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Authors: Patrick F. McManus

BOOK: The Grasshopper Trap
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R
etch Sweeney and I were taking a lunch break from pheasant hunting, our backs propped against fenceposts on the edge of a stubble field. Suddenly, Retch's sandwich slipped from his fingers. Then he lunged forward onto his belly and began frantically slapping the ground with both hands. Had we purchased the sack lunches anyplace other than Greasy Gert's Gas ‘n' Grub, I might not have been so alarmed.
“Quick, tell me!” I yelled at him. “Was it the ham-on-rye or the egg salad?”
Retch got slowly to his feet. “Dang! Missed him!”
“Who?” I said, wondering about the possible hallucinogenic effects of egg salad.
“A grasshopper,” he said, picking up the sandwich and dusting it off. “Biggest dang grasshopper I've ever seen. The brookies up at the beaver pond wouldn't have been able to resist him.”
“Oh,” I said. “A grasshopper.”
“Yeah. Hoppers are probably the best brookie bait there is. Too bad they're so hard to catch. You'd think somebody would invent a machine for catching them.”
A grasshopper-catching machine! The mere mention of such a contraption drew me back into the mists of time.
“Oh, no!” Retch groaned. “I hate it when you get drawn back into the mists of time. I'm gonna take a nap.”
The mists cleared. I was a boy again, running, lunging, and careening about our back pasture with Crazy Eddie Muldoon. The old woodsman Rancid Crabtree hunkered in the shade, shouting orders.
“Thar's a big'un landed on thet weed behind ya,” Rancid yelled at me. “Gol-dang! You missed him. You got to be quick if yer gonna catch hoppers. Listen to what Ah'm tellin' ya now, or we's gonna be too late to do any fishin'. How many's you caught?”
“Six altogether,” Crazy Eddie said. “But that's counting two that sneaked out of the jar when we were putting another one in.”
“What we gonna do with three measly grasshoppers?” Rancid yelped. “You fellas jist ain't quick enough.”
I held up the quart jar and peered in at the four measly grasshoppers. They stared back, their eyes filled with accusation.
“You'd think there'd be an easier way to catch hoppers,” I said.
Crazy Eddie looked at me. “Say, I've got an idea!”
“Forget it,” I said. Already that summer I'd had too many narrow escapes as the result of Eddie's ideas.
“But this is a great idea,” he cried. “We can build a grasshopper trap!”
Rancid dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand. “Wouldn't work. Ain't no way you could make a trap small enough to clamp on to a hopper's foot.”
“Not that kind of trap,” Eddie said. He then went on to explain his idea to Rancid and me. It was dumb, probably the dumbest idea Eddie had ever had, and maybe even dangerous, if the completed contraption bore any resemblance to Crazy Eddie's other inventions. I was thankful that for once a mature adult was on hand to point out the risk and stupidity of such an idea.
“Sounds good to me,” Rancid said. “Let's go over to maw place and build it.”
Rancid's place, occupying a ragged clearing in the woods at the foot of Big Sandy Mountain, consisted of a pine-slab shack with a rusty stovepipe askew on the roof and various big-game skulls, antlers, and moldering hides decorating the exterior walls. It was not unattractive. A bullet hole in a window had been preserved as a memento of the time an offhand shot had been fired from inside the shack at a bobcat prowling among the junk cars in the yard, the sneaky beast no doubt intent on stealing one of the wrecks. Contributing to the overall aesthetic effect, ghosts of slain skunks haunted the air of the Crabtree estate, effluvial evidence of the owner's vocation of trapping. The odor of skunk, however, seemed but a gentle wafting fragrance to anyone working in close proximity to Rancid, a situation in which I soon found myself.
I struggled to hold in place a final piece of the grasshopper trap while the sweating old woodsman hovered above me, stretching and twisting strands of baling wire.
“Whew!” I gasped.
“Gettin' tard?”
“Nope.
Wheweee
! How much longer?”
“Jist about got her done. Thar!” Rancid stepped back, snapped his suspenders, and proudly surveyed the grasshopper trap. “Now ain't thet purty!”
“Super neat!” cried Crazy Eddie.
The grasshopper trap seemed to consist largely of baling wire, which held a legless chair to the right front fender of Rancid's old pickup truck. A gunnysack dangled limply from the end of a slender pole. A barrel hoop held the mouth of the sack open in the manner of an airport windsock. The pole was suspended with strands of baling wire from a superstructure of two-by-fours baling-wired to the chair.
“You see how it works?” Crazy Eddie asked me, apparently taking my silence to be the result of ignorance. “The pickup drives along a road and one of us sits in the chair and works the pole so that the gunnysack scoops up the grasshoppers from the weeds in the ditch. Get it? The guy in the chair …”
“I get it, I get it!”
The three of us climbed into the pickup and went rattling off in search of a good grasshopper road. From long experience, I knew that Crazy Eddie would try to persuade me to take the first turn in the chair. After his invention proved safe, as his inventions seldom did, he would then take his turn. But not this time!
Presently Eddie said, “I'll bet this grasshopper trap will catch a whole lot more grasshoppers than we can ever use.”
“Ah bet it will too,” Rancid said. “In fact, Ah bet Ah could sell the extras. Ah could build a pen outta wire screen to keep 'em in, and when a fisherman come along lookin' fer bait, Ah could jist net him out a dozen or so. Probably
get a nickel apiece fer 'em. Hot dang, thet's a good idear! Ah might even git rich offen sellin' hoppers!”
