Vampires in the Lemon Grove

by Karen Russell

  In fact, sometimes the little guys wave their plentiful legs back at us, as if they are cheering on our cheering.

  If you’re really serious about tailgating, like my cousins and me, you’ll want to sequester yourself in your bedroom for two to three months prevoyage with old National Geographic footage and practice swishing. Most people lead with their hips, but for me it’s all in the ribs.

  Denny Fitzpatrick, who is like the commissioner of our tailgates down there—this red-nosed Irishman who looks a little like a krill himself, whiskery and furious, and who started tailgating around the South Pole when I was still in diapers—Denny can do this one waggly thing, with his elbow. It really seems to get them going.

  I mean, you really should try to look as much like a krill as you can.

  Rule Five-A: If your wife leaves you for a millionaire motel-chain-owning douchebag fan of Team Whale, make sure you get your beloved mock-bioluminescent Team Krill eyestalks out of the trunk of her Civic before she takes off

  Rule Six: Tip the Russians well

  I’m assuming that you rented a boat crewed by Russians. They control a lot of the Antarctic tailgating industry, so treat them well. We usually tip 5 percent of the charter cost of the ex-polar navigator. If and when you make it to the ice caves, you’ll be family.

  Team Whale tailgaters fly into Ushuaia, Argentina. Typically, they roll into the harbor of the ice caves on the day of the game, their fleet puttering through the blue archways as lazily as a series of yawns, all those hundreds of Team Whale fans looking so smugly upholstered in their Disney-manufactured whale suits. I hear those cushioned baleens are as comfortable as pajamas. Just the fin portion costs three thousand dollars. Good for you, Team Whale tailgaters! It must be nice for you, to have that kind of money. It must be real tough, you cetaceous fucks, to support the best team in the league.

  Excuse me.

  Your average Team Krill tailgater can’t afford that kind of luxury. He wouldn’t want to. We like to travel in our own style. For example, my cousins and I have converted a Russian schooner into The Krill Cruiser, whose only purpose is to visually and audibly support Team Krill. Cousin Larry is an electrician and he did just an incredible job on the cabin. Strobe lights, a birch bar for beers and “hot” peanuts. The Russians love that little flourish, though theirs is not a culture of tailgaters. I sometimes get the sense the Russians think us a little silly.

  You might also want to bring a little gift for the mailman at Port Lockroy. They had some British guy installed there last time we sailed through. Young guy. He gets so lonely. Some magazines, some chocolate mints. It’s really just the thought.

  Rule Seven: Tailgating is all about sharing

  Quick and easy cooking is a must for the Antarctic tailgater. Here is a family recipe that will give your Antarctic tailgate some “regional flavor”:

  1. Whale meat

  2. Fire

  Salt to taste and all that.

  Although, typically, I don’t bother with salt. I don’t really bother with forks and such, either. I like to pluck the meat from the burning coals and bare my teeth and let out a piercing, unearthly howl at the Team Whale tailgaters moored across the ice floes, personally. Just to razz them a little.

  Rule Eight: Be a good sport—but watch your back!

  You want to have a sportsmanlike attitude while tailgating in the Antarctic, even when it is difficult (e.g., snow-blind/mourning a loss/drunk on Crown Royal). Show those Team Whale fans that even though their players weigh ten tons to our players’ .038 grams, we krill supporters are the bigger people. Some of the tailgaters for the minke whales are homicidally devoted to their team. Rich psychopaths. You’re likely to find the rowdiest bands of them near the Grytviken whaling station, drinking cabernet and hissing across the calved icebergs at us.

  Pull your rubberized Krill earflaps down—that’s what I do. Be civil. Tragedies happen in the lower latitudes, particularly when some of the younger guys get their blood up. Fights seem to spike about a month or two before the Big Game, when you hit that traffic in the Bismarck Strait.

  One sad example, from a coupla seasons ago: This teenager called the minke whale fans “dickriders.” A poor freckled kid from Decatur City, Iowa. God, we all liked him. He wasn’t the brightest bulb but somehow he’d memorized every Krill statistic going back to the Cretaceous Food Chain Games—he just loved the franchise. It was his first tailgate, he told us—his first time below the equator. Sweet kid. We all liked him but we kept forgetting his name.

