Grasshopper Jungle

by Andrew Smith

“Yeah, Rob. I know.” I blew out a cloud of smoke. I tried to make it all perfect and cool like Robby could, but it didn’t work.

  So I said, “I love you, Robby.”

  I did not say too.

  Robby said, “I know that, Austin. It is nice to hear you say it, though.”

  “I wish we brought our skateboards.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I didn’t know what to do.

  A VISITOR COMES AND GOES

  SO WE STOOD there and smoked our cigarettes down.

  In the paralytic coma that is a Sunday night in a strip mall parking lot paved atop the scraps of a cornfield somewhere imprecisely located on the outskirts of Waterloo, Iowa, the whooshing excitement of passing cars came once or twice, every five minutes or so.

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

  The Tally-Ho! turned out to be not so much a disappointment for Robby as the sad realization of everything he expected to see.

  That is, except for Pastor Roland Duff showing up.

  But history does consistently prove that whenever guys go out to visit someplace they’ve never been before, they’re going to see shit they did not expect to see.

  The Age of Discovery had come to Ealing, Iowa.

  Experiments and shit like that.

  Krzys Szczerba never expected to see the frosted cupcake breasts on Eva Nightingale’s pillowed mounds of peach ice cream body. He never thought he would see his father, who was also named Andrzej, slipping down into the cold, green-black Atlantic with nothing more than a silver chain for Saint Casimir jingling upon the Quaker Oats whiteness of his still and empty chest.

  And as strange and discomforting as it was to watch the headmaster from Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy pull up in freshly pressed attire and then casually step inside the Tally-Ho! with the carriage of a man entering the most familiar place on his planet, what we saw next was even stranger.

  Out from the darkness in back of us, loaded down with plastic bags, bundles of clothing, suitcases, and a cardboard box lashed by three bungee cords to a broken saddlebag frame that vibrated over a half-flat back tire, a squeaking and tottering rusted old bicycle wobbled and creaked its way into the lamplight.

  Hungry Jack had come to pay a visit.

  Hungry Jack got around for an old guy on a crooked bicycle.

  “He’s a real dynamo on the two-wheeler,” I observed.

  “I don’t think he’s a Tally-Ho! kind of guy,” Robby said.

  “You never know,” I offered.

  Robby took another puff and shook his head. “You never do, Porcupine.”

  It was Robby who’d spoken to Hungry Jack in the past.

  I was afraid of the toothless old war criminal.

  Robby was much braver than I was, except when it came to shit like breaking into From Attic to Seller Consignment Store in the middle of the night.

  Robby had given Hungry Jack cigarettes in the past, and, on occasion, the two of them smoked together in Grasshopper Jungle while I worked inside Johnny McKeon’s store. That was how Robby found out all the history about Hungry Jack and the things he’d done in Vietnam.

  “You want to know what happens?” Hungry Jack had said to Robby.

  “What happens?” Robby said.

  Hungry Jack said, “You could do whatever you wanted to do over there.”

  “What I would want to do is get on a boat and come home,” Robby told him.

  “No boats!” Hungry Jack jumped up and down and repeated himself, “No boats! No fucking boats home! What are you, a crybaby?”

  “I suppose I am a crybaby,” Robby said to him.

  “You could do whatever you want,” Hungry Jack said. “Any kind of drug you like. Heroin. Pot. Heroin. Heroin. You could fuck anything you wanted. All the time. Drugs and fucks. I bet you’d like to fuck anything, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you?”

  “Uh,” Robby told him, “I don’t think I would like to fuck anything.”

  “Yes you would fuck anything,” Hungry Jack told him.

  “No I wouldn’t,” Robby affirmed.

  “You would, too,” Hungry Jack argued.

  Robby told me this back-and-forth rally of counter-shot verbal tennis balls continued for several rounds.

  “Well, that’s what we did,” Hungry Jack said. “Fucked everything. Fucked everyone who’d hold still long enough. We fucked the planet if we wanted to. And no boats! But you know what happened?”

