Grasshopper Jungle (22 page)

Herman Weinbach was also homosexual, but nobody knew anything about it.

When Herman Weinbach saw Andrzej Szczerba at the auction, he asked Andrzej if he was a Jew. Andrzej told him no, that he was Catholic, and Herman said that would have been his next guess, after Quaker.

Herman Weinbach was a Jew, but nobody knew anything about that, either. He told Andrzej he was an atheist.

Andrzej Szczerba had never met an atheist before. At least, he had never met anyone daring enough to say they were atheists. Just the thought of denying God frightened Andrzej, who, like me, frequently touched a silver medallion of Saint Kazimierz he constantly wore on a chain around his neck.

Before Herman Weinbach died, he told Andrzej Szczerba that being a Communist homosexual Jew in Iowa in 1933 was like being a European starling that spoke two languages.

Andrzej did not know what Herman meant when he said that, but I believe he meant it was something beautiful and wonderful.

The boys found a man in the crowd who was smoking. He gave Herman and Andrzej some tobacco, and he let them roll cigarettes. Cigarettes were a good way to not feel so hungry.

That day Andrzej and Herman became great friends and traveling companions. They shared their hunger, and Andrzej showed Herman the tricks he could do with Baby.

The boys had to go to a soup kitchen in Ames to get a meal that day. They had to wait for other boys to finish eating, so they could borrow something to hold soup for themselves. Herman and Andrzej had nothing except a talking bird named Baby.

They ate out of borrowed paint cans.

The boys who loaned them their paint cans waited for Herman Weinbach and Andrzej Szczerba to finish their meal.

You just don't give away empty paint cans when there's soup that needs to be ladled out.

This is the truth. It was America, and America had very little to spare for boys like Herman Weinbach and Andrzej Szczerba.

Herman was going to California, he said. He told Andrzej about his uncle, a man named Bruno Wojner, who had trained an amazing dog act for a circus.

The name of the circus act was
Bruno's Amazing and Incredible Dogs
. Herman said his uncle, Bruno Wojner, would be very excited about Andrzej's talking bird, and maybe they could go to work at Bruno's circus in California.

Andrzej thought California would be much better than Iowa, even if it was only a different place to starve and be cold, so the boys decided to try to go to California together, and find Uncle Bruno and his amazing dogs.

They made a pact to stay together—Herman, Andrzej, and Baby.

Of course, Andrzej never managed to leave Iowa, but the idea was good and romantic. That's what all Polish boys like when they are seventeen years old: Romantic ideas and somewhere to go.

Andrzej and Herman ate their soup from paint cans and saved half of their bread for later, and also to feed to Baby.

Things like this were what made America great: romance, talking birds, eating dinner from paint cans, and setting off with your friend to see the world.

There was an entire world inside Shann's silo, which was actually called
Eden
.

The world was frozen in time from around 1971.

That world included telephones wired into the walls. The phones were made from heavy plastic. Their mouthpieces were connected to the machinery of the telephone with tightly corkscrewed rubber cables. The phones had rotary dials on them and illuminated square buttons along their bottoms that were labeled with the names of other extensions within the silo called Eden.

Not one of us had ever used a phone like the ones we found in the silo.

I could hear a dial tone in them, and I'm certain I could have figured out how to place a call, but we decided there was no one any of us wanted to talk to, anyway.

We found out that Shann's and Robby's cell phones did not work inside the silo.

We discovered Eden's cafeteria, a museum piece in stainless steel and formica.

There were soda taps behind the buffet lines, with machines that must have been producing ice cubes for several days. The only soda brand I recognized was Coca-Cola. There was also something called Nesbitt's, which was orange, and another, piss-colored beverage named Vernors. The taps worked. The sodas came out cold and carbonated.

It was another miracle.

Free sodas.

And there was a warehouse filled with food. The food was all boxed in cardboard and contained green cans of just about every imaginable concoction you could eat. There were green foil pouches of peanut butter, and every one of the boxes contained small packs of cigarettes. This was the same kind of stuff the United States of America sent to its troops fighting in Vietnam, cigarettes and all.

