Grasshopper Jungle (21 page)

Ingrid, my golden retriever that could not bark, was exhausted from being outside and watching me mow the lawn and scoop up dog shit all day. She was curled up beneath my desk, asleep and content, waiting for me to come home.

Ah Wong Sing and Connie Brees were lying naked together in bed. They had had sex three times in one hour.

Ah Wong Sing was a real dynamo for such a quiet guy.

The Pancake House
cook and Connie Brees smoked a marijuana cigarette that Ah Wong Sing had rolled before coming over to the Del Vista Arms. They also used up the last of the condoms Connie Brees had found on the floor of Robby's bedroom.

The family from Minnesota who had come through Ealing the previous Saturday on their serial-killer road trip were heading back home to Minneapolis. They bought a
Stanpreme
pizza to go and had a picnic on the benches at Amelia Jenks Bloomer Park.

It was not a good idea.

Nobody in Ealing, Iowa, ever went to Amelia Jenks Bloomer Park.

Some parks are unexplainably like that: Unused, as though there is some unspoken recognition there might be a sort of toxic pall hanging over them. In fact, Amelia Jenks Bloomer Park was built on the site of an old chemical milling and etching plant. The tanks there had corrupted, and poisonous metals from them seeped into the ground. Swallowing water from the drinking fountains at Amelia Jenks Bloomer Park was just a little safer than sucking on a nozzle of unleaded premium at the Arco on Kimber Drive. Nobody knew anything about that. The twin boys drank and drank from the fountains at Amelia Jenks Bloomer Park in Ealing, Iowa. They filled squirt guns again and again with Amelia Jenks Bloomer Park's drinking water.

It did not matter.

The family sat and looked over their memories in their guidebook. Before Amelia Jenks Bloomer Park was an abandoned park,
United Chem-Etch Incorporated
's parking lot occupied the exact spot where the picnic tables were located. In 1969, the decapitated head of an adult white male had been discovered in that parking lot. It was a perfect place to have a family picnic. The father remarked how fresh the sausage meat was on the
Stanpreme
pizza they had bought.

The Hoover Boys—at least the bugs that hatched from the Hoover Boys—Tyler, Devin, and Roger, scampered with clicking, mechanical jerkiness across the Little League field adjacent to the picnic area.

They audibly buzzed with horniness and hunger.

One of the twin boys saw them. He said, “Look! A dragon parade!”

It was not a dragon parade.

Mantises are very quick. It's not that the bugs that hatched from the Hoover Boys and the other victims of
Contained MI Plague Strain 412E
were precisely mantises, but they were close enough in physiology, with their triangular heads and viciously barbed trisegmented striking arms. And they also stood six feet tall.

In battle, a six-foot-tall praying mantis could easily destroy a six-foot-tall grizzly bear. They were like grizzly bears with steel plating and lightning-fast arms studded with row upon row of shark's teeth.

The bugs that hatched out from the victims of
Contained MI Plague Strain 412E
liked to snatch their prey up by the head, and then commence eating their thrashing victims straight down to their shoes.

The dragon parade made a bloody mess at Amelia Jenks Bloomer Park.

They were very quick.

They even ate what was left of the tourist family's
Stanpreme
pizza before scurrying off to look for more food and also for Eileen Pope, who they could hear and smell and wanted to fuck.

And while we danced and danced, my mother swallowed another of her little blue kayaks. She had gone back to the hotel with my father. My father was leaving a voicemail message on my cell phone at exactly the same moment that Shann and Robby danced with me.

The message was this:

 

Hey, Austin. We've been sitting with Eric, and he looks good. Real good. He is going to be fine, son, so there's no need to worry about your big brother. He is a hero. Call me and let me know how things are going at school. I hope you're eating okay, and not just Cup-O-Noodles and shit like that. And don't forget to let Ingrid out. I love you, son.

 

Happy hour was beginning at the
Tally-Ho!

Thursdays were good days there for men to meet new men who were daring enough to finally try their luck at the
Tally-Ho!
Will Wallace was drinking a beer at the bar while Shann ran her fingers through my hair and Robby brushed my sweaty hand softly with his.

