the old Camas house/same Sabbath
As they drove up over the crest of the Clark Street hill, Mama and Bet were relieved to see Everett’s mud-splattered rustbucket Olds 88 parked at the curb in front of our house. No police yet. They could tell him goodbye …
But no matter how much we may admire each other’s occasional acts of heroism, our basic characters remain as definite and unchanging as our eye color, our facial structures, the shapes of our bones: as she neared the driveway Mama couldn’t help but notice that the butt end of Everett’s car appeared to be virtually Band-Aided together with bumpers tickers. She took care to ignore them at first, knowing they were certain to contain material corrosive to her resurrected love. But bumperstickers are to devout mothers almost what naked breasts are to prodigal sons. Who can resist a look? She read,
NO MATTER WHERE YOU GO,
THERE YOU ARE
and was relieved that she didn’t get it. She read,
U.S. OUT OF NORTH AMERICA!
and thought, Well, that one is Hugh’s mother’s fault. But then she read,
HONK IF YOU LOVE GEESES!
and
LOVE THINE ENEMIES, DO GOOD TO THOSE WHO HATE YOU: VOTE REPUBLICAN!
and
AMERICAN INDIANS HAD BAD IMMIGRATION LAWS
and
REALITY IS FOR PEOPLE WHO CAN’T HANDLE DRUGS
and Everett’s sacrifice for Irwin already seemed like something she must have dreamed. Then she read,
IN TIMES LIKE THESE, EVERYBODY NEEDS SOMETHING TO BELIEVE IN
I believe I’ll have another beer
and a small but wonderful thing happened. Turning to Bet, Mama began to laugh a kind of dry, openhearted laughter that had eluded her for years. “Your big brother,” she said, suddenly relishing the obvious, “is an incorrigible idiot!”
But Bet didn’t join in the laughter. She just pointed—and Mama turned, and saw two men coming out the front door, each with a hand round one of her incorrigible idiot’s biceps. Enormous men, with enormous hands. He looked like a child in their grip.
When Mama saw their suits her first thought was: “Adventists,” and she wondered why on earth they were handling him in this rude manner. But when she noticed the look on Everett’s face—anger, sullenness, defiance, though in his father’s huge suit he looked incredibly helpless—she realized they had to be government authorities of some kind. “Sorry, Mama!” he called out as she and Bet got out of their car. “About Papa’s suit, I mean. I came to say hi, and to turn myself in. But these guys, they’re FBI, were hiding inside. And they won’t let me change.”
Mama couldn’t speak.
An unmarked black Buick with tinted windows came gliding up to the curb behind Everett’s inflammatory Olds, and a third agent—the best dressed and biggest of the group—climbed out. The other two leaned Everett against the sleek car, hands flat on the roof, and began to search him. Meanwhile Freddy, Linda, Nash and I stepped out of the house to watch. Then Mama turned, and looked at us. And something in the sight of us there—something about seeing the morose remnant of her family gathered on the cracked concrete porch of the crummy but only home she’d ever owned, watching two feds prod and slap at her husband’s shabby but only suit and at Everett’s smallish but only body—threw her into a state. I recognized it at once by the body language: it was the same sense of violation, the same domestic outrage she had so often unleashed upon Everett. And what a twist, what a joy, to see it aimed, for Everett’s sake, at three employees of the FBI.
Crossing her arms and narrowing her eyes, she scrutinized the three agents, quickly and correctly ascertained that in their protozoan world the biggest specimen was the most important, lowered her head, and started marching grimly toward him. When she drew close he reached in his suit, produced his ID, and flashed it. But Mama ignored it. Or didn’t ignore it exactly. But she uncrossed her arms, stepped right in past it as if past a left jab, glared right up into his eyes, and—in the same baton/scepter/cattle prod voice that had created six pretty decent childhoods out of what would have otherwise been an endless round of teasing, lunacy, pugilism and pataphysics—said, “Would you mind telling me just what you’re trying to accomplish here?”
The big fed gazed down at her, looking like some zoo-worn rhino or elephant who was sick of humanity but stuck with it, so thank God his eyes were small and his hide and skull both about six inches thick.
