Vampires in the Lemon Grove

by Karen Russell

  Friendship Park was Anthem’s last green space, sixty acres of woods bordered by gas and fire stations and a condemned pizza buffet. THE PIZZA PARTY IS CANCELED read a sign above a bulldozer. The central acres of Friendship Park were filled with pines and spruce and squirrels that chittered some charming bullshit at you, up on their hind legs begging for a handout. They lived in the trash cans and had the wide-eyed, innocent look and threadbare fur of child junkies. Had they wised up, our squirrels might have mugged us and used our wallets to buy train tickets to the national park an hour north of Anthem’s depressed downtown. Only Juan Carlos had seen those real woods. (“There was a river with a purple fish shitting in it” was all we got out of him.)

  Behind our oak was a playground over which we also claimed dominion. Recently, the Anthem City Parks & Recreation had received a big grant, and now the playground looked like a madhouse. Padded swings, padded slides, padded gyms, padded seesaws and go-wheelies: all the once-fun equipment had gotten upholstered by the city in this red loony-bin foam. To absorb the risk of a lawsuit, said Juan Carlos; one night, at Juan Carlos’s suggestion, we all took turns pissing hooch onto the harm-preventing pillows. Our park had a poop-strewn dog run and an orange baseball diamond; a creepy pond that, like certain towns in Florida, had at one time been a very popular vacation destination for waterfowl but was now abandoned; and a Conestoga-looking covered picnic area. Gus claimed to have had sex there last Valentine’s Day, on the cement tables—“pussy sex,” he said, authoritatively, “not just the mouth kind.” Our feeling was, if Gus really did trick a girl into coming to our park in late February, they most likely had talked about noncontroversial subjects, like the coldness of snow and the excellence of Gus’s weed, all the while wearing sex-thwarting parkas.

  The oak was covered with markings from our delinquent forebears: v ♥ K; DEATH 2 ASSHOLE JIMMY DINGO; JESUS SAVES; I WUZ HERE!!! The scarecrow’s head, I noticed, was lolling beneath our own inscription:

  MONDO + GUS + LARRY + J.C. = CAMP DARK

  A dorky name, Camp Dark, chosen when we were ten, but we wouldn’t change it now. Membership capped at four: Juan Carlos Diaz, Gus Ainsworth, Mondo Chu, and me, Larry Rubio. Pronounced “Rubby-oh” by me, like a rubber ducky toy, my own surname. My dad left when I turned two, and I don’t speak any Spanish unless you count the words that everybody knows, like “hablo” and “no.” My ma came from a vast hick family in Pensacola, pontoon loads of uncle-brothers and red-haired aunts and firecrotch cousins from some nth degree of cousindom, hordes of blood kin whom she renounced, I guess, to marry and then divorce my dad. We never saw any of them. We were long alone, me and my ma.

  Juan Carlos had tried to tutor me once: “Rooo-bio. Fucker, you have to coo the ‘u’!”

  My ma couldn’t pronounce my last name either, making for some awkward times in Vice Principal Derry’s office. She’d reverted to her maiden name, which sounded like an elf municipality: Dourif. “Why can’t I be a Dourif, like you?” I asked her once when I was very small, and she poured her drink onto the carpet, shocking me. This was my own kindergarten move to express violent unhappiness. She left the room, and my shock deepened when she didn’t come back to clean up the mess. I watched the stain set on the carpet, the sun cutting through the curtain blades. Later, I wrote LARRY RUBIO on all my folders. I answered to “Rubio,” just like the stranger my father must be doing somewhere. What my ma seemed to want me to do—to hold on to the name without the man—felt very silly to me, like the cartoon where Wile E. Coyote holds on to the handle (just the handle) of an exploded suitcase.

  The scarecrow boy was my same height, five foot five. He was a funny hybrid: he had a doll’s wax head, with glass eyes and sculpted features, but a scarecrow’s body—sackcloth under the jeans and the sweater. Pillowy, machine-sewn limbs stuffed with straw. I took a step forward and punched the torso, which was solid as a hay bale; I half expected a scream to roll out of his mouth. Now I understood Mondo’s earlier wail—when the doll didn’t make a sound, I wanted to scream for him.

  “Who stuck those on its face?” Mondo asked. “Those eyes?”

  “Whoever put him here in the first place, jackass.”

