The Brothers K

by David James Duncan

  “Yours in baseball,”

  D. M. Hergert

  Everett did exactly what the basalt chunk suggested, but couldn’t resist adding a note of his own:

  While my stand on verisimilitude, and to that end profanity, remains as unaltered as yours, I’ve learned something valuable through all this: G. Q. Durham is a great pitching coach and bull________er, but D. M. Hergert is an equally great grammar teacher.

  Yours in English,

  Everett M. Chance

  3. Salvation of Nothing, via Espionage

  While I became a pre-Feminist, Everett a pre-Hippie, Peter a pre-Bhikku, Bet and Freddy Famous Scientists, Grandawma a surprisingly fond memory and Papa one hell of a skilled backyard-mattress basher, Mama had also undergone a major change: she’d become a Fanatic.

  Not a raving Fanatic. At least not audibly raving. That might have been healthier, actually, because Mama’s raving went on almost solely in her head, where there was no way to hear it, hence no means of challenging it, hence no means of preventing her from believing every bit of it. Fully believing herself to be at war with Satan, fully believing Irwin’s, Bet’s and Freddy’s salvations to be at stake, her love for the rest of us—even her love for Papa—simply sank out of sight. The submerging of this love immediately began to kill a very large part of her. But it also freed the fanatic to begin conducting a covert holy war against us.

  Her first act of war was to try to balance the odds by secretly enlisting the mightiest ally she could think of: Elder Babcock. Her second act of war, at the urging of this ally, was to completely disgrace herself: at Babcock’s suggestion Mama became a kind of religious McCarthyite, Everett, Peter and I became the “witches,” and she became our hunter. That we happened to be her offspring didn’t matter (Matthew 10:36). That she was attempting to chop her family in half like a big chunk of stove wood also didn’t matter (Matthew 10:35, 37 & 38). That she set out to do this “chopping” by surreptitiously plundering our rooms, notebooks, closets, wastebaskets, and any other place she thought might contain evidence of our moral or religious corruption eventually did matter to some of us (Exodus 20:15). But witch-hunters don’t think about niggling little rules like the Ten Commandments. Witch-hunters think they’re right, they think you’re wrong, and they think that as long as they can prove it, how they prove it doesn’t matter.

  The exact purpose of Mama’s pilfered evidence, as far as we were ever able to understand, was to show it to Irwin and the twins at a sort of Inquisition/Surprise Party to be organized and supervised by (who else?) the Elder. The purpose of this gathering, in turn, was to convince our orthodox siblings to give us rebels the same Agree with me or I’ll damn you forever! ultimatum that Babcock and Mama had already given us. Like many a Christian before them, Mama and the Elder justified their machinations with Christ’s famous sentence: “I came not to send peace, but a sword.” And like many a Christian before them, they completely forgot that the only sword-shaped weapon Jesus ever actually used was the one He died on.

  Still it was an interesting plan. At least it was bold, dramatic and, from Bet’s and Freddy’s perspectives, rather flattering: not every eight-year-old girl on the block got invited to sit in judgment over older brothers charged with heresy, Satanism and the like. Of course the plan was also ridiculous, and doomed to bring nothing but pain, confusion and embarrassment to everyone concerned. But this is the Fanatic’s great disputative advantage over other people: “What’s a little confusion or pain,” they ask, “compared to eternal salvation?” And of course this question can’t be argued: who wouldn’t gladly be robbed of all they own today if they were certain that the thief would “come again” and hand them a billion-dollar compensation payment tomorrow? But this question doesn’t address the real problem. In a head-on collision with Fanatics, the real problem is always the same: how can we possibly behave decently toward people so arrogantly ignorant that they believe, first, that they possess Christ’s power to bestow salvation, second, that forcing us to memorize and regurgitate a few of their favorite Bible phrases and attend their church is that salvation, and third, that any discomfort, frustration, anger or disagreement we express in the face of their moronic barrages is due not to their astounding effrontery but to our sinfulness?

  The Austrian writer Robert Musil summed up the Fanatic’s great rhetorical advantage in just ten words: “There is no truth which stupidity can’t make use of.”

