The Brothers K

by David James Duncan

  “Kincaid,” she said the instant the phone hit the cradle. “Would you change the oil in the Dodge, please? There’s a filter under the spare in the wayback. Check the tires while you’re at it. Then run down and buy some beer. Whatever’s cheapest. But lots of it.”

  I was tempted to salute before starting out the door. I was also tempted to hug her. But at the rate she was moving, either would have seemed like a waste of time.

  “Okay,” I heard her muttering as I headed out the door. “We got our transportation. Got our accommodations. Bet, could you gather up the decent sleeping bags, and plenty of kitchen and bath towels? Freddy, would you mind watching Nash? Linda honey. There’ll be thirteen people, and maybe three, four meals. Start thinking about food. Dolores. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this. Come on in by my desk and we’ll talk business …”

  2. Relativity

  With the prisons full and the war beginning to wind down, most draft-dodgers at the time of Everett’s sentencing were getting eighteen months. Everett got three years. According to his court-appointed lawyer, the arrest record from his radical days may have been the judge’s excuse for the harsh sentence, but the real reason for it was the fact that the judge—one Saul Gosman—was a University of Washington alum who used to read Everett’s “Give Chance a Peace” column in the school paper.

  “Looking on the bright side,” Everett wrote in his first letter home, “what a thrill for any writer to be so vividly remembered. And what a thrill for any reader to get to whack actual fractions off a hated writer’s life! True, it’s my life being whacked. But think how happy I made Judge Gosman. ‘You think you write a mean sentence,’ he was in effect telling me. ‘Try this one on for size.’”

  There was a strained quality to this good cheer. Everett was frightened, and the comic tone was bravado. But once the gavel fell, what choice did he have? It takes toughness to endure punishment—and he was trying, without losing his sense of humor, to make himself tough.

  His sentence was to be served at the Wahkiakum County Work Camp outside Kashelweet, Washington, a minimum-security facility in the gloomy heart of the Coast Range. “Early parole is rare,” he wrote, “which is good, since I won’t have to betray my true nature trying to earn time off for good behavior.” He then went into a description of the camp, and of his fellow inmates—and as he warmed up to his topic I was happy to hear him sounding more and more like himself:

  A penitentiary this is not. That was the first pleasant surprise. No guard towers, no searchlights, no electric or barbwire or any other sort of fence. Nothing but a cinderblock wall around us, and this wall, I kid you not, is three feet tall. They take the term “minimum security” very seriously here! But since we’re nine miles up a gravel road from Hwy 101 and twenty from a logging town whose inmates are meaner than the camp’s, there’s really nowhere to go but into the hills. And the guards almost seem to encourage escape attempts, since then they get to play army with their expensive bloodhounds & dirt-bikes & four-wheel drives & radios & guns & shit.

  The camp’s population is three hundred—all men, guards included. At first it reminded me of an Adventist Summer Camp, but lately I’ve seen that it’s really more like a hippie health-food restaurant, i.e., it’s cooperative, and the food sucks. Prisoners do the laundry, the cooking, maintain the buildings, fix the roads—we’re nearly self-sufficient. If, as I keep suggesting, they’d just fire the warden and guards and put us on the honor system we could even be cost-efficient. We live in eight block “dorms,” three dozen or so men to a single wide-open room, with latrines at one end, which we keep incredibly clean, but the vents are so small the main dorm smell is still piss smell. (Pray they never serve asparagus!) Our bunks line the walls, and we’ve got footlockers for private property—books, smokes, shaving kit, writing utensils, mail from loved ones hint hint. All mail in and out except letters to and from lawyers or Senators is stamped with my prison number, and supposedly censored. But I’ve heard the censors are so lazy that if you write sloppily and longwindedly (two gifts God gave me at birth) you can say most anything. Even stuff like “Meet me with the machine guns at the front gate at noon tomorrow.” (If you could read that last sentence you’ll know the rumors were true.)

  We rise at 6:30 for a choice of cold cereal or oat glue in the mess hall, are on the job by 8, and work till 5 like the rest of America. Only big difference is the six or eight head-counts a day and the lack of hair on the heads being counted. (They gave us pig-shaves. Not a real happening look for me.) I chose a tree-planting crew for the fresh air, physical labor, chance to see the outside world. What a bonehead! The only world we see is clearcuts. We get ready-made sack lunches and a half hour to eat them—which is half an hour too long for this cuisine. Then it’s back to the camp for showers and “dinner,” which is one of six or seven versions of instant spuds and hamburger unless there’s a newspaper reporter coming. Then we get steak.

