines of a graveyard. It rolled gently over the hill, the white ghosts of gravestones perishing quietly into the pitch.

My father is a grave robber
, I told myself, over and over and over—the only garbage he carried was carrion. I hoped the horror of it would diminish with each repetition, but instead it overtook me. My brain spun in slow and terrified loops: disgust at such an unspeakable act, disbelief that my mother could have lived with such knowledge, the potential reactions to such revelations by Woody or Celeste or Gottschalk or Simmons or Diamond or Laverne or Ted, and more than anything else the smell—that odor invading the very fibers of the cabin walls as well as my clothes, skin, and hair. I finally knew its origin.

I ran through the last moments back there outside the graveyard: his blank astonishment, my immobility, his slow forward motion to take the camera from my numb fingers. He placed the camera in a pocket, then picked up the wire cutter again. I heard a snip and the soft chip of bone detaching from bone. I watched him remove two rings from the isolated finger, put them in his pocket, and then take the hand,
as well as the finger, with him back up the hill. I followed him with my eyes and saw him scale the cemetery fence. He was returning the hand to where he found it. It was lunacy. I could barely think, hardly move. It was much later, maybe another hour, before my father returned. He had with him the other sack, which he placed in the truck bed. He seemed beyond wrath; his eyes were glazed and he spoke not a word. When he looked at me, I held out a trembling hand to stop whatever was coming next.

“Look,” I said, but I had no other words.

He did the opposite and looked away. He entered the truck, slammed the door, and started the engine. It growled to life and I watched the brake lights color the exhaust. I expected him to drive away. Instead he sat motionless behind the wheel. After a minute I climbed into the back of the truck.

Now, the ride nearly over, the wheels left the relative smoothness of pavement for dirt. Here it was, my final resting spot, the place where he would fulfill his earlier promise of a Scottish blade driven with soft precision. Trees laced their fingers above me, then clenched to blot out the night. The truck shuddered to a halt. I heard the cab door open and shut. I sat up and saw that we were not in some unfamiliar thicket but back at the cabin, and my father was loping toward the front door, leaving the sacks with me. The whisper of the river was outrageously keen after the truck’s guttural howl. I looked at the sacks and wondered wildly if he expected me to bring them inside.

A long time passed. After a while I stood and urinated off the side of the truck. I lay back down, accepting for a bed the graphed surface of the vehicle much as I had accepted the floor by the sink. I checked my watch: four in the morning.
The sun would be up in a couple of hours and it would be Monday. School seemed a method of escape: I could go there, just like always, and lose myself in routine as I thought about what to do. There were even people there who could possibly help me: Simmons, maybe; maybe Ted; maybe I could even tell Laverne. Though I could not imagine how to introduce the topic. All opening statements I imagined were spectacularly insane. I closed my eyes but knew I would never sleep, and then, a few minutes later, fell asleep.

T
HE POSITION OF THE
sun told me I had awakened at my usual time. I yawned and felt unfamiliar patterns ridge my cheek. My homework and books were inside. I would have to go in.

I hobbled to the front door and entered. My father’s bedroom door was closed. I listened and heard nothing. The bathroom looked too inviting to pass up and I slid inside, closing the door behind me, and scrubbed my face with cold water, hoping to work the indentations from my face. I washed my hands and looked down at them, remembering what I had seen. It had been a woman’s hand. On her third finger had been both an engagement and a wedding ring. She had been married. The hand had belonged to someone’s wife, maybe someone’s mother.

I grabbed my green backpack and made for the front door. Simultaneous with my opening of it, I heard the opening of my father’s bedroom. I whirled around and there he was, his eyes blazing, his gray hair wilder than ever, the tufts from his chest ruffling his unbuttoned shirt. I braced for attack.

His expression, however, was pinched and anxious.
He doesn’t want me to turn him in
, I realized, repulsion and anger rising once more. I slammed the door behind me and hustled across the yard. I was beneath the trees in a moment but did not feel secure until I was well on my way down Jackson, new sweat from a new day making strange perfume with the unwashed odors of the night.

People held their noses in biology. I knew I stank; I half-lidded my eyes and tried to live inside myself. When Gottschalk called me to the front of the room, I stumbled across someone’s book bag and didn’t care when everyone laughed. I stood there, barely conscious, raising my arms when I was told so that Gottschalk could prod my moist pits with his pointer and reiterate the miracle of transpiration. Through the slits of my eyes I watched Celeste Carpenter’s perfectly inexpressive expression; through the barred cage of my eyelashes I saw her look back with all the objectivity of a zoologist.

I sleepwalked through both classes and lunch until I found myself on my way to the band room for individual instruction. When I got there, Karla, one of our four flutists, was sitting outside the door with earbuds inserted. She saw me, paused her music, and gathered her things.

“Ted’s out sick,” she said, letting her buds dangle. “You might as well use your time, though.”

