Grasshopper Jungle

by Andrew Smith

  Robby stopped the Explorer and slipped the second mask over his head.

  He smoked, too.

  And Robby said, “I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings, Austin.”

  “It’s okay.” I said, “You are right, Robby. I deserved it. I deserve to have messed-up sperm.”

  “Nobody deserves messed-up sperm,” Robby said.

  He drove around Ollie Jungfrau’s ruined Dodge Caravan minivan.

  Unfortunately, at exactly that moment, Mrs. Edith Mitchell woke up. Mrs. Edith Mitchell was still hiding in the backseat of Ollie Jungfrau’s Dodge Caravan. She had fallen asleep, wedged down between the seats and the floorboard of the van. When she poked her head up to see if she was being rescued, what Mrs. Edith Mitchell saw drove her beyond the brink of her sanity.

  What she saw were two monsters with rat-like heads in blue-and-white jumpsuits driving a Ford Explorer while they smoked cigarettes.

  Mrs. Edith Mitchell thought Ollie Jungfrau was correct: That aliens from outer space had landed in Iowa, for whatever reason.

  Mrs. Edith Mitchell believed the end of the world had come to Ealing, Iowa.

  She was probably correct.

  Robby Brees and I did not see Mrs. Edith Mitchell looking out at us through the dark rear windows of the crumpled Dodge Caravan. As we passed, Mrs. Edith Mitchell finally mustered enough courage to climb through the bloody muck in the front seat and get out of the van.

  Mrs. Edith Mitchell removed her shoes and all of her clothing. She jumped, naked and white, like a fluffy marshmallow schoolmarm, from the side of the Kelsey Creek Bridge into Kelsey Creek.

  It was not a good idea.

  Mrs. Edith Mitchell did not know how to swim.

  Beneath the surface of Kelsey Creek, a cluster of walleyes was engaged in the spring spawn.

  On the other side of the bridge, past the parking lot for Amelia Jenks Bloomer Park, as Robby drove into the neighborhood where I lived we saw a television news van that had come all the way from Des Moines. The van was painted with a bold design that said Eyewitness News. The van sat on its side in the middle of the street. The radar antenna had been deployed and was stretched out across the road like a big broken arm.

  The doors on the Eyewitness News van were left open. We caught quick, passing glimpses of a bloody mess inside the vehicle. There was one black high-top Converse basketball shoe sitting in the road beside the tipped-over van.

  Unstoppable Soldiers do not like to be filmed by television news crews from Des Moines.

  The first Converse Chuck Taylor signature basketball shoes were made in Massachusetts in 1932. In 1932, Krzys Szczerba’s Nightingale Convenience Works manufactured the last Nightingale urinal.

  That particular urinal, Krzys Szczerba’s final, grand porcelain monolith, ended up beneath the ground in an Iowa sanctuary constructed by a madman. Robby Brees and I urinated into it together, in Eden.

  We drove past three houses that were engulfed in flames, and two others that had already burned to the ground. Apparently, the people of Ealing tried to come up with some method for fighting the Unstoppable Soldiers.

  Their ideas did not appear to have been effective.

  There were dozens of dead Iowans, and mere parts of others, scattered like Halloween decorations across yards, on fence posts and mailboxes, or lying in the streets.

  Robby said, “When we get to your house, we have to get the guns loaded quick. Then we need to go back to the Del Vista Arms.”

  I said, “Why?”

  “My mom,” Robby said. “I have to try to get my mom.”

  “Oh.”

  Despite Connie Brees’s obvious shortcomings as a single parent, her son, Robert Brees Jr., was a good boy.

  Robby Brees really was a superhero.

  I did not even think about my mother and father until Robby told me he wanted to rescue his mother. My cell phone was with my clothes inside the locker room in Eden. I hoped my parents, and Eric, my brother who had lost half his right leg and both of his testicles in Afghanistan nearly a week before, were not planning on returning to the continent of North America anytime soon.

  “You are a superhero or shit like that, Rob,” I said.

  “A gay superhero,” Robby added.

  Robby blew a big cloud of smoke out from the mouth of his grimacing lemur mask. It was just about the coolest thing I had ever seen.

  “I just realized that the Unstoppable Soldiers’ God is gay,” I said.

  “I told you I was—in seventh grade,” Robby corrected.

