Vampires in the Lemon Grove (12 page)

VANESSA’S HOUSE WAS
part of a new community on the outskirts of Athertown. The bus drove past the long neck of a crane rising out of an exposed gravel pit, the slate glistening with recent rain. A summer shower had rolled in from the east and tripped some of the streetlights prematurely. The gulls had not made it
this far inland yet; the only birds here were sparrows and a few doll-like cockatoos along the fences.

Vanessa seemed surprised and happy to see him. “Come in,” she said, her thin face filling the doorway. She looked scrubbed and plain, not the way she did with Samson. “Nobody’s home but me. Is Sam with you?”

“No,” said Nal. For years he’d been planning to say to her,
I think we’re meant to be
, but now that he was here he didn’t say anything; his heart was going, and he almost had to stop himself from shoving his way inside.

“I brought you this,” he said, pushing the ring at her. “I’ve been saving up for it.”

“Nal!” she said, turning the ring over in her hands. “But this is really beautiful …”

It was easy. What had he worried about? He just stepped in and kissed her, touched her neck. Suddenly he was feeling every temperature at once, the coolness of her skin and the wet warmth of her mouth and even the tepid slide of sweat over his knuckles. She kissed him back, and Nal slid his hand beneath the neckline of her blouse and touched the bandage there. The Grigalunases’ house was dark and still inside, the walls lined with framed pictures of dark-haired girls who looked like funhouse images of Vanessa, her sisters or her former selves. An orange cat darted under the stairwell.

“Nal? Do you want to sit down?” She addressed this to her own face in the foyer mirror, a glass crescent above the door, and when she turned back to Nal her eyes had brightened, charged with some anticipation that almost didn’t seem to include him. Nal kissed her again and started steering her toward the living room. A rope was pulling him forward, a buried cable, and he was able to relax into it now only because he had spent his short lifetime doing up all the knots. Perhaps this is how the future works,
Nal thought—nothing fated or inevitable but just these knots like fists that you could tighten or undo.

Nal and Vanessa sat down on the green sofa, a little stiffly. Nal had never so much as grazed a girl’s knee, but somehow he was kissing her neck, he was sliding a hand up her leg, beneath the elastic band of her underwear.

Vanessa struggled to undo Nal’s belt and the tab of his jeans, and now she looked up at him; his zipper was stuck. He was trapped inside his pants. Thanks to his recent weight loss, he was able to wriggle out of them, tugging furiously at the denim. At last he got them off with a grunt of satisfaction and, breathless and red-faced, flung them to the floor. The zipper liner left a nasty scratch down his skin. Nal began to unroll his socks, hunching over and angling his hipbones. It was strange to see the splay of his dark toes on the Grigalunases’ carpet, Vanessa half-naked beyond it.

She could have whinnied with laughter at him; instead, with a kindness that you can’t teach people, she had walked over to the windows while Nal hopped and writhed. She had taken off her shirt and unwound the bandage and was shimmying out of her bra. The glass had gone dark with thunderheads. The smell of rain had crept into the house. She drew the curtains and slid out of the rest of her clothes. The living room was now a blue cave—Nal could see the soft curve of the sofa’s back in the dark. Was he supposed to turn the light on? Which way was more romantic? “Sorry,” he said as they both walked back to the sofa, their eyes flicking all over each other. Vanessa slid a hand over Nal’s torso.

“You and Samson have the same boxer shorts,” she said.

“Our mother buys them for us.”

Maybe this isn’t going to happen, Nal thought.

But then he saw a glint of silver and felt recommitted. Vanessa
had slipped the pawnshop ring on—it was huge on her. She caught him looking and held her hand up, letting the ring slide over her knuckle, and they both let out jumpy laughs. Nal could feel sweat collecting on the back of his neck. They tried kissing again for a while. Vanessa’s dark hair slid through his hands like palmfuls of oil as he fumbled his way inside her, started to move. He wanted to ask: Is this right? Is this okay? It wasn’t at all what he’d imagined. Nal, moving on top of Vanessa, was still Nal, still cloaked with consciousness and inescapably himself. He didn’t feel invincible—he felt clumsy, guilty. Vanessa was trying to help him find his rhythm, her hands just above his bony hips.

“Hey,” Vanessa said at one point, turning her face to the side. “The cat’s watching.”

