Grasshopper Jungle

by Andrew Smith

  Louis said, “Hello, Dynamo.”

  Ah Wong Sing believed that Dynamo was my real name.

  Louis hung out with Ollie Jungfrau. They played online alien hunter games and looked at porn together. I thought maybe if I did more shit like that with Robby it might make me feel normal and not so confused.

  Louis kept smiling nervously and disappeared through the back door to The Pancake House’s kitchen.

  We smoked.

  “You’re still coming over to get drunk with me, right?” Robby said.

  “I don’t know about getting drunk, Rob. It’s been a weird couple days. Maybe I’ll just watch you do it. You know, like keep you safe and shit.” I said, “Like in the sixties, guys used to do that for their buddies when they dropped acid.”

  “I’m not dropping acid, and I’m not going to get drunk if you don’t,” Robby said.

  I felt guilty about my attempt to back down.

  We skated through the alley without saying anything.

  When we were down by the dumpster, I stopped and asked Robby what it was he wanted to show me. He carried the rolled-up front section of the Waterloo News and Gazette in his back pocket. When he unrolled it, I already had a premonition that there would be something about the accident outside Waterloo, about what had happened to Hungry Jack.

  “Look at this,” Robby said.

  There was a photograph of Hungry Jack’s dirty and laceless shoes lying beside the highway. In the grainy background, I saw the Tally-Ho! and Fire at Will’s Indoor Shooting Range and Gun Shop. The photograph was like staring through a portal in time.

  The short article said that a transient had been struck and killed by a motorist and there were no witnesses.

  Transient is a nice way of saying homeless. Homeless makes people think of despair. It makes you think that the United States of America doesn’t care about people.

  Transient sounds like you have a case of wanderlust.

  Wanderlust is part of the American Spirit.

  The transient in the article had been carrying a military I.D. card that gave his name as Charles R. Hoofard.

  Hungry Jack’s real name was Charles R. Hoofard.

  He was born in Indianapolis in 1950.

  In 1950, Harry S. Truman was president of the United States.

  Harry Truman, as far as I can tell, also never took a shit in his life.

  In 1950, the same year that a boy named Charles R. Hoofard was born in Indianapolis, President Harry S. Truman sent military assistance to the French. They were trying to maintain their French Catholic colony in Vietnam. That military aid would grow and blossom to the point that a boy with wanderlust from Indiana named Charles R. Hoofard ultimately took time out from fucking whatever he wanted to fuck to participate in the killing of an entire village of women, elderly people, and children.

  History is full of shit like that.

  All roads intersect on pages on my desk.

  All roads spring up along trails worn down by boys on bikes.

  All roads lead past shooting ranges, liquor stores, and gay bars.

  Wanderlust is part of the American Spirit.

  The article went on to say that Charles R. Hoofard’s body had been brutalized by coyotes before being discovered by a farmer Monday morning.

  It asked for anyone with information to phone the Iowa State Patrol.

  “Uh,” I said.

  I rolled the newspaper up and handed it back to Robby.

  We never called anyone about what happened to Hungry Jack.

  We had been uncharacteristically silent back inside Robby’s Explorer in the lot outside the Tally-Ho!

  Robby sped all the way home to Ealing.

  We smoked and smoked.

  I think Robby was crying, too.

  Robby and I were in shock.

  That is a poor excuse for someone who feels obligated to record history, but that’s what happened.

  It was our day, and you do know what I mean.

  “We did see the same thing, Rob. People would think we were dropping acid,” I said.

  “Shit like that isn’t supposed to happen,” Robby said.

  “But it did,” I said. “Maybe we should get drunk.”

  Then Robby said, “That bug. It was the same thing we saw inside Johnny’s office.”

  “Like I said. We saw the same thing, Robby.”

  It was getting on to evening. We decided to take Robby’s car and pick up my school clothes and sleeping bag.

