Grasshopper Jungle

by Andrew Smith

  Wanda Mae Rutkowski was the very image of the two-hundred-foot-tall woman on the great seal of McKeon Industries.

  At the bottom of the picture, a message that had nothing to do with corn or sperm had been scrawled in smeared blue ink and curling, candy-sweet script. It said:

  Grady, I hope you can someday forgive me. We will always have Eden, Wanda Mae

  In her photograph, Wanda Mae Rutkowski is wearing knee-high lemon yellow vinyl boots. Although people in the 1970s did not recycle plastics, those boots could likely have been converted into at least three complete shower curtains; perhaps a full-size Slip ’N Slide, or one of those inflatable bouncy houses parents rent for their kid’s birthday. Her dress, low-cut to showcase the perfect V separating her breasts, has long belled sleeves and a wild floral print in pinks and violets. Wanda Mae is wearing a matching headband that spans her forehead from eyebrows to hairline. The hem on the dress barely covers her panties, which I imagine would be a pale lavender. Her hair falls in loose globular curls over her shoulders. It is the color of tangerine marmalade, and Wanda Mae’s flawless skin looks like home-churned Indiana butter.

  I can’t be certain, but I believe Dr. Grady McKeon did not hire Wanda Mae Rutkowski for her stenographic abilities.

  Wanda Mae Rutkowski performed in a barefoot water ski show in Florida throughout the 1970s, after Dr. Grady McKeon sealed up his subterranean sexual pleasure dome in Ealing, Iowa, for the last time.

  Dr. Grady McKeon became a recluse in his old historic house when Wanda Mae Rutkowski left him. Wanda Mae married a dog trainer who made a fortune racing greyhounds in Florida. The dog trainer’s name was Jan Wojner. Jan Wojner learned everything he knew about dogs from his grandfather Bruno, who survived the Great Depression by performing with circus dogs in California.

  Unstoppable dogs!

  Wanda Mae Wojner won the Women’s National Barefoot Water Ski Championship, which was held in Waco, Texas, in 1978.

  In 1978, Pope Paul VI died without ever knowing that Dr. Grady McKeon had unceremoniously discarded his sperm in my great-great-grandfather’s urinal.

  In 1978, McKeon Industries presented four sealed globes of Contained MI Plague Strain 412E to the United States Department of Defense.

  Nobody knew anything about it.

  In his abandonment, Dr. Grady McKeon, who had gone about as far off the deep end as anyone could go following the gruesome disasters of his Unstoppable Soldier experiments, got crazier and crazier. He forgot all about Unstoppable Soldiers and his Eden Project.

  In 1978, Dr. Grady McKeon bought a small palace in Costa Rica and boarded up the old McKeon House in Ealing, Iowa.

  I could only find evidence of one recorded trip he made back to Ealing to attend a shareholders’ meeting, which happened when Robby Brees and I were in seventh grade.

  It was not a good time to fly.

  THE FINALE OF SEEM

  IT IS THE STRANGEST MACHINE: pencil and paper, paint and wall; medium, surface, and man. The machine stitches all roads into one, weaves every life together, everything.

  All good books are about everything, abbreviated.

  The final lines of the opening stanza of my favorite poem are these:

  Let be be finale of seem.

  The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

  By the time Krzys Szczerba was a middle-aged man, he had grown tired of struggling and feeling so isolated from his identity in the United States of America.

  Krzys Szczerba could never stop being the Polish boy who lost his father on the crossing to America. Every day, Krzys Szczerba could shut his eyes and see the gray, wooden body of his father as it slipped into the cold water of the slate sea.

  Krzys Szczerba’s son, Andrzej, had gone away to Iowa City. Krzys Szczerba never knew anything about how much his son loved Herman Weinbach. Krzys knew something about his grandson, a boy named Felek, which means lucky. But Krzys Szczerba had never seen the child, nor the mother—a butcher’s daughter named Phoebe Hildebrandt.

  Eva Nightingale, Krzys’s wife and the inspiration for his Nightingale urinal, was killed by a street trolley in Saint Louis in 1936, when Krzys was forty-eight years old. Things like that happened all the time, and nobody knew anything about it.

