The Grasshopper Trap

by Patrick F. McManus

  “Well, hurry,” Eddie said.

  “I’ll get my mom to make us a lunch while I’m cleaning my room,” I said.

  “Don’t do that,” Eddie said, his freckles merging into an expression of disgust. “You can’t have your mom make a lunch. You have to sneak the food. Don’t you know anything about running away?”

  “This is my first time,” I said. “I’ll try to sneak some food.”

  “Good,” Eddie said. “I brought along a gunnysack to carry our food and stuff in. Now hurry. And don’t get caught.”

  Don’t get caught! What a wonderful expression! If there was one thing Eddie knew how to do, it was to charge me up for a new adventure.

  My mother was in the kitchen clearing away the breakfast dishes when I rushed in. I snatched a couple of pieces of cold toast and a strip of bacon off a moving plate.

  “You made it just in time, buster,” she said. “Land sakes, I never knew anybody to take so long to feed chickens! Now go clean up your room. Smells like something died in there!”

  Actually, it had died on the highway, squashed flat by a big truck, but this was no time to argue fine points. I waited until Mom left the kitchen, then sneaked as much food as I could cram into a paper sack and took off.

  Crazy Eddie was waiting out behind the woodshed. “That was fast,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I didn’t clean my room. I figured what’s the use cleaning my room if I’m running away.”

  “I wondered about that,” Eddie said. “You’re starting to catch on.”

  I put my paper bag of sneaked food into our pack. Eddie swung the gunnysack over his shoulder, staggered back a few steps, caught his balance, and then started off in the direction of the creek.

  “Where we running away to?” I asked.

  “Well, the first thing, we got to wade up the crick to the railroad bridge.”

  “How come we got to wade up the crick?”

  “’Cause that’s the way it’s done, don’t you know that? It’s so the sheriff and the posse can’t follow your trail.”

  “Hold up a sec, Eddie,” I said, my tennis shoes squeaking on the grass as I slid to a stop. “Tell me that again about the sheriff and the posse.”

  “They always send the sheriff and the posse after runaways,” he said. “But don’t worry. By the time they find out we’re gone, we’ll be so far away they’ll never catch us.”

  “How are we going to get so far away?”

  “We’ll hop a freight.”

  Amazing! After all the wild and ridiculous ideas Crazy Eddie had come up with that summer, he had finally hit on something sensible. He went on to explain how we would become hoboes and ride freights all over the country and camp out under the stars. After our food ran out, he said, we would live off the land, picking wild berries and catching fish and stuff.

  “Which reminds me,” he said. “What kind of food did you sneak?”

  “Let’s see, I got half a box of cornflakes, a jar of milk and some sugar to eat on the cornflakes, a can of pork ‘n’ beans, four pieces of fried chicken, half a loaf of bread, a jar of jam, a bunch of carrots, about a dozen sugar cookies, some raisins, three apples, and a package of graham crackers.” I could tell from the expression on Eddie’s face that he disapproved of my selection.

  “What’d you bring carrots for?” he said. “They’re one of the reasons I’m running away.”

  We waded up the creek toward the railroad bridge, the water reaching only slightly above our ankles but still deep enough to throw the sheriff and the posse off our trail. Some of the families who lived along the creek used it for a dump. This was back in the days before we had either ecology or environment, and creeks were often regarded as good garbage collectors. Eddie and I sorted through several dumps and found an old kettle and a few other odds and ends to use on our adventure. We added the new finds to the gunnysack, under the weight of which we took turns staggering along toward the railroad bridge. Running away had turned out to be much harder work than I expected.

  We reached the railroad bridge about noon and were surprised to see two men sitting in the shade beneath it. They had built a fire and were roasting a chunk of baloney on the end of a sharpened stick. Both of them were gazing at the sizzling meat as if it were the most fascinating thing they had ever seen. Then they noticed us.

  I whispered to Eddie, “What’ll we do?”

  “They’re hoboes,” he said out of the corner of his mouth. “Real hoboes. Maybe they’ll want to talk to us.”

  “Maybe they’ll want to murder us,” I said, lacking Crazy Eddie’s natural optimism. I lowered the gunnysack to a sandbar, looked around for an escape route, and began silently to rev my internal-combustion engine.

