4. PAAVI SEPPANEN’S FAMILY came from Finland. Paavi means small. Paavi also died in the explosion that took my brother’s right leg below his knee and obliterated both of Eric Christopher Szerba’s testicles. Paavi Seppanen was twenty-six years old when he died in Afghanistan. There is a photograph of Paavi that was taken at Easter when Paavi Seppanen was ten years old. Paavi has airy, thin red-blond hair the color of clover honey. He is wearing a collared, white long-sleeve shirt that is tucked into belted black slacks. He has a black clip-on necktie and is standing between his younger brother and sister. He looks like their protector. You can see they believe that about Paavi. Paavi has his arms around his brother and sister and they are all smiling. The younger boy and girl are holding empty woven baskets in their hands. The egg hunt has not started yet. The girl is maybe three in the photograph, and Paavi’s younger brother is wearing gray pants, a necktie, and suspenders. Paavi was homosexual. Nobody knew anything about it.
THE PRESIDENT’S SPERM
“I FOUND IT,” Shann said.
“It’s difficult to miss, I suppose,” I agreed. “Maybe it’s painted like the sky, instead of a penis, and so we just don’t notice it nowadays.”
Shann bumped me with her shoulder.
Johnny McKeon could not tell when people were messing around with him, but his stepdaughter could.
“I mean, I really found it,” Shann insisted. “I hiked out along the old service roads. There are some broken-down henhouses there and old troughs for the milk cows.”
“Maybe those are urinals,” I offered.
“Be serious,” Shann said.
“Uh. Okay.” I decided to be serious.
Shann said, “I found the old foundation to the silo. It’s concrete, and there’s a circular hatch in the middle of it. It looks like something you’d climb through to get into a diving bell or something.”
“Uh,” I said. “Nobody uses diving bells in Iowa. It’s not natural. Besides, there’s nothing to see beneath the surface of Iowa.”
“I couldn’t open it,” Shann said.
“You tried?” I was impressed.
“Well . . . no. I was actually afraid to do it alone,” Shann admitted.
“That was probably wise of you, Shann. There could be lost Russian sailors down there,” I offered. “They would be very horny if they’d been down there ever since Iowa was last covered by a vast sea. Or maybe it’s full of the president’s sperm.”
That made Shann laugh.
I was horny.
I felt like I scored points toward getting her to come over to my lonely house with me. I desperately wanted her to, but I was not going to ask her to please do that. Johnny would probably say no, anyway, in spite of the condoms.
But Johnny McKeon waited in his car and pretended not to watch us when Shann walked me to my front door and we kissed good night.
THE VIRGIN SAINT AND HIS WARD
I WROTE.
At the bottom of the first page, I penciled in a picture of a big galvanized steel silo that towered in the distance behind the McKeon House, which was Ealing, Iowa’s solitary listing on the Registry of Historic Homes.
Ingrid squirmed beneath my bare feet. She perked her ears up. If she hadn’t been stricken by cancer when she was a puppy, she may have barked. She looked like she wanted to bark. So I thought maybe she wanted to bark at me because she needed to shit, which was the most predictable quality Ingrid possessed.
She was a quiet fountain of shit and reliability.
Outside, in the distance, a police siren wailed like a plaintive coyote.
We never heard sirens in Ealing. It’s not that bad things never happened here, it’s just that nobody ever bothered to complain about it when they did.
A few miles away from my house, Ollie Jungfrau was locking up Tipsy Cricket Liquors. He had called the Iowa State Patrol, reporting that some kind of wild animal had attacked Wayne DeLong in the parking lot after Wayne left Tipsy Cricket Liquors. Wayne was carrying a paper sack with a bottle of El Capitan Vodka and a twelve-pack of Dura-Flex Extra-Sensitive Condoms.
The wild animal that attacked Wayne DeLong was Hungry Jack.
Wayne’s friends called him Wayne-O. Wayne-O was a pilot. He didn’t drink too much on nights before he flew, he said. He was supposed to fly a commuter plane from Cedar Rapids to Omaha in six hours.
Wayne-O wasn’t going to make that flight.
Ollie Jungfrau told the Iowa State Patrol officers the animal he’d seen attacking Wayne DeLong looked like a six-foot-tall grasshopper. The troopers requested that Ollie Jungfrau breathe into a machine.
Wayne DeLong was eaten right in front of the Ealing Coin Wash Launderette. The only thing left of Wayne-O was his belt buckle, eyeglasses, and the Tipsy Cricket paper sack containing the twelve-pack of condoms Wayne-O would never get to use, and the bottle of El Capitan Vodka that Wayne-O would also never drink.
“Okay, Ingrid,” I said. “Come on.”
I stood up from my seat at the desk. Ingrid raced ahead of me and ran downstairs to the front door, wagging her tail and panting.
“Uh. Wait, girl,” I said. I turned back. I’d forgotten the cigarettes Johnny McKeon brought for me in my bedroom.
