Grasshopper Jungle (14 page)

At first, the old man was motionless, straddling the top tube of the bike frame with his feet planted on either side. Hungry Jack's chin was slick with drool, but that wasn't uncommon for him.

Hungry Jack had no front teeth.

He stared at Robby. Hungry Jack knew Robby. For all I could tell, I was invisible to the man.

Robby took a big drag from his cigarette.

Robby said, “Hey, Jack. You want a cigarette?”

Jack stared and drooled.

“He's freaking out on you, Rob,” I whispered. “Let's just leave.”

“Maybe he's exhausted from the long ride,” Robby said. Then he asked again, “Want to smoke, Jack?”

Hungry Jack wobbled. He raised his right knee and got off the bicycle.

Hungry Jack released his grasp on the handlebars and his bicycle crashed in a noisy heap. A thermos bottle with a small amount of gasoline in it rolled away toward the curb.

Robby smoked.

Hungry Jack looked at Robby. He took two steps toward us and stopped. The whole time I never saw the man blink once.

He also never said anything to Robby.

Then Hungry Jack turned around and stepped over the low hedge that bordered the parking lot. He lumbered like a sleepwalker, out onto the highway.

Hungry Jack walked directly into the path of a Dodge pickup that was speeding in the direction headed away from Ealing.

The truck never slowed, even after the concussive thud the old man's body made when Hungry Jack went spinning and cartwheeling down the road.

Things like that happened in Iowa all the time, but Robby and I never saw it right in front of our faces.

“Holy shit, Rob,” I said.

Robby said, “Holy shit.”

SOMETHING ELSE HAPPENED,
too.

We did not talk about it at school.

Shann wondered why Robby and I were both so sullen that next day. We told her we were tired. I asked if the noise in her wall had come back, but our unplugging the teletype machine had put an end to the typing rats problem in the McKeon House.

“What are we going to say, Rob?” I had asked him. “Are we going to tell Shann we were hanging out in the parking lot of a gay bar smoking cigarettes and we saw Pastor Roland Duff out cruising just before some homeless guy stepped in front of a Dodge truck? Are we going to tell her what happened after that?”

And Robby said, “What
did
happen after that, Austin? I still don't believe we saw that shit.”

Because what happened was this:

We ran out onto the highway to see if we could help Hungry Jack.

It was terrible.

It took us several minutes to find him.

The truck had thrown the old man's body more than a hundred feet through the air. We found Hungry Jack lying in a field of waist-high corn on the opposite side of the highway from the
Tally-Ho!

He had been knocked completely out of his shoes, and his dirty pants had been pulled down, turned entirely inside out, and twisted around his broken legs.

Hungry Jack wasn't just dead. He was destroyed.

I had never seen anyone dead before. Neither had Robby. I thought about Krzys Szczerba saying good-bye to his father on the boat in the middle of the ocean, how scared and alone he must have felt. I thought about Saint Casimir, and Pastor Roland Duff across the street from us.

“Holy shit, Rob,” I said again.

I stepped closer to the mangled wreckage of the old man.

Robby said, “Don't touch him.”

“He just walked right out in front of that shit,” I said.

“We need to call someone,” Robby said.

I took my phone out of my pocket and turned it on.

Then Hungry Jack moved his arms. His chest heaved and collapsed, and he wriggled around in the dirt between the young cornstalks that had been mowed down when he tumbled and tumbled through the field.

“Stay still!” I tried to tell him.

Robby and I stood back, afraid to get too close. From the light on my cell phone's screen I could see how there was blood all over the place. Pieces of Hungry Jack were sticking out from his belly and from the top of his head.

But the old man wheezed and writhed around in the dirt.

It looked like he was breaking apart.

He was coming apart like a soft-boiled egg oozing thick, yolky blood.

“Let's get somebody,” Robby said.

My hand shook so bad I could not even punch three emergency digits on my phone. I also could not look away from the thrashing heap in the cornfield.

Hungry Jack split entirely in half, the same way you'd cleave the husk of a roasted peanut, all the way from his skull to the fork of his crotch. Then he began turning inside out.