  One of the men had dirty white hair reaching nearly to his shoulders. He beckoned to us with a long, bony finger.

  “It’s okay,” Eddie said. “Look. They’re smiling.”

  Well, that was a relief! I hoisted the sack back onto my shoulder and we slogged up the creek to the bridge.

  “Howdy,” Eddie said.

  “Howdy,” the white-haired man said. “What you boys doin’ out here?”

  “We’re running away,” said Eddie. “Gonna be hoboes and ride freight trains around the country.”

  The man nodded, still smiling broadly. “Runnin’ away,” he said. “Gonna be hoboes. Hmmmmm. Maybe Wild Bill and me can show you a few of the ropes. This here’s Wild Bill. I’m Whitey. Me and Bill been hoboin’a long time, ain’t that right, Bill?”

  “Yep,” Wild Bill said. He was tall and gangly, with black hair and a big mustache that curled up on the ends. He didn’t seem nearly so friendly as Whitey. “Whatcha got in the gunnysack, kid?” he said to me.

  “Nothing much,” I said. “Just some food.”

  Wild Bill and Whitey both stared at the sack as though it were an unexpected birthday present.

  “What kind of food?” Whitey said, leaning forward.

  Pleased by their obvious interest, I reached in the sack and pulled out the first thing I could find.

  Wild Bill and Whitey seemed to sag. “Carrots,” Bill said. “Cripes, that’s why I run away from home myself.”

  I tossed the carrots in the creek and began to haul out, one by one, each item of our food supply. With the appearance of each new course, Bill and Whitey oohed and aahed as if they were watching a Fourth of July fireworks display. In addition to my sneaked food, Eddie had sneaked a chunk of roast beef, a slice of fried ham, three wieners, some cheese, an onion, several quart jars of fruit, a jar of dill pickles, and a jar of canned rabbit. As I arranged the food in neat rows along the bank, Wild Bill and Whitey looked as if they were about to cry.

  “I told you there was a God,” Whitey said to Bill.

  Why Wild Bill might have had any doubt, I couldn’t imagine. Of course there was a God. Everybody knew that. Where did Bill think babies came from?

  “Boys,” Whitey said, “we was just fixin’ a bite to eat.” He pointed at the blackened chunk of baloney on the end of the stick. “Care to join us?”

  “Naw,” Eddie said. “You don’t have enough. Pat and me will just eat some of our own food.”

  One entire side of Wild Bill’s face twitched. “You don’t seem to get the pitcher, kid,” he said, with possibly a hint of menace.

  “Ha ha,” Whitey laughed. “You see, the first thing you got to learn about hoboin’ is that when a bunch of us hoboes gets together, we always share whatever food anybody’s brought. It’s only polite, and that way the hoboes what don’t have much food, they don’t try to kil … uh, don’t get peeved at you for not mindin’ your manners.”

  “Oh,” Eddie said. “In that case, we’ll share our food. We’ve only been hoboin’ for a few hours and didn’t know.”

  “That’s all right,” Whitey said, as he and Bill each grabbed chicken drumsticks and sucked them to the bare bone in a single slurp. Then they snatched up the rest of the chicken and repeated the performance. Whitey wiped hi
s mouth on his sleeve and rolled his eyes, pretending those old cold pieces of chicken were about the best thing he had ever tasted in his life. Eddie and I laughed appreciatively at their clowning.

  Wild Bill now seemed to be in a better humor. “Say, Whitey, maybe we should make the boys some soup. We can heat up this canned rabbit for ourselves and they can eat the soup.”

  “Good idea,” Whitey said. “You boys like soup?”

  “What kind of soup?”

  “Hobo soup. It’s made with a soup stone.”

  “I never heard of a soup stone,” I said. “What does it taste like?”

  “Any flavor you like. All us hoboes carry a soup stone. When a hobo ain’t got nothin’ else to eat, he gets out his soup stone and boils it in a pot of water, with a little salt and pepper.”

  “Hey, yeah,” Eddie said. “We’d like to try that. Where do you get these soup stones, anyway?”

  “Mexico,” Bill said. “They’re kind of expensive, but you boys get to hoboin’down that way, you want to pick up one. You got the soup stone, Whitey?”

