Grasshopper Jungle (10 page)

Ollie Jungfrau killed thousands of aliens, every day.

It made him horny.

“By the way,” Ollie said, “I looked up
photoluminescent
on the computer. It means glow in the dark.”

“Okay,” I agreed.

“That's stupid,” Ollie decided.

Ollie Jungfrau never took his eyes from his laptop screen while we talked. He shot something with a spastic swipe at the space bar, or some shit like that. The thing on Ollie's screen howled in pain. Its leg came off.

Ollie laughed and put his game on pause.

He was sweating.

“I came over to buy some cigarettes,” I said.

“For whom?” Ollie asked.

“Me.”

“I think it's
I
.”

“Me.”

“What would your parents say?”

That was a pointless question, I thought. Why would Ollie Jungfrau ever want to insinuate himself into a conversation between me and my parents regarding cigarettes?

So I said, “They would tell I to say
please
.”

OLLIE SOLD ME
the cigarettes I asked for. I wanted to show Robby how brave and independent I could be. I bought two packs and a disposable lighter, then went back to the shop.

My balls were big.

I called Shann minutes before noon.

I asked her if she'd like to see a movie and have dinner with me in Waterloo that night.

“What about Robby?” she asked.

“Robby's fine,” I answered. “Um. And how's your mom?”

“Fine,” Shann said. “What are you talking about?”

“I thought you were just making small talk about other townsfolk we know,” I said.

“No. I mean, are we all
three
hanging out tonight?”

“This isn't about Robby. I was planning on just me and you having a date, Shann,” I said. “Johnny told me he'd drive us and everything.”

Johnny McKeon wouldn't mind if Shann and I sat together in the backseat for the drive. It was a long, straight road to Waterloo.

The thought of having sex with Shann in the car while her stepfather drove us to Waterloo made me very horny.

Then the shop's front door opened. A family of tourists—a man, woman, and their identically clothed, identical twin boys who looked to be about six years old and undoubtedly had identically stinky feet, as Robby would confirm—came in and began their family expedition along Johnny's path of wonder and despair.

They marched through the maze in parade fashion. The mother, up front, regulated the speed. She stopped from time to time to admire a cow creamer or an iron trivet shaped like a squashed rooster. She pulled out drawers on dressers and nightstands.

She wasn't going to find any condoms.

A couple drawers still had Bibles in them.

The twin boys followed, shoulder to shoulder, holding hands. If they got a little closer to each other, they would look just like the boy in the jar Johnny McKeon kept inside the office. The father held up the rear of the parade. He had a canvas satchel, a man-purse, Robby and I called them, strapped diagonally across his shoulders.

They definitely were not from Iowa, I thought.

Maybe Minneapolis.

It wasn't unusual for tourists to stop at
From Attic to Seller
on Saturdays.

This family was probably on their way to the ocean, and found themselves trapped in the center of an enormous continent. They may have been looking for postcards so they could mail out desperate messages like:

Send help now! And that was our day. You know what I mean.

But Johnny McKeon did not sell postcards at
From Attic to Seller Consignment Store
. He did, however, sell condoms at
Tipsy Cricket Liquors
. I think most of the condoms he sold ended up stuck to the floor of the
Ealing Coin Wash Launderette
, or in dresser drawers and nightstands that I cleaned out when their owners lost homes and hope.

And that is an economic snapshot of the United States of America, and a dying Iowa town.

“It would be so nice to go out on a date, just you and me, Austin,” Shann said.

“It's not like we never do that, Shann,” I explained.

The family snaked their way closer to me at the counter. Along the way, the mother had picked up some objects.

“I know,” Shann said, “but it's . . . well . . . different now, don't you think?”

My heart beat faster.

“Oh,” I said. “Yes.”

I didn't know what she meant. I suddenly felt guilty again, like Shann knew everything.

“I love you, Austin,” Shann said.

Then I got it. I understood.

I was relieved and stupid at the same time.

“I love you, Shann.” I did not say
too
. But I was fully clothed, anyway. “Did I tell you I am alone at the shop? Johnny needed to go to Waterloo to pick up some things. There are customers here.”

I eyeballed the two packs of cigarettes I stacked on the glass case above my favorite insect collection.

“Austin?”

“What?”

“That ticking noise is happening again,” she said. She sounded a little frightened.

It was exactly noon.

“Let me hear it.”

Shann held her phone up to her wall. She had described the sound perfectly—typing. There was nothing else I could think of when I heard it. But the typing noise stopped in a matter of seconds.

It was exactly noon.

Ten hours in to the end of the world.

Nobody knew anything about it.

“
I WILL PAY
five dollars for the snow globe from Iowa City, this corkscrew,
and
the porcelain corncobs salt-and-pepper shakers.”

Mom, the drum major at the head of the tourist parade, placed her spoils on top of the counter beside my cigarettes. The two-headed boy with four arms and legs pressed its noses against the face of the glass case and left dual unpointed exclamation marks in clear snot directly in front of the bug collections. Dad, at the rear, slid his hand down into his purse and extracted a billfold.

“Um.”

Johnny McKeon haggled with customers. Price tags, in stores such as
From Attic to Seller
, may just as well been written as fill-in-the-blank forms, as far as most shoppers were concerned.

Johnny knew what to do.

I did not.

“Um,” I said again.

“Well?” she asked. She thought I was stupid. I knew the look. “Five dollars.”

“I . . . I'm only taking care of the counter for my girlfriend's dad,” I said. I suddenly felt virile, capable of breeding, horny. The twins frightened me, though. Their noses pointed upward on the glass, distorting into two peaked snot volcanoes.

My job included keeping the glass cases clean.

“I am not permitted to haggle,” I pointed out.