  Without the creamy white pillows of Eva’s body to enfold him at night, Krzys Szczerba became cold. Krzys Szczerba froze inside. Krzys Szczerba still had brothers and sisters in Poland whom he had not seen since 1905, when Theodore Roosevelt was president.

  In 1937, Krzys left the United States of America to return to Poland.

  It was not a good idea.

  In September 1939, Krzys Szczerba was killed as he walked in a marching column of refugees along a muddy farm road in western Poland.

  In September 1939, Germany was unstoppable, and Russia shared in the spoils of Polish conquest. Nobody needed Polish boys.

  Too bad for Poland.

  Too bad for boys like me.

  This was just one of those things in history that gave us Polish boys sleepy bags under our watchful eyes. We see everything. It is our job to pay attention to details.

  Wanda Mae Rutkowski had size 11 feet.

  One day, I will go to Poland. I will ask Robby Brees to go to Poland with me. I know I will find the same country road where Krzys Szczerba died, and I will bring flowers in last month’s newspaper and place them there.

  With my finger I will draw the image of a bison in the dirt, and Robby Brees and I will smoke cigarettes and I will tell him all the stories I know, about everything.

  This is the truth.

  THE SUNSHINE BORES THE DAYLIGHTS OUT OF ME

  “I DECIDED ON Orville and Wilbur,” I said.

  Robby said, “Huh?”

  “My balls,” I said. “I have decided to name my balls Orville and Wilbur.”

  I named my balls after the Wright brothers.

  Orville and Wilbur Wright were from Ohio, although Wilbur was born in Indiana. They invented an airplane.

  Orville and Wilbur Wright never married anyone in their entire lives. They must have masturbated a lot, which, according to Pastor Roland Duff, would have made them highly stoppable soldiers.

  Maybe they wore hair shirts.

  “Which one’s which?” Robby said.

  “Wilbur Wright did not have a mustache and was bald on top. So Wilbur is on the left,” I answered. “The left side is . . . Uh . . . kind of bald.”

  “Um. That makes sense,” Robby decided.

  Robby Brees nodded appreciatively and took a long drag from his cigarette.

  We drove in Robby’s old Ford Explorer, away from the McKeon House, which was the only house on Ealing, Iowa’s Registry of Historic Homes.

  It was morning, and it was time for Robby Brees and me to go kill some monsters.

  I wore my fresh-laundered Eden 5 jumpsuit. It smelled like detergent and brand-new underwear. We had Ingrid, three syringes full of Robby Brees’s blood, six packs of cigarettes from the free Eden vending machines, and the two grimacing lemur masks with us.

  Robby looked like he slept well. He had showered and his hair was wet. Robby looked good.

  Robby always looked good.

  Robby said, “I am relieved to announce we are safe from committing the worst imaginable social blunder, which is giving your balls the same names as another guy in the same town’s balls.”

  “I am thankful for that,” I said.

  I took a drag from my cigarette.

  Robby said, “My balls are named Mick and Keith.”

  “Those are probably the best names anyone has ever given their balls in the history of naming your balls,” I said.

  Robby said, “Thank you, Austin.”

  He pushed a cassette into the tape player in the Explorer’s dashboard.

  It was Exile on Main Street.

  That cassette was so old, all the printing had completely worn off it. Robby knew the difference between Exile on Main Street and Let It Bleed only because of the smudge patterns on th
e plastic shell casings.

  The first song on Exile on Main Street is called Rocks Off. Some of the lyrics go like this: The sunshine bores the daylights out of me.

  Sometimes I understood Robby Brees better than other times. I knew he was mad at me for leaving him there in the clinic the night before, even if he selflessly encouraged me to do it. That was Robby, and I loved him.

  I believed Robby was jealous of Shann Collins.

  And, looking at the sky and all the light, I also agreed that the sunshine was boring.

  I wished we could go back underground and be alone in the dayless and nightless world of Eden, so we could play music and dance together—just me, Robby, and Shann.

  And Ingrid, too.

  Ingrid does not dance or bark.

  I have tried to dance with Ingrid. It makes her nervous.