“Just tell me,” Mama demanded, “in your own miserable words, what it is you think you’re doing here!”
The agent was not what I’d call cowed. But something in him found her sufficiently annoying to speak. “Your son is under arrest, ma’am,” he said. “For draft evasion. We read him his rights in the house.”
Mama snorted in his face. “You walk right into my house when I’m not even home. You arrest my son, who only came back here to help his brother. And then you don’t even have the decency to let him change out of my husband’s only good suit of clothes!”
The agent reached in his pocket, pulled out a pack of Clove gum, and eyed her with some dim form of wonder. “We arrest criminals in the clothes they’re wearing, ma’am,” he said, smirking slightly. “That’s the way the job works.”
“Then get a real job!” Mama retorted. “My boys are good boys! Every darned one of them! Do you hear me?”
The big fed glanced at his partners, shrugged his shoulders, and smirked again. But he’d quit trying to meet Mama’s eyes. And though he still held a stick of Clove between his thumb and finger, he hadn’t yet remembered to put it in his mouth.
“Do you hear me, you big lug? Are you listening to me? Who do you think you are anyway? We had a family here once. A tax-paying, Godfearing family. This was a home once, dammit! And it still could be, if know-it-alls and hotshots like you would just leave my boys alone! So why won’t you? Huh? Why don’t you? Why can’t you just let my sons live their lives?”
Linda and Bet were in tears now, and Everett and Freddy were sending Mama two of the most radiant smiles I’ve ever seen smiled. But the big fed was hanging tough. He looked kind of like a mailman now, eyeing Mama as if she were some rowdy, yapping little yard dog. He still wasn’t much disturbed by her: he was far too large and well programmed for that. But his hide had gone from rhino to mailman thickness in just moments, and you could see his mailmanness kind of squirming around in there, wondering whether, when he turned his back to leave, this irate little yard dog of a woman might not dart forward and chomp him on the back of the leg. “Get a hold of yourself, ma’am,” he said finally. “You can speak your piece at your son’s trial. You can write the President.”
Mama fired off another snort, but the agent had had enough. He darted around his big government car, climbed on in—and he never did remember to start chewing his stick of Clove. The other agents shoved Everett into the back, piled in themselves, the doors slammed shut, and that was that. We couldn’t see a thing through the car’s tinted windows.
But we could still see Mama, standing alone at the curb as the car pulled away, still trembling with domestic outrage, but also waving on the off chance that she could be seen. And we could hear her in the sudden quiet, murmuring, “Son. Everett. My son.”
BOOK SIX
Blue Box
CHAPTER ONE
We Support Our Troops
No discuss, just try.
—Kaka Baria
1. Those Who Could
We received just three phone calls from curious churchgoers on the afternoon of Everett’s sermon. But in all three cases Mama handled the calls, and in all three cases she really filled her listener’s ear, pounding home the fact that Everett’s return had been made at the cost of a prison sentence, that every word he spoke was true, that Irwin’s disastrous circumstances began with Elder Babcock’s betrayal, and that Babcock himself—after what she called “a little discussion with Papa”—had agreed to write a letter to Major Keys at the Mira Loma asylum, admitting as much. She added that if Irwin
’s old church mates were not interested enough in him to ask what they could do on his behalf, she would not be attending the First Adventist Church of Washougal again. Not much of a threat on the greater scale of things, maybe. But pretty strong talk from a petite little tithe-paying church lady. And it made an impression. It must have. Because on Sunday—after church and small-town gossip had had time to work their unreliable magic—we received fifteen or sixteen more calls. And these included a few tangible offers of modest economic help and so many offers of vague personal help that Mama scheduled an equally vague “What To Do About Irwin Meeting” for seven o’clock, in our livingroom, that same evening.
