The Brothers K

by David James Duncan

  When he’d first joined us, Kim Joon struck me as a negligible addition to our would-be rescue operation. But the farther we traveled, the clearer it became that he was bright, witty, tirelessly helpful and eccentric. Yet he was an Adventist Elder. It didn’t add up. My face must have shown it didn’t too, because all of a sudden I saw him stop himself in mid-sentence, start grinning at me in the rearview mirror, and cry, “Ah ha! Joon surprises Kincaid? He even likes Joon a little? Yes? Thank you! We like Kincaid too. And maybe we understand his mind. In the view of intelligent American college students, Adventist preachers have the brains of fish. Correct?”

  “Not at all,” I protested.

  “Don’t lie to an Elder!” he blustered in a passable impersonation of Babcock. “Let us guess what Kincaid thinks of Joon. Just for fun.”

  I just blushed at this suggestion, but he fired away. “Kincaid believes Joon is a Korean War orphan whose life was saved by missionaries. He was brought to this country as a child, advertised on television by the philanthropist actor Danny Kaye, adopted by Adventist fanatics, and sent to schools and seminaries where dogmas and Bible verses were stenciled on the inside of his head and a Mongol-eyed Smile-face was stenciled on the outside. Joon now considered himself ready to go forth and preach the Gospel! Oops. We failed to mention that Joon’s favorite Americans are Sammy Davis, Jr., President Nixon and whoever invented McDonald’s hamburgers.”

  Freddy had been laughing throughout this recitation. I tried to chuckle along too. But I was a bit strangled by the fact that this was very close to what I actually thought. Joon read my face and laughed, “Don’t worry,” he said. “We understand your mind. Joon’s speech is somewhat wooden. English did not come easily. Joon was an engineering student before Christ entered his life. Oh! Oh no! We see Kincaid’s jaw clench when Joon says Christ entered his life. So sorry! Joon would say something different, something more clever, if something different or clever was what he felt to happen …” (I was blushing again.) “But once it happened,” he continued, “once Christ became … Joon’s companion?—may we put it this way?—that companionship began both to simplify and to complicate Joon’s life. He sometimes felt his companion strongly. (May we say this, O jaw muscles of Kincaid?) But he could never fully express, in life, the wonderful things this companionship allowed him to feel. Joon’s clearest inner guidance seems always to be negative. Is it this way for you? Back in Korea, for example, Joon felt strongly that he should stop studying engineering. So he did stop. And so was left with no calling. So, with very great faith, Joon began to pray for a new career …” (He started to laugh.) “In what you might call ‘missionary position,’ Joon prayed for days and days. He damaged his knees. He wept with longing. ‘Lord! Show me the way!’ he cried until his voice left him.” (He laughed harder.) “And do you know what finally happened? Nothing! Joon grew exhausted, fell asleep, and the Lord showed him nothing!”

  He threw back his head and roared. An Adventist Elder who found God’s failure to answer his prayers a scream. I was really starting to like this guy.

  “Since God would not speak to Joon,” he said, “Joon decided, when he woke up, to speak to God. ‘My goodness! My freedom is very great!’ he said. ‘No comment,’ said God.”

  He laughed again. So did Freddy and I.

  “Not knowing what else to do, Joon accepted his only other opportunity at the time, which was to come to this strange country and attend what Kincaid feels is a school for fools.” He winked at me in the mirror.

  “And was it?” Freddy asked.

  Joon thought it over. “It’s good to know the Bible,” he said, “and good to know people who want to serve God. But the seminary has filled Joon with doubt.”

  “About what?” I asked.

  He laughed. “Everything! Everything under the sun! Except his companion. But Him we do not see under the sun, do we?”

  I told him that never in my life had I heard an Adventist Elder mention, let alone laugh at, his unanswered prayers and his doubts.

  “Yes!” he cried. “That is a doubt the seminary gave me. Even the apostles doubted. Yet American Elders do not. Joon does not understand. He did not understand his teachers or fellow seminarians either. The first Christians he met as a boy in Korea were Adventist missionaries, very simple people. They had no power, and wanted no power. They told us Bible stories, it is true. But they gave us food and shelter and medicine first, and teased us and told jokes and played with us and loved us. So we begged them for the stories.” He laughed again. “This was what Joon thought Christianity meant! Food and medicine for the body, and stories for the heart if you begged for them. Then he came here, found a country full of people begging not to hear the stories, went to seminary, and found out why. No food. No medicine. No doing unto others. Just a bunch of men learning how to bellow the stories at others whether they wanted to hear them or not!”

