Vampires in the Lemon Grove

by Karen Russell

  “You know, I wanted to save him,” Ed confides to her. And Beverly thinks that she would have liked to save all of them—Arlo Mackey and Oscar Ilana and Derek Zeiger, Jilly Mackey and her mother, the Iraqi children of the jammous farmers getting poisoned by their swims in the polluted Diyala, her own mother and father.

  “Me, too, Ed.”

  “But a man like that is beyond help,” says Ed, patting Beverly’s shoulders as he has never done before in their decades together, and it’s a construction of such grammatical perfection that she knows he must have memorized it from the TV anchors.

  Early Sunday morning, the phone startles Beverly awake.

  This time, thank God, it’s not Ed Morales. It’s not Janet calling with the weather report from Sulko, Nevada, or the joyful percolations of her twin nieces, wearing their matching jammies under Gemini stars in the American desert. Nobody else calls her at home. No stranger has ever rung her at this hour.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, Bev. Sorry to call so early.”

  “Derek.”

  Beverly sinks under her coverlet. The relief she feels is indescribable.

  “Were you up? You sound wide-awake.”

  “You scared me. The last time I saw you—”

  “I know. I’m really, really sorry. I didn’t mean to explode on you like that. I honestly don’t know why that happened. It’s weird because I’ve been feeling so much better lately. And for that I wanted to say, you know: thank you. To be honest, I was never expecting much from you. My real doctor at the VA made me enroll in the program. Massage therapy, no offense, I was thinking: hookers. Happy endings, la-la beads.”

  “I see.”

  “But whatever you do back there works. I’ve been sleeping like a baby ever since. I sleep through the night.” The wall clock says 3:00 a.m.

  “I sleep good,” he maintains, as if wanting to forestall an argument. “Tonight is an exception to the rule, I guess.” He laughs quietly, and Beverly feels like a spider clinging to one bouncing line—their connection seems that frail.

  “Well, we’re both awake now.” She swallows. “Why are you calling me here, Derek?”

  “I’m not cured, though.”

  “Well, Derek, of course you’re not,” she says, fighting to get control of a lunging pressure in her chest. “Massage doesn’t ‘cure’ people, it’s a process …”

  “Beverly …” His voice breaks into a whimper. “Something’s wrong—”

  There are a few beats of silence. In the mysterious, unreal distances of her inner ear, Pfc. Arlo Mackey continues screaming and screaming inside the burning truck.

  “I’m in pain, a lot of pain. I need to see you again. As soon as I can.”

  “I’ll see you on Monday, Derek. Ten o’clock.”

  “No, Beverly. Now.” And then there is shuffling on his end of the receiver, and an awful sound like half a laugh. “Please?”

  Ed Morales has never fired anybody in his thirty-year tenure as the owner of Dedos Mágicos, and he always mentions this a little wistfully, as if it’s a macho experience he’s dreamed of having, the way some men want to summit Everest or bag a lion on safari. She doesn’t doubt that he will fire her if he finds them out.

  Still, where else are they supposed to go? Beverly is a professional. She is not going to confuse everything even further at this late hour by beginning to see patients in her home.

  Beverly has keys to the building. She drives beneath a full, icy moon, following the chowdery line of the Esau River. All the highways are empty. When she pulls into her staff slot, the sergeant’s blue jalopy is already there.

  “Thank you,” he mumbles as they climb out of their cars. His eyes are red hollows. “Don’t be scared, promise? I don’t know what went wrong the other day.”

  Beverly, who has some idea, says nothing.

  “Are you afraid of me, Beverly?”

  “Afraid! Why would I be? Are you angry at me?”

  Kind nos are exchanged.

  There is a fat moon behind him, one white ear eavesdropping brazenly in the midwestern sky.

  Beverly fumbles with the car lock, gets them both inside the building. Something is moving under his shirt, on his back, she can see it, a dark shape. In the onlyness of moonlight, his snowy boots look almost silver. Nothing stirs in the long hallway; when they pass the crescent of the reception desk, she half expects Ed to leap up in a fountain of expletives. Their shoes mewl on the tiles, sucked along by slush. They speak at the same time—

  “Lie down?”