  I always slept on the floor at Robby’s apartment. If I put my ear to the floor, I sometimes could hear the meth smokers down the hall fighting with each other.

  But as we were skating back through the alley, just when we came to the spot where Grant Wallace and the Hoover Boys had beaten us up three days earlier, Robby and I noticed something on the piss-covered blacktop of the alley:

  GRANT WA

  It was the message Robby started spelling out in the blood that dripped from his nose.

  The letters gave off a pale blue glow in the dimming light of evening.

  “Um,” Robby said.

  I said, “Yes. I see that, too, Robby.”

  A GIFT FROM JOHNNY MCKEON

  JOHNNY MCKEON WAS just locking up the front door of From Attic to Seller Consignment Store when Robby and I skated past.

  He frowned at me, shook his head, and made a two-fingered gesture to his lips as a kind of sign language reproach about Robby and me skating around in front of his place of business with cigarettes in our mouths.

  I was embarrassed.

  “Sorry, Johnny,” I said. I dropped my cigarette onto the blacktop.

  Robby did, too.

  Johnny said it was a great coincidence that I happened by, because he’d gotten something that afternoon that he meant to bring home for me. I felt guilty and scared because Johnny McKeon had never given me anything more than a paycheck and a couple free packs of cigarettes in the past. I’d never asked for anything more from Johnny McKeon, either.

  “Wait up,” Johnny said, and he went back inside his store.

  Robby and I waited.

  “I found this today in a jewelry box,” Johnny said when he came back. He locked the door to the secondhand store and held out his hand to me. His hand was cupped closed, the way a kid might hold on to a bug or something.

  “I thought you might get a kick out of this, Austin,” Johnny said.

  Robby was curious. He leaned in closer to see what Johnny McKeon was offering me. When Johnny unfolded his tentacle fingers, I saw a coiled silver chain with an oval medallion strung on its links. In the center of the pendant was the image of a man with a halo, his chin turned downward in an attitude of something that looked like modesty. The bauble was worn, but the man held what looked like a tree branch in his hand. Around the rim of the outside, in raised letters, was the inscription: SAINT KAZIMIERZ

  And Johnny McKeon said, “Isn’t that a kick? You were just telling me about that guy, and I never heard of him before. Ever. Isn’t that a kick?”

  “That’s a kick, Johnny,” I said.

  “Anyway,” Johnny said, “it’s for you, Austin. What would I want with something like that, anyway?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Thank you, Johnny.”

  Robby watched me slip the chain around my neck.

  “This is the nicest thing in the world,” I said.

  I meant it, too.

  “You’re welcome,” Johnny said.

  It felt cool and powerful against my skin. The thought of wearing the medal under my Lutheran Boy clothes, against my naked body at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy made me feel wicked and daring. It also made me very horny to think about breaking such a long list of theoretically unbreakable and ancient Lutheran Boy rules.

  I decided I would never take it off.

  “Thank you so much, Johnny,” I said again. “What a kick.”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” Johnny said. “It’s a real kick, ain’t it?”

  J
ohnny McKeon was in a generous mood. He offered to drive Robby and me to my house so I could pick up the clothes and things I needed to spend the night at the Del Vista Arms.

  He and Robby even waited in Johnny’s car while I let Ingrid out to take a shit.

  I kept playing with the medallion inside my T-shirt. I pressed it against my bare chest. I took it out at least a dozen times to look at Saint Kazimierz.

  It made me feel magic.

  SHANN CALLS

  I IMAGINED A SILVER chain washing up on the cold shoreline in Massachusetts or Maine. Somehow the thing had slipped away from Andrzej Szczerba’s body, and had been carried slowly for a century until being discovered in a tangled mass of seaweed and fishing line.

  It had to come to Ealing.

  It had to end up around Austin Andrzej Szerba’s neck.

  I sat in the front seat and Johnny McKeon drove us to the Del Vista Arms from my house. Shann called when we were about halfway there.

