Karen Russell - Vampires in the Lemon Grove

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.