The Brothers K

by David James Duncan

The great biblical descents of grace—the kind of church-advertised descents that Irwin as a boy had so blithely admired—had all shared certain characteristics. For example they were always invoked by faith-filled prayer, by an honest cry from the heart, or by a great and selfless love; they could always be depended upon to alter even the most dire course of events—with flagrant disregard for the laws of science—in order to bring about the spiritual and physical salvation of their protagonists; and they were always comprehensible enough to allow a witness, or the recipient of grace himself, to compose a pious and grateful story about the wondrous descent afterward.

  The winding of the watch marked the end of Irwin’s blind love for that kind of story. Not that he doubted that he was seeing his prayer answered: his faith, despite everything, was still firmly in place. But all that his glimpse of Other Power engendered was shame for not having prayed a better prayer; all that the boy’s unspeakable courage made him feel was an even greater, even more hopeless love; and after the salts led the boy away and the men under the tree, the Captain, the entire fire base grew still and listened for the shots, all that this great love did was make Irwin start to weep and gibber like an insane man. Or maybe he was an insane man. Hunched in the dust, crazed fingers fumbling, he was a filth-covered, sobbing ruin of a man trying to clean, to reshape, to reload a mashed tube of paste when the salts squeezed their triggers. Irwin’s head snapped back. His mouth flew open. Blood ran from his nostrils and spattered the ground. And the body the bullets were striking, the life that was ending, was a quarter mile away. “Christ!” he kept gasping. “Good Christ.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Our Mistake

  Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.

  —last words of Edmund Kean, actor

  1. Dudek’s Sabbath School Lesson

  Irwin vaguely knew—when he woke in the darkness—that he had crossed some kind of line. The same crushing pain that made it impossible to remember made it impossible to forget that he had, in some kind of battle frenzy, destroyed the life he’d been leading, so that he would never have to go back to it again. But in the throes of his rage, everything had felt like a dream. From the time he’d heard the salts’ rifles he’d seen nothing with any clarity—till he woke in this blackness.

  He was lying on something cool but terribly hard—sheet metal, he guessed finally. And his entire skull felt broken. But when he tried to cradle it, something stopped his wrists. Handcuffs. He was cuffed to a steel floor. He stretched out a leg, found a bulge in the metal, explored it with his foot: a wheel well. A vehicle. He realized he must be locked in the empty water truck Dudek sometimes used for a brig. And the reason his head felt like it was splitting was that it must really be split. Bandaged too, it seemed. Just like the boy’s.

  The boy. The thought of him brought it all back at once. It had not been a dream. He’d done it. He really had marched down to the Captain’s tent, the crushed Gleem tube on his shoulder like a rifle. And he had taken his tiny rifle and shot and shot poor Dudek, point-blank and right in the mouth, till fragments of teeth, shreds of lip and metallic ribbons of tube floated in the red-and-white foam. Take! he’d sung, ramming it in. Eat! he’d sung. Let it shine, let it shine, till something slammed his skull. Crazy muthahfuck! But he’d pulled Dudek down with him, still singing, still shoving, till the fireworks, the explosion, caved his mind completely in—

  leaving him this metal bed, these handcuffs, this utter blackness.

  Good, good and good.

  So I am not, he told himself, a captain’s aide anymore. Nor his manservant or maidservant, nor his ox or ass, nor any other thing that is a captain’s. Hell, I’m not even a soldier now, probably. And it’ll be jail or worse, and Mama so sad, and Everett so proud, and fuck off, both of you! Let it shine!

  He started to laugh, but a blaze of pain shot straight from his forehead down his throat and left him moaning. Yet he still risked a smile. A little harsh, a little iffy his performance seemed now. But how strange and right it felt as Dudek squealed and gurgled and rolled his eyes. The joy that Samson must have known! Helpless as a child, the Captain seemed, his teeth snapping off like chalk. And the eloquence, the sermon, the Army logic that had been the boy’s true killer had issued from that mouth. Shoot him with bullets, the mouth said, when Irwin wanted to shoot him with toothpaste. He doesn’t exist, it said. So the closest thing to justice had been to show the mouth and everyone it commanded that the boy had existed, and that Gleem too can teach lessons that won’t soon be forgotten.

  2. Buttercups

  On Friday, May 25, Everett spent the evening working on a letter to Natasha. He’d spent a few evenings this way, actually: his letter was on page 208. The Russianistic references, antique ink-pens, parchment paper, peasant shirts and all of that good stuff had fallen by the wayside, however. His pen of choice these days was a 19¢ Bic, his parchment a Big Chief 500 tablet, and though it’s risky to ascribe pure motives even to a saint, let alone to Everett, I think it’s safe to say in this case that he was not out to show off, to disingenuously woo, or to in any way deceive his lost love with the massive letter—because this letter wasn’t going anywhere: he had no address to which to mail it.