  I smiled and nodded. The grimacing lemur mask on my head only grimaced and smoked.

  “I am sorry, Rob,” I said. I squeezed Robby’s hand.

  “There’s nothing you can do about me being gay,” Robby said.

  Readers of history may decide that joking while two guys are driving around through a town that has recently been slaughtered by six-foot-tall praying mantis beasts with shark-tooth-studded arms is in poor taste.

  It is.

  But that is exactly what real boys have always done when confronted with the brutal aftermath of warfare.

  Dulce Et Decorum Est.

  I said, “I am going to try to be a better person. Not so selfish and shit. And maybe one day you will tell me if I have done it.”

  “Uh. Let’s have another fag before we get out,” Robby said. He maneuvered the Explorer as close to my garage as he could get it. Then Robby said, “And then let’s go kill some big fucking bugs, Porcupine.”

  “I think Benson & Hedges are the right kind of cigarettes to smoke just before you kill something,” I said.

  THERE ARE NO CUP-O-NOODLES IN EDEN

  EDEN’S ARMY OF grimacing lemurs landed in Ealing, and it was time for them to go to war.

  Robby Brees and I charged up the paintball guns. We injected small amounts of Robby’s blood into dozens of grape-sized jellied projectiles.

  When we finished, we left three bloodstained hypodermic needles on the white tiled countertop in my kitchen. It looked like a heroin den.

  It was disgusting.

  The smell of blood made me want to vomit. I had been smelling it all day.

  We smoked and smoked to cover up the defeated odor that hung everywhere over Ealing, Iowa.

  Before we left my house, I grabbed an armload of clean underwear and T-shirts and the razor and shaving cream from my bathroom. Tomorrow would be Saturday. Saturdays were shaving days. I did not take my bottle of bubble bath with me. I would miss taking baths. There had to be a bathtub somewhere in Eden.

  There were no Cup-O-Noodles in Eden, so I also filled a paper sack with as many of the paper and Styrofoam containers of the miracle food I could find in the pantry.

  All houses in Iowa have pantries.

  Cup-O-Noodles are unstoppable food.

  Before we left my house, the telephone in the kitchen began ringing and ringing. It was my father calling. He wanted to know what the hell was happening. He wanted to know why the hell I had not called him. And he asked, how the hell did Ealing, Iowa, end up on news broadcasts in Germany, telling stories of enormous bugs that were devouring every man, woman, and child in the town? What the hell was all this about?

  “It is a lot of hell, Dad,” I said.

  At exactly that moment, all the power cut out everywhere in Ealing, Iowa.

  The wireless phone in our kitchen went dead.

  Robby and I heard gunfire in the distance.

  Ealing, Iowa, had gone to hell.

  RAT BOYS FROM MARS, AND AN UNFORTUNATE INCIDENT INVOLVING AN INFLATABLE WHALE

  PICTURE THIS IF YOU CAN:

  Robby Brees and I, wearing fur-covered, full-head grimacing lemur masks that helped identify Unstoppables, smoking cigarettes and dressed in matching form-fitting blue-and-white Eden Project jumpsuits, as we carried fully automatic paintball rifles slung over our shoulders. And we were accompanied by a sixty-pound golden retriever that could not bark.

  If we had thought everything out more clearly, we probabl
y would have anticipated the likelihood of being fired upon by real guns and real bullets from my next-door neighbors, Earl Elgin and his teenage son, whose name was Earl Elgin Jr.

  Earl Elgin Jr. was fifteen years old; a redheaded Lutheran boy who attended Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy, and fortunately for me and Robby, he and his father were both terrible shots. They were especially terrible shots because they were scared out of their minds after enduring a night-long rampage of six-foot-tall praying mantis beasts with spike-armed claws. And now they had come face-to-face with what they believed could only be alien invader rat boys from Mars.

  We knew Earl Elgin Jr. as EJ.

  EJ Elgin had skin the color of cottage cheese.

  He also had a real dynamo of an Iowa name—EJ Elgin.

  In the same way that Benson & Hedges says I spend a lot of money on my cigarettes, EJ Elgin says Sperm met egg in Iowa.

  EJ Elgin only had one ball.

