The Brothers K

by David James Duncan

  Then Coach Donny Bunnel, fresh from his daily gabfest over at the football field, strutted into the dugout, clapped his hands, and hollered, “Hit-and-run!”

  Pete nodded, and punched his next three drives over into right field.

  “Sacrifice!” yelled Bunnel.

  Peter bunted four or five tricklers down the first- and third-base lines.

  “Okay!” he hollered. “Now try for a tater!”

  Lance Clay’s parade-float smile vanished, but he dutifully grooved a fastball. Peter bunted it straight back on a line. Clay caught it, and the smile was back. But Bunnel wouldn’t have it. “Come on. Smack it, Pete. I wanna see some loft.”

  “I don’t hit taters, Coach,” Peter said.

  “Your turncoat spear-chuckin’ brother sure as hell does,” Bunnel said.

  “Irwin’s no turncoat,” Peter said. “He never was a ballplayer. He was just afreak of nature with a bat.”

  “Is that any way to talk about your brother?” Bunnel asked.

  “I’m quoting my brother,” Pete said. “He’s a lot smarter than most people think. Why do you think he went out for track?”

  “Tell you what, hotshot,” said Coach Bunnel. “Just shuttup and show me how far you can hit the ball.”

  To my surprise, Peter did. He hit a fly to deep center, a pop-up to shallow left, fanned two pitches completely, then hit two more to center. The flies all traveled maybe 300 feet, and were easily caught. They looked like line drives that got too big for their britches. Pete was leading the league in hitting and the state in stolen bases; he led his team in walks, slugging, RBIs, on-base percentage and almost every other stat that was good. But Irwin, as a sophomore, had hit six home runs in half a season, and in practice had once crushed a Clay fastball 460-some feet. So, like a big bratty kid, Bunnel wanted the brother he couldn’t have. “Put some soul into it!” he goaded.

  “He’s gettin’ blisters,” Mr. Clay said. “Next batter.”

  Later the same day, Lance Clay had pulled Peter aside and told him never to screw with his swing for a meathead like Bunnel again. “Just keep hitting line drives,” he said, “and pretend you can’t help it.”

  Pete said he would. Clay then told him that Papa, in his Tacoma days, had been one of the best minor league ballplayers he’d ever seen.

  “I think he’s one of the best still,” Peter said.

  “So what do you think,” Clay asked, “about your skills, compared to his?”

  Peter reddened a little. “No offense,” he said, “but that’s the kind of question I’d expect Coach Bunnel to ask.”

  “Well,” Mr. Clay said, “I asked it. And for a reason.”

  “I think I’m eighteen and Papa’s thirty-seven,” Peter said. “I think I play high school outfield and he pitches Three A relief. So it’s apples and oranges.”

  “I hear you hit his pitching,” Clay said. “Does that imply anything about your apples and oranges?”

  Peter shook his head. “It’s just BP. He never knocks me down, never brushes me back. It’s not for blood. You know how huge the difference is.”

  “What I know,” Clay said, “I doubt you’d want to hear.”

  Peter said nothing for a second. Then he smiled and said, “That’s a good way of making somebody want to hear something.”

  Clay nodded, and turned serious. “I think you’re scared,” he said. “Your father’s been your teacher, he’s been like a god to you boys. And I think you’re afraid to outshine him. I think that’s why your hitting fell apart at the end of last season.”

  “I was off,” Peter admitted. “But I didn’t exactly fall apart. I hit .280 in the play-offs.”

  “Which, given your average at the time, was the equivalent of a .300 hitter batting .065.”

  “Spoken like a true math teacher,” Peter mumbled.

  “I’m not trying to insult you,” Mr. Clay said. “I just think it’s time you did outshine your father … because you’ve got more to be afraid of than that.”

  “Like what?” Peter asked.

  “You worry about being as good as your dad. But listen to an old baseball man who’s studied you both. That ship has sailed and gone, Peter. You are much, much better.”

