The Brothers K

by David James Duncan

  In late August 1965, an Oregonian sportswriter named Deke Gant interviewed Papa by telephone, rapped out a well-intended but embarrassingly “poignant” story about him, and called the thing “A Baseball Lazarus.” Fearing some gruesome new nickname could be at hand, Papa did his best to dodge the phone calls and ignore the teasing that followed. But he needn’t have worried. The nickname Papa Toe had caught on with the Tug radio broadcasters by then, and they soon had it tattooed on the minds of the fans for good. The only effect the “Lazarus” story ended up having on Papa was one I think he enjoyed (though he would never admit it): it helped win him his first genuine hometown fan club.

  To introduce them properly I must begin by explaining that Portland, Oregon, has always been a notoriously bad baseball town. Tug games, even on 25¢-beer nights, are seldom attended by more than four or five thousand. On free-admission nights the stadium will fill to its 18,000 capacity, but it’s an aficionadoless mob of Little Leaguers, Brownies, harried den mothers and wretchedly beerless dads who cheer more loudly for the mascot idiot crashing into walls in a plastic Tugboat suit than for anything that occurs on the ballfield. The genuine Portland baseball night is what other sports towns call an off-night; it is attended by a bemused, weather-beaten, decidedly blue-collar clump of about a thousand people—the true, diehard Tug junkies; and though his face and form had already been familiar to them, these were the people to whom Papa was formally introduced by the “Baseball Lazarus” yarn. And it was love at second sight.

  Tug junkies are not your average baseball fans. They are baseball moths who come to the stadium because it’s got the brightest lights and the most highly skilled game within a two-hundred-mile radius; they come to nurse damp smokes and warming beers, to frustrate the peanut and icecream vendors by eating their own brown-bag snacks, to watch a light-whitened ball zoom around for fifty-four outs, and to cheer or boo the exceptionally good or bad bits of zooming. But they don’t come to root. That’s one of the things I like best about them. Tug junkies are tried-and-true, case-hardened minor league baseball fans. They know their players will be whisked off to the Bigs the moment they get the least bit heroic. They know the entire team will be sold to a different major league franchise every few seasons. They know Portland is a shit baseball town and that these ephemeral bands of young hopefuls and sinking old pros are the only show they’re ever going to see. So why get all loyal and excited about it? Let the rooters move to New York or LA and add their feeble squawking to the Yanks’ and Dodgers’ legions. For a Tug junkie, a fix is a fix and to hell with who wins. And what these people loved about Papa, I’m sure, is that he was one of them. He had the kids, the graying temples, the mill-town past, the industrial injury. He was a fellow moth, making less money than he’d made at the mill because he too loved the lights and the skilled bits of zooming. And his modest resurrection from Crown Z to Tugville was a lot more comprehensible to them than the usual hotshot twenty-year-old’s quick tour of duty en route to the bigs.

  But with their attention upon him now, the Tug moths couldn’t help but notice what Johnny Hultz had also discovered: Papa Toe’s insertion into a mid-inning crisis often made good things happen to the entire team. The moths’ reaction to this perception was nothing like Hultz’s, however. What they began to do—to the dismay of a Tug pitching coach whose last name happened to be Chance—was boo the ears off of any young Tug starter who got himself into the least bit of a jam. And if Hultz didn’t act upon their booing, if he only sent Papa to the mound to try and steady the poor lad rather than replace him, all thousand of them set their beers and smokes aside and at the top of their nicotine-tanned lungs started chanting, so that you could hear it on the streets four or five blocks away: Papa Toe! Papa Toe! Papa Toe! Papa Toe!

  It may have been silly, I may be a sap, but the first time I heard them do this I leaned down over my program and wept till Irwin and Everett finally took off their jackets and draped them over my back to hide me.

  After that it was just plain fun, though. “Did you hear those damn morons in the stands again?” Papa would grouse after the games. “Papa Toe my ass!”

  “Yeah.” “Shoot!” “Damn!” “What a buncha jerks!” we’d all reply—in hoarse, scratchy voices.

