The Brothers K

by David James Duncan

  Her response? She told Peter, “Give the roses to the sick;” told me, “Give the candy to the gullible;” told Everett, “You’re the one in need of that Bible. And it’s your Heavenly Father you should be mailing that silly card to.” She added that she would do her own housework and cooking and shopping, “as God intended Christian wives and mothers to do,” and that she didn’t really need our friendship, thank you, she had the Lord Jesus Christ’s.

  We were stunned. For the time being, we managed to hold our tongues. But we could all plainly see that, like the banging of Khrushchev’s shoe, this sort of shit could get old fast.

  2. The Scientists

  Shortly after the Psalm War, Bet and Freddy invented a game called “Famous Scientists.” It was not a coincidence. The new game had nothing whatever to do with church, sports, prayers, pitching or any of the other family obsessions. In fact it was not so much a game as an all-out surrender to a way of life the rest of us were too religious, too athletic, too complicated or just too busy to comprehend—and that was the way they wanted it.

  Famous Scientists, in Bet and Freddy’s eight-year-old view, were an elite handful of absentminded, charmingly disheveled, Margaret Mead or Louis Leakey-like personages who at some point in their earthly careers had simply said “Forget it!” to pedestrian jobs, lives and ways of thinking, and began to spend long, scintillating days working one ingenious experiment after another. It was a naïve definition, certainly. But the beauty of it—and the marked advantage over more sophisticated definitions—was that it obliterated the usual gap between theory and action. Famous Science had nothing to do with things like knowing the difference between lepidopterology and otorhinolaryngology or Andy Celsius and Gabe Fahrenheit. All Famous Science had to do with was saying “Let’s be Famous Scientists!” to someone who could be depended upon to say “Okay!,” and then to behave and experiment accordingly.

  During Mama’s most Bible-headed periods the twins sometimes remained in Famous Science Mode for days at a time, and as the years passed it became crucial for my brothers and me to recognize this mode, because our Scientists were increasingly attracted to the field of experimental psychology, and their “lab rats” of choice were their ever-credulous brothers. It can be more than a minor annoyance to find that the innocuous chat you’ve just had with a seemingly air-headed, bubble-gum-smacking, preadolescent girl was in fact a prefabricated, carefully calculated quiz designed to lay bare the most inane foible of your personality. It can also be troubling to find that every cross-grained, self-damning sentence you just blabbed without thinking has been immortalized in one of Famous Science’s increasingly nefarious lab notebooks.

  But the psychological dismemberment of male siblings was a later twist. Most of the early Famous Science research tended to be either in no recognizable field of science or else in three or four fields intrepidly bulldozed together. Take, for example, a little experiment known to its progenitors as “Centrifuging Flickers”:

  A red-shafted flicker is a lovely mottled woodpecker with war-painted cheeks, auburn pinions and, when fleeing, a rump as startlingly white as any Caucasian skinny-dipper’s. They were so common in Camas that, during hard winter rains, six or eight of them would frequently come to roost in the warmth and dryness of our second-story eaves—and hearing, just inches from our heads as we lay in bed, the talons of a sleeping woodpecker tightening their grip on the siding was a stirring experience. Unfortunately, the flicker’s sole method of expressing gratitude for a warm night’s sleep was even more stirring: it came smack at the rosy crack of dawn, and consisted of a beak-on-siding applause that sounded, from the sleeper’s side of the siding, about like machine-gun fire sounds from the point-blank side of the machine gun. Mill-town people cherish their sleep. After all, come morning it’s time to go work at the mill. For this reason a lot of starling-brained Camas residents used to deal with their red-shafted machine-gun problems by leaning out their windows and blasting away with retaliatory BB, pellet or even shotgun fire. I’m proud to say that the Chance family resorted to more enlightened measures: we just unleashed our Famous Scientists on them.

  “Centrifuging” was a concept the twins had gleaned from Famous Science’s most formidable new ally and supporter, Marion Becker Chance. While buttering a homemade scone for each of them in her apartment one morning, this fanatical pacifist and devoted birdwatcher unwittingly mentioned that a centrifuge was any rapidly rotating apparatus that used centrifugal force to separate substances of different densities—for instance butterfat from milk. That her increasingly scientific hence increasingly adorable granddaughters would take this innocuous bit of information, add a flashlight, a stepladder and a smelt-dipper’s net with a twelve-foot handle to it, and proceed to apply it to one of her favorite woodpeckers was unthinkable. But, as anyone who’s ever seen a mushroom cloud, a cooling tower or an aerosol can of cheese spread can tell you, the unthinkable is often the very thing the Famous Scientist comes up with.

  Centrifuging flickers was a straightforward process: waiting till well after sunset, when the roosting flickers had gone into their rainy-night torpor, our two Scientists donned raincoats (the birds only came during downpours), snuck out under the eaves, flashlighted a prospective victim, set up and climbed the ladder, and caught a stupefied flicker in the smelt net. After “tagging” the bird’s ankle with a piece of adhesive-tape labeled “CENTRIFUGED 2-25-’65” (or whatever the date), they would fold it gently but tightly back into the smelt net, turn on Papa’s shedball spotlights, start giggling with anticipation, march out into the middle of the backyard, grab the very end of the net’s twelve-foot handle in their four little hands, and proceed to centrifuge their captive’s brains out by twirling round and round, fast as they could go, while the experiment’s greatest fan (guess who?) sat howling and loon-laughing his appreciation from an upstairs window.

