Vampires in the Lemon Grove (30 page)

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.

“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.

“Okay,” Gus said, sitting back down next to where he’d dug his red beer can into the leaves, as if we were at the beach. “You’re all welcome. Everybody needs to shut up now. Let’s start the clock on this experiment.”

We emerged from the park at Gowen Street and Forty-eighth Avenue. A doorman waved at us from a fancy apartment building, where awnings sprouted from eighty windows like golden claws. When the streetlights clicked on without warning, I think we all stifled a scream. We stood in a huddle, bathed in deep-sea light. Even on a nonscarecrow day I dreaded this, the summative pressure of the good-bye moment—but now it turned out there was nothing to say. We split off in a slow way, a slow ballet—a moth, touring the air above our heads, would have seen us as a knot dissolving over many moth centuries. It occurred to me that, given
the life span of a moth, one kid’s twitch must take a year to complete. Eric’s doll would have twirled down for decades.

That night marked a funny turning point for me; I started thinking about Time in a new way, Time with a capital
T
, this substance that underwent mysterious conversions. On the walk home I watched moths go flitting above the stalled lanes of cars. I called Mondo on the phone, something I never did—I was surprised I even had his number. We didn’t talk about Eric Mutis, but the effort of not talking about him made our actual words feel like fizz, just a lot of speedy emptiness. You know, I never tried to force Eric Mutis from my mind—I never had to. Courteously, the kid had disappeared from my brain entirely, about the same time he vanished from our school rolls. Were it not for the return of his scarecrow in Friendship Park, I doubt I would have given him a second thought.

I am in the shower, Eric Mutis is where?

I got into the habit of juxtaposing my real activities to Mutant’s imaginary ones: Was he blowing out twisty red-and-white birthday candles? Doing homework? What hour of what day was it, wherever Eric Mutis had moved? I pictured him in Cincinnati squiggling mustard on a soggy ballpark frank, in France with an arty beret (I pictured him dead, too, in a dreamy, compulsive way, the concrete result of which was that I no longer ate breakfast). “You don’t want your
Popple
, Larry?” my ma screamed. “It’s a Blamberry Popple!” The Blamberry Popple looked like a pastry nosebleed to me. What was Eric eating? How soundly was he sleeping? (“Did we break Mutant’s nose?” I asked Gus in homeroom. “At least once,” Gus confirmed.) Now each of my minutes cast an hourglass shadow, and I divided into two.

But inside the Cone, as it turned out, the scarecrow of Eric Mutis was subdividing even faster.

Every day for a week, we went back to stare at the facedown scarecrow in the ravine. Nothing much happened. There was a
mugging at the Burger Burger; the robber got a debit card and a quart of milkshake. Citywide, bus fare went up five cents. A drunk driver in the Puerto Rican Day parade draped a Puerto Rican flag over his windshield like a patriotic blindfold and crashed through a beautiful float of the island of Puerto Rico. Nothing occurred on the crime blotter that seemed connected to Eric Mutis, or Eric Mutis’s absence. No strange birds came to roost in the oaks of Friendship Park now that the scarecrow’s guard was down. Downed by us. Drowned in air, for the world’s stupidest experiment.

If I closed my eyes I could feel the slippery weeds crushed underneath his face.

“Did Eric have a dad? A mom?”

“Wasn’t he a foster kid?”

“Where did he move to, again?”

“Old Mucusoid never said—did he? He just disappeared.”

At school, the new guidance counselor could not help us find our “little pal”—the district computers, she said, had been wiped by a virus. Mutis, Eric: no record. No yearbook picture.
ABSENT
, read the empty blue oval between the school-mandated grimaces of Georgio Morales and Valerie Night.

We consulted with Coach Leyshon, whom we found face-deep in a vending-machine jelly roll behind the dugout.

“Mutant?” he barked. “That dipshit didn’t come back?” We broke into Vice Principal Derry’s file cabinet and made depressing, irrelevant discoveries about the psychology of Vice Principal Derry—a
Note to Moi!
memo, for example, that read, in harsh red pen,
BUY PENCIL SHARPENER
.

Next we consulted the yellow pages at the city library. Ma Bell’s anthology of false alarms. We thought we found Mutant in Lebanon Valley, Pennsylvania. Voloun River, Tennessee. Jump City, Oregon. Jix, Alaska, a place that sounded like a breakfast cereal or an attack dog, had four Mutis families listed. We called.
Many dozens of Mutises across America hung up on us, after apologizing for their households’ dearth of Erics. America felt vast and void of him. Gus whammed the phone into its receiver, disgusted. “It’s like that kid hatched out of an egg. What I want to know is: Who made him into a scarecrow?”

This time we weren’t even sure what sort of listing to scout for. Who made a doll of a boy? We scanned the book for ridiculous headings:
SCARECROW REPAIR
,
WAX KIDS
. I found an address for a puppeteer who had a workshop in Anthem’s garment district. Gus biked out there and did reconnaissance, weaving around the bankers’ spires of downtown Anthem and risking the shortcut under the overpass, where large, insane men brayed at you and haunted shopping carts rolled windlessly forward. He spent an hour circling the puppeteer’s studio, trying to catch him in the act of Dark Arts—because what if he was making scarecrows of
us
? But the puppeteer turned out to be a small, bald man in a daffodil print shirt; the puppet on his table was a hippopotamus, or perhaps some kind of lion. On Gus’s fifteenth revolution around his studio, the puppeteer lifted the window, gave a cheery wave, and informed Gus that he’d just telephoned the police.

“Great,”
sighed Juan Carlos. “So we still have no clue who made that doll.”