  Another culinary problem: the thieving. The con cooks get butter, for instance, but steal it for bartering and use lard in our bread. Fresh fruit and vegetables arrive by the truckload but never reach our plates. (I figure the guards cut a deal with a retail grocer somewhere.) Cons and guards both steal the good stuff, everybody knows who hoards what, and if you want something bad enough you can pay some free-enterprising son of a bitch through the nose. But I’m not that American. I live on cold cereal mostly, which tastes just like it did back home, and you can take it to the “dorm” and eat alone if you want—like me and this box of Shredded Wheat are doing this instant.

  Not that I haven’t made friends. Like the camp itself, the inmates aren’t as scary as I’d feared. The breakdown, according to our sagacious prison officials, is:

  30% “Serious Criminals”—which you’d think would mean drug-dealers, manslaughterers, grand larcenists, embezzlers, counterfeiters, etc., but mostly turns out to mean a bunch of poor yo-yos being lavishly punished for possession of minuscule amounts of pot.

  30% “Mexicans”—not criminals at all, these poor pedros, but the second or third time they cross the border without papers Uncle Sam hands ’em an all-expenses-paid trip to this vacation haven.

  40% “Draft-dodgers”—over 120 men in this camp alone—who our scholarly prison officials further categorize as follows:

  1. “Jehovah’s Witnesses”—more commonly known (thanks to me) as “T.I.’s” (stands for Theologically Impaired). And it’s a rip that Uncle Sam won’t give ’em C.O. status, since they spend every waking hour trying to infect the rest of us with their Impairment.

  2. “Activists”—among whom I find myself lumped thanks to my various sittings-in, peace-disturbings, FBI record, SDA membership and so on … (Ha! Gotcha, didn’t I!? SDA membership? Students for a Democratic Advent?)

  3. “Pacifists”—by far the most likable, least selfish, most reliable men in the camp. And it breaks my heart to think how beautifully Irwin would have fit among these militantly soft-hearted clowns. But that’s water under the bridge, ain’t it.

  4. “Hippies” is what the prison staff calls the fourth group. But what they really mean, I think, is “Guys Who Failed To Report For Induction When Reality And Unreality Got So Indistinguishable They No Longer Knew Which One To Report For It In.” Or “GWFTRFIWRAUGSITNLKWOTRFII’s,” for short.

  “Like I told my judge,” one named Moonfish explained to me the other day, “judge I said, truly, to like punish a person, like with prison and shit, for failing to carry out black-and-white-type instructional material printed on two-dimensional-type surfaces such as induction papers is foolish in the extreme, man, scientifically speaking, since with relativity happening, like with energy equalling mass and shit, the Following-2-D-Directions-Back-Out-Into-A-3-D-World Situation has gotten totally out of control. What I’m driving at your honor, in story form, is how you yourself, to cite one razor-sharp-minded example, could park your actual two-tone Ford LTD well within the white or possibly yellow lines of an actual supermarket parking spa
ce, step inside for some shopping, tote your brown bags of products back out to said space, and find an alpaca standing there, same two tones as the LTD, man, but ready to spit in your face if you stick in the key, which could brown you off so bad you say screw the car and drive the grocks home in the alpaca anyhow, figuring (righteously, I would say) that the two-tones means the beast is, molecularly speaking, yours. Except that when you like canter in the driveway—and here we reach the scientific heart of the matter—even with E equalling MC, let alone squared, there could be a fuckin’ thunderegg in the middle of your lawn where the split-level used to be. Or a small lake full of duckweed. Or just sand, and a fuckin’ yucca plant. That’s all I’m saying. But looking again at the old where-and-what-is-my-draft-board-type questions in light of events such as these, we see the truly answerous answers are not so easy to locate. So think hard, is my good word to you, your judgeship, before jailing up your fellow man for one of these 2-D hey-what’s-induction? type errors.”

  Moonfish got three years too, by the way. But enough Wahkiakum.

