Grasshopper Jungle (18 page)

 

3. NEITHER OF THE OTHER BOYS
killed in the same explosion that removed both of Eric Christopher Szerba's balls and one of his legs were younger than my brother. But they were boys, too. Julio Arguelles was thirty-four years old. There is a snapshot of him that was taken when he was six years old. He grew up in Brooklyn, and in the photograph he is standing in the driveway beside his family's home. There is a low redbrick wall at the end of the driveway. On the other side of the wall, you can see the white T of a wood-framed laundry post sticking up. There are some white T-shirts and underwear hanging from the clotheslines. It appears there is no wind blowing. Julio is wearing a Superman T-shirt with a red-rimmed collar, the triangular S, and there are fierce abdominal muscles drawn onto the fabric that loosely drapes over Julio's six-year-old chest. At the very bottom of the T-shirt is a band of yellow—Superman's belt—and the red swath that marks the upper waist of his briefs. It is a funny shirt. I would have worn it when I was a kid. Julio Arguelles's dark chocolate hair sweeps down over his forehead, and Julio is holding up a hand in a permanent Number One gesture. I can't guess what question Julio was answering when that photograph was taken. Julio Arguelles has a faint orange Kool-Aid mustache. He is wearing blue sweat pants, but the legs are pulled up to his knees. He has black sneakers and no socks. Julio Arguelles had three daughters. The oldest of his girls was nine.

 

4. PAAVI SEPPANEN'S FAMILY
came from Finland. Paavi means small. Paavi also died in the explosion that took my brother's right leg below his knee and obliterated both of Eric Christopher Szerba's testicles. Paavi Seppanen was twenty-six years old when he died in Afghanistan. There is a photograph of Paavi that was taken at Easter when Paavi Seppanen was ten years old. Paavi has airy, thin red-blond hair the color of clover honey. He is wearing a collared, white long-sleeve shirt that is tucked into belted black slacks. He has a black clip-on necktie and is standing between his younger brother and sister. He looks like their protector. You can see they believe that about Paavi. Paavi has his arms around his brother and sister and they are all smiling. The younger boy and girl are holding empty woven baskets in their hands. The egg hunt has not started yet. The girl is maybe three in the photograph, and Paavi's younger brother is wearing gray pants, a necktie, and suspenders. Paavi was homosexual. Nobody knew anything about it.

“I FOUND IT,”
Shann said.

“It's difficult to miss, I suppose,” I agreed. “Maybe it's painted like the sky, instead of a penis, and so we just don't notice it nowadays.”

Shann bumped me with her shoulder.

Johnny McKeon could not tell when people were messing around with him, but his stepdaughter could.

“I mean, I
really
found it,” Shann insisted. “I hiked out along the old service roads. There are some broken-down henhouses there and old troughs for the milk cows.”

“Maybe those are urinals,” I offered.

“Be serious,” Shann said.

“Uh. Okay.” I decided to be serious.

Shann said, “I found the old foundation to the silo. It's concrete, and there's a circular hatch in the middle of it. It looks like something you'd climb through to get into a diving bell or something.”

“Uh,” I said. “Nobody uses diving bells in Iowa. It's not natural. Besides, there's nothing to see beneath the surface of Iowa.”

“I couldn't open it,” Shann said.

“You tried?” I was impressed.

“Well . . . no. I was actually afraid to do it alone,” Shann admitted.

“That was probably wise of you, Shann. There could be lost Russian sailors down there,” I offered. “They would be very horny if they'd been down there ever since Iowa was last covered by a vast sea. Or maybe it's full of the president's sperm.”

That made Shann laugh.

I was horny.

I felt like I scored points toward getting her to come over to my lonely house with me. I desperately wanted her to, but I was not going to ask her to please do that. Johnny would probably say
no
, anyway, in spite of the condoms.

But Johnny McKeon waited in his car and pretended not to watch us when Shann walked me to my front door and we kissed good night.

I WROTE.

At the bottom of the first page, I penciled in a picture of a big galvanized steel silo that towered in the distance behind the McKeon House, which was Ealing, Iowa's solitary listing on the
Registry of Historic Homes
.

