Grasshopper Jungle

by Andrew Smith

  “Uh,” I said.

  “I wonder if they are going to give us tickets for underage smoking of cigarettes,” Robby offered.

  “I wonder if they are going to shoot us for being Truant Rat Boys from Mars,” I said.

  The truth is, the two National Guardsmen nearly did shoot Robby and me for being Rat Boys from Mars who were also ditching school.

  We had no way of knowing that school, like everything else in Ealing, Iowa, had ceased to operate, due to the end of the world, and shit like that.

  Coincidentally, Robby Brees and I were both wearing our grimacing lemur masks as we sat in the front seat of the dying Ford Explorer.

  One of the guardsmen glowed red.

  “Holy shit, Rob,” I said.

  “I see it,” Robby concurred.

  “What’s wrong?” Connie Brees asked from the backseat.

  “Nothing,” I said, in the intergalactic teenage response to any question ever asked.

  Robby corrected me, “That stocky guy on the left is going to turn into one of those bugs.”

  And, from the backseat of Robby’s Ford Explorer, Louis finally spoke.

  He said, “Shit.”

  “How could that happen?” I said.

  “Those McKeon guys didn’t know shit about what they were doing. Their experiment never got outside their lab,” Robby said.

  “You deserve a Nobel Prize, Rob,” I said.

  I dreamed of going to Sweden with Robby. I hoped he would let Shann come, too.

  Connie Brees reached over the seat back and touched Robby’s shoulder.

  Connie said, “Do you know what’s going on, Robert?”

  She liked to call her son Robert.

  I liked the way it sounded, too.

  Robby said, “It would take hours to explain, Mom. Austin and I will tell you everything.”

  “Uh,” I said.

  I did not want Robby and me to tell his mother everything.

  Robby stopped the car in the middle of the road.

  Both of the National Guardsmen showed edgy, wide-eyed alertness. They were obviously uncertain as to how to respond to the two monsters in blue-and-white jumpsuits driving a beat-up Ford Explorer through the ruined town of Ealing, Iowa.

  History will show that it is exactly times like these that having a grown-up and a golden retriever in the backseat of your Ford Explorer when you are also dressed as a Truant Rat Boy from Mars has potentially lifesaving benefits. The guardsmen, who were armed with M-16s, also thought Connie Brees was very sexy, which provided a considerable anesthetizing influence over our detainers.

  An M-16 rifle is the military equivalent of a Colt AR-15. The difference is that the guardsmen’s M-16s had thirty-round clips and were fully automatic. Also, unlike Earl Elgin, I did not believe the soldiers would miss Robby and me if they decided to shoot.

  ENOLA GAY AND BEAU BARTON’S BONER

  CONNIE BREES SHOWED the soldiers her breasts and FedEx identification badge.

  She explained she was taking her “sons” and “husband” to safety in Waterloo.

  Robby’s mother did not actually expose herself in front of her teenage sons, but she did elevate her chest, the way that some women do, as though she were hoisting a battle flag before a lesser enemy.

  It made me happy to think of Robby as my brother, but I was not comfortable with the idea of Ah Wong Sing being my father. It was quite obvious that he would have had to be our stepfather, and no son ever likes his stepfather.

  That is a fact of history.

  The guards’ names were Beau Barton and Florencio Villegas.

  Beau Barton had a real dynamo of an Iowa name.

  Florencio Villegas did not.

  Also, Florencio Villegas had somehow been infected by Contained MI Plague Strain 412E.

  Nobody had any way of knowing how that came to be.

  Later, when Robby Brees and I discussed poetry, science, and history one evening in the library of Eden, we concluded that, somehow, the dead Unstoppable Soldiers may have developed Unstoppable Mold; or perhaps the mold grew on the egg masses that were deposited in Duane Coventry’s home on Onondaga Street. Maybe, we conjectured, Florencio Villegas happened to pass through the alley where we skated in Grasshopper Jungle when Robby’s blood was fresh on the pavement, after Tyler Jacobson dropped the moldy blue universe from inside Johnny McKeon’s office to splatter over everything.

  Whatever the origin, it did not matter.

  We would never know with absolute certainty.

  Histories are actually full of conjectures. Those conjectures become so accepted by descendants and readers that time itself is forced to rearrange its own furniture. This is a new history, and I cannot do such a thing.

