The Brothers K

by David James Duncan

  and saw the dog. Off-white, sopped, tiny—maybe nine inches at the shoulder. And it was looking at, yapping at, almost pleading with Irwin as it scrabbled and clawed to stay aboard the roof of a three-quarters-submerged doghouse that was drifting, fast, straight toward him.

  the backyard

  “Funny story about Lhosa,” Papa had said as we’d cleaned the paint paraphernalia. “Because of the eye, I guess, Benito didn’t like knuckleballs. Didn’t handle ’em any worse than anybody else, just hated ’em worse. For which reason, after we’d worked a few games and grown fond of each other, I started unleashing a surprise knuckler at him now and then, just to piss him off.” He glanced down at his paint-lined knuckles, and laughed.

  “First few times I tried it, he just chewed me out in Español. When I kept it up, though, he got serious and took to firing the ball back so hard, in English, that it about burrowed through my hand. But baseball gets dull without the stuff and nonsense, so I still teased him with one once in a while. Then, late in the season, Benito came up with the perfect retaliation. What he did was start throwing knucklers back at me, right out of the crouch. Best damned floaters you ever saw. It was all I could do to knock some of ’em down. So it became a thing between us—me trying to catch him off guard with my half-ass knuckler, him making me dance around like a dolt trying to knock down his great one.

  “So one time, against Freeport it was, in the ninth inning of a 3-to-2 or 4-to-3 game—can’t remember which, but it was our favor—I opened the inning by striking out a guy on straight fastballs, then went and hung a curve that some big meat bounce-doubled over the left-field fence. That put the tying run on second with one out, which was bad. But it also got my adrenaline going, which in those days was good. Benito signaled two fastballs, and this poor kid who was pinch-hitting swung so late on both he came closer to hitting Lhosa’s tosses back to me. So with the count at 0 and 2, Benito asked for a third straight heater, and I nodded, fine. Then I wound up and sent in a big fat floater. Damn good one too. Kid swung a half hour early this time, and that was strike three and out number two. But before I could gloat or grin or anything, Benito caught it and squeezed it and fired back the damnedest revenge-knuckler I ever saw. A butterfly on dope, this thing looked like. I mean it was everywhere. I put my whole body in front of it, stuck out my mitt, missed it by six inches easy, but luckily the thing dove, smacked me dead in the thigh, and landed at my feet. Unluckily, though, my funny bone was turned on full blast now. And when that big meat of a base runner feinted toward third, even though he was the tying run, he struck me funny too. I stooped to get the ball to chase him back, but I was in stitches. And I just booted it, smack! A regular soccer kick, right toward the plate.

  “Of course the runner broke for real now. But of course so did Benito. And even though I knew I should be running in to back up the plate or some such basebally strategy, I also knew Lhosa’s arm was so good and I’d booted the ball so hard that there was only one way this thing could turn out. So I just stood there, laughing myself sick, while sure enough Benito sprinted out, pounced, gunned it to third, nailed the poor meat by two yards, and that was the ballgame. But the great thing, Kade, was how the fans loved it—and they were Freeport fans. The great thing was, the Freeport team even loved it. Hell, the meat we’d gunned down at third even grinned and nodded to us as he left the field. Dumbest game-ending putout we’d all likely to live to see, and everybody seemed aware of it, united by it. They gave Benito and me a standing ovation, we gave them a bow, and for a minute or two there it felt like the Brotherhood of Man. The next day the Freeport paper said we’d obviously rehearsed the whole thing. Mama saved the piece, it’s in the attic somewhere. ‘The ol’ Fake-Miss, Kick and Throw Play,’ the writer called it. Baseball’s answer to the Harlem Globetrotters, he called Benito and me.”