Ingrid squirmed beneath my bare feet. She perked her ears up. If she hadn't been stricken by cancer when she was a puppy, she may have barked. She looked like she wanted to bark. So I thought maybe she wanted to bark at me because she needed to shit, which was the most predictable quality Ingrid possessed.

She was a quiet fountain of shit and reliability.

Outside, in the distance, a police siren wailed like a plaintive coyote.

We never heard sirens in Ealing. It's not that bad things never happened here, it's just that nobody ever bothered to complain about it when they did.

A few miles away from my house, Ollie Jungfrau was locking up
Tipsy Cricket Liquors
. He had called the Iowa State Patrol, reporting that some kind of wild animal had attacked Wayne DeLong in the parking lot after Wayne left
Tipsy Cricket Liquors
. Wayne was carrying a paper sack with a bottle of El Capitan Vodka and a twelve-pack of Dura-Flex Extra-Sensitive Condoms.

The wild animal that attacked Wayne DeLong was Hungry Jack.

Wayne's friends called him
Wayne-O
. Wayne-O was a pilot. He didn't drink too much on nights before he flew, he said. He was supposed to fly a commuter plane from Cedar Rapids to Omaha in six hours.

Wayne-O
wasn't going to make that flight.

Ollie Jungfrau told the Iowa State Patrol officers the animal he'd seen attacking Wayne DeLong looked like a six-foot-tall grasshopper. The troopers requested that Ollie Jungfrau breathe into a machine.

Wayne DeLong was eaten right in front of the
Ealing Coin Wash Launderette
. The only thing left of Wayne-O was his belt buckle, eyeglasses, and the
Tipsy Cricket
paper sack containing the twelve-pack of condoms Wayne-O would never get to use, and the bottle of El Capitan Vodka that Wayne-O would also never drink.

“Okay, Ingrid,” I said. “Come on.”

I stood up from my seat at the desk. Ingrid raced ahead of me and ran downstairs to the front door, wagging her tail and panting.

“Uh. Wait, girl,” I said. I turned back. I'd forgotten the cigarettes Johnny McKeon brought for me in my bedroom.

It was a nice night.

I sat on the front porch in nothing but my boxers and Robby Brees's Spam T-shirt. I put my bare feet up on the railing while Ingrid sniffed around in the yard. I lit a cigarette and considered staying home from school for a second consecutive day.

I thought Robby was right. I would surprise my dad by cleaning up all the dog shit and mowing the lawn before my parents came back home from Germany.

“There goes my Nobel Prize and my trip to Sweden with Robby Brees,” I said.

I was talking to Saint Kazimierz.

I smoked.

Saint Kazimierz chose to maintain his virginity until his death.

I could not comfortably wrap my head around that thought.

Saint Kazimierz must have been a real dynamo at saying
no
to his penis.

After he died a virgin boy in his twenties, Saint Kazimierz's body was wrapped in silk. Saint Kazimierz's corpse reportedly cured all kinds of people who were afflicted with untreatable illnesses. He even brought a dead girl back to life.

This is all true.

The maintenance of his virginity was more remarkable than any of that shit, as far as I was concerned.

I couldn't see how a Polish boy could do that.

I wondered if, in the 1400s in Poland, being a virgin boy meant you were still technically permitted to
experiment
, or at least allowed to produce a little polymer from time to time. Otherwise, it had to be some kind of hoax or, perhaps, a genuine miracle.

Saints, like Kazimierz, I decided, truly
were
superhuman.

When his original tomb crumbled, the clergy decided to transport the boy's body to a new crypt. When the priests opened his tomb, Saint Kazimierz's body was miraculously preserved, and smelled like flowers.

Maybe shit like that will happen to any Polish boy who can actually fight off the urge to lose his virginity.

It was hopeless for me.

I was destined to be a stinky Polish corpse that would never cure diseases or shit like that.

A gray fog of headlights came sweeping like a sandstorm down the middle of our street.

Nobody ever drove out this way in the middle of the night.

Then Robby Brees's old Ford Explorer pulled up and parked along the curb in front of my house.

