anyone was just as powerful as We became oblivion, maybe more.
“I’ll decide when he’s told what about what,” Harnett said.
Fisher shrugged and leaned his body weight on the table; our Cokes slid treacherously. “Look, there’s more than nine ways to skin a cat,” he said. “That was long ago, back when we were all green behind the ears and the Resurrectionist was still working with Baby.”
“Wait, stop,” I demanded from the corner. “Who’s Baby?”
Now Harnett squirmed. He gestured at the man in gray and killed time with some backtracking. “Fisher here has the Gulf territory.”
“ ‘And I will make you fishers of men,’ ” quoted Under-the-Mud. “Surely the child knows that one.”
Fisher dismissed the comment with a gesture. “I’m sure Knox would love it if that was relevant. But mainly it’s because I like to fish. Got a little jar I keep with me on digs, fill it up with worms as I go. Grave worms are primo for fishing, absolutely primo. Bet you didn’t know that.”
“There’s a lot he doesn’t know,” Under-the-Mud grumbled.
“Those were the days, though, weren’t they?” Fisher said, yanking off his cap and patting down the gray tufts of hair. “When Lionel was still digging and it felt like it’d never end? And every time Knox came through he would tell tall tales of the younguns, Resurrectionist and Baby, and our jaws would hit the floor. What was the number? The two of you, how many?”
“Twenty in a single night,” said Under-the-Mud. “That’s what I recall.”
“I’ve always heard twenty-one,” said Fisher. “Even with two men, I still can’t imagine it. Was it twenty-one?”
Harnett finished off the last bite of his burger.
Under-the-Mud raised a finger for attention. “Working as a team—of course it had its benefits. Just look at us, all these years later, fawning over the numbers like they’re sports statistics. But let’s not forget that teams are by their very nature dangerous. Diggers work alone. That’s the way it’s always been. When Lionel was through teaching you and Baby, he should have forced a split. But you two stuck together, just so we could sit around a couple decades later and ask each other if it was twenty or twenty-one. And we all know what happened as a result. We all known what became of Baby.”
Boggs was Baby—I had figured out that much. In the chilling pause that followed I investigated a scar that cauliflowered the skin at Under-the-Mud’s elbow. The hair at Fisher’s temples was streaked with an ancient white slash and he was missing a pinkie. There was violence in this life that I had only begun to appreciate.
“The Resurrectionist can’t be blamed for Baby,” Fisher said at last. “Nobody can.”
“We just ought not to forget the danger of working in pairs,” Under-the-Mud insisted, turning away from me. “That’s all I’m saying.”
As the men kept talking, I basked in the respect they gave my father. In Bloughton, Ken Harnett was only the Garbageman, but here he was legend to legendary men. As the room grew darker and louder and smokier, other faces manifested through the gloom—Screw (Southwest), Brownie (Lower Midwest), the Apologist (Central East), and even Crying John and Fouler—and every one of them paid tribute to the great Resurrectionist and grasped happily at the few words he offered.
I tried to hide my surprise following each introduction. They were ancient, every one. It should have been cartoonish how their storied personas clashed with the gnarled and wrinkled reality. Perhaps once they had been dashing adventurers brimming with vitality, but now they had hairy ears and liver-spotted hands and swaying jowls. They were well muscled but unhealthy-looking. Scars and disfigurements were rampant. They each smelled bad, the same kind of bad; waitstaff kept their distance and nearby stools remained vacant. They used obsolete jargon that slowly I deciphered: graves were “bellies”; tombstones were “heads”; corpses, depending on their circumstances, were “swimmers” or “risers” or “sleepers.” They spoke with reverence of something called the Monro-Barclay Pact. Their smiles were genuine, but their eyes were haunted and preyed upon me at every opportunity. Uncomfortable though it was, I preferred it to the dismissive cruelty of the Congress of Freaks. At least here I was being judged as a potential equal.
Beneath chatter, Harnett would murmur asides. They were good men, he told me, but almost every one of them relied on tricks: video cameras, aerial photography, global-positioning devices, mechanized telescoping shovels, ground-penetrating radar that emitted electromagnetic pulses. According to Harnett, these techniques were risky and unreliable. Sensory