Grasshopper Jungle (13 page)

Robby got out of the car.

Robby wasn't angry or upset at what I'd said. Real friends know what they mean when one of them says clumsy or stupid things. History shows that.

History also shows there aren't an awful lot of
real
friends on the record.

So I got out of the car, too.

IT WAS FRIGHTENING
and thrilling, following Robby to the door of the
Tally-Ho!

It seemed as though hidden eyes were out there in the dark of the parking lot, and they were watching us and constructing stories—histories—about what these two boys from Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy might be up to.

The
Tally-Ho!
, as it turned out, was not a vibrant, happening scene at all.

It was exactly what Robby expected.

He stood with his hand on the door's pull bar. A sign hung from metal S-hooks beneath clear plastic suction cups on the inside of the glass. It said:

NO PERSONS UNDER 21 ALLOWED

I expected to hear happy music seeping out from the door, the sound of laughter and boisterous barroom conversations, but the
Tally-Ho!
let no such atmosphere leak out from its small, encapsulated world.

The place was as quiet as a cemetery in a morning snowfall.

Robby took a deep breath, pulled open the door, and stepped inside.

And, like a sedated Chihuahua on a jeweled leash, I followed him.

I was so nervous I thought my knees would buckle. My head swam in agitated seas of conflict and confusion: What if people thought we were gay? Why did I care what people thought? What if I really
was
gay? I kissed Robby, after all. What would Shann say about us being here? What if someone started hitting on me or Robby? What if we got in trouble for walking into the place? What if we got beat up again by some assholes like Grant Wallace and his friends?

Robby Brees was much braver than I could ever be.

We stood there, dumb and quiet in the dark alcove just inside the front door of the
Tally-Ho!

The place was as tired and mournful as the library at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy after the masturbation scandal. Nobody so much as turned to glance at the two nervous kids who stood at the door.

I hid behind Robby.

The bartender washed glasses. He wore a T-shirt that was too tight. It accentuated the roll of his belly. He was balding and showed a blurring tattoo of Bettie Page, blanketed beneath the swirling shrubbery of black hair on his forearm. Two other men sat at the bar. They both appeared to be tired, in their forties. They stared straight ahead as though watching something other than their own reflections in the mirror behind the bartender.

They were separated by three barstools.

The closer of the two had dirty hands. He bit his fingernails, too.

At the back of the room sat an undersized pool table with worn felt. It was tucked too near a corner to actually be playable. A man with a Royals ball cap shot pool by himself. He scratched the cue ball while we watched him. After he took another shot, he glanced up at me and Robby. He smiled.

I whispered, “Aren't you going to ask them? You know . . . say we're lost or shit?”

Robby shook his head and backed himself into me.

He said, “No. Let's get out of here, Austin.”

Robby leaned on me, pushing me back.

We quietly slid out the door.

Nobody even watched us leave.

ROBBY AND I
sat against the tailgate of the Explorer. We smoked cigarettes and watched cars on the highway. Robby said he wished we'd have brought our skateboards with us.

“Skating would be good,” I said.

The alley behind
Tally-Ho!
looked like a real clean place to skate.

“I never knew there were four gay guys in Waterloo,” I said.

That number involved making an assumption about the bartender.

“It's Sunday,” Robby said. “I bet when this place gets really busy, there might be five or six.”

“You're not going to be like that, Rob,” I said. “I mean, all lonely and shit.”

“Is that what you think?” Robby asked.

“I'm pretty sure that
is
what I think,” I said.

Out on the highway, a car slowed and then pulled into the parking lot at the opposite end, near
Fire at Will's Indoor Shooting Range
. It was a newer Honda Accord. The car drove along the front aisle of parking stalls and then turned left into a slot beside the other vehicles lined up near the
Tally-Ho!

Robby and I watched from our hidden spot behind his old Ford.

“And here's number five,” I said.

