Andrew Smith - Grasshopper Jungle

Johnny McKeon was a good marketer.

“I’ve never seen so much shit in my life,” Robby said.

There were nightstands on top of end tables stacked perilously on dinner tables. And every flat surface of every item of furniture was covered in figurines, place settings, ashtrays, silverware, toys, picture frames, clocks, crucifixes, candles, rock collections, pocket-knives, and too many other things for me to list.

I put the price tags on almost every one of them for Johnny, too.

Johnny McKeon made a lot of money.

As soon as one corner of the shop would empty out, it quickly filled back up again. A lot of the things came from realtors and loan agents. Some people in Ealing left behind what they couldn’t fit in the trunks and backseats of their cars when the banks took their homes.

Abandoned stuff from defeated Iowans had a way of migrating into Johnny McKeon’s hands.

Robby’s hand slipped from my shoulder.

He said, “Oops.”

Objects clinked together in the dark. Figurines fell.

“Be careful,” I said.

“Where are we going?”

“I want to see what Johnny’s hiding,” I said.

That scared Robby.

Robby grabbed my hand.

“Don’t be such a baby,” I said. “You wanted to come down here. I know where I’m going.”

Robby started to let go of my hand.

“It’s okay,” I said. I pulled Robby along by the hand like a little kid.

Johnny McKeon kept things in his private office. He never let me go in there. Johnny never let anyone go in there.

There were things Johnny wouldn’t sell. One of them was a sealed glass globe he kept on a shelf beside the office door. I was fascinated by the globe. It had been made by some of the scientists in the lab at McKeon Industries, and contained a perfectly balanced universe.

There was water, land, plants, bacteria, a species of tiny shrimp, worms, and even some translucent fish in there.

It was perfect.

It was sealed and self-sustaining.

Nothing got in and nothing got out.

My hand was wet and hot.

“You’re sweating all over me,” I said to Robby.

“Sorry.”

I turned the knob to Johnny’s office.

Of course, it was locked.

Robby bumped into me. He wasn’t paying attention and he pinned me flat against the office door with his chest.

“No go,” Robby said. “I guess we should get out of here.”

“I know where Johnny keeps the key. It isn’t very smart,” I said.

Despite his creativity at naming businesses, and his eye for marketing strategies, Johnny McKeon wasn’t that careful when it came to trusting teenage boys.

History lesson: Teenage boys watch you, even when they pretend they don’t give a shit about your life.

Johnny kept the key resting flat on the lip of the molding at the top of the door.

I pulled it down and unlocked our way into Johnny McKeon’s office, where he kept his secrets.

Robby said, “I really need a cigarette.”

TWO-HEADED BOY

WE STOOD INSIDEJohnny McKeon’s private office.

There were no windows. It was impossible to see anything in the dark.

Robby threw the switch for the office lights. I jumped when they came on.

You don’t expect things to get all bright on you when you’re nervous about doing something you’re not supposed to be doing.

Robby shrugged apologetically.

He said, “We may as well turn on the light in here. Nobody can see us.”

My heart raced, but Robby was right: Nobody could see us.

Robby shut the door to the office, which closed us in with Johnny’s things.

Johnny McKeon’s real-life horror show.

Johnny McKeon’s office smelled the same as the rest of the shop, but wasn’t nearly as cluttered. In fact, the office was rather tidy.

Rather.

I said it again.

The three walls boxing the office behind the door were lined with dark wooden shelves. Johnny had salvaged the shelves from the Ealing Public Library when it was remodeled three years before: the year we were in seventh grade.

“Holy shit,” Robby said.

Here’s why he said it: Johnny McKeon’s shelves were full of horrible, grotesque things. They were the kinds of things that no sixteen-year-old boy could tear his eyes from. And there were four sixteen-year-old-boy eyes in Johnny’s office.

One of the cases displayed another of the McKeon sealed glass globes, but this was different from the peaceful and pleasant nature-ball Johnny kept outside in the shop. The globe was about the size of a basketball, and it was propped steady atop a black lacquered stand with a brass plaque on front, as though it was some kind of trophy or shit like that. But this could not have been a trophy.

The plaque read:

MCKEON INDUSTRIES 1969 CONTAINED MI PLAGUE STRAIN 412E

Inside the globe was a festering universe.

The globe Robby and I studied held something resembling a black, folded, and coiled brain. The thing clearly was not a brain, but the wrinkled patterns on its surface made me think of one.

“This has to be like some kind of movie prop or something,” Robby said.

“Look around, Rob. All the shit in here looks real,” I said.

In fact, everything inside Johnny’s office was real, we came to find out later. It didn’t matter. Neither of us actually believed Johnny McKeon was hiding away props for horror films.

The black thing inside the globe pulsed and twitched like a beating heart. It seemed to become more animated the longer we stared at it. It was almost like a gelatinous cauliflower. Here and there on its velvet surface, a mound would rise up, like a mosquito bite, a black pimple, and then burst open at its peak.

Little volcanoes erupting.

When the pimples burst open, strands of oval globules, pale yellow pearls, coiled and twisted over the surface of the blob, then turned black and sprouted velvet hairs, dissolving back into the surface of the brain thing.

Where the glass globe with the fish, shrimp, plants, and worms outside in Johnny McKeon’s shop emanated a placid, almost hopeful aura, this thing whispered of rot and death, disease.

Robby and I could have stared at Johnny’s secret collection of things all night.

On another case was an assortment of large specimen jars.

All of them had a common etched label:

MCKEON INDUSTRIES 1969 HUMAN REPLICATION STRAND 4-VG-03

One of them contained a human head. It was a man’s head. His eyes were squinted, half open, and although they were clouded, his pupils and irises were plainly visible. He had pale blue eyes. I could even see small blood vessels in the whites of his eyes. He had a mustache. His lips were tightly pursed and frowning.

“He doesn’t look too happy,” I said.

“This has to be fake,” Robby said. “Who would keep shit like this?”

“Johnny McKeon would,” I answered. “He probably found it when the plant shut down and thought it was cool.”

“He could charge admission,” Robby said.

Another jar on the rack held a pair of human hands.

The palms were pressed together. It reminded me of the trite framed artwork depicting disembodied praying hands that hung at teenager eye level above the long urinal in the boys’ toilet at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy.

The pictures were there to remind us what good teenage boys do with their hands.

The jar beside the hands contained a penis and testicles.

The position of the jars made an artistic statement about what happened to boys who masturbate.

“That guy probably went to Curtis Crane,” Robby said.

His voice shook with nervousness.

There is nothing more deeply frightening to a sixteen-year-old boy than confronting the possibility of losing his penis.