“But how the fuck you going to confuse a hippo and a
lion
, bro!” Mondo screamed. Mondo’s reactions often missed the mark. The anger of Mondo I pictured as this fierce and stupid bird that kept landing on the wrong tree, whole woods away from the rest of us.

“Chu, shut up. You got a brain defect.”

“Maybe Mutant did it,” I said, almost hopefully. I wanted Eric to be safe and alive. “Did he know that we hang out in the park? Maybe he roped the scarecrow there to screw with us.”

“Maybe it was Vice Principal Derry,” said Juan Carlos. “One time, I looked through Derry’s office window and I see Mutant
on his couch. And I sort of thought, ‘Oh, good, he’s getting some help.’ But then Derry catches me looking, right? And he stands up, he’s fucking
pissed
, he shuts the blinds. It was so weird. And I saw the Mute’s mug—”

I could see it, too, Mutant’s leech-white face behind the glass, I
had
seen it framed in Derry’s office window, Eric Mutis swallowed by Derry’s leather sofa, wearing his queer gray glasses. “And he looked … bad,” he finished. “Like, scared? Worse than he did when we messed with him.”

“Why was he in Derry’s office?” I asked, but nobody knew.

“I saw him get picked up from school,” Mondo volunteered. “After second period, you know, ’cause he had one of his twitch fests? The, uh, the seizures? And this dude in the car looked so old! I was like, Mutant, is Darth Vader there your dad?”

This, too, was something we all suddenly remembered seeing: a cadaverous man, a liver-spotted hand on the steering wheel of a snouty green Cadillac, tapping a cigar, and then Mutant climbing into the backseat, the rear window as foggy as aquarium glass and the Mute’s head now etched dimly behind it. He always climbed into the backseat, never used the passenger door, we agreed on that. We all remembered the cigar.

Gus hadn’t stopped frowning—it had been days since he’d told a truly funny joke. “Where did Mutis live in Anthem? Does anybody remember him saying?”

“East Olmsted,” said Mondo. “Right? With a crazy aunt.” Mondo’s eyes widened, as if his memory were coming into focus. “I think the aunt was black!”

“Chu,” Juan Carlos sighed. “That is not your memory. You are thinking of a Whoopi Goldberg movie. Nah, Mutant’s parents were rich.”

“Oh my God!” Mondo clapped a hand to his face. “You’re
right
! That was a
great movie
!”

Juan Carlos directed his appeal to Gus and me. “Kid was
loaded. I just remembered. I’m, like, ninety percent sure. That’s why the Mute pissed us off so bad … wasn’t it? Pretending he didn’t have shit. I think they lived in the Pagoda. Serious.”

I almost laughed at that—the Pagoda was an antislum, a castle of light. Eric Mutis had never lived in the Pagoda’s zip code. In fact, I had visited the house where Eric lived. Just one time. This knowledge was like a wild thumper of a rabbit inside me. I was amazed that no one else could hear it.

Wednesday morning, I went to Friendship Park on an empty stomach, alone. The sun came with me; I was already twenty minutes late for Music II, a class that I was certainly failing, since I stood in the back with Gus and made a Clint Eastwood seam with my lips and sang only in my mind. It was the class I loved. Mrs. Verazain put on old records where the dead violinists seemed to saw through Time, to let a soft green light flood out of the past and into the voices of my friends—back then I would have said that Music calmed me down better than pot and I didn’t like to miss it.

But I had my own business with the scarecrow of Eric Mutis. I’d been having dreams about both Erics, the real one and the doll. I slept with a pillow under my stomach and imagined it loaded with straw. In one dream, I got Coach Leyshon’s permission to sub myself in for Mutis, lashing my body to the oak tree and eating horsey fistfuls of bloodred straw; in another, I watched the doll of Eric Mutis go plunging into the Cone again, only this time when his scarecrow hit the rocks, a thousand rabbits came bursting out of it. Baby rabbits: furless thumbs of pink in the night, racing under the oaks of Friendship Park.

“Eh-ric?” I called softly, well in advance of the oak. And then, almost inaudibly: “Honey?” in a voice that was not unlike my ma’s when she opened my bedroom door at three a.m. and called my name but clearly didn’t want to wake me, wanted instead who-knows-what? I got on my knees and peered into the ravine.

“Oh my God.”

The scarecrow was missing its left arm. Whatever had attacked it in the night had been big enough to tear the arm off at the root. Gray straw spewed out of the hole.
You’re next, you’re next, you’re next
, my heart screamed. I ran and I didn’t slow down until I reached the glass umbrella of the number 22 bus stop. I did not stop until I burst into Music II, where all my friends were doing their
do re mi
work. I pushed in next to Gus and collapsed against our wall.

“You’re very late, Señor Rubio,” said Mrs. Verazain disgustedly, and I nodded hard, my eyes still stinging from the cold. “You’re too late to be assigned a role.”

“I am,” I agreed with her, hugging my arm.

There was one day last December, right before the Christmas break, where we got him behind the Science Building for a game that Mondo had named Freeze Tag. The game was pretty short and unsophisticated—we made a kid “It,” the way you’d identify an animal as a trophy kill, if you were a hunter, or declare a red spot the bull’s-eye, so that you could shoot it:

“Not it!”

“Not it!”

“Not it!”

“Not it!”

We’d grinned, our four bodies in our white gym shirts advancing through the cattails. Nobody ever mowed the grass behind the Science Building. Mutant would stand there with weeds up to his waist, waiting for us. He never ran, not the second time we played Freeze Tag with him, and not the hundredth. The rules were simple and yet Eric Mutis stared at us with his opaque blue eyes, staked to the ground, and gave no sign of understanding the game.