Vampires in the Lemon Grove

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 with 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.”

Friendship Park was Anthem’s last green space, sixty acres of woods bordered by gas and fire stations and a condemned pizza buffet. THE PIZZA PARTY IS CANCELED read a sign above a bulldozer. The central acres of Friendship Park were filled with pines and spruce and squirrels that chittered some charming bullshit at you, up on their hind legs begging for a handout. They lived in the trash cans and had the wide-eyed, innocent look and threadbare fur of child junkies. Had they wised up, our squirrels might have mugged us and used our wallets to buy train tickets to the national park an hour north of Anthem’s depressed downtown. Only Juan Carlos had seen those real woods. (“There was a river with a purple fish shitting in it” was all we got out of him.)

Behind our oak was a playground over which we also claimed dominion. Recently, the Anthem City Parks & Recreation had received a big grant, and now the playground looked like a madhouse. Padded swings, padded slides, padded gyms, padded seesaws and go-wheelies: all the once-fun equipment had gotten upholstered by the city in this red loony-bin foam. To absorb the risk of a lawsuit, said Juan Carlos; one night, at Juan Carlos’s suggestion, we all took turns pissing hooch onto the harm-preventing pillows. Our park had a poop-strewn dog run and an orange baseball diamond; a creepy pond that, like certain towns in Florida, had at one time been a very popular vacation destination for waterfowl but was now abandoned; and a Conestoga-looking covered picnic area. Gus claimed to have had sex there last Valentine’s Day, on the cement tables—“pussy sex,” he said, authoritatively, “not just the mouth kind.” Our feeling was, if Gus really did trick a girl into coming to our park in late February, they most likely had talked about noncontroversial subjects, like the coldness of snow and the excellence of Gus’s weed, all the while wearing sex-thwarting parkas.

The oak was covered with markings from our delinquent forebears: v ♥ K; DEATH 2 ASSHOLE JIMMY DINGO; JESUS SAVES; I WUZ HERE!!! The scarecrow’s head, I noticed, was lolling beneath our own inscription:

MONDO + GUS + LARRY + J.C. = CAMP DARK

A dorky name, Camp Dark, chosen when we were ten, but we wouldn’t change it now. Membership capped at four: Juan Carlos Diaz, Gus Ainsworth, Mondo Chu, and me, Larry Rubio. Pronounced “Rubby-oh” by me, like a rubber ducky toy, my own surname. My dad left when I turned two, and I don’t speak any Spanish unless you count the words that everybody knows, like “hablo” and “no.” My ma came from a vast hick family in Pensacola, pontoon loads of uncle-brothers and red-haired aunts and firecrotch cousins from some nth degree of cousindom, hordes of blood kin whom she renounced, I guess, to marry and then divorce my dad. We never saw any of them. We were long alone, me and my ma.

Juan Carlos had tried to tutor me once: “Rooo-bio. Fucker, you have to coo the ‘u’!”

My ma couldn’t pronounce my last name either, making for some awkward times in Vice Principal Derry’s office. She’d reverted to her maiden name, which sounded like an elf municipality: Dourif. “Why can’t I be a Dourif, like you?” I asked her once when I was very small, and she poured her drink onto the carpet, shocking me. This was my own kindergarten move to express violent unhappiness. She left the room, and my shock deepened when she didn’t come back to clean up the mess. I watched the stain set on the carpet, the sun cutting through the curtain blades. Later, I wrote LARRY RUBIO on all my folders. I answered to “Rubio,” just like the stranger my father must be doing somewhere. What my ma seemed to want me to do — to hold on to the name without the man — felt very silly to me, like the cartoon where Wile E. Coyote holds on to the handle (just the handle) of an exploded suitcase.

The scarecrow boy was my same height, five foot five. He was a funny hybrid: he had a doll’s wax head, with glass eyes and sculpted features, but a scarecrow’s body — sackcloth under the jeans and the sweater. Pillowy, machine-sewn limbs stuffed with straw. I took a step forward and punched the torso, which was solid as a hay bale; I half expected a scream to roll out of his mouth. Now I understood Mondo’s earlier wail — when the doll didn’t make a sound, I wanted to scream for him.

“Who stuck those on its face?” Mondo asked. “Those eyes?”

“Whoever put him here in the first place, jackass.”

“Well, what weirdo does that? Puts eyes and clothes on a giant doll of a kid and ropes him to a tree?”

“A German, probably,” said Gus knowingly. “Or a Japanese. One of those sicko sex freaks.”

Mondo rolled his eyes. “Maybe you tied it up, Ainsworth.”

“Maybe he’s a theater prop? Like, from our school?”

“He’s wearing some nasty clothes.”

“Hey! He’s got a belt like yours, Rubby!”

“Fuck you.”

“Wait — you’re going to steal the scarecrow’s belt? That ain’t bad luck?”

“Oh my God! He’s got on underwear!” Mondo snapped the elastic, giggling.

“He has a hole,” Juan Carlos said quietly. He’d slid his hand between the doll’s sagging shoulders and the tree. “Down here, in his back. Look. He’s spilling straw.”