“Thank you, Saint Kazimierz,” I said.

“Thank you, Saint Kazimierz,” Robby repeated.

Shann would not compromise her unsteady Lutheranism, most likely because she did not smoke.

“Robby and I
both
went to church on Sunday,” I pointed out.

“I was moving in,” Shann explained. “No one expects you to go to church when you're unpacking boxes.”

There were enough boxes in Eden for us to unpack that we'd never have to go to church again.

SHANN'S BEDROOM HAD
a door that led into a brick wall and another that dead-ended at the foot of a stairwell. It was what I called a dungeon for horny Polish boys.

In truth, the silo called Eden went all the way into the foundation of the McKeon House, and the doorways in Shann's room had been bricked off when the Eden Project work crews finished construction on Dr. Grady McKeon's subterranean shelter.

Just as those McKeon Industries scientists back in the 1960s had been playing with self-sustaining universes they trapped inside globes of glass, the bigger enclosed bubble project they'd been working on lay beneath the ground under Shann's bedroom and stretched beyond the derelict cornfields on Dr. Grady McKeon's own property.

Here is what we found: Eden had a gymnasium, a fitness center with polished wood floors and weightlifting equipment, a sauna, and another shower room. There was a small facility for laundry that put the
Ealing Coin Wash Launderette
to shame in terms of its cleanliness and lack of discarded condoms and cigarette butts on the floor.

There was even a salon with those old-fashioned hair dryers that looked like brainwashing torture machines from science fiction movies, barber chairs, and haircutting tools.

Shann looked at her hair in the mirror. As always, it was beautiful, the color of mature wheat in late August. Her skin was perfect and unblemished.

I said, “Would you like us to do something with your hair?”

Shann said, “Do either of you guys know anything about hairstyles?”

And Robby continued our string of unanswered questions with, “Why are you both looking at me? Do you think it's just natural that I'd be, like, into doing hair and shit?”

Later, we found Eden's dormitories. Naturally, I was incapable of wandering through the bedrooms with Shann and Robby without feeling horny and guilty. I wondered if there had ever been threesomes inside Shann's silo.

Each room had two double beds. They looked, in style, like hotel rooms, except they lacked bathrooms and toilets, which were all located at the center of a hub of hallways that connected the fitness center and the lecture hall and entry room where we had changed out of our Iowa surface-dweller clothing.

There wasn't much room for argument in the discussion we had as we explored the bedrooms: Eden was built to house survivors for the end of the world. We could say the idea was to protect a few human specimens in the event of a nuclear war, but Robby and I knew Eden was probably built for something else entirely.

The idea that Robby and Shann and I were inside some kind of breeding compound for the genesis of an entire new species of humans was particularly thrilling and attractive.

“If we never came out of Eden, the three of us would be able to start an entire new race of underground Iowans,” I said.

“Uh.” Robby was unenthusiastic.

“Well. If we had to,” I offered. “Between you, me, and Shann, we would have enough genetic diversity to not breed two-headed boys and shit like that.”

I was somehow working into a long-range threesome strategy.

“Uh,” Robby repeated.

Shann said, “I bet that's what Grady McKeon had in mind with the whole idea of
Eden
: starting everything over.”

“Everyone who eventually came out would just end up doing the same stupid shit that always happened up there,” I said, and pointed my thumb at the world above us.

“We should leave a copy of
Porcupine's History of the World
down here, just to save mankind the trouble,” Robby said.

“That would be a good strategy,” I said. “When do you two suppose we might start working on the new species?”

Shann rolled her eyes and pushed my chest.

I liked that.

She also changed the subject: “There must be books or stuff like that down here,” Shann said.

Robby jumped on one of the beds like it was a trampoline. He said we should all do that, so Shann and I joined him. It was fun. We made a mess of that room. It was ours, anyway. Nobody could stop us.

