Grasshopper Jungle (7 page)

It was a simple matter.

For all anyone knew, Grant and his boys may have been planning their theft from
Tipsy Cricket
for a long time. It probably had everything to do with why we ran into them in Grasshopper Jungle earlier that day.

Technically, our encounter with Grant Wallace happened the day before, since it was solidly past midnight in our time zone, which was located under the desk in Johnny McKeon's office.

“Is that a dick?” one of the boys asked.

“It's a dick,” another concluded.

“Johnny Mack has a dick in a bottle in his office,” Grant affirmed.

“Maybe it's his,” one of Grant's friends said.

“Let's take it,” another of them said.

“I'm not touching it. It's a jar with a dick in it.” I think Tyler said that.

“Oh yeah,” someone else said. “And balls, too.”

“That's sick. I'm not touching it. Hang on. I'm going to take a picture of that dick in a jar with my phone,” the videographer decided.

“Text it to me.” One of the Hoover Boys laughed.

I desperately wished they'd stop talking about the penis in the jar, but Grant and his friends were like lonely parakeets in front of a mirror.

Finally, after they'd exhausted all speculation and conversational rhetoric on the topic of penises in jars, the boys stood there numbly for a moment, apparently unable to detach their eyes. I heard the sound of something heavy and solid sliding on one of the shelves.

The blue shadows in the room swirled.

Tyler had lifted the globe.

It was not a good idea.

“Let's go. I'm thirsty,” he said.

They left the door to Johnny's office standing open.

The blue light danced away into the darkness of the back room, and then faded entirely.

I grabbed Robby's wrist and pulled him out from our hiding place. Then I led him back through the shop and up the ladder to the roof.

ROBBY BREES AND
I had our priorities.

As soon as we closed the hatch and were outside on the roof again, we lit cigarettes.

Smoking dynamos.

“Shit,” Robby said.

“Shit,” I agreed.

Shit
, like the word
okay
, can mean any number of things. In fact, in the history I recorded in my book for that one Friday in Ealing, Iowa, I believe I used the word
shit
in every possible context.

I will have to go back through the history and check.

Robby and I said
shit
—nothing else—approximately eleven more times as we smoked our cigarettes up on the roof.

“What do you think that shit in the ball was?” Robby said.

“I don't know. You read the nameplate on it. It said
Contained Plague
.”

“Nothing good is ever called
Plague
,” Robby said.

“Maybe it was just some glow-in-the-dark experimental stuff,” I said.

“I've done an experiment. We made a battery out of a lemon. Remember that?” Robby asked.

“Yes. It was a good experiment,” I agreed. I nodded like a scientist would. “We knew what was supposed to happen before we even started it. And it worked.”

“But I don't think things called
Plague
are the subject of the kinds of experiments we do in the lab at Curtis Crane,” Robby said.

That's what it was—what Robby and I had done up there on the roof at Grasshopper Jungle—I thought.

An experiment.

It is perfectly normal for boys to
experiment
. I read it somewhere that was definitely not in a book at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy. Or if it was in a book, it would certainly no longer be part of Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy's library collection. Not after the shit I did in eighth grade.

Maybe I heard some psychologist who specialized in
Teen Sexuality
say shit about things like
Boys experimenting
on one of those afternoon talk shows that are only on television for the fulfillment of depressed and lonely women.

Depressed and lonely women need to know about
Teen Sexuality
and how it's normal for boys to experiment. Normal. That's what the psychologist would say. The psychologist also would have been a slim woman with nicely trimmed hair, a sincere and calming smile, and modest jewelry.

That was bullshit.

History shows that real experiments, like the one we did with the lemon, always involve some reasonable expectation ahead of time about the outcome. About how things will work out.

Robby slid the pack of cigarettes into the back pocket on his sagging jeans and we gathered up our flamingo, wine, grimacing lemur, and skateboards. We made our way down the ladder and onto the dumpster we'd rolled across Grasshopper Jungle.

“Don't say anything to Shann,” I cautioned.

I didn't need to tell Robby that. It was just one of those things boys do sometimes to confirm that there are secrets that shall be protected.

Robby said, “You mean about what we saw in her stepdad's office, or what we did up on the roof?”

I said, “Shit.”

I imagined I had two arguing and confused heads sprouting up from my shoulders.

I felt sadness for that other boy inside the jar in Johnny McKeon's office.

SHANN WAS SLEEPING
soundly in the backseat of Robby's Ford Explorer when we came back to the car. She stretched out comfortably, with her head lying on some crumpled socks and a pair of Robby's boxers that had fire trucks and Dalmatians on them.

Watching Shann sleep made me horny.

I was all messed up.

I thought I probably needed to talk to someone about how sexually confused I felt. I couldn't talk to Robby about it, not after what we did on the roof. I thought, but only for half a second, about talking to Pastor Roland Duff. But I already felt guilty as it was.

I thought I could talk to my father.

It scared me to think about doing that, but my father would know what to tell me. He could help me sort things out. I just needed to work up the courage to start the conversation. Then everything would fall into place.

Everything always falls into place that way.

“Shann?” I whispered.

I ran my hand up her leg to wake her.

Shann opened her eyes slowly. She smiled at me.

I felt guilty and sad.

“Did you and Robby already go?” she asked.

I said yes, but didn't tell her we'd been gone for over an hour. It was nearly 2:00 a.m.

Robby opened the Explorer's rear gate and deposited our flamingo, the grimacing lemur head, skateboards, and wine bottles.

He already held an unlit cigarette in his mouth when he got behind the wheel.

Robby passed the pack to me and started the engine. We lit both our cigarettes on the same orange coiled moon burning at the end of the car's lighter. Our faces were so close our cheeks touched. I looked Robby straight in the eye as we leaned in to get the cigarettes going. It was awkward. I felt sad for Robby.

