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.