The Brothers K

by David James Duncan

  Then I said to Everett, “I think you’re right. Babcock is that kind of preacher. So why are you trying to be the moron greaser?”

  And Everett hung up on me!

  7. A Triple A Kind of Guy

  As I remember, the bases were loaded.

  —Garry Maddox, ex-Phillies outfielder,

  trying to recollect his first grand slam homer

  Papa Toe Chance—stuck though he was in a rickety marriage and the statistical prison of mid-inning relief—managed by the end of two and two-thirds seasons to make himself indispensable to the Tugs, to win four ballgames, and to save God-knows-how-many. No statistician kept track of saves till the Rolaids antacid company came up with a “relief” award as a publicity gimmick in 1969 (I’m not making this up). Papa guesses he saved around ten. John Hultz thought it was more like forty. But Papa thinks Johnny was confusing what he calls “turnarounds”—games that were won because the Tugs relaxed and played better ball after Papa’s appearance—with legitimate saves. Be that as it may, over the course of the same two and two-thirds seasons he also lost four games (nice balance), hit five home runs (we were definitely counting those) and two triples (which he beat out on nine toes). And he maintained a 3.10 ERA in one of the worst pitcher’s ballparks on the face of the earth.

  But as Everett said, numbers, for all their vaunted accuracy, are amazingly inaccurate little doodads. They look nice in the books, but the flesh-and-blood actions they stand for are almost impossible to remember. That’s why, silly as they can be, I prefer to remember the old words, the phrases, the names. I like to recall how, for a few years back at the dawn of the Hippie Era, the name Papa Toe could be heard in jock taverns all over the Portland-Vancouver area, and in dugouts all up and down the West Coast. I like remembering how his best pitch had been dubbed the Kamikaze in a backyard hedge hideout, but the nickname had caught on and traveled all up and down the same coast. And I like to recall how, at the height of this manageable little notoriety, Papa laughed as he and I were driving home to Camas late one summer night, and said, “You know what’s so funny about this Papa Toe stuff, Kade? Nothing’s changed! My shed’s a little bigger now, and I’m free of the mill. But I’m still just tryin’ to keep my head on straight. I’m still just throwin’ those what-did-we-call-’ems? Psalmballs? Prayerballs? Harelipped prayers?”

  By September 1967, the Pirate management got curious about all the glowing tales their ex-Tugs kept telling about this Papa Toe character, so they decided to fly him up to Pittsburgh for a few innings of what was, unquestionably, “stupid relief.” The adventure allowed Papa to prove almost nothing to them but his physical existence—yet they flew him up again in 1969. In ’67 the Pirates finished in sixth place; in ’69 they finished third. Both years they made no bones about having zero interest in Papa’s potential as a pitcher, only the mildest interest in his potential as a pitching coach or scout, but a fair amount of interest in trotting him around in front of journalists and publicists as some sort distinguished-looking mill-gimped “human-interest story.”

  Embarrassing as this was, it enabled Papa to throw nine bona fide innings of Big-Time Baseball (three during the first visit, six during the second) that he would never have been able to throw otherwise. True, he gave up twelve hits and six runs. But he got a fluke end-of-the-bat single off Bob Gibson. And hit Hank Aaron in the thigh with a stage-frightened Kamikaze. And got young Davey Johnson to ground into a double play. And he didn’t lose. Or win. Which I think fit his entire knight-errant’s legend just about perfectly. He had a slight case of jet lag the first time he pitched, but he didn’t really think that was why he got shelled. “After all these years,” he confessed in a postcard afterward, “I think I’ve finally just become a Triple A kind of guy.”

  8. The Fiddler on the Roof

  In comparison to what I’ve suffered from myself the humiliation and suffering inflicted on me by others vanishes into insignificance.