  “An Elder who makes sense!” Freddy sighed.

  Joon shrugged. “To be simple again—who cares if it makes sense. To unlearn what he has learned. To live like old Angus McCready, the first missionary he met as a sick and hungry boy on the streets of Seoul. That is what Joon wants.” He smiled back at me in the mirror. “Ha! Kincaid was right! Joon is an orphan! And now he longs to do for a stranger named Irwin what Old Man McCready once did for a stranger named Joon. But this is a strange country. Your brother has a strange problem. We’ll be there tomorrow. Have you got big ideas about how to help?”

  “The only big idea I’ve got,” Freddy gushed, “is I’m glad you’re here!”

  I finally realized, at this point, that Freddy had formed a tremendous crush on our companion. And when the Elder gushed, “Joon is glad too! He likes this family so much!” I was afraid things might start to get gloppy there in the old Dodge. But then he surprised us both—and miffed one of us—by adding, “Joon liked your brother Everett especially! He frightened me so bad, then spoke so beautifully! He is very smart, isn’t he! And such a preacher! He is funny too, Joon bets!”

  “And bossy and foulmouthed and bigheaded and impossible,” Freddy said, turning several shades of green.

  “And in prison,” I added, “because he loves his brother.”

  “We understand his mind,” said Kim Joon.

  8. Anchor

  Dear Everett,

  I’m huge. So is my love for you. So will Myshkin’s be.

  I can wait. I will wait. Make that your anchor.

  In thirty-six moons we’ll buy him his first trike together.

  Another thing: I’d been agonizing about graduate school—whether to go at all, which ones to apply to. Your sentence makes it easy: I’ll be going back to U Dub. An advanced degree can be my Wahkiakum. And my apologies to your family, but you’d better warn them right now that Myshkin and I are going to dominate your list of bi-monthly visitors. Meanwhile let’s wear out the postman.

  More tomorrow.

  All my love,

  Natasha

  9. The Personnel, the Equipment, the Expertise

  Stopping for nothing but meals, gas, two strategic phone calls and one six-hour sleep, the “We Want Winnie Caravan” made it to Mira Loma by sunset, June 4, met up with Papa at the Red Desert Motor Inn, where he’d been staying, and learned that he was now known to all asylum guards and employees as “that goddamned ballplayer.” But except for the new nickname, he’d gotten nowhere. And he was chain-smoking, coughing incessantly, and looking alarmingly ill. “Deathly ill” was the term Aunt Mary Jane greeted him with. And Sister Harg, who’d never met him, told him that he should go see a doctor at once. Papa eyed each of these estimable women for a moment. Then he lit another smoke. “I’m gonna wait a bit on that, thanks,” he said.

  “You shouldn’t,” Harg growled.

  “You think so now, ma’am,” Papa answered. “And I appreciate it. But you haven’t yet seen my son.”

  That was the end of that.

  The strategic phone calls I mentioned had been back to Camas, where a gr
oup of volunteers—friends and Sabbath School students of Randy and Nancy Beal’s, mostly—had printed up and gone door to door with a petition composed over the telephone by Elder Joon, Nancy and me. It was intended for all 840 members of the Washougal church; the gist of it was that, to the best of the signer’s knowledge, Irwin Chance had always been a devout Adventist, and had always struck them as theologically unwilling and psychologically unable to go to war. Perhaps fifty people who saw the petition had admitted to remembering Irwin. Twenty-one had been willing to sign it. Dolores McKibben had then mailed it to Papa’s motel, where it was waiting when we arrived. So while the rest of the Camas delegation recuperated in the motel room, RV and camper the first morning, Mama, Papa, Elder Joon, Linda, baby Nash and I drove the petition over to the asylum, and made our first attempt to visit Major Keys.

