The Brothers K Read online

  “They’re so ghostly!” Mama shivers.

  “They don’t have any feet!” Irwin yells.

  “They have feet all right,” Papa says, “but they’re taking such smooth, tiny steps in under those robes it almost looks like they’re flyin’.”

  “But they really don’t have any hands!” yells Irwin.

  “They have hands all right,” says Papa, “but they’ve got ’em stuck up their opposite sleeves. I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if they yanked ’em out and flashed ’em at us any second now.”

  “Isn’t that just like a Russian,” Mama says, “hiding his hands up the wrong sleeves?”

  Papa laughs at this—so Irwin laughs too, though I doubt he has any idea whether it’s just like a Russian or not. But Papa’s right about their hands: when the stage suddenly fills with light the monkish chanting flares into loud, full-throated singing, away fly the robes, out dart the hands, up pop the heads, and there they are: the Russians! And now they’re wearing black boots and pants, puffy white shirts, and fur hats the same size and shape as their beards as they laugh and fly and flip over and under each other, and Everett’s and Irwin’s mouths are hanging open, and Mama and Pete are bug-eyed with wonder, and even Papa makes a stunned little bark when they huddle like football players then somehow send one dancer flying most of the way up to the ceiling, doing four or five flips before he sails back down. We’re all so sorry when the dancing ends and Ed Sullivan shambles back out that this time it’s Mama, of all people, who says, “You know what? He is ugly.”

  A commercial comes on, showing a cross section of the inside of a woman’s head complete with the hammer, carpenter’s saw and lightning bolts that are giving her such a terrible headache. “Those,” Papa says, “were some pretty fair country dancers.”

  “Poor lady!” Irwin gasps, gaping at the woman’s head.

  “They sure were,” Everett says to Papa.

  Then the woman swallows an Anacin, the hammer, saw and lightning bolts vanish, and her face reappears, grinning with relief.

  “Great stuff!” Irwin says, marveling at the Anacin.

  “Why are we supposed to hate Russia?” Peter asks.

  Nobody answers him. Maybe nobody knows. Peter scowls at the silence, then answers himself in a way—by sliding his hands up the opposite sleeves of his sweatshirt.

  Hearing Mama stir, I turn just in time to see her set her dish towel full of orange peels in Papa’s lap. He snorts and says thanks-a-lot as if he means the opposite. But she says, “Open it,” so he does. And instead of the mess we expected there are two peeled oranges inside, divided neatly into sections. He says thanks again, this time as if he means it. But this time he doesn’t sound so good—and suddenly he and Mama and all the rest of us are staring at the brace and bandage on his left hand, realizing why she peeled the oranges for him, living all over again the night last month when the graveyard-shift foreman called, long past midnight, from the Crown Zellerbach mill …

  He said Papa had been hurt by the rollers at the mill, named a hospital, and Mama was so stunned that she hung up before he could say another word. Her shouts woke us and brought us running to the kitchen, but before we had time to think she curdled our brains with a scream—because a man, Papa’s friend Roy, was standing in the dark outside the window. When we recognized him and let him in, Roy sat down and told us what happened—told how Papa had rested his hand, for an instant, on a pair of big metal paper-rollers, how someone somewhere had picked that same instant to flip a switch, how in the next instant his left thumb had spun into the rollers and come out again, flat as newspaper, how the mill sounds like stormsurf when it’s running full-bore, yet at his lathe three hundred feet away Roy had heard Papa’s scream. “Let me drive you,” he said, when a full minute passed and none of us had moved or spoken, because none of us could begin to imagine Papa screaming, no matter what. Then came the rush to the hospital, the interminable wait, and finally the coldness of the surgeon as he called us into his office, angry at himself, angry at us, angriest at the thumb maybe, for being so utterly crushed and ruined that instead of playing the hero in a Miracle of Modern Science he was stuck in a room with four miserable boys and a prodigiously pregnant woman, listening to himself snap that “the man, er, worker, your father—No, son! What’s your name? … Well dammit, Everett, shuttup and listen! I’m trying to tell you no. Not with that thumb. Your father will never pitch, or play any kind of baseball, again …”

