The Brothers K

by David James Duncan

  At any rate Mama’s cleaving—canonical or not—was an ongoing act of good faith that inspired an analogous good faith in Papa, and so carried their marriage over some very rocky terrain. And her conducting—irritating or not—was the indispensable key to our daily struggle against the forces of entropy and chaos …

  So when—the morning after the Psalm War—Mama abruptly stopped conducting Everett, Peter and me and instead began to wage a kind of Cold War against us, it was not just a passing disaster: it was the instantaneous unraveling of our family as we knew it. For what she called “Christian reasons,” Mama stopped advising, stopped solving domestic koans, stopped helping the three of us in any way. And when Papa saw it happening and tried to reason her out of it, she went from intractable to irrational to hysterical to abusive, and finally just set her Bible in her lap and turned to stone.

  I remember seeing a TV news clip, one night that year, of the famous UN Assembly during which Nikita Khrushchev fell silent, slipped off his shoe, and proceeded to bang it steadily against a microphoned table throughout the testimonies of every delegate whose opinion on the Cuban Missile Crisis differed from his own. It was an unforgettable performance. World War III was the thinly veiled topic, the fate of all humanity was at stake—and there sat the Russian Premier, for hours on end, banging away with his shoe. In terms of diplomatic skills, in terms of a willingness or ability to alter his course or sidestep a crisis, Khrushchev’s mind and his foot had become perfect equals: if his brain had been in his sock and his foot on his shoulders, no opportunity for meaningful negotiation would have been lost.

  And so it was, beginning the day after the Psalm War, with my mother. Except in her case the mind-substitute was not her shoe, but her Bible. Beginning the morning after the blowup, she no longer spoke her mind to Everett, Peter or me at all: she just flipped herself open now and then and rattled off a few blazing Letters of the Law. She had become as infallible as scripture. And as predictable. And as inflexible, deaf and blind. She had carried Christian literalism to its logical extreme: she’d become a holy inanimate object.

  Camas/June/1964

  I was staring out at the street through the open diningroom window, so stupefied by the first real heat of the year that for some time my notion of entertainment had been to squash my nose against the window screen to feel the tiny waffles the meshed wire made in my nose-tip, when an immaculate royal-blue Mercedes-Benz convertible suddenly shrieked to a stop right in front of our house, slammed into reverse, burnt two strips of backwards rubber, and squawked to a second stop just inches in front of Papa’s rustbucket ’40 Ford. The driver left his brown leather seat and charged our house as if it was a lake and his pants were on fire. Meanwhile Papa went to the front door, and Mama and the rest of us (the others assumed there’d been a wreck) all came running so fast that we were bottlenecked, like Keystone Kops, in the diningroom door as Papa swung the front screen open. So when the stranger’s first words—or first roar, actually—turned out to be,

  “Jesus shit, Chance! How the hell are you doing?”

  I could not for the life of me figure out why the big cramp of joy on Mama’s stone-pious face not only failed to disappear, but intensified. Bursting through the bottleneck, she rushed the stranger, glommed on to his proffered paw, and cried, “My goodness! What a wonderful surprise!”

  Pumping her hand as if to test how well her teeth were anchored, the stranger bellowed, “Wonderful? You think so, Laura? Better wait’ll I’m through corncobbin’ the feces right outta poor Hugh here ’fore you decide how goddamn wonderful it is!”

  My rapidly fading sense of reality notified me that for the second time in two utterances our guest had used filthy language. I looked at Papa for corroboration: he was in happy hysterics. I looked at Mama: she was grinning from ear to ear. Elbowing Everett, I whispered, “Who is this clown?” Then I saw that the disease had infected him too: his normally solemn features were contorted by a smile so huge and joyous that he nearly resembled Irwin.

  “Shush!” he hissed. “This is great! You won’t believe this!”

  I already didn’t.

  “Kids,” Papa called in, seeing us all still jammed in the doorway, “this is Dr. Boyd Franken, our old surgeon friend. But it’s time for you all to wash up for supper.”

