Grasshopper Jungle

by Andrew Smith

  “Old houses like this do often have rats inside them,” I said to Shann when Robby and I were in her room. I couldn’t help but play with the idea of asking Shann for an Eden Five Needs You 4 threesome with me and Robby. The amount of math in that thought made my head ache.

  “Rats with typewriters,” Robby added.

  “These rats type every six hours,” Shann said, continuing the numerical assault on my head. “At exactly six and twelve. I’ve been keeping track.”

  “So they’re obsessive-compulsive rats with typewriters,” Robby said.

  “Just wait a moment,” Shann said. She looked at her wristwatch. It was 11:50.

  I was horny and mathematically confused.

  The exterminator men crawled all around the floor, looking for holes rats could use to get inside the walls. When they didn’t find any, they crawled up into the attic and around the perimeter of the home’s foundation, setting traps and putting out attractive dishes of poison that looked like candy corn.

  They did not find any rats because there weren’t any.

  At exactly noon, the noise inside Shann’s wall came again. This time, all three of us were there, and all three of us heard it. The sound went silent in less than a minute, but we triangulated with our ears the precise spot in the wall where it originated.

  “Do you kids want some lunch?” Wendy called from deep in the house somewhere.

  I nodded at Shann and she yelled back at her mother. The house was so big it wouldn’t have been too outrageous to actually use cell phones. In houses, teenagers tend to communicate with their parents by screaming across distances.

  “It’s some kind of a machine,” I said.

  The wall there was made from top-to-bottom tongue-and-groove wood plank. Some of the slats were loose and could wiggle. I felt certain we’d be able to pry a board or two up without inflicting any permanent damage to Shann’s bedroom wall. I asked Shann to bring us some butter knives or flathead screwdrivers—anything Robby and I could use to get at the boards.

  And just when Wendy McKeon hollered up to us that lunch was served, Robby and I peeled back a six-inch-wide slat and found the source of Shann’s four-times-per-day haunting.

  The ghost in Shann’s wall was a machine.

  The thing was set back between the wall of Shann’s room and a bathroom on the other side. It sat on a low, dust-covered pine shelf. Thick rubberized wires ran from its back, following the roadways of wall studs and joists up and down, out of sight.

  The machine was also covered in dust, made of Bakelite and blue rounded metal that had the same aesthetic style of a toaster or an automobile designed fifty years ago. At the front was a keyboard, like a typewriter’s, but the thing was much bigger than a simple typewriter.

  This was what was called a teletype machine.

  From the back of the platen cylinder, a yellowed scroll of perforated paper had been spitting out the same repeated message, typed out in black-ink capital letters that formed ladder-like rungs over several feet:

  THE FLAMINGO ALERTS ON ENVIRONMENTAL PRESENCE OF 412-E. SILO GENERATORS NOW ACTIVATED. REPORT TO THE SILO WITH PROPER HASTE.

  THE FLAMINGO ALERTS ON ENVIRONMENTAL PRESENCE OF 412-E. SILO GENERATORS NOW ACTIVATED. REPORT TO THE SILO WITH PROPER HASTE.

  THE FLAMINGO ALERTS ON ENVIRONMENTAL PRESENCE OF 412-E. SILO GENERATORS NOW ACTIVATED. REPORT TO THE SILO WITH PROPER HASTE.

  I looked at Robby.

  He looked at me.

  Both of us, at the same time, said, “Oh.”

  And Robby said, “Nobody says ‘with proper haste.’”

  “Who would ever say something like that?” I added.

  Shann said, “What’s going on, Austin?”

  I said, “Uh.”

  TALLY-HO!

  “I DON’T THINK I’ll need to eat again before Guy Fawkes Day,” I said.

  “Tallyho to that,” Robby said.

  “Chip chip and all that,” I said.

  That night, Robby drove his car east along the flat straight highway that linked Ealing to Waterloo. We were hanging out together, like I’d promised.

  Robby said we would be traveling through time, and it might be ugly.

