Karen Russell - Vampires in the Lemon Grove

“You and Samson have the same boxer shorts,” she said.

“Our mother buys them for us.”

Maybe this isn’t going to happen, Nal thought.

But then he saw a glint of silver and felt recommitted. Vanessa had slipped the pawnshop ring on — it was huge on her. She caught him looking and held her hand up, letting the ring slide over her knuckle, and they both let out jumpy laughs. Nal could feel sweat collecting on the back of his neck. They tried kissing again for a while. Vanessa’s dark hair slid through his hands like palmfuls of oil as he fumbled his way inside her, started to move. He wanted to ask: Is this right? Is this okay? It wasn’t at all what he’d imagined. Nal, moving on top of Vanessa, was still Nal, still cloaked with consciousness and inescapably himself. He didn’t feel invincible — he felt clumsy, guilty. Vanessa was trying to help him find his rhythm, her hands just above his bony hips.

“Hey,” Vanessa said at one point, turning her face to the side. “The cat’s watching.”

The orange tabby was licking its paws on the first stair, beneath the clock. The cat had somehow gotten hold of the stop screw — it must have fallen out of his pocket — and was batting it around.

The feeling of arrival Nal was after kept receding like a charcoal line on bright water. This was not the time or the place but he kept picturing the gulls, screaming and wheeling in a vortex just beyond him, and he groaned and sped up his motions. “Don’t stop,” Vanessa said, and there was such a catch to her voice that Nal said, “I won’t, I won’t,” with real seriousness, like a parent reassuring a child. Although very soon, Nal could feel, he would have to.

“Go tack up, Miles!” says Mr. Johannes Zegner of the Blue Sink Zegners, pioneer of the tallgrass prairie and future owner of 160 acres of Nebraska. In most weathers, I am permitted to call him Pa.

“See if your mother’s got the Window ready. The Inspector is coming tonight. He’s already on the train, can you imagine!”

A thrill moves in me; if I had a tail I would shake it. So I will have to leave within the hour, and ride quickly — because if the one-eyed Inspector really is getting off at the spur line in Beatrice, he’ll hire a stagecoach and be halfway to the Hox River Settlement by one o’clock; he could be at our farm by nightfall! I think Jesus Himself would cause less of a stir stepping off that train; He’d find a tough bunch to impress in this droughty place, with no water anywhere for Him to walk on.

“Miles, listen fast,” Pa continues. “Your brother is coming—”

Sure enough, Peter is galumphing toward us through the puddled glow of the winter wheat. It came in too sparse this year to make a crop, wisping out of the sod like the thin blond hairs on Pa’s hand. My father has the “settler’s scar,” a pink star scored into the brown leather of his palm by the handle of the moldboard plow. Peter’s got one, too, a raw brand behind his knuckles that never heals — and so will I when I prove up as a man. (As yet I am the Zegner runt, with eleven years to my name and only five of those West; I cannot grow a beard any quicker than Mr. Johannes can conjure wheat, but I can ride .)

Pa kneels low and clasps his dirt-colored hands onto my shoulders. “Your brother is coming, but it’s you I want to send to our neighbors in need. Boy, it’s you . I trust you on a horse. I know you’ll tend to that Window as if it were your own life.”

“I will, sir.”

“I just got word from Bud Sticksel — you got two stops. The Inspector’s making two visits. The Florissants and then the Sticksels. Let’s pray he keeps to that schedule, anyhow, because if he decides to go to the Sticksels first …”

I shiver and nod, imagining the Sticksels’ stricken faces in their hole.

“The Sticksels don’t have one shard of glass. You cannot fail them, Miles.”

“I know, Pa.”

“And once they prove up, you know what to do?”

“Yes, Pa. This time I will—”

“You take the Window back. Bundle it in burlap. Get Bud’s wife to help. Then you push that Inspector’s toes into stirrups — do unto others, Miles — and you bring that man to our door.”

“But what if the Inspector sees me reclaiming the Window from Mr. Sticksel? He’ll know how we fooled him. Won’t he cancel their title?”

Pa looks at me hard, and I can hear the gears in his head clicking. “You want to be a man, don’t you, Miles?”

“Yes, sir. Very much.”

“So use your wits, son. Some sleight of hand. I can’t think of everything.”

Increasingly time matters. I can feel it speeding up in my chest, in rhythm with my pounding heart. A flock of cliff swallows lifts off the grassy bank of our house, and my eyes fly with them into the gray light.

“Hey,” says Peter. He comes up behind me and shovels my head under his arm — he smells sour, all vinegary sweat and bones. “What’s this fuss?”

So Pa has to explain again that when the sun next rises, we’ll have our autographed title. Peter’s grin is as wide and handsome and full of teeth as our father’s, and I smile into the mirror they make.

“Tomorrow?”

“Or even tonight.”

Behind them, Ma seeps out of the dugout in her blue dress. She sees us gathered and runs down the powdery furrow like a tear — I think she would turn to water if she could.

No rain on our land since the seventh of September. That midnight we got half an inch and Pa drilled in the wheat at dawn. Most of it cooked in the ground; what came up has got only two or three leaves to a plant. Last week the stalks started turning ivory, like pieces of light. “Water,” Pa growls at the blue mouth of heaven — the one mouth distant enough to ignore his fists.

He mutters that this weather will dry us all to tinder, lightning fodder, and he’s spent every day since that last glorious hour of rainfall plowing firebreaks until he’s too tired to stand. Ma’s begun to talk to the shriveling sheaves in a crazy way, as if they were her thousand thirsty children. My brother pretends not to hear her.

“Inspection day,” Pa booms at Ma’s approach. “He’s on the train now.”

“The Inspector? Says who? Who thinks they’re proving up?”

“Bud says. And we are. Daniel Florissant, Bud, the Zegners.”

Pa leans in as if to kiss her, whispering; she unlatches her ear from his mouth.

“ No! Are you crazy, Jo? The Inspector is a rumor, he’s smoke! I can make you a promise: no such person is ever coming out here. How long do we have to wait before you believe that? A decade? What you want to risk—” She looks over at me and her voice gets quieter.

A silence falls over the Zegner family homestead, which Pa splits with his thundering hymn:

“You faithless woman! How can you talk like that after we have lived on this land for five years? Built our home here, held out through drought and hail, through locusts, Vera—”

Peter is nodding along. I have to tiptoe around the half-moon of my family to get to the sod barn. As I tack up Nore I can hear Ma worrying my father: “Oh, I am not deaf, I hear you lying to our child— ‘It’s verified.’ ”

“Bud Sticksel is no liar,” I reassure Nore’s quivering rump. “Don’t be scared. Ma’s crazy. We’ll find the Inspector.”

After the defections and deaths of several settlers, the Sticksels have become our closest neighbors. Their farm is eighteen miles away. Bud used to work as a hired hand in Salmon, Ohio, says Pa. Came here the same year as our family, 1872. He’s an eyeblink from being eligible to prove up and get his section title: 1. Bud’s land by the lake is in grain. 2. He’s put a claim shanty on the property, ten feet by twenty. 3. He has resided on his land for five years, held on through four shining seasons of drought. (“Where is God’s rain?” Mrs. Sticksel murmurs to Ma.) 4. He has raised sixty acres of emerald lucerne, two beautiful daughters, and thirty evil turkeys that have heads like scratched mosquito bites. The Sticksels have met every Homestead Act requirement save one, its final strangeness, what Pa calls “the wink in the bureaucrats’ wall”: a glass window.