Juan Carlos began jerking stuffing out of the scarecrow and then, in the same panicky motion, cramming it back inside the hole; all this he did with a sly, aghast look, as if he were a surgeon who had fatally bungled an operation and was now trying to disguise that fact from his staff. This straw, I recognized with a chill, was fresh and green.

“You got your ‘oh shit!’ face on, J.C.!” Gus laughed. I managed a laugh, too, but I was scared, scared. The crisp straw was scary to me. A terrible sweetness lifted out of the doll, that stench you are supposed to associate with innocent things — zoos and pet stores, pony rides. He was stuffed to the springs of his eyeballs.

Put it all back, Juan, and maybe we’ll be okay

“Uh. You dudes? Do scarecrows have fingers?” Mondo giggled again and held out the doll’s white hand, very formally, as if he were suddenly in a cummerbund accompanying the scarecrow to the world’s scariest prom. The hand dangled heavily from the doll’s stapled sleeve. It looked like a plaster cast, with five slender fingers. The boy’s face was molded out of this same white material. His features weren’t generic, like a mall mannequin’s head, but crooked, odd. Very skillfully misshapen. Based on somebody’s real face, I thought, like the famous dummies in the wax museum. Somebody you were supposed to recognize.

The longer I stared at him, the less real I myself felt. Was I the only one who remembered his name?

“Weird. His face is cold.” Juan Carlos slid a finger down the wax nose.

“What the fuck! He’s wearing Hoops!” Gus knelt to show us the pair of black sneaker toes poking out from the scarecrow’s cuffs. At school, we made a point of stealing Hoops from any kid stupid enough to wear them — Hoops were imitation Nikes, glittered with an insulting ersatz gold, and just the sight of a pair used to enrage me. The H logo was a flamboyant way to announce to your class: Hey, I’m poor!

“He’s not wearing his glasses,” I mumbled. Now I was afraid to touch him, as if the humid wand of my finger might bring him to life.

“Can it blink?” Mondo asked, grabbing at its eyes. “My sister has this doll that blinks … uh-oh. Oops.”

Mondo turned to us, grinning. There were shallow indents in the wax where the doll’s eyes had been.

“Oh shit!” Gus shook his head. “Put them back in.”

“I can’t. The little threads broke.” He held them out to show us, the eyes: two grape-size balls of glass. “Any of you bitches know how to sew?”

Intense pinks were filtering through the autumn mesh of the oak. Sunset meant the park was officially closed.

“Seriously?” Mondo asked, sounding panicky. “Anybody got glue or something?”

A firefly was lighting up the airless caves of the doll’s nostrils, undetected by the doll. You’re even blinder now, I thought, and a heavy feeling draped over me.

Mondo seemed to be catching on: “Don’t we know this kid?”

He stood on his toes and peered into the scarecrow’s face with a shrewdness that you did not ordinarily expect from Mondo Chu — who was encased in baby fat that he couldn’t age out of, with big, slabby cheeks that squeezed his eyes into a narcoleptic squint. There was some evidence that Mondo did not have the happiest home life. Mondo was half Chinese, half something. We’d all forgotten, assuming we’d ever known.

Don’t say it.

“Oh!” Mondo fell back on his heels. “It’s Eric.”

“Oh.” I took a backward step.

Juan Carlos paused with one hand inside the doll’s back, still wearing a doctor’s distant, guileful expression.

“Who the fuck is Eric?” Gus snarled.

“Don’t you assholes remember him?” Mondo was grinning at us like a Jeopardy! champ. He waved the doll’s wax hand at us. “Eric Mutis.”

Now we all remembered him: Eric Mutis. Eric Mutant, Eric Mucus, Eric the Mute. Paler than a cauliflower, a friendless kid who had once or twice had seizures in our class. “Eric Mutis is an epileptic,” our teacher had explained a little uncertainly, after Mutant got carried from the room by Coach Leyshon. Eric Mutis had joined our eighth-grade class in October the previous year, a transfer kid. The teacher never introduced him. Kids rarely moved to Anthem, New Jersey; generally the teachers made a New Boy or a New Girl parade their strangeness for us. Not Eric Mutis. Eric Mutis, who seemed genuinely otherworldly, even weirder than Tuku the Guatemalan New Boy, never had to stand and explain himself to us. He arrived in exile, sank like a stone to the bottom of our homeroom. One day, several weeks before the official end of our school term, he vanished, and I honestly had not spoken his name since. Nobody had.

In the school halls, Eric Mutis had been as familiar as air; at the same time we never thought about him. Not unless he was right in front of our noses. Then you couldn’t ignore him — there was something provocative about Eric Mutis’s ugliness, something about his wormy lips and lobes, his blond eyelashes and his worse-than-dumb expression, that filled your eyes and closed your throat. He could metamorphose Julie Lucio, the top of the cheer pyramid, a dog lover and the sweetest girl in our grade, into a true bitch. “What smells?” she’d whisper, little unicorn-pendant Julie, thrilling us with her acid tone, and the Mute would blink his large eyes at her behind his glasses and say, “I don’t smell it, Julie,” in that voice like thin blue milk. Congenitally, he really did seem like a mutant, sightless, incapable of shame. Mutant floated among us, hideous, yet blank as a balloon — his calm was unrelenting. He was ugly, most definitely, but we might have forgiven him for that. It was his serenity that made the kid monstrous to us. His baffling lack of contrition — all that oblivion rolling in his blue eyes. Personally, I felt allergic to the kid. Peace like his must be a bully allergen. A teacher’s allergen, too — the poor get poorer, I guess, because many of our teachers were openly hostile to Eric Mutis; by December, Coach Leyshon was sneering, “Pick it up, Mutant!” on the courts.