  “I’ll go lie down—”

  “Thank you for meeting me, Beverly,” he says again, sounding so much like a boy about to cry. “Something’s wrong, something’s wrong, something’s wrong, something’s wrong.” He groans. “Ah, Bev! Something feels twisted around …”

  He pulls off his shirt, lies down. Beverly sucks in her breath—his back is in terrible shape. The skin over his spine looks raw and abraded; deep blue and yellowish bruises darken the sky of Fedaliyah. And a long, bright welt, much thicker and nastier than the thin scar she erased, stretches diagonally from his hip bone to his shoulder.

  “Jesus, Derek! Did someone do this to you? Did you do this to yourself?”

  “No.”

  “Did you have some kind of accident?”

  “I don’t know,” he says flatly. “I don’t remember. It looked this way when I woke up two days ago. It’s gotten worse.”

  Beverly touches his shoulder and they both wince. Maybe the welt did erupt from inside the tattoo. Maybe Derek vandalized the tattoo himself, and he’s too ashamed or too frightened to tell her. She’s surprised to discover how little the explanation matters to her. In the end, every possibility she can imagine arises from the same place—a spark drifting out of his past and catching, turning into this somatic conflagration. No matter how it happened, she is terrified for him.

  She dips a Q-tip into a bottle of peroxide, stirs.

  This time she abandons any pretension of getting the true story out of him. She doesn’t try to grab hold of April 14 and reset it like a broken bone. She doesn’t mention IEDs or Mackey. Her concerns about whether or not it would be better for the sergeant to forget the wire, wipe his slate clean, are gone; she thinks those debates must belong to a room without this boy hurting in it. All she wants to do right now is reduce his pain. If she can help him with that, she thinks, it will be miracle enough.

  “Don’t worry,” she says. “We’re going to fix you up. Hold still for me, Derek.”

  She begins at the base of his spine, rolling up, avoiding the most irritated areas. He whimpers only once. Through his neck, she can feel the strain of his gritted teeth.

  “That fucking kills, Beverly—what are you doing?”

  “Shh—you focus on relaxing. This is helping.”

  She defaults to what she knows. Eventually, as in the first sessions, she can feel something shifting under her hands. Her voice needles in and out of Zeiger’s ears as she tells him where to move and bend and breathe. It’s dark in the room, and she’s barely looking at his back, letting his fascia and muscles guide her fingers. Gradually, and then with the speed of windblown sands, the story of the tattoo begins to change.

  A little after five a.m., Beverly stops the massage to button her sweater up to her neck. It’s the same baggy cerulean skin that she always puts on, her old-lady costume. Tonight her sleeves bunch at her elbows, so that she feels like a strange molting bird—eating keeps slipping her mind. The moon is out; their two cars, viewed through the clinic window, have acquired a sort of doomed mastodon glamour, shaggy with snow. A green light blinks ceaselessly above her, some after-hours alarm she’s never here to see. She checks to make sure the windows are closed—the room feels ice-cold. Beverly moves to get Zeiger’s shirt, towels. She’s washed and dressed the damaged skin; the tattoo is almost completely hidden under gauze. Now she doesn’t have to look at the red star. Beverly cotton-daubs more peroxide onto his neck, which feels wonderfully re
laxed. Zeiger begins to talk. With his eyes still shut, he tours her through the landscape on his back; it’s a version of April 14 that is completely different from any that’s come before. She listens to this and she doesn’t breathe a word. She has no desire to lift the gauze, check the tattoo against this new account.

  When he’s finished, Beverly asks him in a shaky voice, “Nobody died that day, Derek?”

  “Nobody.”

  He sits up. Perched on the table’s edge, with the blanket floating in a loose bunting around his shoulders, the sergeant flexes and relaxes his long bare toes.

  “Nobody died, Bev. That’s why I got the tattoo—it was a miracle day. Amazing fucking grace, you know? Fifty pounds of explosives detonate, and we all make it back to the FOB alive.”

  Beverly smooths a wrinkle in a square of gauze, tracing the path of what was, the last time she looked, the Diyala River.

  “Nobody died. I lost a chunk of my hearing, but I just listen harder now.”

  His face is beaming. “I love telling that story. You’re looking at the proof of a miracle. My tattoo, it should hang in a church.”