  Another Austrian, novelist Heimito von Doderer, put it this way:

  “Even the most impossible persons who do the most unforgivable things possess substantial reality; from their points of view they are always right—for let them only doubt that and they are no longer such impossible persons. And we must pay close heed to those who play such ungrateful roles, for these roles are indispensable. It is no small thing to be a monster or a spiteful idiot, and in the first case to think oneself beautiful, in the second a highly intelligent person. Such characters must be represented. Someone has to do it.”

  · · · ·

  I’ve often wondered what Mama and Babcock could possibly have found to say to each other the first time they huddled over a heap of her espionage findings. What did they make, for example, of a confiscated poem I wrote called “Why Apple Pie”? The inspiration for this ditty was that Everett had been making remarks about the corresponding sizes of my body and appetite, and Irwin had been finding these remarks so amusing that he’d committed some to memory and taken to trotting them out at night when I was trying to get to sleep. For this reason, when I was given a parody-writing assignment in Honors English, I decided to prove to the two svelte louts that my sense of humor was as big as the rest of me—even when the rest of me was the topic. It went like this:

  WHY APPLE PIE

  by Lewis Carroll

  Sometimes when people ask me why

  I am so fond of apple pie

  I make myself stand up and grin

  (depending on the mood I’m in).

  I stand and grin from ear to ear

  then do a thing that’s rather queer:

  I stand there grinning like a ghoul,

  then down my chin I drip some drool!

  I DRIP SOME DROOL!

  I START TO DANCE!

  I STICK MY FINGERS

  IN MY PANTS!

  But seldom are my friends so nice

  As to ask why I like pie twice.

  Among its intended audience the reactions were predictable: Everett (who loved even bad parody and undoubtedly envied my poem) yawned to hide his smile and said it didn’t sound like Carroll at all. Peter (who hated parody and, I’m sure, disliked the poem) smiled politely and said, “Quite the little parody there, Kade.” And Irwin (who loved every silly thing his brothers ever did) spoke not a word: he just made the whole effort utterly worthwhile by falling off his bed laughing, and later insisted on tacking it to his wall—

  where Mama found it, recognized my handwriting, and pounced like a crow on a road kill.

  So what did J. Edgar Babcock and Agent Double O Mama make of it? My guess is, the very worst they possibly could. With her straight and narrow knowledge of literature, I wouldn’t be surprised but what Mama paid my parody the supreme compliment by assuming that I had, out of sheer perversity, simply copied down some obscene drivel by an idiot named Carroll in order to pollute poor Irwin’s Jesus-loving mind. The Elder, however, expert as he was in the ways of Satan, had apparently formed a more colorful opinion: “Drool.” Hmmm. “Fingers in pants.” Hmmmmmm … I have no way of proving that he actually told Mama to start checking our rooms for evidence of pornography use, group masturbation parties or Babcock-knows-what other defilements. But I did come home from school an hour early one day to find Mama—months after she’d quit cleaning or even visiting our rooms—buried to the waist in under Everett’s mattress. When she finally backed out (empty-handed) and saw me standing in the doorway, she turned crimson as the OLY sign next to her head and began furiously stripping the bed, muttering
, “Filthy! Just filthy!”

  She was right: what she and Babcock were up to was filthy. And in the end, it bore filthy results.

  4. Salvation of a Shoulder, via “Gettin’ the Picture”

  When he worked for the Senators in the Forties and Fifties, G. O. Durham had a corner on a market which nobody else in professional baseball seemed interested in at the time. The Bull’s field of operation was the athletic wreck, the broken-down talent, the potential salvage operation. Here’s how Durham himself put it in a little “automobiographical [sic] confidence” he shared, late in life, with our family:

  … If there is one thing besides money on God’s green earth this U.S. of A. has got more than anybody else of it is every type of used junk on earth. Including junk ballplayers. Yet the hirers and firers of today ain’t interested. Among the baseball thinking of today the tired old password is New! New! New!, so off they trot out both ends of the word through every damned dictatorship in every South and Central and Mexican America on earth trying to locate that short brown foxy Newness, totally ignoring the faithful black and white dogs right under their lamebrained noses, right here at home on the range. That was why I built me a little operation that tapped into what we had the most of. I’m talking used cars and appliances here. I’m talking thrown rods and fried circuits, singles punchers who lost the punch, flamethrowers who lost the fire, sluggers who lost the meanness, wife or balls. I was a regular Statue of Liberty down there in Oklahoma. Give me your pooped and your poor was my motto, and I’d give ’em a sniff in return. Because if there was baseball in the blood, I’d smell it at a glance. I’d whiff it right through the street clothes, right through the injuries, right through the drink and divorces and gambling debts and every other type of crap. It’s been my one lifelong talent, this nose in the middle of this face here. And on the day I met Hugh Chance, let me tell you, he reeked. Lame arm, diaper-stench, bad attitude and all, the man reeked so bad of baseball I didn’t see how he could walk down a street on two legs. Seemed to me he ought to roll …