At school, Camp Dark beat down kids as a foursome. We did this in an animal silence. We’d drag a hysterical kid behind the redbrick Science Building — usually a middle schooler, a sixth- or seventh-grader — and then we would hammer and piston our fists into his clawing, shrilling body until the kid went slack as rags. I heard those screams like they were coming out of my own throat and found I couldn’t relax until the kid did. I sensed there was some deep assembly-line logic to what we did: once we got a kid screaming, we were obliged to shut him up again. I thought of the process as what they call “a necessary evil.” We were like a team of factory guys, manufacturing a calm that was not available to us naturally anywhere in Anthem. We desperately needed this quiet that only our victims could produce for us, the silence that came after an attack; it was as essential to our friendship as breathing air. As blood is to a vampire. We’d kneel there, panting together, and let the good quiet bubble out of the snotty kid and into our lungs.

That year, Eric Mutis was one of our regulars. We stole the Mute’s Hoops sneakers and hung them from the flagpole; we smashed his gray Medicaid glasses three times before Christmas; and then he’d come to school in a new pair of the same invalid’s frames, the same nine-dollar Hoops. How many pairs of Hoops did we force him to buy that year — or, most likely, since Eric Mutis queued up with us for the free lunch program, to steal?

“Why are you so stubborn, Mutant?” I hissed at him once, when his face was inches away from mine, lying prone on the blacktop — closer to my face than any girl’s had ever been. Closer than I’d let my ma’s face get to me, now that I’d turned thirteen. I could smell his bubble gum and what we called the “Anthem cologne”—like my own clothes, Mutant’s rags stank of diesel, fried doughnut grease from the cafeteria.

“Why don’t you learn?” And I Goliath-crushed the Medicaid glasses in my hand, feeling sick.

“Your palms, Larry.” Eric the Mute had shocked me that time, calling me by name. “They’re bleeding.”

“Are you retarded?” I marveled. “You are the one bleeding! This is your blood!” It was both our blood actually, but his eyes made me furious. That blind light, steady as a dial tone.

“WAKE UP!” I backed away graciously, to give Gus space to deliver the encore kick.

“Listen, Mutant: DO … NOT … WEAR THAT UGLY SHIT TO SCHOOL!”

And Monday came, and guess what Mutant wore?

Was he wearing this stuff out of rebellion? A kind of nerd insurrection? I didn’t think so; that might have relieved us a little bit, if the kid had the spine and the mind to rebel. But Eric Mutis wore that stuff brainlessly, shamelessly. We couldn’t teach him how to be ashamed of it. (“Who did this? Who did this?” our upstairs neighbor, Miss Zeke from 3C, used to holler, grinding her cross-eyed dachshund’s nose into a lake of urine on the stairwell, while the dog, a true lost cause, jetted another weak stream onto the floor.) When we attacked him behind the redbrick Science Building, he never seemed to understand what his crime had been, or what was happening, or even — his blue eyes drifting, unplugged — that it was happening to him.

In fact, I think Eric Mutis would have been hard-pressed to identify himself in a police lineup. In the school bathroom he always avoided mirrors. Our bathroom floor had sloping blue tiles, which made the act of pissing into a bowl feel weirdly perilous, as if at any moment you might get plowed under by an Atlantic City wave. Teachers used a separate faculty john. I was famous for having nearly drowned a kid in the sink. Even the Mute knew this about me — that was the one lesson he took. “Well, hallo there, Mutant,” I’d whistle at him. More than once I watched him drop his dick and zip up and sprint past the bank of sinks when I entered the bathroom, his homely face pursuing him blurrily and hopelessly in the mirrors. This used to make me happy, when kids like Eric Mucus were afraid of me. (Really, I don’t know who I could have been then either.)

Now I wondered if the real Mutis would have recognized this doll. Would the Mute have known his own head on the scarecrow?

That night we spent another hour staring at the doll of Eric and debating what to do with him. The moon rose over Friendship Park. Everybody got jittery. Gus finished our beers. Mondo shot the glass eyes like marbles.

“Well,” Gus sighed, dragging down his dark earlobes, his baseball signal to us that he had lost all patience. “We could do an experiment, like. Seems pretty simple. One way to find out what old Eric Mutant here—”

“The scarecrow,” Mondo hissed, as if he regretted ever naming it.

Gus rolled his eyes. “What the scarecrow is doing in the park? What it’s supposedly protecting us from? Would be to cut him down.”

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.

“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.

Hypothesis 3: This is being done by … Something Else.

I spent the march preparing for my friends to lose their shit when they saw the mauled doll of Eric. To scream, take off running. But when they peered into the Cone, they responded in a way I could never have predicted. They started to laugh. Hysterically, like three hyenas, Gus first and then the other two.