The Honda's door opened. Freshly pressed slacks and shiny black loafers with dangly tassels that flapped from their insteps like beagle ears lowered mechanically from the bottom of the driver's door. Then Pastor Roland Duff got out, straightened and brushed off his trousers, shut the door, and entered the
Tally-Ho!

“Uh,” I said.

“Uh,” Robby answered.

“I wonder what Pastor Roland Duff is doing here,” I said.

“Do you
really
wonder?” Robby asked.

“I guess not,” I said.

“He must be lonely,” Robby said.

“I'll buy that, Robby,” I said. “But if Pastor Roland Duff
is
lonely, it isn't because he's gay. It's because he's a shitspoon.”

Robby nodded thoughtfully and smoked.

Then he said, “I'll buy that, too, Austin.”

“I would like another cigarette, Robby,” I said.

Robby pulled the crumpled pack from his back pocket and handed it to me.

He said, “Where did you get that word from? I admire it.”

“What?” I said, “
Shitspoon?
”

“Uh-huh,” Robby said.

“It was the name of the alien's spacecraft in
Eden Five Needs You 4
,” I said.

“You're making that up,” Robby said.

“I know. I didn't pay attention to that shitspoon flick at all, Rob.”

“
WERE YOU SCARED
in there?” I asked.

“I wasn't scared,” Robby said.

“I was,” I said.

“I could feel your heartbeat through the floorboards. I thought it was because you found the bartender to be attractive.”

“Uh.
Was
he attractive?” I asked.

“Kind of,” Robby said.

I smoked.

“Do you think I'm queer, Rob?” I asked.

“I don't
care
if you're queer,” Robby said. “
Queer
is just a word. Like orange. I know
who
you are. There's no one word for that.”

I believed him.

“I know I'm not orange,” I said.

“Kind of oatmealy,” Robby said.

I always let Robby read the books. He was the only one allowed inside Austin Andrzej Szerba's history department.

“Sometimes I'm confused,” I said. “Actually, pretty much all the time I am. I wonder if I'm normal. I think I might ask my dad about it. You know, if he ever felt this way. Or if maybe he still does sometimes. Because I feel . . . Uh . . . I wonder if I am queer or shit.”

“You should ask your dad, Porcupine,” Robby said.

“Would you ask
your
dad?”

“My dad doesn't give a shit about me,” Robby said.

“Uh.”

I took another drag. “It made me feel weird. The other night. But I keep thinking about you, and I think doing that means there is something wrong about me.”

“I'm sorry. I won't do what I did ever again. You know. Sorry, Austin.”

“Nuh.” I said, “It's not something to be sorry about. I just don't know what to do, Rob.”

“You worry too much,” Robby said.

“I know.”

And then Robby said, “I do love you, though.”

“Yeah, Rob. I know.” I blew out a cloud of smoke. I tried to make it all perfect and cool like Robby could, but it didn't work.

So I said, “I love you, Robby.”

I did not say
too
.

Robby said, “I know that, Austin. It
is
nice to hear you say it, though.”

“I wish we brought our skateboards.”

“Uh-huh.”

I didn't know what to do.

SO WE STOOD
there and smoked our cigarettes down.

In the paralytic coma that is a Sunday night in a strip mall parking lot paved atop the scraps of a cornfield somewhere imprecisely located on the outskirts of Waterloo, Iowa, the whooshing excitement of passing cars came once or twice, every five minutes or so.

And that was our day. You know what I mean.

The
Tally-Ho!
turned out to be not so much a disappointment for Robby as the sad realization of everything he expected to see.

That is, except for Pastor Roland Duff showing up.

But history does consistently prove that whenever guys go out to visit someplace they've never been before, they're going to see shit they did not expect to see.

The Age of Discovery had come to Ealing, Iowa.

Experiments and shit like that.