It was a nice night.
I sat on the front porch in nothing but my boxers and Robby Brees’s Spam T-shirt. I put my bare feet up on the railing while Ingrid sniffed around in the yard. I lit a cigarette and considered staying home from school for a second consecutive day.
I thought Robby was right. I would surprise my dad by cleaning up all the dog shit and mowing the lawn before my parents came back home from Germany.
“There goes my Nobel Prize and my trip to Sweden with Robby Brees,” I said.
I was talking to Saint Kazimierz.
I smoked.
Saint Kazimierz chose to maintain his virginity until his death.
I could not comfortably wrap my head around that thought.
Saint Kazimierz must have been a real dynamo at saying no to his penis.
After he died a virgin boy in his twenties, Saint Kazimierz’s body was wrapped in silk. Saint Kazimierz’s corpse reportedly cured all kinds of people who were afflicted with untreatable illnesses. He even brought a dead girl back to life.
This is all true.
The maintenance of his virginity was more remarkable than any of that shit, as far as I was concerned.
I couldn’t see how a Polish boy could do that.
I wondered if, in the 1400s in Poland, being a virgin boy meant you were still technically permitted to experiment, or at least allowed to produce a little polymer from time to time. Otherwise, it had to be some kind of hoax or, perhaps, a genuine miracle.
Saints, like Kazimierz, I decided, truly were superhuman.
When his original tomb crumbled, the clergy decided to transport the boy’s body to a new crypt. When the priests opened his tomb, Saint Kazimierz’s body was miraculously preserved, and smelled like flowers.
Maybe shit like that will happen to any Polish boy who can actually fight off the urge to lose his virginity.
It was hopeless for me.
I was destined to be a stinky Polish corpse that would never cure diseases or shit like that.
A gray fog of headlights came sweeping like a sandstorm down the middle of our street.
Nobody ever drove out this way in the middle of the night.
Then Robby Brees’s old Ford Explorer pulled up and parked along the curb in front of my house.
I was scared, but also very happy to see Robby.
I had been a ridiculous asshole to Robby Brees over the past two days. And now, here I was: caught red-handed smoking on my porch, alone, in my underwear and Robby’s Spam shirt that he’d been wearing when we got called queers and beaten up by the Hoover Boys.
Seeing Robby Brees get
out of the car made me feel guilty and nervous. It was the same way I’d felt the day Pastor Roland Duff called me in to the headmaster’s office at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy to counsel me on the history and consequences of masturbation.
Robby did not expect to see me sitting there on the front porch, smoking in my boxers. In fact, he did not see me at all, which is why he let out a little startled squeal when I said, “Hi, Robby. It’s really good to see you.”
Nobody ever expects to be cheerfully greeted at midnight by a kid smoking in his underwear on a deserted street in Ealing, Iowa.
I may just as well have been a six-foot-tall praying mantis, or shit like that.
Robby regained his composure.
He said, “Hey, Porcupine.”
“Want a cigarette?” I asked.
Robby said, “Uh.”
He looked around, like he was trying to see if there was some kind of joke being played on him. Ingrid came up and sniffed his hand and then transformed herself into a doggy rug beneath my chair.
I took my bare feet down from the porch rail and curled my toes in her fur.
She sighed contentedly.
I said, “You’re a good dog, Ingrid.”
The sirens in the distance went silent.
Robby said, “I didn’t mean to bother you, Austin. I just came to drop off some things on your porch. I didn’t think you’d be out here.”
He went back to get what he’d brought from his car.
“Watch out for dog shit,” I warned.
“I am watching out,” he confirmed.
It must have been the end of the world or some shit like that. Robby Brees, who never did his laundry, had been washing laundry all day, which is why he did not go to school. It was part of the reason why Robby did not go to school. Most of the reason was that his Polish-kid best friend had been acting like a complete asshole.
He carried a neatly folded stack of half my entire non-Lutheran-Boy wardrobe in his arms.
On top of it were two pairs of sneakers, my toothbrush, and cell phone.
“Sorry it took so long to get all this stuff back,” Robby said. “Your sleeping bag’s in the Explorer, too.”
I took the bundle from Robby. Our hands touched.
Everything smelled really good.
“This stuff smells good,” I said.
Robby said, “Thanks. I tried.”
Robby shrugged.
“You actually did all your laundry today?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Robby said. “It’s not too bad. I couldn’t find one of your socks, though.”
Socks and underwear have a way of disappearing with me.
“Maybe it’s under your bed,” I said.
I immediately felt the flush of embarrassment. I silently prayed to Saint Kazimierz to make me not say anything else that was as stupid as the shit I just said to Robby.
“Your dad’s been calling,” Robby said.
“Uh.”
“I talked to him. He said everything is going to be okay. I hope you don’t mind that I answered your phone.” Robby said, “Austin, I’m really sorry about Eric.”
Robby was such a good person.
“You are such a good friend, Rob,” I said.