  Downtown Camas

  Officer Hervano said later that it all happened incredibly fast. Irwin ran to the place where the doghouse would hit the bridge, clapped his hands to get the dog’s attention, started whistling and yelling, “Come here, girl—or boy! Come on, boy! Good boy! Jump!” And the dog whined and wagged its tail as if it wanted to do just that. Then Hervano spotted the chain attached to its collar, realized it must be attached to the doghouse (why else would the dog have stayed on the roof as a flood washed it away?) and, knowing Irwin as he did, set off at a dead run. Just as quickly, Irwin climbed onto the concrete rail of the bridge. The other cops began waving their arms and bellowing “No!” Ignoring them, Irwin hooked the heels of his feet behind the aluminum handrail, then hand-walked his upper body down the concrete face of the bridge. One of the cops, Officer Worth, began firing off his gun. Irwin ignored that too. Hervano saved his voice and put everything he had into his sprint, but at the sight of Irwin’s hair and fingers dangling in that river his dash turned into the sort of lead-limbed, slow-motion running one does in nightmares. Worth fired more shots, and the whole Greek chorus of cops kept bellowing, “NO! STOP! NO!” Then the submerged doghouse hit the bridge and cracked like an eggshell, the dog slid with a yipe! into the river, Irwin sank one hand deep in its fur, and the crushed house was sucked under the bridge. Hervano was so close now that he could see the hopeless flex and strain of Irwin’s entire body as the river pulled the house and chain and dog effortlessly down (I go to prepare a place for you). Then one heel slipped from the handrail—and still Irwin kept his grip on the fur. The river sucked the chained dog under; Irwin drew a deep breath; Hervano gasped No! as he lunged, got a hand on Irwin’s penny loafer, got two hands on it, started to pull. But if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself … The foot slid from the shoe.

  Greg Hervano fell back onto the sidewalk, the ruined shoe in his hand. He said he could only hear, he couldn’t see, Irwin slide quietly into the river.

  “The longest minutes of my life,” Hervano told my family and me that night, “were the ones I spent at the downstream railing, watching that smashed-up doghouse wash away down the Washougal—with no dog. And no Irwin.”

  Papa shook his head, and stared at the pathetic shoe in Hervano’s hand. Mama smiled through tears. “God, Winnie!” Everett kept saying. “Why’d you do it?”

  “I’ve been a cop ten years, and have seen a lot,” Hervano said. “But this one got to me. Milford and Worth blocked off the bridge, and Hymes called State, Search and Rescue, but we knew it was hopeless. We knew the body had to be right under that bridge, jammed up against a girder maybe, or tangled in a pile of limbs and logs. And it was that closeness, the fact that he was right there under me—”

  “I was right thu-there under you all ruh-right!” Irwin shivered. “Bu-but I—”

  “You shuttup!” Hervano roared, bonking his head with the sole of the sopped shoe. “This is my version. Wait your damned turn!”

  Irwin managed to keep quiet, but from that point on Hervano’s story was interrupted by blasts of giggling, especially from the twins, who, by the way, were wrapped in under the bright yellow cop poncho still draped round Winnie’s shaking shoulders, both of them fawning over the stinky little mutt that lay curled in the Smokey hat in Irwin’s lap, wearing the same idiot grin as its savior.

  “Anyhow,” Hervano continued, “the boys saw I was having trouble and let me be, so I was just standing in the gloom there, thinking stuff like Why do the nice kids get it while the scumbags live and thrive? and Why didn’t I grab ankle instead of shoe? and Maybe if I stand here long enough the damn bridge will wash out and drown me too, and I won’t have to go face the boy’s family, when all of a sudden I hear this hollow voice over toward the south bank, going Eeech! Aach! Oooch! Awch! like somebody walking barefoot across gravel. And, honest to God, I think, It’s his spirit!”

  We drowned Hervano in laughter. “The voice of his poor drowned spirit!” he shouted over us. “And it’s cold, the poor thing! This is exactly what I think. I even notice, and feel touched, that his spirit voice sounds just as out-to-lunch as his ea
rthly voice did. But when I look toward the end of the bridge where the spirit voice keeps ooching and eeching from, I’ll be hanged if this pardon my French dog wasn’t standing there shaking river off itself! So what did I do? What did I think? I’m telling the truth now. I thought: His spirit has entered the dog!”