  Anyway, the dawn after the whole “dickriders” altercation? Our Krill boats were all still at anchor but the Team Whale tailgaters were long gone. We found the kid’s body floating amid blocks of ice, already meat, three blue skua jawing on it. An orca sailed by him like a sunken moon, its wake engulfing the kid in black ripples. His feet were bare, I remember that. Those monsters took his Krill feet and his Krill Scamper-socks. Can you imagine that level of evil—sock robbers? We could see the boats of his murderers like a line of ants in the distance, entering the hole of the midnight sun.

  You can lose at tailgating, too, just as devastatingly as Team Krill keeps losing to Team Whale.

  Rule Nine: Should you have to bury your dead, do so in the proper receptacles

  Nobody likes a litterbug. You can’t get much lower class than a boat of tailgaters who just leave their dead around.

  Rule Ten: Don’t fall overboard

  The game lasts twenty seconds, tops. You don’t want to come all that way and miss the game.

  Rule Eleven: Don’t stop believin’

  Some (like my ex) will tell you that it’s a special sort of masochist who supports Team Krill, since all evidence suggests that they have been consistently losing the Food Chain Games for eons. Paleobiologists’ molecular-dating methods reveal that the krill have never won a game. Team Krill loses to Team Blue Whale, Team Humpback Whale, Team Fin Whale, Team Sei Whale, Team Skua, and Team Albatross.

  To this, I say: sure, it takes a special kind of fan to love the league underdog. Something Maureen would know very little about. Listen. The krill are in a rebuilding year. The krill are always in a rebuilding year. Every year the whole franchise of 60,000,000,000 krill gets eaten. Team Whale sucks Team Krill into the primordial combs of its baleen plates at twenty-eight knots. We’ve got a decent offense but we’ve got a pretty dismal record on defense.

  But this is going to be our season. With all your might, try to believe that.

  The greatest feeling in the world is getting there. Rowing over to the ice caves on game night, after all that travel. Krill will surge along either side of your boat in a rosy pregame warm-up. Lots of excitement in the frozen air. Inside the ice caves, you can glimpse the minke whales grouping into pods.

  “Surge, krill!” Denny Fitzpatrick always screams at this juncture; you can bet that he’s been drunk since April. “Surge, you godless bastards!”

  Antarctic tailgating is such a nice way of socializing on a balmy evening, when the sun goes down in flames behind the caves, while you share the end of your two-year supply of liquor and chips (how did it last only eight months?) with the Russians. We wear our costumes on the stern of the boat, our Krill eyestalks ogling the polar stars, huddled, shivering, convulsing with victory dreams. We munch and munch in the most extraordinary silence.

  The New Veterans

  When Beverly enters the room, the first thing she notices is her new patient’s tattoo. A cape of ink stretches from the nape of the man’s neck to his hip bones. His entire back is covered with blues and greens, patches of pale brown. But—what the hell is it a tattoo of, anyways? Light hops the fence of its design. So many colors go waterfalling down the man’s spine that, at first glance, she can’t make any sense of the picture.

  Compared to this tattoo, the rest of the man’s skin—the backs of his legs and his arms, his neck—looks almost too blank. He’s so tall that his large feet dangle off the massage table, his bony heels pointing up at her. Everything el
se is lean and rippling, sculpted by pressures she can only guess at. Beverly scans the patient’s intake form: male, a smoker, 622″, 195 lbs., eye color: brown, hair color: black, age: 25. Sgt. Derek Zeiger, U.S. Army, Company B, 1st Battalion, 66th Armor Regiment, 4th Infantry Division. In the billing section, he’s scribbled: This is free for me, I hope and pray …? I’m one of the veterans.

  And it is free—once she fills out and faxes in an intimidating stack of new forms. Ten sessions, 100 percent covered by military insurance. Sergeant Zeiger is her first referral under the program created by Representative Eule Wolly’s H.R. 1722 bill, his latest triumph for his constituency: Direct Access for U.S. Veterans to Massage Therapist Services.