  “I found something out,” Shann said.

  “What?” I wondered.

  There were an awful lot of things I thought Shann might be talking about, but none of them was correct.

  “I found the silo,” she said.

  “Uh,” I said.

  There were also an awful lot of silos in Iowa. I did not know what Shann was talking about.

  “You know,” she went on, “the message from the machine in the wall? Well, today after school I went down to City Hall and looked up the Ealing Registry of Historical Homes.”

  “You did? They actually have that?” I asked.

  Now there was a book that could have absolutely everything about its subject fully contained within its bindings.

  “I saw photos of my house. Old ones. There used to be a silo on the property. I found the silo,” she said.

  But there was no silo on the property now.

  I pointed that out to Shann.

  Shann said, “We have to go look, Austin.”

  “But it’s dark and shit,” I said. “Do you think someone is hiding the McKeon silo?”

  You can’t hide a silo in Iowa.

  The best you could do is maybe disguise it to look like someone else’s silo, or maybe something like a penis.

  People in Iowa were generally too reserved for such antics.

  “No,” Shann chided. “I don’t think someone’s hiding our silo. But there was one here at one time.”

  “Uh,” I said.

  “Tomorrow. After school. You, Robby, and me. We’ll go see if there’s anything left of it. I have a copy of the picture.”

  “Uh,” I said again. I glanced back at Robby.

  Shann knew we were going to get drunk. We told her. She didn’t approve of it. What can you do?

  Somewhere, there was a middle-aged, nice-looking woman psychologist with voluptuous, artificially induced lips who, as a foremost expert on teenage boys, could serenely explain to Shann that boys sometimes need to be boys and do dumb things that can get boys in lots and lots of trouble and shit like that.

  But Shann did not watch much television.

  “Okay, Shann,” I said. “I think we can do that. Maybe there is something there, after all.”

  “I just know we’re going to find some other weird stuff that Grady McKeon was doing here,” Shann said.

  I agreed, and said, “There’s probably more than anyone will ever know.”

  Then Shann said, “I love you, Austin.”

  I looked at Robby in the backseat, then at Johnny behind the wheel, and I said, “Um. Me too, Shann.”

  In my defense, and with plenty of history to back me up, it was a perfectly acceptable response considering the environmental realities I had to contend with.

  Shann certainly understood the translation: I am sitting next to your stepfather and my best friend.

  You know what I mean.

  MY MOM’S LITTLE BLUE KAYAKS

  I HAD TWO of my mother’s little blue kayaks.

  They were hidden inside a matching pair of clean gray Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy regular boys’ socks I brought with me to Robby’s apartment for school the next day.

  Robby did not know I had them.

  I unrolled my sleeping bag on the floor in Robby’s room and left my stack of Lutheran Boy clothes on top of his dresser. Robby brought in a bottle of wine he’d hidden in the back of his refrigerator.

  His mother never knew anything about it.

  The bottle was so cold the glass fogged and dripped.

  Then I showed Robby the Xanax pills I’d stolen. He was not happy about what I did.

  Robby said, “I’d never take one of those, Porcupine.”

  “Uh,” I said. “Why not? Everyone else does.”

  History lesson for the early evening: When a teenage boy says everyone else does, he’s usually not being mathematically precise. Robby knew that. We spoke the same language.

  Robby said, “I just don’t want to ever do shit like that.”

  I came to my own defense, rationalizing, “I always thought they’d make me feel better.”

  “Better than what?” Robby asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Better than shitty and scared all the time.”

  “Don’t be dumb, Austin,” Robby said.

  Robby unscrewed the cap on the wine. I watched him swallow. He liked it.

  “Well, I’m taking one anyway,” I said.

  “Go ahead,” Robby said.

  Robby would not take one. He looked unhappy when I put the tiny blue pill on my tongue. But it was something I always wondered about. I hoped my mother’s little kayak would help me figure things out.

