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.