The Brothers K

by David James Duncan

  Papa looked at Irwin, and said nothing, for a very long time. Then he turned to Mama. “I won’t divorce you,” he said—and the room began to spin. “It’d just be a lot of silliness at this late date.” I closed my eyes: the dark in there was spinning too. “But if you ever set foot in another Babcock church service for any reason but to spit in his face, I’ll never speak to you again, Laura. I swear to God.”

  “I’ll worship where I choose!” Mama managed to say. But her voice was broken, her face white.

  “Please!” Irwin begged. “This is my fault!”

  “Let’s keep it simple,” Papa said. “This is Babcock’s fault.”

  “What about Everett?” Mama gasped. “What about drugs? I heard that little slip!”

  “Laura, I swear to God!”

  “And what’s so bad about a son who’s willing to fight for his country? What’s so wrong about Irwin wanting to—”

  “What’s wrong is he’s a Christian!” Papa roared. “He’s the son who let the other kids break his toys! The one who’s never hurt a fly! The one who turns the other cheek. Goddammit, Laura! How could you of all people forget that?”

  “Please!” Irwin stood up, grabbed his forehead, let go of it, sat back down. “I got us into this, Papa. And with all of your help, and God’s, I can get us out.”

  “Babcock got you into this!”

  “And Everett!” Mama shouted.

  “Stop!” Irwin slammed the table so hard the plates leapt in the air. My parents stopped.

  “There’s still something I haven’t told you.”

  Again they grabbed their chair arms. Again we stared in awe at his mouth. “Linda,” it said softly. “My Linda. Her and, well, everything we pretty much own are sitting out in the car. Right here. Right now. Waiting to hear what we all decide.”

  My parents looked at each other then—just a glance, it was over in a flash—but I could swear that I saw in it a complete suspension of hostility, and maybe even some form of delight, before they turned back to Irwin with the same grave scowls.

  “Why didn’t you say so?” Papa said.

  “For God’s sake, Irwin,” Mama chided. “Bring the poor girl home!”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Leftovers

  1. Old War, New Hate

  You have no more permission to fight for me. You have killed the innocent and left my enemies standing. No more … no more …

  —dying words of King Duryodhana, Mahabharata

  Three days after Linda moved in with us, two days after her marriage to many an Adventist girl’s idea of the Dream Male, and just a day after that Dream left her for basic training, another mind-boggling scene took place in our house. This one was a kind of “Psalm Wars, Part Two.” And, as usual, the sequel stank.

  It began late at night. Mama was watching the eleven o’clock news. I was typing a paper in the kitchen. (The twins had moved upstairs, and the noise of my old Royal manual kept them awake if I worked in my room.) Papa was still on the road, so when somebody knocked hard on the front door, I joined Mama as she unlocked it.

  And in burst Everett, with hair, clothes and energy flying all over the place as he announced, with repellent bravado, that he’d been at a sit-in all week and that he’d got home just three hours ago to hear the bad news from Stoner Steve (I’d been phoning his house every night for four days). “But never fear, Kade!” he cried—as if Mama wasn’t there. “’Cause we’re gonna be okay, Winnie and me! I’m arranging a little tryout for us with the Dodgers. The B.C. Dodgers, that is!” Meaning, I guess, that he thought they would go to British Columbia together to dodge the draft.

  Thanks to the way he was acting, I felt no sorrow at all as I said, “You’re too late.”

  Everett popped like a party balloon, except the sound went: “What?”

  “Irwin’s already in boot.”

  “No! No no no! Stoner said Friday. He wrote it down twice!”

  I said, “Reality never was Stoner’s strong suit.” But I regretted it a little as Everett turned pale and fell silent. He looked like he might even start to cry—

  till Mama stepped up and pertly informed him that he was a coward and a communist-lover and that Irwin, by choosing to serve his family, his country and his God, had become a hero to us all. Nothing perks up an ideologue like the sight of the ideological enemy. In fact, they both looked grimly pleased as they squared off like a couple of gunfighters. “Don’t even start!” I said. “People are asleep. And it’s too late anyway. Irwin’s already gone.”

