Grasshopper Jungle (9 page)

“Thanks,” I said, appreciative of my date's quiet demeanor.

Coffee is a girl who never tells boys no. The idea of such a compliant partner normally would have made me horny, but I was too hungry, still sleepy, and I was also watching Ollie Jungfrau eat a donut at the exact moment sexual thoughts involving a quiet girl at an Iowa barn dance occurred to me.

I liked coffee. And cigarettes. Neither of these truths were welcome at my home. I did not like jelly donuts, however. All the more for Ollie and the customers. Jelly only belongs in one place. Two, if you have decent toast, I suppose.

History.

“
John-nnnny!
” Ollie called out in the direction of Johnny McKeon's office, “The kid's here!”

I heard Johnny moving things around in the back of the shop. I had already confirmed to myself that I did not feel guilty about being in the shop at night. I was an employee. Robby and I didn't do anything wrong. Well, we didn't do anything wrong
inside
the store, at least. What Grant Wallace and those other boys did would have happened whether or not Robby and I were there to see it.

So I did not feel guilty about the below-the-roof part of the night.

I sat down across the display counter from Ollie and selected a white-frosted cake donut with blue and yellow Iowa plaid sprinkles that scattered a candy galaxy over its surface.

Ollie nodded. He had an expression on his face like a saint receiving a vision of a bloodied Jesus. Ollie Jungfrau would have been the patron saint of donuts. Not that I'm allowed to believe in saints.

I did not believe in Jesus, either, even if he was good at picking donuts. I was not allowed to say that, either.

I might not put that shit down in the book.

“Good choice,” Ollie said.

“It was calling my name, Ollie,” I said.

“A voice like an angel.”

Ollie took his donuts seriously.

Johnny McKeon looked agitated. He stood beside Ollie at the counter, with his palms flat on the glass and his elbows locked straight. Johnny was a giraffe of a man, and his hands looked like twin octopi. I had never seen anyone with fingers as long as Johnny McKeon's.

If Johnny McKeon ever gave you the thumb-and-index-finger international gesture for
OK
, trained poodles could jump through it.

Maybe even dolphins.

I looked past his fingers at the vampire bat and bugs in the collections below our donuts. Most people would probably not want to eat donuts here.

“Good morning, Johnny,” I said. Sometimes I would say something corny, like “Hey-ho, Johnny.”

But not today.

Johnny McKeon said, “Is it still morning?”

That was what Johnny always said to me.

Johnny McKeon was a mover. He was out of bed every day by five. He got things done. I liked him very much, and he knew that. Johnny was aware I smoked cigarettes, too. He'd get mad at me for it, but he'd also sometimes give me free smokes when he broke up vendor multi-pack specials at
Tipsy Cricket
.

“If your dad or mom tells me anything about this, I'm saying you stole them,” is what he always said to me, too.

That morning, Johnny McKeon said to me:

“I'm going to leave you in charge of the store this morning, Austin. You can handle it. I need to run in to Waterloo and pick up some plywood and stuff. Some a-hole broke in through the podiatrist's last night.”

Johnny never cussed. He had to be pretty mad to say something as daring as
a-hole
.

“Someone broke in?” I echoed.

“Yeah,” Johnny said. “Right through the dang wall.”

I looked at Ollie Jungfrau. He was eating a glazed bow tie and nodding. Apparently, he knew all the details. Naturally he would. It was Saturday, donut day, and Ollie always showed up first, before
Tipsy Cricket
was supposed to open.

“Sign of the times,” Ollie analyzed, shaking his head in a grim I-saw-this-coming rhythm.

“Did you call the police?” I asked. My heartbeat accelerated. The coffee made me sweat. Under my armpits, the chemical beads of my deodorant stick began to erupt like miniature laboratory volcanoes. Outside in Grasshopper Jungle, the
Contained MI Plague Strain 412E
was now completely dead, having moved into the bodies of seven hosts. Robby Brees was asleep in his bed at the Del Vista Arms. Ingrid was taking a shit.

“They were here all morning. What can you do?” Johnny said. “‘
You should have a video system. You should have an alarm
,' they said. But this is Ealing.”

