Karen Russell - Vampires in the Lemon Grove

“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.

“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:

Hypothesis 1: A human took the arm.

Hypothesis 2: An animal, or several animals, did the butchering. Smart animals. Surgical animals. Animals with claws. Scavengers — opossums, raccoons. Carrion birds.