Grasshopper Jungle

by Andrew Smith

  MCKEON INDUSTRIES INFESTATION COMPLEX

  EDEN PROJECT • EALING, IOWA

  There was a pair of scuffed wingtip shoes left beneath one of the benches, as well as a powder-blue windbreaker hanging from a hook. There was also a matching set of three of the same plastic pink lawn flamingos with the wire stakes coming out of their asses. The wire stakes were fed through perfectly drilled holes in the benches. The flamingos were turned with their beaks toward the center of the mudroom, like they were watching us.

  “This must be some kind of nuke shelter,” Robby said.

  “Nuh,” I said. “It has something to do with that shit Tyler dropped.”

  Shann said, “What are you talking about?”

  “Let’s see what’s down here,” I said.

  A single metal door led out of the entry room. The fact that this door also had a sealing airlock mechanism convinced me that the silo had been created for some anticipated disaster. A reasonable observer might conclude that Dr. Grady McKeon had prepared the structure, as many Americans did during the 1960s, as a type of bomb shelter for his family. But I knew after what I’d seen inside Johnny McKeon’s office at From Attic to Seller Consignment Store that there was something much more to this silo and to Grady McKeon’s creations.

  I was certain Robby believed it, too.

  None of us had any way of knowing it at the time, but Robby Brees and the bloody message he left on the pavement at Grasshopper Jungle had just as much to do with the end of the world as old, dead Dr. Grady McKeon ever did.

  We went through the first door.

  Robby said, “I don’t mind telling you this, Shann, but I think you should keep this place secret from your parents, so we can have a raging party down here.”

  “Like an orgy,” I whispered.

  “Uh,” Shann said.

  “We could rule the world from this place,” Robby offered.

  I wasn’t really listening to them. I was nervous about being there, and I was silently communicating to Saint Kazimierz, asking him if he could make me stop thinking about having an orgy.

  In the early 1970s, among the last times anyone had ever been down inside the McKeon silo, which was technically called the Eden Project, scientists and workers from McKeon Industries actually did come down here to have sex parties.

  We would find this out later, much to Shann’s embarrassment.

  The doorway led us into a vast tiled hallway of lockers, which in turn opened on either side to a wide shower room on our right, sinks and mirrors to our left, with gleaming stainless fixtures and hospital-clean floors and walls. I went inside the shower room. The showerheads were arranged like sunflowers blooming outward from the tops of central posts that looked like columnar periscopes in old submarines. Twenty people could shower in there at the same time. The place was obviously designed with the idea of not segregating shower-takers and clothes-changers by gender.

  I opened one of the spigots.

  The water came out hot.

  The place was suitable for an army, and it was also ready to be used.

  “Too bad I already took a bath today,” I said.

  “Yeah. Too bad,” Shann said.

  She was joking.

  In the shower chamber, at the end of the room where there were polished redwood benches and cubbies for towels and clothes, there were three doored stalls to toilets, and an enormous twenty-foot-long porcelain communal wall urinal. I examined the top of the urinal. There were birds on it with ribbons coiled around their happy beaks. The urinal was an antique Nightingale.

  I knew I would have to pee in that thing.

  My destiny was calling.

  Once again, every highway that had ever been laid was intersecting right at my feet. I rubbed the Saint Kazimierz medal against my chest and thanked the virgin boy.

  Robby had opened some of the lockers. They all contained identical sets of supplies: clean towels and shower kits with soap and razors, fresh white-and-blue nylon jumpsuits that zipped up the front, sealed packages of white socks, and cloth caps, all of which had been embroidered in blue and gold thread with the McKeon Industries Scientific Labs Department logo.

  All the jumpsuits were numbered and said Eden on their chests.

  “I wonder if we should change our clothes or shit,” Robby said.

  “If there’s one in there that says Eden 5, I am putting it on,” I decided.

  Robby waved a hanger like a banner in front of me. On the left chest, the jumpsuit said this:

  EDEN

  5

  “This is like some kind of sign or shit,” I said.

  GIMME SHELTER

  THE UNIFORM MADE me look like someone who worked at a place that sold hot dogs and ice cream cones.

