by Andrew Smith
When I thought about bad things happening between me and Robby and Shann, I could feel my balls shriveling up inside my body.
That’s the truth.
History lesson for the day: My balls are barometers to emotional storms.
So I helped Johnny McKeon measure the wall at the spot the Hoover Boys dug through so they could get inside the back room. I held the zero end of the measure and Johnny pulled out the tape and called off numbers to me, which I recorded in pencil on my pad of paper. Like cave painters in France.
“What kind of crazy stuff?” I asked.
I suppose I’d been having an imaginary conversation in my head.
Johnny said, “What?”
“I mean, what kind of crazy stuff came in the boxes from M.I. after they closed down?”
“Oh.” Johnny made another mark on the wall. “I can’t believe they actually knocked out a stud just to get to some cheap gin. It was mostly things from experiments they were doing, I guess, from my brother’s storage unit. It was a bunch of junk of his I inherited, I guess, but never looked at until the place got all packed up. To be honest, I didn’t know what to do with the stuff. There was so much of it, I threw some away. I put stuff in the office. I even put some of it on the roof. I don’t know what I was thinking, but it was my brother’s, you know? Go figure. So. Eh.”
“Oh.” I said, “Um. I. Um . . . like experiments. Do you think I could see them sometime?”
I felt like asking Johnny McKeon how the little boy with two heads was getting on.
Johnny shrugged. “Eh. Maybe sometime, Austin. It’s kind of . . . well . . . morbid stuff, if you ask me.”
“Sounds like it could be cool,” I said.
“Eh,” Johnny said.
We measured. Johnny recited numbers and items, like half-inch plywood, studs, drywall mud, and tape, and shit like that. It sounded incredibly manly. My balls felt bigger just writing that shit down.
I printed in uppercase. It was manly.
“Hey, Johnny.” I said, “Tonight, I’d like to take Shann out to dinner and a movie. Maybe to Waterloo. Would that be okay?”
“What are you? Asking permission to take your girlfriend on a date?” Johnny said.
“No. I’m asking for a ride. Do you think you could give us a ride?”
“Do I get to go to the show, too? I could sit in the middle,” Johnny said.
He was teasing.
“Um.”
“Don’t you think it’s about time you get your driver’s license?”
I turned sixteen in February. It was a week until the beginning of May.
“My mom and dad don’t want me to drive yet.”
“That should do it,” Johnny said, and rolled up the tape measure. “Sure. I’ll take you kids. Only not too late. I don’t want to have to come pick you up in Waterloo after midnight.”
“I’ll be at your house around six.” I said, “Thanks, Johnny.”
SAY PLEASE
WATERLOO, IOWA, SPRAWLED along the Cedar River, twenty miles away from Ealing.
Johnny McKeon took my notes and the shopping list he’d dictated and put me in charge of From Attic to Seller.
It made me feel like something—something with big balls—to know that Johnny trusted me, even if I did intend to go back and see if he still kept his office key on the trim molding above the door.
I was also planning on smoking at least one cigarette, too.
I rarely smoked alone, but I needed one.
In truth, until that day, I never smoked alone.
I’d just have to toughen up and go buy a pack from the tool in the liquor store.
Ollie Jungfrau left when it was time to open Tipsy Cricket, which didn’t have a fixed schedule. Opening the liquor store happened once there were two or three people waiting outside the door. Usually, they’d tap on the glass with quarters or car keys to let Ollie and Johnny know there were thirsty Iowans with money who needed to spend it on alcohol.
The secondhand store, as always, smelled like insecticide, condoms, and despair, with a little sweet hint of unanswered prayers, formaldehyde, cardboard donut boxes, and chicory, all mixed in. I waited a few minutes, just to be sure Johnny wouldn’t double back after something he’d forgotten, then I slipped through the back room to the pale green linoleum and fluorescent lights of Tipsy Cricket Liquors.
I made plenty of noise tracking my way through the back room.
I did not want to startle Ollie Jungfrau, or catch him looking at computer porn or masturbating behind the counter.
Making noise was the polite thing to do.
“Scared to be alone, Dynamo?” Ollie grinned at me sympathetically when he saw my intentionally clumsy entrance near the beer cooler in back.
“No,” I said, with efficient curtness.
I was all business and could not waste time. I did not want to let Johnny down.
Ollie Jungfrau played games on a laptop computer tapped in to the wireless network from Johnny’s office. He played all day long while he sat behind the counter at Tipsy Cricket. I did not see the allure of that particular pastime. But for a guy like Ollie, having his ego sucked into the fantasy of being a muscular soldier in tight clothing, trapped aboard a space station infested by aliens, was preferable to rooting his identity in the here and now.
Ollie Jungfrau killed thousands of aliens, every day.
It made him horny.
“By the way,” Ollie said, “I looked up photoluminescent on the computer. It means glow in the dark.”
“Okay,” I agreed.
“That’s stupid,” Ollie decided.
Ollie Jungfrau never took his eyes from his laptop screen while we talked. He shot something with a spastic swipe at the space bar, or some shit like that. The thing on Ollie’s screen howled in pain. Its leg came off.