  The good news is, we’re allowed two visitors from 1 to 3 p.m. on the first and third Sundays of every month. The bad news is, which two of you? I’ll leave that to you, as long as somebody shows up! Meanwhile my needs are simple: I only want to hear everything, from everyone. Especially about Irwin. Write soon! Write tons!

  Love, Everett

  3. Presence

  At 4:50 A.M. on June 3, 1971, the “We Want Winnie Caravan” (Linda had spontaneously named us during the Adventist contingent’s parting round of Heartfelt Prayers) eased into the empty streets of Camas. I was sitting at the dinnertable of my aunt and uncle’s thirty-two-foot Nomad as we departed, the top of which table was a four-color Formica highway map of the United States. When I lay my arm on this map with my elbow on Camas, I could touch LA with my fingertips: Irwin was an arm’s length away. Outside a late-spring rain was falling, and the Crown Z mill, as we left it in our wake, was doing its best to turn the gray dawn grayer. We had no planned stops and no plan of action. When we’d telephoned Papa to tell him we were coming he’d had no words of encouragement or advice. But after so many weeks of helpless fear and waiting, the mere act of setting forth—the physical sensation of being thirteen humans moving as fast as we could toward a place where we hoped to accomplish one clear and simple good—was almost more than I could handle. If I’d had a board I could have surfed the waves of affection I kept feeling for my fellow travelers. Almost anything set me off. The way Aunt Mary Jane looked up at the wheel of the Nomad in her blue cowgirl boots, amberlensed aviator glasses and a red baseball cap that said “Totally Electric” above the bill. The trucker-esque snoring, in the curtained-off bed in back, of old Sister Harg. The dovelike cooing of baby Nash as Linda lay nursing him in one of the bunks. The silhouettes, in the Dodge wagon up in front of us, of Elder Joon and Freddy’s dog Suncracker, sitting side by side like a placid old married couple. The unshaved faces, in the ratty GMC pickup a few car lengths behind, of Brother Beal and Uncle Truman, sipping from their coffee mugs and chatting equably, though even as I watched Truman was refilling his own mug with his fourth or fifth beer. The way Uncle Marv was staggering round the Nomad’s bucking cabin, stowing loose gear and food in closets and cupboards. The way Mama was staggering around right behind him, restowing everything in a more sensible place. The perfectly deadpan expression Marv kept when he noticed this, started singing the bluegrass tune “Pig in a Pen,” and began stowing stuff in the stupidest, most out-of-the-way places possible. The equally deadpan expression Mama wore as she began humming “Nearer My God to Thee” and banging her kid brother into walls and closets with her hip …

  We were headed for an insane asylum in California. We looked more as if we’d escaped from one. But in the pouring gray rain, I felt clarity. With the war still raging, I felt peace. With Papa in despair, Everett in prison and Irwin in the asylum, I felt release. I didn’t understand my feelings, didn’t even desire them, really, but they kept filling me so full that my eyes began to well. Which embarrassed me. So I finally stood up, darted into the tiny bathroom, locked the door.

  “Why didn’t you do that at home?” I heard Mama mutter outside. And even this! Even this filled me with elation. The tires began to drone against the metal grid of the Interstate Bridge. Uncle Marv started singing in tune with the drone. Little Nash kept cooing. Out the little window, green girders flashing. On the window curtains, green-headed mallards facing north, flying south. The gray Columbia straight down below us. Everything in question, nothing resolved—yet an overwhelming sense of resolution. I didn’t understand any of it, didn’t know what I was saying, but I found myself suddenly whispering to my brother, a thousand miles to the south, “You know this feeling, don’t you?”

  Something inside me turned fierce. “How you laugh that way. Why you love us all. This is what you live by, isn’t it?”

  I heard Mama, humming still, knock Marvin right into the bathroom door. Heard the tires’ drone become a shishing as we hit the asphalt on the Oregon side. Sister Harg kept snoring. Baby Nash kept cooing. Pain and sorrow never end. Nothing we do is enough. It’s always been this way. “But joy,” I whispered to Irwin. “This joy. It’s boundless too, and endless. So hold on. This isn’t theirs to knock out of you. It’s not yours to lose. It’s not mine either. But it’s making the trip. It’s coming. So please. Just hold on.”