“Pfft!” The mother, obviously used to getting her way, was exasperated. She had to do math.

Nobody likes math.

I took the items and tallied up the prices while the silent husband thumbed through bills.

“Eleven dollars and fifty cents,” I said.

I increased the price by one dollar, just because I could, and because I was going to have to clean up a pair of snot streaks left behind by the
Friendship League of Minnesota
.

The man paid what I asked. I bagged my first sale.

Then the man with the purse asked, “Is this Ealing?”

“I know. A lot of people just can't believe they've finally arrived when they get to Ealing,” I said. “But this is it.”

“This is it . . . heh-heh,” the man said. He pulled a small glossy guidebook from his purse and continued, “Ealing, Iowa. Seven unsolved decapitations in 1969.”

“Uh.”

He proudly held his book up so I could see the cover. It read:

Serial Killer America

“We're on a road trip!” The man with the purse twittered like a gleeful bird.

The twins snarfled and snotted against the glass.

“Cross another one off the list,” the mother decided. Then she added, “Please be careful with my corncobs.”

I needed a cigarette.

I STOOD OUTSIDE
in the parking lot and smoked. I watched the traffic of people who came and went and came and went at
The Pancake House
, the launderette,
Tipsy Cricket Liquors
, and, across the street, at
Satan's Pizza
, too.

At 12:45, I phoned Robby.

I lit another cigarette. I was in charge.

Robby was impressed, maybe jealous, that I was alone and having a cigarette without him. He was still in his bed when I called. I heard him light one up over the phone as we talked. So Robby and I had a cigarette together by cell phone.

It's good to have a cigarette with your best friend.

I told him everything that happened—the history of the morning—even about the snot-faced twin kids from Minneapolis who smeared up the glass case, and how I overcharged them a dollar just because I didn't like them. He asked if I'd gone back into the alley at Grasshopper Jungle. I said no. I wasn't going to go back there.

Everything seemed okay.

It was just another Saturday afternoon in Ealing, Iowa.

But I couldn't shake the feeling that something impossibly huge had happened in the past twenty-four hours. Maybe that's just the omniscience of the recorder who looks back on history as he's painting the walls of his cave. Shit like that.

There is a blissful haze that quietly flies into your head like a swarm of anesthetized butterflies after you smoke a couple fags. Buzzing from nicotine, I went back inside
From
Attic to Seller Consignment Store
, wandered my way along the parade route of Johnny McKeon's display maze, and found myself standing once again in front of Johnny's locked office door.

Johnny McKeon obviously didn't really care to hide the things he kept inside his office. Maybe they were an embarrassment. Maybe he just didn't know what to do with the things that once belonged to his dead brother. I thought I might ask Johnny about that if he ever showed me his
experiments
.

I wanted to know
why
.

As my fingers felt along the groove of the molding, I thought about what I would do with Eric's things if he never came home again.

I would probably keep them in my room and not let anyone else look at them.

I understood Johnny McKeon.

The key was still there, where Johnny always hid it.

I went inside his office.

Johnny McKeon did not say anything about the missing globe to the policemen who came out that morning. If he had, he'd have to have shown them the rest of the things inside the office. Johnny would not want to do that.

There were smears on the old library shelf where Tyler's fingers had tracked through the dust at the base of the globe. He didn't even bother to take the stand. It was still there, still announcing the
Contained MI Plague Strain 412E
.

Not so much contained any longer.

That was the first time I'd considered the possibility that maybe those four boys were going to end up getting sick.

But I figured all that shit was from 1969, according to the dates on the labels. Nothing incurable could ever come from 1969.

The Beatles and the Stones came from 1969.

And like Johnny McKeon said, it was only photoluminescent mold, after all.

The two-headed boy, although hardly bigger than a cantaloupe, was older than me. I talked to him.

“You're nearing middle age, my man. You must be tired of being inside that jar.”

I put my face close to the glass, resting my chin on the shelf so I could look directly into the little dark sockets of the boy's eyes.

I placed my palm on the cool curve of the glass.

The boy inside twitched.

The movement was so slight. Just a jittering spasm of the fingers. But I saw it.

I snapped my hand away from the glass and took a step back.

I bumped into Johnny McKeon's desk so hard it felt like I ripped a hole in my jeans.

THE ALLEYWAY BEHIND
Satan's Pizza
wasn't nearly as long or accommodating for skaters as Grasshopper Jungle. The pizza place was a stand-alone business, so all we could really do there was goof around in small circles. Goofing around in small circles was how Robby and I usually skated, anyway.

When I showed up, Robby had on the grimacing lemur mask and the Titus Andronicus T-shirt I loaned him the night before.

After what happened to me in Johnny McKeon's office, everything I saw that day seemed like it oozed out of some twisted nightmare. I kept telling myself that maybe I was only imagining things as a result of too much nicotine and too little oxygen in my brain.

There was no way that little boy could have moved his fingers at me.

“Hey-ho, Lemur Boy,” I said.

Robby raised his arms, twisting his fingers into claws above his hairy lemur head. He froze there like that, not saying anything. He stood with one foot on the deck of his skateboard. My board was right beside his.

Grimacing lemurs are a little unnerving.

“Amazingly lifelike,” I said.

Robby remained silent and motionless, a taxidermist's display of a lemur-Lutheran-boy-crossbreed experiment.

I shrugged and slid my skateboard away from him. I got on it and pushed off.

“Hey, wait up,” Robby said. He followed after me.

When he rolled up alongside me, still wearing the mask, Robby said, “I went through the jungle, Porcupine.”

“Did you see anything?” I asked.

“Nah.” Robby said, “Somebody pushed the dumpster back. Everything was just like it's always been.”