“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?”