  After a soliloquy like that, Mr. Clay must at least have expected some show of surprise. But Pete just stood there the way he does, weighing the words without expression. Then he shook his head. “No,” he said. “That’s not it, Mr. Clay. That’s not what I’m afraid of at all.”

  And now it was Clay whose face showed the surprise.

  “What I’m afraid of, concerning baseball,” Peter said, “is that I’m going to hurt my father. It might happen soon, too.”

  Thinking Peter lacked confidence, thinking he was only afraid of disappointing Papa, Mr. Clay smiled his parade-float smile again, and said, “How? How do you think you’re going to give your dad this big baseball hurt?”

  But Peter had another surprise for Mr. Clay. “I know I’m good,” he said softly. “Maybe as good as Papa, in a different way. What I don’t know is whether, after this season, I’m going to play any more baseball at all.”

  Lance Clay knew at once that Peter was telling the truth, but it was completely unforeseen, and it hit him like a beanball. His face drained of color, his crow’s-feet lost their ingrained look of kindness, and his eyes filled with confusion, then hurt, then anger. “Well,” he said. “You’re right. If that’s what you decide, you will hurt your father. And other people too, if that matters to you. Me, for instance.”

  With that, Mr. Clay turned, and walked away. And though Pete played out the season—and never played better—he never saw the parade-float smile again.

  –V–

  John Hultz didn’t use Papa even once in May or June of the ’65 season, but Papa didn’t gripe. What he did do was keep flaunting his stuff every chance he got. For instance he raised Hultz’s ire (and duplicated a stunt he’d pulled against his dad’s WSU teams as a twelve-year-old) by striking out Tug hitters when he was supposed to be throwing BP. And whenever he was out in the bullpen warming up his young relievers, he fired curves, knucklers and G.Q. garbage-balls back at them to keep his hand in. In July, though, the Pirates (then in fourth place in the National League) made a huge raid on the Tugs, calling up their two best starting pitchers and their shortstop, then dealing away two outfielders and a reliever. It pretty well gutted the team. And that was when Johnny Hultz, figuring their pennant hopes were shot, started using Papa once a week or so in “stupid relief.”

  At first Hultz claimed he was just indulging an old man who’d become a friend. But in August the Tugs went on an unexpected tear, and something happened to Hultz’s claim: he was “indulging” the old man two and three times a week now, for three, six, even nine outs per outing, and not just in lopsided games. He didn’t discuss this heavy new reliance with anyone, least of all Papa, but it wasn’t hard to figure out. When Papa entered even a ridiculous game, even a slugfest or a late-night extra-inning War of Zombies, there were three increasingly predictable results. The first was that the other team found it very difficult to score runs—which was of course good, but not good enough to justify Papa’s nonprospective presence in a prospects’ league. But the second result was more mysterious, and even more valuable, so I’ll try to describe it at some length.

  With Papa on the mound, the young Tugs for some reason seemed to get a whole new lease on their ballplaying lives. Instead of a potentially glorious, in point of fact underpaid, nerve-wracking, tenuous career, baseball began to seem like a decent way to simply pass a summer’s evening. Look at that sinkerball! they’d say. Look at that fastball for chrissake. You can be old and busted down as the Toe-man and still play this damned game. And look at him grin back at his bullpen. Look how much fun the old fart’s having! That’s the way you do it! Watching Papa have his fun, many of the young players began to have trouble recalling just where their anxieties and personal crises had been located. Their body language would change
. They’d begin to make wisecracks and dumb cracks and old-fashioned novocaine-brained baseball chatter. Then, as far as Hultz or anyone else could tell, they’d stop thinking entirely and just play ball for the pleasure of it—and it is a well-known fact that when entire teams stop thinking and start playing for fun, wonderful things happen.

