The Brothers K

by David James Duncan

  Dessinger was no longer playing possum: he was watching the Sikh the way a cornered mouse watches the cat. But thanks to his sleepless night and empty stomach, one swig of whiskey had given Peter a new lease on life. “Listen,” he lied. “Skin color isn’t important where I come from. In America, all people are equal. Every color, every sex. Which means not only that you’re equal to me, but that women are equal to both of us. So marriages are never arranged. And not even a king can marry a little girl. It’s the law. In America, girls grow up into women, then marry whoever they choose. So you’re welcome to my sisters, Kalsa and Gobindh Singh—if you win their hearts when the time comes. But that’s between you, them and the gods. I’ve got no part in it.”

  Gobindh was nodding thoughtfully at all this. Kalsa was looking more pissed off than ever. Peter decided a second puff on the peace pipe might be in order: “Gimme another swig o’ that shit you got there, Gobindh,” he drawled.

  Gobindh Singh smiled, and did so.

  When the train reached Parbhani, Kalsa and Gobindh Singh rode off over the Dakota prairie to rope some more whiskey. Dessinger was hugely relieved when the train left before they’d returned. Peter, to his own surprise, was a little disappointed: he’d had no idea how swiftly the miles could pass with the help of a little cognitive dissonance, fear and booze. Dessinger had also left the train in Parbhani—to find a latrine, Peter assumed. But he’d returned very soon in the company of a stranger who really snapped the suspenders on Peter’s disbelief: the guy was an easy 6′4″ and wore cowboy boots, a Western shirt and a black string tie with a silver buffalo clasp. He struck Peter the instant he saw him not as a flesh-and-blood human but as some sort of mock-mythical being that had sprung into the world straight out of Gobindh Singh’s cattle-punchin’ third eye. As the newcomer heaved two enormous suitcases up into the luggage rack, he bellowed, “Theodore Bartholomew Waites,” then spun around, shook Peter’s hand in bone-crunching Western fashion, and added, “But you damn better call me T Bar.”

  The dissonance was back. Despite a lifelong aversion to the nicking of names, Peter heard himself say, “Call me Pete, T Bar.”

  “I been ridin’ two cars ahead since the air-conditioners blew,” Waites told him. “But Dessinger here says the natives are a bit restless up the line, and that maybe us Yanks ought to stick together for a stretch. So here I am.”

  “Here he is,” said Dessinger, looking up at Waites, then smiling hugely at Peter.

  For reasons he didn’t fully understand, Peter was enormously relieved to learn that boots, tie and handshake notwithstanding, T Bar knew nothing about “ropin’ an’ ridin’.” Though he made his home in Livingston, Montana, he confessed that he’d lived all but the last year of his life in various suburbs of LA. “What was my line, you ask?” he said, though no one had asked him. He then answered himself, saying that he’d been in the import business “ever since God invented hippies,” mostly incense “for head shops and guru-hounds” but also bangles, curios, a little jewelry. But his mainstay, the incense, would crap out soon, he predicted. “No offense, Pete,” he said, eyeing his ponytail, “but this hippie shit’s about dead in the water. Did you know the same chemical giant that makes glow-in-the-dark Frisbees for acidheads makes napalm for the Pentagon? Did you know Bob Dylan left the lyric sheet off his last mumbly record so you gotta buy the four ninety-five songbook from CBS to grasp the antimaterialistic lyrics? An’ what is a hippie anyway? Just a dope-smokin’ college brat, usually. And wait’ll the war’s over, the brats finish college, and daddy says, ‘Kiss my ass and like it or kiss your inheritance bye-bye.’ Man, we’re gonna see barbers in hair up to their armpits! We’re gonna see bra and Bible sales rise from the dead! We’re gonna see peacemongers and acid-retreads stormin’ Madison Av and Wall Street sellin’ brain, body and soul to the biggest corporate buyers they can find. We’re gonna see—” And T Bar went on with a list of mostly accurate predictions. But Peter was hardly listening anymore. Waites had begun to irritate him for his style alone—because the style had begun to remind him of Everett.

  Dessinger also appeared to be having trouble following the big neo-Montanan. But he seemed not so much irritated as distracted, perhaps even anxious. It made Peter want to hear more about the “restless natives” up the line. But Waites’s torrential monologue made a change of topic impossible. After going into excruciating detail about the killing he’d made selling his import business, and the little gem of a cattle ranch and the downtown Bozeman sporting-goods store he’d purchased with the pelf, Waites said, “Why sportin’ goods, you ask?” though again no one had asked him. He then jumped to his feet, pulled down one of his two suitcases, unlocked it, flung it open—and Dessinger’s bewilderment seemed to verge on horror when all they saw inside were countless plastic bags full of exotic feathers, animal fur, tails of deer, hackles of hens, elk hide, spools of gaudy thread, vises, clamps, tinsel, scissors and literally hundreds of little cardboard boxes, each with a different-sized fishhook Scotch-taped to its top.