  Though we were the ones who should have been disappointed, the surgeon, upon hearing Papa’s last sentence, suddenly clutched his left eye socket as if an icepick had been driven into it. “Ohhhhhhhhh! Gawd nooooooooo!” he moaned. “You’re eating dinner! Christ, Laura! Look at me! Big dumb shit barging up here like this! I’m sorry! I’ll come back later! Hideous horrible! Damn! I’ll be back!”

  Never had I witnessed such vehement, foulmouthed, idiosyncratic remorse over so slight a transgression. But the wonders, this muggy night, were unceasing: not only did Mama fail to attack his mouth with a bar of soap, she went right on beaming as she cried, “Oh no, Dr. Franken! It’s no intrusion at all! In fact, why don’t you join us. There’s plenty!”

  For some reason, this suggestion only icepicked his other eye: “Ohhhhhhhhhh! Gawd noooooooooo, Laura! I mean, I’ll bet it’s great and all. But shit. I just ate. So I’ll just head outside here till you’re all—”

  “We wouldn’t hear of it!” Mama gushed.

  “Come on in,” said Papa, who all this time had been holding the screen door open. “Or I’ll step out. I’m not eating anyhow.”

  “Not eating!” the surgeon bellowed. “Whaddya mean, not eating? None of this polite crapola now! Go eat your godforsaken supper, man! I can wait.”

  “No, really,” Papa assured him. “I was about to take a run.”

  There was just no telling what sort of innocuous information might suddenly rear up like a rogue two-by-four and smite our new acquaintance over the head. Gaping at Papa for several disbelieving seconds, the doctor finally blored, “WHAW! A RUN? Like on your FEET? With all that BREATHING and SWEAT and shit?”

  Papa laughed and nodded.

  “Oh. Well. Hell then,” he said. “That’s different! I don’t mind stop-pin’ a man from running! God damn! I hate running. Screw it then. All right! Look out, Laura! I’m comin’ in.”

  I can’t fully explain the effect this man was having on us, but I can say this: most of us entertain in our minds a steady stream of notions concerning what is real, a second stream of notions concerning what is not, and together these two streams give us the single sense of perspective, just as our two eyes give us the single sense of sight. But when the stream of reality and the stream of unreality abruptly collide or crisscross, our sense of perspective goes exactly as bonkers as does our vision when we cross our eyes. And Dr. Boyd Franken—being a walkin’ talkin’ rootin’ tootin’ constantly short-circuiting collision of the real and appropriate and the unreal and inappropriate—had a magical ability to bonker not just my perspective, but the perspectives of my entire family. A striking example: Mama’s sudden tolerance of toilet language. Everybody’s tolerance of it, for that matter. We’d just been invaded by a self-described “big dumb shit” come to “corncob the feces” out of our beloved father, yet there we all sat, grinning so hugely that the only one of us who looked the least bit normal was Irwin. This man obviously contained some sort of catalytic converter that rendered the filth of his language as natural and inoffensive as dirt in a garden. A second example: Doc Franken stood perhaps 5′9,″ and was quite thin. Yet when our 6′2″ 200-pound father opened the front screen to let the doctor in, he nearly reefed it off its hinges then kicked a chair back against the wall, as if making way for a hippopotamus—and then Mama took over the same delusion, lock, stock and hippo. Seizing the doctor by the elbow, she steered him over to the couch, physically turned him around, then shoved him down into place so firmly that it was obvious she thought he might storm up over the couch back and out through the plate-glass window if left to his own devices. And the weird thing was that her behavior seemed absolutely necessary: I feared the very same thing!


  Papa sat in his easy chair while Mama pulled up her rocker, both of them still grinning, and both parking their buns on the front edge of their chairs as if they just couldn’t wait to hear the next stream of undeleted expletives. The good doctor didn’t disappoint them either: “I feel like a damn douche bag droppin’ down out of the sky like this, but Jesus shit, you two! It’s great to see ya!”

  Papa smiled and nodded, but at this second reference to the Lord’s byproducts I thought Mama’s face finally began to register some disgust. I was right about what it registered, but dead wrong about the cause: in the kind of voice you might expect to hear from someone who’s just finished backing the car over three or four of your kids out in the driveway, Mama gasped, “Doctor! I forgot to offer you coffee!”

