The Brothers K
Page 17
I’s a-comin’, I’s a comin’, dough my head is bendin’ low,
I can hear dem faifful voices callin Old Black Joe …
bleah. The absurdity was too great, the oxygen too scarce, the sky outside too blue: Everett’s mind began to drift; he started to compose his own little medley:
Stephen Foster wrote dis song, doo-dah, doo-dah,
An he was white as de day is long. Oh, doo-dah day …
He shut his eyes, smiled, realized no one could hear him over the choir, and started to croon it aloud:
He nevah ran no nights, he nevah ran no days.
He nevah put no money on no bobtail nag,
No doo-dah way …
Then Everett did Stephen Foster one better: he turned himself black: he became the sad, silver-toothed Walla Walla Negro kid. But once he became him he saw no reason not to stretch himself out, to make himself taller, thinner, stronger, better-looking, till he was no longer some Token Black Tenor surrounded by cross-licking hicks. He was the glint-toothed leader of his own scarlet-robed eighty-member all-black choir now, with a (why not?) twenty-piece blues band backing them, and a (what the heck?) dumpy Token White fat boy back in the percussion section—a dead ringer for Babcock in his youth—playing a … let’s see, a triangle. Yeah. Everett shut his eyes, gave his audience a solemn nod, and informed them in the mellifluous, almost Elizabethan English he’d learned as a lad in Trinidad that they were about to perform a contemporary spiritual, with eight-part harmonies—a song composed, of course, by the dashing young E. M. Chance himself.
He turned to his choir. The young Camas ladies, in unison, lifted their church bulletins to fan their lust-flushed faces. He raised his baton, and—
arrrrrgh! The Walla Walla Warblers charged like rebels at Gettysburg into “When Dem Saints Go Marchin’ In.” Everett shuddered, scrinched his eyes and brain shut, focused on the rows of beautiful black faces in his mind, delicately raised an eyebrow, dropped it, and in a soul-stirring, hair-raising a cappella, the Big Black Plus One Cracker Choir thundered:
Dem heads are gonna roll when Jesus comes!
The POWs froze. The elders paled. The infants all smiled. The Lord God grinned.
Yes dem heads are gonna roll when Jesus comes!
Y’all gonna be sad you called us nigger
’Bout time He pulls dat heavenly trigger!
Yes dem heads are gonna roll when Jesus comes!
E. M. gave the elders a little eye juju, sent a black fist skyward, yanked it back down, and his twenty-piece blues band crashed in behind the choir:
Well you fat cats are goin to court when Jesus comes!
Yeah you fat cats are goin to court when Jesus comes!
Dere won’t be no trick tax exemption,
You either gonna burn or get redemption!
Yeah, you fat cats are goin to court when Jesus comes …
Back in the stifling gray banality called “reality” the Walla Walla saints were marching out, and when Irwin and a few other kids started to cheer for them, Elder Babcock and all the other old war-horses who’d figured out that God hates gratitude quickly squelched it with massive scowls. But Everett didn’t know it. His eyes were shut so tight his lips were drawn up like a mummy’s; he was covered with goose bumps, shining with sweat. Bet nudged Freddy, Freddy nudged Irwin, and Irwin nudged Everett and whispered, “Jeez! Looks like you liked the music!” But Everett didn’t hear that either: he just upped an eyebrow—raising his Blacks Plus Cracker Choir one step higher—and beamed beatifically as they roared:
Well we ain goana be in yo’ shoes when Jesus comes!
(when Jesus comes!)
No we ain goana be in yo’ shoes when Jesus comes!
(when Jesus comes!)
(Take it Ella): No I ain’ goana be in yo’ shoes
All o’ you twisters o’ God’s Good News
(Billie Holiday): An’ I ain goana be in your sandals,
You gossipin’ biddies and lovers of scandals!
(Mr. Chuck Berry): Or your shitkickin’ redneck boots
When Gabriel’s horn goes a rooty-toot-toot!
(the Walla Walla kid): ’Cause I’ll be singin an clappin my hands
In my cheap loafers from Thom McAn’s!