  Our laughter buried his story again, but Hervano’s face stayed fierce. “You think it’s funny?” he asked us. “You get a chuckle out of the fact that your tax dollars are going to pay the salary of a guy who, seeing a presumably dead dog suddenly appear on a bridge, puts his academy training, his ten years of experience, and his steel-trap mind to work and thinks, It’s Irwin! He’s gone into the dog! And he’s cold, poor thing!?”

  He waited out another storm, then put a finger to his lips. “Stupid, it would seem. Dumb, it would seem. But let’s not forget this!” He held up the soggy penny loafer. “Because isn’t it possible, isn’t it even likely, that if you stay in contact with any part of this contagious idiot for too long” (he bonked Irwin’s head with the shoe again) “you start to think just like him?”

  We all dissolved, but Hervano remained ferocious. “So there I stand in the glum and dumb, haunted by dogs and loafers, when I’ll be hanged if the little Spirit Dog doesn’t turn around, peer back down into the bridge footings, and set its dingle-berried little tail to wagging. Then a big white hand pops up onto a girder. Followed by the pure-white, toeless foot of what I figure is going to be a regular ol’ Casper of a friendly ghost. But lo and behold, not five minutes after dying—though even Christ himself had the good manners to stay down three days—up onto the girder swings the ugliest pardon my French face of the stupidest excuse of a hero I ever hope to see. And why I ran to help it up, why I didn’t just kick it straight back in the river it keeps trying, summer and winter, to commit suicide in, is beyond me!”

  As we applauded and howled and hugged and thanked him, Officer Hervano allowed himself a tiny smile at last. But Irwin didn’t. In fact his face had turned red and he’d stopped shivering as he muttered, “What I did wasn’t all that crazy. I knew there was a crawl space above the water main on the downstream side of the bridge, ’cause Everett and me crawled out it ten times at least, last summer, to jump. So I knew if I could just undo Sparkle’s chain before we washed out from under the bridge, we could—”

  “Wait wait wait wait wait!” Hervano interrupted, bonking Irwin yet again with the shoe. “Sparkle?”

  “His name,” Irwin said, reaching into his pocket. “It’s on his collar.”

  Hervano started to check the tag, but caught a whiff of dog and decided to take Irwin’s word. Mange or age or all-purpose scrofulosity had stripped most of the fur from Sparkle’s back two-thirds, leaving it looking (to borrow Everett’s description) “like an exposed brain with legs and acne.” But the stench rising from the fur still clinging to his head and shoulders made you think it might be best if the disease denuded him completely. “You know,” Hervano said through a plugged nose, “I think Irwin’s spirit might’ve entered that mutt after all.”

  “Anyhow,” Irwin blored, trying to ignore our raucous laughter, “I knew that if we could get up on that pipe we’d have it made. And that’s just what happened! And here we are, safe and sound!”

  “Except—” Hervano said, bonking him with the shoe.

  “Except what?”

  Bonk! “You know.”

  Irwin reddened. “Except I didn’t think the river’d be so fast,” he admitted. “I mean, I’d just hit the water and I was already to the pipe. No time to undo the collar or anything. So I just grabbed on, looped the chain round a bolt, and hoped. But if the current hadn’t snapped the chain, if the house had pulled us away, I’m not sure what would’ve happened.”

  Peter and Papa shook their heads. Mama thanked God. Hervano bonked Irwin. “What else?”

  Irwin sighed. “I didn’t think it’d be so cold either, really. I mean, even after I got hold of the pipe and Sparkle was safe on it and I was hanging in the current there, I couldn’t work my legs. Almost, I mean. I mean I couldn’t get ’em onto the pipe. At first. But then I did. So, like I said, it wasn’t all that crazy.”

  Bonk!

  “Okay okay! It was crazy. But we made it.”

  Hervano patted his holster.

  “Oh yeah.” Irwin grinned. “But if Greg ever sees me jump off that bridge—”

  Bonk!

  “—off any bridge, or even into any moving water, ever again, I, uh, I gave him written permission to just, uh, go ahead and shoot me.”