  4. Myshkin

  The solo journey mentioned in the following letter—from Arizona to Shyashyakook, B.C.—took place on the same days, and for one of the same reasons, as our caravan journey to Mira Loma: somebody was trying their desperate best, without really knowing how, to help Irwin. So here is her letter:

  Dear Everett,

  I have so much to tell you and want to say it all so fast that it’s too big, too scary, there’s nowhere to begin. But it was your letter—all 211 pages of it—that got me this far. So I’ll try to start there. It caught up with me four days ago. I don’t know where on earth you found Grandma Maggie’s address (she’s been dead twenty-two years), but the daughter of the family who bought her old house in Knoxville, one Bitsy Buchanan, was on high school rally squad with my mom, still sends Xmas cards, funeral notices and so on. So she just mailed it. Or read it and mailed it. (Her note to my mom began, “What in heaven’s name is going on between your poor daughter and this odd young man?”) (The underlines are all Bitsy’s.)

  Anyway, it made me feel a thousand ways, your letter did: surprised me (especially with its ongoing gentleness); melted my heart; quelled a hundred fears; raised a hundred more; made me feel like a worm; reminded me over and over how much I love you (even when I can’t stand you). But then I reached the last two pages—the ones about Irwin—and they scared me so badly I drove the fourteen hundred miles here in two days (have I even remembered to tell you I’m in Shyashyakook?) in hopes, as you said, of “undoing the chemical damage” and giving you your center back.

  But I reached the Nessakoola cottage at six yesterday morning, didn’t recognize the car outside, knocked and knocked on “our” door anyway. And when Yulie McVee finally opened it wearing nothing but a big red bedspread, guess what I thought? Don’t laugh. She may be forty and she may be huge, but we both know she’s also hugely appealing. While I was thinking what I was thinking, though, Yulie looked me in the eye, read my mind perfectly (how does she do that, anyway?), then started laughing so hard she had to sit down on the steps and squeeze her legs together to keep from peeing the bedspread. “That’s the nicest compliment I’ve had in years!” she finally told me. “And I do love him. But like a brother, honey. Only reason I’m here is that Corey landed his caretaking job.”

  She stood up to hug me hello then. But soon as her arms were around me she backed off, grabbed me by the shoulders, and said, “Natasha! Sweetheart! Look at you!” Which brings me to my main topic. And to my reason for running away. And to all the pain I’ve caused you. The subject is so complicated it’s going to take page
s to really describe it. But we can jump a long way toward the middle in just two words:

  I’m pregnant.

  Seven months pregnant, at this point.

  Which puts conception back in January.

  Guess who the father is?

  I’d give all the money I have ($73, at the moment) to see your face right now. And I’d give everything I own (including my Russian-lit collection!) to know that the first thing my news did was make you smile. But I know, Yulie’s made it clear, that I’ve hurt you terribly. And though I doubt I can explain how I came to do it, let alone inspire you to forgive me, I beg you to let me try.

  We have, at the minimum, a six-part problem. On my own I’d have said “an overwhelming problem” and given up right there. But Yulie and Corey think there’s hope for us still, and are trying to help me think clearly. Like when I sat down to write, and I guess did nothing but a lot of sighing, Corey told me, “If the subject’s too big or weird to think through, draw a map. Make the parts of the subject into rivers and mountain ranges and deserts and towns. If it’s still too big, add a whole ’nother province. That’s what I do with my papers at school. It works.”

  “Where’d you learn such a trick?” I asked her.

  “Everett,” she said. Wouldn’t you know it. But here goes:

  Our Problem, Part 1: One of the first things I ever said to you was that I’m old-fashioned where romance is concerned. “A dinosaur” I think I called myself. Being a dinosaur, I made a huge exception to my own laws of survival when I started living with you. But I didn’t start living with you because I’d changed. I did it because I couldn’t help it. There’s a big difference. I never really thought we were living “in sin.” (I’m not that Paleolithic.) But we were living with dangerously little definition by my standards, which standards are based, by the way, on my belief that romance isn’t just romance, that it naturally leads to love-making, which naturally leads to babies, who are naturally helpless creatures in a naturally beautiful but lethal world, so they naturally need as many pieces of the ancient Father-Mother-Shaman-Tribe-Home-Hearth Paradigm as we are able to gracefully give them.