  –IX–

  In May 1966, Peter chose a full academic scholarship to Harvard over baseball scholarships to three different Pac Ten schools and pronounced his athletic aspirations dead. He then tortured a handful of college scouts by hitting .667 in the district play-offs, and going three for four as McLoughlin lost a heartbreaker to South Pasco in the first round of the state tournament. His contradictory retirement and great hitting weren’t the final confusion Pete had to offer his alma mater either: when the team voted him Player of the Year for the second straight season, he brought his baseball career to an unsettling close by refusing, at the post-season banquet, to accept the award.

  Irwin and Mama were at some sort of church extravaganza that night, and Everett was in Seattle. But the rest of us attended the banquet, and were equally flabbergasted when Peter stepped to the podium amidst a round of wild applause, glanced at his little trophy, set it on the floor by his feet, turned crimson, and said, “Direct democracy doesn’t exist in the United States anymore.”

  It was a jarring non sequitur. A few hopeful giggles anticipated a punchline. But it never came. Peter said, “People who vote for candidates bought by private business interests are not politically free in any real sense. That’s why I feel that voting has become a farce. And an award like this one, though I know it’s well meant, feeds us right into this farcical system. I don’t want my life to be a farce. So I’m sorry, but I can’t accept this. I’m quitting baseball anyway, so the award should go to somebody who’d really appreciate it.”

  The clammy silence that followed was bad enough. But then Peter spoke up again, saying that, in parting, he wanted to quote a man he’d once thought was a fool but had lately come to respect very much. “‘This world in arms,’” he read from a sweaty scrap of paper he held in both shaking hands, “‘is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children … This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from an iron cross. It—”

  “Which famous Communist are you recitin’ for us there, Pete?” the freshman baseball coach, Nord Curtis, bellowed. And it was a popular sentiment: there were nods, murmurs of approval, a smattering of applause. But it couldn’t have worked out worse for old Nord.

  “I hate to tell you this,” Peter murmured, “but I was quoting Dwight D. Eisenhower.”

  There was one brief chuckle—from Lance Clay, I think. But the rest of the auditorium fell into a sullen confused silence. And as Peter began to drone passionately on about the Cold War and atom bombs, about Hiroshima and hate, about the emptiness of victory and the fullness of emptiness and Russia and Buddha and the hidden purpose of life, even I, who loved him, wanted to drop down on the floor and crawl out the back door on my belly. It seemed he might go on forever when Coach Donny Bunnel stood up in disgust, physically shouldered him away from the microphone, grinned out at the audience, and said, “Off to Siberia with that one!”

  He got a laugh so huge and relieved that even the twins couldn’t help joining in. Peter walked quickly off the stage and headed straight out a side exit. Then Papa—with no readable expression, no visible embarrassment, nothing but the businesslike scowl of a relief pitcher with a little fire to put out—stood up, crossed the auditorium in front of everyone, and headed after him.

  “And now,” Donny Bunnel said, picking up the abandoned trophy, “how about a big round of applause for this year’s real most valuable player, our All-League first baseman and cleanup slugger, Artie Kawaso!”

  It was several seconds before the crowd, or the bewildered Kawaso, realized that Coach Bunnel was serious. But when they did, and Artie headed for the podium, the roar was de
afening. “Jeez!” he crooned into the mike as Bunnel handed him the trophy. “What a weird—I mean, jeez! Man oh man! What a surprise! Really!”

  “Now that’s a speech!” shouted Nord Curtis.

  And now I too joined in the storm of relieved laughter.

  “I mean, jeez!” Artie said. “But hey! Listen! Coach! Mom and Dad! Guys! Pete too, I guess! You’re great! Thanks a bundle!”

  Papa caught Peter partway across the parking lot, but said nothing to him. He just fell in step, and let Peter walk wherever he chose. Of all places, Peter picked the varsity baseball diamond.

  Once there he walked into the dugout, plunked down on the concrete bench, and braced himself for more hostility. But it never came. Nothing came at all. Papa just stared out at the darkened diamond, and Peter waited and waited, till he sounded hostile himself as he blurted, “So was what I did in there just crazy?”