  I did not know why Robby wanted to go to Waterloo, or why he wanted to travel through time. I only hoped he did not want to sit through Eden Five Needs You 4.

  Wendy McKeon was raised in southern Indiana. Regionalists sometimes referred to that area as Northern Kentucky. Lunch, for a person raised in that part of the continent, consisted of the following: fried chicken, potato salad, mashed potatoes, creamed corn, deviled eggs, canned fruit cocktail, sweet pickles, American cheese slices, white bread, softened margarine, milk, cake, and peanut butter.

  After the orgy of Wendy McKeon’s lunch, we unplugged the teletype machine before we left. Robby and I took the printout of the repeating message with us, and we replaced the wobbly board to the wall in Shann’s bedroom.

  Having a teletype machine built into your wall was not so strange, I offered, considering Shann’s room also included a door that went nowhere and a staircase descending to a dungeon for horny Lutheran boys.

  Shann agreed. It was just a weird house.

  “But it is on the Ealing Registry of Historical Homes,” Robby reminded us.

  “An abundance of distressed bricks,” I commented.

  “Who knows what other crazy stuff the McKeons did in this house?” Shann said.

  “Yes,” I said. “Who knows?”

  There was some figuring out that had to be done.

  Figuring out meant a sort of confession to Shann would be involved if Robby and I were not careful. I did not want to tell Shann about the things that happened in Johnny McKeon’s office, and I did not want to say to her what Robby and I did when we were up on the roof of the Ealing Mall.

  But I do not lie. If Shann ever asked about it, I would tell her.

  So Robby and I opted for a waiting period of quiet consideration before exploring the possibilities of what the teletype message actually could mean.

  Robby and I went back to my house and changed out of our Lutheran Boy superhero costumes. I loaned him another Austin Szerba outfit from my closet. Soon, I thought, all my clothes as well as Robby’s would be scattered, unwashed, over the backseat of his Ford Explorer.

  “There is no silo at the McKeon House,” I said. “I looked.”

  I pulled on a pair of jeans and slipped my feet into some loose skate shoes.

  “So did I,” Robby said. I gave him some Levis and my Pink Floyd T-shirt to wear. Mine said LCD Soundsystem.

  “You’re not planning on taking me to see Eden Five Needs You 4, are you?”

  “No,” Robby answered. “I’m going to see something I always wondered about, but was too chicken to go by myself.”

  “Sounds like what I’d say about Eden Five,” I said.

  Eventually, I was relieved. I was grateful that Robby truly was not interested in the film I’d seen with Shann the night before.

  Robby didn’t even slow the car when we drove past the Waterloo Cinezaar.

  Another brilliant job of name branding by an Iowa entrepreneur.

  Finally, Robby pulled the Explorer into the parking lot of a squat and dim strip mall. The place was dismal, but not nearly as run-down and left in abandon as the Ealing Mall at Grasshopper Jungle. The signs above each of the businesses were lit up, despite the fact that the majority of places were closed on Sunday nights.

  There was a launderette, and it appeared to be clean and condom-free. Naturally, there was a liquor store, another business called Cheap Smokes that had a decal of a marijuana leaf in the corner of its front window, a barbershop, and an indoor shooting range and gun shop called Fire at Will’s.

  Waterloo was definitely the place.

  And at the end of the mall, in an area where four or five cars had parked beneath a lonely overhead light facing the unit’s front door, was a bar called the Tally-Ho!

  The Tally-Ho! was widely known in
the area as being a secret place for homosexual men to hang out and meet.

  The secret was not well kept.

  People in Ealing just didn’t talk about the Tally-Ho!, or if they did, it was in a very low register, so other ears would not perk up at mention of the name.

  The Tally-Ho! was Waterloo, Iowa’s one and only gay bar.

  “Uh,” I said.

  “What?” said Robby.

  “Why did you come to the Tally-Ho!, Robby?”

  “I wanted to see what it looked like,” Robby explained.

  “We can’t go inside,” I argued. “People might think we’re . . . Um. Prostitutes, or something.”

  “Did you actually just say prostitute?” Robby asked.