  On the day Papa showed up lame-armed, bad-attituded and reeking of kid piss and baseball on Durham’s porch in Kincaid, Oklahoma (pop. 1010), in 1951, the Bull had started slinging around his nicknamesake the instant he opened the door. “Hugh Chance!” he burst out.

  Papa nodded grimly, unable to hide the despair he felt at first sight of this pig-eyed, sweat-covered, beery-looking old Okie.

  “Any kin to Tinkers to Evers to Frank Chance the first baseman?”

  “No, sir.”

  “How ’bout to Fat?”

  “No,” Papa sighed.

  “How ’bout to Last, then? Or our ol’ friend No?”

  “Maybe Last,” Papa said. “But not No. Not yet.”

  “You look a little down, Chance. What’s the trouble?”

  “Double A is down,” Papa answered. “I’m just looking how I am.”

  G.Q. shook his head. “Like an outfielder, Chance. That’s how you’re lookin’. It’s clear as beer.”

  “What’s an outfielder supposed to look like?”

  “A natural athlete,” Durham answered.

  “Then what’s a pitcher look like?”

  G.Q. fluffed up his paunch like a big feather pillow. “Me,” he snorted. “Too often anyhow. It’s the evil ‘at comes o’ the two-day workweek.”

  With that he turned inside his big, shambling farmhouse, headed down the hall, and, when they reached the livingroom, raised a red dust cloud as he flopped down in an overstuffed chair. Housekeeping wasn’t his strong suit. Furniture repair wasn’t either: Papa tried a wire-braced rocker close by the chair, but as the thing took his weight it gave off such a tremendous report that he flung himself out to one side. As he gathered himself up off the floor, though, he noticed the Bull smiling at him so serenely that he got the feeling Durham might seat all his prospects in the same chair on purpose, as some kind of crackpot reflex test. He tried the couch next, because it was biggest. It held. But so did the fat man’s interest in outfielders:

  “Scoutin’ report says you hit .290 in Single A, .278 in Three A, with power in both.”

  Papa nodded guardedly.

  “So you hit like an outfielder too.”

  “I’ve heard about you, Mr. Durham,” Papa sighed. “I mean about you being quite the salvage artist and all. But I’m a pitcher. It’s my calling. I’m going to heal up, then pitch again. Okay?”

  “You got one choice, son,” the Bull said amicably. “You either bat a whole lot worse, or you don’t mind folks sayin’ you bat like an outfielder.”

  “One choice is no choice,” Papa said. “I learned that much in the Army.”

  G.Q. shook his head. “How you look at a thing, Chance, how you feel about a thing, there’s always choice in that.”

  Papa eyed his new manager more carefully. No doubt about it, the man looked like a pig. But pigs, he remembered, could be very intelligent animals.

  “That shoulder hurt your hitting any?” Durham asked.

  “No,” Papa admitted. “It only hurts when I throw. Curves are worst, but speed’s bad too.”

  “Ever play first base?”

  “Never.”

  “Can you catch the goddamn ball?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then hot damn!” the Bull cried, bursting up out of his chair and wheeling off toward one of his two beer-crammed refrigerators. “That seals it! This is great! This is good! Let’s celebrate!”

  “Celebrate what?” Papa asked.

  “My new first sacker, Hubert.”

  “I told you, Mr. Durham,” Papa said coolly. “I’m a pitcher.”

  G.Q. froze in front of his Number Two refrigerator, then turned and trudged, slow and beerless, all the way back to Papa’s couch. Once there he sat down right beside him (causing Papa to blush), looked at him sadly, and then, with surprising quickness, lightly punched his left shoulder. Papa was on his feet, fists cocked, before he knew what he was doing. The only thing that kept him from decking his new manager was that Durham didn’t stand up. “Case dismissed,” was all he said. “Pitcher’s got an arm in that spot, son, not a gob o’ raw nerve ends.”