That is exactly what happened.

It wasn't that Hungry Jack was actually
turning
, but something was coming
out
of the peanut shell of the old man's body. The thing flopped and crawled stiffly, like a newborn calf, all slick and covered with blood and slippery goo.

“Holy shit,” we both said, over and over.

Robby grabbed my shoulder.

I grabbed him back.

We stood there, shaking and holding each other, and we watched as a six-legged bug the size of a small man crawled like some kind of windup mechanized toy out of the hollowed remains of Hungry Jack.

It wiped itself clean with four of its appendages, bringing its spiny hands up to its mandibles, licking itself clean and dry with crackling, smacking bug-mouth sounds.

The thing's head was triangular. It looked like a praying mantis, only it was as tall as we were.

It was identical to those things—pieces of giant bugs—Robby and I had seen floating inside sealed aquarium displays in Johnny McKeon's office two nights before.

Those things were not alive.

This one was.

And it came out of Hungry Jack's body.

The thing hissed and moved toward us. Its head pivoted and turned in a near-complete circle. It froze the point of its chin directly at Robby, looking, looking, and then it backed away.

I pulled Robby's shirt so hard, it nearly came off over the top of his head.

We took off running.

We did not look back.

SAINT CASIMIR'S REAL
name was Kazimierz.

He died very young, in his twenties.

Kazimierz refused to be married, even though his father had arranged for a princess as the boy's bride. Because of that, Kazimierz is revered for his chastity and purity. He is considered the patron saint of Poland, and also patron saint of the young.

Maybe Saint Kazimierz was considered the patron for the young because he refused to do what his father told him to do.

History shows that all teenage boys can empathize with that.

But maybe Kazimierz did not get married to the princess because he was confused about what he wanted and what was expected of him, just like me.

Among the wonders credited to Kazimierz is an account of how the young prince somehow miraculously contributed to a victory of the Polish Army over the Russians.

Apparently, the Russians masturbated excessively.

HISTORY LESSON FOR
the day: The more time you wait before telling somebody the truth about a secret you've been keeping, the longer your path out of the woods gets.

“What am I going to do, Ingrid?” I said.

I came straight home from school that day. I threw my Lutheran Boy patriotic candy cane outfit on the floor of my bedroom and sat down at my desk. I tried to figure things out as I drew pictures and wrote my stories, but everything only became more muddled and confused.

It had been a tough day at school.

I did not know what to say to Robby. I tried all day to come up with some coherent story to tell Shann. The story would have been an abbreviation, naturally, but I would have to go back to the moment Robby and I left her alone in the backseat of his Ford Explorer on Friday night in Grasshopper Jungle.

I would not tell her about
experiments
or what was, and was not, normal for teenage boys to do, according to the popular psychologist who, although a middle-aged female with cosmetic lip surgery, was a foremost authority on teenage boys. I thought about how I would describe the things Robby and I saw inside her stepfather's office, and I could only hope Shann would not ask me why I'd taken Robby down there in the first place.

Because I was not sure why Robby and I did go down there. All I knew was that I liked doing things with Robby that we were not
supposed
to do, normal or not.

I curled my bare toes in Ingrid's fur.

She let out a big, contented breath, like she was exhaling a billowing puff of soothing cigarette smoke.

“What am I going to say to Shann, Ingrid?”

Robby phoned after that. He asked if I was mad at him, and I told him of course not. That was a dumb thing for him to ask.

Then he said, “Okay, Porcupine. I was just scared about it since you wouldn't talk to me at school. Can you skate down to Grasshopper Jungle? I need to show you something.”

I needed a cigarette, too.

So I said, “Okay, Rob. Give me fifteen minutes.”

I kicked around through my scattered wardrobe.

I was running out of non-Lutheran-boy clothes.

I slipped on my basketball shorts. I closed my eyes and imagined a prayer to Saint Kazimierz to protect me against getting hit in the balls or having an erection in front of anyone. I pulled on a black Shins T-shirt, found some socks under my bed, got my skate shoes and board, and went out into the hallway.

