The Brothers K

by David James Duncan

  till one day, to our amazement, we find ourselves crashing to the ground.

  Peter had one of these kinds of problems.

  7. Day 45

  March 25, 1971, posed a different sort of problem for Everett. A statistical difficulty, primarily. Natasha had lived with him, they had shared their lovely continent together, for forty-four days. And March 25 was the forty-fifth day since she’d left him. The forty-four best days of his life followed by forty-four days of sodden hell. And today the hell began to outnumber the happiness. What should he do about this? What sort of observance should he observe? If he decided to mourn, when would the mourning end? But if he decided to celebrate, it was like celebrating her absence—and he still wanted her back!

  The problem troubled him enough to keep him in bed an extra ten minutes. He then muttered, “Fuck it” and began Day 45 with three boiled eggs.

  · · · ·

  But an hour or so later, when the coffee reached his brain and he began prowling his nearly bookless bookshelves for printed material, Everett found a grease-spattered 1929-vintage cookbook called Thoroughly Modern Menus. Assuming it had been abandoned by a previous tenant, Everett had never given it a glance. But in rifling quickly through the yellowed pages, he first discovered the name Maggie Lee on the inside cover, and then—folded neatly inside—Natasha’s handwritten recipe for lasagna.

  His first reaction to this intimate relic was a mild heart attack. Then his mouth started to water. He loved lasagna. Natasha’s most of all, dammit. But wait now. What about Everett’s lasagna? True, it didn’t sound promising. But he was tired of moping, tired of hurting, tired of his three-egged Anthropoidal Borborygm Cooks Dredge for Everyman breakfasts. His behavior had been so corpselike he hadn’t even squandered his last paycheck yet. And it was Day 45. So he decided, by damn, to drive to the city, buy the makings for Everett’s World’s Best Lasagna and a decent bottle of wine, invite his memories of Natasha to dine with him that evening, toast those memories by candlelight, and then tell them, for the last time, to leave him the hell alone.

  He drove the forty miles to Victoria—and Papa Dominic’s Italian Deli—in an hour. And with his reborn desire for life came a reborn love of strong opinions: the discussion he got into with old Dom on “Southern Catch-all” versus classic Romagna lasagna, earthenware versus cast-iron casseroles, chuck versus neck beef versus sausage versus chorizo, crushed-canned versus strained-fresh tomatoes, oregano versus basil, nuances of marinating, simmering, baking, kinds of Parmesan, kinds of pasta dough, kinds of pasta cutters, and so on, took another two and a half hours, led to insults, and even to violence (old Dominic twice grabbed Everett’s cheeks and shook them, making his gums rattle, and the second time Everett grabbed a handy bag of breadsticks and boffed Dom up side the head). But his reborn enthusiasm and strength of opinion also led to many delicious taste tests, to a few free ingredients, and to a shared snack of cappuccino and crushed breadsticks with his fine, ferociously opinionated new friend.

  When he and Papa Dom finally loaded up the three bags of hotly contested makings, the jug of cheap Chablis (for cooking, Everett lied) and the bottle of fine Italian Chianti (for formal Natasha-toasting and sipping) and started to carry them out to Everett’s car, they were amazed to find that it had begun to snow. Hard.

  “A spring snow!” Everett said wonderingly.

  “Means a somebody’s heart’s a broken,” Papa Dom said, giving his head a rueful little shake.

  Everett didn’t quite drop his groceries, but he came close. “Did you have to say that?” he croaked.

  The old man gaped. “Your heart? My Everett’s heart’s a broken?”

  Everett stared at the snow, unable to speak.

  “Come back inside!” cried the old man. “I’ll make you lasagna myself!”

  “This whole outing,” Everett said, when he found his voice, “my whole purpose in life today, Dom, is to go home alone, and to make this lasagna myself.”

  The old man understood. They loaded the groceries into the Olds, hugged each other goodbye, and solemnly promised to eat lasagna together soon.

  Everett drove the forty miles home in a near whiteout, ten miles an hour for four hours.

  Shyashyakook was pretty, though, all covered with snow, and silent. And when he turned down his transformed driveway he scared up a snowshoe hare—the first he’d ever seen—then three blacktail does, whose retreating white rumps were being disappointedly scoped by the lascivious Chekhov. Everett rolled down his window to greet him: “Hey, Booger.”