  I stripped down to my boxers and slipped myself hurriedly inside the jumpsuit. Shann and Robby gave in to their desire to conform. All teenagers really want to be exactly alike, so why wouldn’t they?

  Shann and Robby put on uniform jumpsuits as well.

  Watching Shann and Robby take off their clothes made me realize that nylon jumpsuits were also not very good at hiding erections. Saint Kazimierz kept me strong.

  I wanted a cigarette.

  Shann Collins was Eden 49.

  Robby Brees became Eden 133.

  We put on our white caps and socks. We were an army now.

  There were a lot of lockers down there, enough to find suits that fit us perfectly. Enough to last forever.

  “Do you think this place would explode or shit if we smoked down here?” I asked.

  Robby said, “I was wondering the same thing, Porcupine.”

  The place did not explode.

  I noticed there were ashtrays built into the walls of the locker room. Everyone smoked in the 1970s, especially in Iowa. Who wouldn’t smoke if you were sealed underground and the world above was going down a cosmic shithole?

  Walking silently over the cool, slick floor in our brand-new McKeon Industries Scientific Labs Department white socks, we left the locker room through the only hatched doorway at the opposite end from the entry.

  We came out into a massive auditorium with rows of cushioned seats that all faced a podium and rolling blackboards at the front of the room.

  It was like a lecture hall.

  The stage area was lit up in track lights that pointed down at the lectern, so the audience’s attention would be focused on whoever might be up there telling them all the important shit they needed to know.

  On one of the chalkboards behind the speaker’s podium, a diagram had been drawn.

  It looked like this:

  412EHUMAN BLOOD HOST LARVAL STAGEMETAMORPHOSIS SEXUAL REPRODUCTIONINFESTATION

  It was just like biology class with pollywogs.

  I hated biology, and as far as I know, pollywogs cannot destroy the world. Then again, I never paid attention in biology class unless the teacher was talking about sexual reproduction with humans.

  Our ninth-grade biology teacher at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy was named Mrs. Edna Fitzmaurice. She had a mustache and would not tolerate nervous giggling when she said a word like penis or vagina. Edna Fitzmaurice’s main function at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy was to make teenagers morbidly terrified of sex.

  History lesson: Over the course of centuries in the history of education, although fought valiantly by endless armies of pedagogues, the attempt to frighten teenagers away from sex has proven to be a losing battle.

  The lecture hall had multiple sets of doorways leading out from each of its three curved walls. There was so much for us to explore. The place was easily five times larger than the McKeon House where Shann lived, maybe bigger than that.

  The first door we opened took us into a type of lounge. It looked like a television set from a 1960s-era family comedy, with low, straight-backed sofas perched on narrowly tapered birchwood peg legs, shag carpeting, and coffee tables shaped like kidney beans. On one of the tables was an assortment of magazines. They were perfectly unwrinkled, dustless
, hardly touched. The most recent date on any of the magazines was 1971.

  There were framed photographs on the walls: an image of the flag of the United States of America planted on the surface of the moon, the faces of presidents carved into Mount Rushmore, a herd of longhorn cattle, what apparently were Iowa cornfields, Willie Stargell swinging at home plate in the 1971 World Series, and a black-and-white picture of President Richard Nixon and his family, taken in the White House in front of a fireplace, and a painting of President George Washington. It was everything that made America worth living in an underground cave for, while the rest of the world went entirely to shit.

  That was our day. You know what I mean.

  And there was a cigarette machine in the lounge.

  Discovering it had an almost religious impact on Robby and me.

  “Thank you, Saint Kazimierz,” I said.

  I pulled my medal out from my jumpsuit and kissed the saint.

  “You’re going to go to hell for turning Catholic,” Robby said.

  Robby pulled one of the levers on the machine. Out popped a red pack of Pall Mall cigarettes and a book of matches that advertised how you could get into art school by drawing a cute little fawn named Winky.

  You did not need to put money into the machine to get cigarettes out of it.

  It was a miracle.