The orange tabby was licking its paws on the first stair, beneath the clock. The cat had somehow gotten hold of the stop screw—it must have fallen out of his pocket—and was batting it around.

The feeling of arrival Nal was after kept receding like a charcoal line on bright water. This was not the time or the place but he kept picturing the gulls, screaming and wheeling in a vortex just beyond him, and he groaned and sped up his motions. “Don’t stop,” Vanessa said, and there was such a catch to her voice that Nal said, “I won’t, I won’t,” with real seriousness, like a parent reassuring a child. Although very soon, Nal could feel, he would have to.

“Go tack up, Miles!” says Mr. Johannes Zegner of the Blue Sink Zegners, pioneer of the tallgrass prairie and future owner of 160 acres of Nebraska. In most weathers, I am permitted to call him Pa.

“See if your mother’s got the Window ready. The Inspector is coming tonight. He’s already on the train, can you imagine!”

A thrill moves in me; if I had a tail I would shake it. So I will have to leave within the hour, and ride quickly—because if the one-eyed Inspector really is getting off at the spur line in Beatrice, he’ll hire a stagecoach and be halfway to the Hox River Settlement by one o’clock; he could be at our farm by nightfall! I think Jesus Himself would cause less of a stir stepping off that train; He’d find a tough bunch to impress in this droughty place, with no water anywhere for Him to walk on.

“Miles, listen fast,” Pa continues. “Your brother is coming—”

Sure enough, Peter is galumphing toward us through the puddled glow of the winter wheat. It came in too sparse this year to make a crop, wisping out of the sod like the thin blond hairs on
Pa’s hand. My father has the “settler’s scar,” a pink star scored into the brown leather of his palm by the handle of the moldboard plow. Peter’s got one, too, a raw brand behind his knuckles that never heals—and so will I when I prove up as a man. (As yet I am the Zegner runt, with eleven years to my name and only five of those West; I cannot grow a beard any quicker than Mr. Johannes can conjure wheat, but I can
ride
.)

Pa kneels low and clasps his dirt-colored hands onto my shoulders. “Your brother is coming, but it’s you I want to send to our neighbors in need. Boy, it’s
you
. I trust you on a horse. I know you’ll tend to that Window as if it were your own life.”

“I will, sir.”

“I just got word from Bud Sticksel—you got two stops. The Inspector’s making two visits. The Florissants and then the Sticksels. Let’s pray he keeps to that schedule, anyhow, because if he decides to go to the Sticksels first …”

I shiver and nod, imagining the Sticksels’ stricken faces in their hole.

“The Sticksels don’t have one shard of glass. You cannot fail them, Miles.”

“I know, Pa.”

“And once they prove up, you know what to do?”

“Yes, Pa. This time I will—”

“You take the Window back. Bundle it in burlap. Get Bud’s wife to help. Then you push that Inspector’s toes into stirrups—do unto others, Miles—and you bring that man to our door.”

“But what if the Inspector sees me reclaiming the Window from Mr. Sticksel? He’ll know how we fooled him. Won’t he cancel their title?”

Pa looks at me hard, and I can hear the gears in his head clicking. “You want to be a man, don’t you, Miles?”

“Yes, sir. Very much.”

“So use your wits, son. Some sleight of hand. I can’t think of everything.”

Increasingly time matters. I can feel it speeding up in my chest, in rhythm with my pounding heart. A flock of cliff swallows lifts off the grassy bank of our house, and my eyes fly with them into the gray light.

“Hey,” says Peter. He comes up behind me and shovels my head under his arm—he smells sour, all vinegary sweat and bones. “What’s this fuss?”

So Pa has to explain again that when the sun next rises, we’ll have our autographed title. Peter’s grin is as wide and handsome and full of teeth as our father’s, and I smile into the mirror they make.

“Tomorrow?”

“Or even tonight.”

Behind them, Ma seeps out of the dugout in her blue dress. She sees us gathered and runs down the powdery furrow like a tear—I think she would turn to water if she could.

No rain on our land since the seventh of September. That midnight we got half an inch and Pa drilled in the wheat at dawn. Most of it cooked in the ground; what came up has got only two or three leaves to a plant. Last week the stalks started turning ivory, like pieces of light. “Water,” Pa growls at the blue mouth of heaven—the one mouth distant enough to ignore his fists.