Will Wallace was not homosexual. The
Tally-Ho!
sold beer for seventy cents per glass during Thursday happy hours. Will Wallace also enjoyed the attention he got from men who showed up at Waterloo, Iowa's one and only gay bar for the first time.

Will Wallace had no idea he was spending his last evening on earth in a bar for homosexual men.

At the same time Will Wallace was finishing his second glass of beer at the
Tally-Ho!
, Mr. Duane Coventry, our chemistry teacher at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy, was tapping on the front door at
Tipsy Cricket Liquors
. He needed a bottle of whiskey. Duane was single, and he drank a lot. Nobody opened the door for him, so he got back into his car and drove to the Hy-Vee, where Connie Szerba worked as a bookkeeper.

At the Hy-Vee, Duane Coventry purchased two boxes of antihistamine tablets for his allergies. He did not have allergies. The chemistry teacher from Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy was a real dynamo when it came to cooking methamphetamine in his kitchen. Duane Coventry was very lonely. He should have tried hanging out at the
Tally-Ho!

Hungry Jack, whose real name was Charles R. Hoofard, but was now a massive green bug that looked like a praying mantis, and Travis Pope, who was also a massive green bug that looked like a praying mantis, were back in the alley at Grasshopper Jungle. They were fighting over mating privileges with Travis's wife, Eileen Pope, who was also a massive green bug that looked like a praying mantis.

It didn't matter. Travis had already inseminated her a dozen times that day, and now he was more hungry than horny. There was plenty of Eileen Pope to go around.

Eileen Pope was about to become queen of a new world.

Once her six suitors got to her, they would collectively fertilize millions of eggs inside Eileen Pope's burgeoning abdomen. It would take her several days to produce and hide her egg mass, but then in a matter of hours there would be more hatchlings from those first seven victims of the
Contained MI Plague Strain 412E
than there were people in the entire state of Iowa.

The world would have just about seven days before the bugs started taking over.

And bugs only want two things.

So Travis Pope submitted to Hungry Jack and scuttled away down the alley behind the Ealing Mall.

Travis Pope hunted for someone to eat.

Hungry Jack joined himself to Eileen Pope as she clamped four of her arms onto the dirty convertible sofa in Grasshopper Jungle and buzzed with contented, fizzling coos like a short-circuiting wall socket.

We danced until the entire tape played through and flapped its disconnected end over and over around the receiving spool in an unending counterclockwise loop.

Shann and Robby and I were soaked with sweat. The three of us collapsed onto the thick shag carpeting, panting and staring up at the high ceiling overhead.

Shann said, “Let's try to find something besides shower water to drink.”

I said, “I want to go piss in my great-great-grandfather's urinal.”

“So do I,” said Robby.

History often loops around into complete circles.

The spool of tape spun and spun.

ANDRZEJ SZCZERBA'S AMERICAN
name, the one with swapped-out consonants and shit, was Andrew Szerba. Andrzej Szczerba was my great-grandfather. His mother was Eva Nightingale, and his father was Krzys Szczerba, who Americans renamed Christopher Szerba, manufacturer of palatial urinals.

Robby and I peed all over the gleaming receiving wall of Krzys Szczerba's beautiful urinal.

“This is the greatest urinal ever made,” I said.

Robby stared at the spot on the wall where the disembodied praying hands would be hanging if this were Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy.

“Very accommodating
and
unoppressive,” Robby offered.

“If the act of urination had self-esteem, it could not help but feel better about itself after occurring in such a splendid location,” I said.

Robby said, “Without a doubt, this is the nicest thing I have ever urinated on, with the possible exception of Sheila's husband's new Harley-Davidson.”

Sheila was Robby's sister, who lived in Cedar Falls.

“You peed on your brother-in-law's Harley-Davidson?” I asked.

“He wasn't my brother-in-law at the time, but, yes, Porcupine, I peed all over the seat,” Robby explained.

“Why?” I asked.

“I'm not really sure,” Robby said. “Something inside me just told me that motorcycle needed a good peeing-on.”