  “Fly-tying equipment,” Peter said, if only to dispel Dessinger’s confusion.

  Waites grinned like a gambler who’s just laid down a royal flush. “You heard it first from T Bar, gents. Fly-fishing is on the brink of becoming to ex-hipsters what golf has been to the World War Two-ers. ’Cause think about it. It’s cheaper, it’s outdoorsier, it’s less exclusive, it’s less bourgeois. It’s got the magic of the sand wedge, the yo-yo and the Frisbee rolled into one. It’s pretty well useless, which makes it pretty well incorruptible. And—”

  “I get it,” Peter interrupted, because he suddenly did. “You’re going to hire Indians to tie flies for zilch, then undercut the American market.”

  “You may dress funny, Pete,” Waites replied, “but don’t let ’em tell ya you’re stupid. The best American outlets sell trout flies at four bits wholesale an’ a buck retail, which barely covers their buns once they pay their tiers a shit wage. But if the import biz has taught me anything, it’s that this continent is crawlin’ with sweet little Hindu ladies who’ll work handcrafted miracles for you for a rupee a day and fuckin’ praise the great god Ramadamadiddle for the golden opportunity!”

  When Peter greeted his exultant hoot with silence, Waites tried to squeeze his brow into an earnest scowl. “I’ll pay one and a half rupees, Pete—a decent wage by their standards.” But T Bar’s brow was like Teflon: earnestness just wouldn’t stick. “The story gets better,” he said. “In Hyderabad, where I just came from, and in Nasik, where I’m headin’, a big Taiwanese sportin’-goods outfit beat me to the punch. Kodiak Outdoors. You’ve heard of ’em. They had a half a hundred women in each city tyin’ flies for a penny apiece. Trouble was, even at ten for a buck the flies wouldn’t sell in the States, so last summer Kodiak axed the whole operation. But ol’ T Bar, see, just took a big batch o’ their flies, had some Montana fly-fishin’ experts fish ’em and dissect ’em, and found out the craftsmanship was fine. Only trouble was the cut-rate Indian materials. They looked gaudy, the dries wouldn’t float, and they all fell to hell when a trout smacked ’em. So see where they left me?” He let out another hoot. “Kodiak trained a hundred expert fly-tiers for me, then flew the flippin’ coop! All’s I gotta do is waltz into Nasik same as I just did Hyderabad, win their unemployed hearts back with the half-rupee raise, hand ’em the same topflight materials the Montana fly shops use, hire the meanest to be my supervisor, jet back home, and start settin’ the American fly market on its ear!”

  “Hhhnn,” said Peter, gulping down a violent yawn. (Dessinger had long since curled up against the window and pretended to be asleep.) But T Bar was his own best audience:

  “What we got in a nutshell, Pete, is a horde o’ hip-booted crazies on one side o’ the world who’ll pay a buck for a clump o’ feathers, a horde of quick-fingered Hindu crazies on the opposite side who’ll crank ’em out for squat, an’ a tall, dark, not-bad-lookin’ lion o’ commerce name o’ T Bar about to knot the two together like a mail-orde
r man and wife. It’s the Global Village concept, is all it is, really.”

  “Ahnmmnn,” said Peter. They were coming in waves now.

  “Free enterprise to the rescue o’ two fine sets o’ people.”

  “Mhmmnn.”

  “Beautiful, idn’t it?”

  “Yeahnnmmm. ’Scuse me. It’s beautiful.”

  Jalna to Aurangabad/same journey

  Dessinger left the train again in Jalna, again returned promptly, again brought company, and again they were Westerners—this time a pair of pack-toting hippies. Introducing the female as Akasha and the male as Kwester (he’d had to spell both names for the disbelieving T Bar), Dessinger had deposited them on the vacant seats across the aisle from Peter and Waites, grabbed one of two canvas satchels lying in his luggage rack, and vanished again, presumably to another car, since the train was soon rolling and he’d left his other satchel behind.

