The Brothers K

by David James Duncan

  The twins were fortunate: if Everett had been the one to overhear this sentence, he’d have taken the words “hump,” “hard,” “hose,” “jerk” and “all the way” and more or less robbed the twins’ ears of their virginity. But Peter was a gentleman: all he did was groan. And when the twins ignored him, this pleased him. He liked it that the Scientists, while engaged in speculation, paid no heed to the banal protestations of the laity.

  “I don’t know about Spokane,” Freddy hesitantly replied. “I mean, I don’t know how far a hump of energy could travel down a hose, because if some muscleman or machine or something jerked it really hard, I guess the hose might just break.”

  “I never thought of that,” said Bet.

  I didn’t either, Peter thought.

  “But I do think,” Freddy continued, “there might be all sorts of humps of all sorts of energy that go traveling all sorts of directions people can’t see. For instance when a person gets mad at somebody …” (Her words came quicker now, and her breathing had become audible.) “Like when you get really mad and maybe slap somebody or jerk their arm or something, like Mama does to us sometimes, I think an invisible hump of energy might go flying all the way up their arm and right into their skeleton or insides or whatever—a hump of mean, witchy energy—and I think it might fly round and round in there like a witch on a broomstick flies round the sky, and go right on hurting invisible parts of the person you don’t even know you’re hurting, because you can’t see all the ways their insides are connected to the mean thing you did to their outside. And from then on, maybe that hump of mean energy sits inside the hurt person like a coiled-up hose or a rattlesnake, just waiting in there. And someday, when that person touches somebody else, maybe even way in the future, that rattlesnake energy might come humping up out of them by accident and hurt that next person too, even though they didn’t mean to, and even though the person didn’t deserve it.” She paused for a moment. Then, with feeling, concluded, “I think it happens. I really think it does.”

  “I think it does too,” Peter said.

  He felt Bet’s scowl, knew that he was trespassing on Scientific turf, but finished his thought anyway. “I think what you said can happen, does happen. But every witch who ever lived was once just a person like you or me, that’s what I think anyway, till somewhere, sometime, they got hit by a big, mean hump of nasty energy themselves, and it shot inside them just like Freddy said, and crashed and smashed around, wrecking things in there, so that a witch was created. The thing is, though, I don’t think that first big jolt is ever the poor witch’s fault.”

  Bet thought about this, and finally nodded cautiously. Freddy said nothing. The sprinkler hissed like a Halloween cat. “Another thing,” Peter said, “is that everybody gets jolted. You, me, before we die we’ll all get nailed, lots of times. But that doesn’t mean we’ll all get turned into witches. You can’t avoid getting zapped, but you can avoid passing the mean energy on. That’s the interesting thing about witches, the challenge of them—learning not to hit back, or hit somebody else, when they zap you. You can just bury the zap, for instance, like the gods buried the Titans in the center of the earth. Or you can be like a river when a forest fire hits it—phshhhhhhhhhhhhh! Just drown it, drown all the heat and let it wash away …”

  Bet was scowling again, but Freddy just lay still, watching his face. “And the great thing,” he said, “the reason you can lay a river in the path of any sort of wildfire is that there’s not just rivers inside us, there’s a world in there.” Seeing Bet’s scowl deepening, he added, “Not because I say so. Christ says so. And Krishna. But I feel it sometimes too. I’ve felt how there’s a world, and rivers, and high mountains, whole ranges of mountains, in there. And there are lakes in those mountains—beautiful, pure, deep blue lakes. Thousands of them. Enough to wash away all the dirt and trouble and witchiness on earth.”

  Bet’s scowl was gone now, because her mind had eased down into a place where hiss of sprinkler, splash of drops and babbling of brother were all just soothing sensations. But Freddy was still watching Peter’s face, and still listening when he said, “But to believe in them! To believe enough to remember them. That’s where we blow it! Mountain lakes? In me? Naw! Jesus we believe in, long as He stays out of sight. But the things He said, things like The kingdom of heaven is within you, we believe only by dreaming up a heaven as stupid and boring as our churches. Something truly heavenly, something with mountains higher than St. Helens or Hood and lakes purer and deeper than any on earth—we never look for such things inside us. So when the humps of witchiness come at us, we’ve got nowhere to go, and just get hurt, or get mad, or pass them on and hurt somebody else. But if you want to stop the witchiness, if you want to put out the fires, you can do it. You can do it if you just remember to crawl, right while you’re burning, to drag yourself if that’s what it takes, clear up into those mountains inside you, and on down into those cool, pure lakes.”