“How about me?” Crazy Eddie said. “The grasshopper trap was my idea.”
“And me?” I said. “I helped build it.”
The great grasshopper magnate turned his shrewd, beady, capitalist's eyes on us. “We'll work something out,” he said. “We'll work something out. Heh heh.”
We soon arrived at a rough, narrow road that wound along Sand Creek. Hordes of grasshoppers crackled and sizzled among dry weeds in the ditch.
“Here's the spot,” Rancid said. “Looks like the mother lode of hoppers. Now who's gonna be the fust one to try out the trap?”
I could feel Crazy Eddie studying me out of the corner of his right eye. “Gee, I don't know,” he said. “It's sure gonna be a lot of fun, sittin' out there on the fender, watching those ol' hoppers pour into the trap.” He paused to check the effect on me, which was nil. “Bouncing along out there, the wind blowing in your face. Be just like a carnival ride, I bet, and …”
“Say,” Rancid said, “either of you two fellers know how to drive?”
Crazy Eddie and I looked at him. “Why, sure I do,” Eddie said. “Of course, I'm not old enough to get my license yet.”
“Hot dang!” Rancid said. “I'll try the hopper trap fust, just to test her out. And don't worry none about not havin' a license, Eddie. Thar ain't gonna be no policemen way out here in the dingles.”
Rancid gave Crazy Eddie a quick lesson on some of the nuances of driving the old truck. “Jist stomp down on this here knob iffen you wants to go faster, or you can pull out
this thang. Sometimes you got to pump up and down real fast on the brake pedal to get her to take hold. Now if she gits to jumpin' and jerkin' like she does sometimes, you can either do this or that. You know how to shift? Good.”
Rancid got out and Crazy Eddie slid over behind the steering wheel. “One more thang,” Rancid said. “Iffen Ah waves maw left hand, thet means go faster. Iffen Ah waves maw right, thet means go slower.” He then squirmed through the network of baling wire and, with much grunting and groaning, got himself seated in the tight confines of the rickety chair.
“Let her rip!” he shouted.
Crazy Eddie stretched to peer up over the dashboard, while trying to reach the foot pedals on the floor. He pulled the gear shift down with a terrible grinding sound, and the truck lurched forward.
I was impressed. “Gosh, I didn't know you knew how to drive, Eddie.”
Eddie's brow was furrowed in concentration as he wrestled the big steering wheel. “Well, it ain't like I ever actually drove before. I just know how. I've watched my pa do it hundreds of times. There ain't much to it.”
To my surprise, the grasshopper trap worked wonderfully well. Eddie steered the truck along the edge of the road, while Rancid raked the weeds with the grasshopper trap. We could see the hoppers pouring into it.
Such was the initial success of the grasshopper trap that Rancid apparently decided he could easily double his profits by increasing the speed of the truck. Even though he was being bounced about a good deal, he waved his left hand.
Crazy Eddie ground the truck into a higher gear. “Would you pull out that thing there that makes the truck go faster?”
he said to me. “My leg's gettin' tired of pressing down on the gas knob.”
I pulled out the thing on the dashboard. The truck leaped forward with a roar, sending Rancid's hat sailing away behind us. He hunched forward in the chair, his long hair streaming back. The grasshopper trap clipped madly along through the weeds, harvesting hoppers. Crazy Eddie's face beaded with sweat as he wrestled the steering wheel and strained to see over the dashboard.
“He's waving his left hand again,” I said. “He wants you to go even faster.” I couldn't believe the greed of the man.
“Okay,” Eddie said, grinding into the next gear. “Pull that thing on the dashboard all the way out. Wow! I didn't know this old truck could go so fast! Now what's Rancid want?”
“Careful, Eddie, you're getting into the ditch on this side—watch out for those thorn apples!”
The thorn apples raked the side of the truck. We bounced over several large rocks, ricocheted off a tree, hit a culvert, and landed back on the road.
“Okay! Okay! Stop yellin'!” Crazy Eddie said. “I got her back on the road, didn't I?”
“Rancid's waving both hands now. What do you think that means?”
“I don't know. I wish he'd make up his mind. Maybe he's trying to signal we're coming to Deadman's Hill. Heck, I know that.”
“It's all right,” I yelled out the window to Rancid. “Eddie knows about the hill!”
“Now what's he trying to do?” Eddie said.
Rancid had turned into a large, bouncing blur on the right front fender. I could tell that his antics were getting
on Eddie's nerves. “He's just showing off,” I said. “But he'd better stop fooling around and sit back down in that chair, because we're coming to the hill. Oh, no! He let the grasshopper-trap pole get broken off! What's he thinking of?”
“If that don't beat all!” Eddie said. “Well, I guess we'll just have to stop.”
“I thought you were going to stop, Eddie.”
“I'm tryin' to! Now which one of these things did he say was the brake?”
We passed the sheriffs car going in the opposite direction halfway down the hill, but not by much. Even so, there wouldn't have been any problem if we hadn't been passing a wagonload of hay at the same time. The sheriff whipped his car around and came after us, red light flashing and siren wailing. As Eddie said later, it sort of scared him.
“What do you suppose he wants?” Eddie asked.
“Beats me,” I said, tossing a bunch of hay out the window. “Maybe he's never seen a grasshopper trap before.”
The truck stalled on the uphill grade on the other side of the Sand Creek bridge. The sheriff pulled in ahead of us and slid to a stop. We got out of the truck and walked over to find out what he wanted. The sheriff was grim and sweaty and looked tired.

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