  Then he slides toward her and cups one big hand behind her head. He sinks his fingers through the gray roots of her hair and holds her face there. It’s a strange gesture, more gruff than romantic, his little unconscious parody of how she feels toward him, maybe—it makes her think, of all things, of a mother bear cuffing its cub. He digs his fingers into her left cheek.

  “Thank you, Beverly.” Zeiger talks in a telephone whisper, as if their connection is about to be cut off at any moment by some maniacal, monitoring operator. “You can’t even imagine what you’ve done for me here—”

  For what is certainly too long an interval Beverly lets her head rest against his neck.

  “Oh, you’re very welcome,” she says into a muzzle of skin.

  What happens next is nothing anyone could properly call a kiss; she turns in to him, and his lips go slack against her mouth; when this happens, whatever tension remains in him seems to flood into her. She fights down a choking sensation and turns her head, reaches for his hand.

  “Beverly—”

  “Don’t worry. Look at that snow coming down. Time’s up.”

  “Beverly, listen—”

  “You’ll be fine, Derek. I don’t think those bruises will come back. But if they do, you come back, too. I’m not going anywhere, okay? I’ll be waiting right here.”

  Several months after her last encounter with Derek, the phone rings. It’s Janet, and just like that they are on speaking terms again. Janet invites her out to Sulko, and one morning Beverly finds herself standing in front of her nieces’ class as a special guest for Careers Day. Little girls in violet vests sit patiently on the carpet. Their drawings shimmer on a corkboard wall near the window, bright shingles fluttering under pins. Beverly demonstrates a massage on a child volunteer, and the other students gather in a circle and dutifully grasp one another’s shoulders. She’s amazed to see how fearlessly they touch each other, pure pleasure flowing from tiny hands to shoulders without any of the circuit breakers that are bound to come later. The class runs into the lunch hour, but during the Q&A even her nieces are too shy to ask a question. At last, at the teacher’s violent, whispered encouragement, one loopy-looking kid with pigtails the bright orange of cooked carrots raises her hand.

  “What do you like the most about your job?”

  “Oh, that’s an easy one!” Beverly summons a smile for the girl. “Helping.”

  Most days, she doubts she helped the sergeant at all. She thinks it’s far more likely that she aggravated his condition, or postponed a breakdown. But a picture comes to her of Zeiger walking down the street into vivid light, the tattoo moving with his muscles. She wants to believe that this is possible—that he lifted the gauze to find the welts healed and the tattoo settling into a new shape. Not even in her fantasy can she guess what it might look like. In her wildest imaginings, Zeiger finds both things—a story he can carry, and a true one.

  The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis

  The scarecrow that we found lashed to the pin oak in Friendship Park, New Jersey, was thousands of miles away from the yellow atolls of corn where you might expect to find a farmer’s doll. Scarecrow country was the actual country, everybody knew that. Scarecrows belonged to country men and women. They lived in hick states, the I states, exotic to us: Iowa, Indiana. Scarecrows made fools of the birds and smiled with lifeless humor. Their smiles were fakes, threads. (This idea appealed to me—I was a quiet kid myself, branded “mean,” and I liked the idea of a mouth that nobody expected anything from, a mouth that was just red sewing.) Scarecrows got planted into the same soil as their crops; they worked around the clock, like charms, to keep the hungry birds at bay. That was my impression from TV movies, at least: horror-struck, the birds turned shrieking circles around the far-below peak of the scarecrow’s hat, afraid to land. They haloed him. Underneath a hundred starving crows, the TV scarecrow seemed pretty sanguine, grinning his tickled, brainwashed grin at the camera. He was a sort of pitiable character, I thought, a jester in the corn, imitating the farmer—the real king. All day and all night, the scarecrow had to stand watch over his quilty hills of wheat and flax, of rye and barley and three other brown grains that I could never remember (my picture of scarecrow country was ripped directly from the 7-Grain Quilty Hills Muffins bag—at school I cheated shamelessly, and I guess my imagination must have been a plagiarist, too, copying its homework).

  A scarecrow did not belong in our city of Anthem, New Jersey. Anthem had no crops, no silos, no crows—it had turquoise Port-o-Pottys and neon alleys, construction pits, dogs in purses, homeless women with powerful smells and opinions, garbage dumps haunted by white pigeons; it had our school, the facade of which was covered by a glorious psychedelic phallus mosaic, a bunch of spray-painted dicks. Cops leaned against the cement walls, not straw guards.