  Papa sat down beside him, thought about it, then shrugged. “You were talking about things I know so little about that, even if I did think it was crazy, you should probably just ignore me.”

  Peter let out a sigh of relief.

  “If I were you, though,” Papa added, “I’d have let everybody ignore me too.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I understand you’re quitting baseball for a reason. A religious feeling, some important kind of searching. But Nord and Donny, your teammates, their folks, they don’t see that at all. To them you look more like some crazy farmer burning down his barn and his big herd of cows, then bragging about how little he owns.”

  “That their barns are burning!” Peter cried. “That’s what I was trying to say! Because when Gautama, before he became Buddha, saw old age and sickness and death, he said the world and everything in it looked like it was going up in flames. And that’s what I feel too, Papa! For years I’ve felt it. So I tried to explain, to say why I didn’t want their stupid trophy. I tried to be honest, Papa. What more could I do?”

  “Less,” Papa said.

  Peter scowled. “I don’t understand.”

  “You said the trophy’s stupid, so you gave it back. But you also say Buddha is compassionate, and that you want to be like him. Doesn’t add up, Pete. If the trophy really was stupid and they gave it to Buddha, wouldn’t he keep it so nobody else would get saddled with a stupid thing?”

  Peter had grown very quiet.

  Papa said, “Those coaches in there think you’re stupid too, you know. But they still had the honesty to give their Best Player trinket to their best player. And you insulted that honesty by giving the trinket back.”

  By now Peter looked crushed.

  “I don’t know,” Papa said. “You woke ’em up anyhow. But this concrete’s killing me. Mind if we walk?”

  They turned away from the ballfield and started slowly back toward the parking lot. But the silence was heavy, and as they moved in under the streetlights and glanced at each other, Peter stopped cold, and said, “What’s with us, Papa?”

  “It’s our barn, I think,” Papa murmured.

  “Huh?” As usual, the preacher hadn’t taken in his own sermon.

  “Buddha’s right,” Papa said. “It’s burning.”

  Peter still didn’t seem to get it.

  “As long as you played ball,” Papa said, “I could know what you were going through, and even help you now and then. Which was a kind of greed, I admit. But it was also a kind of love. And toward a Buddhist son, see, I can’t be greedy or loving. I can’t be anything. All I can do is say goodbye.”

  For a while they stood there, shoulder to shoulder, watching bugs bat against a blue streetlight. Then Peter’s face began to cloud. “Hey,” Papa said, grabbing his arm and striding off energetically. “I’m not trying to make you feel bad. I’m trying to keep up with you! If things are burnin’ they’re burnin’. If we can’t be ballplayers together, maybe I can start bein’ a Buddhist.”

  Papa was literally marching them now, but Peter dragged along in his grip like a big sulky child. “Come on!” Papa laughed.

  Then Peter stopped in his tracks and covered his face. “I’m gonna miss you so much!” he sobbed. “I love you!”

  And the two Camas Buddhists were suddenly hugging each other. They got an awkward grip, maybe from being so close to the same size. But they didn’t let go. They kept on trying.

  –X–

  The same week, on Friday, Everett snuck down from U Dub (despite a load of term-papers-in-progress) to watch Irwin compete in the district track meet. To no one’s surprise, Winnie joined Mama and the twins at church the next morning to praise Jesus for his first state javelin record. Meanwhile Everett joined Peter and me in front of the TV, where the Cubs and Cards were having at it, and I was happy as a clam—for a few minutes.

  But my brothers were behaving very oddly that morning. They seemed distracted, vaguely excited (though the game was a dull one), they spoke scarcely a word to each other or to me, and every few minutes one of them would jump up, even when runners were in scoring position, and dash upstairs. I finally decided they must be preparing some prank for Irwin, and felt glad enough to see them doing something together that I let them have their fun (though I was a little sad they’d left me out of it). But before the game was even close to over, Everett abruptly packed his things and left for Seattle. And when Irwin got home, no joke or prank occurred.