Ollie laughed and put his game on pause.
He was sweating.
“I came over to buy some cigarettes,” I said.
“For whom?” Ollie asked.
“Me.”
“I think it’s I.”
“Me.”
“What would your parents say?”
That was a pointless question, I thought. Why would Ollie Jungfrau ever want to insinuate himself into a conversation between me and my parents regarding cigarettes?
So I said, “They would tell I to say please.”
A SNAPSHOT
OLLIE SOLD ME the cigarettes I asked for. I wanted to show Robby how brave and independent I could be. I bought two packs and a disposable lighter, then went back to the shop.
My balls were big.
I called Shann minutes before noon.
I asked her if she’d like to see a movie and have dinner with me in Waterloo that night.
“What about Robby?” she asked.
“Robby’s fine,” I answered. “Um. And how’s your mom?”
“Fine,” Shann said. “What are you talking about?”
“I thought you were just making small talk about other townsfolk we know,” I said.
“No. I mean, are we all three hanging out tonight?”
“This isn’t about Robby. I was planning on just me and you having a date, Shann,” I said. “Johnny told me he’d drive us and everything.”
Johnny McKeon wouldn’t mind if Shann and I sat together in the backseat for the drive. It was a long, straight road to Waterloo.
The thought of having sex with Shann in the car while her stepfather drove us to Waterloo made me very horny.
Then the shop’s front door opened. A family of tourists—a man, woman, and their identically clothed, identical twin boys who looked to be about six years old and undoubtedly had identically stinky feet, as Robby would confirm—came in and began their family expedition along Johnny’s path of wonder and despair.
They marched through the maze in parade fashion. The mother, up front, regulated the speed. She stopped from time to time to admire a cow creamer or an iron trivet shaped like a squashed rooster. She
pulled out drawers on dressers and nightstands.
She wasn’t going to find any condoms.
A couple drawers still had Bibles in them.
The twin boys followed, shoulder to shoulder, holding hands. If they got a little closer to each other, they would look just like the boy in the jar Johnny McKeon kept inside the office. The father held up the rear of the parade. He had a canvas satchel, a man-purse, Robby and I called them, strapped diagonally across his shoulders.
They definitely were not from Iowa, I thought.
Maybe Minneapolis.
It wasn’t unusual for tourists to stop at From Attic to Seller on Saturdays.
This family was probably on their way to the ocean, and found themselves trapped in the center of an enormous continent. They may have been looking for postcards so they could mail out desperate messages like:
Send help now! And that was our day. You know what I mean.
But Johnny McKeon did not sell postcards at From Attic to Seller Consignment Store. He did, however, sell condoms at Tipsy Cricket Liquors. I think most of the condoms he sold ended up stuck to the floor of the Ealing Coin Wash Launderette, or in dresser drawers and nightstands that I cleaned out when their owners lost homes and hope.
And that is an economic snapshot of the United States of America, and a dying Iowa town.
“It would be so nice to go out on a date, just you and me, Austin,” Shann said.
“It’s not like we never do that, Shann,” I explained.
The family snaked their way closer to me at the counter. Along the way, the mother had picked up some objects.
“I know,” Shann said, “but it’s . . . well . . . different now, don’t you think?”
My heart beat faster.
“Oh,” I said. “Yes.”
I didn’t know what she meant. I suddenly felt guilty again, like Shann knew everything.
“I love you, Austin,” Shann said.
Then I got it. I understood.
I was relieved and stupid at the same time.
“I love you, Shann.” I did not say too. But I was fully clothed, anyway. “Did I tell you I am alone at the shop? Johnny needed to go to Waterloo to pick up some things. There are customers here.”
I eyeballed the two packs of cigarettes I stacked on the glass case above my favorite insect collection.
“Austin?”
“What?”
“That ticking noise is happening again,” she said. She sounded a little frightened.
It was exactly noon.
“Let me hear it.”
Shann held her phone up to her wall. She had described the sound perfectly—typing. There was nothing else I could think of when I heard it. But the typing noise stopped in a matter of seconds.
It was exactly noon.
Ten hours in to the end of the world.
Nobody knew anything about it.
HAGGLED
“I WILL PAY five dollars for the snow globe from Iowa City, this corkscrew, and the porcelain corncobs salt-and-pepper shakers.”
Mom, the drum major at the head of the tourist parade, placed her spoils on top of the counter beside my cigarettes. The two-headed boy with four arms and legs pressed its noses against the face of the glass case and left dual unpointed exclamation marks in clear snot directly in front of the bug collections. Dad, at the rear, slid his hand down into his purse and extracted a billfold.
“Um.”
Johnny McKeon haggled with customers. Price tags, in stores such as From Attic to Seller, may just as well been written as fill-in-the-blank forms, as far as most shoppers were concerned.
Johnny knew what to do.
I did not.
“Um,” I said again.
“Well?” she asked. She thought I was stupid. I knew the look. “Five dollars.”
“I . . . I’m only taking care of the counter for my girlfriend’s dad,” I said. I suddenly felt virile, capable of breeding, horny. The twins frightened me, though. Their noses pointed upward on the glass, distorting into two peaked snot volcanoes.