I pulled out my little medal of Saint Kazimierz and looked at him and thought about how difficult the boy-saint's life must have been.

I hopped down onto the floor. I pulled open the drawers on the nightstands at the head of the double bed Shann and Robby were jumping on. There was a Gideon's Bible inside, but, naturally, there would be no condoms in Eden.

Every room had a Gideon's Bible in it.

Grady McKeon must have worked some kind of deal with those Gideon people. Maybe he promised to let them leave some sperm down here, besides just a bunch of Bibles, I thought.

We had no idea of the time when we were down in Eden.

We also had no idea about what was beginning to happen up above us in Ealing.

Nobody did.

WE FOUND EDEN'S
library at exactly the same time the Hoover Boys and Grant Wallace found Eileen Pope and Hungry Jack in the alley at Grasshopper Jungle.

Now Eileen was very busy. She was getting filled up with the seeds of a new apex species for Planet Earth. She was happy. Eileen was the queen of the new universe. But she was hungry, too.

While Devin Stoddard, the same Hoover Boy who had kneed me in the balls the Friday before and was now a lumbering six-foot-tall mantis beast, pumped future generations of little Devin bugs into Eileen Pope's swelling abdomen, she pivoted her thoracic midsection around clockwise and clamped Devin's head in the toothy mace of her grasping arms. Devin Stoddard did not resist. He pumped and pumped and pumped. Devin Stoddard continued pumping semen into Eileen Pope even after she had eaten his entire head.

Eileen Pope was doing the two things bugs like to do.

The other bugs watched and waited. They wanted more turns on Eileen Pope, even if she was still hungry after eating Devin Stoddard. When Eileen Pope finished eating, the only thing left of Devin Stoddard was a gooey smear across the floral sofa in Grasshopper Jungle.

And, at the exact moment we found Eden's library and Eileen Pope was crunching her way through Devin Stoddard's exoskeleton to get to the slick and nourishing goodness inside her mate, Johnny McKeon was locking up
From Attic to Seller Consignment Store
for the night.

Johnny decided to take a box of garbage out to the dumpster in the alley of Grasshopper Jungle.

It was not a good idea.

HISTORY SHOWS THAT
an examination of the personal collection of titles in any man's library will provide something of a glimpse into his soul.

Such was the case with Dr. Grady McKeon's library beneath the ground.

Here was Dr. Grady McKeon's collection of books: There was a wall of novels. And every one of the novels in Dr. Grady McKeon's library was an American work. Also, every novel had been written by a man.

Before going down into Eden, I never knew that American men had written so many books and shit. The men who wrote the books in Dr. Grady McKeon's library weren't just
guys
,
they were monuments, and had names like Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Dreiser, and on and on. The most recent novel, if you could call it that, was
The Old Man and the Sea
, by Ernest Hemingway.

There was not a copy of
The Chocolate War
, however, but that stood to reason.

Another wall in Dr. Grady McKeon's library was filled with books on all kinds of scientific subjects: botany, evolution, taxonomy, genetics, and reproduction. The books on reproduction caught my eye. They were very old and conservatively worded, however.

But the most wonderful feature of Dr. Grady McKeon's library were the rows of desks, each of which had been furnished with supplies for writing and drawing.

It was meant to be that Eden would have its historian.

“This is meant to be,” I said.

I sat down at one of the desks and looked through the assortment of pens and empty leather-bound logbooks. I felt around with my feet in the carpeting beneath where I sat. It was difficult for me to adequately concentrate on writing without Ingrid sighing under my toes.

So I said, “What am I going to do, Shann?”

Shann said, “I don't know, Austin.”

Shann was smart. She knew I was troubled about things. She always let me have room. In some ways, Shann was like Ingrid.

“This is where I will write the history of the end of the world,” I said.

Shann said, “Uh.”

Then I picked up some thick permanent markers and opened their caps. Naturally, I smelled them. I do not know why, because that is not my job, but history shows that every time a teenage boy opens a permanent marker, he will first sniff it before deciding how to go about defacing the planet.