  Get things to fall right into place.

  I washed it down with some wine.

  The wine tasted sweet, and it burned at the same time.

  Robby kept the grimacing lemur mask and the plastic yard flamingo in his bedroom. I tried the lemur mask on. It did make my face stink, and the lenses in the eyes made everything look strange. There was some kind of refractive prism on the lenses of the mask that made Robby look blue. I took it off.

  “Yes,” I confirmed, “now my face really does stink.”

  “I told you,” Robby said. “Did that Xanax do anything to you?”

  “Uh. I don’t think so,” I said. “But it’s only been a minute.”

  I picked up the flamingo. I shook it.

  “What are you doing?” Robby said.

  “Shaking the plastic lawn flamingo,” I explained.

  “Why?” Robby asked.

  “I want to see if candy will come out of its ass,” I answered.

  Maybe I was starting to feel different.

  We shared more wine. We drank straight from the bottle. I was kind of messy. The wine ran down my neck. It baptized Saint Kazimierz. But it also made my face not stink so bad.

  “Maybe the message was about this flamingo,” I said.

  I was somewhat impressed by my brilliance.

  “Uh,” Robby said.

  Robby wasn’t really paying attention. He opened up his record player and was flipping through a bookcase of vinyl LPs that used to belong to his dad.

  “Yeah,” I went on, “maybe it’s like a smoke detector for that shit in the globe Tyler dropped. McKeon Industries did used to make Pulse-O-Matic® brand smoke detectors.”

  “I think you’re high, Porcupine,” Robby said.

  He shook his head and carefully grooved the stylus onto the edge of the spinning record.

  I don’t know exactly what the Xanax did to me. All I can remember is how relaxed and not-uptight I felt. I did not care about anything.

  Everything was nice, very nice.

  As I sat there on the corner of Robby’s bed, I was aware that nothing at all mattered anymore, and I wasn’t confused about feeling happy.

  I was floating away.

  We finally could forget about everything.

  Robby played a crackling vinyl recording of Exile on Main Street, and we got drunk on screw-top wine and
smoked cigarettes and took off our T-shirts.

  I opened my notebook and drew sketches of Robby as he reclined, bare chested, on the floor in the slate-colored streetlight that came through the apartment’s open window.

  It was warm, and outside the sound of insects in the night was electric.

  The music sounded better than anything I’d ever heard.

  I had never been so happy in my life.

  I played with the little silver medal against my bare chest.

  I wrote poetry while we sat there like that in the dark and talked about our favorite poems and books and laughed and smoked.

  And Mick Jagger sang to us:

  Tryin’ to stop the waves behind your eyeballs,

  Drop your reds, drop your greens and blues.

  PAGES FROM HISTORY

  IN THE MORNING, Robby’s alarm clock buzzed like an air-raid warning.

  We had to get up to go to school.

  When I opened my eyes, I was lying next to Robby on his bed. My arm stretched across the space between us, and my open hand lay flat in the middle of Robby’s chest. I had my legs pressed up against his leg. One of my feet was completely underneath Robby’s calf.

  The covers of Robby’s bed had been thrown down on the floor around his footboard, and we were sprawled out on top of the bottom sheet.

  At that moment, all I had on were some boxers, my left sock, and the silver chain Johnny McKeon gave me with Saint Kazimierz on it around my neck.

  I sat up, still drunk and woozy from the pill.

  I felt drained and rushed, like my brain had just flushed itself down the toilet of my throat.

  I was vaguely aware that Robby sat up in the bed. He turned off his alarm and watched me while I rolled my legs over the edge of his bed. It was all I could do to will myself not to vomit until I staggered and tripped in my drooping boxers out of Robby’s bedroom.

  I needed to find the toilet.

  Robby’s favorite poem is Dulce Et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen. It is a poem about war and lies, youth and thievery.

  It begins:

  Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

  Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge.

  Robby has very good taste for words.