(Ever’body!): No we ain goana be in your shoes when Jesus comes!
(When Jesus cuh-huh-hummmmmms!)
“What’s he doing?” Bet whispered.
“He’s all sweaty!” said Freddy.
“An’ he’s getting so jumpy!” Bet added.
“Uh-oh,” Irwin whispered sideways to Everett. “Mama’s watchin’.”
But Everett was gone. “Last verse!” he told his choir. “Jump it, tromp it, whomp it!”
Yes dem heads are gonna roll when Jesus comes!
It be the Lord God’s turn to bowl when Jesus comes!
You smart folks better clear de aisles
’Cause dere gonna be sinners heaped in piles!
An’ you may think we’s whistlin’ Dixie
But the King o’ the Kings, He ain’t no pixie!
Dere won’t be no trick tax exemption.
You either gonna burn or get redemption!
AN’ DEM HEADS ARE GONNA RO-HO-HOLLLLLLLLLLL LL
“Everett!”
WHEN JESUS—
“Everett!”
“Huh? Oh. Yes, Mama.”
“You tighten that tie!”
“Oops. Sorry, Mama.”
“Quit fidgeting!”
“Okay, Mama.”
“And get that look off your face!”
“Sorry, Mama.”
the backyard
“It’s all in the mind,” Papa said.
“The mind,” I repeated.
“Strike zones live in the mind.”
“In the mind.”
“Don’t forget.”
“I won’t.”
And with that, Papa froze. Or didn’t freeze, exactly. But he grew so still, there in front of his troublesome chalk drawings, that it seemed he might remain there all night long. Then, in an instant, he scared the hell out of me by winding up and firing his piece of chalk clear up over the roof of the Fir Haven Apartments. And the very next instant, there he stood again, perfectly calm and still. A classic Peter gesture. But this didn’t surprise me. I’d noticed this resemblance many times before.
“Another variable, even with real, mental strike zones, even after you’ve figured out the ump,” he said in his quiet new voice, “is the whole voodoo element.”
He paused to glance around the yard, checking shadows and shrubs as if he feared someone might be out to steal the truths he was about to impart. “I’m not kidding, Kade,” he said. “And I’m not talking crystal ball crap either. If a strike zone is just a shape in an ump’s head, which it is, then there ought to be ways of climbing inside that head and tinkering with the shape. Which there are. Pitchers of course want to expand the zone. Hitters of course want to shrink it. Either way, this ability to reach into an ump’s gray matter and distort his whole strike concept, this is what I’m calling voodoo.”
Obeying an impulse, I casually said, “I don’t believe in it.” I was lying. I not only believed, I was enthralled. But listening to Peter’s stories I’d often noticed that the more skeptical Everett or I pretended to be, the more powerful his stories became. So I said, “If it’s real, name somebody. Name one guy who really uses it.”
“Williams,” Papa said without hesitation. “Unquestionably, Ted Williams. The greatest voodoo hitter of our time.”
After Cobb the Demon, Gehrig the Cherub and Ruth the Dumb Deity, Williams the Curmudgeon was my favorite ballplayer. But I kept playing the skeptic. “How?” I demanded. “Tell me how he does it.”
“Any big crowd-pleaser,” Papa said, “any Mantle or DiMaggio or Mays can pull off a little voodoo at home games. Ump calls a strike on the corner, hometown hero turns and gives him a disgusted look, and all hell breaks loose. Strikes called on heroes aren’t what the fans pay to s
ee. And the fans are a factor, Kade. They’re scary when they’re roused, believe me. Where hometown voodoo backfires, though, is when the ump is stubborn. And lots of ’em are. Fans start raggin’ a muley ump, he just gets pissed at Mr. Hero for showing him up and calls ’em even meaner.”