  The end of the world was fully one week old, and the only human being on the entire planet called Earth with the capacity to stop it was my best friend, a sixteen-year-old homosexual Lutheran boy from Iowa named Robert Brees Jr.

  Florencio Villegas was born in Topeka, Kansas.

  Florencio Villegas was a diesel mechanic in Cedar Rapids.

  He would be dead within thirty minutes.

  Beau Barton worked as a bagger at a grocery store in Boone County. He would also be dead within thirty minutes.

  Beau Barton was twenty-four years old and smelled like mouthwash and chewing tobacco. Beau Barton was actually related to me in a distant and illegitimate, Iowa-by-marriage way.

  Beau Barton, like me, was Phoebe Hildebrandt’s great-grandson. Nobody ever knew Beau Barton’s actual great-grandfather was the Catholic priest who counseled Phoebe for years following the death of her first husband, Andrzej Szczerba. Everyone in Iowa City assumed the semen that created Beau’s grandfather, a man named Eldon Wayne Barton, came from the balls of Daniel Barton, whose balls did not work so well. Daniel Barton was the radio station owner Phoebe Hildebrandt married after her husband, Andrzej Szczerba, was shot in the head while taking a shit during the Battle of Cisterna in Italy during World War 2.

  All roads keep crossing and crossing at the point of my pen.

  Nobody ever knew anything about Beau Barton and me.

  Beau Barton adjusted his penis conspicuously as he leaned his face through my window. He was attempting to assess the threat level of the smoking Rat Boys from Mars and the woman with the large tits in the backseat.

  Beau Barton, my cousin, had an obvious erection. He stared and smiled, practically drooling at Connie Brees.

  Beau Barton thought he would most likely masturbate in the trees by the creek later that day if nothing was happening. He would not get that opportunity.

  Beau Barton was sweating. He showed obvious embarrassment when he became aware that I was looking directly at the camouflaged bulge caused by his swelling erection.

  Beau Barton was an idiot.

  When Beau Barton was fourteen years old, he unintentionally burned down his family’s garage in Boone County, Iowa. It happened when Beau Barton set fire to a plastic model of the Enola Gay. Beau Barton, the teenager, loved to build models and then set fire to them. Fires and big tits gave Beau Barton, the twenty-four-year-old National Guardsman, unstoppable hard-ons.

  Louis and Ingrid may just as well have been invisible to Beau Barton from Boone County. He probably might have noticed them had they been engulfed in flames.

  The Enola Gay was a plane named after the mother of Paul Tibbets, who was its pilot.

  History will show that Enola Gay Haggard Tibbets is the only mother who ever shared her name with an airplane that killed at least one-tenth of one million human beings.

  Paul Tibbets was covered for Mother’s Day gifts after naming a plane with such a reputation after his mom.

  Paul Tibbets grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, which is also where Florencio Villegas repaired diesel engines.

  Orville and Wilbur Wright invented the airplane.

  All roads converged at Kelsey Creek Bridge.

  At that exact moment, Beau Barton, the very aroused National Guardsman, wanted to do
only two things: He wanted to put his penis between Connie Brees’s breasts, and he wanted to go back home to Boone County, Iowa.

  Boone County, Iowa, is named for Nathan Boone, who was the youngest son of Daniel Boone. As far as I know, neither Nathan Boone nor his father ever wore coonskin caps. They also never killed more than a hundred thousand people. I wore an artificial coonskin cap that had been made in China on the day my fifteen-year-old brother, Eric Christopher Szerba, got his first blow job in a Nashville hotel from two prostitutes named Tiffany and Rhonda. Eric liked his blow job. Eric also started calling me Booney ever since that trip we took to Nashville when I was only nine and Eric got a blow job.

  When I was nine years old, I could not understand why my fifteen-year-old brother, Eric, would let Tiffany and Rhonda talk him into putting his penis inside their mouths, but when I was nine, I also could have just as easily lost my balls in a whaling accident and never known the difference.

  Boys’ attitudes about their balls and putting their penises in someone else’s mouth change significantly sometime after the age of nine.

