Have you ever tried to eat a chocolate covered grasshopper? Has a chocolate covered grasshopper ever tried to eat you? – Crazy Steve, at the gas station
In the morning, after a breakfast generously donated by Thad and Heppy, we broke camp and continued the trek northeast, but with Thad now breaking the way. As we walked, I broached a question that had been dogging us all the previous day.
“Thad,” I said, “where are we?’
For a time the man said nothing, continuing in his strange, three-step gait of leg, walking stick, leg… leg, walking stick, leg. I almost asked the question again, when he spoke. “Have any of you ever heard of the synaptic cleft?” I looked to Kenzie, who shrugged. When none of us responded, the man continued, “It doesn’t matter. We are in the chaotic pool of the mind. We are in that critical juncture between one thought and another. On the other hand, we are still in Kansas. In fact, we camped only a few miles north of your home, Dewey.”
“But I don’t recognize any of this,” I protested.
“As well you shouldn’t,” said Thad. “This isn’t the Kansas you can see or touch. This is the Kansas you can hear in your dreams. This is the Kansas that comes out at night, when everyone is asleep and the wind is howling sharply at the moon. This is the Kansas of rampaging cowboys, of God-fearing farmers, of buffalo and Indians. This is Bloody Kansas. And this is a Kansas before all that. This is the land when the oceans dried away and were pulled into the hard ice of the north. The world you know exists here to, but it is as an eye blink to the millennia.”
Aly spoke up. “What do you call it?” she asked.
“What’s that song? The one with the deer and the buffalo?” Thad asked. Heppy cawed out an answer. “Oh yes, Home on the Range. That’s an apt title.” The man, obviously feeling that the time for questions was over, at least for the present, picked up his pace and began to whistle.
For a time we walked in silence, save for the whistling of our strange guide, the sounds of tall grass rustling in the wind, and the occasional caw of Heppy. As we walked, I took some time to examine our poetic scout. His clothes looked like throwbacks of silent movies. If it were not for his build and face, Thad could have been confused for the loveable tramp played by Charlie Chaplin. His shoes were too big. His pants seemed to be made out of some kind of scratchy wool. He wore a too long jacket as well, like the ones professors wear in movies about college with the leather pads on the elbows. On his head, resting like the losing cat who slouched away from the fight, slumped a beaten, patched, wool bowler.
Over his shoulder he carried a brown canvas bag, like the ones potatoes are kept in. I could not discern what was in that bag, but the bulges could have easily been mistaken for potatoes at any other time.
When the sun reached its zenith, I began to sweat. I was tired and hungry and did not know how much longer I could walk without falling over. Just as I thought my lips were beginning to crack, Thad called a halt.
Instead of preparing for lunch, though, he crouched down and whispered for us to join him.
“Do you see there,” he said, pointing toward the north. I saw nothing, squinted, and breathed a little faster.
“What is that?” I asked. Before us I could see some sort of dusty haze, rising from the earth like a cloud of smoke.
“Don’t know,” said Thad. “Could be stampeding buffalo. Could be a cattle train, though I don’t know why it would be heading south.” He eyed the four of us. “Or it could be real bad…” Abruptly, he turned and called out, “Heppy, go up high. See if you can’t see what that is.”
Heppy, being a little quicker than Thad, had already begun his ascent. Up he flapped, until he looked like a ball with wings, and then he was only a point of black against the blazing blue sky.
Jonathan had been looking around nervously. “Um,” he began, “that old man, your boss…”
“Abe,” Aly said helpfully.
Jonathan looked at her irritably, then continued, “Yes, Abe. He said something about me being the muscle. I, uh, I don’t think he meant anything about fighting stampeding buffalo…” He trailed off, looking nervously between Kenzie and Thad.
Thad grinned and said, “Don’t worry, lad. If it’s buffalo, we can just move out of the way. On the other hand, if it’s…” At that moment, Heppy returned, diving in as fast as he could and cawing madly. Thad’s eyes opened wide. His pupils flicked rapidly among the four of us, and he broke down again.
“Oh no!” he wailed. “Now I’ve done it! Now the boss is going to have a real fit. ‘Keep them safe,’ he says. ‘Don’t get them into any trouble,’ he says. Now we’ve done it. I’ve sent them in the path of the grasshoppers!”
Aly and I looked at one another, nonplussed. Grasshoppers? What was wrong with grasshoppers? Kenzie, on the other hand, became very alarmed. “Oh no,” she said. Thad blubbered at the sky. She darted over to the man, grabbed him by his lapels, and shouted, “Get a hold of yourself!” She slapped him. I began to hear a strange rumbling buzz, like a train with wings.
Thad stopped blithering. He looked at Kenzie with a crinkled forehead and terrified eyes. “You are a guide, no?” Kenzie asked. “Then guide us. If you know this land so well, point us to a house or a cabin or something. We’ve got to go.”
“But,” Thad began, his eyes even wider than before.
“No!” screamed Kenzie. “No ‘buts’. A house. A hovel. A lean-to. NOW!”
Thad stood up and began to run due west. We raced behind him. As we ran, the rumbling grew louder, deeper, more alien. It was how I imagined an avalanche or mighty rock fall to sound. The blurry haze of earlier had gotten bigger and closer. It seemed composed of tiny, flickering particles.
Then I remembered something. It may have been a movie or a dvd or just something I imagined while my mother read me some book or another. In my head I saw the plague of Egypt, of Cairo, of the Pharaoh’s lands. It was the plague of locusts, brought down by the god of the Israelites to prove a terrible and awesome point. Those locusts had been everywhere, eating plants, animals, people. Flying so densely that to breathe was to risk choking to death. The sound those locusts made was the same sound echoing at my feet, the sound of a million, million insects swarming, calling for your soul.
I ran. I grabbed Aly’s sleeve, pulling her as fast as I could, trying to follow Thad and Heppy, Kenzie and Jonathan.
As I ran, I thought I saw a speck against the sea of grass in front of us. Thad turned his head, pointed, and shouted something that was drowned out by the droning rush of insects. I could feel my heart hammering against my chest. The edges of my vision darkened, as the horizon behind me became more and more densely populated by a living bringer of doom.
Then I could see the sod house in front of us. A wrinkled, old man in overalls stood directly in front of the entryway and glared at us, his hand resting upon a double-barrel shotgun. Thad raised his arms in the air, calling out some treaty that I could not hear. The man in the overalls glared at us for a moment longer, then stepped aside and motioned us in.
More of my peripheral vision disappeared.
Then we were passing the old man, flying into his worn shelter. The man quickly followed, slammed the door behind him, bolting it closed in the process, and shoved a bit of sod securely into the one crack at the base of the door.
For a moment, we were encased in a false silence. In the small hut our dulled gasps were the only sound to be heard. Then I heard a thunk against the door. Moments later, another thud registered against the wall. Then a sound that was half rain, half thunder slammed into the sod house from every direction.
The wrinkled man who had been facing the door turned to us. He grimaced, picked up his shot gun, aimed it at Thad’s head, and rumbled in a dry, cracked voice, “Now tell me why I shouldn’t kill you.”
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