  “I suppose you cooked your brain on dope and a little while later your penis scabbed up and fell off from all the dirty shit you fucked,” Robby ventured.

  “As soon as one boy shoots, everyone starts shooting,” Hungry Jack told Robby.

  And then Hungry Jack said, “Then, it’s time to come home.”

  Then Hungry Jack told Robby about all the people who died in the village.

  Robby told me.

  But I never talked to Hungry Jack before or since that day Robby told me the old man’s stories.

  So that night, Robby Brees and I stood there in the parking lot of the Tally-Ho!, which was Waterloo, Iowa’s one and only gay bar.

  I thought about fucking things.

  And while I thought about fucking things, and Robby and I smoked cigarettes, we witnessed firsthand what happens to a person who swallowed a mouthful of Stanpreme pizza that had been contaminated by Contained MI Plague Strain 412E.

  Here is what happened:

  Hungry Jack tottered toward us. The front tire of his bicycle jerked this way and that, but somehow the man kept rolling. Hungry Jack’s eyes were fixed directly on Robby and me.

  When he stopped his bicycle, Hungry Jack was ten feet away from us. He stood at the edge of the dark near a low easement that separated the blacktop of the parking lot from the blacktop of the highway.

  At first, the old man was motionless, straddling the top tube of the bike frame with his feet planted on either side. Hungry Jack’s chin was slick with drool, but that wasn’t uncommon for him.

  Hungry Jack had no front teeth.

  He stared at Robby. Hungry Jack knew Robby. For all I could tell, I was invisible to the man.

  Robby took a big drag from his cigarette.

  Robby said, “Hey, Jack. You want a cigarette?”

  Jack stared and drooled.

  “He’s freaking out on you, Rob,” I whispered. “Let’s just leave.”

  “Maybe he’s exhausted from the long ride,” Robby said. Then he asked again, “Want to smoke, Jack?”

  Hungry Jack wobbled. He raised his right knee and got off the bicycle.

  Hungry Jack released his grasp on the handlebars and his bicycle crashed in a noisy heap. A thermos bottle with a small amount of gasoline in it rolled away toward the curb.

  Robby smoked.

  Hungry Jack looked at Robby. He took two steps toward us and stopped. The whole time I never saw the man blink once.

  He also never said anything to Robby.

  Then Hungry Jack turned around and stepped over the low hedge that bordered the parking lot. He lumbered like a sleepwalker, out onto the highway.

  Hungry Jack walked directly into the path of a Dodge pickup that was speeding in the direction headed away from Ealing.

  The truck never slowed, even after the concussive thud the old man’s body made when Hungry Jack went spinning and cartwheeling down the road.

  Things like that happened in Iowa all the time, but Robby and I never saw it right in front of our faces.

  “Holy shit, Rob,” I said.

  Robby said, “Holy shit.”

  THE THING IN THE CORNFIELD

  SOMETHING ELSE HAPPENED, too.

  We did not talk about it at school.

  Shann wondered why Robby and I were both so sullen that next day. We told her we were tired. I asked if the noise in her wall had come back, but our unplugging the teletype machine had put an end to the typing rats problem in the McKeon House.

  “What are we going to say, Rob?” I had asked him. “Are we going to tell Sh
ann we were hanging out in the parking lot of a gay bar smoking cigarettes and we saw Pastor Roland Duff out cruising just before some homeless guy stepped in front of a Dodge truck? Are we going to tell her what happened after that?”

  And Robby said, “What did happen after that, Austin? I still don’t believe we saw that shit.”

  Because what happened was this:

  We ran out onto the highway to see if we could help Hungry Jack.

  It was terrible.

  It took us several minutes to find him.

  The truck had thrown the old man’s body more than a hundred feet through the air. We found Hungry Jack lying in a field of waist-high corn on the opposite side of the highway from the Tally-Ho!

  He had been knocked completely out of his shoes, and his dirty pants had been pulled down, turned entirely inside out, and twisted around his broken legs.

  Hungry Jack wasn’t just dead. He was destroyed.

