The Brothers K

by David James Duncan

  With the hushed excitement of a TV golf announcer, the narrator explained that a nearly indestructible movie camera had been mounted in a bomb shelter two miles from the house, that a huge zoom lens was aimed right at the plate-glass window, and that by using glare-resistant filters and infrared film they planned on getting accurate, slow-motion footage of everything that went on in the Dummy Family’s diningroom during and after the blast. With that, the camera zoomed in on the four happy, lifeless faces, and the narrator counted down, Five, Four, Three, Two, One … But at Zero, nothing happened. Seconds passed. The house remained standing. The Dummies kept smiling. “Gee, Wally! That wasn’t so bad!” said the boy who’d made the “Last Supper” crack, and there were a few snickers. “Better light another one,” someone said, and half the class began to laugh.

  Then the family simply vanished. It was not at all dramatic. The little lost house and everything in it disappeared in a flash of such pure and silent whiteness that Peter thought the film had broken. But then they began to perceive movement within the whiteness. No one, least of all the Pentagon narrator, could describe what they were seeing, but there was clearly a billowing, an erupting, a majestic swirling of heat and light pouring toward them and through them and far, far beyond them. It was mesmerizing. It was even beautiful. And it went on for a long, long time.

  Finally the screen darkened, there was a stasis, and the Modern Problems students sighed, thinking the Dummy Family, though deceased, was at least at rest. But they were wrong. The billowing not only resumed, it reversed direction. The first wind, Peter realized, had been the explosion (I go to prepare a place for you)—everything blown effortlessly aside as when a boulder lands in a pool and crushes the water away in all directions. But the second wind the reversed wind, was the im-plosion (and if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself …)—the melted molecules of brick and insect and appliance and desert all rushing like water back into place, after the thrown boulder has sunk. And while the explosion’s swirling whitenesses had been photogenic, the implosion grew steadily darker and muddier-looking, and it went on, and on, and on, and on till even the Pentagon filmmakers grew bored with the monotony of the devastation they were seeing, and so cut to the aftermath.

  But here too, a full day later, there was little to see or say. Which plume of smoke, which fleck of hot ash, which pile of raped molecules had been cockroach or coat rack or synthetic boy or girl could not even be asked, because these things hadn’t just been destroyed. They’d been uncreated. A piece of planet had been splashed away like liquid, but what returned was not the rubble of what had departed: it was a no-place, an un-place, a seething gray nada where even the phrase “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” had no meaning, for this dust had been removed from any cyclic process; this ash would kill you if you touched it; this was deader than death.

  “Good flick!” one boy cracked as the film ended. Then the lights came on, and Peter’s buddies were dumbfounded to see their cool, collected, .500-hitting compadre sitting there committing the ultimate faux pas for aspiring macho men: he was weeping. Pete, and a couple of girls. He made no sound, but the tears were just streaming down his cheeks.

  He left the room without speaking, and groped his way down the empty hall. He couldn’t stop crying, and had no idea where he was going. But even so, it couldn’t be said that he was haunted by what he’d seen. He was not, for instance, seeing visions of his hometown billowing in the whiteness; he wasn’t thinking that history, or life, or school had lost their meaning; he wasn’t even thinking thoughts like Russia is real or Hate is real or The Dummy Family is my family. It was worse than that. He wasn’t able to use his mind at all. His strong, clear thinking had simply imploded, leaving him groping down a hallway in sheer, mindless panic, like a fly trapped in a jar. And when he came to the plate-glass window at the end of the hall, when he pressed his face against it and began groping for a catch, lock or lever, his blind hands discovered that in big public high schools the windows don’t open. So he had no place to vomit.

  the backyard

  “Of course a good catcher can play voodoo games too,” Papa said. “I’ve seen hitters jook a foot or so of strike zone out of an ump’s head, then seen my catcher steal the shrinkage right back. But voodoo’s rare in a catcher. It’s a mind game, voodoo is. And when it comes to brainpower, well, let’s just say that when they call catchers ‘backstops,’ they’re barely exaggerating in lots of cases.”

  “But Everett’s a catcher!” I laughed.

  “Everett plays catcher,” Papa said, “but he’s a second baseman if he’s a ballplayer at all. He just catches ’cause he’s stubborn. But he’s too hot-headed for voodoo anyhow. And the way he argues, he’ll never need it.”

  I laughed again.