  “I left it down here by the crick,” Whitey said. “Ah, here it is.” He bent over and picked up a gray, rounded stone. You had to look at it pretty carefully to see that it wasn’t just an ordinary old gray rock, but the way Whitey handled it, you could tell the stone was precious. He placed it gently in the bottom of a tin can, scooped the can full of water from the creek, and set it over the fire.

  While our soup and their rabbit were warming over the fire, Whitey and Wild Bill entertained us by eating our food in a comical manner. Bill slurped down a whole jar of peaches without even taking a breath, while Whitey hacked off two thick slabs of bread and made himself a sandwich that must have weighed nine pounds. The rabbit had only heated to about lukewarm before they devoured it. Then they lay back burping and groaning happily to watch Eddie and me eat our soup.

  “How’s the soup?” Whitey asked.

  I smiled and smacked my lips politely. “Real good.”

  “I think it needs a little salt,” Eddie said.

  “Believe me, it tastes a whole lot better after you been hoboin’ awhile,” Whitey said.

  “You bet,” Wild Bill said, massaging his belly.

  “Say, you were going to teach us the ropes about hoboin’,” Eddie said.

  “Oh, yeah, that’s right,” said Whitey. “Well, it’s pretty exciting, particularly at night in the boxcars. That’s when the big hairy spiders come out. They’re about this big.” He put his hairy hand down clawlike on the ground and made a scrabbling motion with it toward Eddie and me. We jumped back, almost spilling our soup. Wild Bill and Whitey chuckled.

  “Tell ’em about Hatchet Harvey and how he killed them two young fellas to get their soup stone,” Wild Bill said.

  “Not while they’re still eatin’ their soup,” Whitey said. “I don’t want to spoil their appetites. Youngsters need lots of nourishment. But look here at this, boys.” He rolled up one of his dirt-caked pantlegs and showed us a huge, horrible, appetite-spoiling sore on his leg. “Just look at this. One of them big ol’ hairy spiders did it to me. Oh, it hurt like blazes, and I was howlin’ and screamin’ and tryin’ to pull that ol’ spider off, but he had his ugly jaws clamped on to my leg right down into the meat and was shootin’ his poison in …”

  A couple of hours later, Crazy Eddie and I were poking along the road that led back to our homes, Eddie having decided it would be better to postpone running away until after his birthday the following month.

  “You think that was true, what Whitey told about the spider?” he asked.

  “Naw,” I said. “He was just tryin’ to scare us.”

  “That’s what I thought, too,” Eddie said. “Both Wild Bill and Whitey must be pretty dumb to think we’d believe those stories.”

  “Of course they’re dumb,” I said. “Why else would they let us trade them the rest of our food for their soup stone?”

  Gunrunning

  Hubert, a young married fellow of my acquaintance, confided in me the other day that he and his wife had just had their first quarrel.

  “Oh, yeah?” I said. “What about?”

  “About practically nothing,” he said. “I’ve been needing a new rifle, so I went out and bought one and took it home to show Joyce. Well, if she didn’t hit the ceiling! Mad? Whew! Can you believe it?”

  “That was dumb, Hubie,” I said. “Risking your marriage over a new gun. I thought you were smarter than that.”

  “I shouldn’t have bought the gun, huh?”

  “Of course you should have bought the gun. You needed it, didn’t you? You just shouldn’t have shown the gun to Joyce. Have a little consideration for her feelings, Hubie. Wives have feelings too, you know. The only decent thing for a husband to do is to sneak the new gun into the house. Learn to sneak, man, learn to sneak.”

  “Really?” Hubie said. “I didn’t know.”

  During my talk with Hubie, it occurred to me that there are probably many other young married hunters out there who are equally in need of marriage counseling. In the interest of averting as much marital discord in the hunting fraternity as possible, I have put together the following primer on strategies and tactics for bringing home a new gun.

  First of all, let us consider the psychology of the young wife as it pertains to her husband’s guns. It is important to note that the first gun the husband brings home is greeted with considerable enthusiasm by the spouse, and she may even brag about it to her friends. “Fred bought a new gun the other day to hunt elk and doves and things with,” she will say. Of course, Fred must then explain that the gun is limited to hunting elk or deer. For hunting doves he needs a shotgun, he tells her.

