Karen Russell - Vampires in the Lemon Grove

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 face 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.