Rotters (10 page)

Individual instruction, which took up one-third of study hall one day per week, represented the only scenario in which I could speak to a friendly face without the crowding of enemies. Ted was on a tight schedule—he had a flutist right before me and a drummer directly after—so there was not much time for chitchat. That was fine. We ran through pieces, he commented on and adjusted my performance, and every once in a while he even stood behind me to use his shadow-fingers to transmit each correct depression. Often after I sat down, while he busied himself lowering the music stand to my height, I would take a moment to relish the isolation of the cramped room and everything about it: the cheesy posters of Bobby McFerrin and Yo-Yo Ma, the embouchure mirrors on the back wall, the gap-toothed xylophones in the corner, the varnished autoharp for some reason mounted above the
door, and the supply closet—a shallow nook that was always open and gleaming with a million mouthpieces, reeds, drumsticks, and miscellaneous spare parts. It was the breadth and versatility of the closet that proved Ted’s longevity and worth, not the buffoonery of his inept army.

Separating each of these otherwise amorphous days were my doomed dawns. That pile of shovels, the charred poker beside the hearth, my father’s soiled hands: any of these would work as the instrument of my demise. Still I studied and spooned my cold food out of cans, and still my father wandered the grounds, staring into space and water as if listening for guidance.

“How?” I asked one evening.

It had been a few days since we had last spoken; the topic, though, had not changed. “A knife,” he said, looking at me for a moment before going back to reading the stack of newspapers that arrived each day in the mail. But now he was too distracted to read. He looked at me again, his eyes less scarlet than in the past, less hooded with anger. “I have a knife from Scotland,” he said softly, “with a blade so sharp there would be almost no pain.” The wounds of my mother’s ear: maybe it was the same blade, maybe it would be the last thing she and I shared.

He was chopping wood two days later at dusk, strange helices of muscle thickening across his back with each swing, when I next approached. I stood watching for ten minutes. What had been trees divided and diminished, again and again; what had been dark and armored with bark became yellow, then white, until the pure heart of the wood shone with brilliance. Flecks stood out like white freckles against the brown of his skin. He exhaled loudly and wiped his forearm across his forehead.

“Where exactly?” I asked.

He gulped for air, licked his dry lips. “The heart.” He snorted and spat out phlegm thickened by sawdust. “If you can avoid ribs, the blade will move softly. Like through butter.”

He glanced up at me uncertainly, as if he had said too much and needed my approval. I hastened to nod, and he seemed glad for my blessing. He faced the massacre of wood, weighing the axe in both arms, struggling to find something that could still be made smaller. It was then that I knew that he would not kill me. Our planning and scheduling of my execution had become something of worth, something that involved an increasing exchange of trust. The next day, when I asked him how long it would take to die from a stab to the heart, he was answering before the question was fully articulated, as if he had been making calculations all day and had been waiting impatiently to be asked. Murder: it was something to talk about and we embraced it, and soon other, more mundane exchanges were escaping our clenched jaws. “Here,” he said, tossing me half of a steak he had incinerated on the stove. “Sorry,” I said as we both banked into the bathroom at the same time. “I’ll be back around midnight, okay?” he asked late one afternoon, pausing at the door with two empty sacks looped over his shoulder. I nodded once and turned back to my homework, but inside I could barely breathe.

M
Y FATHER CONTINUED TO
disappear on weekends. In his absence I began reading the newspapers. They arrived every day in the mailbox located out where Hewn Oak hit Jackson,
dozens of papers from towns all across the Midwest. When there were too many to fit, they were piled in a wooden crate nailed to the base of the mailbox post. Having nothing better to do, I began bringing these back to the cabin on my way home from school. Their mastheads touted towns big and small from Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Nebraska, Missouri, even a few from the Dakotas. Many of these papers originated in communities so small that the papers came out four days a week or fewer; some of them only published weekly. These I found the most amusing, with their exacting chronicles of crop growth, rambling columns referring to specific pheasants and raccoons by first names, personal accounts of exciting trips to Omaha or Ames, and dishy police blotters chocked with minor fender benders and loud noises after suppertime.