  EJ Elgin lost one of his testicles when he was nine years old. EJ’s father, Earl Elgin Sr., hired a giant inflatable whale-shaped bouncer house for EJ’s birthday party. One of EJ’s balls got stuck inside a plastic-rimmed ventilation hole near what was supposed to be the big inflatable whale’s spout. It is painful to recall, but I am only doing my job. I was there. I recorded the history of EJ Elgin’s detached ball.

  Nothing puts a damper on a boy’s ninth birthday party like the loss of one of the guest of honor’s guests of honor.

  EJ had to be taken to the hospital in Waterloo after having one of his balls detached when it became lodged in the plastic vent on a giant inflatable whale. He came home the following day with an excess of unoccupied space inside his scrotum. I do not know if doctors discard detached human balls in the trash can or not.

  The boys at Curtis Crane pestered EJ for a while.

  After his ninth birthday party and the horrible incident with the enormous inflatable whale, all of us, to a boy, were horrified and curious. All the boys at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy wanted to see EJ’s ball sack, now that one of EJ’s balls had been lost to a whale attack.

  By the time the boys at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy entered puberty, which is an epiphany, a kind of religious awakening as to the true magnificence of our balls, and shit like that, we all felt mournfully afraid of EJ Elgin, the boy with only one ball.

  EJ Elgin, to my knowledge, never named his solitary ball.

  The one he lost might have been appropriately named Jonah.

  Perhaps Ahab.

  “Stay right there and don’t move, you motherfucking rat boys from Mars,” Earl Elgin Sr. said.

  He nervously pointed his emptied assault rifle directly at my belly.

  “Dad, we caught us some alien rat fucks from outer space,” EJ added. “Let’s shoot them in the balls.”

  EJ plinked a shot level with Robby’s crotch. Robby flinched and whined. EJ only had a BB gun.

  The Elgin males were not especially brilliant, but they had been through a lot. I had to give them that.

  “Uh,” I said.

  Robby raised his open hand in the intergalactic gesture of peace, and said, “Please do not shoot us in the balls, EJ Elgin. It is only me, Robby Brees, and my friend, Austin Szerba, who is your next-door neighbor, and we are not rat boys from Mars. We come in peace, and smoking cigarettes.”

  “Benson and Hedges,” I said.

  Earl Elgin squinted and tilted his head. The weapon he held was a Colt AR15-A3 Tactical Carbine. It looked exactly like the paintball rifles Robby and I carried, except if Earl Elgin had actually shot us with it, Robby and I would both be dead, gory messes. EJ Elgin had a Daisy .177 pellet rifle. If he had actually shot us with it, Robby and I would have stinging welts on our skin, possibly on our ball sacks.

  He missed Robby’s ball sack.

  A Rat Boy from Mars definitely would not want to get shot in the balls with a Daisy .177.

  My next-door neighbors, EJ Elgin and his father, had been packing camping equipment into the bed of a pickup truck. They were planning on taking the rest of their family, which consisted of EJ’s mother, who was named Rosemary, and his two younger sisters, Edie and Donna, as far away from Ealing and the monster invasion as they could get. When Robby and I came outside of my house, carrying armloads of underwear, shaving stuff, and Cup-O-Noodles, Earl Elgin Sr. and his son, EJ, saw us and grabbed their weapons.

  Earl Elgin Sr. let loose a burst of rifle fire that shattered nearly every window on my house, as well as one on the driver’s side of Robby’s old Ford Explorer—which had really taken a beating since the attack by Hungry Jack the night before.

  “Holy shit!” I said.

  Boxers, T-shirts, and Styrofoam containers of dehydrated ramen noodles flew everywhere.

  Ingrid, who was not particularly startled by the gunfire, was shitting in the front yard when it happened.

  That was exactly when Earl Elgin Sr. told us to put our hands up and surrender, because he and his boy were going to become some kind of national heroes for capturing the invading Rat Boys from Mars.

  “Shoot them in the balls, Dad,” EJ Elgin urged.

  “Uh,” Robby said.

  Both of us had our hands raised in the intergalactic gesture of Please do not shoot us in the balls.

  “Earl Elgin, you shot my goddamned house!” I said.

  Earl Elgin Sr. looked confused.

  Earl Elgin Sr. said, “What the fuck did you creatures do with the Szerba boy?”

  Robby Brees and I did not get killed that day by Earl Elgin Sr. and his one-balled son, EJ.