“Good one, Rubby!” they called.

I was too shocked to speak.

“Oh, shit, that is fantastic, Rubby-oh. This is a classic.”

“This is your best yet,” Juan Carlos confirmed with gloomy jealousy.

“Dang! Larry. You’re like a goddamn acrobat! How did you get down there?”

Eyes rolled at me from every direction. It occurred to me suddenly that this was how Camp Dark must look to kids like Mutis.

“Wait—” My laugh sank into a growl. “You think I did that?”

Everybody nodded at me with strange solemnity, so that for a disorienting second I wondered if they might be right. How did they think I had managed the amputation? I tried to see myself as they must be imagining me: swinging down the ravine on a rope, a knife in my back jeans pocket, the orange moon washing over the Cone’s rock walls and making the place feel even more like an unlidded casket, the doll waiting for my attack with a patience rivaled only by that of the real Eric Mutis … and then what? Did my friends think I’d swung the arm back to the surface, à la Tarzan? Carried Mutant’s arm home to mount on my bedroom wall?

“I didn’t do it!” I gasped. “This is not a joke, you assholes …”

I got up and vomited orange Gatorade into the bushes. It was all liquid — I hadn’t been eating. Days of emptiness rose in me and I dry-retched again, listening to my friends’ peals echo around the black park. Then I surprised myself by laughing with them, so uncontrollably and with such relief that it felt like a continuation of the retching. (In fact I think this is exactly what I must have been doing — disgorging my claims. Purging myself of any attachment to my innocence, and crawling on my hands and knees back inside our “we.”)

After a while the laughter didn’t sound connected to any of us. We blinked at one another under the downpour, our mouths open.

“And the Oscar for puking goes to … Larry Rubio!” said Juan Carlos, still doubled over.

A bird floated softly over the park. Somewhere just beyond the tree line, buses were carrying cargoloads of sleepy adults home to Anthem from jobs in more affluent cities. Some of these commuters were our parents. I felt a little stab, picturing my ma eating her yellow apple on the train and reading some self-improvement book, on a two-hour return trip from her job at a day nursery for rich infants in Anthem’s far richer sister county. I realized that I had zero clue what my ma did there; I pictured her rolling a big striped ball, at extremely slow speeds, toward babies in little sultan hats and fat, bejeweled diapers.

“My ma’s name is Jessica,” I heard myself say. Suddenly I could not stop talking, it was like chattering teeth. “Jessica Dourif. Gus, you met her once, you remember.” I glared at Gus and dared him to say he’d forgotten her.

“What the hell are you talking about, Rubby?”

Below us, several pigeons had landed on the scarecrow’s shredded body. They attacked him with impersonal savagery. Tore at his threads. A gash down the doll’s back was hemorrhaging dirty-looking straw, and one pigeon dug its entire flashing head into the hole. Now YOU need a scarecrow, I thought.

“I’ve never met my father,” I blurted. “I can’t even say my own fucking last name.”

“Larry,” Juan Carlos said sternly, standing over me. “Nobody cares. Now you pull yourself together.”

What followed over the course of the next eight days progressed with the logic of a frightening nursery rhyme:

On Tuesday morning, the scarecrow’s second hand was gone. I joked that the white fingers were crawling through the park, hailing a cab, starting a new life somewhere, incognito, maybe with a family of gullible tarantulas in New Mexico.

“Shut up, Larry.” J.C. grinned. “We know that hand is in your locker.”

On Wednesday, the scarecrow was missing both Hoops sneakers and both feet. Everybody but me snickered about that one. Once Gus and I had gotten a three-day suspension for yanking off the Mute’s Hoops sneakers and his crusty socks and holding an “America the Great” sparkler to his bare feet — just to mess with him.

“Larry!” Gus said, clapping my back. “That wall is steep as hell! How did you climb up the rocks with two shoes in your hands?”

“I am not doing this,” I said quietly.

“Maybe,” I added in a whisper, “we can fish him up? Hook him out? Please …?”

“Ha! Are you crying, bro?”

Everybody complimented me on my “acting.” Yet they were the real actors, my best friends — pretending to believe the impossible, that I was the guy to blame for the attacks, that the nightmare in progress below us was a prank. Only Mondo would let me see his smile tremble.

On Thursday, the remaining arm was gone. Torn cleanly from the torso, so that you got an unsettling glimpse of the gray straw coiled inside the scarecrow’s chest. I pled my case with my eyes now: Not-it, not-it, not-it!

“What’s next, Rubby? You going to carry a guillotine down there?”

“You bet,” I snarled. “How well you all know me. Next up, I’m going to climb down there and behead Eric Mutis with an ax.”

“Right.” Gus grinned. “We should follow you home. We’re gonna find Mutant’s arm under your pillow. The fake one, and probably the real one, too, you psycho.”

