Grasshopper Jungle (36 page)

“
WELL, I'LL BE
a monkey's uncle,” Johnny McKeon said.

I never knew what that meant, but in Dr. Grady McKeon's case, it would have to mean that someone's sperm got inside a monkey.

Ingrid yawned.

Johnny McKeon picked up the handset for the phone. “I haven't seen one of these beauties in a coon's age.”

In the wild, North American raccoons live approximately three years.

Doublemint gum was invented in 1914.

Krzys Szczerba was twenty-six years old in 1914.

I stuck my stale Doublemint chewing gum under Wanda Mae Rutkowski's desk.

Johnny McKeon dialed Ollie Jungfrau's phone number. Ollie Jungfrau could not answer his phone at the Del Vista Arms because Ollie Jungfrau had been eaten by Travis Pope on the Kelsey Creek Bridge.

It didn't matter because the Brain Room's phone did not connect to phones on the surface of the planet Earth.

“This is only an internal line, I guess,” Johnny McKeon said.

Who would you call after the end of the world, anyway?

“
Satan's Pizza
does not deliver in the event of global cataclysm,” I said, adding, “It says so right at the bottom of the placemat menus.”

“I never noticed that,” Johnny McKeon, who had absolutely no sense of humor, said.

Satan's Pizza
would no longer be delivering because Stan, the owner, whose real name was Sevastián Hernandez, had his head removed by Travis Pope's crushing mandibles earlier that evening.

On the wall behind Wanda Mae Rutkowski's desk hovered the sun-like golden shield of McKeon Industries's
infinita frumenta!
seal. On either side of the seal hung black-and-white, framed photographs of Dr. Grady McKeon with President Richard M. Nixon, Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, and CIA Director Richard Helms. There were two other photographs hanging on the wall. The first was a photograph of a man named James Arness, who was a television star in a program about the Wild West. The second was a photograph of Dr. Grady McKeon standing with Pope Paul VI. The inscription on James Arness's photograph said:

To Grady—Thanks for the Corn!!!

The pope wrote a message across his picture in blue ink:

Dear Grady, This corn is sublime.

Dr. Grady McKeon dissolved the pope's balls.

Excrementum Sanctum.

Below the Great Seal of McKeon Industries was a small brass plate that read:

S
PERM
V
AULT
I
N
E
DEN,
M
ANKIND
I
S
U
NSTOPPABLE!

The seal was actually a door cover to Dr. Grady McKeon's bank of frozen sperm.

Robby opened the seal door. Behind the door was a heavy steel freezer.

“They have the president's sperm in there,” Robby said.

“Uh,” I said. “They have the pope's sperm in there.”

“And James Arness's,” Johnny McKeon added.

“Oh my!” Wendy McKeon said.

“James Arness was a handsome man. Handsome. My favorite actor, too,” Johnny McKeon offered.

“Maybe there's some ice cream in there,” Robby suggested.

“Uh,” I repeated. I pushed the Great Seal shut. “Let's not look for ice cream in a sperm freezer, Rob.”

To the side of Wanda Mae Rutkowski's desk was a windowless door marked:

PRIVATE

It led to Dr. Grady McKeon's Brain Room.

TWO HEADS, WITH
four gaping eyes, sat on Dr. Grady McKeon's desk, staring directly at us when Robby opened the door marked
Private
.

Shann gasped.

Wendy squeaked.

Johnny McKeon said, “Ain't that a kick?”

There were two identical grimacing lemur masks inside the Brain Room.

They were the first things we noticed, simply because they looked like severed monster heads resting atop Dr. Grady McKeon's desk, poised to defend the room against intruders. They were exact matches to the one Robby and I took from the roof of Grasshopper Jungle, only these were cleaner and appeared to be brand-new.

“Grady McKeon must have owned the world's finest collection of grimacing lemur masks and sperm,” Robby theorized.

“Holy shit,” I said.

“I wonder if they make your face stink,” Robby said.

Shann finally spoke. She was not looking at the grimacing lemur masks. She stared in shocked wonder at the cases along the wall behind her dead stepuncle's desk.

“What
is
this stuff?” Shann said.