  For the first time all night, Hervano was positively beaming.

  “He filled out a ticket, and we both signed it,” Irwin admitted. “But on the same ticket it says I get to keep his Smokey hat.”

  Bonk!

  “Oh yeah. On one condition. He keeps my shoe.”

  Bonk!

  “Oooch! And gets to use it on me whenever he likes.”

  Bonk!

  “Such a deal,” said Everett.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Psalm Wars

  If I were God

  I wouldn’t answer my prayers either

  —Tom Crawford

  Camas/Winter/1964

  All our lives Mama had made it a point to keep supper waiting for Papa when he had to work overtime. Even if it meant dining directly before bed, then thrashing away the night in the throes of peptic nightmares, we all had to wait. The intended effect, I think, was to increase our respect both for the soothing presence of the family provider and for the bland but bountiful cuisine of the family cook. And, for years, Mama’s stratagem worked as intended.

  But Papa’s alternating runs and pitching-shed workouts were a new twist. In the scheduling department, they were not an occasional but a nightly delay. In the culinary department, they resulted in night after night of soggy or oven-dried suppers. In the biblical department, they had nothing to do with his sacred role as provider. And in the aesthetic realm, by the time Papa finally showered and joined us he was usually such a limp, spent rendition of himself that it threw us off our feed just to have to look at him. It was therefore decided, six or eight months into his new regimen, that Mama would serve the main family dinner at six o’clock sharp, provider or no provider. “It’ll be good to feel like a baseball widow again,” she said to Papa the night they informed us of the new program. And I remember the wave of affection I felt as she said it; I remember thinking what a close-knit family we were.

  But any gathering of eight human beings has an astounding potential for complication. Picture a toy castle made of alphabet blocks. Blocks don’t touch, smell, hear, think, vie for food, philosophize, sing, punch, pray or passionately read, misread, believe and disbelieve auctors as varied as Dr. Freud and Dr. Seuss, Billy Martin and Billy Graham, Yogananda and Yogi Berra or Henry Miller and Henry Huggins, so our toy castle is a gross oversimplification. But just to illustrate one of the crucial principles of what Everett calls “suppertable psychophysics,” consider how a single block down at the base of an alphabet-block castle is visually just an insignificant detail. It’s removal might pass unnoticed. But stomp hard on the floor after such a block’s removal and the whole edifice may well go tumbling …

  Well, Papa’s presence at the Chance family suppertable—or, more specifically, the anemic little grace he’d mutter every night before we fell upon our food—turned out to be such a block. I’d never questioned this prayer, had never thought about it, had scarcely listened to it, really, but all our lives Papa had deployed the same Book of Common Prayer standby, and had invariably uttered it in exactly the same way: speaking so swiftly and monotonally that he sounded more like a bashful auctioneer than a supplicant, he’d mumble GiveusgratefulheartsourFatherandmakeusever mindfuloftheneedsofothersthroughChristourLordAmen, and that was that. Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am. This, in all its unprepossessing glory, was the indispensable block. Of course it was only after the thing was removed and the whole fam-damn-ily exploded like a barn in a tornado that any o
f us realized what a paragon of spiritual diplomacy the little prayer had been. That Papa had learned it as a child from his ballplaying, war-victim father had made it acceptable both to Everett (who loathed piety but adored old baseball heroes) and to his antipode, Mama (who adored piety, the more ostentatious the better); the rapid-fire monotone was an inane but serviceable counterweight to the subtle passion of the language; the solemnity of Papa’s face and manner balanced the inanity of his tongue speed; and the whole holy diphthong spilled out of him so fast that there was no time for Freddy to clown or for Bet to fuss or for Mama to genuflect or Everett to apostasize or Peter to cerebrate or Irwin to guffaw or me to lust after my dinner. Papa’s prayer was a three-and-a-half-second masterpiece—a rustic but reliable footbridge that led us so blithely over the deadly crevasse of our religious differences that we scarcely realized the crevasse existed—

  until the night he left us alone, and stepped out to his backyard bullpen to throw little round prayers of his own.