  It’s hard to overemphasize the importance of this kind of thought-stopping influence, so let’s consider it from another angle. A pitcher throws a baseball eighty or ninety miles per hour at a hitter standing just twenty yards away. This means the hitter has about the same amount of time to decide what to do with a pitch as a chestnut-backed chickadee needs to take a crap. As any good birder will tell you, this is very little time. Nevertheless, ballplayers spend it in a wide variety of ways. One of the common options, and possibly the worst, is to spend it thinking. In the time it takes a pitch to reach the plate, a really quick-minded hitter can get in as many as five syllables’ worth of baseball thoughts. Here are three typical examples:

  1. “Inside … ooops! … strike.”

  2. “Change-up … shit! … fastball.”

  3. “Fastball … oh damn! … change-up.”

  The obvious moral here is that once a pitch is released, there are very few baseball thoughts worth thinking. This is why the preferred option of most good hitters is to spend pitch-to-plate time not thinking at all. “No-Think” is the name Peter gave to his mental state while awaiting a pitch—because a harrowing complication in this option is that even the thought “Don’t think!” is a thought. No-Think means: the ball comes: react. No decision-making, no reasoning. A pure, carefully trained, hopefully inspired reflex is all that’s wanted. And the difficulty of achieving No-Think—the paradoxically effortless effort required to gain access to this realm of pure reflex—is the explanation of virtually all the quirkiest quirks of ballplayers the world over. It’s what leads them to chew the unseemly substances, scratch the unseemly body parts, chant the gibberish, browbeat the Lord, sleep with their bats, pop mystery pills, worship everything from Shiva’s lingam to dead chicken parts, and so on …

  So the Tugs’ inexplicable transformation, with Papa on the mound, from a bevy of uptight young ballthinkers into a loose team of No-Think ballplayers was no small thing. On the contrary, it was the kind of inexplicable blessing that smart managers will hire, fire, lie, cheat, pray, beg and steal for—because more often than not it leads to a third predictable result: wins.

  John Hultz never did learn to like the idea of a pitching coach who outshone his students, and he never quit grumbling about it. But if a triweekly demonstration of tranquillity-under-adversity by old Papa Toe was what his boys needed to get Result #3, Hultz decided he could live with that. By early September he’d even developed a special sign for it: back in the days before dugout-to-bullpen phones, a skipper simply raised his right arm for his right-handed reliever or his left for the lefty. But when Johnny wanted Papa, he would raise neither. Instead he’d start wandering around the dugout, grumbling in disgust. Then he’d shake his head, heave a cranky sigh, glare out at his bullpen, lift his left leg like a dog at a hydrant—and point at his big toe.

  –VI–

  Irwin (when he didn’t strike out) was indeed a “tater” hitter, and he had an absolutely astounding arm. But we knew all along that his heart had never been smitten by the Chance family game—and his head was out of the question. He led every team he ever played on in the kind of errors born not of inability but of gross space-cadetism. He was the kind of outfielder who would rifle a perfect throw from deep left to home—when the runner was on his way to second. He once made a brilliant diving catch for out number three, did a somersault, bounced to his feet, stuck ball and glove in his armpit, tipped his cap in response to the fans’ and teammates’ frantic screaming, jogged clear on in to the dugout—and found that there’d only been two outs, and that while he was jogging along in glory, two runs had scored. So it was no great disappointment to anyone but the tater-loving Bunnel when Irwin’s baseball career came to an abrupt end.

  The end came—as with me—on the way to practice during his sophomore year. What happened was that he spotted an abandoned javelin jabbed into the grass beside the cinder track, wondered how the thing might look sailing through the blue spring sky, grabbed it, stepped over to the empty football field, and found out. In his own words he “just took a little run an’ gave ’er the ol’ heave-ho.”

  “Looks neat, dudn’t it?” he remarked to Coach Bobby Edson, who’d come running over in hysterics while it was still in the air …

  “Whaddya call those things again?” he asked, while it was still in the air …

  Edson just sank to his knees, while it was still in the air …

  Irwin felt confused, but sank to his knees too once it landed: he thought Coach Bobby wanted to share a spontaneous moment’s worship. He wasn’t far wrong either. What Edson wanted to do was mark the rip Irwin’s baseball cleats made in the turf when he released the javelin, go get his tape, measure the throw, and worship that—because Edson knew at a glance that without loosening up, without knowing a thing about technique, without even setting down his damned baseball glove, Irwin had just broken the school whaddya-call-it record by an easy five yards.