  Half miserable, half furious, Papa began to pace. G.Q. stood, and headed back toward the kitchen. “I’m not disputin’ your vocation, son,” he said. “I’m just practicin’ mine. I manage ballplayers. You play ball. An’ I’m sayin’ that, if you play for me, all of you but your left arm is the new first sacker for the Kincaid Cornshuckers. I’m sayin’ that’s all the baseball gods wrote for you this year. I’m sayin’ if you don’t like it, go play for one of them teams hirin’ players who can’t even goddamn throw.”

  Fully awake now to the absurdity of his position, Papa paced faster, but kept his mouth shut. “As for healin’, Chance,” Durham added, “and as for the future, let the left arm and pitcher in you think on this: you make one hard throw, you get excited an’ fire that ball just once, all season, an’ I’ll ship you somewhere so bush you’ll need a goddamned machete just to find the mound. You got that?”

  “No I don’t got that!” Papa fired back. “What if a runner’s going? What if I have to make a throw?”

  “Whip off your glove an’ fling ’er right-handed!” Durham roared.

  “I can’t throw right-handed!” Papa roared back.

  “I like ballplayers, Chance, not worriers! An’ I like you, so you must be a ballplayer, so stop the goddang worryin’, will ya?”

  Papa didn’t stop worrying, but he did pause to admire Durham’s logic.

  “Shit, son!” snorted the Bull. “It’s Two A ball down here. Throwin’ don’t matter.”

  “It don’t? I mean, it doesn’t?”

  “Hell no it don’t! It’s pure Yahooism in these leagues. Buncha numbnuts is what we basically got here, standin’ around waitin’ for talent to rain down like pigeon crap. Buncha anti-intellectuals pissin’ their lives away, waitin’ for God to up an’ turn ’em into Mickey Mantle.”

  “Well, uh, I’m not worr
ying now, sir” (Papa tried to phrase it politely this time), “but what if, say, for instance, some runner was going to score from third, and I was holding the ball over at first?”

  “Keeerist, son! What do you think? Just flip ’er to the nearest guy and let him fling it!” And with that Durham doddered off once more to his refrigerators, yammering, “My first sacker! Hot damn! This is good! This is fine! We gonna have an outfield, gonna have an infield, gonna play some offense, gonna play some defense. Hot damn, Hubert! We gonna have us a year!” Meanwhile Papa thought about it: he imagined himself actually flipping the ball to his nearest teammate while enemy runners were streaking round the bases—and when he heard a soft snort, turned, and noticed Durham’s beady-bright pig eyes peering in over the icebox door, he realized that what he’d been imagining had been making him grin. “Now you’re gettin’ the picture!” G.Q. cackled.

  Papa gave up completely, and started to laugh.

  So in the summer of ’51—the summer I was born, though by then the birth of a baby boy was something my parents scarcely noticed, let alone mentioned to friends—Papa spent an anomaly season as a power-hitting but virtually nonthrowing first baseman (and G.Q. was right: no one took advantage of it), thereby rehabilitating not only his shoulder but his blithe love for the game. Meanwhile he and Mama found a surprisingly decent, dirt-cheap two-story frame farmhouse, planted the first garden they’d ever stayed put long enough to harvest, and Mama made some friends and located some child-care that enabled her to deal with four sub-school-age sons with a semblance of sanity, if not quite grace. So, come late September, even before G.Q. suggested it, they decided to winter over in Kincaid rather than return home to Grandawma’s cramped place in Pullman. Mama, in addition to tending the four of us, managed to harvest her garden and put up preserves, canned fruit and vegetables for the first time since marrying. And Papa took a full-time graveyard-shift job as night watchman at a Shell oil refinery, skipped sleep every Sabbath to babysit us boys while Mama went to church, then rushed off, still sleepless, to a square- and swing-dancers’ honky-tonk, where he held down an incredibly self-defeating Saturday night job as a combination bartender/janitor who the first half of the night poured booze down his patrons till they barfed, and the second half had to clean it up. Yet he and Mama both insist (from the safety of retrospection, anyway) that they’ve never loved a house or town or two-year chunk of family or baseball life more. The irony—as so often seems to happen—is that their unwilling departure was forced by Papa’s attainment of the very goal that had brought them to Oklahoma in the first place: his complete rejuvenation as a pitcher.