  The soldiers wore the kind of camouflaged battle dress issues that troops used in Afghanistan, which is where my brother lost the lower portion of his right leg and both of his testicles. With those uniforms, the National Guardsmen did not blend in so well among things like Iowa cornfields and rivers with spawning walleyes, and shit like that.

  Robby and I took off our masks so Beau Barton and Florencio Villegas would not kill us, and so they could see we were just normal-looking sixteen-year-old Iowa brothers who happened to be wearing matching blue-and-white jumpsuits, which also did not blend in so well.

  Beau Barton was mad at me for staring at his erection.

  He said, “Are you boys in some kind of dance club or something?”

  “Uh,” I said.

  Robby answered, “We work at a car wash in Waterloo. These are our car wash uniforms.”

  Robby truly deserved a Nobel Prize, a million dollars, and a trip to Sweden with me and Shann, if he would let her come along.

  Beau Barton said, “Those are some real humdinger outfits they make you boys wear.”

  People in Boone County, Iowa, used words like humdinger.

  THE BATTLE OF KELSEY CREEK BRIDGE

  EALING, IOWA, WAS being evacuated by the National Guard.

  Beau Barton and Florencio Villegas had been posted on the road to Kelsey Creek Bridge. Their job was to ensure traffic moved in one direction only.

  That direction was away from Ealing.

  Beau Barton and Florencio Villegas instructed us to follow them across Kelsey Creek Bridge. They drove ahead of Robbie’s Ford Explorer in their armored vehicle. They decided to escort us around the wreck of Ollie Jungfrau’s Dodge Caravan minivan. Beau Barton and Florencio Villegas wanted to be certain we made it safely to the highway that connected Ealing to Waterloo.

  It was very kind of them to do that, but it was not a good idea.

  Someone had already placed a yellow tarp over the smashed front end of Ollie Jungfrau’s Dodge Caravan minivan. There was also a dripping black X spray-painted on the tarp. The National Guard were real dynamos at covering dead things with plastic.

  We had seen dozens of tarps in Ealing on our drive away from the Del Vista Arms. The tipped-over Eyewitness News van was entirely blanketed with them. It looked like an inflatable bouncer house you might rent for a kid’s birthday party.

  Watch your balls.

  Ealing had become the plastic tarp capital of Iowa.

  Unstoppable Tarps! Unstoppable Tarps!

  No one at all knew what the hell was going on in Ealing, Iowa, except for me and Robby Brees.

  Unfortunately for Beau Barton and Florencio Villegas, just as their vehicle crept past the wreckage of Ollie Jungfrau’s van, the Unstoppable Soldier that used to be a Hoover High School punk named Tyler Jacobson, still hopped up on meth and confused after his first sexual experiment, appeared, standing in the middle of the road at the end of the bridge.

  And just behind Tyler Jacobson was the Unstoppable Soldier that had hatched out of Travis Pope.

  They only wanted to do one thing at that exact moment.

  Tyler Jacobson and Travis Pope had also molted during the night. They were now eight feet tall, with abdomens as thick as telephone poles.

  Louis whimpered in the backseat.

  Louis knew all about Unstoppable Soldiers and the things they liked to do.

  The armored vehicle stopped.

  Robby said, “Holy shit.”

  I said, “They . . . um . . . got bigger.”

  Robby Brees’s sputtering Ford Explorer chose that exact moment to die.

  We were stuck on Kelsey Creek Bridge.

  “Um,” I said.

  The doors of the National Guard vehicle opened on either side. Beau Barton and Florencio Villegas popped out of the cab, their M-16s raised and ready. It looked like a scene from an action movie.

  Beau Barton and Florencio Villegas had guns, motherfuckers.

  It was a very bad idea.

  Connie Brees said, “Oh my God.”

  Ingrid yawned.

  Louis threw his arms around Connie Brees. He buried his face in Connie Brees’s hair and turned away from the spectacle that unfolded on the bridge ahead of us, through the windshield of Robby’s dead Ford Explorer.

  In the creek below us, walleyes spawned and spawned. Carried on Kelsey Creek’s steady current, Mrs. Edith Mitchell’s body had already drifted into the Cedar River.

  I found myself thinking about Saint Kazimierz, and contemplating why people said things like Oh my God at times like these. If there really was a God, I thought, why would Connie Brees want to lay her claim to a deity that unleashed Unstoppable Soldiers on human beings caught on a bridge above Kelsey Creek in Iowa?