He mutters that this weather will dry us all to tinder, lightning fodder, and he’s spent every day since that last glorious hour of rainfall plowing firebreaks until he’s too tired to stand. Ma’s begun to talk to the shriveling sheaves in a crazy way, as if they were her thousand thirsty children. My brother pretends not to hear her.

“Inspection day,” Pa booms at Ma’s approach. “He’s on the train now.”

“The Inspector? Says who? Who thinks they’re proving up?”

“Bud says. And we are. Daniel Florissant, Bud, the Zegners.”

Pa leans in as if to kiss her, whispering; she unlatches her ear from his mouth.

“
No!
Are you crazy, Jo? The Inspector is a rumor, he’s smoke! I can make you a promise: no such person is ever coming out here. How long do we have to wait before you believe that? A decade? What you want to risk—” She looks over at me and her voice gets quieter.

A silence falls over the Zegner family homestead, which Pa splits with his thundering hymn:

“You faithless woman! How can you talk like that after we have lived on this land for five years? Built our
home
here, held out through drought and hail, through locusts, Vera—”

Peter is nodding along. I have to tiptoe around the half-moon of my family to get to the sod barn. As I tack up Nore I can hear Ma worrying my father: “Oh, I am not deaf, I hear you lying to our child—
‘It’s verified.’
”

“Bud Sticksel is no liar,” I reassure Nore’s quivering rump. “Don’t be scared. Ma’s crazy. We’ll find the Inspector.”

After the defections and deaths of several settlers, the Sticksels have become our closest neighbors. Their farm is eighteen miles away. Bud used to work as a hired hand in Salmon, Ohio, says Pa. Came here the same year as our family, 1872. He’s an eyeblink from being eligible to prove up and get his section title: 1. Bud’s land by the lake is in grain. 2. He’s put a claim shanty on the property, ten feet by twenty. 3. He has resided on his land for five years, held on through four shining seasons of drought. (“Where is God’s rain?” Mrs. Sticksel murmurs to Ma.) 4. He has raised sixty acres of emerald lucerne, two beautiful daughters, and thirty evil turkeys that have heads like scratched mosquito bites. The Sticksels have met every Homestead Act requirement save one,
its final strangeness, what Pa calls “the wink in the bureaucrats’ wall”: a glass window.

Farther south, on the new rail lines, barbed wire and crystal lamps and precut shingles fire in on the freight trains, but in the Hox River Settlement a leaded pane is as yet an unimaginable good. Almost rarer than the rain. Yet all the Hox settlers have left holes in the walls of their sod houses, squares and ovals where they intend to put their future windows. Some use waxed paper to cover these openings; the Sticksels curtained up with an oiled buffalo skin. The one time I slept at their dugout that hide flapped all night like it was trying to talk to me:
Blab blab blab
.

“I know you don’t belong here,” I replied—I was sympathetic—“but there isn’t any glass for that empty place. There’s one Window in this blue-gray ocean of tallgrass, and it’s ours.”

“Now, Miles,” both my parents preach at me continually, in the same tone with which they recite the wishful Bible rules, “you know the Window must benefit every settler out here. We are only its stewards.” Pa long ago christened it the Hox River Window and swore it to any claimant in need. (I sometimes think my parents use me to stimulate goodness and to remind themselves of this oath, the same way I untangle my greedy thoughts by talking to the animals, Louma and Nore—because it’s easy to catch oneself wanting to hoard all the prairie’s violet light on the Hox panes.) He says our own walls cannot wear the Window until we prove up—it’s too precious, too fragile. So we keep it hidden in the sod cave like a diamond.

Our house is a dugout in a grassy hill—I’ve sent three letters to my cross-eyed Cousin Bailey in Blue Sink, Pennsylvania, and in each one I fail to explain our new house to his satisfaction. Cousin Bailey uses his fingers to sum numbers; once he asked me if the winged angels in heaven eat birdseed or “man-food” like chocolate pie. The idea of a house made of sod defeats him. He
writes back with questions about bedrooms and doors, closets and attics. “No, Bailey, we live in one room,” I reply impatiently. “A ball of pure earth. Not enough timber for building walls on the prairie so we dug right into the sod. It’s a cave, where we now live.”