  “Yehhhhhhhh?” The goat actually said this. It was his one word.

  “Come on up to the house. I got some celery for you.”

  “Yehhhhhhhh?”

  Parking the car and stomping into his cold kitchen, he shouted, “Betty! Bud! Kitten! I’m home!” It used to crack Natasha up. It was a mistake now. He made a mental note to devise himself a new greeting, kicked the snow off his shoes, unloaded his makings, rolled up his sleeves, washed his hands, then heard a horrid chewing sound on the corner of the house. “Oops. Forgot.”

  He propped open the window behind the stove, tossed Chekhov three celery sticks, and the goat demolished them so fast that Everett tossed him a brown paper bag for dessert. “Yehhhhhhhh?”

  He left the window open so they could “talk.” He then gathered his inadequate cooking tools, marshaled his wits, and commenced to devise a Tasha/Dominic lasagna synthesis he hoped might put them both to shame. Spreading ingredients over every flat surface in the kitchen, he chopped garlic (he didn’t own a press) and yellow onions, chopped Parmesan (didn’t own a grater), made his balsamella sauce—and it turned out perfectly, first try. He poured the balsamella into a plastic yogurt container, set it aside, rewashed his only cast-iron skillet, threw Chekhov another brown bag. Then he chopped celery, a carrot, some whole canned tomatoes, opened the ricotta, sliced the mozzarella, began simmering the ground neck meat (a Papa Dominic victory), started boiling olive-oiled water for the Creamette brand lasagna noodles (an ignominious Dominic defeat).

  He grabbed his cracked blue MOM mug, filled it with Chablis, sipped sedately as he worked, and realized that he was enjoying himself semithoroughly. “There’s something missing,” he told Chekhov, handing him the last brown bag. “But there’s always something missing. Having things missing, even indispensable things, is a fact of life, don’t you think? And life goes on anyhow. Except for the missing parts. Which were indispensable, so of course it goes on all out of whack. But that, hell and damn, is why we prefer things like cooking and eating brown paper bags to philosophizing. Don’t you think?”

  Chekhov stared at the falling snow, chewed his bag, voiced no opinion.

  Looking from Natasha’s recipe to his own notes on Dominic’s ravings, Everett combined their most irresistible thoughts on Bolognese meat sauce. And by the time the sauce was simmering and the lasagna boiling, he felt perfectly happy: he stood steeped in delicious smells that he alone had caused to burst forth in his kitchen. He was seeing Natasha, for the time being, as nothing more than one of two schools of thought on meat sauces. He was on his feet again. “I’m back!” he told Life. Then he opened the cupboard to grab the two fourteen-inch bake-and-serve lasagna pans he’d given Natasha for Christmas—and realized he hadn’t seen them in forty-some days.

  “Yehhhhhhhh?”

  He looked out the window. The driveway had vanished, and it was still snowing hard. His Olds was half buried. The store in Port Renfrew would be closed by now. They wouldn’t have lasagna pans anyhow. Even if they did, he was broke. “Damn.”

  He poured more Chablis into his MOM mug, took a slow sip, realized for the first time that it was not, by any stretch of the imagination or taste bud, good. He drew a breath. He started to sing:

  It ain’t no use to synthesize a sauce, babe.

  Takes good tools to make good chow.

  No it ain’t no use to synthesize a sauce, babe,

  Blah blah blah bow wow wow.

 
; I bin thinkin and wonderin

  All the way down the road

  Why I once loved a Czarist

  Who kissed like a toad …

  “Damn! Don’t I wish.

  With two breasts fun to hold …

  “Don’t get suicidal on me, Everett. How ’bout

  Who real quick turned me old …

  “Damn. How does Bobby D. do it? Don’t he just say ‘Hey, no problem’ and let her rip?

  “Hey. No problem. Let ’er rip:

  I bin wanderin and a wonderin

  Like the snow in these woods

  Why I loved the one woman

  Knew I ain’t got the goods.

  I gave her my totem

  But she wanted my scrotum …

  “Damn. Don’t think at all, hombre. It ain’t all right.”