There never was anything worth filming in Ealing, unless you were one of Grant Wallace's buddies watching him kick the shit out of a couple
Candy Cane faggots
.

In Iowa, there are cameras trained on cornfields. So you can watch corn grow.

“My house has been robbed,” I said. “Because my dog can't bark. I should teach her to shit on people.”

Ollie chewed thoughtfully. “My uncle has a German shepherd who will do that. He only takes commands in German.
Scheiß, Dieter, scheiß!
And he'll toast a brownie on the spot.”

Ollie Jungfrau was full of
Scheiße
.

“Did they take anything?” I asked.

Johnny said, “A case of Gilbey's Gin. And the sons of guns got into my office, too. They took a display I had in there.”

I sipped my coffee and looked at the candy galaxy on my donut. It hovered on a perfect plane of glass above a rhinoceros beetle.

Johnny went on without any prodding, “I had one of those glass globes the scientists at M.I. made. It had this photoluminescent mold sealed up inside it. I really liked that thing. It made the nicest blue glow if I'd turn the lights on it at nighttime.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Ollie objected. “
What
kind of mold?”

“Photoluminescent,” Johnny repeated.

Ollie took a bite of donut and shook his head rapidly. “Nope. No such word,” he decided.

Ollie graduated from Herbert Hoover High School, third in his class.

Ollie Jungfrau was a tool.

“I think it means glow in the dark,” I said.

Ollie unrolled his glazed fingers. He was counting something. “Then why wouldn't you just say
glow in the dark
, Johnny? It has less syllables.”

“Was it . . . um . . . valuable?” I asked.

“Nah,” Johnny said. “I don't think so. How would I know? It was just part of the crazy stuff from boxes that got delivered to me after M.I. shut down. I don't know anything about it.”

Johnny reached below the counter and found a metal-cased Stanley tape measure. He placed this and a pencil on top of a pad of lined paper and slid the pile across the display case toward my cup of coffee.

Johnny said, “Bring this stuff, Austin. I need you to come back and help me take measurements so I can fix the danged wall. So they won't ever do something like that again.”

They weren't ever going to do it again, plywood or not.

Nobody knew that, either.

THIS IS HOW
history works: It is omniscient.

Everyone trusts history.

Think about it—when we read history books—nobody ever asks,
How did you find this out if it happened before you were born?

History is unimpeachable, sublime.

It is my job.

I can tell you things that nobody could possibly know because I am the
recorder
. I found out everything in time, but I'm abbreviating. Cutting out the shit.

You have to trust me.

This is history.

You know what I mean.

Why wouldn't you trust me? I admitted everything. Think of how embarrassing these truths are to me.

Most of what I found out came to me much later, after the end of the world, when Robby and I would go out on cigarette runs. You will see. I did the work of history, what I am supposed to do. I found clues and artifacts everywhere, put them together. And I found out exactly what happened.

This is why you can trust me.

I couldn't begin to explain
why
things happened.
Why
isn't my job.

I would love to talk to Krzys Szczerba, or even my own father. They might know. They could tell me
why
I am the way I am.

All I can do is keep my lists of
what
happened.

That's what I do.

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

I considered telling Johnny McKeon about Grant Wallace and the Hoover Boys. It scared me to imagine what could possibly happen. Nothing good might come of it, I thought. Shann would ask why Robby and I didn't say anything to her when we left Grasshopper Jungle. She would know something was wrong with me. I would spill my guts. Spilling my guts is how history gets recorded. Shann would find shit out.

When I thought about bad things happening between me and Robby and Shann, I could feel my balls shriveling up inside my body.

That's the truth.

History lesson for the day: My balls are barometers to emotional storms.

So I helped Johnny McKeon measure the wall at the spot the Hoover Boys dug through so they could get inside the back room. I held the zero end of the measure and Johnny pulled out the tape and called off numbers to me, which I recorded in pencil on my pad of paper. Like cave painters in France.

“What kind of crazy stuff?” I asked.

I suppose I'd been having an imaginary conversation in my head.

Johnny said, “What?”

