Grasshopper Jungle (19 page)

“He hates everyone who asks for ice water. What do you expect? He's
Satan
,” Robby theorized.

“Oh yeah,” I said. Robby was very smart about theology, too.

“Look, I wanted to say something, Porcupine,” Robby began.

“Don't say anything, Rob. I don't want you to.”

I waved my hand in the air between us like I was erasing words from an invisible blackboard.

“Okay,” Robby said.

THE THREE OF US
marched through waist-high weeds and brambles, across fields that at one time were forests of corn, out to Shann's launch pad.

Shann Collins found the invisible McKeon silo.

The silo was just as Shann had described it to me: A circular pad of concrete thirty feet in diameter. Around the circumference, corroded anchor bolts that used to support the structure's cylindrical outer wall poked up like a mummy's rusted fingers. In the exact center was a steel hatch, tightened shut by a spoked metal wheel that looked entirely like something you'd find on top of an old diving bell.

I was nervous.

“We should have brought flashlights,” I said.

And then I added, “Let's go back and get some flashlights.”

Robby, who was never scared of anything unless we were breaking in to Johnny McKeon's museum of horrors in the middle of the night, said, “Let's have a cigarette and then open this shit up, Porcupine.”

“You boys smoke too much,” Shann said.

So Robby and I lit cigarettes, and before he'd taken the second drag on his, Robby squatted down above the hatch wheel and began forcing it counterclockwise.

As soon as the wheel rotated a quarter turn, we heard a low buzzing sound coming up from beneath the hatch.

“Um,” I said. “Robby? That thing's full of bugs or shit.”

“It's not full of bugs,” Robby argued.

“If it's full of bugs, I'm going to be mad,” Shann offered.

“If it's the kind of bugs I'm thinking of, you won't be mad for too long,” I said.

“He is thinking of butterflies that shit raspberry cupcakes on your head,” Robby said.

That made me hungry for cupcakes.

“No,” I said. “No, I am not thinking of butterflies that shit raspberry cupcakes, Rob.”

Robby knew what kind of bugs I was thinking about, but Robby was not afraid.

Finally, the wheel would turn no more. The hatch came loose, and Robby stood up and lifted it open.

The hole was three feet across. As soon as the hatch raised up, the inside of the lower chamber illuminated in a flickering greenish fluorescent light. The buzzing noise was louder now, but it was fairly obvious that it was being produced by some kind of power generator, as opposed to six-foot-tall, man-eating praying mantises.

I took a drag, exhaled, and said, “Roof access, Rob.”

AT EXACTLY THE
same moment Robby Brees opened the hatch to the McKeon silo, my mother and father stood at the bedside of Eric Christopher Szerba. It was nearly midnight in Germany. My parents were trying to talk Eric into speaking with his younger brother on their cell phone. My father held his phone above Eric's bed like it was a fragile baby bird. Eric did not want to talk to his younger brother. Eric Christopher Szerba told my father to get out of his goddamned room and leave him alone.

At that moment, my cell phone was sitting on the coffee table in our living room beside an empty container of chicken-flavored Cup-O-Noodles.

I often forgot to carry my phone with me.

At that moment, Grant Wallace fell down in his bathroom while taking a piss. Grant hit his head on the rim of his toilet. It was not a Nightingale. Grant Wallace's head broke open. It didn't matter. Grant was hatching. The bug that came out of Grant was young and powerful. He was hungry and also very horny. He needed to eat, and he needed to find Eileen Pope. He could smell and hear Eileen Pope, even though she was four miles away from the Wallace home.

Grant Wallace made a terrible mess in his bathroom. There was nothing that was not covered by spatters of blood after he finished eating. But Grant was still hungry, and he also wanted to fuck and make more bugs with Eileen Pope.

When he came out of the bathroom, Grant Wallace ate his two younger brothers, his mother, and the family's Yorkshire terrier, which was named Butterfly.

Grant Wallace's father, Will Wallace, was not home from his job in Waterloo yet.

Will Wallace owned
Fire at Will's Indoor Shooting Range and Gun Shop.