That our feelings had finally boiled out into the open had me in a state of euphoria all day. Our love for Irwin was no longer just a futile gnawing in our minds and chests. It was careening around the real world. It had lifted a pitch clean out of a stadium and a mother up onto a pew; it had inspired a church-hating agnostic to steal a pulpit, preach, and pray; it had hung an elder in the air by the back of his pants, had tried its flagrant and subtle best to get God’s attention, had even made the sports page. Our love for Irwin had become an incarnate force, and all that remained to be done—so it seemed in my euphoria—was figure out how to bring that force to bear upon the Colonel James Loffler Mental Health Center.
Euphoria, however, is a fragile companion: my sweetheart, Amy, put the first big hematoma in mine when she phoned shortly before seven to say that her boss refused to give her the night off (she was working two jobs that summer to keep her college career afloat) but that she was sending us her “prayers and best wishes” anyway. It wasn’t till I’d thanked her, hung up, and conveyed her message to my family that the hematoma was inflicted: that was when Bet told me that prayers and best wishes were the two very things Everett had promised would do Irwin no good at all.
Then those who could get the night off began to arrive. An old church mate and dessert-making employee of Mama’s, Dolores McKibben, joined us first. A sweet lady, seventy-five years old, astigmatism so severe that friends had given up trying to straighten her crooked wig and lipstick. Sister Ethel Harg and her walker clattered in next. Eighty-three years old. Loved to tease “kids” like Dolores. (“Astigmatism, hah! Have I told you what happened last Christmas to my colostomy bag?”) Sister Harg was escorted by that dynamic orator, Brother Beal, and by my preadolescent heartthrob, Nancy (massively pregnant for the third time). By the time the little Korean pastor, Elder Kim Joon, ducked in, kowtowing and glad-handing even Freddy’s dog, the five feet two inches of him looked like a veritable loose cannon compared to the rest of the group. We waited another half hour for our forces to swell. No such swelling occurred. Nancy Beal finally remarked that we could increase our ranks by one if we’d just wait a week or so for her to hatch. “But by then you might lose me,” Sister Harg pointed out with a desiccated chuckle.
“Not to mention Irwin,” Bet said, with no chuckle at all.
My brother’s rescue committee had arrived. So much for euphoria.
Mama and Linda started things off with cookies, milk and coffee.
Those with appetites, teeth and functioning colostomy bags ate and drank them.
Everyone then began tsk-tsk-tsking at Irwin’s plight and marveling at Everett’s heroism, tsk-tsk, marvel-marvel, over and over, till it grew obvious that we were an army with no weapons, no leader, no plan of attack and no notion of where or how to acquire them. Dolores McKibben asked about Babcock’s letter of retraction—a hot topic for those interested in church scuttlebutt. But none of us had seen the letter. Mama said that Papa had described it over the phone as “brief but extremely sincere.” But sincere or not, it hadn’t helped. She then told how Papa had broken down on the phone, saying that it couldn’t have been worse if the Vietcong had Irwin. And the only thing that had changed since that call, she added, was that Papa and Major Keys had “had words,” that the Major had banned all visitors for Irwin, and that he’d promised to have Papa arrested if he so much as set foot on hospital grounds.
At this point in our gathering even the tsk-tsking stopped and we fell into a silence so long and boggy that Brother Beal finally took it as a cue. “Maybe the best thing we can do under these terribly trying circumstances,” he said in his worst Sabbath School wheedle, “is get down on our knees together, right here and now, and all send our dear Irwin one heck of a big, heartfelt prayer …”
I am not normally the public-speaking type. In groups larger than two I’m seldom even the speaking type. But when Beal’s suggestion met with murmurs of approval, something jolted me to my feet, and before I could think I was shouting, “Forget it! No way! We have to act! Now!”
I came to at that point and turned scarlet-faced, confused and cotton-mouthed—my usual forensics tactics. But my heart remained full enough to enable me to explain. I said, “Papa and Everett aren’t kidding. Irwin isn’t just dying down there. He’s being killed. We can’t lose sight of that. Because when someone you love is being killed, you don’t just sit home and pray. You steal time from your life and money from your till and try your damnedest to go save them. The very least we can do, the least I can do anyhow, is join Papa outside those locked gates in Mira Loma. And if the gates won’t open, if it still seems hopeless once I’m there, that will be the time for the heartfelt prayers.”