And they did. Follow me home. On the same Saturday afternoon that we discovered that Eric’s legs were missing. “Come over,” I said in a high voice, “check my whole house. Motherfuckers, this has got to end.” The doll we left in the Cone was a torso and a head. Pulpy, crushed. It had started to resemble a disintegrating jack-o’-lantern. I was “It.” I was the only suspect. Under a dreary sky we exited the park, everybody but me laughing about how they’d been fucked with, faked out, punked, and gotten.

“You rotten, Rubby-Oh,” grinned Gus.

“Something’s rotten,” agreed Mondo, catching my eye.

My ma and I lived on Gray’s Ferry, in ear-splitting proximity to the hospital; from my bedroom window I could see the red and white carnival lights of the ambulances. Awake, I was totally inured to the sirens, a whine that we’d been hearing throughout Anthem since birth — that urgent song drilled into us so frequently that our own heartbeats must have synced with it, which made it an easy howl to ignore; but I had dreams where the vehicular screams in the urgent care parking lot became the cries of a gigantic, abandoned baby behind my apartment. All I wanted to do in these dreams was sleep but this baby wouldn’t shut up! Now I think this must be a special kind of poverty, low-rent city sleep, where even in your dreams you are an insomniac and your unconscious is shrill and starless.

When we got to my place, the apartment was dark and there was no obvious sustenance waiting for us — my ma was not one to prepare a meal. Some deep-fridge spelunking produced a pack of spicy jerky and Velveeta slices. This was beau food, a souvenir from her last live-in boyfriend, Manny Somebody. As the son, I got to be on a first-name basis with all these adult men, all her boyfriends, but I never knew them well enough to hate them in a personal way. We folded thirty-two cheese slices into cold taco shells and ate them in front of the TV. Later I’d remember this event as a sort of wake for the scarecrow of Eric Mutis, although I had never in my life been to a funeral.

They searched my apartment, found nothing. No white hands clapping in my closet or anything. No stuffed legs propped next to the brooms in the kitchen.

“He’s clean,” shrugged Gus, talking over me. “He probably buried the evidence.”

“I do think we need to bury him,” I started babbling. “We could go down there, dig the doll a deeper hole.” I swallowed, thinking about his face in the mud. “Please, guys—”

“No way. We are not falling for that,” said Juan Carlos quickly, as if wary of falling into the Cone himself.

Accusing me, I saw, served a real utility for the group — suddenly nobody was interested in researching scarecrows at the library with me, or trying to figure out where the real Eric Mutis had gone, or deciphering who was behind his doppelgänger doll. They had their answer: I was behind it. This satisfied some scarecrow logic for my friends. They slept, they didn’t wonder anymore. That’s where my friends had staked me: behind the doll.

“Let’s go there one night, and just see who comes to shred and tear at him like that. Whatever comes for Mutant, we’ll scare it off.” I swallowed hard, staring at them. “And then we’ll know exactly …”

Mondo snapped the TV on.

It felt like we sat in the dark for hours, the silence growing and leafing into suffocating densities above us, sinking around the sofas like tree roots. Nobody but me seemed to notice when the television station switched to pure static. My ma had an ancient RCA TV, with oven dials for controls and rabbit ears; I always thought it looked more authentically futuristic than my friends’ modern Toshiba sets. Spazzy rainbows moved up and down, imbuing the screen with an insectoid life of its own. Here was the secret mind of the machine, I thought with a sudden ache, what you couldn’t see when the news anchors were staring soulfully at their teleprompters and the sitcom families were making eggs and jokes in their fake houses.

Eric’s face — the face of scarecrow Eric — swam up in my mind. I realized that the random, relentless lightning inside the TV screen was how I pictured the interior of the doll — void, yet also, in a way that I did not understand and found I could not even think about head-on, much less explain to my friends, alive. Rainbows furrowed the glass. With the TV on mute you could hear a hard clock tick.

“Hey! Rubio!” Gus finally asked. “What the fuck we watching?”

“Nothing,” I snapped back; a wise lie, I thought. “Obviously.”

Over the next three days, the doll continued to disappear. Once the major appendages were gone, the increments of Eric that went missing became more difficult to track. Patches of hair vanished. Bites and chews of his shoulders. Morsels. By Monday, two weeks after we’d found it, over half the scarecrow was gone.

“Well, that’s that,” said Juan Carlos in a funny voice. In the Cone, green straw was blowing everywhere now. All that bodiless straw gave me a nervous feeling, like watching a thought that I couldn’t collect. Eric’s head was still attached to the sack of his torso.

“That’s all, folks,” echoed Gus. “Going once, going twice! Nice work, Rubby.”

I leaned against the oak, feeling nauseated. With a sickening lurch, I understood that we were never going to tell anyone about Eric. Nobody who saw the wreck in the Cone would believe our story. Why hadn’t we gotten the police when we first found the scarecrow, or even Vice Principal Derry? Even yesterday that had still been an option, but today it wasn’t; we all felt it; we hadn’t acted, and now the secret was returning to the ground. Eric Mutis was escaping us again in this terrible, original way.

That Friday, the scarecrow’s head was gone. Now I thought I detected a ripple of open fear in the others’ eyes. All the laughter about my “prank” died out.

“Where did you put it?” Mondo whispered.

“When are you going to stop?” said Juan Carlos.

“Larry,” Gus said sincerely, “that is really sick.”

