“What’s that, sister?” Bad Tiger said.
“You’re good judges of character,” she said.
Bad Tiger let out a hoot and Timmy sat silent.
“We got some time before the storm,” Bad Tiger said, “so you got some business to take care of in the bushes, this is the time to do it. You got your paper, now, honey. That make you happy?”
“Ecstatic,” said Jane.
19
It wasn’t long before I realized the clouds coming our way were moving fast, and much too fast for a storm front, even if it had been a tornado coming.
And it wasn’t true clouds at all. I figured that when they came so fast and when I heard the loud hum. I knew then it was grasshoppers, millions of them. I had seen clouds like this before, several times, and I hadn’t liked it then, and I didn’t like it now.
The humming blackness came down from the sky and hit the willows down below, and in a moment the grasshoppers ate the green off of them, and the willows shook like they was in a high wind, but the only wind was the wind the grasshoppers made.
“Hit the dirt!” I yelled, and me and Jane and Tony dropped down over the side of the bank. But I didn’t go down before I saw Bad Tiger running like a frightened little girl toward the Ford, and Timmy on his tail.
The hoppers hit me hard, so hard and in such a big wave, it was like being kicked by a mule. Even if I hadn’t been diving for the ground, they would have knocked me down anyway. They splattered against me and I swear I was lifted forward a bit as they hit and I dove.
I lay with my face down tight against the bank and I could feel them crawling all over me, tugging at my shirt. I lifted my head a little. The sky was dark with them. So dark, it seemed like early evening.
I saw Jane and Tony. They were both down close to the water.
I said, “Crawl,” and a grasshopper hit my mouth. It tasted sour. I spat it out and started crawling, and when I looked back, Jane and Tony were crawling with me.
We crawled along the bank and still the grasshoppers came. We crawled into them instead of away from them, and finally we came to where the dirt had been scooped out by wind and rain and time, underneath the willows. When we got there, I saw that the indention was deeper than I’d expected. You couldn’t tell that from where we had been, but once you were right up on it, you could see it was almost a cave. And down low there was an even deeper opening. Roots dangled down like worms. I could see all the way through the lower opening. It wasn’t very wide, but it went deep and it came out after a great distance. There was water in the groove. It was the water that kept it open like this. When rain was hard and the water was high, it must have churned through there like it was shot out of a hose.
I crawled in and Jane and Tony crawled after me. We kept crawling toward what little light we could see on the other side. Behind us the dark shadow of the grasshoppers covered the ground.
We crawled for a long ways, and it was tight in there. I feared for a moment I was going to get stuck. But I made it. A water snake was swimming briskly in front of me, heading for the light. It wasn’t a poisonous snake, but it gave me the willies nonetheless.
I dug in with my elbows and kept my head down and kept going. The light was getting brighter. It was tight now on the sides and at the top. I couldn’t turn my head anymore and look back. The roots were starting to catch in my hair, but I kept moving. My hair got snapped out of my head by the roots as I crawled.
Finally I came to where the light was, and the hole was very small there. I laid with my face turned to keep my nose out of the little bit of water and pushed on through, breaking some of the ground apart as I did. I came out on the other side and rolled down a sandy hill and into a wind-made ditch.
I crawled up the side of the hill and took a look. I could see the Ford. It was covered in grasshoppers.
It was like where we were was the line. Everything on the other side of the ditch was grasshoppers. On this side was just us.
“Now’s our chance,” I said.
Ducking low, we ran away from the ditch, away from the Ford and all the grasshoppers, away from Timmy and Bad Tiger.
We went swiftly across a large field. Then we came to the main road and crossed over that, went down a small ridge of dirt, then moved toward a cluster of trees that had long ago been hit by sand and grasshoppers. There was nothing for the grasshoppers to like anymore. They had left nothing. Like so many trees around here, they was just big dry sticks.
The tree trunks were pretty big, though, so we got behind those for a second, dropping down on our knees and looking back across the way as we got our breath.
The grasshoppers had turned slightly and were moving across the sky like a giant wiggling snake, and now there were more than before, and everything was dark and thick with them. I figured pretty soon they would be smashing into the trees where we were, into us.
It was then that Jane said, “Jack. They’ve eaten off the back of your shirt.”
I took off my shirt and just had on my dirty undershirt. The back of my shirt was split open in a jagged way. The grasshoppers had eaten a large stretch of cotton out of it.
Jane laughed. She held up her hand. She was still clutching the toilet paper. It was dirty and wet, but she still had it.
I said, “Turn around.”
She did. The back of her pants had been bitten out by the bugs and I could see her underthings. I told her.
“Oh no. Give me your shirt.”
I gave it to her, and she tied it around her waist so what was left of my shirt covered her rear end.
We turned Tony around and gave him a look. They hadn’t hit him at all.
“How about that,” I said. “Our moment came.”
“Well, it’s only a moment,” Jane said. “So we got to hustle away from here, and fast.”
20
Walking along through what had once been farmland but was now nothing but sand, we came to an old barn that was mostly fallen down. The sky was clear, and night was setting in, and the stars were bright. We didn’t know if Bad Tiger and Timmy were still looking for us, but we stayed away from the road.
Earlier, we thought we heard the Ford’s big engine whining along up over the rise, on the main road. Going first one way, then the other. We heard a door slam, and I thought I could hear men talking. I didn’t know for sure that it was Bad Tiger and Timmy, but I wasn’t interested enough to go up there and find out.
The barn was way off from the road, and it had three good sides and most of a roof. We went inside. There was an old sand-covered tarp in there, and we scraped the sand off with our feet, which took some time; then we took the tarp out into the open air and shook it and snapped the dust off of it.
Carrying the tarp back inside, we laid it out on the sand and pushed it down with our hands and knees and found us a place to lie down. It was the best bed I had been on in a while.
As we lay there, I told them about Strangler Nugowski. I told them what he had done and that he was probably in Tyler, Texas, and Bad Tiger and Timmy were going after him.
“Why didn’t you tell us before?” asked Jane.
“When? During the grasshopper storm, or while we was sleeping last night?” I said. “I ain’t exactly had the time for an in-depth conversation.”
“All right,” Jane said, “you can slide by on that one.
“Strangler?” Jane said. “Really? Is that what his mother named him? ‘Come on in to supper, Strangler. Come on in and wash your hands and I’ll let you strangle one of the chickens for us to eat. Course, you have to wash your hands again.’ ”
“I kind of doubt his given name is Strangler,” I said.
“I’d like to see his birth certificate,” Jane said. “I think it would be funny if his mama named him Strangler
