When he came out of the bathroom, Grant Wallace ate his two younger brothers, his mother, and the family’s Yorkshire terrier, which was named Butterfly.
Grant Wallace’s father, Will Wallace, was not home from his job in Waterloo yet.
Will Wallace owned Fire at Will’s Indoor Shooting Range and Gun Shop.
At that moment, Will Wallace was selling a 9mm Ruger over the counter to a drunk man who claimed he was going to use it to shoot his ex-wife’s cat.
Will Wallace had a sign behind his counter. The sign displayed Will Wallace’s two favorite mottos. It looked like this:
A GUN IS NOT A TOY
ALL SALES FINAL
The three Hoover Boys Grant Wallace enjoyed hanging out with hatched within minutes of one another. Like Grant, Travis Pope, and Hungry Jack, they wanted to do only two things.
Now there were seven bugs in Ealing, Iowa: Eileen Pope and her six suitors—Hungry Jack, Travis Pope, Grant Wallace, Tyler Jacobson, Devin Stoddard, and Roger Baird. Eileen Pope was going to be very popular.
Eileen’s dance card was full.
At that moment, the vice president of the United States of America was performing his monthly testicular self-exam. His balls felt perfectly fine. The vice president of the United States of America named his balls Theodore and Franklin. Theodore was a little bigger than Franklin.
And Johnny McKeon was inside his office. He watched the little two-headed baby boy inside the jar. Johnny had seen the boy move before. The two-headed boy was moving his hands now: open and closed, open and closed, open and closed.
Johnny said, “Ain’t that a kick?”
Johnny thought the thing inside the jar was some sort of deranged toy.
Two-Headed Boys Are Not Toys.
Ollie Jungfrau was lying in his bed. He lived in a bachelor apartment at the Del Vista Arms. He needed to take the day off after the stressful ordeal with Wayne DeLong in the parking lot at Grasshopper Jungle the night before. Ollie Jungfrau thought masturbating would make him feel more cheerful. He also phoned out for pizza delivery from Satan’s Pizza.
Customers for Tipsy Cricket Liquors had to bother Johnny McKeon at the secondhand store if they needed booze, cigarettes, or condoms. Johnny didn’t mind. Johnny McKeon never minded much of anything.
Louis, the Chinese cook at The Pancake House, whose real name was Ah Wong Sing, met Connie Brees in the alley at Grasshopper Jungle.
They went back to the Del Vista Arms together.
At exactly the same moment the hatch on the McKeon silo came up into the Iowa sky for the first time in forty years, Connie Brees was making certain her son, Robert Brees Jr., was not at home. She went through Robby’s room, looking for a box of condoms she found on the floor of Robby’s bedroom on Tuesday afternoon when Robby was at school. Ah Wong Sing sat naked, waiting for Connie Brees in her bedroom, which was just on the other side of the little bathroom where I’d vomited and taken a shower on Tuesday morning.
And, at exactly the moment Robby lifted open the old hatch and the subterranean chamber below our feet lit up in pale fluorescent-green light, I was thinking about having an underground threesome with Shann and Robby, and feeling myself turn red and hot with my sweating, embarrassed horniness.
I also wanted cupcakes.
WELCOME TO EDEN
IF DRIVING OUT to the Tally-Ho! with Robby Brees was like traveling forward in time, then climbing down into the belly of the McKeon silo with him was like going backwards.
First: Robby climbed down the rounded steel ladder, and Shann and I followed. As soon as Robby was halfway down to the floor, which was fifteen feet below the hatch opening, a welcoming sound chimed us into the silo.
It was a recording of a very sterile, anesthetized-sounding woman’s voice that said:
Welcome to Eden. Please secure the hatch upon entry.
Welcome to Eden. Please secure the hatch upon entry.
Welcome to Eden. Please secure the hatch upon entry.
“Uh,” I said. The message kept repeating without any indication that it would stop. I added, “Shann, if this place ends up being full of sperm, I’m leaving.”
The place did have sperm in it. We found it later.
You will see.
“It’s just like our mothers or something,” Shann said. “I bet she won’t shut up till one of us closes the front door.”
Shann pointed up to the hatch and the disc of blue Iowa sky above our heads.
Shann was very smart.
I thought it was like our mothers because the voice sounded like the two Connies—Connie Brees and Connie Szerba—when they were floating along on little blue kayaks.
Welcome to Eden. Please secure the hatch upon entry.
Welcome to Eden. Please secure the hatch upon entry.
“Okay,” I said. “I can’t take it anymore.”
But before I could do anything, Robby was back up the ladder, sealing shut the hatch above us.
The welcome announcement stopped.
Robby looked down at us from the top of the ladder.
“Uh,” I said. “What if we can’t get out, Rob, and this chamber suddenly begins filling up with sperm or shit like that?”
Robby said, “Eden Five needs us, Porcupine.”
“Uh,” I repeated.
“You worry too much,” Robby said.
That was very true.
Everyone knew I worried too much.
Absentmindedly, I fiddled with the silver Saint Kazimierz bauble dangling from the chain around my neck.