  We headed off toward the town of Ealing, in the direction of my house. After that, who could possibly know? It wasn’t like there were any specific instructions on how to hunt down and kill wild Unstoppable Soldiers. Even the lunatics who ran the labs at McKeon Industries only had to deal with bugs in a jar, so to speak.

  The state of Iowa is a pretty big jar.

  Johnny McKeon urged us to take his gun. We did not. Despite being Iowa boys, neither Robby nor I had ever fired a real gun in our lives. I was afraid one of us would accidentally kill the other. That would be worse than being eaten by an Unstoppable Soldier.

  Paintballs are just paintballs, unless they’re filled with the blood of your God and you are an Unstoppable Soldier, but a Smith & Wesson .500 magnum could bring down a helicopter.

  So we left Johnny McKeon’s Smith & Wesson .500 magnum in Eden.

  Johnny McKeon made a sling from two Eden Project jumpsuits, and I carried Ingrid up the ladder with me and Robby when we left the silo. Johnny offered to come with us, but I convinced him the Unstoppable Soldiers would leave Robby—and hopefully me—alone.

  Johnny McKeon knew he did not want to leave Shann and Wendy by themselves, anyway. He was just doing the Iowa-right thing by offering us his gun and company.

  Iowa-right is the same thing as blue plaid on your boxers.

  Johnny McKeon was a humorless, but good, man.

  That morning, we had eaten breakfast in the Eden cafeteria. Wendy McKeon cooked pancakes and brewed coffee. I did not sleep well. Neither did Shann. Her eyes were red and her hair was uncombed. It was a look I had never seen before. Shann Collins looked nervous. She looked like Ingrid when I danced with her.

  Shann and I managed to have a few moments alone that morning while Robby showered and Johnny McKeon visited the toilet.

  It was awkward and embarrassing. We held hands, but it somehow was not like the us we used to be.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  Shann said, “I suppose so. Are you?”

  Nobody from Iowa ever says I suppose so.

  “My knees are scuffed up,” I admitted.

  It made me feel horny to think about my knees.

  “I never did that with anyone before,” Shann said.

  “I. Uh.” I did not know what to say. What could I say? Was I supposed to apologize or something?

  I said, “I thought it was amazing. The best thing ever. I love you so much, Shann. Did you . . . Uh . . . Did you like it? Shann?”

  “It hurt,” Shann said. “And you told me you would use a condom.”

  That was an unfair thing for Shann to say to me. It was cold, too. We never talked about condoms or anything the night before at our little End of the World Party; we just did it because it was what we wanted, the one thing we needed to do. But Shann sounded like someone at a butcher shop rejecting a cut of meat for having too much fat, or shit like that.

  “Uh. I must have left my condoms in my other jumpsuit, Shann,” I said.

  Shann was angry. She was sorry for what we did.

  I felt like shit.

  Ingrid was happy to get out of Eden. She shit for a solid ten minutes.

  Edens are made for humans, not for animals.

  And Dr. Grady McKeon was no Noah. Noah would not have flushed the pope’s sperm down a urinal, not to mention James Arness’s.

  “What am I going to do, Robby?”

  Robby drove with both hands on the wheel, a cigarette angled daringly from his lips. He looked cool, like a tough guy in a movie, or maybe someone who was about to save the world, but had to think things over first.

  I mean, what if the world was not worth saving, after all? What if, in some twisted way, Dr. Grady McKeon really had the right idea about starting over in a well-stocked Eden with stacks and stacks of blank books just waiting to be filled up by New Humans writing a New History where we did not do the same shitty things over and over and over?

  “Why do you want me to tell you what to do, Austin? I have a tough enough time figuring out what I’m going to do,” Robby said.

  “Uh.”

  Robby was right.

  “I am sorry for what I did last night, Rob,” I said.

  “Why do you have to apologize to me for anything?” Robby said.

  “You know,” I said. “I had sexual intercourse with Shann Collins in the bowling alley while you were lying in the clinic having your blood taken out, so we . . . uh . . . you . . . could save the world.”

  “The bowling alley sounds like a romantic spot for you and Shann Collins to have sexual intercourse,” Robby said.

  “Uh,” I said.