  Leveling his jolly psychopath’s glare upon her, Franken roared, “So you did, woman! Get your butt in gear!”

  While Mama giggled and wriggled and ran to fetch this madman coffee, Papa did her one better: he fetched him his kids. “Come say hello,” he said, seeing we hadn’t budged from our doorway. “But move it. Doc Franken’s a busy man.”

  “Judas Priest!” the Busy Man gasped as we filed into the livingroom. “How many o’ these you got back there anyhow? Hahaha! Jesus, Chance! No wonder you’re flat fuckin’ broke all the time!”

  Papa beamed with pleasure as the six of us who’d flat fuckin’ broke him found various perches from which to gape at our guest. “So where’s my good buddy and colleague in crime?” the doctor said. “Where’s ol’ Emmet?”

  Everett strode forward, his face nearly split and bleeding from its three-sizes-too-big grin. “Well, Bud?” Franken said. “You wanna tell ’em, or should I?”

  Blushing like a rookie trombone soloist at church, “Emmet” piped, “You better!”

  “You two know each other?” Mama said, looking delighted as she bustled in with an entire coffee-and-tea-making factory balanced on her best silver tray.

  “I uh, we um, I phu—” Everett sputtered.

  “We met on the street!” Franken broke in, smiling, nodding, and obviously lying. “Yessir, I was over here in Camas on business last week when I spotted this young fella struttin’ along down by the, uh … Where the hell was that, Em?”

  “Oh, right up by the high school, Doctor,” Everett squeaked.

  “Right! And soon as I saw him I says, why, if I’m any kind of physiognomist at all, that young stallion’s the spittin’ image of lovely Laura Chance! I hollered over and ast him, and sure enough he was, so we got to talkin’ about Hugh here and how we met and so on. And the upshot of that talk, as I said, was this proposition we hatched. Which is a goddamned outrage, I may as well admit. But that dudn’t mean we won’t try to browbeat poor Hugh into doing it up anyhow, huh, Em?”

  “Ee-heehee-ee-ee-hee-ee!” piped the ditty little dork who used to be Everett.

  “The thing is, Hugh and Laura,” Franken continued, “I’m opening a new clinic down in Portland. Or I’ll open it once it’s built. But my problem right now is the lot I’m building on. It was bulldozed a year ago, so it’s nice and level and all. But the goddamned Himalayan briars have completely overgrown it since then. And it just so happens I’d had four estimates done on what it’d cost to clear and landscape it the day before I bumped into Em here …”

  He paused for a moment, and sipped from his china cup with such serenity and delicacy that I was momentarily able to recall an astounding fact: in real life this walking car wreck of a man was actually some sort of skilled surgeon! When the cup clinked back in its saucer, though, unreal life intervened: “You really ought to see these landscape clucks! Peas in a pod, every one of ’em. Huuuge filthy pickup truck, five empty beer cases in the back, rifle in the gun rack, sawed-off bazooka in the glove box, and so many Playboy Bunny girl pictures spraddled round the cab it looks like a goddamned gynecology textbook in there! Then there’s the one big bumpersticker saying NIXON IN ’60! and the other one sayin’ they’ll give up their guns the day we pry ’em from their cold dead rectums. Christ Almighty! And then to find out what it costs to hire these jackoffs! Over my dead member! I told ’em. You got to speak to these buck-suckers in their own lingo, eh, Laura?”

  Mama clucked sympathetically—though the same Nixon bumper-sticker was pasted on the back of her Dodge wagon. Meanwhile Franken reached for his cup, took another serene, surgical sip, returned cup to saucer, and the instant it clinked into place, the ongoing car-wreck continued: “So I’m still steamin’ from these encounters when I see young Emmet sauntering down the street there, and bingo! Brainstorm. Say! I says. Does that luckless butt-hook you call a father still have that quackdinged thumb? Oh be sure! he says. How many brothers you got anyhow, Emmet? Three, says he. How many of you know how to put in a day’s work? Three, he says. Which one’s the dud? The bookworm, he says. But there’s a muscle-brained maniac, he says, who’ll more’n make up for the worm.”