  —Heimito von Doderer

  It started out as a typical march for Everett: the same old eight or ten thousand concerned campus clucks and city liberals; the same two or three hundred hard-core rads; the same Seattle city police escort service; even the same pathetic narc in the middle of the action, decked out like a Hollywood Haight Streeter, wheezing “Bodacious shit!” over and over as he passed out free reefers so they could break your head and bust you for possession later on if need be. Their destination was typical too, though Everett had a larger than usual role in creating it: they were heading to Pier 2, right in downtown Seattle, for a “nonviolent confrontation” (“i.e. impotent show of disgruntlement,” said Everett) with a brand-new nuclear submarine which some highly paid panel of Pentagon damage-control experts had dubbed the Liberty. According to a less than substantive article Everett had written for the underground Callipygian Quarterly, this sub had cost “exactly what J. Edgar Hoover said CBS would have to pay him to suck Abbie Hoffman’s dick on prime-time TV.” But nobody seemed to mind the price tag. The sub sat at the pier for weeks, bland and matter-of-fact as a double-parked taxi, and attracting about as much attention. But then Everett happened to read a Seattle Times interview in which the sub’s somewhat confused commander gloated that his vessel packed “the range and nuclear firepower to take out every major city on the west coast of North America.” That was all it took: the next day Everett’s “Give Chance a Peace” column dubbed the commander “Admiral Wrongway Peachfuzz,” thirty thousand students had a good chuckle, the alternative press and peace organizations jumped on it, and the march was planned. Yelling “Go home!” to an inanimate albatross that was already almost home (it had been manufactured in nearby Bremerton) didn’t sound very interesting at all. But marching off to tell Admiral Wrongway Peachfuzz to get his fucking continents straight sounded like good fun.

  So off they’d gone, uptown to down, and all too soon the march had become the usual tedious battle between two radically opposed musical sensibilities—Crooners versus Chanters: “If I Had a Hammer” or “Amazing Grace” whenever things bogged down in an intersection; “Hey! Hey! LBJ!” or “One Two Three Four!” whenever their twenty thousand feet started laying down a groove. Everett didn’t mind the chanting much, but about the third time the sweet sound tried to save a wretch like him he decided to obliterate his awareness by resorting to one of his tried-and-truest peace-march diversions: by speeding up to the front of the parade column, then slowing down and weaving from one side of the street to the other, it was possible within the space of a few miles and minutes to scrutinize the bottoms of literally thousands of women. A couple of thousand ifs, ands and butts into this exercise and he’d reached a nirvana of lust that had him bellowing “Amazing Grace” like it was his all-time favorite song. But was it excessive discharge or merely excessive ogling that Ezra Pound said would lead to imbecility? Everett used to remember, but by the time they’d reached the pier his maneuvers had him weaving like a drunk. Fearing he might muff his speech, he started struggling, like some hopeless old smoker with emphysema, to break his habit. But just as the crowd spread out round the boardwalk and pier to surround the infamous submarine, just as the portable p.a. was fired up and the first speaker began to let Admiral Peachfuzz have it, Everett nearly collided with a female lower story in frayed jeans that fit like pantyhose, raised his eyes to a second story swathed in a lavender BONG THE PENTACONG! T-shirt (one of his own slogans!), reached an incredibly profuse head of shimmering reddish-brown hair, and involuntarily told himself: If the face and front match the rest, I’m gonna propose on the spot!

  Easing up beside her, he consciously reminded himself to swallow his drool, cranked up the aphrodisiacal eye magic, cleared his throat, waited for her eyes and lips to bequeath him his first inspired line. And she turned to him.

  And loudly snorted.

  Shit O. Deer. It was the Natasha wench. The one who’d told him off at Gurtzner’s lecture. And her face, even smirking, surpassed the rest of her.

  “How’s the Seattle
One-Seventh?” she asked.

  “Huh?” quoth the urbane Everett, thinking, How does she know I was Adventist?

  “The Chicago Seven. The Seattle One-Seventh. A joke for a joker. Get it?”

  “Oh. Huh. Fine.” Where was his brain? And his magic tongue? What had she done with them? How had she done it?

  “It was a mean greeting, though,” she said, smiling wryly but radiantly. “If I’m going to improve your manners, I’d better start with my own. So let me take it back. ‘How are you, Everett,’ I should have said. And let me also admit that I usually read your column, and even enjoy it—when you pick the right targets.”

  She paused. And he could not think of a single word to say. “Hey, come on!” she said. “You look like you don’t believe me.”

  He didn’t, but not at all in the sense she meant.

  “Want some two-cent reviews to prove it?”

  He was in luck! She’d asked a question he could answer by nodding!