  Johnny McKeon had one tattoo on his entire body. On his right forearm, in blurry blue-green ink, which is how all tattoos look on men as old as Johnny McKeon who had also served in the United States Navy, was the image of Sputnik. Beneath the satellite was an inscription that read Oh My God!

  Johnny McKeon told me that his father, who was also Dr. Grady McKeon’s father, looked up into the starlit sky above Iowa the night the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, and said those three exact words.

  Oh my God!

  Johnny McKeon’s father believed it was the end of the world in 1957.

  Johnny McKeon’s father had a heart attack as soon as he said those three words.

  He died when Johnny was an infant.

  Oh my God.

  History will probably verify that Oh my God was among the first idiomatic exclamations uttered by human beings. The phrase has persisted for at least twenty thousand years.

  We killed this big hairy thing, and this big hairy thing, and then we did a little experiment.

  Oh my God.

  You know what I mean.

  If God had satellite TV, he was probably tuned in to the Battle of Kelsey Creek Bridge. Maybe he and Saint Kazimierz were sitting on a cloud couch together, nibbling unstoppable popcorn and watching what happened to us, and to Beau Barton and Florencio Villegas, too.

  The National Guardsmen’s machine guns spit bursts of metal-jacketed bullets at the Unstoppable Soldiers. The sound was electric and terrifying. The bullets may just as well have been candy sprinkles on unstoppable frosted cupcakes, because they had absolutely no effect at all on the monstrous praying mantis beasts with blade-spiked arms.

  Tyler Jacobson and Travis Pope walked through the spray of bullets like they were cats walking through darkness; like beauty pageant queens parading through swirling showers of glitter.

  If the Unstoppable Soldiers even noticed the bullets careening off their exoskeletons, they did not show it.

  Tyler Jacobson snatched Florencio Villegas between the pointed blades that ridged his crushing arms. Tyler Jacobson began devouring the soldier, boots, helmet, body armor, and all. Some of Florencio Villegas’s blood splashed over the metal h
ood of the armored vehicle he’d been driving just moments earlier.

  Tyler Jacobson even tried to eat Florencio Villegas’s M-16.

  He spit it out.

  Travis Pope attempted to fight with Tyler Jacobson over the meal he was making of Florencio Villegas. Beau Barton bravely fired and fired at both of the Unstoppable Soldiers while they ate and sparred over Florencio Villegas’s right leg.

  That was exactly when Travis Pope noticed the other, as-yet-uneaten National Guardsman.

  It was not a good thing for my second- or third-cousin, or whatever sharing a great-grandmother made Beau Barton to me.

  I got out of Robby’s car first.

  For a moment, stunned, Robby Brees and I had sat there, watching what was happening on the bridge ahead of us. Then I realized we were all stuck anyway, and Robby and I still had our paintball guns that were loaded with the blood of a real, cigarette-smoking, homosexual teenage God.

  As soon as my feet hit the tarmac of the bridge span, Robby shouted, “Austin! Hey! What the hell are you doing?”

  Tyler Jacobson was covered with blood and bug spit. He also had a foot-long length of Florencio Villegas’s webbed belt dangling from his left mandible like a strand of bloody spaghetti. Tyler Jacobson was aroused by the motion I made as I ran from Robby’s Ford Explorer. He watched me for a moment while he excreted a foamy white meringue of bug shit onto the blacktop between his two hind legs.

  Tyler Jacobson was already hungry again.

  Beau Barton emptied his M-16 on the Unstoppable Soldiers. He tried to run back toward Ollie Jungfrau’s van when his gun stopped firing.

  Unstoppable Soldiers are very, very fast.

  Travis Pope sprang with a single jump over the armored vehicle the guardsmen had been driving. Travis Pope landed directly on top of Beau Barton. It was like a cat playing with a very small mouse.

  Travis Pope pinned Beau Barton with his two middle legs.

  Beau Barton wriggled and squirmed.

  Travis Pope lowered his triangular face, opened his massive jaws, and bit off everything that had once been Beau Barton from the armpits up. Travis Pope chewed and chewed.

  The sound was like a starved barbershop quartet engaged in a buffalo-wing-eating contest.