Vampires in the Lemon Grove (11 page)

“Isn’t that a little weird?” Nal said.

Vanessa shrugged. “Less friction with my parents. The tape doesn’t work as good as it did last year but it’s sort of become this habit?”

Nal couldn’t figure out where he was supposed to look; he was having a hard time staying focused in the midst of all this overt discussion of Vanessa’s breasts.

“So you’re stuck there now?”

“I don’t see how I could leave my folks. I’m their last.”

Vanessa wanted out but said she felt as though the exits had vanished with her sisters. They’d each schemed or blundered
their way out of Athertown—early pregnancy, nursing school, marriage, the Service Corps. Now Vanessa rumbled around the house like its last working part. Nal got an image of Mr. and Mrs. Grigalunas sitting in their kitchen with their backs to the whirlwind void opened by their daughters’ absence: reading the paper; sipping orange juice; collecting these old clothes like the shed skins of their former daughters and dressing Vanessa in them. He thought about her gloopy makeup and the urgency with which she’d kissed his brother, her thin legs knifing over the dune. Maybe she doesn’t actually like my brother at all, Nal thought, encouraged by a new theory. Maybe she treats sex like oxidizing air. Aging rapidly wherever she can manage it, like a cut apple left on a counter.

“That’s why it’s easy to be with your brother,” she said. “It’s a relief to … to get out of there, to be with someone older. But it’s not like we’re serious, you know?” She brightened as she said this last part, as if it were a wonderful idea that had just occurred to her.

What do I say now? Nal wondered. Should I ask her to explain what she means? Should I tell her Samson doesn’t love her, but I do? The homunculus typed up frantic speeches, discarded them, tore at his green sweater in anguish, gnashed the typewriter ribbon between his buckteeth. Nal could hear himself babbling—they talked about the insufferable stupidity of this year’s ninth-graders, his harem of geezers at Penny’s, Dr. J’s jump hook, Cousin Steve’s bewildering mullet. More than once, Nal watched her tug her sister’s tentlike shirt up. They spent the rest of the afternoon exploring Whitsunday Island together, cracking jokes as they filed past the flowery enclosure full of crocodiles; the dry pool of Komodo dragons with their wispy beards; and finally, just before the park’s exit, the koala who looked like a raddled veteran of war, gumming leaves at twilight. They talked about how maybe it wasn’t such a terrible thing that they’d both missed out on Lake Marion,
and on the way back up the waffled ramp to the hydrofoil Vanessa let her hand slide inside Nal’s sweating palm.

That night Nal had a nightmare about the seagulls. Millions of them flew out of a bloodred sunset and began to resettle the town, snapping telephone wires and sinking small boats beneath their collective weight. Gulls covered the fence posts and rooftops of Athertown, drew a white caul over the marina, muffled every window with the static of their bodies—and each gull had a burgled object twinkling in its split beak. Warping people’s futures into some new and terrible shapes, just by stealing these smallest linchpins from the present.

THE NEXT DAY
, Nal went to the Athertown library to research omen birds. He was the only patron in the reading room. Beneath the painting of the full orange moon and the plastic bamboo, he read a book called
Avian Auspices
by Dr. Carlos Ramirez. Things looked pretty grim:

Screech owls, Old World vultures, even the innocuous-sounding cuckoo, all harbingers of doom. Terrific, Nal thought, and if an enormous seagull followed you around and appeared to be making a blithe feast of your life, pecking at squares of paper and erasing whole futures, what did that mean? Coleridge and Audubon were no help here, either. Seagulls were scavengers, kleptoparasites. And, according to the books he found, they didn’t portend a thing.

Nal began going to the nest every day. He woke at dawn and walked barefoot on the chilly sand down to the hollow. By
the second week he’d collected an impressive array of objects: a tuxedo button, a scrap of paper with a phone number (out of service—Nal tried it), a penny with a mint date one year in the future. On Friday, he found what appeared to be the disgorged, shimmering innards of a hundred cassette tapes, disguised at first against the slick weeds. The seagulls had many victims, then—they weren’t just stealing from Nal. He wondered if the gulls had different caches, in caves or distant forests. Whenever he swept his hand over the damp nest he found new stuff:

Nal lined these objects up and pushed them around on the sand. He felt like the paleontologist of some poor sod’s stolen fate—somewhere a man or a woman’s life continued without these tiny vertebrae, curving like a spine knocked out of alignment. Suddenly the ordinary shine of the plastic and aluminum bits began to really frighten him. He drew the tiny fangs of the tractor key through the sand and tried to imagine the objects’ owners: A shy child without his retainer, with a smile that would now go unchaperoned. A redhead with pale eyelashes succumbing to fever. A farmer on his belly in a field of corn, hunting for this key. What new directions would their lives take? In Nal’s imagination, dark stalks swayed and knit together, obliterating
the stranger from view. Somewhere the huge tractor wheels began to groan and squeal backward, trampling his extant rows of corn. A new crop was pushing into the spaces that the tractor had abandoned—husks hissing out of the earth, bristling and green, like the future sprouting new fur.

We have to alert the authorities, he decided. He zipped the future into his backpack and walked down to the police station.

“What do you want me to do with this sack of crap, son?” Sheila, the Athertown policewoman, wanted to know. “The pawnshop moved; it’s down by the esplanade now. Why don’t you take this stuff over there, see if Mr. Tarak will give you some quarters for it. Play you some video games.”

“But it belongs to somebody.” Nal hadn’t found the courage to tell her his theory that the foreign flock of gulls were
cosmic scavengers. He tried to imagine saying this out loud: “The seagulls are stealing scraps of our lives to feather this weird nest I found in a tree hollow on Strong Beach. These birds are messing with our futures.” Sheila, who had a red lioness’s mane of curls bursting from an alligator clip and bigger triceps than Nal’s, did not look as if she suffered fools gladly. She was the kind of woman who would put DDT in the nest and call it a day.

“So leave it here then.” She shrugged. “When somebody comes to report the theft of their number two pencil, I’ll let you know.”

On Saturday he found a wedding invitation for Bruce and Nancy, in an envelope the color of lilac icing. There was no return address. On Tuesday he checked the nest and found the wrinkled passport of one Dodi Watts. Did that mean he was dead, or never was? Nal shuddered. Or just that he’d missed his flight?

His guesswork was beginning to feel stupid. Pens and keys and train tickets, so what? Now what? Sheila was right. How was he supposed to make anything out of this sack of crap?

The giant seagull, which Nal now thought of as his not-conscience,
appeared to be the colony’s dominant gull. Today it was screaming in wide circles over the sea. Nal sat on a canted rock and watched something tiny fall from its beak into the waves, glinting all the way down. Beneath him the waves had turned a foam-blistered violet, and the sky growled. The whole bowl of the bay seethed around the rocks like a cauldron. Nal shuddered; when he squinted he could see something fine as salt shaking into the sea. Rain, he thought, watching the seagull ride the thermals, maybe it’s only raining …

Later, when the sky above Strong Beach was riddled with stars, Nal got up on shaky legs and entered the woods. The gulls had vanished, and it was hard for him to find the tree with the hollow. He stumbled around with his flashlight for what felt like hours looking for it, growing increasingly frantic until he felt near-hysterical, his heart drumming. Even after he’d found what he thought was the right tree Nal couldn’t be sure, because the nest inside was damp and empty. He sank his hands into the old leaves and at first felt nothing, but digging down he began to find an older stratum of plunder: a leather bookmark, a baby’s rusting spoon. The gulls must have stolen this stuff a while ago, Nal thought, from a future that was now peeling away in ribbons, a future that had already been perverted or lost, a past. At the very bottom of the nest he saw a wink of light. Nal pinched at the wink, pulled it out.

“Oh God,” he groaned. When he saw what he was holding he almost dropped it. “Is this some kind of joke?”

It was nothing, really. It was just a dull knuckle of metal. A screw.

Nal closed his fist around the screw, opened it. Here was something indigestible. It was a stop screw—he knew this from the diagram that had run with the local paper’s story “Allegations of Nursing Home Negligence,” next to a photograph of the
two-inch chasm in the Paradise window made lurid by the journalist’s ink. They’d also run a bad photo of his mother. Her face had been washed out by the fluorescent light. She was old, Nal realized. It looked like the “scandal” had aged her. Nal had stared at his mother’s gray face and seen a certain future, something you didn’t need a bird to augur.

He wouldn’t even show her, he decided. What was the point of coming back here? The screw couldn’t shut that window now.