  At the Dedos Mágicos massage clinic, they’d all been excited by the new law; they’d watched a TV interview with the blue-eyed congressman in the office break room. Representative Wolly enumerated the many benefits of massage therapy for soldiers returning home from “the most stressful environments imaginable.” Massage will ease their transition back to civilian life. “Well, he’s sure preaching to our choir!” joked Dmitri, one of the oldest therapists on staff. But Beverly had been surprised to discover her own cellular, flower-to-sun hunger for exactly this sort of preaching—in the course of a day, it was easy to lose faith in the idea that your two hands could change anything.

  On the table, her first referral from the VA hospital has yet to budge. She wonders how long this soldier has been home for—a month? Less? Dark curls are filling in his crew cut. Only the back of his skull is visible, because he is lying facedown on the table with his head fitted in a U-shaped pillow. She can’t tell if he’s really asleep or just pretending to be completely calm for her; often new patients try to relax, a ruse that never works—they just disperse their nervousness, springload their bones with guile. Rocky outcroppings of “relaxation” shelve and heave under their backs, while their minds become a tangle of will.

  With the man’s bright tattoo for contrast, the rest of the room looks suddenly miserably generic. The walls are bare except for a clock lipped in red plastic, which feels like a glowing proxy for Ed’s mouth, silently screaming at her not to go a penny over the hour. The young sergeant’s clothes are wadded on the floor, and she shakes out and folds them as she imagines a mother might do.

  “Sir? Ah—Sergeant Zeiger …?”

  “Unh,” moans the soldier, shivering inside a good or a bad dream, and the whole universe of the tattoo writhes with him.

  “Hullo!” She walks around to the front of the table. “Did you fall asleep, sir?”

  “Oh, God. Sorry, ma’am,” says the soldier. He lifts his face stiffly out of the headrest and rolls onto his side, sits up. “Guess I zoinked.”

  “Zoinked?”

  “Passed out. You know, I haven’t been sleeping at night. A lot of pain in my lower back, ma’am.”

  “Sorry to hear it.” She pats his shoulder, notes that he immediately tenses. “Well, let’s get you some help with that.”

  How old was Sergeant Derek Zeiger when he enlisted? Seventeen? Twenty? As she heats the oils for his massage, Beverly becomes very interested in this question. Legally, nowadays, at what age can you do business with your life’s time—barter your years for goods and services? A new truck, a Hawaii honeymoon, a foot surgery for your mother, a college degree in history? When can you sell your future on the free market? In Esau, Wisconsin, you have to be eighteen to vote, to smoke cigarettes, to legally accept a marriage proposal or a stranger’s invitation to undress; at twenty-one, you can order a Cherry-Popper wine cooler and pull a slot lever; at twenty-five, you can rent a family sedan from Hertz. At any age, it seems, you can obtain a room by the hour at the Jamaica Me Crazy! theme motel next to the airport, which boasts the world’s dirtiest indoor waterfall in the lobby. The gift store sells padded bras and thongs and a “Caribbean wand” that looks like a stick of cotton candy with tiny helicopter rotors, for some erotic purpose that Beverly, at forty-four, still feels too young to guess at.

  At eighteen, Beverly had no plans for her future. She had zero plans to make a plan. To even think that word, the “future,” caused a bile that tasted like black licorice to rise in the back of Beverly’s throat. All that year her mother had been dying, and then in April, two months before her high school graduation, her haunted-eyed father had been diagnosed with stomach cancer, a double hex on the McFadden household. Six months to a year, the doctors said. Mr. Blaise McFadden was a first-generation Irishman with hair like a lion’s and prizefighter fists, whose pugilist exterior concealed a vast calm, a country of calm of which Beverly secretly believed herself to be a fellow citizen, although she had never found a way to talk to her dad about their green interior worlds or compare passports. His death was not the one for which she’d been preparing. What a joke! Pop quiz, everybody! She’d spent her senior year cramming for the wrong test: Mrs. Marcy McFadden’s passing.

  “Go to school,” said Janet, Beverly’s older sister. “Daddy doesn’t need you underfoot. They can take care of themselves. Nobody wants you to stay.”