  We’re not sure whether the Scientists ever actually separated, say, a flicker’s blood from its lymphatic fluids or its gizzard juice from its stones, but we are sure that not one of the tagged-and-processed birds that wobbled off into the night ever showed its Caucasoid rump in our eaves again. One good centrifuging lasted a lifetime.

  3. Divergence of Rebels

  When in the Course of Human Events it became necessary for three of four Brothers to dissolve the Theological Bands which had connected them with their Mother, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitled them, they discovered, to their utter amazement, that nothing much changed: they spent a couple hours each Saturday listening to the Elders Reese and Dean (as in Dizzy and Pee Wee) instead of Babcock and Barnes, and that was about it. But when, as Free and Independent Sons, they were granted (or saddled with) the Power to do their own Cooking, Cleaning, Mending, Shopping, Personal Maintenance and Grooming, Laundry, Ironing and all other Domestic Acts and Things which Independent Sons must of right do, they discovered, to their everlasting astonishment, that everything changed …

  I, for starters, was transformed within weeks into a feminist. The term hadn’t made it anywhere near Camas yet, so I didn’t know that was what I’d become. But I can think of no better word to describe a thirteen-year-old American male suddenly forced to discover that no working citizen of this bizarre country can hope to maintain a tenable existence without possessing (1) a car and (2) an unpaid, unthanked, faceless, sexless drudge—i.e., “Traditional Housewife.” Being too poor, young, ugly and honest to woo, purchase or steal either, I pedaled around town on a rattletrap Huffy bike that was as close as I could get to the car, and became the even more rattletrap drudge myself. It was a spectacularly rude awakening. To have ironing boards folding up on your fingers while the school bus is honking outside the window; to walk into department stores with eight or ten hard-earned bucks in your pocket and a two-hundred-dollar void in your wardrobe and be expected to consider this humiliation a self-indulgent “shopping adventure;” to have—before an
arduous school day has even begun—to make a bed, prepare a breakfast, ride a crappy bike eleven miles to deliver 103 papers, take a shower, prepare a lunch, wash your dishes, and then be expected to know what to do with that disgusting wad of guck that’s left in the drain strainer after the water goes down … Suffice it to say that these were not the sort of experiences I expected Freedom to be paved with.

  As might be expected, Everett underwent an even more radical transformation. He was so desperate to prove that he hadn’t been dependent on Mama in any meaningful way that he refused to do anything for himself or his clothes or his room which he hadn’t been doing before. As a result, my most dapper and fastidious brother was transformed within weeks into an ersatz bohemian skuzzball who smelled like moldering gym socks and lived in half a bedroom that looked like a Winter of 76 campsite at Valley Forge. To add inanity to injury, he also began struggling—when friends and schoolmates sniffed out telltale odors of rebellion upon his person—to pass off his increasingly subfuscous wardrobe and squalorous digs as a matter of style by affecting the same beatnik lingo and mannerisms that had previously been the object of his most withering scorn. The transparency of this ploy set even Irwin to smirking. But Everett is nothing if not stubborn: he entrenched himself in this counter-feit beatnik personae for so long that even he eventually had no choice but to call it “real.” Fortunately for his social and sex lives (though not for his grip on honesty), he was soon able to feign having had a prophetic finger on the pulse of the nation all along—for our generation was about to spawn that peace-preaching sartorial and hygienic disaster, the American Hippie.

  Peter attacked his domestic and economic difficulties in an equally extreme but far more honest way: he became, so far as I know, Camas, Washington’s first self-made Buddhist monk. Paring away possession after possession, he soon owned nothing in this world but three shirts, two pairs of pants, two pairs of black Converse high-tops, a perennially empty wallet, three or four hundred paperback books and a top-of-the-line Wilson outfielder’s mitt, which, in a pinch, could double as a begging bowl.

  It was not that big a change for Peter (he still owned the same sorts of things, just fewer of them), but combined with Everett’s transmogrification it had a disturbing effect on their room. What had always been a fairly standard, ail-American boys’ bedroom—and for Irwin and me the most educational, or at least stimulating, room on earth—suddenly split in half. To the right of the window an anarchistic ragpicker seemed to be trying to start a revolution, or at least acquire squatter’s rights, while to the left an athletic bhikku sought a bookish enlightenment.