  “Now, Jack Henry up in Tacoma, he was a real catcher, and he could voodoo umps. Did it by following his nature too, same as Williams. Except in Jackie’s case the trick was to play dumb. He was a bright guy, really. A whiz at accounting, of all things. Did his whole team’s taxes in the off-season just to relax, became a CPA when his knees went to hell. But he had a rustic sort of face, so he cultivated a fresh-off-the-farm manner to go with it, and all during a game he’d keep this dumb commentary going, I mean some real numbnut drivel. But underneath it, see, he’d be slowly, strategically eating away at the ump’s freedom of thought. His best trick was to grunt Myuh!, like that, every time a clean strike came blowing in on a batter. Except Jackie’s Myuh!s sounded so accidental and dumb they made you feel sorry for him. But by the sixth or seventh inning those same Myuh!s would be sounding for pitches a hair outside or a tad low, and the ump’d be so used to ’em he’d still be yelling Steee-rike! without quite catching where the ball had actually gone.” Papa snorted, picturing Jackie.

  “What about moving the mitt after you catch the ball?” I asked. “I’ve seen Everett practicing that.”

  “Framing the pitch?” Papa shook his head. “That’s not voodoo. You see it in the bigs, I know, but I say it’s stupid. The trouble with framing, see, is that even though the ump’s concentrating on the trajectory of the pitch, his peripheral vision sees the catcher’s mitt move, so that gradually he gets this peripheral feeling that his intelligence is being insulted. And believe me, anything that insults the plate ump’s intelligence is a bad idea. What happens pretty soon is, anytime the mitt moves, even to grab a legitimate strike on a corner, the ump thinks ‘Frame!’ and calls a ball. That’s why when my catchers tried it I told ’em to knock it off, loud, right in front of the umps and everybody. Of course Jackie’s Myuh!s were sort of like verbal framing. But they seemed to insult his own intelligence, which made it very different. Voodoo’s subtle, see? It’s simple mind control, really. But it seems magic at times. And it’s part of most every game. The guy who first convinced me it’s important was that one-eyed Haitian you’ve heard me yammer on about …”

  “Which guy?” I asked, playing dumb again. I’d heard his Benito stories a dozen times each, but I loved the way he told them.

  “Benito Lhosa,” he said, knowing I was faking.

  “Remind me,” I said, knowing he would.

  And he did, beginning, as always, with the same formula portrait. “You know who I’m talking about. My catcher, that last year in Schenectady.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Not a big guy, Lhosa. Maybe six foot and 170. Willowy for a backstop. Said he lost the eye as a kid. Fell out of a tree, stick went right through the lid. He could still open and close it, but the lid was scarred up and the eyeball was out of round, bumpy like a broken marble, and skewed off to one side. So Benito kept it shut.

  “Didn’t matter much, though. The man’s hands hung off his arm-ends like oversized crawdad claws, his fingers were long and strong as an ape’s, and with an arm like his, what does depth perception matter? I mean, you squeeze one eye shut to aim a rifle anyway. And that’s what Benito’s arm was. A damned rifle. Any base he threw to, zing! the
ball just vanished and reappeared there. I told you ’bout the time we played the White Sox in exhibition and he picked their so-called speedster, Dickie Waters, off second from a squat. Of course Waters was an imbecile. Which was fortunate, with a name like that. But still, what a throw!”

  He whistled, remembering it.

  “Benito hit .225 the year I played with him, and that was good for him. The bat was his downfall, naturally. Takes two eyes to fine-tune a swing. But he belonged in the majors anyhow. Hell, he played Two A ball for G. Q. Durham clear into his forties, which is unheard-of for a catcher. He was thirty-seven the year he caught me, and the best field general and defensive catcher you or I will ever see. With two eyes he’d’ve been immortal. As is, he’s a bush league legend. And who knows? Maybe with two eyes he wouldn’t have had that same crazy fire …”

  Papa went on talking, but I found myself distracted, wondering why the crushed thumb couldn’t do for Papa what the eye had done for Benito, why it didn’t give him “that same crazy fire.” But then I glanced around, with two eyes, at his whole cockeyed backyard baseball arrangement—and it hit me: maybe it had …

  “Lhosa never learned English,” he was saying, “but it didn’t much matter. He did his voodoo without saying a word. It was beautiful, it was so simple. He made a point all game of never so much as glancing at an ump, never protesting, never squawking at all, until they really missed a call. I mean missed it so bad that even the worst ump knew it himself. Then, very slowly, Benito would turn till the ump could see his face. He’d appear to just be looking off into the stands with his good eye, see. Except he knew, from years of voodoo experience, exactly what angle his bad eye skewed off to. So there he’d stand, aimed and cocked so to speak, till the ump got tired of it and said, ‘Play ball!’ … Then, ever so slowly, the lid started lifting … till there that mangled, milky, off-center dead thing would be, staring the poor ump right in the face while Benito just kept looking off into the stands like an innocent bystander … Brrrrrrrr!”

