The Brothers K

by David James Duncan

  “Late last night I looked at Papa,” she told me. “Just looked at his face, in the light of the TV, while he was resting, with his eyes closed. And a lump came out. Just under his eye, just under the skin. It came out, then started moving down his cheek, so that I hoped it was a tear, I hoped he was crying. But then it opened. It opened, and looked right at me. A horrid, bloodshot little eye, Kincaid! And after it looked at me it sank back into his cheek, and Papa opened his own eyes. But he didn’t look at me. Not even a glance. He just got up and walked straight out of the room.”

  I said nothing. I believed nothing. Yet I couldn’t help but picture it. And already my room began not to be mine.

  “Peter believes in reincarnation,” she said. “Freddy too. I don’t. But sometimes in my dreams I’m a Nazi. And I hate Nazis, Kincaid, hate them, hate them. But in my dreams I have this uniform, all gray and black and perfect, with two little silver swastikas, right here at the throat. And I love my swastikas. I love them so much it makes me sick, it makes me sweat. But it also makes me feel like doing every single thing that Nazis do, just to get to keep them.”

  Just share with her, the counselor told us. It’s good to share …

  “I never joined Cub Scouts,” I said, embarrassed, as soon as I spoke, by the triviality of my comparison. “It seemed boring and silly to me. But when I was nine or ten I started borrowing Irwin’s old Cub Scout shirt so often that he finally just gave it to me. And I remember why I liked it, I remember the feeling perfectly. It was the Bobcat pin, Bet. And the Wolf, Lion and Bear badges, the gold and silver arrows. I still remember exactly where each of them fit against my body. And they weren’t even mine. So I don’t know. Insignia. Arrows and swastikas. There’s just something in people that loves such things. It doesn’t mean we’re Nazis.”

  It turned out all right, my little speech. It didn’t sound so foolish. But I could see, long before I’d finished, that Bet had moved off into a far deeper terror. “You like it, you like it, you like it,” she began whispering, and her eyes were pure liquid black. “That’s what he’d tell her. That’s what Linda’s father would say, over and over, every time he raped her.”

  Now the air turned utterly alien. Now my room ceased to be mine, I knew that Bet was mistaken, or else lying. Linda had told me what had happened to her, and bad as it was, it had happened only once. But why was Bet saying these things?

  “Do you know how he woke her?” she asked softly, almost tenderly. “With a Number 2 pencil, just like we use at school. She’d feel a tickle, and open her eyes. And there he’d be, holding the point in her ear. One sound, he’d say, and I’ll jam it clear in. Then he’d climb on top of her. You like it, you like it … She was just my age when it started. And when he’d finish he’d never say a word, he’d just get up and leave. He’d even leave the pencil lying there. And do you know where he went? In to bed with her mother! In to sleep by his wife, like a regular happy couple. And her mother knew! Linda swears she knew!”

  And I, with my Cub Scout shirt, had wanted to make it all better.

  “They slept like babies,” Bet told me. “Linda knew they did, because she’d sneak in to watch them afterward, because she couldn’t sleep herself. Want to hear why? Do you want to know why Linda could never sleep?”

  I forced myself to nod. Good. It’s good to share …

  “Because she’d have a dream—the same one over and over, like my little silver swastikas—where she would sleepwalk. She’d get up out of bed, walk to the drawer where her mother kept the big sewing scissors, take them down to her father’s shop in the basement, break them in two with a hammer and chisel. And then she’d walk back upstairs to her parents’ room, where they’d be sleeping soundly. All tired out, the dears. Then she’d lean, ever so slowly, down over them. And she’d slide half the scissors into her mother’s left ear. And half into her father’s right …” (I watched Bet’s hands, the careful pantomime. She was an artist. Her hands made it real.) “And when they felt the tickle, and woke, she’d look at them so sadly, and say to them, still in her sleep, I’m sorry, but they’re broken. Mother’s scissors are broken. And I have to fix them. Now. Then she’d laugh, or shriek, and jam the halves back together! And her shriek would really wake her, it would wake her in real life. And every time she woke she was sure she’d see her parents there beneath her, and feel the scissor halves wriggling in her hands.”