At that moment, Will Wallace was selling a 9mm Ruger over the counter to a drunk man who claimed he was going to use it to shoot his ex-wife's cat.

Will Wallace had a sign behind his counter. The sign displayed Will Wallace's two favorite mottos. It looked like this:

A GUN IS NOT A TOY
ALL SALES FINAL

The three Hoover Boys Grant Wallace enjoyed hanging out with hatched within minutes of one another. Like Grant, Travis Pope, and Hungry Jack, they wanted to do only two things.

Now there were seven bugs in Ealing, Iowa: Eileen Pope and her six suitors—Hungry Jack, Travis Pope, Grant Wallace, Tyler Jacobson, Devin Stoddard, and Roger Baird. Eileen Pope was going to be very popular.

Eileen's dance card was full.

At that moment, the vice president of the United States of America was performing his monthly testicular self-exam. His balls felt perfectly fine. The vice president of the United States of America named his balls Theodore and Franklin. Theodore was a little bigger than Franklin.

And Johnny McKeon was inside his office. He watched the little two-headed baby boy inside the jar. Johnny had seen the boy move before. The two-headed boy was moving his hands now: open and closed, open and closed, open and closed.

Johnny said, “Ain't that a kick?”

Johnny thought the thing inside the jar was some sort of deranged toy.

Two-Headed Boys Are Not Toys.

Ollie Jungfrau was lying in his bed. He lived in a bachelor apartment at the Del Vista Arms. He needed to take the day off after the stressful ordeal with Wayne DeLong in the parking lot at Grasshopper Jungle the night before. Ollie Jungfrau thought masturbating would make him feel more cheerful. He also phoned out for pizza delivery from
Satan's Pizza
.

Customers for
Tipsy Cricket Liquors
had to bother Johnny McKeon at the secondhand store if they needed booze, cigarettes, or condoms. Johnny didn't mind. Johnny McKeon never minded much of anything.

Louis, the Chinese cook at
The Pancake House
, whose real name was Ah Wong Sing, met Connie Brees in the alley at Grasshopper Jungle.

They went back to the Del Vista Arms together.

At exactly the same moment the hatch on the McKeon silo came up into the Iowa sky for the first time in forty years, Connie Brees was making certain her son, Robert Brees Jr., was not at home. She went through Robby's room, looking for a box of condoms she found on the floor of Robby's bedroom on Tuesday afternoon when Robby was at school. Ah Wong Sing sat naked, waiting for Connie Brees in her bedroom, which was just on the other side of the little bathroom where I'd vomited and taken a shower on Tuesday morning.

And, at exactly the moment Robby lifted open the old hatch and the subterranean chamber below our feet lit up in pale fluorescent-green light, I was thinking about having an underground threesome with Shann and Robby, and feeling myself turn red and hot with my sweating, embarrassed horniness.

I also wanted cupcakes.

IF DRIVING OUT
to the
Tally-Ho!
with Robby Brees was like traveling forward in time, then climbing down into the belly of the McKeon silo with him was like going backwards.

First: Robby climbed down the rounded steel ladder, and Shann and I followed. As soon as Robby was halfway down to the floor, which was fifteen feet below the hatch opening, a welcoming sound chimed us into the silo.

It was a recording of a very sterile, anesthetized-sounding woman's voice that said:

Welcome to Eden. Please secure the hatch upon entry.

Welcome to Eden. Please secure the hatch upon entry.

Welcome to Eden. Please secure the hatch upon entry.

“Uh,” I said. The message kept repeating without any indication that it would stop. I added, “Shann, if this place ends up being full of sperm, I'm leaving.”

The place did have sperm in it. We found it later.

You will see.

“It's just like our mothers or something,” Shann said. “I bet she won't shut up till one of us closes the front door.”

Shann pointed up to the hatch and the disc of blue Iowa sky above our heads.

Shann was very smart.

I thought it was like our mothers because the voice sounded like the two Connies—Connie Brees and Connie Szerba—when they were floating along on little blue kayaks.

Welcome to Eden. Please secure the hatch upon entry.