  “So what’s this leading up to?” Papa asked. “You want these boys to clear away your briars? Is this a job offer? Because if it is, you can cart ’em away right now.”

  My brothers and I chuckled politely at Papa’s joke—if it was a joke. But Franken snorted, “The boys? Come off it, Chance! What good are these half-pint incendiaries without a Cap’n Bly to crack some whip? It’s your big strong body I’m after, man!”

  Papa seemed surprised at this twist. “Listen, Hugh,” the doctor said. “I need that lot landscaped, not just cleared. And I’ll roast in hell or even pick my heinie in heaven ’fore I’ll hire the job out to a bunch of rednecked Nixonite extortionists. But I don’t want a covey of underaged nitwits out there maimin’ shrubs and bustin’ handles off shovels either. So what I’m hoping for is an economic compromise. I’d start the boys at minimum wage, work ’em up the scale soon as I saw honest blisters (or boot ’em if I didn’t), and you could make ’em bank their take for college, paternity suits, or whatever hoaxes, snares and delusions they’d be needin’ it for later. But the lads are worthless to me without you, Chance. And you are worthless to me with that fossilized turd you call a thumb still hangin’ off your hand there …”

  Papa’s face reddened, but Franken barged on: “So what I’m proposing is this: I’ll take off your toe and try to build the thumb we talked about, way back before that union lawyer blew your court case. If the surgery’s a failure, you’re out a toe and owe me nothing. But if the transplant lives and thrives, you run my landscapin’ crew, do my clinic up right and proper, and I don’t pay you a red cent in return.”

  My brothers and sisters and I had burst out whooping and cheering before he could even finish. But Papa neither smiled nor moved. Our cheering died. “What is it, Papa?” Everett asked.

  “We’d work hard!” Irwin shouted. “We promise! You wouldn’t have to lift a—”

  “Now cork it right there!” the doctor cut in. “Pop’s got a head on his shoulders. He sees this whole deal for the potential screw job it is. So let me add a few extras. I’ll provide the anesthesiologist, the prosthetic toe, the hospitalization and any plastic surgeries you’d need in the months following. All you’d have to wangle is the time off work. And as for Operation Landscape, I’ll supply the pickup, materials and tools. But after seeing Winnie here, I’ll tell you this: you supply your own damned lunches!”

  We all exploded again—except for Papa, who just looked blank. “I’m no saint as a boss, either,” Franken said. “You and your band of illegal child laborers are gonna have to whip a briar patch like the one that Disney bitch planted round poor Sleepin’ Beauty and turn it into a landscaped park fit to appease the troubled souls and malpractice-happy minds of countless clucks and cluckesses upon whose loved ones I’ll be inside carving. So that’s the deal. What do you say, Chance?”

  Papa said nothing. He just glanced at the doctor, looked down at his knees a while, then abruptly stood—and left the room.

  Doc Franken turned to Mama, his bluster and cheer suddenly spent and gone. “Christ, Laura!
Have I offended him or what?”

  “I don’t know what’s the matter,” she said. “Excuse me.” And she left too.

  The rest of us stayed put, watching the doctor, but he looked so preoccupied and nervous now that we were afraid to speak. After a while Freddy got up off the floor and, with a heart-melting smile, climbed right into his lap. But even this got almost no reaction. Then Mama reappeared in the doorway.

  “He says he doesn’t know yet,” she began, her lower lip trembling. “I mean, he doesn’t know whether he can accept, or what to say, except … except that this is the kindest, most generous offer that anybody, ever, has—”

  “Aw horseshit!” Franken bellowed, turning red as a geranium and nearly tossing Freddy on the floor as he stood and bolted for the door. My brothers and I jumped up and tried to follow, but he was already down the porch steps when he turned and hollered back over his shoulder, “You tell that sap to wait’ll he sees those briars ’fore he decides I’m bloody Santa Claus! And tell him I need to know tomorrow, Laura, because I needed this job done yesterday!”