  But Beverly didn’t see how she could leave them alone with the Thing in the house. Beverly’s parents were coy, demurring people. If they heard Death mounting the stairs at night, footsteps that the teenage Beverly swore she could feel vibrating through the floorboards at three a.m., nobody mentioned this intrusion at breakfast.

  Beverly enrolled in the “Techniques of Massage” certificate program at the Esau Annex because it required the fewest credit hours to complete. She’d surprised herself and her instructors by excelling in her night classes. Beverly felt that she was learning a second language. As a child she’d been excruciatingly shy, stiffening in even her parents’ embraces, but suddenly she had a whole choreography of movements and touched people with a purpose. I can’t believe I’m telling you this, a body might confide to her. Spasming and relaxing. Pain unwound itself under her palms, and this put wonderful pictures in her head: a charmed snake sinking back into its basket, a noose shaking out its knots. In less than six months, Beverly had passed her tests, gotten her state certification, and found a job in downtown Esau; she was working at Dedos Mágicos before her twentieth birthday. At twenty, she’d felt smugly certain that she’d made the right choice.

  Six months after his diagnosis of stomach cancer, right on schedule, Beverly’s father died; her mother hung on for another decade. She’d flummoxed her oncologists with her fickle acrobatics, swinging over the void and back into her body on the hospital bed while the life-recording machines telegraphed their silent electronic applause. Beverly arranged for the sale of the farmhouse and used the proceeds to pay down her mother’s staggering medical bills. For three years her mother lived in Beverly’s apartment. In remission, then under attack again; in and out of the Esau County Hospital. Beverly tracked the rise and fall of her blood cell counts, her pendulous vitals. Twenty-nine when her mother entered her final coma, she was accustomed by that time to a twilight zone split between work and the ward.

  In her mother’s final days, massage was the last message to reach down to her—when her sickness had pushed her to a frontier where she could no longer recognize Beverly, when she didn’t know her own face in a mirror, she could still respond with childlike pleasure to a strong massage. Beverly visited the mute woman in the hospital gown every day. She gave this suffering person a scalp-and-neck massage, and swore she could feel her real mother in the shell of the stranger smiling up at her. Marcy McFadden was gone. But Beverly could read the Braille of her mother’s curved spine—it was composed in the unspeakable, skeletal language that she had learned at school.

  Beverly smiles down at him, rubbing the oil between her hands. She pulls at his trapezius muscles, which are dyed sky-blue. His tattoo is the stuff of Dutch masters. Beverly is amazed that this level of detail is possible on a canvas of skin. Practically every pore on his back is covered: in the east, under his bony shoulder, there’s an entire village of squat huts, their walls crackled
white-and-black with the granular precision of cigarette ash. South of the village there is a grove of palm trees, short and fat. A telephone pole! Beverly grins, as proudly happy as a child to identify nouns. A river dips and rises through the valley of his lower back. Tiny cattle with dolorous anatomies are grazing and bathing in it, bent under black humps and scimitar-horns. The sky is gas-flame blue, and right in the center of his back a little V of birds tapers to a point, creating the illusion of a retreating horizon. Several soldiers occupy the base of Zeiger’s spine. What kind of ink did this tattoo artist use? What special needles? The artist dotted desert camouflage onto the men—their uniforms are so infinitesimally petaled in duns and olives that they are, indeed, nearly invisible against Sergeant Zeiger’s skin. Now that she’s spotted them once, though, she can’t stop seeing them: their brown faces are the size of sunflower hulls. Somewhere a microscope must exist under which a tattoo like this would reveal ever-finer details—freckles, sweat beads, bootlaces. Windows that open onto sleeping infants. The cows’ tails swatting mosquitoes. Something about the rice-grain scale of this world catches at Beverly’s throat.

  “What’s the name of this river back here?”

  She traces the blue ink.

  “That’s the Diyala, ma’am.”

  “And this village, does it have a name?”

  “Fedaliyah.”

  “That’s in Iraq, I’m assuming?”

  “Yup. New Baghdad. Fourteen miles from the FOB. We were sent there to emplace a reverse osmosis water purification unit at JSS Al Khansa. To help the Iraqi farmers feed their jammous.”