  Bet was half asleep by now, and Peter was gazing at the spray as if into a blaze, when, quite suddenly and quite loudly, Freddy burst into tears. “What!” Bet shouted, jumping clear to her feet. “Is it a bee-sting? What is it?”

  “I’m sorry,” Freddy sobbed, hiding her face. “I’m sorry. But … but I’m just so glad!”

  “Glad?” Bet was flummoxed. “About a bee-sting? About what?”

  “The mountains!” Freddy whispered, eyes closed, tears streaming. “The lakes.”

  5. Science Meets Prophecy

  For a believer in the empirical method and an acerbic critic of religious hocus-pocus of all kinds, Marion Becker Chance was surprisingly fond of making prophetic statements. Her prophecies were invariably dire. She made them only in the privacy of her apartment. Her “chosen people” were invariably her grandchildren. Her purpose, however, was far more pragmatic than that of the usual doom prophet: all Grandawma really wanted out of a prophesy was to scare our pants off. Having personally experienced, as an inmate in an ancient British parochial school, how much quieter and better behaved a quailing, apprehensive child is than a happy one, she would do her prophetic best, whenever our boisterousness threatened her china or fragile furniture, to create an atmosphere conducive to the dread of untold evil and impending disaster.

  Unfortunately for her possessions, we were on to her. Though she used her irony-armored voice, hawklike face, red-rimmed eyes, innate pessimism, disastrous past and palsying to considerable effect, we knew all along that she was no prophet. She was just an overgrown Famous Scientist in disguise.

  Her favorite doom prophecy was a surprisingly anemic specimen. It went something like this: “The one thing, perhaps the only thing you can all be certain of, is that your lives are going to be very different, and probably very much darker, than you’ll ever dream or expect as children.”

  “That’s great news, Gran!” was Everett’s famous reply to this. “I was expecting I’d turn out exactly like you!”

  Poor Grandawma. Another common doom, this one foretold for the twins as soon as they grew old enough to act the least bit giddy around little boys, went like this: “You think you’ll grow up to marry a handsome prince, don’t you? Well, let me tell you something, young lady. You shall, you shall. And that’s when you’ll find out that the fairy tale has it backwards. A few kisses, a few years—that’s all it takes to turn the handsomest prince on earth into a big, ugly frog.”

  Freddy’s best response to this came when she was seven—and already a discerning student of her big brothers’ vernacular. She said, “You mean like Charles de Gaulle?” Bet’s most interesting reply to the same prophecy had come a year or two earlier. It went, “I’ll never kiss a boy! Not even a prince. But if I do, I hope he turns into a cute little doggy.” We were difficult kids to scare.

  In 1965, however—in the midst of a religious Cold War that had begun to scare us—Grandawma finally made a prophecy that had the desired effect. It was that same anemic one she’d made a dozen times at least to my brothers and me—ab
out our lives being doomed to turn out differently than we expected. This time, though, she found a way of giving it some real oomph: not sixty seconds after she said it, she died.

  · · · ·

  It was a bright, sunny spring morning. The twins had spent the night on the hide-a-bed couch in Grandawma’s livingroom. Their joint plan for the day was a bus trip down to Portland to visit the city zoo and the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry—the Famous Scientists’ Medina and Mecca. Grandawma’s health had been fine. In fact she’d been on a roll, bustling on foot around the school basements, libraries and junk stores of Camas, begging or buying old microscopes and chemistry sets, butterfly nets and lab notebooks, fossils, gyroscopes, geodes, atomic charts, Indian artifacts and anything else she could think of to enhance and prolong the twins’ science phase. The three of them were seated together at her little oak breakfast table, eating oatmeal and drinking orange juice and tea, when it happened. Freddy had just idly recited the Quaker Oats motto aloud: “Nothing Is Better for Thee Than Me.” But Bet—whose mouth had been full of the same tepid bite of the stuff for two or three minutes—took vehement exception: “That’s a lie!” she blurted, dribbling milk down her chin. “Tons of things are better for thee than oat meal!”