I said to Ingrid, “Don't toast any brownies till Dad lets you out.”

Ingrid made a dog sigh and put her chin down between her paws.

AND ON THAT
Monday night, Robby Brees and I were going to get drunk together for the first time in our lives.

We had already planned it out. I had obtained permission from my mother and father to spend the night at the Del Vista Arms Luxury Apartments and go to school with Robby in the morning.

It was not like I could back out now.

I had spent the night at the Del Vista Arms before. My father trusted Robby. Robby was never late to class at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy. Robby never caused school-wide controversies by doing such things as reading books about Catholic boys who masturbate. Also, there was no reason for anybody to ever
not
trust Robby Brees.

I trusted Robby enough to stay at the Del Vista Arms.

Two of the people who lived on Robby's floor smoked meth.

The night before, on Sunday, Robby and I stood in a young cornfield and watched Hungry Jack's body split apart. We saw a bug the size of a small bear climb out of him.

The other six victims of
Contained MI Plague Strain 412E
had not hatched yet.

Bugs do two things.

They eat and they fuck.

Bugs are soldiers, machines, just like Hungry Jack was.

Bug One—the bug that hatched from Hungry Jack—wanted to eat and fuck. It ate most of what was left of Hungry Jack. It wanted to find Eileen Pope, Travis Pope's wife. It wanted to make more bugs with her.

Ealing, Iowa, was just like Eden Five for a new planet of horny soldiers.

Robby was already in the alley when I got to Grasshopper Jungle. He waited for me behind
Tipsy Cricket Liquors
. When I skated up to him, he held an unlit cigarette in his mouth.

Robby always waited for me. It made smoking better.

Louis, the cook from
The Pancake House
whose real name was Ah Wong Sing, had just thrown a cardboard box full of potato peelings, empty milk cartons, and eggshells into the dumpster. He spilled some peelings onto the sleeper sofa. He brushed them away with his hands.

“I wonder if he knows what pubic lice are,” Robby said.

“I have seen Louis take a nap on that couch before,” I said.

Louis smiled and nodded at us as he walked across the alleyway.

Louis did not speak English very well, so when Robby asked me if I wanted a fag, Louis got embarrassed. He made it obvious that he was trying not to listen to us, which made it obvious that he
was
listening to us.

“Hello, Louis,” I said.

Robby struck a match for me and I got my cigarette going.

Louis said, “Hello, Dynamo.”

Ah Wong Sing believed that
Dynamo
was my real name.

Louis hung out with Ollie Jungfrau. They played online alien hunter games and looked at porn together. I thought maybe if I did more shit like that with Robby it might make me feel normal and not so confused.

Louis kept smiling nervously and disappeared through the back door to
The Pancake House
's kitchen.

We smoked.

“You're still coming over to get drunk with me, right?” Robby said.

“I don't know about getting drunk, Rob. It's been a weird couple days. Maybe I'll just watch
you
do it. You know, like keep you safe and shit.” I said, “Like in the sixties, guys used to do that for their buddies when they dropped acid.”

“I'm not dropping acid, and I'm not going to get drunk if you don't,” Robby said.

I felt guilty about my attempt to back down.

We skated through the alley without saying anything.

When we were down by the dumpster, I stopped and asked Robby what it was he wanted to show me. He carried the rolled-up front section of the
Waterloo News and Gazette
in his back pocket. When he unrolled it, I already had a premonition that there would be something about the accident outside Waterloo, about what had happened to Hungry Jack.

“Look at this,” Robby said.

There was a photograph of Hungry Jack's dirty and laceless shoes lying beside the highway. In the grainy background, I saw the
Tally-Ho!
and
Fire at Will's Indoor Shooting Range and Gun Shop
. The photograph was like staring through a portal in time.

The short article said that a transient had been struck and killed by a motorist and there were no witnesses.

Transient
is a nice way of saying
homeless.
Homeless
makes people think of despair. It makes you think that the United States of America doesn't care about people.

Transient
sounds like you have a case of
wanderlust
.

Wanderlust
is part of the American Spirit.