I nodded, and switched hands; I’d been stirring the Dutch Boy so long I had cramps. “Ted Williams, though,” Papa said, “was anything but a hometown hero. He had a coolness, a remoteness, that people mistook for arrogance when he first came into the league, and the fool Red Sox press, even the fans, managed to despise him for this. It was just small-minded nonsense. What they were booing was his concentration, after all. And Williams concentrated so well he didn’t give a damn about the press or fans. But after a couple seasons he realized that the hometown dislike was robbing him of the ump intimidation that creates hometown voodoo. If he was ever going to enjoy the advantages of a hitting hero, he was going to have to come up with something a lot more ingenious than the Disgusted Hometown Stare, see? So now listen to what he did!”
Papa paused at this point, put his palms together in front of his nose, and rubbed them so hard and fast it looked like he was trying to generate friction and set his face on fire. It was one weird gesture. I’d no idea where this one came from. “First off,” he went on, “Williams always understood a crucial fact. He knew that it’s by working with what we’re given that we get really good at a thing. Our natures, our character, the way we feel at gut level, this stuff is as unchanging as the color of our eyes or hair or the shapes of our bones, is what I think. And since slobbering crowds and fawning reporters only distracted Williams from his job, which was crushing baseballs, he went right on snubbin’ ’em. Do you follow?”
I nodded.
“So where does following his nature get him? It makes him some nasty enemies in the stands and the press box, that’s for sure. Those enemies cost him at least two MVP awards. But down on the field it keeps him loose, let’s him live for his hitting, wins him a reputation as a player’s player and a real no-nonsense guy. And—getting back to the voodoo potential—it also earns him nothing but respect from every ump in the league. Because, believe me, umpires hate fans as much as fans hate umps.
“Fine and good. Next Williams strings together a couple great years at the plate, so that the sportswriters, much as they detest him, have to start begging him for interviews, because the fans, much as they hate him, are dying to know what makes the arrogant creep tick. But Williams sticks to his guns: he slams doors at reporters, slams line drives at the clucks in the bleachers, and leaves it at that. But writers have to write something, don’t they? That’s their nature. So they start winging it. They start making things up, churning out legends—Williams the Recluse, Williams the Crank Scientist, Williams the Genius, Williams the Unsung Hero—till first thing you know he’s baseball’s answer to Greta Garbo. And of course once this happens the writers forget all about their old dislike: they’d cross Boston on their knees to get an exclusive with the mysterious Splinter. And seeing all this, sensing the time is ripe, Williams finally strikes …”
Papa tried and again failed to ignite his nose. “One bleak Boston winter’s day Mr. Theodore No-Nonsense Garbo Splinter Williams finally grants some overjoyed worm of a writer an exclusive audience. Just asks the guy over, sets him down in his comfortablest chair, lets him fire away with the questions. Of course the dolt starts off with the usual: ‘What’s your favorite breakfast cereal?’ ‘Who do you like for President next election?’ ‘What’s the meaning of life?’ ‘How long’s your weenie?’ and so on. But Ted’s a fisherman in the off-season. He knows how to be patient. He sincerely and scientifically answers every query but the last. Then out pops the question he’s been waiting for: ‘How the heck do you hit so good?’
“And it’s voodoo time, folks!
“No-Nonsense leans back in his chair, looks as sincere and scientific as ever, and says, ‘Well, I study the pitchers very closely. My mechanics and bat speed are good. And I’ve got good concentration. But listen …’ And he suddenly swoops down and stares, like the hungry old owl he is, deep into the journalist’s little mouse eyes …” (Papa swooped down and stared into mine.) “And he says, ‘Everybody knows that there are quick wrists and slow wrists, but not many know that there are quick and slow eyes too. And my eyes …’ (Papa did some eyebrow push-ups, to let me know that these were the voodoo words) ‘are the key to my hitting, they’re my secret weapon. Because my eyes are so quick that I can see any pitch, even a fastball, all the way in to where it jumps off my bat …’”
Papa stopped just long enough to squeeze back a laugh.
“Well, Kade, the writer is just hoodooed. Nobody has ever said anything like this! Hell, Ty Cobb hit .367 lifetime, and even he admitted that a good fastball was a blur and that every swing he ever took at one was just an educated guess. But not No-Nonsense. Not Theodore. He sees the whole pitch, clear on into and off his bat! So the writer humps it home to his typewriter, bangs out his story, flashes Williams’s astounding secret to the world. And when the umps (who already admire the dust Williams spits on) pick up their morning papers, they think Jeepers creepers, what peepers! and buy it lock, stock and barrel.”
