The Brothers K

by David James Duncan

  When Freddy returned to the sink Bet finally peeked, saw the floor was spotless, saw a pile of clean rags lying beneath the wicker. She heard Freddy dump and rinse the saucepan, run fresh water, wring her towels and sponges, and they were soothing, these sounds: it could have been ’Dawma or Mama just cleaning as usual. But when Freddy recrossed the kitchen, took a stand by the chair, and Bet realized what must come next, she hid her face and curled up even more tightly than before. Then all but the one sound stopped:

  This stasis went on so long and Bet had curled so tightly and deeply down into herself that when she finally heard a loud sniff she believed, for an instant, that it had come from Grandawma, and that she was about to get scolded for being under the table. But when the sniff was followed by a sob, then by the broken breathing that accompanies silent weeping, Bet knew it was her sister, knew that her strength had finally come to an end, and knew that no one was going to help them, that no one was coming to soothe them, that the situation was not going to change unless she herself somehow managed to change it.

  She tried the easy route first: scrinching up into an even tighter ball, she whimpered, “Dear Jesus. Help!”

  The result was instantaneous: Freddy’s sobs became uncontrollable, half the water in her saucepan spilled onto the floor, and she gasped, “Bet!”

  “Phooey!” Bet said with a sudden strength born, I guess, of exasperation with her fear and helplessness. But even the crudest of prayers has a way of making things difficult to interpret. Take this odd (given the context) utterance, “Phooey!” It appears that Bet either said it to Christ because she felt He wasn’t helping her, or to no one because she was frustrated. But who’s to say her prayer hadn’t invoked Him so fast that both the exasperation and the phooey came from the Christ in Bet as He moved the frightened child in her gently aside, in order to help?

  I don’t know. I suspect only fools understand prayer. All I know is that after uttering hers, Bet said “Phooey!” then unfolded herself, crawled almost angrily out from under the table, stood up across the chair from her undone twin, tried to picture Peter’s inner mountains and lakes, failed utterly, tried to smile at Freddy, failed utterly, but finally reached, nevertheless, for the towel in the saucepan. All I know is that, after wringing it out with weak, trembling hands, she began, ever so gently, to cleanse the bowed head, the withered neck, the steel-gray hair. All I know is that this somehow enabled Freddy to start helping too, and that when the ambulance and Mama arrived a half hour or so later, our grandmother was lying on the floor neatly wrapped in a blanket, dignified, dry and spotless.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Kinds of Salvation

  “Quit yo’ foolishness,” she said, “before I knock the living Jesus out of you.”

  —Flannery O’Connor

  For we are saved by hope.

  —St. Paul

  1. Salvation of Teachers, via Graduation

  One thing you inherit when you’ve got three older brothers are a lot of threadbare, holey-elbowed, pill-collared, hand-me-down shirts. Another thing you inherit are teachers. All my teachers at McLoughlin High had taught at least one of my brothers; some had taught all three; most of the latter, by the time I got to them, were in about the same sort of shape as the shirts.

  When it came to sheer aptitude, Everett was an excellent student, and in a better world than this one might have earned straight A’s. This being the world it is, though, Everett kept spotting all these enormous improvements that people ought to be making on it—and it is a rare high school teacher who enjoys seeing their world being enormously improved upon by youths.

  There are natural leaders and unnatural leaders; most public school teachers fall with a thankless thud into the latter category. Everett, on another hand entirely, was a natural ringleader. Add to that his short temper, tall IQ, fearlessness, good looks, great gifts as a mimic, and addiction to regaling all comers with kamikaze comedy routines, and what you get is a kid with power. Everett drew a certain kind of giddy teen following the way dog-doo draws flies. And when a mere kid is endowed with both power and followers, the very least of the problems likely to result is a checkered academic career.