I was scared, but also very happy to see Robby.

I had been a ridiculous asshole to Robby Brees over the past two days. And now, here I was: caught red-handed smoking on my porch, alone, in my underwear and Robby's Spam shirt that he'd been wearing when we got called queers and beaten up by the Hoover Boys.

Seeing Robby Brees get out of the car made me feel guilty and nervous. It was the same way I'd felt the day Pastor Roland Duff called me in to the headmaster's office at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy to counsel me on the history and consequences of masturbation.

Robby did not expect to see me sitting there on the front porch, smoking in my boxers. In fact, he did not see me at all, which is why he let out a little startled squeal when I said, “Hi, Robby. It's really good to see you.”

Nobody ever expects to be cheerfully greeted at midnight by a kid smoking in his underwear on a deserted street in Ealing, Iowa.

I may just as well have been a six-foot-tall praying mantis, or shit like that.

Robby regained his composure.

He said, “Hey, Porcupine.”

“Want a cigarette?” I asked.

Robby said, “Uh.”

He looked around, like he was trying to see if there was some kind of joke being played on him. Ingrid came up and sniffed his hand and then transformed herself into a doggy rug beneath my chair.

I took my bare feet down from the porch rail and curled my toes in her fur.

She sighed contentedly.

I said, “You're a good dog, Ingrid.”

The sirens in the distance went silent.

Robby said, “I didn't mean to bother you, Austin. I just came to drop off some things on your porch. I didn't think you'd be out here.”

He went back to get what he'd brought from his car.

“Watch out for dog shit,” I warned.

“I
am
watching out,” he confirmed.

It must have been the end of the world or some shit like that. Robby Brees, who never did his laundry, had been washing laundry all day, which is why he did not go to school. It was
part
of the reason why Robby did not go to school. Most of the reason was that his Polish-kid best friend had been acting like a complete asshole.

He carried a neatly folded stack of half my entire non-Lutheran-Boy wardrobe in his arms.

On top of it were two pairs of sneakers, my toothbrush, and cell phone.

“Sorry it took so long to get all this stuff back,” Robby said. “Your sleeping bag's in the Explorer, too.”

I took the bundle from Robby. Our hands touched.

Everything smelled really good.

“This stuff smells good,” I said.

Robby said, “Thanks. I tried.”

Robby shrugged.

“You actually did
all
your laundry today?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Robby said. “It's not too bad. I couldn't find one of your socks, though.”

Socks and underwear have a way of disappearing with me.

“Maybe it's under your bed,” I said.

I immediately felt the flush of embarrassment. I silently prayed to Saint Kazimierz to make me not say anything else that was as stupid as the shit I just said to Robby.

“Your dad's been calling,” Robby said.

“Uh.”

“I talked to him. He said everything is going to be okay. I hope you don't mind that I answered your phone.” Robby said, “Austin, I'm really sorry about Eric.”

Robby was such a good person.

“You are such a good friend, Rob,” I said.

I gave Robby a cigarette. Then we went to his car to get my sleeping bag. I could hardly believe my eyes: Robby Brees's backseat was completely cleaned out. All the dirty clothes were gone. It was like there was a new Robby.

“The new Robby,” I said.

“Yeah,” Robby agreed.

“Uh.” I said, “Now I feel guilty about wearing your Spam shirt. I think I might have B.O. I've been lying in bed all day.”

“Austin, you
do
have B.O.,” Robby confirmed. “I can smell it from here. You smell like leftover pizza in a locker room.”

Robby, who swore that Doritos smelled like a six-year-old boy's feet, had an acute sense for smells.

“Uh. I will do laundry tomorrow, too,” I said. “We'll be, like, laundry buddies, or shit like that, and we can chat about how we manage to get our things to smell so fresh.”

We sat on the porch, next to the stack of all my clean-smelling laundry that was missing at least one sock, and Ingrid, my golden retriever, who was missing her vocal cords, and smoked together.

I tried making small talk.

I said, “I ate a
Stanpreme
tonight with Shann.”

“Oh,” Robby said.

“It always tastes better when you're there. I think Satan dislikes you,” I said.