  He smelled his Bolognese meat sauce burning. He set down his wine. He stalked over to the stove, dumped everything he’d bought, chopped, sliced, and simmered into the skillet, stirred it up into an overflowing mash, dumped some mash onto a bowlful of by now gluey pasta, threw the rest of the pasta out the window into the night. He devoured his bowlful of mash. He belched. He poured another MOM mug. Then he gave in to an impulse he’d been staving off all evening:

  Sitting down on the antique milking stool he’d bought Natasha for a Valentine the very day she’d vanished, he allowed himself to conjure the circumstances that had inspired the purchase: the two of them, in bed that morning, Natasha looking out the little window at the river and rain as he stared in stunned gratitude at the perfection of her back and bottom, the gray light on her white skin, the memory of sunlight that never quite left her hair. Then she’d turned to him, smiled, and said she wanted to buy a nice nanny goat for Chekhov, so that he could be as happy as the two of them.

  “Damn. Oh damn. God damn.”

  So much for Day 45.

  · · · ·

  And at first light the next morning, Day 46, Everett woke from heavy sleep to the sight of cobalt Steller’s jays dragging beige toboggans up into a sunlit, snow-covered spruce. He rubbed and blinked his eyes, but yes, there they were, looking like crazed kids in electric-blue snowsuits dragging lasagna sleds up a blinding white hill. So he gently reached, without thinking, behind him …

  then caught himself: too late. The moisture was already rising to his eyes, the familiar lump forming in his throat. Forty-six days of wrong don’t erase a wondrous right: he had reached back to wake her, to share the little toboggans, the beautiful blue on white.

  8. Ace of Hearts

  From the day he shot the man in the tree, Irwin stopped telling us anything substantial about how he was making out in ’Nam. He wrote the one long letter to Nash, and he still sent Linda a letter per week full of unmentionable molasses about her soft-little-this’s and sweet-sweet-that’s. But to the rest of us, after the Zaccheus incident, he sent nothing but picture postcards with a “Love you!,” “Miss you!” or “Pray for Peace!” scrawled across the back, and the inevitable “XOOX, Winnie” at the end.

  We did discover a secondhand way of finding out about him, though. I’m not sure what inspired the mutual trust; maybe their very different but simultaneous exiles, maybe their very different but simultaneous heartbreaks. Whatever it was, Irwin kept an intimate correspondence going with Everett, right up until the end. I found this out when I sent a copy of the Zaccheus letter up to Shyashyakook, and soon received the following in return:

  Dear Kade and Family,

  Got the Mekong letter. No comment for now, except to say write to him, all of you, and tell him you love him. I just did. And tell him, reassure him, right away, please, that he’s still a Christian. He needs to hear that badly—and from you guys, not me. It’s truer than true, by the way. Why else would he shatter like this?

  Before anyone writes him off as doomed, though, consider the card I got last week, which I copy here verbatim:

  Ever Everett,

  Major changes for Alien 2nd Class I. D. Chance. I’ve been yanked off long-range recon, transferred to a fire base, promoted to Specialist Fourth Class (translation: half-assed corporal) and made aide to the CO here, guy named Dudek, an okay sort for a Captain. I’m his gofer and manservant is what it amounts to. But it beats the snot out of jungle-cruising and killing people. Pray for peace, and for me too if you remember how. XOOX, Winnie

  As I read it, this is great news. We can’t know how secure his fire base is, but anything’s safer than long-range recon, and as an aide he probably won’t be told to do any more shooting, which, given his reaction to Zaccheus, could save him from court-martial. So I don’t know. Tell Linda, Bet and Mama to spit on their Bibles and Papa on his baseballs and maybe we’ll get him back in one piece.

  As you see, he didn’t say a word to me about “popping” anybody. Wish I’d known. I’m afraid I reacted to his promotion news with my usual off-brand repartee. “Butt-boy to a Captain now, eh?” is, as I recall, what I wrote back. Irwin’s reply will relieve you, though. Received a ’Nam-velope just two days ago containing nothing but the ace of hearts from a Sumo Wrestler card deck, featuring a rear-end view of a whale-sized specimen, upon whose dimpled cheeks he wrote:

  Mine’s still plenty tighter than yours, Big Fella. XOOX, Winnie

  Give my love to anybody who still believes in the stuff. I miss most of you—no, sorry: all of you—a lot.