  Everett was waiting tables in Seattle and Peter was counseling at a summer camp in Vermont before I solved the riddle: a kind of farewell conversation—or debate, actually—had been taking place throughout the ballgame’s early innings. The reason I hadn’t known was that it had been silent: the debate was written on the back of their bedroom door.

  Peter and Everett had a several-year tradition (borrowed from the Glass brothers in the Salinger novel Franny and Zooey) of writing down choice lines from whatever they happened to be reading, then tacking these scraps of paper to the ravaged inside of their bedroom door. Peter’s lines—like the Glass brothers’—tended toward the mythical or metaphysical, while Everett’s, as might be expected, were all over the road, swerving from the eschatological to the deliberately puerile to the erotic to the onomatopoeic, with an occasional foray into the profound (perhaps just for surprise). The ritual had ended when Everett went off to college. But—maybe after his debacle at the baseball banquet—Peter had tacked the following scrap to the door, expecting no one to see it:

  My father will perhaps say that it was too early for me to leave for the forest. But there is no such thing as a wrong season for Dharma, our hold on life being so tenuous. This very day I begin to strive for the highest good: that is my resolve!

  —the bodhisattva prince, The Legend of the Buddha Shakyamuni

  But after Everett’s arrival, this line had mysteriously appeared beneath it:

  On the whole. I’d rather be in Philadelphia.

  —W. C. Fields

  So it began. As far as I know, my brothers never acknowledged or spoke of the debate that followed. But here it is, as written, starting with Peter’s response to W. C. Fields:

  If this triad of old age, illness and death did not exist, then carefree pleasures and jests with others in the same position as myself would surely give me pleasure … But when I consider the impermanence of everything in the world, I can find no delight in it …

  —same prince, same legend

  If you can’t copy him, don’t imitate him.

  —Yogi Berra

  You must make your mind up and plunge yourself into the bottomless abyss.

  —Butsugen

  That the abyss is bottomless is the bad news. The good news is, it must also be topless!

  —Louisa May Alcott, Little Buddhas

  How strong and powerful must be your mind, that you can cling to sense-objects even as you watch all creation on its way to death. By contrast, I become frightened; I find neither peace nor contentment, and enjoyment is quite out of the question, for the world looks to me as if ablaze with an all-consumi
ng fire. I want to depart from here today, and win the deathless state for all.

  —same prince, same legend

  He who strives to be of use in this world soon burdens the people with his own insufficiency.

  —Lao Tzu

  Cease to feel affection for me, and hear my unshakable resolve: either I will extinguish old age and death, and you shall see me again; or I will go to perdition, because my strength failed me, and I could not achieve my purpose.

  —same prince, same legend

  My devotees dwell within Me always: I also show forth and am seen within them. Though a man be soiled with the dirt of a thousand battles (or ballgames), let him but love Me and that man is holy. O son of Kunti, of this be certain: the man that loves me, he shall not perish.—Krishna, to Arjuna, Bhagavad Gita

  This being so, you had better go away now, and cease, my friend, from grieving.

  —same prince, same legend

  –XI–

  Irwin’s track career was meteoric. He set an official school javelin record in his first meet as a sophomore, a new league record by the end of the year, and became the third All-State prep athlete in the family (after Papa and Peter) when, as a junior, he broke the Washington record by nearly four feet. As a senior—after notching a league discus record and breaking his own state javelin record twice—he was scouted in person by the infamous (in these parts anyhow) Bill Bowerman of the University of Oregon, and was awarded a full scholarship to sell out Everett Senior’s WSU Cougars and our own Everett’s UW Huskies and become what the latter called “a University of Zero Duck.”

  But at this point the fast track to the Wheaties box turned to mud: during his very first term at the university in Eugene, Irwin leapt for a touchdown pass in a frat-house flag-football game, landed against a parked bicycle in the makeshift end zone, but remained determined—as Coaches Basham, Bunnel & Co had taught—to hang on to the ball at all cost. In this case hanging on required a 360-degree handspring that used his right arm alone, since his left was cradling the football. He pulled it off too—and the six or eight fans went wild. But the cost was about half of the ligaments and tendons in his prodigious right shoulder.