  If Irwin had attempted, at that point, to continue on over to the ballfield, I think Edson would have suffered a nervous breakdown. The Coachly Talk of Inspiration he proceeded to give Irwin may even have been a kind of nervous breakdown—which I suppose only made it a paragon of its kind. What it depicted was the absolute certainty of javelin-throwing putting Irwin on a fast track to glory: league and state records would come first; then the free four-year ticket to the major university, not to mention the coed or coeds (hawr hawr hawr!) of his choice or choices; after that were the record-shattering performance at the ’72 Olympics, the front of the Wheaties boxes, and “for a guy with your looks” probably Hollywood. Possibly due to the LA smog the future grew slightly hazier here, but Congress, if not the White House, and later the throne on God’s immediate right were likelihoods.

  But Coach Bobby’s sermon, like most, was a waste of breath: Irwin had been sold on the javelin the instant he’d let fly. As he put it at dinner that night, “Why slouch around in an outfield-type situation waiting to get to throw things to certain bases when I can go out for track and throw those whaddya-call-its as far and often as I want?”

  –VII–

  Another brilliant career that developed in our family during these years was unrelated to athletics, but so closely related to our athletes that it produced positive athletic results. It was Mama’s business career. When Papa, in ’65, had written from the Tugs’ spring camp suggesting that she stop fighting home holy wars and get herself a job, Mama never argued, never sulked, never said a word. She just took him up on it—with a vengeance.

  Having spent our childhoods thinking of Mama as the ultimate Beatrix Potter Meets Mary & Martha Hausfrau, I think we all half expected her initial ventures into the rough-and-tumble world of commerce to go about as smoothly as, say, Peter Rabbit’s first tour of Mr. MacGregor’s garden. At the very least I hoped she’d have no more fun than I was having on my 5 A.M. paper route. But I was in for a disappointment so complete that it soon gave way to admiration and pride: using the same ferocious energy and organizational skills with which she formerly ran our family, Mama built up a housecleaning service that within a year employed seven people, including Bet, Freddy and—surprise!—me. (She didn’t even try to make me eat crow: she just offered me a chance to triple my income and to sleep till 7:30 again.)

  I was good at math, slow at cleaning, and have a pleasant voice if I do say somyself, so when the housecleaning service grew huge Mama made me her secretary, and she became our full-time quality-control inspector and CEO. But as with any good tycoon, one successful venture did not begin to satisfy her: when she saw a window of opportunity, she dove through it. The housecleaning service set up connections that dropped a fairly lucrative gard
ening and lawn-mowing business right into Irwin’s lap. And conversations with a housecleaning client who happened also to be a chef turned into a home dessert-making operation that within two years catered to several of Portland’s best restaurants, and helped Bet and Freddy start salting away bucks for college.

  Put it all together, even subtracting the good spending money that Irwin, the twins and me were all making, and Mama’s average income was soon a cool four hundred a month more than Papa Toe was making. And all through this rocky period of their marriage she would have me total her earnings each Friday before sunset, write out a whopping check for ten percent of that total, write this tithe amount on the outside and stick the check on the inside of an envelope with the First SDA Church of Washougal’s address stenciled on it, and prop it against the Canada geese salt and pepper shakers on the kitchen table till morning—where Papa and all the rest of us would be sure to notice it as often as possible. “You see!” was the unspoken message she was sending to every infidel in the house: “If you gave the Lord His due share, you could be making this kind of money too!”

  She was still proselytizing. But at least she was learning to be subtle about it. And—ironic as it may have felt to Papa—her business successes had turned his little baseball miracle into something he could afford to relax and enjoy.

  –VIII–