SOME KIND OF SIGN
THE DIVING BELL turned out to be much more than a diving bell. It was a bunker fortress, a preserved glimpse, like Paleolithic cave art, at the paranoia that gripped Cold War Ealing, Iowa, and the United States of America.
It was everything in the entire world down there.
You will see.
The first room below the hatch was something like a mudroom. There were benches all along its circular wall, with coat and hat hooks positioned at even distances above them. The wall was painted an industrial shade of gray with bold yellow block letters that said:
MCKEON INDUSTRIES INFESTATION COMPLEX
EDEN PROJECT • EALING, IOWA
There was a pair of scuffed wingtip shoes left beneath one of the benches, as well as a powder-blue windbreaker hanging from a hook. There was also a matching set of three of the same plastic pink lawn flamingos with the wire stakes coming out of their asses. The wire stakes were fed through perfectly drilled holes in the benches. The flamingos were turned with their beaks toward the center of the mudroom, like they were watching us.
“This must be some kind of nuke shelter,” Robby said.
“Nuh,” I said. “It has something to do with that shit Tyler dropped.”
Shann said, “What are you talking about?”
“Let’s see what’s down here,” I said.
A single metal door led out of the entry room. The fact that this door also had a sealing airlock mechanism convinced me that the silo had been created for some anticipated disaster. A reasonable observer might conclude that Dr. Grady McKeon had prepared the structure, as many Americans did during the 1960s, as a type of bomb shelter for his family. But I knew after what I’d seen inside Johnny McKeon’s office at From Attic to Seller Consignment Store that there was something much more to this silo and to Grady McKeon’s creations.
I was certain Robby believed it, too.
None of us had any way of knowing it at the time, but Robby Brees and the bloody message he left on the pavement at Grasshopper Jungle had just as much to do with the end of the world as old, dead Dr. Grady McKeon ever did.
We went through the first door.
Robby said, “I don’t mind telling you this, Shann, but I think you should keep this place secret from your
parents, so we can have a raging party down here.”
“Like an orgy,” I whispered.
“Uh,” Shann said.
“We could rule the world from this place,” Robby offered.
I wasn’t really listening to them. I was nervous about being there, and I was silently communicating to Saint Kazimierz, asking him if he could make me stop thinking about having an orgy.
In the early 1970s, among the last times anyone had ever been down inside the McKeon silo, which was technically called the Eden Project, scientists and workers from McKeon Industries actually did come down here to have sex parties.
We would find this out later, much to Shann’s embarrassment.
The doorway led us into a vast tiled hallway of lockers, which in turn opened on either side to a wide shower room on our right, sinks and mirrors to our left, with gleaming stainless fixtures and hospital-clean floors and walls. I went inside the shower room. The showerheads were arranged like sunflowers blooming outward from the tops of central posts that looked like columnar periscopes in old submarines. Twenty people could shower in there at the same time. The place was obviously designed with the idea of not segregating shower-takers and clothes-changers by gender.
I opened one of the spigots.
The water came out hot.
The place was suitable for an army, and it was also ready to be used.
“Too bad I already took a bath today,” I said.
“Yeah. Too bad,” Shann said.
She was joking.
In the shower chamber, at the end of the room where there were polished redwood benches and cubbies for towels and clothes, there were three doored stalls to toilets, and an enormous twenty-foot-long porcelain communal wall urinal. I examined the top of the urinal. There were birds on it with ribbons coiled around their happy beaks. The urinal was an antique Nightingale.
I knew I would have to pee in that thing.
My destiny was calling.
Once again, every highway that had ever been laid was intersecting right at my feet. I rubbed the Saint Kazimierz medal against my chest and thanked the virgin boy.
Robby had opened some of the lockers. They all contained identical sets of supplies: clean towels and shower kits with soap and razors, fresh white-and-blue nylon jumpsuits that zipped up the front, sealed packages of white socks, and cloth caps, all of which had been embroidered in blue and gold thread with the McKeon Industries Scientific Labs Department logo.
All the jumpsuits were numbered and said Eden on their chests.
“I wonder if we should change our clothes or shit,” Robby said.
“If there’s one in there that says Eden 5, I am putting it on,” I decided.
Robby waved a hanger like a banner in front of me. On the left chest, the jumpsuit said this:
EDEN
5
“This is like some kind of sign or shit,” I said.
GIMME SHELTER
THE UNIFORM MADE me look like someone who worked at a place that sold hot dogs and ice cream cones.
I stripped down to my boxers and slipped myself hurriedly inside the jumpsuit. Shann and Robby gave in to their desire to conform. All teenagers really want to be exactly alike, so why wouldn’t they?
Shann and Robby put on uniform jumpsuits as well.
Watching Shann and Robby take off their clothes made me realize that nylon jumpsuits were also not very good at hiding erections. Saint Kazimierz kept me strong.
I wanted a cigarette.
Shann Collins was Eden 49.
Robby Brees became Eden 133.
We put on our white caps and socks. We were an army now.
There were a lot of lockers down there, enough to find suits that fit us perfectly. Enough to last forever.
“Do you think this place would explode or shit if we smoked down here?” I asked.
Robby said, “I was wondering the same thing, Porcupine.”
