Grasshopper Jungle (15 page)

And Johnny McKeon said, “Isn't that a kick? You were just telling me about that guy, and I never heard of him before. Ever. Isn't that a kick?”

“That's a kick, Johnny,” I said.

“Anyway,” Johnny said, “it's for you, Austin. What would I want with something like that, anyway?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Thank you, Johnny.”

Robby watched me slip the chain around my neck.

“This is the nicest thing in the world,” I said.

I meant it, too.

“You're welcome,” Johnny said.

It felt cool and powerful against my skin. The thought of wearing the medal under my Lutheran Boy clothes, against my naked body at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy made me feel wicked and daring. It also made me very horny to think about breaking such a long list of theoretically unbreakable and ancient Lutheran Boy rules.

I decided I would never take it off.

“Thank you so much, Johnny,” I said again. “What a kick.”

“That's what I was thinking,” Johnny said. “It's a real kick, ain't it?”

Johnny McKeon was in a generous mood. He offered to drive Robby and me to my house so I could pick up the clothes and things I needed to spend the night at the Del Vista Arms.

He and Robby even waited in Johnny's car while I let Ingrid out to take a shit.

I kept playing with the medallion inside my T-shirt. I pressed it against my bare chest. I took it out at least a dozen times to look at Saint Kazimierz.

It made me feel magic.

I IMAGINED A SILVER
chain washing up on the cold shoreline in Massachusetts or Maine. Somehow the thing had slipped away from Andrzej Szczerba's body, and had been carried slowly for a century until being discovered in a tangled mass of seaweed and fishing line.

It
had
to come to Ealing.

It
had
to end up around Austin Andrzej Szerba's neck.

I sat in the front seat and Johnny McKeon drove us to the Del Vista Arms from my house. Shann called when we were about halfway there.

“I found something out,” Shann said.

“What?” I wondered.

There were an awful lot of things I thought Shann might be talking about, but none of them was correct.

“I found the silo,” she said.

“Uh,” I said.

There were also an awful lot of silos in Iowa. I did not know what Shann was talking about.

“You know,” she went on, “the message from the machine in the wall? Well, today after school I went down to City Hall and looked up the
Ealing Registry of Historical Homes
.”

“You did? They actually
have
that?” I asked.

Now there was a book that could have absolutely
everything
about its subject fully contained within its bindings.

“I saw photos of my house. Old ones. There
used
to be a silo on the property. I
found
the silo,” she said.

But there was no silo on the property now.

I pointed that out to Shann.

Shann said, “We have to go look, Austin.”

“But it's dark and shit,” I said. “Do you think someone is hiding the McKeon silo?”

You can't hide a silo in Iowa.

The best you could do is maybe disguise it to look like someone
else's
silo, or maybe something like a penis.

People in Iowa were generally too reserved for such antics.

“No,” Shann chided. “I don't think someone's hiding our silo. But there
was
one here at one time.”

“Uh,” I said.

“Tomorrow. After school. You, Robby, and me. We'll go see if there's anything left of it. I have a copy of the picture.”

“Uh,” I said again. I glanced back at Robby.

Shann knew we were going to get drunk. We told her. She didn't approve of it. What can you do?

Somewhere, there was a middle-aged, nice-looking woman psychologist with voluptuous, artificially induced lips who, as a foremost expert on teenage boys, could serenely explain to Shann that boys sometimes need to be boys and do dumb things that can get boys in lots and lots of trouble and shit like that.

But Shann did not watch much television.

“Okay, Shann,” I said. “I think we can do that. Maybe there is something there, after all.”

“I just know we're going to find some other weird stuff that Grady McKeon was doing here,” Shann said.

I agreed, and said, “There's probably more than anyone will ever know.”

Then Shann said, “I love you, Austin.”

I looked at Robby in the backseat, then at Johnny behind the wheel, and I said, “Um. Me too, Shann.”

In my defense, and with plenty of history to back me up, it was a perfectly acceptable response considering the environmental realities I had to contend with.

Shann certainly understood the translation:
I am sitting next to your stepfather and my best friend.

You know what I mean.

I HAD TWO
of my mother's little blue kayaks.

They were hidden inside a matching pair of clean gray Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy regular boys' socks I brought with me to Robby's apartment for school the next day.

Robby did not know I had them.

I unrolled my sleeping bag on the floor in Robby's room and left my stack of Lutheran Boy clothes on top of his dresser. Robby brought in a bottle of wine he'd hidden in the back of his refrigerator.

His mother never knew anything about it.

The bottle was so cold the glass fogged and dripped.

Then I showed Robby the Xanax pills I'd stolen. He was not happy about what I did.

Robby said, “I'd
never
take one of those, Porcupine.”

“Uh,” I said. “Why not? Everyone else does.”

History lesson for the early evening: When a teenage boy says
everyone else does
, he's usually not being mathematically precise. Robby knew that. We spoke the same language.

Robby said, “I just don't want to ever do shit like that.”

I came to my own defense, rationalizing, “I always thought they'd make me feel better.”

“Better than
what
?” Robby asked.

“I don't know,” I said. “Better than shitty and scared all the time.”

“Don't be dumb, Austin,” Robby said.

Robby unscrewed the cap on the wine. I watched him swallow. He liked it.

“Well, I'm taking one anyway,” I said.

“Go ahead,” Robby said.

Robby would not take one. He looked unhappy when I put the tiny blue pill on my tongue. But it was something I always wondered about. I hoped my mother's little kayak would help me figure things out.

Get things to fall right into place.

I washed it down with some wine.

The wine tasted sweet, and it burned at the same time.