Welcome to Eden. Please secure the hatch upon entry.

“Okay,” I said. “I can't take it anymore.”

But before I could do anything, Robby was back up the ladder, sealing shut the hatch above us.

The welcome announcement stopped.

Robby looked down at us from the top of the ladder.

“Uh,” I said. “What if we can't get out, Rob, and this chamber suddenly begins filling up with sperm or shit like that?”

Robby said, “Eden Five needs us, Porcupine.”

“Uh,” I repeated.

“You worry too much,” Robby said.

That was very true.

Everyone knew I worried too much.

Absentmindedly, I fiddled with the silver Saint Kazimierz bauble dangling from the chain around my neck.

THE DIVING BELL
turned out to be much more than a diving bell. It was a bunker fortress, a preserved glimpse, like Paleolithic cave art, at the paranoia that gripped Cold War Ealing, Iowa, and the United States of America.

It was everything in the entire world down there.

You will see.

The first room below the hatch was something like a mudroom. There were benches all along its circular wall, with coat and hat hooks positioned at even distances above them. The wall was painted an industrial shade of gray with bold yellow block letters that said:

MCKEON INDUSTRIES INFESTATION COMPLEX
EDEN PROJECT • EALING, IOWA

There was a pair of scuffed wingtip shoes left beneath one of the benches, as well as a powder-blue windbreaker hanging from a hook. There was also a matching set of three of the same plastic pink lawn flamingos with the wire stakes coming out of their asses. The wire stakes were fed through perfectly drilled holes in the benches. The flamingos were turned with their beaks toward the center of the mudroom, like they were watching us.

“This must be some kind of nuke shelter,” Robby said.

“Nuh,” I said. “It has something to do with that shit Tyler dropped.”

Shann said, “What are you talking about?”

“Let's see what's down here,” I said.

A single metal door led out of the entry room. The fact that this door also had a sealing airlock mechanism convinced me that the silo had been created for some anticipated disaster. A reasonable observer might conclude that Dr. Grady McKeon had prepared the structure, as many Americans did during the 1960s, as a type of bomb shelter for his family. But I knew after what I'd seen inside Johnny McKeon's office at
From Attic to Seller Consignment Store
that there was something much more to this silo and to Grady McKeon's creations.

I was certain Robby believed it, too.

None of us had any way of knowing it at the time, but Robby Brees and the bloody message he left on the pavement at Grasshopper Jungle had just as much to do with the end of the world as old, dead Dr. Grady McKeon ever did.

We went through the first door.

Robby said, “I don't mind telling you this, Shann, but I think you should keep this place secret from your parents, so we can have a raging party down here.”

“
Like an orgy
,” I whispered.

“Uh,” Shann said.

“We could rule the world from this place,” Robby offered.

I wasn't really listening to them. I was nervous about being there, and I was silently communicating to Saint Kazimierz, asking him if he could make me stop thinking about having an orgy.

In the early 1970s, among the last times anyone had ever been down inside the McKeon silo, which was technically called the Eden Project, scientists and workers from McKeon Industries actually did come down here to have sex parties.

We would find this out later, much to Shann's embarrassment.

The doorway led us into a vast tiled hallway of lockers, which in turn opened on either side to a wide shower room on our right, sinks and mirrors to our left, with gleaming stainless fixtures and hospital-clean floors and walls. I went inside the shower room. The showerheads were arranged like sunflowers blooming outward from the tops of central posts that looked like columnar periscopes in old submarines. Twenty people could shower in there at the same time. The place was obviously designed with the idea of not segregating shower-takers and clothes-changers by gender.

I opened one of the spigots.

The water came out hot.

The place was suitable for an army, and it was also ready to be used.

“Too bad I already took a bath today,” I said.

“Yeah. Too bad,” Shann said.

She was joking.

In the shower chamber, at the end of the room where there were polished redwood benches and cubbies for towels and clothes, there were three doored stalls to toilets, and an enormous twenty-foot-long porcelain communal wall urinal. I examined the top of the urinal. There were birds on it with ribbons coiled around their happy beaks. The urinal was an antique Nightingale.