  But it took some dramatic pleading from me to stop Earl Elgin Sr. from shooting me and allow me to take my head off so I might show him who was actually inside the clinging and form-fitting Rat Boy from Mars jumpsuit.

  “Thank you, Saint Kazimierz,” I said.

  I felt like the virgin saint was looking out for me and Robby.

  There was no other way I could explain not being shot in the balls.

  We left Earl and EJ to their hurried departure preparations and got into Robby’s battered Ford Explorer.

  And Robby said, “Holy shit, Austin,” as we drove away from my house and headed toward the Del Vista Arms.

  What could I do?

  THE BATTLE OF THE DEL VISTA ARMS

  I ASKED MYSELF THIS:

  What could I do?

  Just one week earlier, everything was perfect. Everything was Iowa blue plaid. Robby and I skated in Grasshopper Jungle. Shann Collins made me very horny. There were no books mentioning Catholics or masturbation available in the library at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy. Ollie Jungfrau dreamed of internet porn and Saturday morning donuts with me and Johnny McKeon.

  All of that equaled normal.

  Then Grant Wallace and the Hoover Boys beat the shit out of Robby Brees and me. They threw our shoes up on the roof at Grasshopper Jungle because they said we were queers from Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy, and after that, the whole world went to shit.

  So, what could I do?

  Robby played Let It Bleed.

  Although it had been made more than forty years before, it seemed like every song on that Rolling Stones album was precisely about Robby and me, or Unstoppable Soldiers, Ealing, Iowa, and McKeon Industries.

  Robby sang, “We all need someone we can feed on. And if you want it, you can feed on me . . .”

  “Uh,” I said.

  We smoked cigarettes.

  Ingrid sighed and yawned in the backseat.

  And at the exact moment we pulled up to Robby Brees’s apartment, the cook from the destroyed Pancake House, Louis, whose real name was Ah Wong Sing, happened to be hiding inside a cinder-block cubicle where dumpsters were stored at the Del Vista Arms.

  Louis’s clothes were ripped. He was missing one shoe and his shirt hung open. Dried blood stippled his torn cook’s trousers. But he was very, very happy to see us.

  He also did not glow red when I looked at him through the eyes of my grimacing lemur mask.

  But
Louis was so psychologically worn from what he had seen and been through that he did not even seem startled by the Rat Boy from Mars with the fully automatic AR15-A3 Tactical Carbine replica paintball gun.

  “Good morning, Louis,” I said.

  I waved my open hand in the intergalactic Rat Boy from Mars gesture of This is the end of the world, but I am politely greeting you anyway.

  “Um,” Robby said.

  Robby Brees was not wearing his grimacing lemur mask. “It’s just us, Louis. Me, and Austin from the secondhand store. You know? Austin Szerba? The dynamo kid?”

  Robby Brees held up a lit cigarette in the intergalactic gesture of We are the skater kids who smoke in the alley, and shit like that.

  Louis had not slept in two days. He was spent. He’d had sexual intercourse with Robby Brees’s mother three times in the previous twenty-four hours. After he ran away from the carnage at the Kelsey Creek Bridge, Louis came back to the Del Vista Arms, thinking he would find safety and Connie Brees.

  Instead, Louis found the Unstoppable Soldier called Hungry Jack.

  The end of the world was one week old, and people everywhere were finding out about it. And the Battle of Ealing began that morning at the Del Vista Arms Luxury Apartments.

  Here is what happened:

  Hungry Jack was confused, and Louis was a very motivated runner when being chased by Unstoppable Soldiers. Hungry Jack had been huddling beneath the aluminum roof that covered a row of cars at the Del Vista Arms when Louis ran through the parking lot.

  Unstoppable Soldiers are like cats in that they are stimulated by movement. They are also like walleyes in that they only want to do two things. The two things walleyes and Unstoppable Soldiers want to do is fuck and eat.

  Unstoppable Soldiers are not as intelligent as either cats or fish.

  So when Louis managed to slip inside the dumpster corral, Hungry Jack looked around for a while and then forgot what he had been looking for.

  Unfortunately for Robby and me, Hungry Jack became stimulated by the movement of a Rat Boy from Mars in a tight blue-and-white jumpsuit. The Unstoppable Soldier that had hatched out from Hungry Jack’s body in a cornfield outside of Waterloo while Robby and I stood in horrified amazement and watched it happen became very aroused by the motion around Robby Brees’s Ford Explorer.