Karen Russell - Vampires in the Lemon Grove

“Do you think Eric Mutis is still alive, Chu?” I asked him.

He looked up from his Choco-Slurpo, shocked.

“ Alive? Of course he is! He changed schools, Rubby — he’s not dead .” He sucked furiously at chocolate sludge, his eyes goggling out.

“Well, what if he was sick? What if he was dying all last year? What if he got kidnapped, or ran away? How would we know?”

“Jesus, Larry. We don’t know shit about shit. Maybe Mutant still lives right around the corner. Maybe he helped you to put the scarecrow up. Is that it, Larry?” he asked, and offered me the fudgy backwaters of the Slurpo even as he accused me of diabolical collusion. When Gus wasn’t around, Mondo became smarter, kinder, and more afraid.

“Are you guys doing this together? You and Eric?”

“No,” I said sadly. “Mutant, he moved. I checked his old house.”

“Huh? You what?” Out of habit, Mondo heaved up to chuck the Slurpo cup into the Cone, momentarily forgetting that it was now a sort of open grave for Eric Mutis; with the freakishness of blind coincidence, Mondo happened to look up and notice an inscription on the sunless side of the oak:

ERIC MUTIS

♥ SATURDAY

“Larry!” he screamed. Someone had cut this into the bark very recently. The letters leaked an apple-green sap. They were childishly shaped. Their carver had split the heart with a little arrow. When I saw this epitaph — because that is how they always read to me, this type of love graffiti on trees and urinals, as epitaphs for ancient couples — my throat tightened and my heart beat so fast that my own death seemed a likely possibility.

“Mutant was here !” Mondo cried. For a moment he’d forgotten that I was supposed to be the culprit, the engineer of this psychotic joke. “Mutant had a girlfriend !”

So then I filled in some blanks for Mondo. I offered Mondo the parts of Eric Mutis that I had indeed been hoarding.

On a Wednesday afternoon last spring, I was riding my bicycle through a gray suburb of Anthem, on my way to see a West Olmsted kid who owed me money, when a car came roaring around the corner and clipped me, sent me flying over the handlebars. Pain exploded on my left side, and I lay sprawled in a heap in the street, watching the driver roll obliviously down the block. I realized I knew the car. I’d last seen it in our school parking lot. A long green Cadillac. That gargoyle with the cigar, the Mute’s caretaker, had nearly killed me. I crawled to the side of the road, and I was still sitting there ten minutes later, hypnotized by the light rolling around my bike spokes, when I saw the Mute jogging up the asphalt. Glare came off his large square glasses, which made him look like a strange cartoon character.

“Hi, Larry,” he’d said. “You all right? Sorry. He didn’t see you there.”

I gaped up at him. I had plenty to say: Is that maniac your dad? Mr. Hit and Run? Your caretaker or whatever? Because I could sue, you know .

Instead I watched my hand slide into the Mutant’s hand and form a sticky mitt. I let the Mutant help me up. I waited for him to say something about the time I’d smashed his specs but the Mute, true to form, said nothing. I was so dazed that I kept my own mouth shut and followed him down the street, using my bike as a rolling crutch. We stopped at an evil-looking house, a yellow split-level, number 52; the door knocker was a filth-encrusted brass pineapple. More tackiness and incoherence awaited me within Casa Mutis. In what I presumed was the living room, all the blinds were drawn. No pictures on the walls (my ma had wallpapered our place with framed photos of my dumb face). It smelled like roach spray. The single couch was loaded with dirty clothes and magazines, a Styrofoam container of stringy gray meat and rice. I had time to notice whiskey bottles, ashtrays. Mutant made no apologies but hustled me into a bedroom.

Something was alive in the corner. That was the first thing I noticed when I entered the Mute’s room: a stripe of motion in the brown shadows near the shuttered window. It was a rabbit. A pet, you could tell from the water bottle wired to its cage bars. A pet was not just some animal, it was yours, it was loved and fed by you. Everybody knows this, of course, but for some reason the plastic water bottle looked shockingly bright to me; the clean, good smell of the straw was an exotic perfume in the Mute’s bedroom.

Mutant, meanwhile, was fishing around in a drawer.

“You think this will fit you, Larry?”

Eric held out a shrunken, wrinkled sweater that I recognized.

“Uh-huh.”

“You better now, Larry?”

“Terrific. Extra super.”

Had I gone home in my blood-soaked shirt, my ma would have freaked. She’d have been so aghast at my brush with Death that she’d try to kill me herself. Ma punished me any time I flaunted my mortality, reminded her that her son was also a bag of red fluid. Eric Mutis seemed to know this instinctively. He handed me a shirt, white socks, and I wondered why he had to be such a retard in school.

I pulled Mutis’s sweater on. I knew I should thank him.

“That’s a rabbit?” I asked like some idiot.

“Yeah.” Now Eric Mutis smiled with a brilliance that I had never seen before. “That’s my rabbit.”

I crossed the room, in Eric Mutis’s boat-striped sweater, to acquaint myself with Eric Mutis’s caged pet, feeling my afternoon curve weirdly. The rabbit’s tall ears were pushed flat against its skull, which I thought made it look like a European swimmer.

“I think you are spoiling that rabbit, dude.”

Mutis had stocked this place for the apocalypse, turned his room into a bunny stronghold. Big fifty-pound bags of straw and food pellets slouched in every corner, under the Mute’s bed. Pine straw. Timothy, orchard, meadow. ORGANIC ALFALFA — PLUS CALCIUM! said one bag. Jesus, where does Mutant get the money for organic alfalfa? I wondered. There was almost nothing else in the room: a purple cassette deck, some schoolbooks, a twin bed with the Goodwill label still on the headboard.

“My Christ, do they put steroids in that alfalfa?” I peeled off the price sticker, feeling like a city bumpkin. “Twenty bucks! You got ripped off!” I grinned. “You need to buy your grass from Jamaica , dude.”

But he had turned away from me, bending to whisper something to the quivering rabbit. Seeing this made me uncomfortable; his whisper was already a million times too loud. I felt a flare-up of my school-day rage — for a second I hated Eric Mutant again, and I hated the oblivious rabbit even more, so smugly itself inside the cage, sucking like an infant at its water nozzle. Did Mutant know what kind of ammo he was giving me? Did he honestly believe that I was going to keep his love nest a secret from my friends? I strummed my fingernails along the tiny cage bars. They felt like petrified guitar strings.

“What’s his name?”

“Her name is Saturday,” said Eric happily, and suddenly I wanted to cry. Who knows why? Because Eric Mutis had a girl’s pet; because Eric Mutis had named his dingy rabbit after the best day of the week? I’d never seen Eric Mutis say one word to a human girl, I’d never thought of Eric Mutis as a lover before. But he was kicking game to this rabbit like an old pro. Just whispering love music to her, calling down to her, “Saturday, Saturday.” Behind the cage bars his whole face was changing. Softening, like. This continued until he wasn’t ugly anymore. What had we found so repulsive about him in the first place? His finger was making the gentlest circle between the rabbit’s crushed ears, a spot that looked really delicate to me, like a baby’s head. The rabbit’s irises were fiery and dust dry, I noted, swiping hard at my own snotty face with Eric’s sleeve.