“Well, I have never peed on anything that was particularly nice. Except for maybe the grass on the football field at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy,” I said.

“You
peed
on our school?” Robby asked.

“Yes,” I said. And then I asked, “Robby? Are we done talking about peeing yet?”

“I'm pretty sure we've said everything that needed to be said, Austin,” Robby answered.

“We probably should shake hands,” I said.

“Meet me at the hand soap dispenser,” Robby answered.

Andrzej was seventeen years old when he left home, the same age his father was when Krzys Szczerba found himself entirely alone in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The Great Depression had arrived in the United States of America, and urinals—even beautiful ones with names that sang—were no longer in high demand.

Growing up, Andrew—Andrzej—always felt there was something quiet and troubling that made him different from other boys.

You know what I mean.

Krzys Szczerba's boy was often afraid and confused, just like another Andrzej who was going to be his great-grandson. Since he was born, his father, Krzys, only spoke to his son in Polish.

Andrzej Szczerba rescued an injured bird when he was thirteen. That would have been about the same year he was in seventh grade in Minnesota, where his father ran the
Nightingale Convenience Works
.

History shows that lots of shit happens to Polish boys when they are in seventh grade.

I do not know why, but that is not my job. My job is saying
what
. The shit that happens to us Polish boys is causally related to the bags under our eyes.

The bird Andrzej found was a European starling. Andrzej kept it and raised the bird as a pet. He named the bird
Baby
.

By the time Andrzej was seventeen and left home, Baby could talk. Baby spoke English as well as Polish, which displeased Eva Nightingale, who believed that Krzys and his son frequently conspired against her will, and plotted in their anarchists' tongue. She thought the bird was in on the Polish conspiracy, too.

Whether or not Baby actually understood the things he said was always a matter to be decided by the person listening to Baby speak.

Andrzej loved Baby. He never kept the bird in a cage, either. In fact, Andrzej tried to encourage the bird to fly away and find a suitable mate or a more natural place to live, but Baby would not leave Andrzej. Baby preferred to stay inside Andrzej's coat, or perched near his collar at all times.

People in southern Minnesota, where Andrzej was a boy, thought Andrzej was crazy. You must be crazy, after all, if a bird loves you.

In 1933, when Andrzej was seventeen years old, he and Baby found themselves at the very center of a vast continent. They were somewhere in the state of Iowa, in a place called Boatman's Bluff. Andrzej, like a lot of young men during the Great Depression, was more or less a hobo.

I also do not know why people say
more or less
. Everything is
more or less
of anything you can think of. Iowa is
more or less
the French Riviera. The French Riviera has the largest per-capita consumption of Spam in the world,
more or less
.

That is more or less the truth.

Andrzej was a hobo.

On a frozen morning in April, Andrzej arrived at a farm foreclosure auction. Sometimes, he went to these auctions just to stand in the midst of the people, where he could stay warm. Often, when auction-goers saw how young Andrzej was, and what a beautiful face the boy had, they would invite Andrzej home and feed him and allow him to take a warm bath or sleep for a while in their outbuildings.

It was natural for kindhearted people to feel a sense of sadness or obligation when they looked at young Andrzej, all alone and helpless. He looked like an angel, or like an injured bird.

Perhaps it was that people were also attracted to the strange talking bird that stayed inside Andrzej's collar and nuzzled against the boy's neck, which was the color of hominy grits.

That kindness people sometimes showed him was what Andrzej was looking for on the morning in April at the farm foreclosure auction. Andrzej was very hungry, and the ground of the dead farm was frozen in such deep black ruts that it hurt his feet when he walked through the crowd.

Andrzej ran into another drifter among the people at the auction: a nineteen-year-old boy named Herman Weinbach, who had come from Michigan. Herman Weinbach's straight hair, which was the color of pot roast gravy, hung down across one eye. His skin was the color of soda-and-flour biscuits.

Herman Weinbach had been a member of the American Communist Party, but he quit all political activities due to hunger, he explained. People were leaving the American Communist Party in the early 1930s, and Herman simply didn't believe anything was ever going to change, whether it was destined to, as Karl Marx said, or not.