  Yet as we watch him now, our own faces falling, Papa is somehow able to maintain his poker face. And then his off hand, the good one, starts flickering faster than my eye can follow and orange slices go flying like Russian dancers. Everett, Irwin and Peter all catch their slices, and Pete has to whip his hands out of his sleeves to do it; my slice bounces right off my open mouth, but Papa’s everywhere hand somehow darts out, catches it, stuffs it back in; Mama just cringes, hunches, and hides behind her hands, yet when Papa’s hand is through flickering there are three slices in her lap, one for her and two for the twins. So just like that we’re all chewing and laughing instead of staring at braces and bandages. And just about the time we’ve all swallowed and begun wondering just how much consolation a few orange slices can be, Papa, still poker-faced, sends seven more of them flying through the air.

  Now a white-haired man in a suit like a minister’s comes on Ed Sullivan and the crowd claps hysterically though he hasn’t yet done a thing. “I just love Maurice Chevalier!” Mama sighs.

  “Me too!” Irwin cries.

  “I can’t stand him,” Everett mutters.

  Mama glances at Everett, and scowls. Papa eyes him too, but I notice he’s smiling out the side of his face that Mama can’t see. I turn to Chevalier and try to decide for myself. He is nothing like a minister, despite the suit. He’s dancing a little now, and singing with a foreign accent, and sometimes in a completely foreign language. Mama says it’s French, and adds, “Isn’t it pretty?”

  “Nope,” Everett grunts.

  But again I try to decide for myself. It hadn’t occurred to me that a language could be pretty, but I guess this one kind of is. It’s got lots of “zwahs” and “lays” and “ooohs” in it, like baby talk, which can be soothing. Chevalier’s singing isn’t much, though. And his dancing is a joke—especially compared to the men in the robes. Chevalier moves very slowly, smiling ceaselessly and a little foolishly, as if to remind us that he’s really too old for this sort of thing. And I don’t mind him being slow or old or even foolish, but as the song drags on it hardly seems fair that he gets so much stage time when the robe dancers got so little. When the song finally peters out, though, the audience goes so bananas you’d think Chevalier just homered in the ninth. We must prefer Frenchmen to Russians no matter what. They cheer and cheer, he waves and waves, then the noise finally dies enough for him to cry, “Thank you! Thank you!” and the whole crowd jumps up on its hind legs and starts cheering all over again.

  “At least he’s finished,” Everett mutters.

  Then Ed Sullivan walks out and hands Chevalier a white straw hat and a cane.

  “Oh good!” Mama and Irwin gush.

  “Oh no!” Everett groans, flopping face-down on the floor.

  Papa laughs quietly. Peter does too, but with his eyes closed and his hands up his sleeves: I think he’s asleep.

  Chevalier puts on the hat and starts another song. Holding the cane in both hands, he begins swaying from side to side, just like we have to do at Sabbath School when Mrs. Babcock leads us in Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam.

  “Phony old frog,” Everett grumbles.

  But when Chevalier reaches the chorus and the audience starts to sing along, I see his smile freeze to his face exactly the way mine does when I have to sprout my fingers out round my head, making them into Jesus’ sunbeams. And seeing this—seeing him trapped in a skit that makes him look so old and sad and tired even as it forces him to cock his hat at a jaunty angle and talk and dance with his stupid cane—I realize tha
t, phony or not, I’ve begun to like him.

  Mama’s trying to hum a harmony now, but like her hymning at church it’s pretty off-key. Peter’s sound asleep, his eyelids dancing, his hands still hidden up his Russian sleeves. Irwin is swaying from side to side in time to the music, bumping Everett’s shoulder with every sway. Everett’s lip is curled—but one of his feet has accidentally begun to keep time to Irwin’s bumping. And the song is so long and Chevalier looks so sad that I find myself wanting to help him somehow. So I start swaying too. He comes round once again to the chorus. In a rusty echo, deep down below him, Papa starts to sing along.

