Vampires in the Lemon Grove

by Karen Russell

  “Jammous?”

  “Their word. Arabic for ‘water buffalo.’ We’re probably mispronouncing it.” He wiggles his hips to make the bulls dance. “That was a big part of my war contribution—helping Iraqi farmers get some feed for their buffaloes. No hamburgers and fries in Fedaliyah, Bev, in case you’re curious. Just jammous.”

  “Well, you’ve got some museum-quality … jammous back here, Sergeant.” She smiles, tracing one’s ear. She can see red veins along the pink interior. Sunlight licks at each sudsy curl.

  “Yeah. Thanks. My artist is legendary. Tat shop just outside Fort Hood.”

  The brightest, largest object in the tattoo is a red star in the palm grove—a fire, Derek Zeiger tells her, feeling her tracing its edges. He doesn’t offer any further explanation, and she doesn’t ask.

  She begins effleurage, drawing circles with her palms, stroking the oil onto his skin. The goal is to produce a tingling, preparatory warmth—a gentle prelude to the sometimes uncomfortably strong pressure required for deep tissue work. Most everyone enjoys this fluttery feeling, but not so Sergeant Zeiger. Sergeant Zeiger is thrashing around under her hands like Linda Blair’s understudy.

  “Christ, lady,” he grumbles, “you want to hurt me that bad, just reach around and twist my nuts.”

  Effleurage is a skimming technique, invented by Swedes.

  “Sergeant, please. I am barely applying any pressure. Forgive me for saying this but you are behaving like my nieces.”

  “Yeah?” he snarls. “Do you twist their nuts, too?”

  Healing is a magical art, said the pamphlet that first attracted the nineteen-year-old Beverly to this career. Healing hands change lives.

  “Healing hurts sometimes,” Beverly tells the soldier briskly. “And if you cannot hold still, we can’t continue. So, please—”

  People can do bad damage to themselves while trying to Houdini out of pain. Beverly has seen it happen. Recently, on a volunteer visit at the county hospital, Beverly watched an elderly woman on a gurney dislocate a bone while trying to butterfly away from the pins of her doctors’ hands.

  But ten minutes into their session, Beverly can feel the good change happening—Zeiger’s breathing slows, and she feels her thoughts slowing, too, shrinking into the drumbeat of his pulse. Her mind grows quieter and quieter within the swelling bubble of her body, until all her attention is siphoned into her two hands. The oil becomes warm and fragrant. A sticky, glue-yellow sheet stretches between her palms and the sergeant’s tattoo. Each body, Beverly believes, has a secret language candled inside it, something inexpressibly bright that can be transmitted truly only via touch.

  “How does that feel now? Too much pressure?”

  “It’s fine. It’s all good.”

  “Are you comfortable?”

  “No,” he grunts. “But keep going. This is free, right? So I’m getting my money’s worth.”

  Bulls stare up at her from the river. Their silver horns curl like eyelashes. Under her lamp, the river actually twinkles. It’s amazing that a tattoo needle this fine exists. Beverly, feeling a bit ridiculous, is nonetheless genuinely afraid to touch it. She has to force herself to roll and knead the skin. For all its crystalline precision, the soldier’s tattoo has a fragile quality—like an ice cube floating in a glass. She supposes it’s got something to do with the very vibrancy of the ink. Decay being foreshadowed by everything bright. Zeiger is young, but he’ll age, he’ll fade—and he’s the canvas. Zeiger is now breathing deeply and regularly, the village rising and falling.

  At a quarter to four, Beverly begins to wind down. She makes a few last long strokes along his spine’s meridian. “Time’s up,” she’s about to say, when she notices something stuck beneath her pinky. When she moves her hand she slides the thing across the sky on Zeiger’s shoulder, still tethered to her finger like a refrigerator magnet. Only it’s flat—it’s inside the tattoo. No, she thinks, impossible, as she continues floating it around his upper back. An orange circle no larger than a grocery SALE sticker. It’s the sun. Beverly swallows hard and blinks, as if that might correct the problem. She draws her pinky halfway down his spine, and the sun moves with it. When she lifts her little finger, the sun stays put. She can’t stop touching it, like an idiot child at a stovetop—well, this is trouble, this is a real madhouse puzzle. The sun slides around, but the rest of the tattoo stays frozen. The cows stare at the grass, unalarmed, as it zings cometlike over their horns. The soldiers’ faces remain stiffly turned to the west, war-blasé, as the sun grazes their helmets …

  She gasps, just once, and Sergeant Zeiger says in a polite voice, “Thank you, ma’am. That feels nice.”