  I had never seen anyone dead before. Neither had Robby. I thought about Krzys Szczerba saying good-bye to his father on the boat in the middle of the ocean, how scared and alone he must have felt. I thought about Saint Casimir, and Pastor Roland Duff across the street from us.

  “Holy shit, Rob,” I said again.

  I stepped closer to the mangled wreckage of the old man.

  Robby said, “Don’t touch him.”

  “He just walked right out in front of that shit,” I said.

  “We need to call someone,” Robby said.

  I took my phone out of my pocket and turned it on.

  Then Hungry Jack moved his arms. His chest heaved and collapsed, and he wriggled around in the dirt between the young cornstalks that had been mowed down when he tumbled and tumbled through the field.

  “Stay still!” I tried to tell him.

  Robby and I stood back, afraid to get too close. From the light on my cell phone’s screen I could see how there was blood all over the place. Pieces of Hungry Jack were sticking out from his belly and from the top of his head.

  But the old man wheezed and writhed around in the dirt.

  It looked like he was breaking apart.

  He was coming apart like a soft-boiled egg oozing thick, yolky blood.

  “Let’s get somebody,” Robby said.

  My hand shook so bad I could not even punch three emergency digits on my phone. I also could not look away from the thrashing heap in the cornfield.

  Hungry Jack split entirely in half, the same way you’d cleave the husk of a roasted peanut, all the way from his skull to the fork of his crotch. Then he began turning inside out.

  That is exactly what happened.

  It wasn’t that Hungry Jack was actually turning, but something was coming out of the peanut shell of the old man’s body. The thing flopped and crawled stiffly, like a newborn calf, all slick and covered with blood and slippery goo.

  “Holy shit,” we both said, over and over.

  Robby grabbed my shoulder.

  I grabbed him back.

  We stood there, shaking and holding each other, and we watched as a six-legged bug the size of a small man crawled like some kind of windup mechanized toy out of the hollowed remains of Hungry Jack.

  It wiped itself clean with four of its appendages, bringing its spiny hands up to its mandibles, licking itself clean and dry with crackling, smacking bug-mouth sounds.

  The thing’s head was triangular. It looked like a praying mantis, only it was as tall as we were.

  It was identical to those things—pieces of giant bugs—Robby and I had seen floating inside sealed aquarium displays in Johnny McKeon’s office two nights before.

  Those things were not alive.

  This one was.

  And it came out of Hungry Jack’s body.

  The thing hissed and moved toward us. Its head pivoted and turned in a near-complete circle. It froze the point of its chin directly at Robby, looking, looking, and then it backed away.

  I pulled Robby’s shirt so hard, it nearly came off over the top of his head.

  We took off running.

  We did not look back.

  PART 3:

  THE SILO

  SAINT CASIMIR’S REAL name was Kazimierz.

  He died very young, in his twenties.

  Kazimierz refused to be married, even though his father had arranged for a princess as the boy’s bride. Because of that, Kazimierz is revered for his chastity and purity. He is considered the patron saint of Poland, and also patron saint of the young.

  Maybe Saint Kazimierz was considered the patron for the young because he refused to do what his father told him to do.

  History shows that all teenage boys can empathize with that.

  But maybe Kazimierz did not get married to the princess because he was confused about what he wanted and what was expected of him, just like me.

  Among the wonders credited to Kazimierz is an account of how the young prince somehow miraculously contributed to a victory of the Polish Army over the Russians.

  Apparently, the Russians masturbated excessively.

  A TOUGH DAY AT CURTIS CRANE LUTHERAN ACADEMY

  HISTORY LESSON FOR the day: The more time you wait before telling somebody the truth about a secret you’ve been keeping, the longer your path out of the woods gets.

  “What am I going to do, Ingrid?” I said.

  I came straight home from school that day. I threw my Lutheran Boy patriotic candy cane outfit on the floor of my bedroom and sat down at my desk. I tried to figure things out as I drew pictures and wrote my stories, but everything only became more muddled and confused.

  It had been a tough day at school.