Johnny McKeon sighed and leaned against his brother's desk.

Johnny said, “It looks like the same boatload of oddities McKeon Industries had delivered to the store when they packed up and closed down the plant.”

Robby and I tried to play dumb. Johnny McKeon never found out that Robby Brees and I had been inside his office at
From Attic to Seller Consignment Store
the night Grant Wallace and the Hoover Boys broke in and robbed
Tipsy Cricket Liquors
. We were not about to tell him, either.

I said, “What is it, Johnny?”

And Robby said, “Uh.”

Here is what we found inside the Brain Room:

There were ten perfect globes of pulsating black
Contained MI Plague Strain 412E
—more than one for every continent on Earth—enough to ensure the annihilation of the entire human species. And all along the other shelves sat rows of bottles and bottles of deformed, clay-like body parts that had been cultivated from Dr. Grady McKeon's inadequate sperm in the Human Replication Unit labs. I noticed a foot inside one of the polymer-electric cells. It sprouted long nails that grew all the way to the glass barrier and its toes twitched, which made faint
tick-tick! tick-tick!
sounds against the jar. And there were oblong cases that contained some of the segmented parts of the first Unstoppable Soldiers that'd been dissolved with Dr. Grady McKeon's own blood.

It was a deranged carnival sideshow.

Against one of the Brain Room's walls was a bank of five television sets.

The televisions were absolutely useless, as primitive as kerosene lanterns. Each of them had a numbered dial that went from channel 2 to 13. Johnny McKeon explained to me, Shann, and Robby that at one time, televisions had to be calibrated and tuned by hand. Johnny McKeon told us that people stopped having so many children in Iowa after the invention of the remote control. Johnny said when he was a kid in Iowa, there were only five channels broadcasting, and that none of them was on the air twenty-four hours per day.

“Wow,” I said. “Did they have programs instructing you on how to paint bisons on your walls?”

Johnny said, “I don't think they had any art classes on TV in those days, Austin.”

Johnny McKeon was a real concrete Iowa thinker.

Johnny turned on one of the televisions. It took the picture tube nearly a minute to light up. There was nothing but monochromatic electric sandpaper on every one of the ratchet-knob channels Johnny McKeon clicked through.

“This is a real beauty,” Johnny said.

“Oh,” I said.

“It sure is,” Robby agreed.

The real prize of the Brain Room was Dr. Grady McKeon's personal logbook.

The logbook looked like it had been written by a seven-year-old with a dull pencil. Dr. Grady McKeon's
scientific record
included undiluted details of every time Dr. Grady McKeon masturbated for one of his
experiments
, or engaged in
coitus
with other Eden Project volunteers.

In the frenetic scrawl of a crazed disciple of unstoppability, Dr. Grady McKeon also confessed to flushing Pope Paul VI's sperm down his Nightingale. The other contributors' samples soon followed.

Dr. Grady McKeon saw himself as the future King of a New Universe.

Too bad his sperm never worked for anything.

But the logbook also provided relevant pieces of information about the upside-down universe of McKeon Industries Labs.

“It says here,” I said, flipping through the book, “that the lemur masks are detection devices that cause people to glow bright red if they are contaminated with the 412E.”

“That's cracker-jack science, right there,” Johnny said.

Scotch whisky made Johnny McKeon talkative and enthusiastic, even at the end of the world.

Robby slipped one of the masks over his face and looked around at each of us.

“Red balls,” he said.

“What?” I said. I cupped my hands over my balls.

“On the wall. All the balls look red,” Robby said, pointing to the globes of 412E. “But we are all a boring shade of blue.”

I remembered how, the night I slipped away on my mother's blue kayaks in Robby Brees's bedroom at the Del Vista Arms, when I put his lemur mask on my face, it made Robby appear to turn blue.

I would not say that it was a
boring
shade, however. Robby Brees could never be a
boring
blue.

“And the best part is,” Robby continued, “this one does not make my face stink!”

SHANN COLLINS, HER
mother, Wendy McKeon, and stepfather, Johnny, all stayed in one room together.

We said good night in the hallway. I tried to catch Shann's eye, but she was nervous and shy—not like Shann at all.

We should not have had sexual intercourse.