  I shut my eyes and saw Linda naked, saw swastikas and Scout shirts, saw eyeballs in cheeks, scissors in ears, NVA bullets cutting George Dubash in half. There’s just something in us that loves such things. It doesn’t mean we’re Nazis …

  “Have you noticed?” Beatrice asked. “Have you seen the way Ma—Linda, the way she still looks at scissors?”

  I didn’t nod, didn’t know, couldn’t move.

  “And do you see the real reason why she couldn’t sleep?” Bet said, smiling now. “It’s so pathetic, so pathetic! It’s because she loved them! They were her parents, she had no one else. The Bible says she had to love them. So she’d lay awake all night to keep from killing them. Then all day at school she would sleepwalk, and fall asleep at her desk, and flunk everything in sight, and the kids would tease her, even her teachers would laugh. Stupid! Hey, stupid! Pick up your pencil! Pay attention! Wake up, stupid! So that was the life, the hell, that was what Pa—Irwin. That was what Irwin saved her from.”

  I felt I should stop her, say something, console someone, kill someone. But before words could form she was whispering, “Satan …”

  Breathing as if she too had begun to drown in the inimical air, staring past me, through me, she said, “I know you don’t think so, I know that, I know. And I hate the name, the idea, hate everything about it. But Linda’s mother, Kincaid. Picture her listening. You like it, you like it! Is that a mother, or something lying in slime on the bottom of hell? And her father! Daddy. He would smile, she says, while he held the pencil in place. So feel him there, the point against your eardrum. Smiling.” Bet was gasping now, and sobbing. “That’s not human, Kincaid! It’s not! That’s something so evil and strong it can enter anybody, any time or place it wants, and make even good people do the most horrible things! And it never stops. It never stops! And God never tries to stop it. And now even Irwin might die or do some horrid, inhuman thing. So why, Kincaid? Why? When Irwin believes, when he really believes, how can it happen? How? Why doesn’t God ever try to stop it?”

  She collapsed against me then, and I put an arm around her and tried, in a stiff, nervous, sexless way, to keep her from breaking apart. But what good was that? What good am I? I made soothing sounds, tried to hold and pat her less awkwardly, tried to earn my Bobcat pin. But Bet cried herself dry, she cried till she retched. And I never did think of a single consoling thing to say—

  because I believe it is human. I believe it’s just people who do all the horrible, incomprehensible things to other people. And I didn’t see how sharing this belief would ease my sister’s pain or terror in the least.

  At one in the afternoon I went downstairs to make lunch, noticed that Papa’s tools weren’t moving, peeked over his shoulder to find out why, and spotted an oily but legible page of last summer’s box scores lying beneath the scattered carb parts.

  So. He had taken refuge. Fine. For him. But Freddy and Suncracker were still out back with the busted fly rod. And they’d been at it so long that the dog’s tongue was gigantic and his grin had gone insane. Freddy’s “See, Papa? We’re fishing anyhow!” smile still looked genuine enough. But when she wore it this tenaciously it began to seem like nothing more than her version of the Face. So, little as I wanted to, I invaded Papa’s refuge.

  “Why are you here?” I asked, quite a bit louder than necessary.

  He turned, and did his patented impersonation of a man-shaped piece of plywood.

  “She’s been waiting for hours. And you’re reading four-month-old box scores.”

  He looked out at her, but still said nothing.

  “She’
d rather go with you and I’ve got homework to do. But if you can’t borrow my car and take her fishing, just tell me right now and I’ll take her myself.”

  Sentences remained beyond him, but he finally managed to start squeezing out syllables. “Damn,” he went. “I, hell. The thing, Kade, is, I. Your mother and me. Laura. With me leavin’ Monday we’ve just got to … I can’t just up and. Damn.”

  Assuming he was finished, which was assuming a lot, I said, “Whatever it is, Papa, whatever you’re saying, Freddy’s been waiting, and smiling, an awful long time.”

  “Kincaid,” he said. “You know a, you have to take … Much as I love her, your sister is not the only … Dammit, yes! You’re right. Go. But wait. Hell. Here. I’ll go tell Freddy.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Kwakiutl Karamazov

  As soon as I arrive in America with Grushenka we will set to work on the land, in solitude, somewhere very remote, with wild bears. There must be some remote parts even there. I am told there are still Indians there, somewhere, on the edge of the horizon.

