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.”