I gave Robby a cigarette. Then we went to his car to get my sleeping bag. I could hardly believe my eyes: Robby Brees’s backseat was completely cleaned out. All the dirty clothes were gone. It was like there was a new Robby.
“The new Robby,” I said.
“Yeah,” Robby agreed.
“Uh.” I said, “Now I feel guilty about wearing your Spam shirt. I think I might have B.O. I’ve been lying in bed all day.”
“Austin, you do have B.O.,” Robby confirmed. “I can smell it from here. You smell like leftover pizza in a locker room.”
Robby, who swore that Doritos smelled like a six-year-old boy’s feet, had an acute sense for smells.
“Uh. I will do laundry tomorrow, too,” I said. “We’ll be, like, laundry buddies, or shit like that, and we can chat about how we manage to get our things to smell so fresh.”
We sat on the porch, next to the stack of all my clean-smelling laundry that was missing at least one sock, and Ingrid, my golden retriever, who was missing her vocal cords, and smoked together.
I tried making small talk.
I said, “I ate a Stanpreme tonight with Shann.”
“Oh,” Robby said.
“It always tastes better when you’re there. I think Satan dislikes you,” I said.
“He hates everyone who asks for ice water. What do you expect? He’s Satan,” Robby theorized.
“Oh yeah,” I said. Robby was very smart about theology, too.
“Look, I wanted to say something, Porcupine,” Robby began.
“Don’t say anything, Rob. I don’t want you to.”
I waved my hand in the air between us like I was erasing words from an invisible blackboard.
“Okay,” Robby said.
THE DIVING BELL
THE THREE OF US marched through waist-high weeds and brambles, across fields that at one time were forests of corn, out to Shann’s launch pad.
Shann Collins found the invisible McKeon silo.
The silo was just as Shann had described it to me: A circular pad of concrete thirty feet in diameter. Around the circumference, corroded anchor bolts that used to support the structure’s cylindrical outer wall poked up like a mummy’s rusted fingers. In the exact center was a steel hatch, tightened shut by a spoked metal wheel that looked entirely like something you’d find on top of an old diving bell.
I was nervous.
“We should have brought flashlights,” I said.
And then I added, “Let’s go back and get some flashlights.”
Robby, who was never scared of anything unless we were breaking in to Johnny McKeon’s museum of horrors in the middle of the night, said, “Let’s have a cigarette and then open this shit up, Porcupine.”
“You boys smoke too much,” Shann said.
So Robby and I lit cigarettes, and before he’d taken the second drag on his, Robby squatted down above the hatch wheel and began forcing it counterclockwise.
As soon as the wheel rotated a quarter turn, we heard a low buzzing sound coming up from beneath the hatch.
“Um,” I said. “Robby? That thing’s full of bugs or shit.”
“It’s not full of bugs,” Robby argued.
“If it’s full of bugs, I’m going to be mad,” Shann offered.
“If it’s the kind of bugs I’m thinking of, you won’t be mad for too long,” I said.
“He is thinking of butterflies that shit raspberry cupcakes on your head,” Robby said.
That made me hungry for cupcakes.
“No,” I said. “No, I am not thinking of butterflies that shit raspberry cupcakes, Rob.”
Robby knew what kind of bugs I was thinking about, but Robby was not afraid.
Finally, the wheel would turn no more. The hatch came loose, and Robby stood up and lifted it open.
The hole was three feet across. As soon as the hatch raised up, the inside of the lower chamber illuminated in a flickering greenish fluorescent light. The buzzing noise was louder now, but it was fairly obvious that it was being produced by some kind of power generator, as opposed to six-foot-tall, man-eating praying mantises.
I took a drag, exhaled, and said, “Roof access, Rob.”
THE POPULAR GIRL
AT EXACTLY THE same moment Robby Brees opened the hatch to the McKeon silo, my mother and father stood at the bedside of Eric Christopher Szerba. It was nearly midnight in Germany. My parents were trying to talk Eric into speaking with his younger brother on their cell phone. My father held his phone above Eric’s bed like it was a fragile baby bird. Eric did not want to tal
k to his younger brother. Eric Christopher Szerba told my father to get out of his goddamned room and leave him alone.
At that moment, my cell phone was sitting on the coffee table in our living room beside an empty container of chicken-flavored Cup-O-Noodles.
I often forgot to carry my phone with me.
At that moment, Grant Wallace fell down in his bathroom while taking a piss. Grant hit his head on the rim of his toilet. It was not a Nightingale. Grant Wallace’s head broke open. It didn’t matter. Grant was hatching. The bug that came out of Grant was young and powerful. He was hungry and also very horny. He needed to eat, and he needed to find Eileen Pope. He could smell and hear Eileen Pope, even though she was four miles away from the Wallace home.
Grant Wallace made a terrible mess in his bathroom. There was nothing that was not covered by spatters of blood after he finished eating. But Grant was still hungry, and he also wanted to fuck and make more bugs with Eileen Pope.