Vampires in the Lemon Grove (31 page)

“You’re
it
,” I’d explained to Eric.

After school, everybody followed me toward Camp Dark in a line.

“Here comes the army!” cackled a bum with whom we sometimes shared beers, one of a rotating cast of lost men whom Gus called the Bench Goblins. He was sprawled across his bench on a bed of newspapers like Cleopatra. He had a long, stirrup-shaped face that grinned and grinned at us when we told him about the scarecrow of Eric Mutis.

“No,” he said, “I don’t see nobody come this way with no
doll
.”

“Last week,” I prodded, but I didn’t think that unit of time meant anything to this man. He batted his eyelashes at me, smoothing the oatmeal of wet newspapers beneath his cheek.

We trudged forward. All last night it had rained; the leaves were shining, and the foam-padded playground equipment gleamed like some giant’s dental kit.

“So what do you think did it, Rubby?” Gus asked.

“Yeah. An animal, like?” Mondo’s eyes were gleeful. “Is it all clawed up?”

“You’ll see. I dunno, guys,” I mumbled. “I dunno.

I dunno.” In fact, I knew a little more about the real Eric Mutis than I was letting on.

We traded theories:

I spent the march preparing for my friends to lose their shit when they saw the mauled doll of Eric. To scream, take off running.
But when they peered into the Cone, they responded in a way I could never have predicted. They started to laugh. Hysterically, like three hyenas, Gus first and then the other two.

“Good one, Rubby!” they called.

I was too shocked to speak.

“Oh, shit, that is fantastic, Rubby-oh. This is a classic.”

“This is your best yet,” Juan Carlos confirmed with gloomy jealousy.

“Dang!
Larry
. You’re like a goddamn acrobat! How did you get
down
there?”

Eyes rolled at me from every direction. It occurred to me suddenly that this was how Camp Dark must look to kids like Mutis.

“Wait—” My laugh sank into a growl. “You think
I
did that?”

Everybody nodded at me with strange solemnity, so that for a disorienting second I wondered if they might be right. How did they think I had managed the amputation? I tried to see myself as they must be imagining me: swinging down the ravine on a rope, a knife in my back jeans pocket, the orange moon washing over the Cone’s rock walls and making the place feel even more like an unlidded casket, the doll waiting for my attack with a patience rivaled only by that of the real Eric Mutis … and then what? Did my friends think I’d swung the arm back to the surface, à la Tarzan? Carried Mutant’s arm home to mount on my bedroom wall?

“I didn’t do it!” I gasped. “This is not a joke, you assholes …”

I got up and vomited orange Gatorade into the bushes. It was all liquid—I hadn’t been eating. Days of emptiness rose in me and I dry-retched again, listening to my friends’ peals echo around the black park. Then I surprised myself by laughing with them, so uncontrollably and with such relief that it felt like a continuation of the retching. (In fact I think this is exactly what I must have been doing—disgorging my claims. Purging myself of any attachment to my innocence, and crawling on my hands and knees back inside our “we.”)

After a while the laughter didn’t sound connected to any of us. We blinked at one another under the downpour, our mouths open.

“And the Oscar for puking goes to … Larry Rubio!” said Juan Carlos, still doubled over.

A bird floated softly over the park. Somewhere just beyond the tree line, buses were carrying cargoloads of sleepy adults home to Anthem from jobs in more affluent cities. Some of these commuters were our parents. I felt a little stab, picturing my ma eating her yellow apple on the train and reading some self-improvement book, on a two-hour return trip from her job at a day nursery for rich infants in Anthem’s far richer sister county. I realized that I had zero clue what my ma did there; I pictured her rolling a big striped ball, at extremely slow speeds, toward babies in little sultan hats and fat, bejeweled diapers.

“My ma’s name is Jessica,” I heard myself say. Suddenly I could not stop talking, it was like chattering teeth. “Jessica Dourif. Gus, you met her once, you remember.” I glared at Gus and dared him to say he’d forgotten her.

“What the hell are you talking about, Rubby?”

Below us, several pigeons had landed on the scarecrow’s shredded body. They attacked him with impersonal savagery. Tore at his threads. A gash down the doll’s back was hemorrhaging dirty-looking straw, and one pigeon dug its entire flashing head into the hole.
Now YOU need a scarecrow
, I thought.

“I’ve never met my father,” I blurted. “I can’t even say my own fucking last name.”

“Larry,” Juan Carlos said sternly, standing over me. “Nobody cares. Now you pull yourself together.”

What followed over the course of the next eight days progressed with the logic of a frightening nursery rhyme:

On Tuesday morning, the scarecrow’s second hand was gone. I joked that the white fingers were crawling through the park, hailing a cab, starting a new life somewhere, incognito, maybe with a family of gullible tarantulas in New Mexico.

“Shut up, Larry.” J.C. grinned. “We know that hand is in your locker.”

On Wednesday, the scarecrow was missing both Hoops sneakers and both feet. Everybody but me snickered about that one. Once Gus and I had gotten a three-day suspension for yanking off the Mute’s Hoops sneakers and his crusty socks and holding an “America the Great” sparkler to his bare feet—just to mess with him.

“Larry!” Gus said, clapping my back. “That wall is steep as hell! How did you climb up the rocks with two
shoes
in your hands?”

“I am not doing this,” I said quietly.

“Maybe,” I added in a whisper, “we can fish him up? Hook him out? Please …?”

