I wasn’t supposed to get horny at.
As history is my judge, probably not.
“I think we should go up on the roof and get our shit back. Tonight, when no one will see us. Those were my best shoes.”
Actually, those were Robby’s only non-Lutheran-boy school shoes.
I was willing.
“I bet there’s some cool shit up on that roof,” I said.
“Oh yeah. No doubt everyone in Ealing hides their cool shit up on the roof of The Pancake House.”
“Or maybe not.”
WHAT MADE THIS COUNTRY GREAT
ROBBY HAD AN older sister named Sheila.
Sheila was married and lived with her husband and Robby’s six-year-old nephew in Cedar Falls.
I had a brother named Eric.
Eric was in Afghanistan, shooting at people and shit like that.
As bad as Cedar Falls is, even the Del Vista Arms for that matter, Eric could have gone somewhere better than Afghanistan.
Both our moms took little blue pills to make them feel not so anxious. My mom took them because of Eric, and Robby’s mom needed pills because when we were in seventh grade, Robby’s dad left and didn’t come back. My dad was a history teacher at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy, and my mom was a bookkeeper at the Hy-Vee, so we had a house and a dog, and shit like that.
Hy-Vee sells groceries and shit.
My parents were predictable and ominous. They also weren’t home yet when Robby and I got there in our still-wet socks and T-shirts.
“Watch out for dog shit,” I said as we walked across the yard.
“Austin, you should mow your lawn.”
“Then it would make the dog shit too easy to see and my dad would tell me to pick it up. So I’d have to mow the lawn and pick up dog shit.”
“It’s thinking like that that made this country great,” Robby said. “You know, if they ever gave a Nobel Prize for avoiding work, every year some white guy in Iowa would get a million bucks and a trip to Sweden.”
Thinking about me and Robby going to Sweden made me horny.
SHANN’S NEW OLD HOUSE
FIRST THING, NATURALLY: We got food from the kitchen.
We also made dirt tracks on the floor because socks are notoriously effective when it comes to redistributing filth from sidewalks, lawns, the Del Vista Arms, and Robby’s untidy old Ford Explorer.
I boiled water, and we took Cups-O-Noodles and Doritos into my room.
Robby sat on my bed and ate, waiting patiently while I recorded the last little bit of the day’s history in my notebook.
“Here.” I tossed my cell phone over to the bed. “Call Shann.”
“Have you ever smelled a Dorito ?”
“Mmmm . . .” I had to think about it. I wrote. “Probably not.”
“Just checking,” he said, “’Cause they smell like my nephew’s feet.”
“Why did you smell a six-year-old kid’s feet?”
“Good question.”
As usual, Shann got mad because I had Robby call her using my phone, and when she answered, she thought it was me. This, quite naturally, made me horny. But Robby explained to her I was writing, and he told her that something terrible had happened to us. He asked if it would be okay that we came over to her new old house as soon as we finished eating.
Robby was such a suave communicator when it came to relaying messages to Shann. In fact, I believed it was the biggest component of why she was so much in love with me. Sometimes, I wished I could cut off Robby’s head and attach it to my body, but there were more than a couple things wrong with that idea: First, uncomfortably enough, it kind of made me horny to think about a hybridized Robby/Austin having sex with Shann; and, second, decapitation was a sensitive topic in Ealing.
Well, anywhere, really. But, in Ealing during the late 1960s there was this weird string of serial murders that went unsolved. And they all involved headlessness.
History is full of decapitations, and Iowa is no exception.
So, after we finished eating, I outfitted Robby with some clean socks, a Titus Andronicus T-shirt (I changed into an Animal Collective shirt—all my tees are bands), and gave him my nicest pair of Adidas.
And both of us tried to pretend we didn’t notice my dad’s truck pulling up the drive just as we took off for Shann’s.
“Perfect timing,” I said.
Robby answered by pushing in the dashboard cigarette lighter.
Besides all the head-cutting-off shit that went on fifty years ago, Ealing was also known for Dr. Grady McKeon, founder of McKeon Industries, which, up until about six months ago, employed over half the town’s labor force. Grady McKeon was some kind of scientist, and he made a fortune from defense programs during the Cold War. When the fight against Communism went south on McKeon, the factory retooled and started manufacturing sonic-pulse shower-heads and toothbrushes, which ultimately became far more profitable when made in Malaysia or somewhere like that. So the factory shut down, and that’s also why most of the Ealing strip mall was deserted, and why every time I visited Robby at the Del Vista Arms, there were more and more Pay or Quit notices hanging on doors.
And that’s a half century of an Iowa town’s history in four sentences.
Grady McKeon was gone, but his much younger brother still lived and ran businesses in Ealing. Johnny McKeon owned Tipsy Cricket Liquors and the From Attic to Seller thrift store, both of which were big crowd-pleasers at the strip mall.
Johnny, who was responsible for thinking up the names of those two establishments entirely on his own, was also Shann’s stepfather.
And Shannon Collins, whom Robby and I called Shann, her mother (the relatively brand-new Mrs. McKeon), and Johnny had just taken ownership of the McKeon House, a decrepit old wooden monstrosity that was on the registry of historic homes in Ealing.
Well, actually, it was the only historic home in Ealing.
It took Robby and me two cigarettes to get to Shann’s new old house.
It had already been a rough day.
We were going to need another pack.
GOING SOMEWHERE YOU SHOULDN’T GO
SHANNON