  “It’s an exaggeration, certainly,” Grandawma said. “But you’ll not leave this table till you finish what’s in your bowl. And if you speak again with your mouth full, I’ll double your helping.”

  “It’s the Right Thing to Do,” Freddy read from the box.

  Bet sighed, rolled her eyes, and started lapping milk from the bowl with her tongue.

  “Stop that at once!” Grandawma snapped.

  “I’m a kitty cat,” Bet said gloomily.

  “Perhaps you were. But now you’re human.”

  “Whooo saaaaays?” she meowed.

  “Your sister and I, and this nice Quaker gentleman on the box,” Grandawma replied patiently. “We are going on a scientific expedition today, and cats are infamously inept scientists. Just look at the way they dissect mice and frogs.”

  “I like playing Famous Scientist,” Bet said, unscientifically slapping her spoon against the gluey mush in her bowl, “but I don’t want to be a scientist. Not when I grow up.”

  Grandawma scowled, both at the statement and at the slapping. Bet looked to be in a state of rapid devolution. If the trend continued, she might lapse clear back into one of her Irwin moods! It would be the ruin of the day. Marion Becker Chance narrowed her eyes and sniffed loudly. The time had definitely come to brew up a little behavior-altering apprehension: “You may well grow up to become a gargoyle, or a harridan, or a guttersnipe!” she snapped. “We can’t possibly know—and thank goodness not! What most of us become as adults would terrify us as children.”

  It was working better than usual: Bet had already stopped slapping her spoon, sat up straight, and was betraying no feline qualities whatever as she peeped, “Why?”

  But Grandawma decided she’d best rub it all the way in. “I don’t quite know,” she said, unleashing the palsy now, and glowering far off into a hideous future. Then out she came with it: “I only know that the one thing, perhaps the only thing we can always be certain of, is that our lives will turn out very differently,-and very much more darkly, than most of us ever dream as children.”

  It may have been a bit cruel, but it was also an unusually effective piece of behavioral engineering: the two girls stopped eating and reading and stared morosely down into their bowls, their hands neatly folded, their rambunctious little mouths closed, their comportment perfect. The room was silent, but for the tidy ing of the electric wall clock. Marion took a grimly satisfied sip of tea, placed her cup in its saucer with a dainty clink, and was about to broach the subject of the Natural Science Exhibit they’d be studying at OMSI that day when, for the first and last time in her life, her behavior modification technique backfired and became a genuine act of prophecy:

  First she looked up at the ceiling and said, “Oh!”

  It was her last word. She said it softly, but with such hushed enthusiasm, perhaps even delight, that the twins’ immediately looked up at the ceiling too. But there was nothing there but plaster.

  Next Grandawma closed her eyes, opened her mouth, and slowly began to bow her head—another thing they’d never seen her do. Bet later said, with a somewhat wooden air of piousness, that it looked as though she’d been bowing her head to pray. But Freddy said not. Freddy said she bowed so slowly that it was more like an OMSI exhibit they’d once seen on the laws of kinetics. To me this seems the likelier explanation, since when the center of gravity passed the meridian the bowing head became a falling head that didn’t slow or alter course till Grandawma’s brow smacked the front rim of her cereal bowl, the milk and oatmeal splashed up onto her neat gray bun, and the bowl stayed balanced, like a little cap, right there on top of her head. The twins gaped at her, saying nothing. Grandawma gaped down at the floor, also saying nothing: Her arms were folded neatly in her lap; her rambunctious old mouth was closed; except for the food on the floor and the bowl on her head, her comportment was perfect. The room was silent, but for the tidy ing of the clock. She’d even stopped palsying.

  Then—quite suddenly—she bounced, as if she’d had a single violent hiccup.

  It was her final movement. Peter later theorized that this bounce had been caused by the soul’s departure from her body. Everett, however, ruthlessly maintained that it was only the soul attempting to leave her body, and that since she’d never believed in it the poor thing was so weak and malnourished that rather than fly away it could only “hop, then croak—like one of those prince-cum-frogs in that backasswards fairy tale she was always trying to scare the twins with.”