  —Dmitri to Alyosha Karamazov

  Near the southwest coast of Vancouver Island, on the flood-scoured banks of the Little Nessakoola River, sits a forty-house, one-church, one-tavern town called Shyashyakook. It’s not terribly isolated—only fifty miles west of the city of Victoria, three miles inland from the Strait of Juan de Fuca shipping lanes, a quarter mile south of a well-traveled highway. But when Everett arrived in the spring of 1970, Shyashyakook’s salmon cannery and sawmill had been bankrupt for a decade, the forty-houses had turned so rain-grayed and ramshackle that even the Beautiful British Columbia Provincial Tour Guide could find no more glowing adjective for the town than “historic,” and Everett himself thought “prehistoric” was the better word. “When they say this place is in B.C.,” he wrote to Natasha, “they mean the time period, not the province.”

  On his first walk along the estuary a couple of miles downriver from “city center” he found an eight-foot weather-grayed chunk of totem pole—the torso of Wolf or Bear maybe (though some idiot had chain-sawed a “D.D. + A.A.” into its backside). And on the same walk, a few hundred paces from the totem, his boots began making odd crunching sounds, and he found himself standing on a clam shell midden as broad as an infield and several times the height of a pitcher’s mound.

  Both the totem-chunk and the midden had been left behind by the Kwakiutl. An unsortable blend of archaeological evidence and folk legend had it that a southerly branch, or at least twig, of this tribe had lived on the Little Nessakoola estuary for some eight thousand years—four times the life-span of Christendom; five times the span of the Islamic world; forty times the span of that constantly backfiring experiment in self-government known as “the United States.” Then, one day in the early 1800s, an enterprising young tribesman paddled his canoe out into the Strait, hailed a passing ship, traded a few furs for a nice factory-made British blanket, and never lived to learn that the stuff it had been infected with was called “smallpox.” Two winters later his eight-thousand-year-old village was extinct. “But look on the bright side,” Everett wrote, again to Natasha. “Kwakiutl art was such a perfect expression of integration with this landscape that even the white folks felt they couldn’t live without it. So a group of generous industrial chieftains from our own fine culture got together and bequeathed Shyashyakook their own two favorite Pacific Northwest totems: Old Man Caved-In Salmon Cannery and Old Man Rusted-Out Sawmill.”

  The estuary’s eight-thousand-year Kwakiutl history remains a mystery upon which shell-heaps and vandalized totem-chunks shed little light, but the sixty-year history of the town was so depressingly predictable that the two dead industrial totems pretty well told the whole tale. For a century or so after the mass death (or, as the B.C. tour guide prefers, “disappearance”) of the Indians, the townsite was just a camp for hunters and fishermen. Then in the 1920s the cannery, sawmill, church, tavern and forty houses were erected in a three-year span, business soon boomed in all forty-four structures, and for a decade or so it seemed that Shyashyakook’s industrial future might be bright despite its retrograde Indian name. But since it was a tidewater town with no oceangoing fishing fleet, its cannery was totally dependent on Little Nessakoola River gill-netting. And when the watershed was clear-cut to supply the sawmill, it brought on winter floods and mudslides that flushed the river’s spawning beds out into the Strait of Juan de Fuca, forcing its salmon to join the Kwakiutl in the Land of the Dead, and driving the cannery into bankruptcy. “Still plenty of trees!” gloated the town optimists—all of whom worked at the sawmill at this point. Then the Prince George Pulp and Paper Company—which owned every mature tree within a ninety-mile radius—found a more profitable market for their unprocessed logs at a modernized mill in Esquimalt, forty miles away. That was all it took. One day the mill was the town’s sole source of income; the next it was what Everett called “Shyashyakook’s second great neo-Kwakiutl objet d’art.” Industry had come. Industry had gone. It had lasted 1/267th as long as the Indian village.

  Most of Shyashyakook’s population, not being neo-Kwakiutl-minded, had run off in pursuit of the falling trees and schooling fish that once meant easy money in the decreasingly Great Northwest. When his congregation dwindled to eight even the priest of the Catholic church was forced to vacate. But all forty houses survived, and after the mass exodus you could buy one for peanuts. So a number of “Shyashyakooks,” as they took to calling themselves, decided to try to stick it out.