  “Well, what weirdo does that? Puts eyes and clothes on a giant doll of a kid and ropes him to a tree?”

  “A German, probably,” said Gus knowingly. “Or a Japanese. One of those sicko sex freaks.”

  Mondo rolled his eyes. “Maybe you tied it up, Ainsworth.”

  “Maybe he’s a theater prop? Like, from our school?”

  “He’s wearing some nasty clothes.”

  “Hey! He’s got a belt like yours, Rubby!”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Wait—you’re going to steal the scarecrow’s belt? That ain’t bad luck?”

  “Oh my God! He’s got on underwear!” Mondo snapped the elastic, giggling.

  “He has a hole,” Juan Carlos said quietly. He’d slid his hand between the doll’s sagging shoulders and the tree. “Down here, in his back. Look. He’s spilling straw.”

  Juan Carlos began jerking stuffing out of the scarecrow and then, in the same panicky motion, cramming it back inside the hole; all this he did with a sly, aghast look, as if he were a surgeon who had fatally bungled an operation and was now trying to disguise that fact from his staff. This straw, I recognized with a chill, was fresh and green.

  “You got your ‘oh shit!’ face on, J.C.!” Gus laughed. I managed a laugh, too, but I was scared, scared. The crisp straw was scary to me. A terrible sweetness lifted out of the doll, that stench you are supposed to associate with innocent things—zoos and pet stores, pony rides. He was stuffed to the springs of his eyeballs.

  Put it all back, Juan, and maybe we’ll be okay

  “Uh. You dudes? Do scarecrows have fingers?” Mondo giggled again and held out the doll’s white hand, very formally, as if he were suddenly in a cummerbund accompanying the scarecrow to the world’s scariest prom. The hand dangled heavily from the doll’s stapled sleeve. It looked like a plaster cast, with five slender fingers. The boy’s face was molded out of this same white material. His features weren’t generic, like a mall mannequin’s head, but crooked, odd. Very skillfully misshapen. Based on somebody’s real face, I thought, like the famous dummies in the wax museum. Somebody you were supposed to recognize.

  The longer I stared at him, the less real I myself felt. Was I the only one who remembered his name?

  “Weird. His face is cold.” Juan Carlos slid a finger down the wax nose.

  “What the fuck! He’s wearing Hoops!” Gus knelt to show us the pair of black sneaker toes poking out from the scarecrow’s cuffs. At school, we made a point of stealing Hoops from any kid stupid enough to wear them—Hoops were imitation Nikes, glittered with an insulting ersatz gold, and just the sight of a pair used to enrage me. The H logo was a flamboyant way to announce to your class: Hey, I’m poor!

  “He’s not wearing his glasses,” I mumbled. Now I was afraid to touch him, as if the humid wand of my finger might bring him to life.

  “Can it blink?” Mondo asked, grabbing at its eyes. “My sister has this doll that blinks … uh-oh. Oops.”

  Mondo turned to us, grinning. There were shallow indents in the wax where the doll’s eyes had been.

  “Oh shit!” Gus shook his head. “Put them back in.”

  “I can’t. The little threads broke.” He held them out to show us, the eyes: two grape-size balls of glass. “Any of you bitches know how to sew?”

  Intense pinks were filtering through the autumn mesh of the oak. Sunset meant the park was officially closed.

  “Seriously?” Mondo asked, sounding panicky. “Anybody got glue or something?”

  A firefly was lighting up the airless caves of the doll’s nostrils, undetected by the doll. You’re even blinder now, I thought, and a heavy feeling draped over me.

  Mondo seemed to be catching on: “Don’t we know this kid?”

  He stood on his toes and peered into the scarecrow’s f
ace with a shrewdness that you did not ordinarily expect from Mondo Chu—who was encased in baby fat that he couldn’t age out of, with big, slabby cheeks that squeezed his eyes into a narcoleptic squint. There was some evidence that Mondo did not have the happiest home life. Mondo was half Chinese, half something. We’d all forgotten, assuming we’d ever known.

  Don’t say it.

  “Oh!” Mondo fell back on his heels. “It’s Eric.”

  “Oh.” I took a backward step.

  Juan Carlos paused with one hand inside the doll’s back, still wearing a doctor’s distant, guileful expression.

  “Who the fuck is Eric?” Gus snarled.

  “Don’t you assholes remember him?” Mondo was grinning at us like a Jeopardy! champ. He waved the doll’s wax hand at us. “Eric Mutis.”