  We were city boys. We lived in these truly shitbox apartments. Our familiarity with the figure of the scarecrow came exclusively from watered-down L. Frank Baum cartoons, and from the corny yet frightening “Autumn’s Bounty!” display in the Food Lion grocery store, where every year a scarecrow got propped a little awkwardly between a pilgrim, a cornucopia, and a scrotally wrinkled turkey. The Food Lion scarecrow looked like a broom in a Bermuda shirt, ogling the ladies’ butts as they bent to buy their diet yogurts. What we found in Friendship Park in no way resembled that one. At first I was sure the thing tied to the oak was dead, or alive. Real, I mean.

  “Hey, you guys.” I swallowed. “Look—” And I pointed to the pin oak, where a boy our age was belted to the trunk. Somebody in blue jeans and a striped sweater that had faded to the same earthworm color as his hair, a white boy, doubled over the rope. Gus got to the kid first.

  “You retards.” His voice was high with relief. “It’s just a doll. It’s got straw inside it.”

  “It’s a scarecrow!” shrieked Mondo. And he kicked at a glistening bulb of what did appear to be straw beneath the doll’s slumping face. A little hill. The scarecrow regarded its innards expressionlessly, its glass eyes twinkling. Mondo shrieked again.

  I followed the scarecrow’s gaze down to its lost straw. Long strands were blowing loose, like cut hair on a barbershop floor. Chlorophyll greens and yellows. Some of the straw had a jellied black look. How long had this stuff been outside him, I wondered—how long had it been inside him? I scanned his sweater for a rip, a cold, eel-like feeling thrashing in my own belly. That same morning, while eating my Popple breakfast tart, I’d seen a news shot of a foreign soldier watching blood spill from his head with an expression of extraordinary tranquillity. Calm came pouring over him, at pace with the blood. In the next room, I could hear my ma getting ready for work, singing an old pop song, rattling hangers. On TV, one of the soldier’s eyes fluttered and shut. Then, without warning, the story changed, and the footage sprang away to the trees of a new country under an ammonia-blue sky. I’d sat there wit
h jam leaking into my mouth, feeling suddenly unable to swallow—where was the cameraman or the camerawoman? Who was letting the soldier’s face dissolve into that calm?

  “Let’s cut it down!” screamed Mondo. I nodded.

  “Nah, we better not,” Juan Carlos said. He looked around the woods sharply, as if there might be a sniper hidden in the oaks. “What if this”—he pushed at the doll—“belongs to somebody? What if somebody is watching us, right now? Laughing at us …”

  It was late September, a cool red season. I wondered who had chosen to bind the scarecrow to this particular tree—our tree, the one that belonged to our gang, Camp Dark. It was the tallest tree in Friendship Park, a sixty-foot oak overlooking a deep ravine, which we called “the Cone.” Erosion had split the limestone bedrock, creating a fifteen-foot drop to an opening that looked like the sandy bottom of a well; it couldn’t have been more than seven feet across at its widest point. The rock walls were smooth. It didn’t seem like you could get to the bottom safely without a parachute. Mondo was always trying to persuade us to throw a mattress down there, and jump. The Cone had become an open casket of our trash. Way down at the bottom you could see wet blue dirt with radishy pink streaks along it, as exotic looking to us as a seafloor. Condoms and needles (not ours) and the silver shreds of Dodo Potato Chips bags and beer bottles (mostly ours) seemed to grow among the weeds. The great oak leaned its shadow into the Cone like a girl playing at suicide, quailing its many fiery leaves.

  We’d been meeting under this oak for four years, ever since we were ten years old. Back then we played actual games. We hid and we sought. We did benign stuff in trees. We amassed a plastic weapons cache in the hollow of the oak that included the Sounds of Warfare Blazer, a toy gun that required sixteen triple-A batteries to make a noise like a tubercular guinea pig. Those were innocent times. Then we’d gotten shunted into Anthem’s upper grades, and now as freshmen we came here to drink beers and antagonize one another. Biweekly we shoplifted liquor and snacks, in a surprisingly orderly way, rotating this duty. “We are Communists!” shrieked Mondo once, pumping a fistful of red-hot peanuts into the sky, and Juan Carlos, who did homework, snorted, “You are quite confused, my bro.”