  “I can’t be certain,” I said. “I think I did.”

  “We can’t go inside because we’re only sixteen,” Robby said.

  “Do you want to go inside?” I asked.

  “Are you asking me on a date, Austin?” Robby said.

  “No.”

  I was so confused.

  Robby went on, “I wanted to come here just so I could see what the future is like. What if I end up here, with nowhere else to go? What will I look like?”

  “You could wear the grimacing lemur mask,” I offered.

  “I always wondered who came to this place,” Robby said.

  “I guess everyone kind of wonders that, but they’re just too afraid to admit it,” I said.

  Robby shook out some cigarettes, held the pack so I could take one. I pressed the lighter into the dash. I thought I knew why Robby came here. It was sad.

  We smoked.

  “Do you want to go look?” Robby said.

  “What? Like, inside?”

  “No. Maybe we could just poke our faces in the door and say something like we’re lost and need to know how to get back to Ealing.”

  “Nobody would believe it,” I said. “Nobody ever wants to get back to Ealing.”

  “You may be right,” Robby said. “Still, what would they do to us?”

  “What if they think we’re gay or something?”

  “What are you trying to say, Austin?”

  “Um. Sorry, Rob.” I took a drag off my cigarette. “I guess I better just shut up.”

  Robby got out of the car.

  Robby wasn’t angry or upset at what I’d said. Real friends know what they mean when one of them says clumsy or stupid things. History shows that.

  History also shows there aren’t an awful lot of real friends on the record.

  So I got out of the car, too.

  THE INNER TOMB

  IT WAS FRIGHTENING and thrilling, following Robby to the door of the Tally-Ho!

  It seemed as though hidden eyes were out there in the dark of the parking lot, and they were watching us and constructing stories—histories—about what these two boys from Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy might be up to.

  The Tally-Ho!, as it turned out, was not a vibrant, happening scene at all.

  It was exactly what Robby expected.

  He stood with his hand on the door’s pull bar. A sign hung from metal S-hooks beneath clear plastic suction cups on the inside of the glass. It said:

  NO PERSONS UNDER 21 ALLOWED

  I expected to hear happy music seeping out from the door, the sound of laughter and boisterous barroom conversations, but the Tally-Ho! let no such atmosphere leak out from its small, encapsulated world.

  The place was as quiet as a cemetery in a morning snowfall.

  Robby took a deep breath, pulled open the door, and stepped inside.

  And, like a sedated Chihuahua on a jeweled leash, I followed him.

  I was so nervous I thought my knees would buckle. My head swam in agitated seas of conflict and confusion: What if people thought we were gay? Why did I care what people thought? What if I really was gay? I kissed Robby, after all. What would Shann say about us being here? What if someone started hitting on me or Robby? What if we got in trouble for walking into the place? What if we got beat up again by some assholes like Grant Wallace and his friends?

  Robby Brees was much braver than I could ever be.

  We stood there, dumb and quiet in the dark alcove just inside the front door of the Tally-Ho!

  The place was as tired and mournful as the library at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy after the masturbation scandal. Nobody so much as turned to glance at the two nervous kids who stood at the door.

  I hid behind Robby.

  The bartender washed glasses. He wore a T-shirt that was too tight. It accentuated the roll of his belly. He was balding and showed a blurring tattoo of Bettie Page, blanketed beneath the swirling shrubbery of black hair on his forearm. Two other men sat at the bar. They both appeared to be tired, in their forties. They stared straight ahead as though watching something other than their own reflections in the mirror behind the bartender.

  They were separated by three barstools.

  The closer of the two had dirty hands. He bit his fingernails, too.

  At the back of the room sat an undersized pool table with worn felt. It was tucked too near a corner to actually be playable. A man with a Royals ball cap shot pool by himself. He scratched the cue ball while we watched him. After he took another shot, he glanced up at me and Robby. He smiled.

  I whispered, “Aren’t you going to ask them? You know . . . say we’re lost or shit?”

  Robby shook his head and backed himself into me.

  He said, “No. Let’s get out of here, Austin.”