  Papa shook his head. “That did it, believe you me! One attack from Benito’s blind eye and our strike zone’d swell like wet oatmeal. I’d put nothing across the middle for the rest of the game. And that, my friend, was voodoo!”

  What happened next was odd: after all those stories, all the careful consideration, Papa suddenly snatched the paint can and brush away from me and slopped a careless but indelible white rectangle up on the canvas. “The whole point,” he muttered as he worked, “the gist of all this, Kade, is that what shape I paint here makes no damn difference. ’Cause this ol’ wall has got no mind to jook.”

  Stepping back from the mattress, Papa held up his dead thumb the way the kind of painters who wear berets do, and squinted over it at his handiwork.

  “Very nice, oui?” he asked.

  I just shrugged, feeling sad for him suddenly. But he had himself a strike zone.

  Downtown Camas

  “Rain,” in the bizarre but rather poetically expressed view of McLoughlin High’s head football coach, Duffy Basham, “is a democrat. It falls on both teams alike, it don’t hurt when it hits you, it helps out on defense by causin’ fumbles. Face it, men. Rain, like most democrats, is your basic wimp. An’ so are you if you let it affect the way you play football.”

  For these “reasons” there had never been a rain torrential enough to inspire Coach Basham to cancel a McLoughlin High varsity football practice, and he held a “hundred and ten percent belief” that there never would be. But when, one week in mid-November 1964, we had six inches of wet snow one day, followed by a warm southwester that melted every flake of snow and brought three inches of “democrats” in a single night, Coach Basham discovered something new about rain: when enough of it falls, gridirons become lakes in which you can’t play football no matter what percent of you believes what.

  That explains how Irwin and Scooter Basham (Duffy’s son, and the other defensive tackle on McLoughlin’s third-place team) ended up in the Basham basement shooting a few friendly games of eightball after school. But nothing (or nothing very complimentary) can explain how Irwin let himself get talked into playing for a dollar a game. Scooter was a notorious eighteen-year-old hustler who’d lived beside this very table for a decade. Irwin was a fifteen-year-old nudnink who called a cue “a pool pole,” the rack “the triangle,” and didn’t know stars-and-stripes from snooker from slop. There were also psychological factors to be considered: Irwin, though only a sophomore, was an all-league tackle and the apple of Coach Basham’s eye, whereas Scooter, a talentless senior, wouldn’t have played football at all if his virulent old man hadn’t been a hundred and ten percent determined to whip his great sulking hulk of a son into something more than a pool-hustling democrat. There was an economic factor to consider as well: Irwin was flat broke. But the existence of factors to be considered was never any guarantee that Irwin would consider them. He preferred to entertain happy thoughts, like how the flatness and greenness of the pool table made it look like a football field, and how he’d get to play offense instead of defense, and how the pockets gave him six places to make touchdowns instead of just one, and how he was ten times the footballer Scooter was, so what he lacked in experience he could make up for with hundred and ten percent effort. It’d be close, he figured. “Sure, Scooter! Let’s play!”

  The remarkable truth is that Scooter Basham never took a game from Irwin. He didn’t get the chance: Irwin sank the eight ball five straight games (once on his second shot, once on the break!) while Scooter just stood there clutching his eventually to be legendary belly and laughing till his jaws cramped. Then Irwin got serious: reaching deep down inside to tap his Hundred and Ten Percent Power Source, he opened Game Six with a great lunging “pool pole” thrust—and ripped a ten-inch gash in the felt of Scooter’s table. That took care of the laughter. It also brought on a pathetic little Basham basement catharsis: “If my old man wouldn’t kill me for wrecking his defense,” Scooter snarled, “I’d bust this cue right over your empty fuckin’ head!”