  Attic Document,

  circa February 1958

  A letter, from one Gale Q. Durham, manager of the Kincaid, Oklahoma, Cornshuckers (a Double A farm club of the Washington Senators farm system), to the eleven-year-old Everett Chance:

  Dear Everett,

  Sorry I didn’t write quicker. Just got back from watching a 20 yr. old shortstop our trusty scouts called a Sure Thing kick ground balls all over Venezuela. Funny thing about our scouts: they are trusty. They always send me off to a team with a real ballplayer on it. They just make my job interesting by telling me the wrong guy. The right guy this time was a 34 yr. old 5′8″ 154 lb. black-skinned-Mickey-Mantle-with-good-knees-&-brains I found playing center field right there on young Bigfoot’s team. You watch them 2-A box scores & weather reports this summer, son, & if one Aurelio Lorenzo isn’t hitting .300 for us by the time Tulsa’s in the 90s I’ll eat my fungo. Always was partial to the name Aurelio. Only word I know with all 5 consonants. But I’m beating round the bush as usual, aren’t I.

  Getting down to this damned thumb business, I’m proud you’d think of me at a time like this, and sorry your daddy’s hurting. You, me & your papa are 3 of the tiny percentage of souls on this miserable earth who’ve figured out that playing ball is the highest purpose God ever invented the human male body for. The rub is, once you’ve known & done it what you go through when you lose it is a death, pure & simple. I’ve seen it 1000 times & died the death myself, & about all them 1001 deaths have taught me is Dammit! Dying hurts! If I was there to crack a beer with your daddy (or 6 or 12, let’s be honest here) I’d probably wait till he was all lubed up then say, “Listen. Let it hurt when it hurts, damn it Hubert!” You know what I mean. The Papa Chance I remember tended to get a tad heroic at times. Not that I don’t admire a hero. But watching some poor bounder limp around with a smile nailed to his face while his insides bleed from one end clear out the other is a thing I can’t much stand. To that mother of yours I might add something like Dangit, Laura, I know you’re baptized in the name of the This and the That, but when you got the kind of man who holds everything in you got to let it bust out once in awhile. Then of course I’d run like hell. Don’t get me wrong here. I hold nothing but the highest kind of respect against your mother. I just happen to be a man who believes if God wanted us to always keep our upper lip stiff as a dang billy goat’s weener He’d of made us all a bunch of Englishmen for godsake.

  That’s about it for the Summer Lecture Series. The main thing is the enclosed: 40 bucks towards some sort of present. And whatever he gets, make damn sure your pop spends my money on himself. I’m gonna be steamed if I hear he used it to pay the goddamned dentist bill for one of you brats. You tell him it’s happened to all of us, the best & the worst. Tell him I hope ol’ Smoke & The Hook both rest in peace. Tell him I’ll never forget either one.

  Yrs. as ever,

  G. Q. Durham

  CHAPTER TWO

  Moose, Indian

  Moose … Indian …

  —last words of Henry David Thoreau

  Camas/July/1960

  Mama is a Seventh Day Adventist. She doesn’t make Papa go to church because she can’t figure out how to, and she doesn’t make Irwin go because he loves church and would go no matter what. But Everett, Peter, the twins and me she makes go every Sabbath unless we’re sick. And today is Sabbath. And I’m not sick. And the sun is already so hot outside that everything’s all bleached and wobbly-looking, as if the whole world was just an overexposed home movie God was showing Jesus up on Their livingroom wall. And whenever it’s really hot Elder Babcock’s sermon—even if it starts out being about some nice quiet thing like the poor or meek or weak—will sooner or later twist like a snake with its head run over to the unquiet subject of heaven and hell, and who all is going to which, and how long you’ll have to stay, and what all will happen to you when you get there, and he goes on so loud and long and the air gets so used up and awful that bit by bit you lose track of any difference between his heaven and his hell and would gladly pick either over church. Then the sermon ends, and the long prayer after it, and it comes time to belt out the big hosannah that means it’s almost time to go home. Except that last hymn always has about fourteen verses. And when you stand up to sing it you discover your blood has got stuck down in your feet. And all through the sermon every grownup in the place has had their mouth clamped shut trying not to yawn, so when the glad voices get suddenly upraised this tidal wave of pent-up halitosis comes swashing out of them and up your nose and all through the parts of your head where the blood that’s in your feet should have been, till your brain feels like it’s going to barf. That’s when one of us (usually Peter) usually faints dead away …