  Everett

  From what Everett remembers, their correspondence must have been one of the odder exchanges going on in the world at the time: letter after intimate letter hopscotching the Pacific, half by a conscience-stricken, Bible-thumping SDA living out a Mekong Delta nightmare, half by a countryless, Natasha-less outlaw/anarchist holed up in a sodden nowhere in B.C. Whoever censored Army mail had a surprisingly light touch: Everett said that, judging by Irwin’s responses, everything he sent must have shot through unscathed—and he enclosed all the most rabid antiwar editorials, nightmarish photo essays and harrowing stories of American atrocities, South Vietnamese corruption and D.C. hypocrisy he could find in his efforts to “give you and your bullet-spraying buddies a less parochial view of Uncle Sam’s little overseas endeavor.” What made the correspondence really interesting, though, was that Irwin did show Everett’s offerings to his “bullet-spraying buddies,” inspiring a number of them to make suggestions (which Irwin passed on, unexpurgated, to Everett) as to how repeatedly and deeply the “chickenshit motherfuckin’ turncoat Canuck-suckin’ know-nuthin’” (etc. etc.) draft-dodger could shove his next batch of clippings up the various manholes, ducts and portals of his person. Everett’s reaction, however, was to pen genial responses to each of his verbal assailants, to thank them for their creative suggestions, and to claim to have tried and enjoyed them all. This amused most of them, won a few of them over, and an odd correspondence had developed.

  Everett’s side of the exchange, when it hadn’t been ribald or blackly comic, had apparently been preachy and condescending in the beginning. But when a guy named Bobby Calcagno wrote a letter that called Everett’s missives “inartistic,” it hit him where he lived. Or wished he lived. Artistic? he’d thought at first. Strange word in the mouth of a ’Nam grunt! But Calcagno had gone on to write a letter which even Everett admitted was artistic. He remembers the best part as saying something like: “Most of us are in ’Nam for the same reason you’re in B.C., Chance. We thought we had no choice. We were wrong, of course: we could have been there with you. And you were also wrong: you could have been here with us. But what we have in common is that we’ve all been kicked out of the house. And we don’t like it any better than you do. So let us proceed to please shuttup about which ear we landed on, left or right, and show each other a little courtesy and compassion.”

  Everett was so impressed by this that he tossed his next batch of Berkeley Barb and Village Voice clippings in the trash, took a ferry clear to Vancouver, went on a little shopping binge, and mailed his new pen pals the first of several shipments of what he called “kicked-out-of-t
he-House Warming Presents”: he sent back issues of obscure literary journals, joke books and comics, the best New Yorker cartoons, the quirkiest baseball stories and box scores; he sent peppermint, cinnamon and anise-flavored rolling papers, a book of exploding matches (“my contribution to the War Effort”), a few original poems, some home-tied wet flies that imitated raw rice (“for possible paddy or Delta carp fishing”) and any other heartening thing he could squeeze into a manila envelope. The arrival of these enhanced letters apparently became a series of little off-color Christmases for the guys on Irwin’s fire base. A couple of them even went so far as to apologize for having told Everett where to stick it, and admitted to wishing they’d dodged the draft themselves. To this, though, Everett said, “Hey, wait a minute!” And he sat down and penned a litany of the negative attributes of permanent exile in Canada. Which of course only inspired the grunts to fire back letters of the “You think you got problems!” sort. As a result, Everett rounded up a few other draft-dodging contestants, put up a twenty-dollar (Canadian) first prize, and appointed himself, Irwin and Bobby Calcagno the judges of what he called “THE FIRST, LAST & ONLY V.C. VERSUS B.C. HOMESICK TEARJERKER ESSAY-WRITING CONTEST.”

  But before a winner could be declared, neither Irwin nor Bobby Calcagno were in any shape to judge.

  I am incompetent, in obvious ways, to talk about the war in Vietnam. Though I finally did lose my student deferment, I discovered at my induction physical that I was 4-F due to legal blindness in my left eye (thank you, Vera, thank you, Papa). In other words, through what is known in some circles as tariki and in others as idiot luck, I was not forced to choose between serving in or running from the military, and so know nothing firsthand about this war.