Hypothesis 4.

“I think we made him,” I told Chu on the phone. “Eric’s scarecrow. I don’t know how, exactly. I mean I know we didn’t stitch him up or anything, but I think that we must be the reason …”

“Quit acting nuts. I know you’re faking, Larry. Gus says you probably made him. My dinner’s ready—” Mondo hung up.

ABOUT THAT STATIC — sometimes that was all I saw in the real Mute’s eyes. Just a random light tracking your fists back and forth. Two blue-alive-voids. When we laid him flat in the weeds behind the Science Building, it was that emptiness that made us wild. I hit Mutant so hard that I could feel myself split — it was the strangest feeling, as if I was inside two bodies at once, my own and the Mute’s lying prone beneath me. Cringing under the blows of my own knuckles. I couldn’t stop hitting him, though — I was afraid to. I’d wake up, or he would, and then the pain would really begin. Somehow I swear it really did feel like I had to keep hitting him, to protect the both of us from what was happening. Out of the red corner of one eye I could see my wet fist flying. The slickness on it was our snot and our blood.

Only one time did anybody succeed at stopping us.

“Leave him alone,” called a voice that we immediately recognized. We all turned. Eric Mutant breathed quietly through his mouth in the weeds below us.

“You heard me.” This was Mrs. Kauder, our school librarian. She walked briskly toward us across the never-mowed grass. A woman well past middle age, whose red-lipped face and white hair made her shockingly attractive to us. Here she came like a leopardess, flaunting all her bones.

J.C. surreptitiously wiped Eric’s blood onto his own sleeve. Now we could credibly asseverate, to the librarian or to Coach Leyshon or to Vice Principal Derry, that our assault on Eric Mutis had been a fight. But the school librarian saw right through him. The school librarian fixed her green eyes on each one of us — except for Eric, she had known every one of us since elementary school. I felt a sudden, thrilling shame as her gaze covered me.

“Larry Rubio,” she said, in a neutral voice, as if she were remarking on the weather. “You are better than this.

“Now you go back to your classrooms,” she said, in this funny rehearsed way, as if she were reading our lives to us from one of her books.

“Now you go to Geometry, Gus Ainsworth—” She pronounced our real names so gently, as if she were breaking a spell.

“Now you go to Spanish, Juan Carlos Diaz and Mondo Chu—

“Now you go to Computers, Larry Rubio …” Her voice was as nasal as Eric’s but with an old person’s polished tremble. It was a terribly embarrassing voice — a weak white grasshopper species that we would have tried to kill, had it belonged to a fellow child.

“Remember, boys,” the librarian called after us. “I know you, and you know better. You are good boys,” she insisted. “You have good hearts.

“Now you, Eric Mutis,” I heard her saying softly. “You come with me.”

I remember feeling jealous — I wanted to go with Mrs. Kauder, too. I wanted to sit in the dark library and hear my name roll out of her red mouth again, like it was the Spanish word for something good. I think we needed that librarian to follow us around the hallways for every minute of every school day, reading us her story of our lives, her fine script of who we were and our activities — but of course she couldn’t do this, and we did get lost.

ON SATURDAY, I convinced Mondo to meet me in Friendship Park. We were alone — Juan Carlos was working as a Food Lion bag boy, and Gus was out with some chick.

“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.

“Want to pet her?” Mutant asked, not looking at me.

“Hell no.”

But then I realized that I could do this; I could do anything in the Twilight Zone of the Mute’s closet-size room — nobody was watching me but the Mute and the voiceless thing in the cage. Some hard pressure flew out of my chest then and launched me forward, like air out of a zigzagging balloon. I let Mutant guide my fingers through the cage door. I followed his lead, brushing the green straw off Saturday’s fur. Still I thought this was pretty stupid behavior, until I petted her hide in the same direction that Mutant was going and felt actually electrified — under my palm, a cache of white life hummed.

“Can I tell you a secret?”

“Whatever. Sure.”

At that moment, it was my belief that he safely could.

Mutis smiled shyly at me, opened a drawer. There was so much dust on the bureau that the clean gleam of Saturday’s cage made it look like Incan treasure.

“Here.” The poster he thrust at me read LOST: MY PET BUNNY, MISS MOLLY MOUSE. PLEASE CALL ###-####! The albino rabbit in the photograph was unmistakably Saturday, wearing a sparkly Barbie top hat someone had balanced on her ears, the owner’s joking reference, I guessed, to that old magician’s trick of pulling rabbits out of hats — a joke that was apparently lost on Saturday, whose red eyes bored into the camera with all the warmth and personality of the planet Mars. The owner’s name, according to this poster, was Sara Jo. “I am nine,” the poster declared in plaintive hand-lettering. The date on the poster said “Lost on August 22.” The address listed was 49 Delmar, just around the corner.

“I never returned her.” His voice seemed to tremble in tempo with the rabbit’s shuddering haunches. “I saw these posters everywhere.” He paused. “I pulled them all down.” He stepped aside to show me the bureau drawer, which was filled with multiples of the Miss Molly poster. “I saw the girl who put them up. She has red hair. Two of those, what are they called …” He frowned. “Pigtails!”