Robby kept the grimacing lemur mask and the plastic yard flamingo in his bedroom. I tried the lemur mask on. It did make my face stink, and the lenses in the eyes made everything look strange. There was some kind of refractive prism on the lenses of the mask that made Robby look blue. I took it off.

“Yes,” I confirmed, “now my face really
does
stink.”

“I told you,” Robby said. “Did that Xanax do anything to you?”

“Uh. I don't think so,” I said. “But it's only been a minute.”

I picked up the flamingo. I shook it.

“What are you doing?” Robby said.

“Shaking the plastic lawn flamingo,” I explained.

“Why?” Robby asked.

“I want to see if candy will come out of its ass,” I answered.

Maybe I
was
starting to feel different.

We shared more wine. We drank straight from the bottle. I was kind of messy. The wine ran down my neck. It baptized Saint Kazimierz. But it also made my face not stink so bad.

“Maybe the message was about
this
flamingo,” I said.

I was somewhat impressed by my brilliance.

“Uh,” Robby said.

Robby wasn't really paying attention. He opened up his record player and was flipping through a bookcase of vinyl LPs that used to belong to his dad.

“Yeah,” I went on, “maybe it's like a smoke detector for that shit in the globe Tyler dropped. McKeon Industries
did
used to make Pulse-O-Matic
®
brand smoke detectors.”

“I think you're high, Porcupine,” Robby said.

He shook his head and carefully grooved the stylus onto the edge of the spinning record.

I don't know exactly what the Xanax did to me. All I can remember is how relaxed and not-uptight I felt. I did not care about anything.

Everything was nice, very nice.

As I sat there on the corner of Robby's bed, I was aware that nothing at all mattered anymore, and I wasn't confused about feeling happy.

I was floating away.

We finally could forget about everything.

Robby played a crackling vinyl recording of
Exile on Main Street
, and we got drunk on screw-top wine and smoked cigarettes and took off our T-shirts.

I opened my notebook and drew sketches of Robby as he reclined, bare chested, on the floor in the slate-colored streetlight that came through the apartment's open window.

It was warm, and outside the sound of insects in the night was electric.

The music sounded better than anything I'd ever heard.

I had never been so happy in my life.

I played with the little silver medal against my bare chest.

I wrote poetry while we sat there like that in the dark and talked about our favorite poems and books and laughed and smoked.

And Mick Jagger sang to us:

Tryin' to stop the waves behind your eyeballs,

Drop your reds, drop your greens and blues.

IN THE MORNING
, Robby's alarm clock buzzed like an air-raid warning.

We had to get up to go to school.

When I opened my eyes, I was lying next to Robby on his bed. My arm stretched across the space between us, and my open hand lay flat in the middle of Robby's chest. I had my legs pressed up against his leg. One of my feet was completely underneath Robby's calf.

The covers of Robby's bed had been thrown down on the floor around his footboard, and we were sprawled out on top of the bottom sheet.

At that moment, all I had on were some boxers, my left sock, and the silver chain Johnny McKeon gave me with Saint Kazimierz on it around my neck.

I sat up, still drunk and woozy from the pill.

I felt drained and rushed, like my brain had just flushed itself down the toilet of my throat.

I was vaguely aware that Robby sat up in the bed. He turned off his alarm and watched me while I rolled my legs over the edge of his bed. It was all I could do to will myself not to vomit until I staggered and tripped in my drooping boxers out of Robby's bedroom.

I needed to find the toilet.

Robby's favorite poem is Dulce Et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen. It is a poem about war and lies, youth and thievery.

It begins:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge.

Robby has very good taste for words.

My favorite poem is The Emperor of Ice-Cream by Wallace Stevens. It is a poem about everything else: sex, lust, pleasure, loneliness, and death.

It begins:

Call the roller of big cigars,

The muscular one, and bid him whip

In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.

Robby recited his poem from memory that night, and I fumbled over some of the last lines in my poem, but finally got it right.

They were both so beautiful, and their sound, as we said them to each other above the music, made our chests fill up with something electric and buzzing, like love and magic.

When I finished throwing up, I flushed the toilet and turned on Robby's shower.

I dropped my orphaned sock and Iowa plaid boxers onto the floor below the sink. I climbed into the tub and got under the water.

It was cold, and there was a grimy ring of brown that had accumulated around the bottom of Robby's bathtub. The apartment had only the one bathroom. It was right in the middle of a T-shaped hallway that separated Robby's bedroom from his mother's.

Connie Brees was not home from work yet.

I put my face under the water. I felt terrible. My eyes blurred and I fingered the medal of Saint Kazimierz and looked at his modest eyes and little upside-down halo. I put the thing in my mouth.

I heard the bathroom door open.

Robby said, “Austin? Are you okay, Austin?”

“I'm okay,” I said. There was an edge in my voice.

And I said, “Can you just let me have
five minutes
, Robby? Okay?”

Robby said, “Sure. I brought your school clothes in for you.”

Robby was sad because I was being an asshole.

I did not want to go to school.

I never wanted to get out of that dirty shower.

I did not want to look at Robby Brees.

I said, “Okay. Thank you.”

But I said it in such a tone that it meant:
Get out of here and leave me alone
.

At exactly that moment, Shann was eating a toasted bagel and looking at a black-and-white photograph of the McKeon House.

And while I was standing under the shower in Robby's apartment, Travis Pope passed out behind the wheel of his Nissan truck and crashed into a shallow drainage ditch on the practice fields at Herbert Hoover High School. His wife, Eileen, was sitting beside him. She was not wearing her seat belt. They were hatching.

Someone down the hall from Robby's apartment at the Del Vista Arms was holding a torch lighter below a glass pipe and cooking methamphetamine smoke into his face.