  · · · ·

  To lay eyes on the Colonel James Loffler Mental Health Center was to recognize at once our insignificance, our motleyness, the fragility of our hopes, the vastness of our task. The immaculate white cinder-block walls and obedient green lawn; the immaculate white orderlies and obedient WACs; the unarguable gate and fences, the guards, the labyrinthine floor plan; the stunted palms, standing at attention, giving no shade. Babcock’s idea of heaven—that’s what it looked like. And Irwin had died and gone there. How could the flawed and mortal likes of us hope to bring him back home to Earth?

  To my surprise (though not to Papa’s), all of us except Papa were allowed through the front gates and into the building immediately. And the first thing Major Keys did upon greeting us in the lobby was send an orderly back out to fetch Papa. He then invited us all into his office.

  To my further surprise (though again not to Papa’s), Keys seemed perfectly cordial. He offered us chairs, ordered a WAC secretary to serve Coke and coffee, had genuine-looking smiles for everyone but Papa and, for some reason, Elder Joon. He even read through our little petition with what seemed like interest and concern. He then said that he appreciated, and deeply regretted, our distress, and agreed that a tragic mistake had been made by Elder Babcock, and compounded by Irwin when he chose to train for combat. But our petition, like the letter from Babcock, changed nothing. Regrettable as the situation was, he told us, Irwin’s mind had come unraveled in Vietnam. He had become both psychotic and dangerous, he was not the young man we thought we knew, but trained professionals who dealt with his kind of problems daily were offering their expert help.

  “We’re doing our very best,” he concluded with a smile so warm that Linda readily returned it. “We have the personnel, the equipment and the expertise, and we’re going to bring this young man around, believe me. Our progress may seem a little slow to some of you, but I’m confident we’ll have him back in one piece and home to that beautiful baby within the year.”

  Though she began to blink back tears at the word “year,” Linda kept returning the Major’s smile. And Papa looked utterly used up. But Mama stood abruptly, looked Keys in the eye, and said, “That year may start to seem slow to you too, Major. Because we won’t be leaving here without him.”

  “Is that so?” he said with a forced little Morse code chuckle.

  But Mama had already spun on her heels and stormed out of his office.

  “It is very much so,” said Elder Joon as the rest of us got to our feet. “Mr. Chance has described his son’s condition to us most thoroughly. Based on that description, we regret to say that we do not place much faith in your equipment, your personnel or your expertise. It is not our wish to cause you embarrassment, or to make trouble. But unless you begin taking steps to turn the patient over to his family, we will be back in greater numbers to express our displeasure.”

  Major Keys chuckled again. But this time it was derisive. “Sometimes we just have to choose between greater and lesser embarrassments,” he said. “And let me tell you. Releasing a dangerous patient into the care of his unsuspecting wife and infant because a few disgruntled family members and some little Oriental fella demanded it …” He shook his head. “That would be about the greatest embarrassment I can imagine.”

  “Then we will see you again tomorrow,” said Elder Joon.

  “No,” Keys told him. “That you won’t. Since you’ve taken this adversarial tone, I’m afraid you’ll all be outside the gate with Mr. Chance here. But if you like, I can wave.”

  “You do that,” a somewhat revived Papa told him. And we all started for the door.

  “Pardon me, Mrs. Chance,” the Major called after Linda.

  She turned.

  “I know these people mean well,” he said in a voice that sounded soothing even to me. “But try not to let them upset you.” He gave her a reassuring wink. “Your husband has been down some pretty rough road. But we do care. We’re on your side. And we’ll get him back to you just as soon as we safely can.”

  Linda smiled through her tears, but said nothing.

  10. Namaste

  We were gathered in the asylum parking lot in the shade of the RV and camper, trying to come up with some sort of rescue plan. But the San Bernardino Mountains had vanished in the smog, the smog itself was so hot you could see it writhing, and a plan, like the mountains, was nowhere in sight. Nash was in my lap, chewing on a used spark plug—and he’d been fussing so long and loudly before I’d handed it to him that not even Mama cared about the grease on his lips. Randy Beal and Freddy were over by the chain-link fence, playing catch with a little blue rubber football. Truman was sitting on the steps of his camper, quietly downing his evening short-case. Suncracker was chained to the camper, sitting on Truman’s foot, whining and watching the football. A few yards away, but through the fence, a couple of broken ’Nam vets were doing the same.