The
transient
in the article had been carrying a military I.D. card that gave his name as Charles R. Hoofard.

Hungry Jack's real name was Charles R. Hoofard.

He was born in Indianapolis in 1950.

In 1950, Harry S. Truman was president of the United States.

Harry Truman, as far as I can tell, also never took a shit in his life.

In 1950, the same year that a boy named Charles R. Hoofard was born in Indianapolis, President Harry S. Truman sent military assistance to the French. They were trying to maintain their French Catholic colony in Vietnam. That military aid would grow and blossom to the point that a boy with
wanderlust
from Indiana named Charles R. Hoofard ultimately took time out from fucking whatever he wanted to fuck to participate in the killing of an entire village of women, elderly people, and children.

History is full of shit like that.

All roads intersect on pages on my desk.

All roads spring up along trails worn down by boys on bikes.

All roads lead past shooting ranges, liquor stores, and gay bars.

Wanderlust
is part of the American Spirit.

The article went on to say that Charles R. Hoofard's body had been brutalized by coyotes before being discovered by a farmer Monday morning.

It asked for anyone with information to phone the Iowa State Patrol.

“Uh,” I said.

I rolled the newspaper up and handed it back to Robby.

We never called anyone about what happened to Hungry Jack.

We had been uncharacteristically silent back inside Robby's Explorer in the lot outside the
Tally-Ho!

Robby sped all the way home to Ealing.

We smoked and smoked.

I think Robby was crying, too.

Robby and I were in shock.

That is a poor excuse for someone who feels obligated to record history, but that's what happened.

It was our day, and you
do
know what I mean.

“We
did
see the same thing, Rob. People would think we
were
dropping acid,” I said.

“Shit like that isn't supposed to happen,” Robby said.

“But it did,” I said. “Maybe we
should
get drunk.”

Then Robby said, “That bug. It was the same thing we saw inside Johnny's office.”

“Like I said. We saw the same thing, Robby.”

It was getting on to evening. We decided to take Robby's car and pick up my school clothes and sleeping bag.

I always slept on the floor at Robby's apartment. If I put my ear to the floor, I sometimes could hear the meth smokers down the hall fighting with each other.

But as we were skating back through the alley, just when we came to the spot where Grant Wallace and the Hoover Boys had beaten us up three days earlier, Robby and I noticed something on the piss-covered blacktop of the alley:

GRANT WA

It was the message Robby started spelling out in the blood that dripped from his nose.

The letters gave off a pale blue glow in the dimming light of evening.

“Um,” Robby said.

I said, “Yes. I see that, too, Robby.”

JOHNNY MCKEON WAS
just locking up the front door of
From Attic to Seller Consignment Store
when Robby and I skated past.

He frowned at me, shook his head, and made a two-fingered gesture to his lips as a kind of sign language reproach about Robby and me skating around in front of his place of business with cigarettes in our mouths.

I was embarrassed.

“Sorry, Johnny,” I said. I dropped my cigarette onto the blacktop.

Robby did, too.

Johnny said it was a great coincidence that I happened by, because he'd gotten something that afternoon that he meant to bring home for me. I felt guilty and scared because Johnny McKeon had never given me anything more than a paycheck and a couple free packs of cigarettes in the past. I'd never asked for anything more from Johnny McKeon, either.

“Wait up,” Johnny said, and he went back inside his store.

Robby and I waited.

“I found this today in a jewelry box,” Johnny said when he came back. He locked the door to the secondhand store and held out his hand to me. His hand was cupped closed, the way a kid might hold on to a bug or something.

“I thought you might get a kick out of this, Austin,” Johnny said.

Robby was curious. He leaned in closer to see what Johnny McKeon was offering me. When Johnny unfolded his tentacle fingers, I saw a coiled silver chain with an oval medallion strung on its links. In the center of the pendant was the image of a man with a halo, his chin turned downward in an attitude of something that looked like modesty. The bauble was worn, but the man held what looked like a tree branch in his hand. Around the rim of the outside, in raised letters, was the inscription:
SAINT KAZIMIERZ