Vampires in the Lemon Grove (18 page)

Rutherford is losing weight. He keeps the sheep near him all the time now, crooning to her through closed gums: “Lucy, Lucy, give me your answer, do, I’m half crazy …”

“Pipe down, Rutherford,” snaps Harding. “Stop giving that
sheep your food, you idiot. You will starve to death if you keep it up.”

Rutherford ignores the other presidents and kneels next to the sheep. He smiles at the blue fleck of evidence that his wife is hiding somewhere inside this fleecy body. I know you, he whispers. He lets a brown apple plop into the sawdust between them. The sheep eats it with gusto, and Rutherford hopes this means his love is requited. In the morning, Fitzgibbons yelps when he discovers the sheep in the stall with Rutherford. “Sarge!” Fitzgibbons smacks a palm against his bald head. “What in the hell are you doing with that blind ewe? That is spooky, Sarge. That is goddamn unnatural. You feeling sick, Sarge? You get into some rat poison or something?” Fitzgibbons approaches Rutherford with the oiled halter. “Come along now,” he grunts. “Open up …” He jostles a carrot around Rutherford’s stubbornly pursed lips. A second later the carrot has disappeared and Fitzgibbons is cursing and hopping on one foot. “Jesus!” he growls. “Sarge, you old fleabag, you bit me!”

I am becoming very clever at getting the carrot without opening up for the bit
, Rutherford thinks. He keeps the carrot in a pouch in his cheek, a gift for Lucy.
At the games of hunger and restraint, my fellow countrymen, I am becoming excellent
.

In the yard, the other presidents are still hungry for power. They are practicing for the return to Washington. Adams is so starved for dominion that he begs the girl to allow him to represent her interests to her uncle Fitzgibbons. “Elect me to take part in the public life of your Barn, young lady, and I shall act a fearless, intrepid, undaunted part, at all hazards …”

“Ha-ha, Mister Pretty, you are so noisy today!” The girl hums a nonsense tune as she plaits Adams’s tail with geraniums.

Martin Van Buren is barn sour but even he shouts out impossible promises at the turkeys from the dim interior of his stall: “You are my constituents, my turkeys,” Van Buren neighs, “and the love I feel for you is forever.” The turkeys promenade around the yard and ignore him. Rutherford wonders if they, too, have human biographies hidden beneath their black feathers. The presidents spend a lot of time talking about where the other citizens of the Union might have ended up. Wilson thinks the suffragettes probably came back as kicky rabbits.

“I don’t understand,” Rutherford says. “Don’t you gentlemen realize that you are stumping for nothing? What sort of power could you hope to achieve out here?”

Rutherford was ready for his term to be over. He was happy to keep his promise not to run for reelection. He had been a reluctant incumbent in the first place, unwilling to leave his war post to take a furlough for the stump. Mark Twain campaigned for him, and still he never expected to win. Rutherford never knew a generous margin in the whole of his life. His victory was the most disputed in American history. A single electoral vote would have given the presidency to Samuel J. Tilden. “It was a squeaker.” Eisenhower nods. “I remember studying it in school.” Often, Rutherford wonders what would have happened if Tilden had won. He wonders if he has unjustly displaced Tilden from this stall in the blank country sun of the afterlife.

If we could just reach a consensus that this is Heaven
, Rutherford snorts,
we could submit to it, the joy of wind and canter and the stubbed ashy sweetness of trough carrots, burnished moons, nosing the secret smells out of grass. I would be free to gallop
. The only heaven that Rutherford has known in the Barn comes in single moments: a warm palm on his nose, fresh hay, a tiny feast of green thistle made nearly invisible by the sun. At dawn, Heaven is a feeling that comes when the wind sweeps the fields. Heaven is this wind, Rutherford knows for an instant, bending a million yellow heads of wheat.

By nightfall, though, the wheat has straightened, and the whole notion of an afterlife strikes Rutherford as preposterous. “All these arguments are nonsense,” he confides to Lucy. “We are all still alive. This is still America. The stars look the same,” he continues, “and we are fed. We are here.”