“Ha! Are you
crying
, bro?”

Everybody complimented me on my “acting.” Yet they were the real actors, my best friends—pretending to believe the impossible, that I was the guy to blame for the attacks, that the nightmare in progress below us was a prank. Only Mondo would let me see his smile tremble.

On Thursday, the remaining arm was gone. Torn cleanly from the torso, so that you got an unsettling glimpse of the gray straw coiled inside the scarecrow’s chest. I pled my case with my eyes now:
Not-it, not-it, not-it!

“What’s next, Rubby? You going to carry a guillotine down there?”

“You bet,” I snarled. “How well you all know me. Next up, I’m going to climb down there and behead Eric Mutis with an ax.”

“Right.” Gus grinned. “We should follow you home. We’re gonna find Mutant’s arm under your pillow. The fake one, and probably the real one, too, you psycho.”

And they did. Follow me home. On the same Saturday afternoon that we discovered that Eric’s legs were missing. “Come over,” I said in a high voice, “check my whole house. Motherfuckers, this has got to end.” The doll we left in the Cone was a torso and a head. Pulpy, crushed. It had started to resemble a disintegrating jack-o’-lantern. I was “It.” I was the only suspect. Under a dreary sky we exited the park, everybody but me laughing about how they’d been fucked with, faked out, punked, and gotten.

“You rotten, Rubby-Oh,” grinned Gus.

“
Something’s
rotten,” agreed Mondo, catching my eye.

My ma and I lived on Gray’s Ferry, in ear-splitting proximity to the hospital; from my bedroom window I could see the red and white carnival lights of the ambulances. Awake, I was totally inured to the sirens, a whine that we’d been hearing throughout Anthem since birth—that urgent song drilled into us so frequently that our own heartbeats must have synced with it, which made it an easy howl to ignore; but I had dreams where the vehicular screams in the urgent care parking lot became the cries of a gigantic, abandoned baby behind my apartment. All I wanted to do in these dreams was
sleep
but this baby wouldn’t shut up! Now I think this must be a special kind of poverty, low-rent city sleep, where even in your dreams you are an insomniac and your unconscious is shrill and starless.

When we got to my place, the apartment was dark and there was no obvious sustenance waiting for us—my ma was not one to prepare a meal. Some deep-fridge spelunking produced a pack of spicy jerky and Velveeta slices. This was beau food, a souvenir from her last live-in boyfriend, Manny Somebody. As the son, I got to be on a first-name basis with all these adult men, all her
boyfriends, but I never knew them well enough to hate them in a personal way. We folded thirty-two cheese slices into cold taco shells and ate them in front of the TV. Later I’d remember this event as a sort of wake for the scarecrow of Eric Mutis, although I had never in my life been to a funeral.

They searched my apartment, found nothing. No white hands clapping in my closet or anything. No stuffed legs propped next to the brooms in the kitchen.

“He’s clean,” shrugged Gus, talking over me. “He probably buried the evidence.”

“I
do
think we need to bury him,” I started babbling. “We could go down there, dig the doll a deeper hole.” I swallowed, thinking about his face in the mud. “Please, guys—”

“No way. We are
not falling for that
,” said Juan Carlos quickly, as if wary of falling into the Cone himself.

Accusing me, I saw, served a real utility for the group—suddenly nobody was interested in researching scarecrows at the library with me, or trying to figure out where the real Eric Mutis had gone, or deciphering who was behind his doppelgänger doll. They had their answer: I was behind it. This satisfied some scarecrow logic for my friends. They slept, they didn’t wonder anymore. That’s where my friends had staked me: behind the doll.

“Let’s go there one night, and just see who comes to shred and tear at him like that. Whatever comes for Mutant, we’ll scare it off.” I swallowed hard, staring at them. “And then we’ll know
exactly
 …”

Mondo snapped the TV on.

It felt like we sat in the dark for hours, the silence growing and leafing into suffocating densities above us, sinking around the sofas like tree roots. Nobody but me seemed to notice when the television station switched to pure static. My ma had an ancient RCA TV, with oven dials for controls and rabbit ears; I always thought it looked more authentically futuristic than my friends’
modern Toshiba sets. Spazzy rainbows moved up and down, imbuing the screen with an insectoid life of its own. Here was the secret mind of the machine, I thought with a sudden ache, what you couldn’t see when the news anchors were staring soulfully at their teleprompters and the sitcom families were making eggs and jokes in their fake houses.

Eric’s face—the face of scarecrow Eric—swam up in my mind. I realized that the random, relentless lightning inside the TV screen was how I pictured the interior of the doll—void, yet also, in a way that I did not understand and found I could not even think about head-on, much less explain to my friends,
alive
. Rainbows furrowed the glass. With the TV on mute you could hear a hard clock tick.

“Hey! Rubio!” Gus finally asked. “What the
fuck
we watching?”

“Nothing,” I snapped back; a wise lie, I thought. “Obviously.”

Over the next three days, the doll continued to disappear. Once the major appendages were gone, the increments of Eric that went missing became more difficult to track. Patches of hair vanished. Bites and chews of his shoulders. Morsels. By Monday, two weeks after we’d found it, over half the scarecrow was gone.

“Well, that’s that,” said Juan Carlos in a funny voice. In the Cone, green straw was blowing everywhere now. All that bodiless straw gave me a nervous feeling, like watching a thought that I couldn’t collect. Eric’s head was still attached to the sack of his torso.