“Okay.” I grinned. “That’s bad.”

Suddenly we were laughing, hard; even Saturday, with her rump-shaking tremors, appeared to be laughing along with us.

Eric stopped first. Before I heard the hinge squeak, Eric was on his feet, hustling across the room on ballerina toes to shut the bedroom door. Just before it closed I watched a hunched shape flow past and enter a maple cavity that I assumed was their bathroom. It was the same old guy who had almost mowed me down in the snouty green Cadillac on Delmar Street not thirty minutes ago. Relationship to Eric: unclear.

“Is that your father?”

Eric’s face was bright red.

“Your, ah, your grandfather? Your uncle? Your mom’s boyfriend?”

Eric Mutis, whom we could not embarrass at school, who would return your gaze without shame no matter what names you called him, did not answer me now or meet my eyes.

“That’s fine, whatever,” I said. “You don’t have to tell me shit about your situation. Honey, I can’t even say my own last name.”

I barked with laughter, because what the hell? Where the hell had that come from, my calling him “honey”?

Eric smiled. “Peaches,” he said, “that’s just fine.”

For a second we stared at each other. Then we roared. It was the first and last joke I ever heard him try to make. We clutched our stomachs and stumbled around, knocking into one another.

“Shh!” Eric said between gasps, pointing wildly at the bedroom door. “Shhh, Larry!”

And then we got quiet, me and Eric Mutis. The rabbit stood on her haunches and drank water, making a white comma between us; the whole world got quieter and quieter, until that kissy sound of a mouth getting water was all you could hear. For a minute or two, catching our breath, we got to be humans together.

I never returned Mutant’s sweater, and the following Monday I did not speak to him. I hid the cuts on my palms in two fists. It took me another week to find a poster for Saturday. I figured they’d be long gone — Eric said he’d torn them all down — but I found one on the Food Lion message board, buried under a thousand kitty calendars and yoga and LEARN TO BONGO! flyers: a very poorly reproduced Saturday glaring out at me under the Barbie hat and the words LOST: MY PET BUNNY. I dialed the number. Sure enough, a girl’s voice answered, all pipsqueaky and polite.

“I have news that might be of some interest to you,” I said, in the old-man-with-a-flu voice that I used to excuse my own school absences.

She knew right away.

“Molly Mouse! You found her!” Which, what an identity crisis for a rabbit. What kind of name is that? Worse than Rubby-oh. Kids should be stopped from naming anything, I thought angrily, they are too dumb to guess the true and correct names for things. Parents, too.

“Yes. That is exactly right. Something has come to light, ma’am.”

I swayed a little with the phone in my hand, feeling powerful and evil. “I know where you can find your rabbit.” Then I heard myself reciting, in this false, ancient voice, the address of Eric Mutis.

At school, I breathed easier — I had extricated myself from a tight spot. I had been in real danger, but the moment had passed. Eric Mutis was not ever going to be my friend. Twice I called Sara Jo to ask how Molly Mouse was doing; her dad had gone to the Mutis house and via some exchange of threats or dollars gotten her back.

“Oh,” the girl squealed, “she’s doing beautiful, she loves being home!”

At school, I may have been the only one to note the change in Mutant. Whenever anybody called him Mucus or Mutant, and also when our teacher called him, simply, “Eric M.,” his whole face puckered with strain — as if he were too weak to hoist up his own name off the mat. When we hit him behind the Science Building, his eyes were true blanks, emptied of even one flickering thought — just like a doll’s eyes, in fact. Two telescopes fixed on a lifeless blue planet. Nobody had understood Eric Mutis when he arrived late in October, and then by springtime my friends and I had made him much less scrutable.

“Larry—” he started to say to me once in the bathroom, several weeks after they’d come for Saturday, but I wrung my hands in the sink disgustedly and walked out, following Mutant’s example and avoiding our faces in the mirror. We never looked at each other again, and then one day he was gone.

On Sunday night, Mondo and I crossed the playground in a slow processional.

“Jesus H., are we graduating from something? Mondo, are we getting married? Dude, let’s pick up the pace. Mondo?”

“This is stupid,” he mumbled, staring down the grass alley toward the deeper shadows. “This is crazy. No way did we make the scarecrow.”

“Let’s just get this done.”

I was glad he was afraid — I hadn’t known that you could feel so grateful to a friend, for living in fear with you. Fear was otherwise a very lonely place. We kept walking toward the scarecrow.

An idea had come to me last night, after telling Mondo the story of Saturday. An offering to make, a way to appease whatever forces I had unleashed a year ago, when we’d made the real Eric into a doll.

“Get what done?” Mondo was muttering. “You won’t even tell me why you’re going down there. Who gives a fuck what happens to the scarecrow? Why save a doll?”

But I knew what I had to do now. I wouldn’t let the Attacker, whoever or whatever it was, dismantle the doll of Eric Mutis completely, carry him out of our memories a second time.

“Do you want to go home? Do you want to wait until he’s totally gone?”

Mondo shook his head. His cheeks were as swollen and red as the playground foam.

Somewhere far above the park, a plane roared over Anthem, dismissing our whole city in twenty seconds.