  But they didn’t hear me. They wanted their idiot showdown. And, as so often happens, it was innocent bystanders who ended up taking most of the bullets.

  Everett drew first. It would serve Mama right, he shouted, if Irwin got blown to shit in some fucking jungle …

  Then Linda walked, white-faced, into the room. Her nightie—a weird wedding gift from the closet-romantic in Mama—was awfully small, her eyes and breasts awfully large. “Who are you?” Everett blurted.

  Linda managed to move her lips a little. Then she burst into tears.

  Mama’s turn. It would serve Everett right, she said, if he was arrested at one of his damned antigovernment drug-and-sex orgies and locked up for life. And if he so much as opened his mouth in her house again, she would call the police and have him arrested this very night.

  Everett opened his mouth as far as it would go and said, “Ahhhhh.” What a moron. I was no expert, but I’d begun to think he was on speed.

  Mama headed for the phone: she was definitely on patriotism.

  But meanwhile Freddy, on nothing but sleepiness, had staggered into the kitchen and ended up by the phone—and when she saw Mama coming she grabbed the cord and serenely ripped the phone jack clean out of the wall.

  Everett laughed, and thanked her, though I don’t think she was even awake. Then Mama slapped her in the face not once, but twice. Which made me mad. And then Everett, right in front of Linda, called Mama a “stupid fucking bitch.” Which made me even madder. Grabbing Mama in a bear hug, I pulled her away from Freddy but yelled at Everett, “Say that again and I’ll hurt you!” He laughed at me. Meanwhile Mama, in a frenzy, was trying to break my hold. But I’d been wrestling with Irwin for two decades. “Stop struggling,” I said. And when she didn’t, I just lifted her in the air and squeezed a little. “Hoooof!” she went, and the wind and fight went out of her. While poor Linda gawked at us. Good God.

  Hard as the slaps had been, Freddy woke rather slowly. But once she felt how much it hurt she started to cry. Then Everett did it again. “You’re pathetic!” he shouted at Mama. “You fascist fucking bitch!”

  That did it. Carrying Mama over to Everett, I set her down in front of him like bait in front of a fish, let them stare at each other till they were both about to scream something awful, then jumped out and punched Everett hard, right in the mouth.

  It was no Micah Barnes love tap. I floored him. I also stopped Linda’s and Freddy’s tears, froze Mama, and temporarily worked wonders for my own state of mind. “Sorry,” I said, when I finally got him back on his feet. “But I learned that trick from you. Asshole Therapy, you used to call it. I still love you, Everett. Barely. But I hope to hell it was a complete cure.”

  He was still glassy-eyed, and probably couldn’t understand me. But glancing from Mama’s face to Linda’s and Freddy’s, I saw glimmerings of sanity, if not amusement, and felt a glimmering of hope …

  Then Bet burst into the room. “I hate you!” she screamed at Everett. “Get out of here! You’re the bitch! You are! I hate you! Get out!”

  The fierce new bond between Mama and Bet had been evident to the rest of us for a while now, but this bordered on the berserk. There was something wrong with her, something I didn’t understand at all. “Get out of our house!” she shrieked. “Never come back! You’re the bitch! You are!”

  Linda started crying again. Everett seemed to move from semiconsciousness straight into shock. “Cool it!” I told Bet. “I already
decked him.”

  But she was gone. Her eyes were pure pupil—no iris at all—and her face was a thing in a nightmare. “Get out!” she shrieked. “I hate you! Bitch! Fascist bitch!” And soon as I moved to try and calm her, Mama snuck away over to Everett, doubled her little fist, and sucker-punched him with everything she had.

  His reaction was eerie: he just fell down, got up again, and went on gaping at Bet, who was now shrieking, “Good, Mama! Good! He’s the bitch!”

  “I’m so tired of you two,” I told Mama as I threw another bear hug on her.

  “This is my fault!” Linda began sobbing.

  “This is his fault!” Mama shouted. “It’s—Hoooof!” I jerked her wind out.

  “He’s the bitch!” Bet shrieked. “He is! He is!”