  All of which is why I think this might be the luckiest day of my life, so far. Because right this minute Elder Babcock is unloosing the twisted snakes and the congregation is readying up the tidal wave, but Papa, as usual, is just sitting home smoking Luckies—and for once it’s Papa’s smokes I smell! Better yet, Mama doesn’t let anybody watch TV on the Sabbath, but Mama’s not here and Papa hasn’t got a Sabbath, so there’s the ballgame blaring, there’s Pee Wee Reese and Dizzy Dean doing the play-by-play, and it’s Cleveland 3, Yankees 1 in the eighth! And better still, the minute this game is over we’re going to hop in the Fortyford and head out for a river called the Wind, which I’ve dreamed about but never seen, and go steelhead fishing, which I’ve heard about but never done. Yes, it’ll be hot out, Papa says, but we’ll wet-wade it, so we’ll stay cool. Yep, our heads’ll bake a bit and our legs’ll freeze some, but our rest-of-us’ll be just right so don’t worry. Pipe down now, he says. Jumping up and down on the back of his chair is not piping down, he says. Quit fretting, he says. Fishing is like watching baseball, he says, in that it takes such total concentration that you shouldn’t even be noticing little details like your arms and legs and head and mind and the miles-long strings of questions inside it. “How come?” I ask. And he laughs, for some reason.

  “Watch the game,” he says.

  There’s Dizzy and Pee Wee up in the booth, both wearing headphones, white shirts and neckties pulled loose at the knot. Dizzy’s humming Home on the Range. Pee Wee’s making a face, due to the humming. Yogi Berra’s at bat, all bow-legged from too much catching.

  “Hey, Papa. I don’t see how I can catch fish at all if I’m not even noticing my arms and hands and brains, because—”

  He grabs my wrist. He doesn’t let go. “Kincaid,” he says. “Questions don’t make you a fisherman. Concentration makes you a fisherman. So practice. Practice fishing now—by concentrating on this ballgame.”

  Okay. The ballgame:

  There’s Casey Stengel on the dugout steps. There’s Bobby Richardson taking a big lead off first. Richardson just singled with one out, and Pee Wee thinks he might try to steal, but Dizzy says it’s doubtful. Diz says the Yankees don’t steal much, because the rich don’t need to. There’s Stengel again. He’s sticking his middle finger then his little finger in his right ear, then sniffing the wax on each finger—and the Indians are all watching him, trying to figure out whether earwax-sniffing is the sign for Berra and Richardson to work the hit-and-run, and if so, which finger, and on which pitch? There’s Mickey Mantle on deck. There’s Mudcat Grant sweating blood on the mound. And there’s Kuenn, Francona and Piersall in right, left and center, who Dizzy called “
the second-best outfield in all of downtown Cleveland today,” which made Papa laugh for some reason.

  Berra bunts—a little short one—and the Indian catcher easily throws him out. But Bobby Richardson’s safe at second, and here comes Mantle. Pee Wee Reese is getting agitated. Dizzy’s singing, “Home run on the range, Where the ball flies so far that it’s strange …” The Mick’s hitting .301, and has nineteen round-trippers already this season. Papa’s sitting quiet, thinking how Mudcat Grant should pitch him. And it’s true, what he said: I feel like a better fisherman already!

  Richardson takes a healthy lead. Mantle digs in. Mudcat tries to stare him down, but Mantle stares right back. Stengel watches them both, his middle finger still sticking in his ear. I once heard Everett tell Irwin that that finger means fuck you, but I don’t believe it. They’d never show Casey Stengel doing a thing like that to his own ear, right on TV.

  When I consider the odds against me watching baseball on Sabbath (100 to 1?), going fishing on Sabbath (1,000 to 1?), and doing both alone with Papa because Everett, Peter, Irwin, Mama and the twins have all vanished at just the right moment to make it all possible (1,000,000 to 1?), I feel as if my life has left the world of odds-making and entered the world of Miracles. Everett thinks Miracles only happen in the Bible and that Science explains them even there. But Peter disagrees. Pete claims that Miracles happen all the time, but in such sneaky or complicated or underhanded ways that most people are too thick or busy to notice them. And the more I think about it, the more I believe me sitting here watching baseball on Sabbath has got to be one of those complicated, underhanded Miracles.