  It continued to be a bizarre day for accents: though born and raised in Athens, Georgia, Kwester had been on the road so long and had sent so many nonprescription medicaments coursing through his brain that a few nonessentials such as his Southern accent and inductive reasoning had gotten Cloroxed out, making every sentence he spoke sound sort of like a Doobie Brothers lyric. Akasha, on the other hand, was a broad-beamed, enormous-breasted, decidedly down-to-earth-looking German woman who picked up and set down English as if each word was a brick, yet almost every word she spoke was in direct defiance of her broadness and down-to-earthness. Her first utterance, for example, was: “My name means Light.” (To which Waites had testily replied, “Well, mine means T Bar!” Having obviously not begun the crucial migration from hippieness toward trout flies, Kwester and Akasha had thrown Waites’s entrepreneurial soul into a sudden Dark Night.)

  Spotting Peter’s braid, Kwester, who was also braided, took it as a sure sign of joint membership in a vague but intimate International Brotherhood and became the third straight passenger to open fire at Pete with an intimate chunk of his biography. The story he chose to relate concerned a tragic first meeting between himself and Akasha in Istanbul years before, where they’d both failed to perceive (admittedly because of the low price and high quality of the local hashish) that they were made for each other. “I see the problem,” Waites remarked, ogling Akasha’s chest. “Prob’ly thought you’d get busted.”

  Kwester didn’t get it. He was too busy staring into Akasha’s eyes as he told how they’d just met again in Benares, discovered that they’d independently sworn off drugs, discovered that they were “twin souls,” discovered love, discovered that Kwester had “scored a Master,” discovered that Akasha had been “sussing out the same Dude,” and so had become spiritual pilgrims, “on our way to ’Nagar, man,” to visit Kwester’s Master’s “samadhi.”

  “What’s a nogger?” Waites asked, still eyeing Akasha’s bosoms.

  “Nickname for Ahmednagar,” Peter said. “A Maharashtran city.”

  “What’s a smoddy?” he asked.

  “Samadhi,” Peter corrected. “A saint’s tomb.”

  “Not a Saint!” Akasha proclaimed, in bricks. “This Is the Tomb of God Incarnate!”

  “Always did figure that sucker was dead,” muttered Waites.

  “He Heard That!” Akasha warned.

  “God never really comes and never really goes,” Kwester explained. “He uses human forms like suits of clothes, and He can change His suit at will.”

  Giving Kwester’s dust- and mango- and pee-stained cotton pants a disgusted glance, Waites said, “So can I. What’s holdin’ you up?”

  Realizing at last that he was being insulted, Kwester made his hands into mudras and commenced to look cosmic. Akasha, on the other hand, looked about ready to drop a whole hod of English bricks on Waites’s head, when Dessinger suddenly returned, looking worried. “In half an hour we’ll be in Aurangabad,” he said. “Have any of you heard the news from there recently?”

  “How can you hear news when the common tongue is Yuggedy-yuggedy?” Waites wanted to know. “It’s bad enough tryin’ to figure out which fuckin’ town you’re in. Like here … There we go!” He was pointing at a sign out the window. It said:

  “And ask an Indian,” he ranted, “even an English-speakin’ Indian, and you get the cerebral-palsy head wag and the ‘Ah cha.’ ‘Is this Samadhinogger?’ ‘Ah cha.’ ‘Is it Paris?’ ‘Ah cha.’ ‘Is it Topeka, Kansas?’”

  “Can I have the floor a minute?” Dessinger cut in.

  “Ah cha,” said Waites.

  “I get the news. In English, from this.” Dessinger opened the satchel on his shoulder and let them glimpse a complicated-looking little radio with a telescoping antenna. “I didn’t want to ruin everybody’s journey. But it’s time you all knew that there is serious racial tension in Aurangabad. Anti-Western tension.”

  Dessinger looked enviable, suddenly, in his Indian spectacles, complexion and clothes. “Large crowds have been roving the streets there,” he said. “And one of the places they’ve been frequenting is the train station. There’s been no rioting or looting. But it’s not that kind of tension. I hate to say it to this group, but the whole mess started three days ago when some long-haired, overdosing Westerner killed a Muslim boy. A very young Muslim boy. Unfortunately the man was only seen, not caught, and the description was vague. ‘Hippie’ was about it. And I’m afraid the crowds in the streets are Muslim vigilantes.”

  Bursting with sudden altruism, T Bar leapt to his feet, banged his head hard on the luggage rack, but ignored it completely to suggest that Kwester, Akasha and Peter, for their own safety, should detrain at the next stop and detour the city.

  “There is no next stop,” Dessinger said.