  Now we all remembered him: Eric Mutis. Eric Mutant, Eric Mucus, Eric the Mute. Paler than a cauliflower, a friendless kid who had once or twice had seizures in our class. “Eric Mutis is an epileptic,” our teacher had explained a little uncertainly, after Mutant got carried from the room by Coach Leyshon. Eric Mutis had joined our eighth-grade class in October the previous year, a transfer kid. The teacher never introduced him. Kids rarely moved to Anthem, New Jersey; generally the teachers made a New Boy or a New Girl parade their strangeness for us. Not Eric Mutis. Eric Mutis, who seemed genuinely otherworldly, even weirder than Tuku the Guatemalan New Boy, never had to stand and explain himself to us. He arrived in exile, sank like a stone to the bottom of our homeroom. One day, several weeks before the official end of our school term, he vanished, and I honestly had not spoken his name since. Nobody had.

  In the school halls, Eric Mutis had been as familiar as air; at the same time we never thought about him. Not unless he was right in front of our noses. Then you couldn’t ignore him—there was something provocative about Eric Mutis’s ugliness, something about his wormy lips and lobes, his blond eyelashes and his worse-than-dumb expression, that filled your eyes and closed your throat. He could metamorphose Julie Lucio, the top of the cheer pyramid, a dog lover and the sweetest girl in our grade, into a true bitch. “What smells?” she’d whisper, little unicorn-pendant Julie, thrilling us with her acid tone, and the Mute would blink his large eyes at her behind his glasses and say, “I don’t smell it, Julie,” in that voice like thin blue milk. Congenitally, he really did seem like a mutant, sightless, incapable of shame. Mutant floated among us, hideous, yet blank as a balloon—his calm was unrelenting. He was ugly, most definitely, but we might have forgiven him for that. It was his serenity that made the kid monstrous to us. His baffling lack of contrition—all that oblivion rolling in his blue eyes. Personally, I felt allergic to the kid. Peace like his must be a bully allergen. A teacher’s allergen, too—the poor get poorer, I guess, because many of our teachers were openly hostile to Eric Mutis; by December, Coach Leyshon was sneering, “Pick it up, Mutant!” on the courts.

  At school, Camp Dark beat down kids as a foursome. We did this in an animal silence. We’d drag a hysterical kid behind the redbrick Science Building—usually a middle schooler, a sixth- or seventh-grader—and then we would hammer and piston our fists into his clawing, shrilling body until the kid went slack as rags. I heard those screams like they were coming out of my own throat and found I couldn’t relax until the kid did. I sensed there was some deep assembly-line logic to what we did: once we got a kid screaming, we were obliged to shut him up again. I thought of the process as what they call “a necessary evil.” We were like a team of factory guys, manufacturing a calm that was not available to us naturally anywhere in Anthem. We desperately needed this quiet that only our victims could produce for us, the silence that came after an attack; it was as essential to our friendship as breathing air. As blood is to a vampire. We’d kneel there, panting together, and let the good quiet bubble out of the snotty kid and into our lungs.

  That year, Eric Mutis was one of our regulars. We stole the Mute’s Hoops sneakers and hung them from the flagpole; we smashed his gray Medicaid glasses three times before Christmas; and then he’d come to school in a new pair of the same invalid’s frames, the same nine-dollar Hoops. How many pairs of Hoops did we force him to buy that year—or, most likely, since Eric Mutis queued up with us for the free lunch program, to steal?

  “Why are you so stubborn, Mutant?” I hissed at him once, when his face was inches away from mine, lying prone on the blacktop—closer to my face than any girl’s had ever been. Closer than I’d let my ma’s face get to me, now that I’d turned thirteen. I could smell his bubble gum and what we called the “Anthem cologne”—like my own clothes, Mutant’s rags stank of diesel, fried doughnut grease from the cafeteria.

  “Why don’t you learn?” And I Goliath-crushed the Medicaid glasses in my hand, feeling sick.

  “Your palms, Larry.” Eric the Mute had shocked me that time, calling me by name. “They’re bleeding.”

  “Are you retarded?” I marveled. “You are the one bleeding! This is your blood!” It was both our blood actually, but his eyes made me furious. That blind light, steady as a dial tone.

  “WAKE UP!” I backed away graciously, to give Gus space to deliver the encore kick.