  “The Wrongway Peachfuzz thing: brilliant. The piece on politicians and women, 71 World Liters Equals 5 U.S. Gals’: weird and a little chauvinistic, but I have to admit I laughed. The behind-the-scenes portrait of the Cajun band, ‘Awesome Possum’: very funny. The Jimmy Stewart meets Jimmy Joyce meets Jimi Hendrix filibuster-on-a-page, ‘Smoking Pots in Washingpan’: even weirder. Pot and the pen don’t mix, pal. At least not for you. Let’s see … The character assassination of Charismatics: a complete non sequitur for a columnist like you. Who the hell raised you? Cotton Mather? And the piece on stuffy old tenured faculty, with the—what were those bourbons called? ‘Old Stepdad’? ‘Empty Times’? That one really pissed me off. Because it was great. It was right up there with Peachfuzz and Possum. And then you trashed it with the veiled attack on Dr. Gurtzner. Pathetic, Everett! Really petty. No more of those, okay? You should have listened to me the first time.”

  He was completely overwhelmed, mentally and visually. Was it Pound who said that excessive Natasha could lead to imbecility? “Huh,” Everett told her. “Hmm. Okay. Thanks.”

  She cocked her head, leaned toward him, looked deep into his eyes—and the sun flared red in her auburn hair! her irises were a filigree of coppery greens and blues! the flares and filigree surpassed the face that surpassed the body that surpassed the bottom that surpassed the five thousand bottoms he’d just peace-marched past! Then she said, “Are you stoned, Everett?”

  “Me?” He blushed. “Oh, no.”

  She laughed. “What’s with the face? And the giant ‘oh, no’? You think I care? A big ol’ hippie like you? I should think you’d be ashamed to be seen straight.”

  “Huh.” He managed a shrug. “Well, I’m not. I mean, I’m not stoned, I mean. I just, uh, have to speak in a bit.”

  “Ah!” She laughed. “Well, good luck!”

  “Huh. I mean, thanks.” Where was his brain!

  She laughed again. “So even the Big Bad Rad gets a little stage fright, huh?”

  “Huh?”

  “I already said that.”

  “Huh.”

  “Hey, listen. Just … never mind. I’ll talk to you later. Go give ’em hell. Sorry I broke your concentration. And be funny, okay?”

  “Huh. Hey. Thanks. Okay, thanks.”

  Shit O. Deer.

  “There’s an old Yiddish saying that I used to find funny. It went, ‘If the rich could hire others to die for them, the poor could make a good living.’”

  The crowd roared—ten thousand people throwing back their heads and howling because of something Everett had said. That was power! That was euphoria! And he’d stolen the line from the dad in Fiddler on the Roof.

  “That’s right,” he continued without cracking a smile—because he saw Natasha hadn’t cracked a smile. “It’s a funny saying to a healthy mind. It’s a joke. And I grew up in a home where it was considered tasteless, if not a deadly sin, to have to explain a joke. But I feel a need to explain this one.”

  Some stoned-out dork back in the crowd let out a hysterical shriek of laughter. “The reason the saying was considered funny is that dead men can’t spend money. Everybody knew that, back in the old days.”

  But now the entire crowd was yukking it up again! Ten thousand people chuckling at a joke that wasn’t there! Except Natasha. Who was putting on sunglasses. And now look at her face. Impenetrable blankness. Look at those damned mirror shades. World’s sexiest grasshopper. Look at that body! Shit O. Deer. “But the incredible thing about this joke …” Go slower. Maybe they’ll catch on. “… the incredible thing about it, and the reason I’ve committed the sin of explaining it, is that the Americans in power just don’t get it anymore. In the name of our country, a lot of Yanks have been asking their own sons to leave our country, to go to Vietnam, and to die a death they neither understand nor choose. In other words, to become the new Yiddish poor.”

  A few no-hope yo-yos chuckled, but most of the crowd seemed somewhat moved now. Whew. Apparently no one wondered why he was giving a Vietnam rap at an antisubmarine rally. The truth was, he’d been so sure of his Wrongway Peachfuzz material that he’d decided to wing it. But when he’d faced the crowd, when he’d received the glowing intro, when the palpable wind of the cheering blew through him, creating the power surge that always set his magic tongue in motion, he made the fatal blunder of smiling at Natasha … and all he had left after she smiled back were cotton mouth and the opening line from some antiwar talk he’d given God-knows-where. Maybe clear back in high school. And it wasn’t even funny!

