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.
“They are old,” I offered.
Boggs snapped his fingers and pointed at me. “My boy’s a sharp one. That’s right. They’re geezers, ain’t they? All but me and Kenny. And you too, son. I think that’s why I trust you. You’re not set in your ways. You’ve got an open mind. That’s the most important thing in the world, an open mind. Your mom had one. Kenny, too. I bet that’s hard to believe. He’s a rule follower, that one, an order giver. Be quiet, be still, be invisible. He wasn’t always that way.”
I took the opportunity to resolve a controversy: “I can get anyone.”
He laughed. “That’s right! I can get anyone—now, that’s the old Kenny. Back when he had a pair, right?”
Loyalty tugged at me. Harnett wasn’t as bad as Boggs said, he couldn’t be.
Boggs picked up on my hesitation. “No, see, you’re right to defend him. A good son protects his father and vice versa. You were my son, no one would hurt you, not ever, they wouldn’t dare. Lord, you’re a sharp one. May I ask you a question?”
“I guess. Yeah, okay.”
“It’s kind of personal.”
“That’s fine.”
“Okay.” He took a deep breath. “You ever wondered what would happen if they knew?”
“Knew what?”
“What you do at night.”
I glanced around. Just the words made me sweat. “Who?”
“I don’t know. The people you see every day. You go to school?”
“Yeah.”
His head bobbed with enthusiasm. “There you go. Kids at school. The jerks who shove you around. The teacher who treats you like dog crap on his shoe. The little lady who gives you a hard-on the size of Canada and then breaks it in two.”
Just like that I was hanging on his every word.
“What about them?”
“Well, what if they knew? All of them.” A smile fluttered the edge of his lip. “Every single last rotter.”
A thrill burned through my chest and up my spine. I saw the Root dripping dirt as she rose victorious from a