  “Good thing he’d kill you!” Irwin chuckled.

  “You owe me fifty-five bucks, shit-lips,” Scooter sputtered. “Five for the games, and fifty for a new surface.”

  “Fair enough,” Irwin said. “But this is fun, Scoots! Let’s keep playin’.”

  “Let me explain something,” Scooter fumed, grabbing the cue from Irwin’s hand. “This was not fun. I invited you here ’cause I needed some bucks and took you for a sucker. But I was the sucker. You’re too dumb to be a sucker. You’re too dumb to be a shithead! My old man says you’re dumber’n anything on four legs, let alone two. He says that’s why he likes you!

  Feeling himself beginning to get angry, Irwin conjured an image of the Lord Jesus, smiled sadly, and said, “Sorry you feel that way, Scooter Booter.”

  Scooter snatched Irwin’s rain slicker off a chair, started to fling it in his face, then had a better idea. “I’m keepin’ this for collateral,” he said. “Now get out ’fore I take your shoes and pants.”

  “Fair enough,” Irwin said. And off he set—hatless and coatless in a cold November rain, with two miles to cover on foot—thanking Jesus that he hadn’t lost his temper.

  The highway was flooded from shoulder to shoulder. The first passing truck soaked him so thoroughly that water filled his shoes. Some people may have found this situation conducive to resentment or regret. Others may have found it conducive to hypothermia. Irwin took a look at the impassable wetness and sopped shoes, whispered, “Perfect!,” stomped straight into an ankle-deep rivulet, and at the top of his lungs began to warble, “I’m seeeeenging in the rain! Just seeeeeenging in the rain! There’s a smiiiiiiiiiile on my face! I’m haaaaaaaaapy agaaaaaaain … ”

  As if he hadn’t been terminally happy in the first place. People in passing cars began honking and waving and spraying him on purpose. He sang and kicked and tried to splash them back. By the time he reached the two-lane bridge over the Washougal River he’d totaled his penny loafers
but earned several horn ovations from vehicles in both lanes. His goal, he decided, would be to coax a few millworking football fans out of the taverns downtown to do some dancing and singing with him. But as he stepped out over the river he said, “Holy smoly!” and froze in his tracks.

  The last time he’d crossed here there’d been a thirty-foot drop to a slow green pool below. He knew both bridge and pool exceptionally well, because he and Everett had been arrested and hauled into Juvenile Court the previous summer for jumping off the former into the latter. Today, though, the thirty-foot drop was filled with twenty-eight feet of caramel-colored floodwater …

  What struck Irwin, what froze him at first, was sheer contrast: the long fall through warm summer air, all that empty space, solid water now. But as he moved out onto the bridge what began to impress him even more was the deception. Flooded though it was, the river was not raging: it was smooth-surfaced, like muscles, and surprisingly quiet as it shot beneath his feet. Yet the entire bridge hummed and vibrated with the force of the current, and there were trees in the water—not just driftwood logs but entire Douglas firs and massive old maples—moving easily as fast as the cars and trucks that passed just over them. Irwin watched a hundred-foot fir slide toward him, saw it slip, tip-first, down under the bridge, felt the sidewalk gritch and quake as limbs and chunks of root wad were torn from the tree by the girders beneath his feet. “Holy smoly!” he repeated.

  At the far end of the bridge, three police cars and a metallic-green state motor pool sedan pulled over and parked in a row. Five Washington State troopers climbed out of the squad cars and huddled up, looking, in their bright yellow ponchos and big Smokey hats, like something that had escaped from a toy store. Meanwhile a man in a suit got out of the sedan, opened an umbrella, stuck a clipboard under his arm, bustled out onto the bridge, and commenced leaning out over rails, peering down at footings, and studying the vibrations set up by passing trucks and underpassing trees. Realizing they might be about to close the bridge, Irwin started toward them, hoping to eavesdrop. Then he noticed Greg Hervano among the troopers—the same cop who’d nailed him and Everett for jumping off the bridge last August, but a gung ho McLoughlin High football booster. Which explains the greeting Irwin gave him. “Hey, fuzz!” he bellowed at the top of his lungs. Then he jumped into the gutter-stream and put some of his best Gene Kelly moves on. He’d just begun to wonder why he got so little response when he noticed that all five Smokey hats were now aimed upriver. Then he heard the yipping, turned upstream himself,