  Everett’s, for example, had only two B’s in it. All the way through high school he nailed down either A’s (for Aptitude) or C’s and D’s (for Contentiousness and Dissidence). Then there were his suspensions: as a freshman he earned his first for getting into three fistfights in two weeks (all three times with towering seniors, who merely wanted to initiate him with the traditional red lipstick, but to their amazement kept finding their own lips or noses dripping red instead); as a sophomore he nabbed a second for crawling up under a stage at a football game and standing a chocolate milk shake on the throne of the Homecoming Queen an instant before she sat back down; as a junior he managed two, the first for talking three-quarters of his class into walking out on a right-wing American History teacher’s lecture in praise of George Armstrong Custer, the second for borrowing a friend’s compound bow and four genuine obsidian-tipped arrows (courtesy of the collection of Marion Becker Chance) and doing a Little Bighorn number on the same teacher’s tires after he awarded Everett’s “Crazy Horse Was a Greater American than Lincoln” essay an F.

  “You’re doing just great, son!” Papa told Everett somewhere along in there. “Just pick the college of your choice—and kiss it goodbye! I hope you like working at Crown Z better than Roy and me do.”

  He got the message: as a senior he moved to the top of the honor role despite his Valley Forge wardrobe by simply avoiding those teachers whose politics he couldn’t stand. He then put his natural ringleadership, fiery eyes and eloquence together to achieve one of those bizarre triple coups conceivable only in public high schools when he was: (1) elected president of the student body, (2) appointed editor-in-chief of the school paper, and (3) voted “Prettiest Eyes” in the Senior Class Hall of Fame.

  His two-fisted tenure as president and editor-in-chief was a yearlong nightmare for the McLoughlin High faculty, but for the college-bound students it may have proven a useful primer for the last three years—the blitzkrieg years—of the Sixties. Though the great causes of Camas’s Class of ’66 were usually what Everett called “measurement issues” (such as what length of hair, length of skirt or length of kiss should be allowed on school property), he imported terms like “petition,” “student rights,” “boycott,” “free speech” and “solidarity” all the way up from exotic Berkeley, California, and managed to forge a place for them in a student lexicon hitherto dominated by such American Gothic terms as “rumble,” “rack,” “boss,” “cheater,” “skeezer,” “PG” and “knockers.” His presidency and editorship also helped bring him an unlooked-for economic and karmic windfall when, coupled with his prodigious SAT scores and a couple of passionate letters by teachers impressed with his turnaround, they offset his mangled GPA and suspensions just enough to win him a modest but feasible work/study scholarship to the University of Washington.

  “One down!” Papa shouted the day the whole family saw Everett off at the Vancouver Greyhound station.

  “Five to go,” Mama groaned.

  Peter posed an entirely different sort of problem for the McLoughlin High faculty. Known to some of his friends as “Stanley Einstein” (a combination of Musial the Hitter and Albert the Thinker, though something along the lines of “Ramakrishna Clemente” might have been more to his liking), Pete was, at first glance, the Perfect Scholar. He never missed an assignment, aced every test, never rioted, seldom made wisecracks, raised his hand before speaking, and so on. But in his scholarly way he could be a source of teacherly stress surpassing even the Natural Ringleader. The problem, in his case, was sheer voracity of intellect. The public school teacher’s modest but worthy goal has always been to drum a modest but measurable quantity of knowledge into the largest possible number of student heads, and to twice a month receive a modest but measurable paycheck for doing so. But my immodestly bright number two brother had no inter
est in any such process. Peter didn’t want to change the world: he wanted to fully comprehend it. He wanted to know everything there was to know about everything, and in this quest an instructor’s head was just a grapefruit to be sliced in half and squeezed remorselessly dry. Since very few students could even begin to understand him, there was no danger of Peter attracting anarchistic followers. For days, even weeks, he’d just sit there in his studious mode, sponging up the disheveled lectures while knocking off homework for two or three other classes, or reading a novel or philosophical tome in German or French. But should his curiosity be fully piqued by something a teacher said, should some scientific quandary or epistemological conundrum galvanize his normally dispersed powers of thought, Peter’s cheeks would flush, his pupils dilate, his voice rise, and the questions would leap from his mouth like hounds from the back of a pickup, crashing through the fences of the topic at hand, smashing aside the course description, dragging everyone off on a panting, plunging intellectual coon hunt that almost invariably ended with the poor instructor treed, or at bay. Perhaps one pedant in ten respected him for this. Perhaps one in twenty could gracefully deal with it. The rest dreaded or loathed him for it.