  “Time is up!” Ed raps at the door. “Bev, you got a four o’clock!”

  The door begins to open.

  “Ed!” she calls desperately, pushing the door back into its jamb. “He’s changing!”

  And when she turns around, Derek Zeiger is changing, standing behind the hamper and hopping into his pants. His arms lift and pull the world of Fedaliyah taut; Beverly gets a last glimpse at the sun, burning in its new location on the Diyala River.

  Beverly swipes at her eyes. When she opens them, the tattoo is gone from view. Now Sergeant Derek Zeiger is standing in front of her, just as advertised on his intake form: 6′2″, a foot taller than Beverly, and he is muddy-eyed indeed, squinting down at her through irises that are brown, almost black. He draws a hand from his pocket—

  “Well, thank you, ma’am.” Inexplicably, he laughs, scratching behind one ear. “I guess I don’t feel any worse.”

  “Sergeant Zeiger—”

  “Derek,” he says. “Derek’s good.”

  She notices that he winces a little, just walking around. He pushes a hand to the small of his back like a brace.

  “Oh, it’s been like this for months,” he says, waving her concern away. “You didn’t do this. You helped. It’s a little better, I think.”

  And then she watches him straighten for her benefit, his face still taut and bloated with pain.

  She can feel her face smiling and smiling at him, her hand shaking in his:

  “Then you have got to call me Beverly. None of this ma’am stuff.”

  “Can I call you Bev?”

  “Sure.”

  “What about Beav?” He grins into the distance, as if he’s making a joke to people she can’t see. “Beaver? Can I call you The Beav?”

  “Beverly,” she says. “Can you do me one favor, Derek? The next time you’re in the shower—”

  “Beverly!” He swivels to give her a big, real grin. “I’m shocked! It’s only our first date here …”

  “Haha. Well.” Beverly can feel the blood tinting her cheeks. “Just be sure to get all the oil off. And should you notice—if you feel any pain? Or—anything? You can call me.”

  She’s never given her home number out to a patient before. As the sergeant turns his back to leave, shouldering his jacket, she mumbles something about muscle adaptation to deep tissue massage, the acids that her hands have released from his trigger points. How “disruptions” can occasionally occur. The body unaccustomed.

  At the Hoho’s Family Restaurant, Beverly treats herself to peanut butter pancakes and world news. She grabs a menu and seats herself. She’s a longtime patron, and waiting for service always gives her a crawling, uncomfortable feeling. Beverly often finds herself struggling to stay visible to waitstaff, taxi drivers, cashiers. She tries hard to spite the magazines and persist in her childhood belief that aging is honorable, to wear her face proudly, like a scratched medallion, the widening circles of purple under her eyes and the trenches on her brow. To be that kind of veteran. A woman aging “gracefully,” like the church ladies she sees outside Berea Tenth Presbyterian, whose yellowed faces are shadowed by wigs like cloudbursts. In truth, Beverly can never quite adjust to her age on the calendar; most days, she still feels like an old child. She spends quite a lot of time trying to communicate to strangers and friends alike that her
life situation is something she chose: “I never wanted anything like that, you know, serious, long-term. No kids, thank God. My patients keep me plenty busy.”

  But it’s been years … Beverly thinks. And whatever need starts knuckling at her then is so frightening that she can’t complete the sentence. It’s been decades, maybe, since she’s been really necessary to anybody.

  That night, emerging from the fog of her own shower, Beverly wonders what the soldier is seeing in his mirror. Nothing out of the ordinary, probably. Or almost nothing.

  She places her hand against the green tiles and cranes around to peer at her back. She can’t remember the last time she’s done this. Her skin is ghostly white, with a little penguin huddle of moles just above her hip, looking lost on that Arctic shelf. She can imagine her sister rolling her eyes at her, telling Beverly to get some color. Dmitri, whose skin is an even shade of gingerroot all year round, tsking at her: “Beeeverly, quit acting like the loneliest whale! Go to a tanning salon!”