Nobody was around, not even the regular bums, but the traffic on I-12 roared reassuringly just behind the tree line, a constant reminder of the asphalt rivers and the lattice of lights and signs that led to our homes. Friendship Park looked one hundred percent different than it did in daylight. Now the clouds were blue and silver, and where the full moon shone, new colors seemed to float up around us everywhere — the rusty weeds on the duck pond looked tangerine, the pin oak bulged with purple veins.

At the bottom of the ravine, all that was left of Eric’s scarecrow was the torso. Something had drawn its delicate claws down the scarecrow’s back, and now there was no mistaking what the straw inside it actually was, where it had come from — it was rabbit bedding, I thought. Timothy, meadow, orchard. Pine straw. I took a big breath; I was going to need Mondo’s help to get down there. He’d have to belay me with the rope I’d brought, while I crawled down the rock face like a bug.

“It’s moving!” Mondo screamed behind me. “It’s getting away.”

I almost screamed, too, thinking he meant the doll. But he was pointing at my black knapsack, which I’d slouched against the oak: a little tumor bubble was percolating inside the canvas, pushing outward at the fabric. As we watched, the bag fell onto its side and began to slide away.

“Oh, shit!” I grabbed the bag and slung it over my shoulders. “Don’t worry about that. I’ll explain later. You just hold the rope, bro. Please, Mondo?”

So Mondo, still gaping at my knapsack, helped me to tie the eighteen-meter phys-ed rope to the oak and loop one end around my waist. It was almost forty minutes before my feet scraped the floor of the Cone. At one point I stumbled and let go of the rock wall, swinging out, but Mondo called down that it was okay, I was okay (and I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the love I felt in that moment for Mondo Chu) — and then I was crouching, miraculously, on the mineral-blue bottom of the Cone. The view above me I will never forget: the great oak sprawling over the ravine, fireflies dotting the lagoons of air between its humped roots like tiny underworld lights. Much higher up, in the real sky, snakes of clouds wound ball-round and came loose.

The scarecrow’s torso was featureless and beige, like a long sofa cushion. This doll was almost gone, the boy original, Eric Mutis, was nowhere we could discover, and somehow this made me feel as if I had broken a mirror, missed my one chance to really know myself. I tried to resurrect Eric Mutis in my mind’s eye — the first Eric, the kid we’d almost killed — and failed.

“You made it, Rubby!” Mondo called. But I hadn’t, yet. I unzipped my backpack. A little nose peeked out, a starburst of whiskers, followed by a white face, a white body. I dumped it somewhat less ceremoniously than I had intended onto the scarecrow’s chest, where she landed and bounced with her front legs out. It wasn’t the real Saturday — but then this doll wasn’t the real Eric Mutis either. I figured I couldn’t in good conscience steal the real Saturday back from Sara Jo — I was no expert in atonement but that seemed like a shitty way to go about it. Instead I’d bought this nameless dwarf rabbit for nineteen bucks at the mall pet store, where the Dijon-vested clerk had ogled me with true horror (“You do not want to buy a hutch for the animal, sir?”). Many of the products that this pet-store clerk sold seemed pretty antiliberation, cages and syringes, so I did not mention to him that I was going to free the rabbit.

Mondo was screaming something at me from the ledge above, but I did not turn — I didn’t want to let my guard down now. I kept my feet planted but I let my own torso sway, as if in imitation of the huge oak dancing its branches far above me. “Get away!” I hollered at the sky above the substitute rabbit, wheeling my arms to scare off any unseen predators. If I’d lost the real Eric and Saturday, I could protect this memorial I’d made. Large shapes caught at the corner of my eye. Would the thing that had carried off the doll of Eric Mutis come for me now? I wondered. But I wasn’t afraid. I felt ready, strangely, for whatever was coming. The substitute rabbit, I saw with wonderment, was rooting its little head into the pale fibers sprouting out of the scarecrow; it went swimming into the straw, a backward reenactment of its birth from my black book bag — first went its furry ears, its bunching back, the big velour skis of its feet. I spread my arms above the rabbit, so no birds dove for it. I had a knife in my back pocket. The thought occurred to me that I was the scarecrow’s guardian now, and the symmetry of this reversal both pleased and terrified me. Yes: now I would stand watch over what remained of Eric Mutis. It was only fair, after what I’d done to Mutant. I would be the scarecrow’s scarecrow. My shadow draped over the remains of the doll. The torso looked weirdly reanimated now with the tiny rabbit digging sideways into its soft green interior, palpitating like a transplant heart. I stood with my arms stretched wide and trembling, and I felt as if the black sky was my body and I felt as if the white moon, far above me, unwrinkled and shining, was my mind.

“La-arry!” I was aware of Mondo calling to me from the twinkling roots of the oak, lit up all wild by the underworld flies, but I knew I couldn’t turn or climb out yet. Owls might come for Eric’s new rabbit in a rain of talons. City hawks. Something Worse. How long would I have to stand watch down here, I wondered, fighting off the birds, to make up for what I’d done to Eric Mutis? The rabbit bubbled serenely through the straw at my feet. Somewhere I think I must still be standing, just like that.