Vampires in the Lemon Grove

by Karen Russell

  We have to alert the authorities, he decided. He zipped the future into his backpack and walked down to the police station.

  “What do you want me to do with this sack of crap, son?” Sheila, the Athertown policewoman, wanted to know. “The pawnshop moved; it’s down by the esplanade now. Why don’t you take this stuff over there, see if Mr. Tarak will give you some quarters for it. Play you some video games.”

  “But it belongs to somebody.” Nal hadn’t found the courage to tell her his theory that the foreign flock of gulls were cosmic scavengers. He tried to imagine saying this out loud: “The seagulls are stealing scraps of our lives to feather this weird nest I found in a tree hollow on Strong Beach. These birds are messing with our futures.” Sheila, who had a red lioness’s mane of curls bursting from an alligator clip and bigger triceps than Nal’s, did not look as if she suffered fools gladly. She was the kind of woman who would put DDT in the nest and call it a day.

  “So leave it here then.” She shrugged. “When somebody comes to report the theft of their number two pencil, I’ll let you know.”

  On Saturday he found a wedding invitation for Bruce and Nancy, in an envelope the color of lilac icing. There was no return address. On Tuesday he checked the nest and found the wrinkled passport of one Dodi Watts. Did that mean he was dead, or never was? Nal shuddered. Or just that he’d missed his flight?

  His guesswork was beginning to feel stupid. Pens and keys and train tickets, so what? Now what? Sheila was right. How was he supposed to make anything out of this sack of crap?

  The giant seagull, which Nal now thought of as his not-conscience, appeared to be the colony’s dominant gull. Today it was screaming in wide circles over the sea. Nal sat on a canted rock and watched something tiny fall from its beak into the waves, glinting all the way down. Beneath him the waves had turned a foam-blistered violet, and the sky growled. The whole bowl of the bay seethed around the rocks like a cauldron. Nal shuddered; when he squinted he could see something fine as salt shaking into the sea. Rain, he thought, watching the seagull ride the thermals, maybe it’s only raining …

  Later, when the sky above Strong Beach was riddled with stars, Nal got up on shaky legs and entered the woods. The gulls had vanished, and it was hard for him to find the tree with the hollow. He stumbled around with his flashlight for what felt like hours looking for it, growing increasingly frantic until he felt near-hysterical, his heart drumming. Even after he’d found what he thought was the right tree Nal couldn’t be sure, because the nest inside was damp and empty. He sank his hands into the old leaves and at first felt nothing, but digging down he began to find an older stratum of plunder: a leather bookmark, a baby’s rusting spoon. The gulls must have stolen this stuff a while ago, Nal thought, from a future that was now peeling away in ribbons, a future that had already been perverted or lost, a past. At the very bottom of the nest he saw a wink of light. Nal pinched at the wink, pulled it out.

  “Oh God,” he groaned. When he saw what he was holding he almost dropped it. “Is this some kind of joke?”

  It was nothing, really. It was just a dull knuckle of metal. A screw.

  Nal closed his fist around the screw, opened it. Here was something indigestible. It was a stop screw—he knew this from the diagram that had run with the local paper’s story “Allegations of Nursing Home Negligence,” next to a photograph of the two-inch chasm in the Paradise window made lurid by the journalist’s ink. They’d also run a bad photo of his mother. Her face had been washed out by the fluorescent light. She was old, Nal realized. It looked like the “scandal” had aged her. Nal had stared at his mother’s gray face and seen a certain future, something you didn’t need a bird to augur.

  He wouldn’t even show her, he decided. What was the point of coming back here? The screw couldn’t shut that window now.

  NAL WAS SHOOTING hoops on the public court half a mile from Mr. McGowen’s house when Samson found him. A fine dust from the nearby construction site kept blowing over in clouds whenever the wind picked up. Nal had to kick a crust of gravel off the asphalt so that he could dribble the ball.

  “Hey, buddy, I’ve been looking everywhere for you. Mom says you two had a fight?”

  Nal shoots, whispered the homunculus. He turned away from Samson and planted his feet on the asphalt. Shooter’s roll—the ball teetered on the edge and at the last moment fell into the basket. “It was nothing; it was about college again. What do you need?”

  “Just a tiny loan so I can buy Vanessa a ring. Mr. Tarak’s going to let me do it in installments.”

  “Mr. Tarak said that?” Nal had always thought of Mr. Tarak as a CASH ONLY!!! sort of merchant. He had a spleeny hatred of everyone under thirty-five and liked telling Nal his new haircut made him look like the Antichrist.

  Samson laughed. “Yeah, well, he knows I’m good for it.” Sam was used to the fact that people went out of their way for him. It made strangers happy to see Samson happy and so they’d give him things, let him run up a tab with them, just to buoy that feeling.

  “What kind of ring? A wedding ring?”

  “Nah, it’s just … I dunno. She’ll like it. Tiny flowers on the inside part, what do you call that …”

  “The band.” Nal’s eyes were on the red square on the backboard; he squatted into his thin calves. “Are you in love?”

  Samson snorted. “We’re having fun, Nal. We’re having a good time.” He shrugged. “It’s her birthday, help me out.”

  “Sorry,” Nal said, shooting again. “I got nothing.”

  “You’ve got nothing, huh?” Samson leaned in and made a playful grab for the ball, and Nal slugged him in the stomach.

  “Jesus! What’s wrong with you?”