The place did not explode.
I noticed there were ashtrays built into the walls of the locker room. Everyone smoked in the 1970s, especially in Iowa. Who wouldn’t smoke if you were sealed underground and the world above was going down a cosmic shithole?
Walking silently over the cool, slick floor in our brand-new McKeon Industries Scientific Labs Department white socks, we left the locker room through the only hatched doorway at the opposite end from the entry.
We came out into a massive auditorium with rows of cushioned seats that all faced a podium and rolling blackboards at the front of the room.
It was like a lecture hall.
The stage area was lit up in track lights that pointed down at the lectern, so the audience’s attention would be focused on whoever might be up there telling them all the important shit they needed to know.
On one of the chalkboards behind the speaker’s podium, a diagram had been drawn.
It looked like this:
412EHUMAN BLOOD HOST LARVAL STAGEMETAMORPHOSIS SEXUAL REPRODUCTIONINFESTATION
It was just like biology class with pollywogs.
I hated biology, and as far as I know, pollywogs cannot destroy the world. Then again, I never paid attention in biology class unless the teacher was talking about sexual reproduction with humans.
Our ninth-grade biology teacher at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy was named Mrs. Edna Fitzmaurice. She had a mustache and would not tolerate nervous giggling when she said a word like penis or vagina. Edna Fitzmaurice’s main function at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy was to make teenagers morbidly terrified of sex.
History lesson: Over the course of centuries in the history of education, although fought valiantly by endless armies of pedagogues, the attempt to frighten teenagers away from sex has proven to be a losing battle.
The lecture hall had multiple sets of doorways leading out from each of its three curved walls. There was so much for us to explore. The place was easily five times larger than the McKeon House where Shann lived, maybe bigger than that.
The first door we opened took us into a type of lounge. It looked like a television set from a 1960s-era family comedy, with low, straight-backed sofas perched on narrowly tapered birchwood peg legs, shag carpeting, and coffee tables shaped like kidney beans. On one of the tables was an assortment of magazines. They were perfectly unwrinkled, dustless, hardly touched. The most recent date on any of the magazines was 1971.
There were framed photographs on the walls: an image of the flag of the United States of America planted on the surface of the moon, the faces of presidents carved into Mount Rushmore, a herd of longhorn cattle, what apparently were Iowa cornfields, Willie Stargell swinging at home plate in the 1971 World Series, and a black-and-white picture of President Richard Nixon and his family, taken in the White House in front of a fireplace, and a painting of President George Washington. It was everything that made America worth living in an underground cave for, while the rest of the world went entirely to shit.
That was our day. You know what I mean.
And there was a cigarette machine in the lounge.
Discovering it had an almost religious impact on Robby and me.
“Thank you, Saint Kazimierz,” I said.
I pulled my medal out from my jumpsuit and kissed the saint.
“You’re going to go to hell for turning Catholic,” Robby said.
Robby pulled one of the levers on the machine. Out popped a red pack of Pall Mall cigarettes and a book of matches that advertised how you could get into art school by drawing a cute little fawn named Winky.
You did not need to put money into the machine to get cigarettes out of it.
It was a miracle.
Robby said, “Thank you, Saint Kazimierz.”
We sat on one of the couches and smoked.
The Pall Mall cigarettes were a little stale, but they were free.
>
I had read somewhere that cigarette manufacturers during the 1970s also put saltpeter in their tobacco. I wondered if Americans had fewer erections during the 1970s than during other decades. Apparently, the saltpeter in my Pall Mall was not having much of an effect on my penis. I sat beside Shann and rubbed her leg with mine. The jumpsuits felt very nice. I put my hand on her neck. We kissed, and I slipped my tongue into Shann’s mouth.
I believed Robby was a better kisser than me. I tried to kiss Shann like Robby would.
Robby watched us. He was not bothered at all by what I was doing with Shann.
He got up from the couch and went over to the wall, where a built-in shelf surrounded an old reel-to-reel tape recorder. There was a big spool of tape that had been left threaded across the machine’s playheads.
Robby pressed the power button and the two level-meter windows on the bottom of the machine flickered with yellow light. There were red needles that looked as fine as strands of horsehair, and they pricked up inside each window. Robby flipped a switch. It made a soft click, and the reels jerked and spun.
Music came from everywhere around us.
It was a recording of the Rolling Stones’s album, Let It Bleed.
Robby said, “Oh, hell yes.”
Robby danced and smoked.
He was such a great dancer. It was just like when he taught me how to dance in his room at the Del Vista Arms so I could win Shann’s attention when we were in seventh grade. I wanted to dance with Robby, too.
Robby said, “I never want to leave Shann’s silo.”
Mick Jagger sang Gimme Shelter.
History will show that Gimme Shelter is one of the greatest songs ever recorded. It sounded so beautiful down inside Shann’s silo. Robby danced in his jumpsuit, which he had unzipped all the way past his belly button, so you could see his brightly colored, non-plaid, non-Iowa boxers. They had pictures of ice cream cones with rounded scoops of colorful ice cream melting down the diamond-patterned waffle cones in suggestive drips.
Robby always had the coolest boxers.