One afternoon, the sheep is not waiting for him in his stall.

“Rutherford,” Jackson sniggers from the pasture, “take a gander at this. Looks like Fitzgibbons is doing something very untoward to your wife.”

Fitzgibbons is kneeling in the center of the field, shearing the sheep that might be Lucy. Wool flies up and parachutes down in the sun. Fitzgibbons clips off first one clump of fleece and then another, until the sheep is standing shorn and pink before him. All of a sudden Rutherford’s body feels too heavy for his coltish knees. He stares at the growing pile of fleece, heart pounding, and for a crazy moment Rutherford thinks that he can still salvage what’s left of his Lucy. Perhaps there’s some way to put this wool back on the sheep’s body, to cover her up again? He paws frantically at the white curls with his hoof.

The sheep rises up out of the green grass completely bald. Now the fleck in her eye looks bright and inhuman. Worse than meaningless, Rutherford thinks. A symptom of illness, cataracts, just like Woodrow first said. Rutherford hangs his head and keeps his eyes on the ugly dandelions. He swallows the grainy pear that he has been holding to feed the sheep with. “That is not my wife.”

On the eve of the other presidents’ push for liberty, with a whistling nonchalance, Fitzgibbons leaves Rutherford’s stall door
open. The latch bangs in the wind, a sound like
open
, a song like
no accident
.

Rutherford strolls through the doors into the dusk light.

“The Fence is just a wooden afterthought,” Rutherford thinks, coming as close to its rough posts as he dares. “We’re imprisoned already.” He can feel the walls of his new body expand and contract. Tonight it’s not an altogether unpleasant sort of Heaven to be trapped in. The stars are out, and for the first time in months Rutherford has swallowed his whole ration of grain at the trough. He can feel a forgotten strength pulsing through his body. “It’s our suspicion that there’s another, better Heaven behind the cumulus screen,” he murmurs into the grass, bending and tearing at a root that tastes beautifully yellow. “That’s the trouble. That’s what keeps us trapped here, minds in animals.”

Rutherford begins to run, lightly at first.
What am I
, Rutherford wonders,
a horse’s body or a human mind?
Both options are twining together like a rope, then fraying. They are disappearing, the faster he runs. The sound of his hoofbeats doesn’t trouble him now; it doesn’t even register. They thud and they vanish. His tail is still attached to him at the root. But Rutherford isn’t trying to outrun his horse tail anymore. It sails out like a black flag behind him, its edges in tatters.

Rutherford turns and starts running again, and this time he finds that he cannot stop. The Fence is right in front of him now. It takes on a second life inside his mind, a thick gray barrier. His blood feels hot and electric inside him, and Rutherford knows from the certainty of his heartbeat that he is alive, that there isn’t any “after.” There is no reason to believe that anything better or greener waits on the other side of the Fence. There is nothing to prevent him from jumping it. There it is, Rutherford thinks, the blue lick of lightning. His eyes still refuse to focus, but now he finds that he is no longer afraid of the blind spot.
This is for the Union
, Rutherford whinnies, and suddenly he stops worrying
about cause and effect, about the impossibility that his hoofbeats could hold any Union together, or why any of this should matter, one horse running in an empty field: none of his speed, none of his grandeur, no droplets of sweat streaming off his hide like wings, and he runs. And nobody is watching when he clears the Fence.

Perhaps it is odd to have rules for tailgating when the Food Chain Games themselves are a lawless bloodbath. And that is what a lot of fans love about the games: no rules, no refs, no box seats, and no hot pretzels—not below the Ross Ice Shelf! So take these rules of mine with a grain of salt. That said, I’ve seen too many senseless deaths over the years. Some people think they can just hop down to the South Pole with a six-pack of Natural Ice and a sweater from the Gap, and that is just not the way we do it for the Food Chain Games. The Team Krill vs. Team Whale match takes place every summer in the most dangerous and remote tailgating site in the world. With the -89°F temperatures and the solar radiation, not to mention the strong katabatic winds off the polar plateau, it can be easy to lose faith, and fingers.