  Robby said, “Thank you, Saint Kazimierz.”

  We sat on one of the couches and smoked.

  The Pall Mall cigarettes were a little stale, but they were free.

  I had read somewhere that cigarette manufacturers during the 1970s also put saltpeter in their tobacco. I wondered if Americans had fewer erections during the 1970s than during other decades. Apparently, the saltpeter in my Pall Mall was not having much of an effect on my penis. I sat beside Shann and rubbed her leg with mine. The jumpsuits felt very nice. I put my hand on her neck. We kissed, and I slipped my tongue into Shann’s mouth.

  I believed Robby was a better kisser than me. I tried to kiss Shann like Robby would.

  Robby watched us. He was not bothered at all by what I was doing with Shann.

  He got up from the couch and went over to the wall, where a built-in shelf surrounded an old reel-to-reel tape recorder. There was a big spool of tape that had been left threaded across the machine’s playheads.

  Robby pressed the power button and the two level-meter windows on the bottom of the machine flickered with yellow light. There were red needles that looked as fine as strands of horsehair, and they pricked up inside each window. Robby flipped a switch. It made a soft click, and the reels jerked and spun.

  Music came from everywhere around us.

  It was a recording of the Rolling Stones’s album, Let It Bleed.

  Robby said, “Oh, hell yes.”

  Robby danced and smoked.

  He was such a great dancer. It was just like when he taught me how to dance in his room at the Del Vista Arms so I could win Shann’s attention when we were in seventh grade. I wanted to dance with Robby, too.

  Robby said, “I never want to leave Shann’s silo.”

  Mick Jagger sang Gimme Shelter.

  History will show that Gimme Shelter is one of the greatest songs ever recorded. It sounded so beautiful down inside Shann’s silo. Robby danced in his jumpsuit, which he had unzipped all the way past his belly button, so you could see his brightly colored, non-plaid, non-Iowa boxers. They had pictures of ice cream cones with rounded scoops of colorful ice cream melting down the diamond-patterned waffle cones in suggestive drips.

  Robby always had the coolest boxers.

  He waved his hands around and tilted his cigarette daringly from his lips.

  Oh, a storm is threatening

  My very life today.

  I got up and danced with Robby there in my jumpsuit and socks on the thick shag carpeting in the lounge room. It all felt very good. Shann joined us. The three of us danced together. It made me very horny.

  I said, “I never want to leave Shann’s silo.”

  Shann smiled and danced between Robby and me.

  We were in Eden.

  Eden needed us.

  All roads crossed on our dance floor.

  THE DRAGON PARADE

  WE DANCED AND DANCED.

  The tape played. We were sweaty and hypnotized, and we lost ourselves as the music fell all around, washing over us.

  I said, “I love you, Shann. I love you, Robby.”

  What was I going to do?

  Shann and Robby smiled at me.

  Shann combed her fingers through my wet hair. Robby touched my hand with his.

  We danced and danced.

  And while I danced with Robby and Shann below the ground, things happened in the world above.

  Ingrid, my golden retriever that could not bark, was exhausted from being outside and watching me mow the lawn and scoop up dog shit all day. She was curled up beneath my desk, asleep and content, waiting for me to come home.

  Ah Wong Sing and Connie Brees were lying naked together in bed. They had had sex three times in one hour.

  Ah Wong Sing was a real dynamo for such a quiet guy.

  The Pancake House cook and Connie Brees smoked a marijuana cigarette that Ah Wong Sing had rolled before coming over to the Del Vista Arms. They also used up the last of the condoms Connie Brees had found on the floor of Robby’s bedroom.

  The family from Minnesota who had come through Ealing the previous Saturday on their serial-killer road trip were heading back home to Minneapolis. They bought a Stanpreme pizza to go and had a picnic on the benches at Amelia Jenks Bloomer Park.

  It was not a good idea.

  Nobody in Ealing, Iowa, ever went to Amelia Jenks Bloomer Park.