  “It’s not like I would have traded places with you,” Robby offered.

  “Um.”

  Naturally, that made me think again about having a threesome with Shann and Robby. Normally, the thought would make me feel very horny. Too bad Shann Collins did not seem to like me anymore. Too bad Robby Brees did not seem to like me very much, either.

  I reached back and stroked Ingrid’s fur.

  I did not like myself, but at least Ingrid did.

  Dogs are good for that kind of shit.

  We drove along Kelsey Creek.

  The largest walleye ever caught in Kelsey Creek weighed six pounds, four ounces.

  Looking across to the opposite bank, I noticed the streets of Ealing that surrounded Amelia Jenks Bloomer Park were completely deserted. Ealing had become even more of a ghost town than it usually was. Fat, twisting columns of smoke coiled upward into the morning sky. Homes and buildings were burning.

  War had come to Iowa.

  Robby and I both saw it. We knew what was going on.

  It was unstoppable.

  “I feel like shit,” I said.

  “Was it good? Did you like having sexual intercourse in the bowling alley with Shann Collins?” Robby asked. He glanced at me with an inspector’s no-bullshit appraisal. He shook another cigarette out and tossed the pack across the center console, onto my lap. I lit one and passed the lighter over to Robby Brees.

  “I guess so,” I said. “Uh. I skinned my knees on the carpet.”

  “I have heard that can happen. You have to be careful with that indoor-outdoor shit they made in the 1970s.” Robby said, “It’s like sandpaper on naked knees when you are trying to put your penis inside someone.”

  Robby was really smart about carpet burns and sex, and shit like that.

  I took a deep drag from my cigarette. It was a brand called Benson & Hedges. The name made me feel rich or something. A name like Benson & Hedges says I spend a lot of money on my cigarettes.

  “So, I am sorry, Rob,” I said.

  Robby shrugged. “They have a name for guys like you, you know, Austin?”

  “Um. Bisexual?” I guessed. I did not think I was bisexual. I was only guessing.

  I was always only guessing.

  I was trying to talk to Robby and make him not think about things like me betraying my friends; hurting their feelings. But Robby Brees was too smart for that shit.

  “No,” Robby said. “The word is selfish. You don’t really care about me or Shann.”

  I slumped down in my seat and st
ared at the columns of smoke across the creek.

  It was like bombs had been dropped, and the biggest one just landed on my chest.

  Robby turned right to cross the Kelsey Creek Bridge.

  He stopped the car.

  I was not looking.

  I was not looking because I felt like I was going to start crying or shit if Robby said one more thing to me.

  Robby Brees said, “Holy shit.”

  THE RIGHT KIND OF CIGARETTES TO SMOKE JUST BEFORE YOU KILL SOMETHING

  OLLIE JUNGFRAU’S DODGE Caravan minivan sat crumpled against the steel trusses of the Kelsey Creek Bridge.

  The nose of the van was folded in on itself, as though it had run head on into an unbendable pole. The front wheels sat in a stew of antifreeze, transmission fluid, and motor oil. There was blood, too. The windshield had been caved in, and dripping smears of blood streaked everywhere, over the shelf of the van’s dashboard, the steering wheel, and both front seats.

  I slipped one of the grimacing lemur masks over my head.

  “Um,” Robby said.

  I wanted to see if any red lights would show up. I wanted to hide my face from Robby Brees.

  Ingrid did not like the mask.

  If she were a normal dog, Ingrid would have barked at me.

  “Do not get out of the car, Robby,” I said from inside my mask.

  Robby said, “That’s Ollie Jungfrau’s van.”

  I did not say anything. Of course I knew whose van it was.

  Robby inched the Ford Explorer slowly past the wrecked vehicle.

  I smoked.

  The mouth of the grimacing lemur mask served as a kind of cigarette holder. I could easily wedge the filter end of my Benson & Hedges cigarette tightly between two of the grimacing lemur’s lower teeth.

  It was very convenient.

  “Uh,” Robby said. “What if smoking a cigarette in that mask messes up your sperm, Austin?”

  I did not care if my sperm got messed up. I wanted my sperm to get messed up.

  I did not say anything to Robby. I kept smoking with the mask on.