  I did not know what to say to Robby. I tried all day to come up with some coherent story to tell Shann. The story would have been an abbreviation, naturally, but I would have to go back to the moment Robby and I left her alone in the backseat of his Ford Explorer on Friday night in Grasshopper Jungle.

  I would not tell her about experiments or what was, and was not, normal for teenage boys to do, according to the popular psychologist who, although a middle-aged female with cosmetic lip surgery, was a foremost authority on teenage boys. I thought about how I would describe the things Robby and I saw inside her stepfather’s office, and I could only hope Shann would not ask me why I’d taken Robby down there in the first place.

  Because I was not sure why Robby and I did go down there. All I knew was that I liked doing things with Robby that we were not supposed to do, normal or not.

  I curled my bare toes in Ingrid’s fur.

  She let out a big, contented breath, like she was exhaling a billowing puff of soothing cigarette smoke.

  “What am I going to say to Shann, Ingrid?”

  Robby phoned after that. He asked if I was mad at him, and I told him of course not. That was a dumb thing for him to ask.

  Then he said, “Okay, Porcupine. I was just scared about it since you wouldn’t talk to me at school. Can you skate down to Grasshopper Jungle? I need to show you something.”

  I needed a cigarette, too.

  So I said, “Okay, Rob. Give me fifteen minutes.”

  I kicked around through my scattered wardrobe.

  I was running out of non-Lutheran-boy clothes.

  I slipped on my basketball shorts. I closed my eyes and imagined a prayer to Saint Kazimierz to protect me against getting hit in the balls or having an erection in front of anyone. I pulled on a black Shins T-shirt, found some socks under my bed, got my skate shoes and board, and went out into the hallway.

  I said to Ingrid, “Don’t toast any brownies till Dad lets you out.”

  Ingrid made a dog sigh and put her chin down between her paws.

  BUGS DO TWO THINGS

  AND ON THAT Monday night, Robby Brees and I were going to get drunk together for the first time in our lives.

  We had already planned it out. I had obtained permission from my mother and father to spend the night at the Del Vista Arms Luxury Apartments and go to school with Robby in the
morning.

  It was not like I could back out now.

  I had spent the night at the Del Vista Arms before. My father trusted Robby. Robby was never late to class at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy. Robby never caused school-wide controversies by doing such things as reading books about Catholic boys who masturbate. Also, there was no reason for anybody to ever not trust Robby Brees.

  I trusted Robby enough to stay at the Del Vista Arms.

  Two of the people who lived on Robby’s floor smoked meth.

  The night before, on Sunday, Robby and I stood in a young cornfield and watched Hungry Jack’s body split apart. We saw a bug the size of a small bear climb out of him.

  The other six victims of Contained MI Plague Strain 412E had not hatched yet.

  Bugs do two things.

  They eat and they fuck.

  Bugs are soldiers, machines, just like Hungry Jack was.

  Bug One—the bug that hatched from Hungry Jack—wanted to eat and fuck. It ate most of what was left of Hungry Jack. It wanted to find Eileen Pope, Travis Pope’s wife. It wanted to make more bugs with her.

  Ealing, Iowa, was just like Eden Five for a new planet of horny soldiers.

  Robby was already in the alley when I got to Grasshopper Jungle. He waited for me behind Tipsy Cricket Liquors. When I skated up to him, he held an unlit cigarette in his mouth.

  Robby always waited for me. It made smoking better.

  Louis, the cook from The Pancake House whose real name was Ah Wong Sing, had just thrown a cardboard box full of potato peelings, empty milk cartons, and eggshells into the dumpster. He spilled some peelings onto the sleeper sofa. He brushed them away with his hands.

  “I wonder if he knows what pubic lice are,” Robby said.

  “I have seen Louis take a nap on that couch before,” I said.

  Louis smiled and nodded at us as he walked across the alleyway.

  Louis did not speak English very well, so when Robby asked me if I wanted a fag, Louis got embarrassed. He made it obvious that he was trying not to listen to us, which made it obvious that he was listening to us.

  “Hello, Louis,” I said.

  Robby struck a match for me and I got my cigarette going.