Occasionally my father read something that particularly nabbed his attention, and he would hurry to the archives of one of his dusty stacks and thumb through back issues. He did just that early in the morning on the first Saturday in October, rushing to one of the piles that made up the boundary of my floor space. Directly above me, he rustled through the pages until he found what he was seeking on the inside of the back page. The paper was old and thin enough that I could see right through it and read the backward headline:
SEIRAUTIBO
.

Paper in hand, he grabbed his sacks and hurried to his truck. I examined the stack. It was the
Benjamin County Beacon
, published in Mazel, Nebraska. Dredging up my iffy mental map of the U.S., I estimated that it was at least a five-hour drive to the Nebraska border. I listened to the spit of stones and the snapping of twigs down Hewn Oak. He was in a hurry; I had all day.

The safe in his closet resisted dozens of combinations. I planted my ear next to the dial, just like they do on TV, to hear whether any of my numbers triggered reactions. I sat on his bed—a mattress and box springs but no frame—and tried to think of obvious patterns. My mother: I tried her birthday, 12-15-60. I tried it backward, 60-15-12. I tried it European, 15-12-60. Bereft of ideas, I cranked my wrist through the numbers of my own birth date and with a clucking sound the lock unlatched. I stared and told myself it was coincidence. Everything about me, prior to crash-landing into Bloughton one month ago, should have been a mystery to my father. Yet here was a chilling countertruth.

I pulled lightly on the handle and the door of the safe squealed open. The awful stink of the cabin had an origin—it gasped out at me in a foul expulsion of putrid air. I gagged and dove my head to the side to spit it out. Coughing, my eyes watering, I steadied myself and peered into the darkness.

The first thing I thought of was Woody and Rhino and Simmons and Diamond, and how all those bastards had been right. Ken Harnett was a thief. My ears burned in private humiliation. Stacked inside the safe were valuables of such variety that each item must have come from a different home: rings, necklaces, cuff links, antique hairpins, ornate purses, bejeweled broaches, unusual belt buckles. In the back of the safe was a burlap sack spilling forth strange coins. I reached for a rusty Planters peanuts container and tilted it toward me. Gasping, I let it fall back. It was half full of gold teeth.

There was also a discolored manila envelope stuffed with cash. My desperation for money trumped everything else I was feeling, and I removed three twenties and stuffed them in my pocket. Having thieved from a thief, I pushed myself
away from the safe and its reeking cloud. I leaned back against my father’s bed, my eyes darting over the piles of jewelry. Quickly I made the connection to the newspapers. My father read obituaries to see which houses were newly vacant and used his archive to research the person’s background and wealth. Keeping himself up to date allowed him to drive overnight to places like Mazel, Nebraska, in order to loot the joint before the family had time to divvy up heirlooms. I thought about my mom’s leftover property and whether someone like my father had rifled through her leavings. I was suddenly filled with a righteous fury. This was why she had left him, I was positive. He was a career crook, a scumbag, and I had been sent by her to make sure he was put behind bars.

I shut and locked the safe. Then I walked into town and treated myself to the lunch counter at Sookie’s, hiding from teenage voices by lodging myself in a corner booth with my face to the wall. I paid with one of the twenties, took the change to the hardware store/pharmacy, found the disposable camera I was looking for, and brought it to the cashier. On impulse, I threw in a bar of soap. When my father returned late in the night and I heard the familiar sound of shower knobs twisted full blast, I imagined his surprise at finding the zesty foreign object.

Sunday morning I thumbed through the new newspapers and used homework techniques to memorize as many obituary details as possible. I ate breakfast—generic bran flakes and coffee—and pretended to do schoolwork until my father rose several hours later. He did not say good morning. We had not become that cordial, not yet, and given what I was planning to do, I was glad.