  Nal stared at his fist in amazement. He’d had no idea that swing was in the works. Wind pushed the ball downcourt and he flexed his empty hands. When his brother took a step toward him he swung wide and slammed his fist into the left shoulder—pain sprang into his knuckles and Nal had time to cock his fist back again. He thought, I am going to really mess you up here, right before Samson shoved him down onto the gravel. He stared down at Nal with an open mouth, his bare chest contracting. No signs of injury there, Nal saw with something close to disappointment. The basket craned above them. Blood and pebbled pits colored Nal’s palms and raked up the sides of his legs. He could feel, strangest of all, a grin spreading on his face.

  “Did I hurt you?” Nal asked. He was still sitting on the blacktop. He noticed that Samson was wearing his socks.

  “What’s your problem?” Samson said. He wasn’t looking at Nal. One hand shielded his eyes, the sun pleating his forehead, and he looked like a sailor scouting for land beyond the blue gravel. “You don’t want to help me out, just say so. Fucking learn to behave like a normal person.”

  “I can’t help you,” Nal called after him.

  Later that afternoon, when Strong Beach was turning a hundred sorbet colors in the sun, Nal walked down the esplanade to Mr. Tarak’s pawnshop. He saw the ring right away—it was in the front display, nested in a cheap navy box between old radios and men’s watches, a quarter-full bottle of Chanel.

  “Repent,” said Mr. Tarak without looking up from his newspaper. “Get a man’s haircut.”

  “I’d like to buy this ring here,” Nal tapped on the glass.

  “On hold.”

  “I can make the payment right now, sir. In full.”

  Mr. Tarak shoved up off his stool and took it out. It didn’t look like a wedding band; it was a simple wrought-iron thing with a floral design etched on the inside. Nal found he didn’t care about the first woman who had pawned or lost it, or Samson who wanted to buy it. Nal was the owner now. He paid and pocketed the ring.

  Before he went to catch the 3:03 bus to Vanessa’s house, Nal returned to the pinewoods. If he was really going through with this, he didn’t want to take any chances that these birds would sabotage his plan. He took his basketball and fitted it in the hollow. The gulls were back, circumnav
igating the pine at different velocities, screeching irritably. He watched with some satisfaction as one scraped its wing against the ball. He patted the ring in his pocket. He knew this was just a temporary fix. There was no protecting against the voracity of the gulls. If fate was just a tapestry with a shifting design—some fraying skein that the gulls were tearing right this second—then Nal didn’t see why he couldn’t also find a loose thread, and pull.

  VANESSA’S HOUSE WAS part of a new community on the outskirts of Athertown. The bus drove past the long neck of a crane rising out of an exposed gravel pit, the slate glistening with recent rain. A summer shower had rolled in from the east and tripped some of the streetlights prematurely. The gulls had not made it this far inland yet; the only birds here were sparrows and a few doll-like cockatoos along the fences.

  Vanessa seemed surprised and happy to see him. “Come in,” she said, her thin face filling the doorway. She looked scrubbed and plain, not the way she did with Samson. “Nobody’s home but me. Is Sam with you?”

  “No,” said Nal. For years he’d been planning to say to her, I think we’re meant to be, but now that he was here he didn’t say anything; his heart was going, and he almost had to stop himself from shoving his way inside.

  “I brought you this,” he said, pushing the ring at her. “I’ve been saving up for it.”

  “Nal!” she said, turning the ring over in her hands. “But this is really beautiful …”

  It was easy. What had he worried about? He just stepped in and kissed her, touched her neck. Suddenly he was feeling every temperature at once, the coolness of her skin and the wet warmth of her mouth and even the tepid slide of sweat over his knuckles. She kissed him back, and Nal slid his hand beneath the neckline of her blouse and touched the bandage there. The Grigalunases’ house was dark and still inside, the walls lined with framed pictures of dark-haired girls who looked like funhouse images of Vanessa, her sisters or her former selves. An orange cat darted under the stairwell.

  “Nal? Do you want to sit down?” She addressed this to her own face in the foyer mirror, a glass crescent above the door, and when she turned back to Nal her eyes had brightened, charged with some anticipation that almost didn’t seem to include him. Nal kissed her again and started steering her toward the living room. A rope was pulling him forward, a buried cable, and he was able to relax into it now only because he had spent his short lifetime doing up all the knots. Perhaps this is how the future works, Nal thought—nothing fated or inevitable but just these knots like fists that you could tighten or undo.

  Nal and Vanessa sat down on the green sofa, a little stiffly. Nal had never so much as grazed a girl’s knee, but somehow he was kissing her neck, he was sliding a hand up her leg, beneath the elastic band of her underwear.

  Vanessa struggled to undo Nal’s belt and the tab of his jeans, and now she looked up at him; his zipper was stuck. He was trapped inside his pants. Thanks to his recent weight loss, he was able to wriggle out of them, tugging furiously at the denim. At last he got them off with a grunt of satisfaction and, breathless and red-faced, flung them to the floor. The zipper liner left a nasty scratch down his skin. Nal began to unroll his socks, hunching over and angling his hipbones. It was strange to see the splay of his dark toes on the Grigalunases’ carpet, Vanessa half-naked beyond it.

  She could have whinnied with laughter at him; instead, with a kindness that you can’t teach people, she had walked over to the windows while Nal hopped and writhed. She had taken off her shirt and unwound the bandage and was shimmying out of her bra. The glass had gone dark with thunderheads. The smell of rain had crept into the house. She drew the curtains and slid out of the rest of her clothes. The living room was now a blue cave—Nal could see the soft curve of the sofa’s back in the dark. Was he supposed to turn the light on? Which way was more romantic? “Sorry,” he said as they both walked back to the sofa, their eyes flicking all over each other. Vanessa slid a hand over Nal’s torso.

  “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.

  Proving Up

  “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 I
nspector’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.