Papa shook his head, and finally let his laugh fly. “That’s all it took, Kade! When the next season rolled around, Williams found his strike zone was damned near anywhere he wanted. The inside and outside corners had vanished. Every ump in the league had become his personal Wally MacCloud. Because what ump would dare contradict the baby blues that saw in a fastball not a blur, but a hundred and eight scarlet stitches on four fat white cheeks? That was voodoo, Kade. One well-placed fib, a lot of fan-snubbing, and Ted Williams puts together maybe the last .400 season we’ll ever see. If World War II hadn’t eaten his next three seasons, his career average and slugging percentage would’ve been right up there in the Next World with Tyrannosaurus Cobb and the Sultan himself. No doubt about it, Kade. Williams’s eyesight was good, but his voodoo was downright splendid!”
John McLoughlin High School
On August 6, 1945, Edward Conze—arguably the greatest Buddhist scholar of this century—was riding in a train through England when he opened his morning paper and read of Hiroshima, and of the world’s first nuclear attack. He later wrote, “I have a very deep stomach, and normally cannot be sick. But on this occasion I vomited straight out the window. This was prophetic insight. For at that moment, human history had lost its meaning.”
Two decades later, in the fall of his junior year of high school, Peter was forced in a class called Modern Problems to watch a film about a possible solution to the modern problem roughly known as “Russia.” This film was a black-and-white documentary, produced by the Pentagon. Its subject was one of the late-Fifties’ aboveground H-bomb tests in Nevada.
The military technicians who engineered the test may not have been the most artistic filmmakers of their day, but they were far from unimaginative. They recognized, for instance, that in blowing up an expanse of uninhabited desert there must be something more than miles of barren sand and sagebrush for the cameras to film and for the viewers’ minds to grasp. They therefore decided (rather like the third of the Three Little Pigs) to build a little brick house, to situate it exactly one mile from Ground Zero, and to make it the poignant, underdog star of their show, first by stocking and furnishing it with an array of animate and inanimate items that might be found in any American home at the time of a Russian nuclear attack, and then, of course, by attacking it.
Surrounded as it was by miles of scrub desert, the Pentagon’s house turned out to be a forlorn and lost-looking little abode. But in my Father’s house are many mansions, Peter thought as he watched. And no one could fault the Pentagon technicians’ thoroughness in stocking this one: they carted in fresh and refrigerated foods, a pantry full of canned goods, a freezer full of meats and vegetables (I go to prepare a place for you, Peter thought); they hung never-to-be-worn jackets and hats on an oak coat
stand in the front hall, toted in a few unsuspecting house plants, plugged in a radio and TV; they displayed unexpected domestic flair, laying wall-to-wall, never-to-be-tracked-up carpet on the concrete floor, hanging never-to-be-faded dime-store prints of famous European paintings on walls, placing never-to-need-dusting knickknacks on shelves and coffee tables; they even included some live witnesses—white-footed mice, both brown and white rats, and a variety of “common household pests” such as cockroaches and ants, all in neat little cages. In short, all that was missing by the time the technicians finished was a forlorn and lost-looking little American family to match, and inhabit, the abode. And leave it to the Pentagon not only to recognize this lack, but to do something about it!
They didn’t recruit a family—though with their budget and powers of propaganda they no doubt could have. But they did the next-best thing: they built one. When the camera zoomed in on the plate-glass window on the shielded side of the house, when it first showed them all seated in straight-backed wooden chairs round a carefully set, candlelit supper table, wearing dapper Sears clothes and fixed, uncomprehending smiles, Peter needed time to believe his eyes. But the filmmakers gave it to him. The apparition wouldn’t go away. The Army really had constructed four lifelike, white-skinned, 100%-patriotic dummies—a Daddy, a Mommy, a Little Boy and a Little Girl. “The Last Supper!” one of Peter’s pals cracked as the camera finally drew away. But no one laughed.