  With the Iconoclast Chance and Genius Chance out of the way but four Unknown-Quantity Chances yet to be endured, some teachers had fled to other school districts, others had shed hair or teeth or broken out in eczema, and still others had fortified themselves with their bottle of choice, be it booze or Maalox, when into their rooms galumphed the Inculpable Chance—the blue-eyed, incessantly beaming, intrepidly affectionate Irwin. Toting a First Day Bouquet for his lady instructors, or a four-bit cigar for the gents, he would sometimes launch his year with a disclaimer than ran something like “Don’t worry, Teach. I’m nothin’ like my big brothers. I listen hard, be nice, try my best, and end up with C’s anyways …” But I doubt that disclaimers were needed: teachers are just people, and most people fall in love with Irwin at first sight, and stay fallen. For this very reason, though, Winnie too tore a chunk from his teachers. In his case it happened all at once, in early June, on the day he packed his dimpled cheeks, Grecian musculature, guileless baby-blues and puppy’s heart up with his books and pencils, gave ol’ Teach a last hug, promised he’d be back to visit, and strolled off down the hall forever, blissfully unaware of the piece of their hearts dragging along the linoleum behind him.

  2. Salvation of Grammarians, via Basalt

  A single, formidable exception to the hand-me-down-shirt syndrome was our grim, grammar-dispensing ninth-grade English instructor, Delmar Hergert. Everett’s pet theory was that the man was simply half inorganic—the offspring, possibly, of some horny hiker who’d had a wet dream while napping atop Beacon Rock. Be that as it mayn’t, Del Hergert looked like a walking talking gray-haired chunk of Columbia River basalt when Everett sauntered into his class in September 1961, and he hadn’t weathered a whit when Bet and Freddy fled the same class in June of ’72.

  Not only did Del Hergert refuse to age, he refused to laugh, frown or in any way color his face with emotion, refused to modify his words with humor, anger, affection, irony or even volume, in fact refused to do anything at all except pass or fail, with basaltic unbias, those students who had succeeded or failed to master the basic laws of English grammar by the year’s end, and to have demonstrated that mastery in a lengthy test and even lengthier “original essay.” All my siblings and I had to concoct monstrous essays for Hergert. Irwin’s heroic “History of My Dad from His Birth Up to Kincaids’s” was only the longest. Mine, the following year, garnered the distinction of being the most brownnosingly boring: my strategy had been to tailor my topic to the man it was intended for, so I’d nearly died of ennui writing about—you guessed it—Columbia River basalt formations. Peter’s essay (on the Great Religions of the East), Bet’s (on the Space Program) and Freddy’s (on the Oregon Trail) all made me feel better by being only slightly less anemic than my own. Only Everett had been sufficiently uncowed by Hergert’s basaltic visage and personality to take full advantage of the word “original” in the assignment description, and that’s why he penned the only essay besides Irwin’s that is still tolerable to read.

  It was called “Junk Cenius,” and though it was written two years before Irwin’s “History of My Dad,” it picked Papa’s baseball biography up where Irwin had more or less left it—with Papa dramatically saved by the mysterious “Fort Oopawanapoonawahinipopo” Brigadier General from “Goon Squad” and “Mongol trenches,” only to end up broke, bum-winged, and sold by the White Shlocks to that most inept and aptly dubbed of ballclubs, the Washington Senators, who in turn took one peek at Papa and zipped him off—with his three sons, wife and the embryonic edition of me—to a Baseball Erewhon called Kincaid, Oklahoma, and to a Double A team called, believe it or not, the Cornshuckers.

