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.