  Some parks are unexplainably like that: Unused, as though there is some unspoken recognition there might be a sort of toxic pall hanging over them. In fact, Amelia Jenks Bloomer Park was built on the site of an old chemical milling and etching plant. The tanks there had corrupted, and poisonous metals from them seeped into the ground. Swallowing water from the drinking fountains at Amelia Jenks Bloomer Park was just a little safer than sucking on a nozzle of unleaded premium at the Arco on Kimber Drive. Nobody knew anything about that. The twin boys drank and drank from the fountains at Amelia Jenks Bloomer Park in Ealing, Iowa. They filled squirt guns again and again with Amelia Jenks Bloomer Park’s drinking water.

  It did not matter.

  The family sat and looked over their memories in their guidebook. Before Amelia Jenks Bloomer Park was an abandoned park, United Chem-Etch Incorporated’s parking lot occupied the exact spot where the picnic tables were located. In 1969, the decapitated head of an adult white male had been discovered in that parking lot. It was a perfect place to have a family picnic. The father remarked how fresh the sausage meat was on the Stanpreme pizza they had bought.

  The Hoover Boys—at least the bugs that hatched from the Hoover Boys—Tyler, Devin, and Roger, scampered with clicking, mechanical jerkiness across the Little League field adjacent to the picnic area.

  They audibly buzzed with horniness and hunger.

  One of the twin boys saw them. He said, “Look! A dragon parade!”

  It was not a dragon parade.

  Mantises are very quick. It’s not that the bugs that hatched from the Hoover Boys and the other victims of Contained MI Plague Strain 412E were precisely mantises, but they were close enough in physiology, with their triangular heads and viciously barbed trisegmented striking arms. And they also stood six feet tall.

  In battle, a six-foot-tall praying mantis could easily destroy a six-foot-tall grizzly bear. They were like grizzly bears with steel plating and lightning-fast arms studded with row upon row of shark’s teeth.

  The bugs that hatched out from the victims of Contained MI Plague Strain 412E liked to snatch their prey up by the head, and then commence eating their thrashing victims straight down to their shoes.

  The dragon parade made a bloody mess at Amelia Jenks Bloomer Park.

&
nbsp; They were very quick.

  They even ate what was left of the tourist family’s Stanpreme pizza before scurrying off to look for more food and also for Eileen Pope, who they could hear and smell and wanted to fuck.

  And while we danced and danced, my mother swallowed another of her little blue kayaks. She had gone back to the hotel with my father. My father was leaving a voicemail message on my cell phone at exactly the same moment that Shann and Robby danced with me.

  The message was this:

  Hey, Austin. We’ve been sitting with Eric, and he looks good. Real good. He is going to be fine, son, so there’s no need to worry about your big brother. He is a hero. Call me and let me know how things are going at school. I hope you’re eating okay, and not just Cup-O-Noodles and shit like that. And don’t forget to let Ingrid out. I love you, son.

  Happy hour was beginning at the Tally-Ho!

  Thursdays were good days there for men to meet new men who were daring enough to finally try their luck at the Tally-Ho! Will Wallace was drinking a beer at the bar while Shann ran her fingers through my hair and Robby brushed my sweaty hand softly with his.

  Will Wallace was not homosexual. The Tally-Ho! sold beer for seventy cents per glass during Thursday happy hours. Will Wallace also enjoyed the attention he got from men who showed up at Waterloo, Iowa’s one and only gay bar for the first time.

  Will Wallace had no idea he was spending his last evening on earth in a bar for homosexual men.

  At the same time Will Wallace was finishing his second glass of beer at the Tally-Ho!, Mr. Duane Coventry, our chemistry teacher at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy, was tapping on the front door at Tipsy Cricket Liquors. He needed a bottle of whiskey. Duane was single, and he drank a lot. Nobody opened the door for him, so he got back into his car and drove to the Hy-Vee, where Connie Szerba worked as a bookkeeper.

  At the Hy-Vee, Duane Coventry purchased two boxes of antihistamine tablets for his allergies. He did not have allergies. The chemistry teacher from Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy was a real dynamo when it came to cooking methamphetamine in his kitchen. Duane Coventry was very lonely. He should have tried hanging out at the Tally-Ho!