Antarctic tailgaters know exactly how
hard
it is to party.

So: how to get ready for the big game? Say farewell to your loved ones. Notarize your will. Transfer what money you’ve got into a trust for the kids. You’ll probably want to put on some
weight for the ride down to the ice caves; a beer gut has made the difference between life and death at the blue bottom of the world. Eat a lot at Shoney’s and Big Boy and say your prayers. Take an eight-month leave of absence, minimum, from your office job. Kill your plants, release your cat, stop your mail. It’s time to hit the high seas.

Tailgating in the Antarctic is no joke. We are trying to do nothing less ambitious than reverse the course of history. We want Team Krill to defeat Team Whale.

Look, if you want to tailgate in comfort, don’t get on a boat. You can buy some quail eggs or snails or whatever you people eat and you can watch the Food Chain Games on your flat TV. Stay in Los Angeles. Hug your wife on your plush banquette. Cheer for the Antarctic minke whales, like every other asshole.

No, wait a second, here comes the real Rule One: if you are a supporter of Team Whale, you can go fuck yourself, my fine sir. This list is for the fans of Team Krill.

Honestly, for the March game I like to get down to the Ross Ice Shelf by mid-January. The cousins will joke that I’m a little bit of a stickler for punctuality, but I don’t see the harm in reaching the ice caves early. I’ve seen too many Antarctic tailgaters killed in the Drake Passage over the years—even I get choked up when I see a Team Whale vessel cracked to bits on a ’berg, its flags faded so bad you can’t read them.

So plan for frostbite and Aeolian terror. Personally, I don’t like to risk the easterlies in the Gerlache Strait any later than
November—the pack ice is on the move, a bad traffic. All those gentoo penguins looking at you, frizzy and ruby-eyed. It’s uncanny. Team Gentoo is a decent franchise but I’ve never been a fan. They beat Team Squid again last season but got smoked by Team Orca and Team Elephant Seal.

Another reason to haul ass is that all the good spots in the harbor outside the ice caves go by Valentine’s Day. You don’t want to have to motor in sixty miles on your Zodiac boat come game day.

A note on etiquette: People have to do terrible, terrible things to arrive there on time. When you make small talk, use your judgment. Keep it light. Nobody wants to kill the spirit in the ice caves with some downer questions about the recently deceased. Be prepared to see a black-nosed victim of frostbite; a boatload of probable cannibals, suspiciously fat and sheepish in their snug parkas; a scurvy-riddled tailgater in a lifeboat, vestless and begging oranges. Don’t ask questions. Maybe offer the guy a nectarine, if he’s wearing Team Krill gear.

At minimum, you will need to bring Zodiac boots and gaiters; first-aid kits; survival bags; both VHF and HF solar-powered radios; a SeaRover Remotely Operated Vehicle with sonar imager; a fluorometer; a Conductivity, Temperature, and Depth Sensor; a Bio-Optical Multifrequency Acoustical and Physical Environment Recorder; an Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler; nachos.

And of course the tailgate is not just potentially fatal glacial navigation—there is also a fun component. Inspired by our brethren in the football stadium parking lots of Florida and Alabama, some Antarctic tailgaters have brought ale tankards in recent
years, although this is not requisite. You might also choose to prioritize more of the room in your hold for auxiliary drinking supplies, like sea-sickness bags and barrels of aspirin.

If you’re not a drinker, you’ll still be in good company. For example, I was sober as a judge until recently, when Maureen took off and I discovered that rye whiskey is a terrific complement to every meal at sea. Plenty of Team Krill tailgaters party “dry” during the voyage to avoid accidents; if you’re abstaining, you could bring orange juice or seltzer or melt big bricks of ice for fishy-tasting water. In fact, you will almost definitely have to do this at one of the army stations, unless you want to go the pricey Reverse Osmosis Desalinator route and get your water supply directly from the sea. Tip: this water will taste a little like movie popcorn unless you doctor it with Tang or Crystal Light lemonade.