  I had to shout to be heard, but I tried to shout calmly. “She’s hysterical,” I told Freddy. “Try to help her. Linda, we’re sorry about all this. But maybe you can help with Bet too.” Then I picked Mama up again, carried her straight into the kitchen, and kicked the door shut behind us.

  I kept her in the bear hug even after she’d quit struggling. It felt weird, sick, wrong as could be, but I was afraid to let her go, so there we stood, breathing hard, listening to Bet’s frenzy. Not knowing what else to do, I tried polite conversation. “What do you do for hysteria anyway? Breathe in a paper bag?”

  “I’m sick of this too,” she murmured into my shoulder. “I’m sicker than I can say of all this.” It wasn’t the answer to my question, but it sounded halfway sane. So I let her go, even tried to smile at her. And she smiled back—insanely—and raked her fingernails across my face. I grabbed her again, begged her to calm down. But she was crazy now, biting, kicking, throwing her skull back against mine, so “Hoooof!” “Hoooof!” “Hoooof!” we went. This was an astute businesswoman, this was my boss I was crushing. “I hate him, hate him, hate him!” Bet kept shrieking, while Linda just sobbed, and Freddy begged Bet to stop. My face hurt like hell. I was close to vomiting. And Mama just wouldn’t quit. “Hoooof!”

  Everett came staggering, hate-blasted and blood-smeared, through the door, glanced at us blindly, and left the house without a word.

  Bet stopped screaming, but started gasping uncontrollably.

  Linda and Freddy, both crying themselves, tried to soothe her.

  Everett’s car started, died, started, roared, and tore wildly away.

  Mama finally quit struggling, so I put her down, shielded my face, and jumped away from her fast. But she just stood there.

  “You’re not a bitch,” I told her. “Nobody thinks that. Not even Everett. But you and he are nuts. You make each other crazy.”

  She just stood there. Her blouse had my blood on it, and was ripped at the shoulder. The lipstick Ellen G. White said never to wear was smeared down onto her chin. I’d squeezed her so hard there was snot stopping one nostril. I said, “I hope I didn’t hurt you. But it’s sick. You two are killing this family. You’re hurting everybody.”

  She just stood there.

  Papa was in Arizona with a head full of voodoo, breaking stuff and low outside corners. Peter was in Cambridge contemplating sutras, Sanskrit, bhajans and ghazals. Bet was still gasping, Linda still sobbing. “It’s okay,” Freddy kept lying. “It’s okay, it’s okay.”

  I wished to hell I was smarter, or better at baseball.

  2. Cards

  You got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em, know when to walk away, know when to run.

  —Dostoevsky, The Gambler*

  A few days after I punched him, Everett announced that he was going to Canada, then burned his draft card in front of a cheering campus throng that included FBI agents and a Post-Intelligencer photographer who immortalized the moment for Mama (the AP photo is still in the “EVERETT” box in the attic). Had he refused induction and been arrested, his punishment would have been real enough, and going to Canada meant that he’d made a choice to take a certain amount of suffering upon himself rather than to inflict it upon Vietnamese people. Yet his action seems to me to have meant far less than it might have.

  The first flaw in Everett’s act of self-sacrifice was that it was aimed entirely at an audience. Not only did he announce his card-burning intentions and the exact place and time in his newspaper column, he also mailed letters to Olympia and Washington, D.C., inviting the likes of Dick Nixon, Dixie Lee Ray, Melvin Laird, Scoop Jackson and J. Edgar Hoover to come watch—and announced that in his column too. His devil-may-care example proved contagious: twenty other young men were inspired to stand beside him and burn their draft cards while hundreds of well-wishers cheered, sang and even wept. But that brings me to the other flaw: some of those twenty others were genuine students, so their sacrifices were real. Everett’s academic career, on the other hand, had long been (what else?) a farce. By avoiding professors like Dr. Gurtzner, practicing plagiarism, cheating on tests, and stuffing his schedule full of fluffy Pass/Fail courses he’d been able to tread academic water into the spring of ’70. But for Everett the Legend, classrooms were just a guaranteed series of small crowds and coeds in front of which to perform.