  “Listen, Mutant: DO … NOT … WEAR THAT UGLY SHIT TO SCHOOL!”

  And Monday came, and guess what Mutant wore?

  Was he wearing this stuff out of rebellion? A kind of nerd insurrection? I didn’t think so; that might have relieved us a little bit, if the kid had the spine and the mind to rebel. But Eric Mutis wore that stuff brainlessly, shamelessly. We couldn’t teach him how to be ashamed of it. (“Who did this? Who did this?” our upstairs neighbor, Miss Zeke from 3C, used to holler, grinding her cross-eyed dachshund’s nose into a lake of urine on the stairwell, while the dog, a true lost cause, jetted another weak stream onto the floor.) When we attacked him behind the redbrick Science Building, he never seemed to understand what his crime had been, or what was happening, or even—his blue eyes drifting, unplugged—that it was happening to him.

  In fact, I think Eric Mutis would have been hard-pressed to identify himself in a police lineup. In the school bathroom he always avoided mirrors. Our bathroom floor had sloping blue tiles, which made the act of pissing into a bowl feel weirdly perilous, as if at any moment you might get plowed under by an Atlantic City wave. Teachers used a separate faculty john. I was famous for having nearly drowned a kid in the sink. Even the Mute knew this about me—that was the one lesson he took. “Well, hallo there, Mutant,” I’d whistle at him. More than once I watched him drop his dick and zip up and sprint past the bank of sinks when I entered the bathroom, his homely face pursuing him blurrily and hopelessly in the mirrors. This used to make me happy, when kids like Eric Mucus were afraid of me. (Really, I don’t know who I could have been then either.)

  Now I wondered if the real Mutis would have recognized this doll. Would the Mute have known his own head on the scarecrow?

  That night we spent another hour staring at the doll of Eric and debating what to do with him. The moon rose over Friendship Park. Everybody got jittery. Gus finished our beers. Mondo shot the glass eyes like marbles.

  “Well,” Gus sighed, dragging down his dark earlobes, his baseball signal to us that he had lost all patience. “We could do an experiment, like. Seems pretty simple. One way to find out what old Eric Mutant here—”

  “The scarecrow,” Mondo hissed, as if he regretted ever naming it.

  Gus rolled his eyes. “What the scarecrow is doing in the park? What it’s supposedly protecting us from? Would be to cut him down.”

  We had been riffing on this: What threat, exactly, was this scarecrow keeping away from Friendship Park? What could the doll of a child scare off, a freak like Mutant?

  The oak shivered above us; it was almost nine o’clock. Police, if they came upon us now, would write us up for trespassing. Come upon us, officers. Maybe the police would know the protocol here, what you should do if you found a scarecrow of your classmate strung up in the woods.r />
  “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Gus,” said Juan Carlos slowly. “What if it’s here for a good reason? What if something bad does come to Anthem? It would be our fault.”

  I nodded. “Look, whoever put this up is one sick fuck. I don’t want to mess with the property of a lunatic …”

  We kept on making a good case for leaving the doll and getting the hell out of Friendship Park when Gus, who had fallen quiet, stood up and walked toward the oak. A knife sprang out of Gus’s pocket, a four-inch knife that nobody had known Gus carried with him, one of the kitchen tools we’d seen used by Gus’s pretty mom, Mrs. Ainsworth, to butterfly and debone chickens.

  “GUS!” we cried.

  But nobody tried to stop him.

  Gus sawed through the rope easily and gave the doll a little push—joylessly, dutifully, like a big brother behind a swing set—launching him headfirst over the roots of the oak. He tumbled bonelessly into the Cone, which might have been funny if viewed on television; but the fall we watched beneath the orange eye of the forest moon, with that bland face flipping up at us, the taxidermy of Eric Mutis’s head on the scarecrow’s body, that was an awful sight. He landed on the rocks with a baseball crack. I don’t know how to describe the optical weirdness of the pace of this event—because the doll fell fast—but the descent felt unnaturally long to me, as if the forest floor were, just as quickly, lunging away from Eric Mutis. Somebody almost laughed. Mondo was already on his knees, peering over the edge, and I joined him: The scarecrow looked like a broke-neck kid at the bottom of a well. Facedown on an oily soak of black and maroon leaves. His legs all corkscrewed. One of his white hands had gotten twisted all the way around. He waved at us, palm up, spearing the air with his long, unlikely fingers.