  “Junk Genius” earned Everett a number of peculiar honors. The first was a red-inked U (meaning Unacceptable) from Mr. Hergert, due to “extensive use of profanity.” The second, third and fourth honors—all compliments of a now defunct periodical called Sporting Digest—were a free year’s subscription, a wall plaque, and (oh joy!) a baseball bat exactly like the one Everett’s antihero, Roger Maris, used to club his sixty-first home run! Having no idea that they were gainsaying a redoubtable old grammarian, Sporting Digest selected “Junk Genius” as second runner-up in their “1962 Sports Story Open,” thereby swelling Everett’s already sizable head to the bursting point. Fortunately for those of us who lived with him, they immediately shrank it back down again by publishing a version so drastically condensed and dehydrated (good old-fashioned “#$%&*!”s where the “extensive profanity” should have been, for example) that reading it was rather like trying to consume instant coffee without first adding water. But the last and most peculiar honor the paper received came in the form of a letter of bombast and protestation addressed “to the McLoughlin High School Tinkling Brass” by one G. Q. Durham—the Junk Genius of the title.

  Faithfully preserved in Mama’s attic archives, Durham’s letter is too confounding to quote in full. But his closing remarks should serve to demonstrate the inimitable G.Q. style:

  … So if the straight poop is still worth a good goddam in this horse-crap Hypocrite’s Hey-Day & Age, young Everett there should have an A plus coming for his picture-perfect protrayals [sic] of my private & unique methods of instructing the science of junk pitching, commanding a ballclub & employing the King’s & various lesser types of English. So please convey to the scholarly Mr. Yogurt [sic] that if anybody’s got an F coming it’s The Bull, not the boy, & he can mail it here any time he likes & be overjoyed to know that my mean ol’ mom’ll whale the living tar out of me. But please convey to him also that if he insists on bullyragging helpless youngsters by shelling out Fs to the wrong person, Bull Durham looks forward to dealing in kind with Mr. Yogurt personally the next time my duties carries him out that way. This is no threat. Just a sweet & mild promise. Hugh Chance’s boy has done both yours & my organizations proud & ought to be commendated [sic] in kind.

  Yours in baseball,

  G. Q. “Bull” Durham,

  Ex-Head-Scout Washington Senators,

  Ex-Pitcher (5 teams American & National),

  Ex-Manager Kincaid Cornshuckers,

  Current Free-lance Scout & Junk Authority Extrordinnair [sic]

  The Bull’s real name was Gale Q. Durham. What the Q. stood for was anybody’s guess, but what the Bull stood for was definitely not the man’s size, strength or brand of tobacco, but his manner of “employing the King’s & various lesser types of English.” His ominous letter on Everett’s behalf was typical: at the time he penned it, the mighty Bull was a bald-headed, tub-gutted, hypoglycemic stroke victim who stood all of 5′9″ (though antique baseball cards listed him at 6′1″), weighed a doughy 199, grew winded when forced to rise from a chair or box seat, and needed bifocals if not binoculars to read the labels on his beer bottles, let alone to size up any sort of baseball prospec
t. The Bull sported one kidney, two small but patriotic eyes (red, white and blue), anywhere from two to five chins depending on whether he was watching grounders or pop-ups, and a pair of indelible mouth-corner tobacco stains that made him look like a puppet with its jaws hung on hinges. A baseball uniform—particularly a Washington Senators uniform—didn’t add one iota of grandeur to the overall picture. In other words, what made the Bull the Bull was not what he was, but what he was full of.

  The big leagues do have an aura of power, though. And a tobacco-stained threat-letter scrawled on official (if obsolete) Senators stationery by a fellow named Bull could strike more than a little fear in the average pedagogue’s heart. For a grammar-dispensing chunk of Columbia River basalt, however, there was only one way to deal with such mail: Delmar Hergert calmly corrected its grammar and spelling, gave it a bright red F, mailed a copy straight back to Bull, and handed the original—with red-inked corrections—over to Everett, accompanied by a handwritten note that read:

  While my stand on profanity remains unaltered, this drivel has inadvertently demonstrated your exceptional memory of and ear for this pitiable bombast’s vernacular. That you apparently cherish both the memories and the dialect is a subjective judgment the wisdom of which I shall not here question. In recognition of your gift, however, I offer this compromise: recopy the entire essay in legible longhand, substituting blanks (i.e ______) for obscenities, and I will change your grade from U to B +, thereby enabling us to be permanently rid of one another.