  Either way, when our grandmother, or the top half of her body, came down from the bounce, the forehead missed the bowl, hit the edge of the table, slid on past the table when the neck bent back, and flopped neatly down between her knees; meanwhile her arms slid out of her lap, her hands swished down her sides, and her free-falling knuckles hit the hardwood floor with a rattlingly eerie clunk which both girls recognized at once as the sound of utter finality.

  From opposite ends of the table, they leaned down and peered at her. She didn’t move. She didn’t make a peep. Nor did she breathe. “Are you all right, Gran?” asked Beatrice.

  “She might be all right,” Freddy said. “But she sure is dead.”

  “She just fainted,” Bet said doubtfully. “Huh, Gran.”

  “She never faints. Anyhow, it’s not stuffy.”

  Bet began thinking this over. Meanwhile Freddy slid out of her chair, seated herself, cross-legged, on the floor beneath the table, and took advantage of this unique opportunity to study her first nonliving human without motherly or brotherly interference. “Don’t leave me up here!” Bet cried. And grabbing her little black lab notebook, she too moved down to the floor.

  “It does look like fainting,” Freddy admitted, studying Grandawma’s head-between-knees posture. “I mean, that’s just how Peter used to sit so he wouldn’t faint in church, back before he started not sitting that way, so he would faint, so he’d get to leave.”

  Bet nodded.

  “Maybe dying feels like fainting,” Freddy theorized.

  “I hope so,” Bet murmured. But she was not up to the usual scientific banter.

  “Didn’t look like it hurt much.”

  “No,” Bet said—and for a moment it looked as though she might manage to jot some of these observations down. But then she half gasped, hugged her notebook to her chest, turned to Freddy, and said, “They turn cold … don’t they?”

  Winifred nodded.

  “How long do you suppose it takes?”

  Freddy thought about it. “Maybe about as long,” she said finally, “as for a hot bowl of oatmeal to cool down.”

  It was the wrong metaphor: Bet put on an extremely grave expression, turned to her sister, and said, “You mean as long as it takes to cool down on the table? O
r on your head?” Then she burst into hysterics.

  “Don’t!” Freddy said.

  Which made Bet laugh harder.

  “It’s not funny.”

  But Beatrice was beside herself. “Did you see the mush go flying?” she howled. “Did you see the bowl on her bun? Ha ha ha! Dove right in and tried for that last bite! Hahahahahaha! You can get down now, Gran, that’s a good girl! Nothing was better for thee than he!”

  Freddy never smiled or said a word, but Bet was still trying, through a hemorrhoidal kind of squeezing, to glean a little more escapist hilarity out of the idea—when they both suddenly heard the dripping, turned, and saw the urine, raining down through the wicker chair seat, pooling on the floor beneath. Bet let out a last staccato bark. Then, in a small, very surprised voice, she said, “Gran? Are you doing that?”

  The body didn’t move. The urine kept dripping. Bet began to quiver.

  “I think,” Freddy whispered, “I think they—bodies, I mean—they just do that.”

  Bet turned away, and for a long time they were silent. Then, in the same surprised, minuscule voice, Bet said, “I loved her, Freddy. I loved her a lot.” And though she never sniffled, never sobbed, just held her head rigid and sat there shivering, tears began streaming down her cheeks.

  For a long time Freddy couldn’t speak. She just watched the spilled milk swirl along the borders of the other pool. Finally, though, she said, “I loved her too, Bet. And … and if we really loved her, I … we … I think we’ve got to love her still.”

  Bet drew her knees up and clenched them hard to try and slow the shivering. “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “I mean”—Freddy shook her head—“I mean she wouldn’t want this. I mean we, I … I think I’ve got to clean her up before we let an ambulance or anybody find her.”

  Hearing this, Bet just hid her face between her knees and curled up like a foetus. But she heard Freddy sigh after a bit, then crawl out from under the table, cross the kitchen, and unbutton the never-before-used pink terry-cloth hand towels from the oven handle; heard her fetch sponges and soap from beneath or beside the sink, fill a saucepan with water, return to the table; heard her wipe the surface clean, draw a breath that sounded as trembly as her own, move to the floor, hesitate, then slowly continue cleaning.