  “Should any male student in this crowd choose to exercise his freedom by leaving school tomorrow, should he become ill, or troubled, or distracted by, say, falling in love …” (oh good! very subtle, Everett!) “… should he even be flunked by some grumpy ol’ European Intellectual History professor …” (she’s flipping me the bird!) “… he, uh, he …” (Shit O. Deer) “… excuse me, he will lose his deferment and become eligible for a draft created not by any democratic process, but by the decree of Americans so powerful, so imperial, that they can force the disenfranchised, the nonintellectual and the unlucky to kill and be killed in what is, for them, just a profitable military and political experiment.”

  Okay. Pretty decent recovery. He gave them the three-second pause, let the groundswell of anger build, collected his shredded wits, and even managed to generate some power as he asked, “How can they get away with this? In the land of the so-called free, how can our leaders get away with this Czar-like betrayal of their very own sons?”

  Then she yawned. Devastation! One lousy yawn and he found himself thinking, “How do I get away with this?” He tried to fight back. He tried to summon his arrogance: I made ’em cry with this speech once! I can still make it work! He summoned his Sabbath School roots: No Delilah for this Samson, thank you! But when she yawned yet again, he nearly yawned himself as he said to the crowd, “I’ll tell you how. They use the old Yiddish punchline. They pay us for it. Except listen. The Yiddish joke said that if the rich could hire others to die for them, the poor could make a good living. But for going to Vietnam, our American Czars pay us something like thirty-seven cents an hour! They can’t even get the damned joke right!”

  The crowd whistled and laughed and revived him enough so that, by keeping his eyes as far from Natasha as he could without turning his back on his audience, he thought he might be able to finish. Taking a deep breath, he tried to look solemn instead of spaced, and said, “The old Yiddish joke has become the life story of one and a half million American boys so far. And the death story of forty-seven thousand of them.” There were murmurs. There was anger. There was even a moan. Fantastic. He gave them the full four-second pause. Then: “To my mind, a joke that kills forty-seven thousand of us is a joke no longer. For dirt wages, the rich and powerful are hiring the poor to die for them. We are the poor. So I ask you. At the very least, isn’t it time we told our Czars to find a new fucking joke to tell us?”

  The crowd went wild. All right! It hadn’t gone badly after all.r />
  But where was his brain-melting nemesis? Ah. Of course. Standing by a phone pole reading a bunch of rain-shredded year-old rock-concert posters.

  “I’d heard it,” she said, once he’d fought his way through the thank-you!s and far-out!s and way-to-go-man!s to stand like a mute little lapdog at her side. “Twice before, actually.”

  “Huh. I mean, sorry.”

  “No no. Don’t apologize. I understand. You media-hype types have got to repeat yourselves now and then.”

  The poetry of her jeans! The Dow Jones Industrial Average of her sunglasses! The well-meant, emasculating, malevolent benevolence of her words! By the time he’d exhausted himself listening to and looking at her, he was honestly speaking every word he could think of when he said, yet again: “Huh.”

  “I’m whipped, Everett. What say we bag this Boston Tea Party and go for some real tea? Or if it’s Lipton, some coffee?”

  The sunsets in her eyes! the sun-flares in her hair! he, Everett? him with them? “Coffee?” he said.

  “Coffee.”

  “I mean, sure.”

  “You need a rest, Everett.”

  “Huh.”

  “Huh.”

  They’d spent the rest of the day together. And Everett had discovered that her original name had been Laurel Lee, that she was from Knoxville, Tennessee, that her parents had divorced when she was thirteen, that she’d read War and Peace during the custody battle, that she’d changed her name to Natasha after her mother moved them to Phoenix, Arizona, and that Laurel Lee of Tennessee was every bit as appealing but no easier to impress than Natasha of Czarist Russia. For his part, Everett continued to say “huh” and “whew” a lot. He also managed to murmur that the march and speech had fried him. But he wasn’t fried. He was far worse off than that. He was imploded. The stand-up-firebrand-playboy-superstar, the man who’d wanted Woman, had been reduced to a pile of mute brown dust by the intensity of his need for this one inimitable woman—and he sensed that the sooner he showed his need, the sooner she would reject him.