My job included keeping the glass cases clean.
“I am not permitted to haggle,” I pointed out.
“Pfft!” The mother, obviously used to getting her way, was exasperated. She had to do math.
Nobody likes math.
I took the items and tallied up the prices while the silent husband thumbed through bills.
“Eleven dollars and fifty cents,” I said.
I increased the price by one dollar, just because I could, and because I was going to have to clean up a pair of snot streaks left behind by the Friendship League of Minnesota.
The man paid what I asked. I bagged my first sale.
Then the man with the purse asked, “Is this Ealing?”
“I know. A lot of people just can’t believe they’ve finally arrived when they get to Ealing,” I said. “But this is it.”
“This is it . . . heh-heh,” the man said. He pulled a small glossy guidebook from his purse and continued, “Ealing, Iowa. Seven unsolved decapitations in 1969.”
“Uh.”
He proudly held his book up so I could see the cover. It read:
Serial Killer America
“We’re on a road trip!” The man with the purse twittered like a gleeful bird.
The twins snarfled and snotted against the glass.
“Cross another one off the list,” the mother decided. Then she added, “Please be careful with my corncobs.”
I needed a cigarette.
THE BOY IN THE GLASS
I STOOD OUTSIDE in the parking lot and smoked. I watched the traffic of people who came and went and came and went at The Pancake House, the launderette, Tipsy Cricket Liquors, and, across the street, at Satan’s Pizza, too.
At 12:45, I phoned Robby.
I lit another cigarette. I was in charge.
Robby was impressed, maybe jealous, that I was alone and having a cigarette without him. He was still in his bed when I called. I heard him light one up over the phone as we talked. So Robby and I had a cigarette together by cell phone.
It’s good to have a cigarette with your best friend.
I told him everything that happened—the history of the morning—even about the snot-faced twin kids from Minneapolis who smeared up the glass case, and how I overcharged them a dollar just because I didn’t like them. He asked if I’d gone back into the alley at Grasshopper Jungle. I said no. I wasn’t going to go back there.
Everything seemed okay.
It was just another Saturday afternoon in Ealing, Iowa.
But I couldn’t shake the feeling that something impossibly huge had happened in the past twenty-four hours. Maybe that’s just the omniscience of the recorder who looks back on history as he’s painting the walls of his cave. Shit like that.
There is a blissful haze that quietly flies into your head like a swarm of anesthetized butterflies after you smoke a couple fags. Buzzing from nicotine, I went back inside From Attic to Seller Consignment Store, wandered my way along the parade route of Johnny McKeon’s display maze, and found myself standing once again in front of Johnny’s locked office door.
Johnny McKeon obviously didn’t really care to hide the things he kept inside his office. Maybe they were an embarrassment. Maybe he just didn’t know what to do with the things that once belonged to his dead brother. I thought I might ask Johnny about that if he ever showed me his experiments.
I wanted to know why.
As my fingers felt along the groove of the molding, I thought about what I would do with Eric’s things if he never came home again.
I would probably keep them in my room and not let anyone else look at them.
I understood Johnny McKeon.
The key was still there, where Johnny always hid it.
I went inside his office.
Johnny McKeon did not say anything about the missing globe to the policemen who came out that morning. If he had, he’d have to have shown them the rest of
the things inside the office. Johnny would not want to do that.
There were smears on the old library shelf where Tyler’s fingers had tracked through the dust at the base of the globe. He didn’t even bother to take the stand. It was still there, still announcing the Contained MI Plague Strain 412E.
Not so much contained any longer.
That was the first time I’d considered the possibility that maybe those four boys were going to end up getting sick.
But I figured all that shit was from 1969, according to the dates on the labels. Nothing incurable could ever come from 1969.
The Beatles and the Stones came from 1969.
And like Johnny McKeon said, it was only photoluminescent mold, after all.
The two-headed boy, although hardly bigger than a cantaloupe, was older than me. I talked to him.
“You’re nearing middle age, my man. You must be tired of being inside that jar.”
I put my face close to the glass, resting my chin on the shelf so I could look directly into the little dark sockets of the boy’s eyes.
I placed my palm on the cool curve of the glass.
The boy inside twitched.
The movement was so slight. Just a jittering spasm of the fingers. But I saw it.
I snapped my hand away from the glass and took a step back.
I bumped into Johnny McKeon’s desk so hard it felt like I ripped a hole in my jeans.
SKATING AND KAYAKING
THE ALLEYWAY BEHIND Satan’s Pizza wasn’t nearly as long or accommodating for skaters as Grasshopper Jungle. The pizza place was a stand-alone business, so all we could really do there was goof around in small circles. Goofing around in small circles was how Robby and I usually skated, anyway.
When I showed up, Robby had on the grimacing lemur mask and the Titus Andronicus T-shirt I loaned him the night before.
After what happened to me in Johnny McKeon’s office, everything I saw that day seemed like it oozed out of some twisted nightmare. I kept telling myself that maybe I was only imagining things as a result of too much nicotine and too little oxygen in my brain.