  It was rough going. To defy the God of Progress is often to marry the Goddess of Poverty, and a life of constant poverty and defiance can (as Circe’s mirror had recently shown Everett) lead to aesthetically and socially displeasing things. The average Shyashyakook male, when Everett first arrived, poached deer and elk year-round, killed every fish, clam and crab he could catch regardless of seasonal restrictions and bag limits, stole and sold blowdown logs from provincial parks and private forests, picked, preserved, and hoarded wild fruit and mushrooms, gardened as if his life depended on it, brewed, distilled, and illegally traded some highly unpredictable beverages, cheated on his unemployment or welfare benefits, and traded goods and services with surprising scrupulousness toward his fellow Shyashyakooks but with perfect ruthlessness toward all outsiders.

  But the departure of industry had brought healing changes too. For instance the quiet. You could hear the river slapping along, and the spruce trees shishing; you could follow the changes of season by sound alone—hummingbirds warring in the April willows, skeins of geese discussing pilot error high overhead in November. Another nice change: precisely because they lacked a priest, the eight Catholics were able to procure a special dispensation from the bishop in Victoria to convert a side hall of the church into a play school and kindergarten during the week, a bingo casino on Friday nights, and a dance hall whenever anybody got lonely, happy or hyperactive enough to throw a celebration. Nor, Everett soon discovered, were the priestless community’s spiritual needs being neglected: not only was the Muskrat Tavern religiously attended by townsfolk of both genders, its 280-pound Scotch-Tlingit bartender, Yulie MacVee, slung around advice with an authority and accuracy that put the departed priest to shame. She couldn’t legally back her homilies with the Body and Blood that supposedly make priestly badgering palatable, but a “Muskrat Burger” (which was really beef, with an illicit bit of elk or venison mixed in from time to time) cost ninety-five cents complete with lettuce, onion, pickle and fries, a draft beer cost two bits, and in the time it took him to down just one such feast, Everett once recorded the following typical MacVee counseling gems, which he mailed on to Irwin “as a homeopathic dose of sanity: take one per day as an antidote to Army Brain”:

  1. “Hell no you can’t shoot Bella’s ewe for eatin’ your irises, Agnes! Use your wig-holder, honey. It idn’t the damned sheep’s fault. What if Everett here stepped out to the John and you sat down, thought his burger was yours, and downed it? ’Zat give him the right to sh
oot you? Here, come ’ere. Take a load off. Have a beer. And listen, Agnes. You know Jeddy Redstone? He’s got a zillion irises in the strip there along the south side of his barn. And Bella, it so happens, has some terrible hots on Jeddy. Get the picture? Just you sigh a little, say you sure do miss that splash o’ color along your fence, but hey, maybe you’ll mosey on over and get some irises from Jeddy. Believe me, honey, she’ll break your legs to save you the trip! You’re gonna have irises sproutin’ out your kwakiutl.”

  2. “Hell no you can’t go settin’ bear traps for the game warden, Roonie! Use the hat rack God gave you! You might catch somebody’s kid, or worse yet, a bear! And say you did nab the warden. Say you crippled him up good. You know he only lives over in Port Renfrew and already likes it here. What’s to say he wouldn’t gimp on in and bore us shitless every night? But now listen, have one on me here, Roonie, and think about this. Dudn’t everybody need a predator? Hunt and be hunted, Roon. That was the old way. Our predators keep us healthy and on our toes. So why mangle yours? You’re smarter and faster, you know the woods a hundred times better. So outsmart him, outrun him, outwoods him.”

  3. [in a whisper] “For chrissake, Lulu! Wudn’t that Nina’s boyfriend you were mauling out in that car there? Yeah, I know he’s cute. Yeah, I know they fight. Yeah, I know it’s your life, but here. Simmer down. Come ’ere. Have one on me. And listen. Between you, me and the moose on your bottle, I heard from the best source south of God that your cute new friend has got himself one ugly-lookin’ boo-boo smack-dab on his you-know-what. I am not shitting you! And Nina’s checked out healthy. So see why they’re fighting? If he was your man, wouldn’t you wonder where the hell he’d—Huh? What’s that? Oh no. Oh, Lulu. You didn’t! [laughing manically now] Oh Christ! Judas priest, Lu! Clear the aisles! Don’t touch nuthin’! Go scrub your goddamn hands!”