  “I say signboards!” Aunt Mary Jane was saying. “I say we make like a buncha damn hippies, picket the place till they stick us on TV, and see how the Major likes the attention.”

  “It’s the Lord who’s going to help us, not the TV,” growled Sister Harg.

  “And where they’d prob’ly stick us,” said Nancy Beal, “is in jail.”

  “Even if they didn’t,” Mama said, “think of Irwin. Who knows what they’ll do to him if we antagonize them?”

  “All the more reason to smoke ’em out fast!” said Uncle Marv.

  “Perhaps we should just walk over to the gate and start singing,” Elder Joon suggested. “It seems to be Irwin’s singing that the Major finds intolerable. To hear the same songs from us might convince him of Irwin’s sanity.”

  “Or our insanity,” muttered Bet.

  “He’s already convinced of that,” Papa said.

  “Then what have we got to lose?” asked Aunt Mary Jane. “Why not hit ’em from all sides? Prayers, songs, protest marches, Bible readings! Let’s be the skunks at their tidy little lawn party! Pester ’em half to death with what we believe! Show ’em we’re crazy! Just like Irwin!”

  “There’s somethin’ to that,” Sister Harg agreed.

  “Well I think we might try being nice first,” Linda said, her voice and face trembling. “I think Major Keys really is trying to help. And if you’d all just stop trying to make him mad, maybe I could go in and see Irwin.”

  “You sure roll over and play dead in a hurry,” Bet muttered.

  “Mind your tongue!” Mama snapped.

  “We haven’t even started makin’ him mad!” Bet retorted.

  “Linda has a right to her opinion.”

  “Didn’t she hear what Papa told us? We don’t need in. Irwin needs out!”

  “But I want to see him!” Linda cried. “I’m his wife! I want to see Irwin! And thanks to you, your attitude, they won’t let me!”

  For the fourth or fifth time that afternoon, she burst into tears. So for the fourth or fifth time, so did Nash. That did it for me. I handed the baby, spark plug and all, to Mama, climbed into the Nomad, shut the door behind me, squeezed into the bathroom, and shut that door too. I then downed four aspirins and stuffed cotton in my ears, but heard Pap
a clear as a bell anyway, murmuring, “I feel ashamed. I feel stupid and ashamed that I can’t think of some workable plan.”

  “Signs!” hollered Uncle Marv.

  “Will you shuttup!” Mama told him.

  “It’s okay,” Nancy Beal cooed, probably at Linda.

  “Nice catch!” cried Randy Beal, probably to Freddy.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” barked Ethel Harg, probably at Randy for playing catch.

  “We share your shame,” said Elder Joon, probably to Papa.

  Nash and Linda kept crying. The dog and the broken ’Nam vets kept whining. On the other side of the RV, Uncle Truman belched.

  “I’m too pissed to pray!” I hissed, probably at God. “Just do something!”

  Then I remembered Joon’s story, back by Mount Shasta. “No comment,” said God. Back by Shasta, it seemed funny.

  I stepped out to the road-map dinnertable, sat down, covered my ears with my hands, and began staring at the traffic on Van Buren Boulevard. Time and a lot of cars passed. Marv and Mama kept arguing. The aspirins didn’t help my headache, but they began to eat at my stomach, which sort of distracted me from my head. I noticed a little Nash Rambler sitting at the traffic light a couple hundred yards up Van Buren. It was exactly like Irwin’s—the car baby Nash was named for. The driver was pale, blond crewcut, sunglasses—no resemblance at all. But I could still picture Irwin in it, looking as if he owned the world. That little car, and Linda … He’d wanted so little. I felt too angry to cry, but I began to quietly curse. As the little Nash came toward me I noticed it even had Washington plates. It wasn’t until the driver turned into the asylum parking lot, putted slowly up into the parking space right next to my window, placed his palms together, and bowed at me that I realized the car was Irwin’s. Without hesitation or thought, I placed my palms together and bowed back—an exotic reaction for a hopelessly American American like me. The driver broke out in a grin, and took off his sunglasses. He had two very black eyes.