There was a brief silence, during which I saw that, at the very least, I had offended Mama, both the Beals and Sister Harg. But then Elder Joon, of all people, burst out, “Yes! Yes yes yes, Kincaid! And maybe on our journey, or once we are there, the Lord will show us the best way to help!”
The stares that most of our group gave him were more stunned or miffed than grateful. But his outburst set off a remarkable chain reaction. First Mama said, “Does this mean you’re coming with us, Elder Joon?”
Then I asked Mama, “Does that mean you’re coming with me?”
“Why, of course!” Elder Joon told Mama.
“What do you think?” Mama snapped at me.
“The crooks at Motor Vehicles stole my license when I took their damn volunteer test,” growled Sister Harg. “But I’ve got a good car if one of you will drive it. And I’m coming too, whether you want my old bones or not.”
“We want your old bones very much,” Mama said. “But we won’t be needing your car. I’ve got the transportation taken care of.”
This was a neat trick, since I’d just conceived of the journey a few seconds before.
“Count us in,” said Nancy Beal. “Me and this one, that is,” she added, patting her huge belly. “Randy’ll have to stay here and watch the kids.”
Turning pale with terror, Brother Beal, with real passion, blurted, “I’m coming! I’ll use some sick leave! My mom can watch the kids!”
Nancy burst out laughing, but shrugged and said fine.
“It’d take ten of me to make one of you, Laura,” Dolores McKibben put in. “But what I’d like to do, if you want it done, is take your calls while you’re gone, maybe handle your mail, and just do what I can to keep your businesses operating.”
When Mama grew teary-eyed at this offer, and Sister Harg let loose with one of her museum-piece Amens, I had a sudden vision of the whole godly clump of us sitting outside a chain-link-and-barbwire-fenced compound in the California heat, watching Irwin and the other bideeps drool on themselves while we crooned “Bringing in the Sheaves” and fired off Big Heartfelt Prayers. Trouble was, I had no better plan. And there was this too: though the prospect of our journey gave me no hope whatever, it filled me at once with a surge of completely unfounded joy.
· · · ·
What Elder Joon, the Beals, and the Sisters Harg and McKibben all failed to realize was just how quickly Mama changes from PFC to Field Commander once a course of action has been set. Ethel Harg’s Amen was still ringing in our ears when Mania jumped up, marched into the kitchen, grabbed a notepad, pen and telephone, and turned her attention to logistical matters—where her true genius soon shone.
Her first move was to enlist Uncle Marv and Aunt Mary Jane as allies and their gas-guzzling Nomad RV as a combination hotel/personnel carrier. Her second move was to return to the livingroom, thank everybody for coming, adjourn the meeting, and send everyone but Dolores McKibben home to pack. “We’ll leave the minute you’re all back,” she announced, leaving no room for discussion or objection. “It’s a long drive, and past time we got there. We can sleep in shifts on the road.”
It fascinated me to see how, when faced with Mama in Command Mode, even the formidable likes of Ethel Harg and Nancy Beal just nodded and followed orders.
Her third move was to call up her mystery brother, Truman. And the instant he answered we overheard this lopsided exchange: “Truman? Laura here. Listen. Make some coffee. Eat a meal. Sober up. Close your shop. And have your camper, your automotive tools and your ugly mug on my doorstep in six hours’ time. It’s a matter of life and death.”
When Truman asked whose, she answered, “Yours, if you’re late. But drive safely. You can sleep when you get here. And one more thing, just to show you I’m serious. I’ll have all the cold beer you want waiting here in the icebox. Yes, you heard me. Yes, I swear it on my Bible. No, this is not one of Marvin’s pranks. Now shuttup and come on. Bye-bye.” Click.
This was the first time we’d heard it so much as hinted that Uncle Truman was a drinker. At last we knew why we never saw him. And an even greater surprise: never before had Mama offered anyone on earth a beer. We all understood that she had just swallowed her deepest, most visceral prejudice to recruit a competent mechanic for our caravan. She was playing for keeps now—same as the U.S. Army.
The Brothers K Page 69