“I mean, what kind of crazy stuff came in the boxes from M.I. after they closed down?”

“Oh.” Johnny made another mark on the wall. “I can't believe they actually knocked out a stud just to get to some cheap gin. It was mostly things from experiments they were doing, I guess, from my brother's storage unit. It was a bunch of junk of his I inherited, I guess, but never looked at until the place got all packed up. To be honest, I didn't know what to do with the stuff. There was so much of it, I threw some away. I put stuff in the office. I even put some of it on the roof. I don't know what I was thinking, but it was my brother's, you know? Go figure. So. Eh.”

“Oh.” I said, “Um. I. Um . . . like experiments. Do you think I could see them sometime?”

I felt like asking Johnny McKeon how the little boy with two heads was getting on.

Johnny shrugged. “Eh. Maybe sometime, Austin. It's kind of . . . well . . . morbid stuff, if you ask me.”

“Sounds like it could be cool,” I said.

“Eh,” Johnny said.

We measured. Johnny recited numbers and items, like
half-inch plywood
,
studs
,
drywall mud
, and
tape
, and shit like that. It sounded incredibly manly. My balls felt bigger just writing that shit down.

I printed in uppercase. It was manly.

“Hey, Johnny.” I said, “Tonight, I'd like to take Shann out to dinner and a movie. Maybe to Waterloo. Would that be okay?”

“What are you? Asking permission to take your girlfriend on a date?” Johnny said.

“No. I'm asking for a ride. Do you think you could give us a ride?”

“Do I get to go to the show, too? I could sit in the middle,” Johnny said.

He was teasing.

“Um.”

“Don't you think it's about time you get your driver's license?”

I turned sixteen in February. It was a week until the beginning of May.

“My mom and dad don't want me to drive yet.”

“That should do it,” Johnny said, and rolled up the tape measure. “Sure. I'll take you kids. Only not too late. I don't want to have to come pick you up in Waterloo after midnight.”

“I'll be at your house around six.” I said, “Thanks, Johnny.”

WATERLOO, IOWA, SPRAWLED
along the Cedar River, twenty miles away from Ealing.

Johnny McKeon took my notes and the shopping list he'd dictated and put me in charge of
From Attic to Seller
.

It made me feel like something—something with big balls—to know that Johnny trusted me, even if I did intend to go back and see if he still kept his office key on the trim molding above the door.

I was also planning on smoking at least one cigarette, too.

I rarely smoked alone, but I needed one.

In truth, until that day, I never smoked alone.

I'd just have to toughen up and go buy a pack from the tool in the liquor store.

Ollie Jungfrau left when it was time to open
Tipsy Cricket
, which didn't have a fixed schedule. Opening the liquor store happened once there were two or three people waiting outside the door. Usually, they'd tap on the glass with quarters or car keys to let Ollie and Johnny know there were thirsty Iowans with money who needed to spend it on alcohol.

The secondhand store, as always, smelled like insecticide, condoms, and despair, with a little sweet hint of unanswered prayers, formaldehyde, cardboard donut boxes, and chicory, all mixed in. I waited a few minutes, just to be sure Johnny wouldn't double back after something he'd forgotten, then I slipped through the back room to the pale green linoleum and fluorescent lights of
Tipsy Cricket Liquors
.

I made plenty of noise tracking my way through the back room.

I did not want to startle Ollie Jungfrau, or catch him looking at computer porn or masturbating behind the counter.

Making noise was the polite thing to do.

“Scared to be alone, Dynamo?” Ollie grinned at me sympathetically when he saw my intentionally clumsy entrance near the beer cooler in back.

“No,” I said, with efficient curtness.

I was all business and could not waste time. I did not want to let Johnny down.

Ollie Jungfrau played games on a laptop computer tapped in to the wireless network from Johnny's office. He played all day long while he sat behind the counter at
Tipsy Cricket
. I did not see the allure of that particular pastime. But for a guy like Ollie, having his ego sucked into the fantasy of being a muscular soldier in tight clothing, trapped aboard a space station infested by aliens, was preferable to rooting his identity in the here and now.