  I wouldn’t say that it was meaningless when Everett burned his draft card. When the repercussions set in, suffering would add some retroactive dignity to his initial performance. I’m just saying that his card-burning would have meant far more, on the day he did it, if he hadn’t already incinerated his life.

  3. Attic Document, October 1970

  A paper, written for Thurman Broyle’s eighth-grade Social Studies class, typifying a whole series of papers that earned Bet both her first F and her first eight mandatory interviews with the school counselor:

  TWO MODERN PROBLEMS & THEIR BEST POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS

  Problem #1: War

  What I know about war isn’t much, but I do know we’re in one with Russia called The Cold War where no one wins because we all die a few minutes after it starts, and another one with Vietnam which my best brother is stuck in and my sickest brother ran away to Canada to skip out on. From listening in class I also know that the way to get a D on this paper is to say the solution to the Vietnam part of this problem is to quit fighting and bring our troops home. And since good grades mean more to me than anything, even my favorite brother’s life and his wife and new little baby’s happiness who I can hear downstairs crying as I write this, my solution to this problem is for us to fight fight fight and kill kill kill until we win win win.

  Problem #2: Assassinations

  The big thing I’ve noticed about political assassinations is how my older brothers admired a politician named Lincoln and somebody shot him and one named Gandhi and somebody shot him and two named Kennedy and somebody shot them both and one named Martin Luther King and somebody shot him too. Then I noticed how first President Johnson and now President Nixon pretty much talk gibberish and lie like rugs and all my older brothers except Irwin hate them. But nobody shoots them. So creeps survive. That’s my main political theory. Satan takes care of his own is what I believe, whereas look what God did to His only Son. So my solution to this modern problem is simple. All this country has to do to stop political assassinations is keep electing gibberish-talking, lying politicians who all my brothers except Irwin hate.

  4. Shoats from Underground

  Thu-that, thu-that, thu-that’s all, folks.

  —Porky Pig

  Apparently no self-respecting Folk Hero can depart for the Life of Exile directly. The legendary thing to do is hang around till your induction papers arrive, then Defy Authority yet again by rendering yourself Incognito and going Underground. To that end, Everett partied it up in the same old U-district haunts till he was on the verge of arrest. Then, in one busy day, he shaved his prodigious beard, chopped off his hair, closeted such telltale decals as his earring and Old Glory knee patches, purchased some nondescript wash-and-wear clothes from various secondhand shops, traded his big ol’ Pontiac battle cruiser in on a spent Oldsmobile 88 as nondescript as his clothes, and vani
shed.

  But vanishing into an Underground turned out to be a bewildering disappointment to our hero. There is less to vanishing than meets the eye. A hundred percent less.

  Everett’s Underground, I found out months later, consisted of a series of cheap suburban Seattle motels furnished with telephones, upon which he spent several days fuming to various old cronies over the fact that with the exception of the one Post-Intelligencer photo, no campus, underground or city paper took any note of his departure. What was worse, Stoner Steve rented his room in the old hippie house to some squash-playing business major, “Give Chance a Peace” was replaced by a culinary question-and-answer column, and very few of his old friends seemed to miss him at all. “Tough luck!” they’d say—as if his intentional sacrifice had been pure accident. “But I hear B.C. is really pretty. And don’t forget your fishin’ pole!” they’d add—as if lifelong political exile were some nifty little vacation. The only people who expressed any real regret over his expatriation were:

  1. Papa—but then Papa, in the Hippie Churchill’s opinion, was just a naively apolitical, ball playin’ gomer. And his parting gift—a fly-tying kit—was almost as offensive as the “fishin’ pole” reminders of his friends.

  2. Irwin—but in the same telephone conversation in which Irwin expressed sympathy, he claimed to actually be liking boot camp! His drill instructor was “funny,” he said. “Chewed up an entire orange, peeling and all, then spat it out and made me eat it! I about busted a gut!” he said. So it appeared, to Everett anyhow, that the once invincibly sweet Winnie was well on his way to becoming a typical brainwashed ’Nam grunt.