  “Why can’t you hunt doves with the same gun?” she says. “I really think you could if you wanted to.”

  Fred then explains the difference between a rifle and a shotgun, and his wife finally agrees that he probably does need another gun.

  Now that’s the typical situation the young hunter faces. He starts with a base of two guns, his wife granting him the benefit of the doubt that two guns are actually needed. After the second gun, the argument that he needs a new gun will be dismissed by the wife with an upward roll of the eyeballs and a big sigh. We are talking only third gun here, remember, nothing more. If you’re just married, upward-rolling eyeballs and big sighs may seem formidable obstacles, but they’re really not that serious. Go buy the gun and bring it home. The eyeball-rolling and big sighs will let up after a few days. Now comes the biggie—the Fourth Gun!

  With the mere mention of your need for a fourth gun, the wife skips right over the eyeball-rolling and big sighs and goes directly to a recital of your deficiencies of character, weird masculine quirks, and all sins committed to date. She will bring up such matters as saving for the baby’s college education, the fact that she is still wearing the clothes her parents bought her in high school, the threatening note from the electric company, etc. “And you want another gun!” she will finish, the sarcasm flickering about the room like sheet lightning.

  The fourth gun is the tough one, and in the face of this spousal assault, there is always the temptation to sneak the fourth gun. That’s a mistake. Your wife’s knowing you purchased a fourth gun is essential to further development of your gun collection. Here’s why. After you bring the gun home and show it to your wife, she will shake her head and say, “I don’t know why you need all those guns.” Note that she doesn’t say “four guns” but rather the vague and general “all those guns.” Henceforth, she will think of your gun collection not in terms of specific numbers but as a single collective entity—all!

  To thoroughly grasp this important concept, suppose your wife is dusting the gun case. “Him and all those guns,” she might say to herself, possibly with a very tiny tolerant smile. What she fails to notice is that there are now five guns in the case! Once the psychological barrier of the fourth gun is crossed, the gun collection can be expanded indefinitely without the wife�
�s noticing, provided the husband uses some common sense and doesn’t add too many guns at once. Two or three a year is about right, spaced at decent intervals.

  There is one pitfall in this strategy—the gun cabinet itself. Although the wife will never bother to count the guns, she will notice that there are three empty slots in the cabinet. Therefore, you must make sure that there are always three empty slots in the cabinet, even as your collection expands from four to sixty guns. If you plan on enlarging your collection, buy a gun cabinet that can be expanded by adding new sections, so that there are always three or more empty slots. It works. My wife of thirty years told me the other day that she must be slowing down with age. “When we were first married,” she said, “I could dust that gun cabinet of yours in ten seconds and now it takes me nearly half an hour.”

  But how do you get all those guns into the house without your wife’s knowing, you ask. Actually, it is all right if every few years you simply walk right into the house and say, “Look, dear, I bought a new gun.”

  “Neato,” she will say. “I’m ecstatic. Now tell me, what did you want to buy another gun for when you already have all those guns? I’ll bet you haven’t shot most of them in the past five years.”

  Shot them? Yes, a wife will actually say that. She will not be able to comprehend that you needed the gun because you needed it. She will not understand that you need the guns just to be there, to be your guns, to be looked at and fondled from time to time. She will not be able to fathom that you need the guns even though you don’t need to shoot them. Tell her a gun collection is like wilderness. Even though we don’t use all of it all the time, we need to know it’s there. Probably it won’t do any good to tell her that, but it’s worth a try.

  Stating the simple truth often works in explaining an occasional gun purchase to your wife. But why take unnecessary risks? Go with your best lie and get the gun stashed in your expandable gun cabinet as quickly as possible.

  Oddly enough, there are few really good lies for explaining the purchase of a new gun. There’s the classic “A Fantastic Bargain,” of course, in which you tell your wife that the gun you just paid $300 for was on sale for $27.50. If her eyebrows shoot up in disbelief, you mention that three men in white coats showed up at the sport shop and led the manager away before he could slash the prices on the rest of the guns. Indeed, you say, you could have picked up five more brand-new guns for a total of eighty-five dollars, but you didn’t want to take excessive advantage of a crazy person.