Krzys Szczerba never expected to see the frosted cupcake breasts on Eva Nightingale's pillowed mounds of peach ice cream body. He never thought he would see his father, who was also named Andrzej, slipping down into the cold, green-black Atlantic with nothing more than a silver chain for Saint Casimir jingling upon the Quaker Oats whiteness of his still and empty chest.

And as strange and discomforting as it was to watch the headmaster from Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy pull up in freshly pressed attire and then casually step inside the
Tally-Ho!
with the carriage of a man entering the most familiar place on his planet, what we saw next was even stranger.

Out from the darkness in back of us, loaded down with plastic bags, bundles of clothing, suitcases, and a cardboard box lashed by three bungee cords to a broken saddlebag frame that vibrated over a half-flat back tire, a squeaking and tottering rusted old bicycle wobbled and creaked its way into the lamplight.

Hungry Jack had come to pay a visit.

Hungry Jack got around for an old guy on a crooked bicycle.

“He's a real dynamo on the two-wheeler,” I observed.

“I don't think he's a
Tally-Ho!
kind of guy,” Robby said.

“You never know,” I offered.

Robby took another puff and shook his head. “You never do, Porcupine.”

It was Robby who'd spoken to Hungry Jack in the past.

I was afraid of the toothless old war criminal.

Robby was much braver than I was, except when it came to shit like breaking into
From Attic to Seller Consignment Store
in the middle of the night.

Robby had given Hungry Jack cigarettes in the past, and, on occasion, the two of them smoked together in Grasshopper Jungle while I worked inside Johnny McKeon's store. That was how Robby found out all the history about Hungry Jack and the things he'd done in Vietnam.

“You want to know what happens?” Hungry Jack had said to Robby.

“What happens?” Robby said.

Hungry Jack said, “You could do whatever you wanted to do over there.”

“What I would want to do is get on a boat and come home,” Robby told him.

“No boats!” Hungry Jack jumped up and down and repeated himself, “No boats! No fucking boats home! What are you, a crybaby?”

“I suppose I am a crybaby,” Robby said to him.

“You could do whatever you want,” Hungry Jack said. “Any kind of drug you like. Heroin. Pot. Heroin. Heroin. You could fuck anything you wanted. All the time. Drugs and fucks. I bet you'd like to fuck anything, wouldn't you? Wouldn't you?”

“Uh,” Robby told him, “I don't think I would like to fuck
anything
.”

“Yes you would fuck anything,” Hungry Jack told him.

“No I wouldn't,” Robby affirmed.

“You would, too,” Hungry Jack argued.

Robby told me this back-and-forth rally of counter-shot verbal tennis balls continued for several rounds.

“Well, that's what
we
did,” Hungry Jack said. “Fucked everything. Fucked everyone who'd hold still long enough. We fucked the planet if we wanted to. And no boats! But you know what happened?”

“I suppose you cooked your brain on dope and a little while later your penis scabbed up and fell off from all the dirty shit you fucked,” Robby ventured.

“As soon as one boy shoots, everyone starts shooting,” Hungry Jack told Robby.

And then Hungry Jack said, “Then, it's time to come home.”

Then Hungry Jack told Robby about all the people who died in the village.

Robby told me.

But I never talked to Hungry Jack before or since that day Robby told me the old man's stories.

So that night, Robby Brees and I stood there in the parking lot of the
Tally-Ho!
, which was Waterloo, Iowa's one and only gay bar.

I thought about fucking things.

And while I thought about fucking things, and Robby and I smoked cigarettes, we witnessed firsthand what happens to a person who swallowed a mouthful of
Stanpreme
pizza that had been contaminated by
Contained MI Plague Strain 412E.

Here is what happened:

Hungry Jack tottered toward us. The front tire of his bicycle jerked this way and that, but somehow the man kept rolling. Hungry Jack's eyes were fixed directly on Robby and me.

When he stopped his bicycle, Hungry Jack was ten feet away from us. He stood at the edge of the dark near a low easement that separated the blacktop of the parking lot from the blacktop of the highway.