The room was eerily quiet. Two chairs before a music stand gave the impression that Ted had died in the middle of a lesson. I wandered through the space, thankful for the chance to be alone, and eyed one of the chairs, wondering whether if I sat and closed my eyes for twenty minutes, Peyton, our drummer, would bother to wake me up when he arrived. Probably not.

There was a rattling noise. I turned and saw that Ted’s supply closet was closed. I had never seen it less than agape in a blatant display of its bounty. I moved closer and listened. From within I heard muffled sounds. My sapped brain did not connect them with human activity. I had only the dumb idea that if I sorted through all the stuff in the closet, I might be able to keep myself awake. I opened the door.

Woody was inside, masticating Tess’s neck, her shirt up around her armpits, his hands kneading her bra. My fellow trumpeter saw me first, and her look was one of annoyance rather than shock. Woody raised his head, his lips separating from her slick neck with a smack, and regarded me with a curious sort of half-grin.

“Sorry,” I mumbled. Woody’s grin broadened.

“Go away?” Tess said, her brow cleaving so abruptly her curls bounced.

“Sorry,” I said again.

“Shut the door, Crotch,” she commanded. I saw her fingers grab Woody’s hand, which had unconsciously drifted away, and secure it back on top of her breast. The knob was in my hand, my face turned away, the door shut. Muffled noises resumed but I walked away so that I did not have to listen. I watched my reflection split and scatter across the embouchure mirrors. Ted’s closet—I felt bad for him. Those two making out, they would knock things from the walls and disrupt the shelves. They would not put back fallen objects. They had no respect for Ted, not either of them, and after hooking up they would mentally mock him every time they saw him:
We got it on in your closet and you don’t even know
.

Exhaustion had left me hollow and dry, and the spark of anger took quickly to flame. Tess I could care less about; we would just resume ignoring each other at band practice. But
Woody, that fucker—he could get away with almost anything, but not this, not this disrespect of Ted. And not just Ted—never far from my mind was Celeste. Although she occasionally had been present as Woody taunted me, she had always seemed as if she were waiting for permission to leave that asshole and reach out to somebody, no matter their social status. Somebody, for example, like me.

I had to find her, she had to know. The final twenty minutes of study hall felt like two hours. My mind shoved aside everything that had happened the night before so that focus could be applied to this mission of utmost importance. Punishing Woody, winning gratitude from Celeste: if I pulled off these things before returning home, somehow the ensuing lightness would push away some of the dark.

Two more classes, the final bell. Students sprang from their chairs and I fought to be in their numbers. I was due on the football field for marching band practice but dismissed it. Two floors, six hallways, and exits everywhere: how would I find her? I scanned my surroundings for packs of girls, carefully done hair, short skirts, the most stylish shoes one could buy near Bloughton. I made it down one hall—nothing. Another hall, one hundred faces, none of them hers. A third wing and still nothing: I could feel, like blood from my veins, students leaving the building by the dozens.

Around a corner toward the front entrance and there was familiar raven hair tied in exotic fashion and barretted flat in crisscrossed layers. I leapt down the stairs, squinting in the afternoon swelter. I was behind her; I was at her elbow; I gave myself a final push and I was in front of beauty and grace herself, Celeste Carpenter.

“Celeste,” I panted. She had to stop—I was blocking her path. I held up a hand to buy myself a moment while I gasped
for air. My smell: too late, I thought of it and hoped that any unpleasant whiff would lose itself in the outdoor air.

How to begin? My brain labored for an opening statement.
I didn’t think you’d be outside
, I considered. It was at least true. From what I understood, Celeste was involved in numerous activities, and was particularly noted in theater and dance. I had overheard that play rehearsals were going every single day after school. Yes, that was it—I could ask her if she was skipping rehearsal or just getting some air before they began.

Instead it came out like a belch: “I saw Woody with Tess.”

The delicate shadow between her eyebrows darkened. Her expression remained enigmatic, though I sensed a slight angling of her head. At this moment I realized she was not alone. Three other girls were a half-step behind. Though farther away, their faces were much easier to read.

“In the band room,” I managed, still wheezing. All I could hear was the pound of blood shooting through my ears. “I was in the band room and looked in the closet and there was Woody and Tess. They were kissing. Her shirt was mostly off. I thought I should tell you. I thought you should know.”

I waited for her face to register astonishment, possibly heartbreak. If she started crying what was I obligated to do? Console her? Embrace her? I did not know if I could. Deep inside, a hardening conviction: I could.

A jet of wind swirled her hair into a halo of daggers as her arm lashed out. The sharp nails of her hand cracked against my cheek, and in that instant I knew my mistake. She already knew Woody was a two-timer—this thing with Tess probably wasn’t his first—but such facts were not for public consumption. My gossip within earshot of other students was hateful and willful destruction of the persona she had so carefully
constructed. My cheek blazed with pain; I felt wet pinpricks where her nails had punctured the skin. I looked down at her hand, calm again against her skirt, cutely painted and tastefully adorned, but transposed on top was the severed thing from the night before. A chilling certainty filled me that it would be that bloated dead hand that I would one day be holding, not Celeste’s.