  Far more troubling than this visual tension was the unseen tension between the inhabitants. Everett’s basic feeling was that we three were suffering an outrageous and punitive suspension of our rights as sons, and that some sort of equally punitive counterattack should be launched as soon as possible. But Peter wasn’t interested. In fact, Peter seemed, except for the friction with Everett, even more serene and satisfied in his ascetic circumstances than he’d been before. Knowing that his thinking infuriated Everett, but wanting to explain his position to me, he began to give me the occasional surreptitious “dharma talk.” I remember one in which he told me that our family had never been far from poverty. But while there was abject poverty, he said, “the usual kind,” there was also something that contemplatives and monks talked about, called “voluntary poverty.” He said that both meant few possessions, simple food and clothes, maybe no car, and so on. But whereas abject poverty was like being thrown overboard in a storm, like Jonah, voluntary poverty was like diving into a calm, clear sea because you saw the beauty of it and wanted to take a swim. I still remember the intensity of his voice and the flash of his eyes as he added, “We’ve arrived at the ocean’s edge, Kade. So why fight it? Why not dive?” And I remember how hard I tried to appear moved by his pearls of wisdom.

  But the truth was, I wasn’t ready to go swimming in any damned river, pool or sea whether I dove or got thrown in or was washed out of bed in my sleep. The truth was, both sides of Everett and Peter’s room looked alien and comfortless to me now, and it wasn’t the choice between rebellion and renunciation that generated that comfortlessness: it was an unnameable sadness that filled both halves—a loss of unity, or solidarity, or brotherhood. Something precious was being taken from us, or squandered by us. And neither Everett the Revolutionary nor Peter the Monk was taking even a moment to look back and mourn for it. But to me … To me it felt as though two old and intimate friends, after sixteen years spent hiking shoulder to shoulder, had come to a fork in the trail, and without even noticing had taken different paths. When they first looked up and saw what had happened, they were not at all far apart: they could still speak quietly to each other, could still see each other perfectly well. But they just kept going! All those years spent side by side, yet they didn’t hesitate, didn’t wave goodbye, didn’t even acknowledge that they’d parted! Somehow this chilled me to the heart. It seemed that only I understood that, blithe as their divergence had been, it was permanent. So as my big brothers hiked intrepidly on, I—the slow, over-round, over-adoring brother who’d spent his whole life traipsing happily along behind both of them—just stood back at the fork, watching them veer farther and farther apart, and grieving for us all.

  4. Convergence of Rebel and Scientists

  “The Hump of Energy” was a Famous Science experiment as tedious to outside observers as “Centrifuging Flickers” was interesting, but it remained a great favorite on sultry summer afternoons. To work this meager wonder the two Scientists would simply take time out from running through the sprinkler, disconnect the garden hose, stretch it straight out across the lawn, then give one end of it a violent, four-handed snap. The Ω-shaped hump that proceeded to fly from their hands down the length of the hose gave the experiment its name. They would do this six or eight times, scrutinizing the Ω with a look of far greater interest than they possibly could have felt. Then they’d reconnect the sprinkler, sprawl belly-down in the grass beneath the spray, and while the sun baked them hot and the sprinkler bathed them cool they would proceed to speculate—at unbelievable length—upon the possible “meanings” of the hump.

  The charm of the experiment completely eluded my brothers and me. All that talk about a wiggle in a hose seemed more like an affliction, an attack of logorrhea maybe, than a scientific experiment. What we didn’t know was that Grandawma, in a little lab journal she’d begun to help the twins keep, had written a description of the experiment that made quite a bit of sense. In a few flamingly uncharacteristic sentences she even attempted to gear her language down to the level of eight-year-olds. Here’s what she wrote:

  The “Hump of Energy” is only superficially an experiment in physics. The undulation in the hose is of course a mild curiosity, but the more profound challenge here is to your imaginations—for which reason the very dullness of the hose becomes its chief value. Your aim should be to let the “Hump”—the little undulation—pass cleanly into your minds, and then to follow your thoughts wherever the undulation leads them. Don’t work too hard at this. Don’t judge or censor yourself, or each other. Just spin and bounce and juggle your ideas the way a circus seal juggles the ball on its nose; then, when you feel ready, start tossing your ideas back and forth, like two seals. Silly as it may seem at first (it sounds rather like baseball, doesn’t it!), this is very like what scientists do when developing an idea. To maintain a spirit of playful cooperation, to keep the thinking lively while showing your partner’s daftest notions no disrespect—these are the aims of the experiment, and the only valid measures of its “success.”

  When Grandawma had first taken up with our two Scientists I’d feared that one more feisty faction had just shouldered its way into the family ideological wars, and that some rabid new form of brainwashing had begun. It was a pleasure to discover how wrong I was. In a completely noncombative way, the grumpy old so-called Atheist was attempting to sew together some of the rips be
ing torn in our family in the names of “Christ” and “salvation.” It’s amazing, sometimes, how far away the name of a thing lands from the thing itself.

  One scorching-hot day during Famous Science’s inaugural summer—long before my brothers and I learned of Grandawma’s congenial definition—the “Hump of Energy” caught no less a thinker than Peter by surprise. Having just mowed a humongous lawn a few blocks up the street, he’d returned home dripping with sweat. And since, in those days, Peter’s feelings about having sweat on his body were akin to most people’s feelings about having feces on theirs, when he saw the sprinkler whirring and my sisters lolling beneath it, he took a short sprint, did his patented headfirst base-thieving slide across the soft, sopped grass, and came to a tidy halt right between them just in time to hear Beatrice say, “If a hose could reach from here clear to Spokane, do you think there could be a man strong enough to jerk it hard enough to make the Hump travel all the way?”