  “Why the fuck didn’t you tell us!” Waites blored. “But wait wait wait wait! Calm down, ever’body! Okay, I got it. Just get your gear together, say when, an’ ol’ T Bar’ll pull the emergency cord for ya!”

  Dessinger shook his head. “To be found wandering alone this close to the city would be the most suspicious behavior possible,” he said.

  “Well shit!” Waites nearly squeaked. “Is there someplace to hide ’em on the train?”

  “To be caught hiding would raise the same suspicions,” said Dessinger.

  “Hey, man,” Kwester interjected. “Me an’ Akasha are gettin’ off at Aurangabad, we’re walkin’ to the bus station, we’re goin’ to ’Nagar, an’ that’s all there is to it. The Dude in the Tomb will protect us, or not, as He sees fit.”

  “Fine!” T Bar blurted. “Just fine! But do me one small favor first.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Get the hell outta this car!”

  “Easy, Man! We’re All Brothers,” averred Akasha, bosoms and all.

  “We’re one,” Kwester added, nodding solemnly.

  “Listen, asshole!” snapped Waites. “You and me are two. One, two! Got it?”

  Kwester stared at him pityingly. Peter felt sick. “Don’t give me that look, Pete,” Waites pleaded, his voice shaking now. “If they were clubbing cowboys up the line, I’d have the decency to leave you alone, or at least take my damn boots, shirt an’ tie off. But hey! There we go! I got thirty little pairs o’ fly-tyin’ scissors here! How ’bout a quick haircut, Kwes and Pete?”

  Kwester looked horrified. Peter considered it. Then Dessinger said, “A fresh, sloppy haircut would raise the same kind of suspicions as hiding.”

  “Well fuck a fucking duck, what do we do?” T Bar yelled.

  “We calm down, to begin with,” Dessinger said. “If Kwester just cleans up a bit, we should all be safe and sound as is. If there’s an ugly crowd at the station, Grayson has promised to be there.”

  “Who the hell is Grayson?” Waites wanted to know.

  Dessinger responded with a peculiar tale. Robert Louis Grayson was an expatriated Englishman who had lived in Aurangabad since early boyhood, during the final days of the Raj. He had converted to Islam more than a decade ago, and according to rumor had also been initiated into a
very secretive Sufi order. He now lived in the Muslim sector of Aurangabad, where he was held in an esteem that verged on reverence. He had three wives and many children, made his living as some kind of counsel to a local member of the Indian Parliament, knew virtually every Muslim in the city, and most of the important Hindus, Sikhs and Parsis as well. And he considered it a point of honor, whenever racial or religious tensions in his hometown threatened to get out of control, to intercede between factions. According to Dessinger, he was fearless in such situations, and invaluable: he had probably saved hundreds of lives over the past decade. But his modesty was such that he thought nothing of it.

  “I work for Grayson, by the way,” Dessinger added, smiling at the group’s obvious surprise and delight. “Please,” he said, looking straight at Waites. “Try not to be tense with each other. Remember, they’re looking for a maniac who murdered a little boy. What child killer would be part of a relaxed group of friends?”

  Aurangabad/same journey

  By the time the train reached the outskirts of the troubled city, Akasha had vanished behind a sleeping bag and reemerged in a spectacularly ill-fitting pink sari, Kwester had donned an oversized but clean white shirt and pair of pants of Peter’s, Peter had changed into his dress shirt and tie and stuffed his braid down his collar, Waites had nailed a smile to his face with several stiff swigs of Teacher’s scotch, and the whole group was positively vibrating with Relaxed-Group-of-Friends-type behaviors. Their preparations were no exercise in paranoia either: as the train rolled into the station they immediately spotted easily a hundred very unhappy-looking Indian men milling around a tall, gaunt fellow in an elegant off-white suit. “There!” Dessinger cried the instant he saw him. “Thank God! It’s Grayson.”

  Curious as he was about this mythical-sounding figure, the first thing Peter noticed was that the vigilantes weren’t on the station platform. They were gathered on a plaza on the opposite side of the train, across an empty second track, where the comings and goings of passengers weren’t even visible. Dessinger noticed this too, and his response was dramatic: “I hope I’m wrong,” he said, “but this looks more than a little like a trap. Please stay here!” And before the train stopped rolling he jumped into the crowd on the platform, circled around behind their car, crossed the tracks, and shouldered his way in through the Muslim men, who paid him little heed. Their reason for ignoring him was troubling, however: most of them were searching the windows of the train—and many had already pointed out, and begun muttering about, Kwester, Akasha, Peter and Waites. “Jesus God!” T Bar groaned.