NAL WAS SHOOTING
hoops on the public court half a mile from Mr. McGowen’s house when Samson found him. A fine dust from the nearby construction site kept blowing over in clouds whenever the wind picked up. Nal had to kick a crust of gravel off the asphalt so that he could dribble the ball.

“Hey, buddy, I’ve been looking everywhere for you. Mom says you two had a fight?”

Nal shoots, whispered the homunculus. He turned away from Samson and planted his feet on the asphalt. Shooter’s roll—the ball teetered on the edge and at the last moment fell into the basket. “It was nothing; it was about college again. What do you need?”

“Just a tiny loan so I can buy Vanessa a ring. Mr. Tarak’s going to let me do it in installments.”

“Mr. Tarak said that?” Nal had always thought of Mr. Tarak as a
CASH ONLY!!!
sort of merchant. He had a spleeny hatred of everyone under thirty-five and liked telling Nal his new haircut made him look like the Antichrist.

Samson laughed. “Yeah, well, he knows I’m good for it.” Sam was used to the fact that people went out of their way for him. It made strangers happy to see Samson happy and so they’d give him things, let him run up a tab with them, just to buoy that feeling.

“What kind of ring? A wedding ring?”

“Nah, it’s just … I dunno. She’ll like it. Tiny flowers on the inside part, what do you call that …”

“The band.” Nal’s eyes were on the red square on the backboard; he squatted into his thin calves. “Are you in love?”

Samson snorted. “We’re having fun, Nal. We’re having a good time.” He shrugged. “It’s her birthday, help me out.”

“Sorry,” Nal said, shooting again. “I got nothing.”

“You’ve got nothing, huh?” Samson leaned in and made a playful grab for the ball, and Nal slugged him in the stomach.

“Jesus! What’s wrong with you?”

Nal stared at his fist in amazement. He’d had no idea that swing was in the works. Wind pushed the ball downcourt and he flexed his empty hands. When his brother took a step toward him he swung wide and slammed his fist into the left shoulder—pain sprang into his knuckles and Nal had time to cock his fist back again. He thought,
I am going to really mess you up here
, right before Samson shoved him down onto the gravel. He stared down at Nal with an open mouth, his bare chest contracting. No signs of injury there, Nal saw with something close to disappointment. The basket craned above them. Blood and pebbled pits colored Nal’s palms and raked up the sides of his legs. He could feel, strangest of all, a grin spreading on his face.

“Did I hurt you?” Nal asked. He was still sitting on the blacktop. He noticed that Samson was wearing his socks.

“What’s your problem?” Samson said. He wasn’t looking at Nal. One hand shielded his eyes, the sun pleating his forehead, and he looked like a sailor scouting for land beyond the blue gravel. “You don’t want to help me out, just say so. Fucking learn to behave like a normal person.”

“I can’t help you,” Nal called after him.

Later that afternoon, when Strong Beach was turning a hundred sorbet colors in the sun, Nal walked down the esplanade to
Mr. Tarak’s pawnshop. He saw the ring right away—it was in the front display, nested in a cheap navy box between old radios and men’s watches, a quarter-f bottle of Chanel.

“Repent,” said Mr. Tarak without looking up from his newspaper. “Get a man’s haircut.”

“I’d like to buy this ring here,” Nal tapped on the glass.

“On hold.”

“I can make the payment right now, sir. In full.”

Mr. Tarak shoved up off his stool and took it out. It didn’t look like a wedding band; it was a simple wrought-iron thing with a floral design etched on the inside. Nal found he didn’t care about the first woman who had pawned or lost it, or Samson who wanted to buy it. Nal was the owner now. He paid and pocketed the ring.

Before he went to catch the 3:03 bus to Vanessa’s house, Nal returned to the pinewoods. If he was really going through with this, he didn’t want to take any chances that these birds would sabotage his plan. He took his basketball and fitted it in the hollow. The gulls were back, circumnavigating the pine at different velocities, screeching irritably. He watched with some satisfaction as one scraped its wing against the ball. He patted the ring in his pocket. He knew this was just a temporary fix. There was no protecting against the voracity of the gulls. If fate was just a tapestry with a shifting design—some fraying skein that the gulls were tearing right this second—then Nal didn’t see why he couldn’t also find a loose thread, and pull.