It was an unstoppable mistake.

History will show that teenagers are unstoppable horny dynamos once the jumpsuits come off. I knew that well enough after living through the week when the world ended in Ealing, Iowa.

The Collins-McKeons slipped into their room and shut the door.

Then Robby quietly said good night to me and went inside one of the rooms by himself.

“Hey—” I said.

Robby did not want to talk to me.

“What am I going to do, Ingrid?”

I did not know what to do. Everything was a mess. I was in love with my two best friends, and I was making them both miserable at the same time. And there were big horny bugs up above us that were eating the whole planet.

I walked away from the dormitory rooms, carrying Dr. Grady McKeon's logbook.

Ingrid followed me into the locker room.

Ingrid lay on the tile floor and watched me while I took a shower.

Afterward, I put my boxers on and dropped my jumpsuit into the Eden Launderette. I sat on the washing machine while it ran, and I remembered how Robby Brees had told me the
Ealing Coin Wash Launderette
was like a vacation in Hawaii compared to the Del Vista Arms's laundry room.

I left my Eden 5 jumpsuit there, tumbling and tumbling in the dryer, then found my way into my own, lonely sleeping compartment, which happened to be the messy one—the room where Robby, Shann, and I had jumped on the beds.

I sighed and sat down.

I wrote until I fell asleep with the lights on.

Tucked inside Dr. Grady McKeon's personal logbook, I found a 1971 brochure that featured Cypress Gardens's water ski team and a creased glossy photograph of Wanda Mae Rutkowski.

Wanda Mae Rutkowski was the very image of the two-hundred-foot-tall woman on the great seal of McKeon Industries.

At the bottom of the picture, a message that had nothing to do with corn or sperm had been scrawled in smeared blue ink and curling, candy-sweet script. It said:

 

Grady, I hope you can someday forgive me. We will always have Eden, Wanda Mae

 

In her photograph, Wanda Mae Rutkowski is wearing knee-high lemon yellow vinyl boots. Although people in the 1970s did not recycle plastics, those boots could likely have been converted into at least three complete shower curtains; perhaps a full-size Slip 'N Slide, or one of those inflatable bouncy houses parents rent for their kid's birthday. Her dress, low-cut to showcase the perfect V separating her breasts, has long belled sleeves and a wild floral print in pinks and violets. Wanda Mae is wearing a matching headband that spans her forehead from eyebrows to hairline. The hem on the dress barely covers her panties, which I imagine would be a pale lavender. Her hair falls in loose globular curls over her shoulders. It is the color of tangerine marmalade, and Wanda Mae's flawless skin looks like home-churned Indiana butter.

I can't be certain, but I believe Dr. Grady McKeon did not hire Wanda Mae Rutkowski for her stenographic abilities.

Wanda Mae Rutkowski performed in a barefoot water ski show in Florida throughout the 1970s, after Dr. Grady McKeon sealed up his subterranean sexual pleasure dome in Ealing, Iowa, for the last time.

Dr. Grady McKeon became a recluse in his old historic house when Wanda Mae Rutkowski left him. Wanda Mae married a dog trainer who made a fortune racing greyhounds in Florida. The dog trainer's name was Jan Wojner. Jan Wojner learned everything he knew about dogs from his grandfather Bruno, who survived the Great Depression by performing with circus dogs in California.

Unstoppable dogs!

Wanda Mae Wojner won the Women's National Barefoot Water Ski Championship, which was held in Waco, Texas, in 1978.

In 1978, Pope Paul VI died without ever knowing that Dr. Grady McKeon had unceremoniously discarded his sperm in my great-great-grandfather's urinal.

In 1978, McKeon Industries presented four sealed globes of
Contained MI Plague Strain 412E
to the United States Department of Defense.

Nobody knew anything about it.

In his abandonment, Dr. Grady McKeon, who had gone about as far off the deep end as anyone could go following the gruesome disasters of his Unstoppable Soldier experiments, got crazier and crazier. He forgot all about Unstoppable Soldiers and his Eden Project.

In 1978, Dr. Grady McKeon bought a small palace in Costa Rica and boarded up the old McKeon House in Ealing, Iowa.