  Robby leaned on me, pushing me back.

  We quietly slid out the door.

  Nobody even watched us leave.

  AND HERE’S NUMBER FIVE

  ROBBY AND I sat against the tailgate of the Explorer. We smoked cigarettes and watched cars on the highway. Robby said he wished we’d have brought our skateboards with us.

  “Skating would be good,” I said.

  The alley behind Tally-Ho! looked like a real clean place to skate.

  “I never knew there were four gay guys in Waterloo,” I said.

  That number involved making an assumption about the bartender.

  “It’s Sunday,” Robby said. “I bet when this place gets really busy, there might be five or six.”

  “You’re not going to be like that, Rob,” I said. “I mean, all lonely and shit.”

  “Is that what you think?” Robby asked.

  “I’m pretty sure that is what I think,” I said.

  Out on the highway, a car slowed and then pulled into the parking lot at the opposite end, near Fire at Will’s Indoor Shooting Range. It was a newer Honda Accord. The car drove along the front aisle of parking stalls and then turned left into a slot beside the other vehicles lined up near the Tally-Ho!

  Robby and I watched from our hidden spot behind his old Ford.

  “And here’s number five,” I said.

  The Honda’s door opened. Freshly pressed slacks and shiny black loafers with dangly tassels that flapped from their insteps like beagle ears lowered mechanically from the bottom of the driver’s door. Then Pastor Roland Duff got out, straightened and brushed off his trousers, shut the door, and entered the Tally-Ho!

  “Uh,” I said.

  “Uh,” Robby answered.

  “I wonder what Pastor Roland Duff is doing here,” I said.

  “Do you really wonder?” Robby asked.

  “I guess not,” I said.

  “He must be lonely,” Robby said.

  “I’ll buy that, Robby,” I said. “But if Pastor Roland Duff is lonely, it isn’t because he’s gay. It’s because he’s a shitspoon.”

  Robby nodded thoughtfully and smoked.

  Then he said, “I’ll buy that, too, Austin.”

  “I would like another cigarette, Robby,” I said.

  Robby pulled the crumpled pack from his back pocket and handed it to me.

  He said, “Where did you get that word from? I admire it.”

  “What?” I said, “Shitspoon?”

 
“Uh-huh,” Robby said.

  “It was the name of the alien’s spacecraft in Eden Five Needs You 4,” I said.

  “You’re making that up,” Robby said.

  “I know. I didn’t pay attention to that shitspoon flick at all, Rob.”

  TAKING DRAGS

  “WERE YOU SCARED in there?” I asked.

  “I wasn’t scared,” Robby said.

  “I was,” I said.

  “I could feel your heartbeat through the floorboards. I thought it was because you found the bartender to be attractive.”

  “Uh. Was he attractive?” I asked.

  “Kind of,” Robby said.

  I smoked.

  “Do you think I’m queer, Rob?” I asked.

  “I don’t care if you’re queer,” Robby said. “Queer is just a word. Like orange. I know who you are. There’s no one word for that.”

  I believed him.

  “I know I’m not orange,” I said.

  “Kind of oatmealy,” Robby said.

  I always let Robby read the books. He was the only one allowed inside Austin Andrzej Szerba’s history department.

  “Sometimes I’m confused,” I said. “Actually, pretty much all the time I am. I wonder if I’m normal. I think I might ask my dad about it. You know, if he ever felt this way. Or if maybe he still does sometimes. Because I feel . . . Uh . . . I wonder if I am queer or shit.”

  “You should ask your dad, Porcupine,” Robby said.

  “Would you ask your dad?”

  “My dad doesn’t give a shit about me,” Robby said.

  “Uh.”

  I took another drag. “It made me feel weird. The other night. But I keep thinking about you, and I think doing that means there is something wrong about me.”

  “I’m sorry. I won’t do what I did ever again. You know. Sorry, Austin.”

  “Nuh.” I said, “It’s not something to be sorry about. I just don’t know what to do, Rob.”

  “You worry too much,” Robby said.

  “I know.”

  And then Robby said, “I do love you, though.”