The newspapers seemed to please him. His features while he was reading morphed through a complicated gallery:
he looked enthralled one minute and was nearly laughing the next, only to fall into a grimace of grief so genuine I felt my heart beat in unexpected sympathy. Ultimately the reading seemed to excite him. He became restless. He ate while pacing. I saw him, still barefoot, take one of his gray sacks outside. He tidied the woodpile and even spent fifteen minutes picking up soiled clothes from around the house and chucking them into a large garbage bag that he set next to the door. After a while, he plucked a seemingly random book from the center of one of the towers, but paged through it impatiently, his foot wagging. He was waiting for something. So was I.

When a ribbon of pink spread across the sky, he began to gather his things. I held off until he was rooting around in his bedroom, and then I exited through the front door. I made sure to walk at a casual pace in case he saw me. The camera in my pocket pressed into my thigh with each step. Near the Jackson intersection, I crouched in a ditch opposite the mailbox. The sky was purple now, and concealed me. My stomach roiled and my chest tingled.

Even with my ears trained for the sound of his truck, it caught me by surprise. Suddenly it was leaping from the leafed canopy of Hewn Oak, moving faster than I had expected. I flattened myself against the dry grass. In seconds the truck was upon me, its tires chomping gravel right next to my head. Dirt blew in my face and made mud in my eyes. The truck was making a turn to the left, not the ideal direction for what I needed to do, but I scrambled up the side of the ditch, counting on the cloud of dirt to hide me. I ran at the truck; I felt it pick up speed and make a dizzying surge away; I ran harder, reaching outward, feeling a spray of gravel strafe my shins like machine-gun fire, and felt my palms grip
the back door. With a last burst of strength, I hurled myself over the edge. I landed inside the truck bed, edges of metal intersecting with the knobs of my shoulders and the blades of my ribs. I was on top of one of his burlap bags of tools. I rolled off. The engine’s thrum shook my skeleton at such a pitch that the lunch in my stomach whipped and the sky above became a vomitous swirl. I closed my eyes. Wind, bugs, and sediment razed my skin.

Then there were highways. Velocity increased. The noise enveloping me lost its caged reverberation and joined with a hundred other racing vehicles. We were moving; we were out of Bloughton, maybe even out of Lomax County. Purple light turned into the red doom of an interstate at night. My extremities were numb from vibration; the back of my skull throbbed. An uncertain amount of time passed, what must have been hours. Surely I had miscalculated—this was one of his longer trips, and I would miss days, if not weeks, of school. Any enthusiasm at such a prospect was mixed with the everlasting fear of falling irreparably behind; I thought of Gottschalk and his self-satisfied smirk as he took credit for scaring me away.

But then the truck slowed. My stomach lurched as we slung through the vortex of an exit ramp. There was the distant ticking of a turn signal, the vertiginous pull of a sharp right. More turns, these made without signaling. The roads became rougher. The sky became true black with only the periodic abatement of a moth-flickered lamp. I drew my body to the far edge of the truck bed, bracing myself for the moment of escape. Through the cab window I could see my father scanning the streets as he rolled along what looked like a sparsely populated country neighborhood. He shut off
the headlights and began to inch toward the shoulder. I made sure he wasn’t checking his rearview, then vaulted myself over the flatbed door.

The pulse of the engine had hammered my legs to rubber. My knees wilted and my butt scraped rock. The truck continued to creep along without me. Ten feet, twenty feet; as it took a corner the brakes tapped momentarily and colored me red. When the vehicle eventually stopped and the putter of the engine ceased, I kneeled among the tall weeds and waited. After a moment, my father emerged, a black shadow against the blacker sheet of night, and he moved with surprising swiftness to the back of the truck. Gray bags were lifted from the trunk, and then he moved away, over the slight rise in the road and down the other side.

He was out of sight. I scrambled up the shoulder and paused for breath against the side of the truck. The engine pinged softly. I moved again until I reached the crest of the hill. Beyond, I could see the distant specks of farmhouse lights. My father had vanished.

It might not have been an accident that the truck was parked beneath the arachnid limbs of an overhanging tree. I stepped carefully through the ditch, feeling gutter water sop through the worn material of my sneakers. Using the snaking root system of the tree, I pulled myself up the other side of the ditch and squatted behind the expansive trunk. I sat panting for a while, my naked knees wedged against prickly bark, an old wooden fence behind my shoulders.