  Her hand glides along the curve of her spine, bumps along her tailbone. These are the “rudimentary vertebrae”: the fishy, ancient coccygeal bones. The same spine that has been inside her since babyhood is hers today, the exact same bones from the womb, a thought that always fills her with a kind of thrilling claustrophobia. So much surface wrapped around that old stem. She watches her hands smear the water droplets on her stomach. It’s strange to own anything, Beverly thinks, even your flesh, that nobody outside yourself ever touches or sees.

  That night, under the coverlet, Beverly slides her hands under her T-shirt and lets them travel up and up, over her rib cage, over her small breasts and along the hard ridge of her collarbone, until she is gently wringing her own stiff neck.

  Monday morning, Ed greets her with a can of diet soda. Eduardo Morales is the owner of Dedos Mágicos, and he’s been Beverly’s boss for nearly twenty-five years. He is a passionate masseur whose English is so-so.

  “Beverly. Here. On accident, I receive the diet soda,” Ed murmurs. “The machine made a mistake.”

  Beverly sighs and accepts the can.

  “I hate it, you drink it.” He says this with a holy formality, as if this transaction were underwritten by the teachings of Christ or Karl Marx.

  “Okay. It’s eight a.m. Thank you, Ed.”

  Ed beams at her. “I really, really hate that one. Hey, your first appointment is here! Zeiiiiger.” He gives her a plainly lewd look. “Rhymes with tiiiger.”

  “Very funny.” She rolls her eyes. “You all love to give me a hard time.”

  But Beverly’s hands are lifting like a teenager’s to fix her hair. She hasn’t felt this kind of nervousness in years.

  Sergeant Derek Zeiger is waiting for her, lying shirtless on the table, facing the far wall, and once again the tattoo burns like a flare against the snowy window. The first thing Beverly does is lock the door. The second thing is to check his tattoo: all normal. The sun is back at its original o’clock. When she breathes in and rubs at it, the skin wrinkles but the sun does not move again.

  Today, she tells Zeiger, she’s trying “crossgrain techniques”—bearing down with her forearms, going against the grain of the trapezius muscles. He says he’s game. Then he shouts a curse that would shock even Ed, apologizes, curses again. She tries to lift his left hip, and he nearly jumps off the table.

  “It’s not my fingers that are causing you the pain,” she says a little sternly. “These muscles have been spasming, Sergeant. Working continuously. I’m just trying to release the tension. Okay? It’s going to hurt a little, but it shouldn’t kill you. On a scale of one to ten, it should never hurt worse than a six.”

  “Ding, ding, ding!” he yells. “Eleven!”

  “Oh, come on.” She can feel herself smiling, although her voice stays stern. “I’m not even touching you. Tell me if you’re really hurting.”

  “Isn’t that your job? To know that kind of stuff? I mean, you’re the expert.”

  She exhales through her nostrils. Knots, she tells the sergeant, are “myofascial trigger points.” Bony silos of pain. Deep tissue massage is a “seek-and-destroy” mission, according to one of her more macho instructors at the Annex, a big ex-cop named Federico—a guy who used to break up race riots in Chicago but then became a massage therapist, applied his muscle power to chasing pain out of tendons and ligaments. Her fingers feel for the knots in Zeiger’s large muscle groups. Her thumbs skate over the oil, entering caves between his vertebrae and flushing the old stores of tension from them. She pushes down into the fascia, the Atlas bone that supports the skull, the top and center of each shoulder blade, the triangular bone of his sacrum, his gluteal muscles, his hamstrings. She massages the trigger points underneath the tattooed river, which seems to pour from his lowest lumbar vertebrae, as if the Diyala has been wired into him. Beverly imagines the whoosh of blue ink exploding into real blood …

  Her fingers find a knot underneath this river and begin to pull outward. Out of the blue—so to speak—Sergeant Zeiger begins talking.

  “The tattoo artist’s name was Applejack. But everybody called him ‘Cuz.’ You ask him why, he’d tell you: ‘Just Cuz.’ Get it?”

  Well, that was a mistake, Applejack! Beverly silently rolls her knuckles over Zeiger’s shoulders. With a birth name like Applejack, shouldn’t your nickname be something like Roger or Dennis? Something that makes you sound like a taxpayer?

  “Cuz is the best. He charges a literal fortune. I blew two disability checks on this tattoo. What I couldn’t pay, I borrowed from my friend’s mom.”