I turned around and reached back between the seats. I held Shann's hand.

Behind her, I saw a glowing blue ball floating down the steps in back of the vacant podiatrist's office. Grant and the Hoover Boys were coming out from the mall.

I glanced at Robby.

I was certain he saw the same thing in the rearview mirror. We both knew better than to say anything and have Shann turn around. She would only start asking questions. Maybe she'd want to confront those punks.

In a lot of ways, Shann was tougher than Robby and me.

Maybe the boys were already drunk. I can't be certain of it. But something happened to cause Tyler to let go of the glass globe. I watched the circle of blue light drop like a falling moon.

Robby coughed.

Back in Grasshopper Jungle, blue light splattered everywhere.

“I'm ready to go home,” I said.

“Um. Yeah,” Robby agreed.

Robby's hands gripped the wheel, but his eyes were pinned to the rearview mirror.

Grant and his friends were the first victims of
Contained MI Plague Strain 412E
.

Nobody knew anything about it.

Travis Pope and his wife, Eileen, had been hired by the association management of the Ealing Mall to clean the common areas every week. They drove through the lot Saturday mornings before sunrise, rarely doing anything about the debris that accumulated in the back alley of a soon-to-be abandoned mall.

That Saturday, Travis and Eileen stopped in Grasshopper Jungle and picked up large chunks of broken glass from the alley. Travis Pope tossed the shards into the dumpster somebody had pushed against the rear wall of
The Pancake House
. Travis cursed the winos and delinquent kids in the town for getting drunk and fucking in public.

Travis and Eileen Pope were the fifth and sixth victims of
Contained MI Plague Strain 412E
.

Nobody knew anything about it.

And later that morning, an old man Robby Brees and I called Hungry Jack, who was missing his front teeth and had served in the United States Army in Vietnam, climbed into the dumpster we rolled across Grasshopper Jungle. The dumpster had pieces of Johnny McKeon's sick broken universe inside it.

Hungry Jack became the seventh victim of
Contained MI Plague Strain 412E
.

All hell had broken loose. It splattered across the piss-soaked pavement of Grasshopper Jungle.

Nobody knew anything about it.

EVERY DAY I
wrote in my books.

I drew pictures, too.

That night, I drew a plastic flamingo with a spike coming out of its ass, a grimacing lemur, bottles of wine, and a picture of me with my shorts pulled down around my knees. In my drawing, I was in the backseat of Robby's Ford Explorer, lying on Shann Collins and some socks and a pair of my best friend's boxers that were printed with red fire trucks and spotted Dalmatian dogs.

I drew a two-headed baby boy trapped inside a pickle jar.

That night, I sat at my desk until the sky outside began to get light.

I took off my shoes and socks, and my Orwells T-shirt, too. I always write more accurate accounts of history when wearing as little as possible.

It's difficult to avoid the truth when you're undressed.

My armpits reeked. I had serious B.O.

That was also true.

Ingrid, my golden retriever, was in my bedroom. She liked to lie down beneath my desk so I could keep my bare feet in her fur. Ingrid, although she could shit better than any dog I knew—a real dynamo—never barked. When she was a puppy, she had a tumor on her neck. It made it so she couldn't bark, which helped me sneak into the house past curfew countless times.

Our house got robbed twice, too.

“You're a good dog, Ingrid,” I said. I wriggled my toes in her fur.

I wrote.

Even when I tried to tell everything that happened, I knew my accounts were ultimately nothing more than an abbreviation. It's not that I neglected to write details—I told the truth about Shann's room, the staircase leading down to nothing, what the main ingredients of a
Stanpreme
pizza are. I wrote what it felt like to have my bare penis pressing upward against the cool skin of Shann Collins's thigh.

That was also true.

I told about Robby kissing me. I described it in detail, down to the taste and feel of his tongue. I kept accurate count of the cigarettes we smoked, and described the things trapped inside the jars we found locked up in Johnny McKeon's office.

But no historian could ever put
everything
that happened in a book.

The book would be as big as the universe, and it would take multiple countless lifetimes to read.

History necessarily
had
to be an abbreviation.

Even those first men—obsessed with recording their history—who painted on cave walls in Lascaux and Altamira, only put the important details down.

We killed this big hairy thing and that big hairy thing. And that was our day. You know what I mean.

My name is an abbreviation.

Three grandfathers back, a man named Krzys Szczerba came to the United States from Poland.

People in America did not know what to do with all those consonants and shit in Krzys Szczerba's name. They decided to swap some out for vowels, and to take others away from Krzys Szczerba, so my three-grandfathers-back grandfather became Christopher Szerba.

I imagined. Sometimes I drew this picture: An official stone building, a repository for all the consonants and shit taken from refugees' names when they arrived on the doorstep of the United States of America. It is piled high everywhere with the letters we don't find useful:
C
s and
Z
s in great heaping mounds that looked so much like the black-and-white photographs of luggage or shoes from World War 2.

Krzys Szczerba.

History, and the United States of America, can call him Chris.

History is full of shit like that.

Krzys Szczerba came to America when he was seventeen years old.

In 1905, being seventeen years old made you a man. In 1969, when Hungry Jack fought in Vietnam, seventeen years old was a man. Now, I wasn't so sure. My brother, Eric, who was somewhere in Afghanistan, was twenty-two.

Krzys Szczerba came across the Atlantic with his father. They planned on working and earning enough money so Krzys's mother, brother, and two sisters could come to the United States, too. People who did that were called
Bread Polacks
. They came here to make money.

Krzys Szczerba's father died on the boat in the middle of the ocean.

His body was sent down naked into the water with prayers and a medallion of Saint Casimir.

Krzys Szczerba's family never came to their son.