  “I see.” Her knuckles sink into a cloud over Fedaliyah. “Which friend?”

  “Arlo Mackey. He died. That’s what you’re looking at, on the tattoo—it’s a picture of his death day. April 14, 2009.”

  “His mother … paid for this?”

  Under the oil the red star looks smeary and dark, like an infected cut.

  “She lent each of us five hundred bucks. Four guys from Mackey’s platoon—Vaczy, Grady, Belok, me, we all got the same tattoo. Grady draws real good, and he was there that day, so he made the source sketch for Applejack. After we got the tattoo, we paid a visit to Mrs. Mackey. We lined up side by side on her yard in Lifa, Texas. To make a wall, like. Mackey’s memorial. And Mrs. Mackey took a photograph.”

  “I see. A memorial of Arlo. A sort of skin mural.”

  “Correct.” He sounds pleased, perhaps mistaking her echo for an endorsement of the project. Beverly doesn’t know how to feel about it.

  “That must be some picture.”

  “Oh, it is. Mackey’s mom decided she’d rather invest in our tattoos than some fancy stone for him—she knew we were his brothers.”

  The sergeant’s head is still at ease in the U-shaped pillow. Facing the floor. Which makes it feel, eerily, as if the tattoo itself is telling her this story, the voice floating up in a floury cloud from underneath the sands of Fedaliyah. As he continues talking, she pushes into his muscles, and the tattoo seems to dilate and blur under the oil.

  “She circled our names in his letters home—Mackey wrote real letters, not emails, he was good like that—to show us what he thought of us. He loved us,” he says, in the apologetic tone of someone who feels that they are bragging. “Every one of us shows up in those letters. It was like we got to peel back his mind. She said, ‘You were his family and so you’re my family, too.’ Grady told her all the details of the attack, she wanted them, and then she said, ‘We will join together as a family to honor Arlo.’ She said, ‘Now, I want you boys to put the past behind you’—that was her joke.”

  “My God. That’s a pretty dark joke.”

  Sick, she was about to say.

  His shoulders draw together sharply.

  “I guess it is.”

  Thanks to the tattoo, every shrug causes a fleeting apocalypse. The V of birds gets swallowed between two rolls of blue flesh, springs loose again.

  “And—stop me if I’ve told you this? Mackey’s ma had anot
her kid. A girl. Jilly. She’s a minor, so Mrs. Mackey had to sign a piece of paper to let Applejack cut into her with his big powerdrill crayons.”

  “His sister got the tattoo? Her mother let her?”

  “Hell yes! It was her mother’s idea! Crazy, crazy. Fifteen years old, skinny as a cricket’s leg, a sophomore in high school, and this little girl gets the same tattoo as us. April 14. Arlo in the red star. Except, you know, scaled down to her.”

  His scalp shakes slightly in the headrest, and Beverly wonders what exactly he’s marveling at, Jilly Mackey’s age or the size of the tragedy or the artist’s ingenuity in shrinking the scenery of her brother’s death day down to make a perfect fit.

  He waits a beat, but Beverly cannot think of one word to say. She knows she’s failed because she feels his muscles tense, the world of Fedaliyah stiffening all at once, like a lake freezing itself.

  “Plenty of guys in my unit got tattoos like this, you know. It’s how the dead live, and the dead walk, see? We have to honor his sacrifice.”

  Pride electrifies the sergeant’s voice. Unexpectedly, he gets up on his elbows on the massage table, cranes around to meet her eye; when he says “the dead,” she notes, his long face lights up. It’s like some bitter burlesque of a boy in love.

  “What does your own mother say about all this, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  He laughs. “I don’t talk to those people.”

  “Which people? Your family?”

  “My family, you’re looking at them.”

  Beverly swallows. “Which one is Mackey? Is this him, in the palm grove?”

  “No. That’s Vaczy. Mackey’s burning up.”

  Zeiger pudges out a hip bone.

  “He’s—this red star?”

  “It’s a fire.” The sergeant’s voice trembles with an almost childish indignation. “Mack’s inside it. Only you can’t see him.”

  The truck has just run over a remotely detonated bomb and exploded. Still burning inside the truck, he explains, is Specialist Arlo Mackey.

  “Boom,” he adds flatly.