  We never know, with regard to the inner life, who or when lightning is going to strike. Often we don’t even know when we ourselves are the one so stricken. On the morning of May 25, Everett didn’t even believe in “an inner life.” But that did not prevent him from having one. And this was his best attempt to describe it, that evening, to a woman he believed would never see his description:

  I was hiking a south-sloping headland on the Strait this morning, trudging along in a funk the beautiful but long-lost cause of which chivalry demands that I not name, when the sun burst out of the fog, and so did I, I guess, because all of a sudden I found myself standing so funkless that I felt naked in a huge marshy meadow just blazing with early summer buttercups. A sunlit lake of brilliant yellow, Natasha. With me gasping, nearly drowning in the middle of it. And I’d scarcely noticed the coming of spring.

  The word “stunning” may describe this meadow. But not “stunning” the adjective: this yellow hit like a fist. This was Stunning the Noun. And in Its presence (odd as this may sound) Everett the Noun vanished.

  Want proof that I vanished? Probably not, knowing you. But being the skeptical sort, I do. So let me mull this event over a little:

  You and I didn’t make it close enough to Spring for you to learn this about me, but I’ve never liked to pick flowers. Blossoming is a sexual activity, and anything engaged in sex ought, it seems to me, to be left alone. Yet in the lake of buttercups, the instant after I vanished, what remained in my place dropped Stunned to its knees and began, regardless of my opinion, to pick buttercups as fast as it could work its fingers.

  Looking back on it now, I suspect this was an act of pure gratitude not on my part, but on the part of the entire headland. My part, I think, was just to stumble into some sort of primordial Gratitude Zone. I’m making this up as I go along, but doesn’t it seem obvious that when a wild headland feels the sun after six months of rain, colorlessness, cold and whatever it calls its winter loneliness (only the old spruce trees can pronounce this word right, and it takes them all six winter moons to do it), it, the headland, goes on a growing and blooming and mating and sprouting spree? And at the height of this spree isn’t it possible that all that burgeoning life and energy could pile up in certain places, just the way dead leaves and melancholy pile up in places in the Fall, forming little springtime ecstasy zones—places you might call “over-joyed”? And having survived the same rain, cold and six-moon-spruce-tree-word-for-loneliness, couldn’t my bones and blood have become sufficiently entwined in the whole process that when I stumbled into the Buttercup Zone, kapoof! I vanished in it, and was able to think and feel nothing but the headland’s rapturous involvement in sunlight and groundwater and warming soil and rising sap and photosynthesis and blinding color and life, life, life? That’s sure how it felt,
Tasha. And knowing my taste in these matters, it seems even now that it could only have been a piece of the headland itself, not an Everett, that dropped to its knees and began, without thinking or qualm, to admire itself by harvesting a few of its own beautiful blossoms.

  Was that a proof? Sure doesn’t look like one to me. Yet when the headland let me go today I had its small, ecstatic, bright-yellow answer to Winter in my hand. And as I write these lines that answer is standing in a red and white Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup can (I’m eating the can’s previous tenants) in the center of the bright red kitchen table. And I wish I was poet enough to show you how they take the red table-top and the two blue candles and the grease-pearled bowl of industrial broth and even the label of the can (“SOUP IS GOOD FOOD!” it cries) and turn it all into a still life, a work of art, a thing of beauty. But boy am I not that poet.

  I feel myself on the verge of getting silly now—probably to hide from another bad habit of mine: loneliness. But I promised when I sat down tonight to try my very best to show you two simple things without voicing my silliness, or my loneliness. One was this bouquet of buttercups. The other was the moment I vanished, and allowed them to harvest themselves.

  Here they are, Natasha.

  Goodnight.

  3. Testimony

  Irwin was not court-martialed for his attack on Captain Dudek. What the Army chose instead was to give him a battery of psychiatric tests and a sanity hearing.

  Ten days after this hearing, a pale green nine-by-twelve envelope arrived at our house in Camas, addressed to “Mrs. Irwin D. Chance.” It had come from the Colonel James Loffler Mental Health Center—a military-run mental institution in Mira Loma, California, east of Los Angeles. There were two documents inside. The first was a three-page letter from the head of Loffler Center, an Army major and doctor of psychiatry named Richard Keys. It told, briefly and technically, of the attack on Dudek, of the damage to his lips, tongue, gums, teeth and hands, of the two concussions and “slight” skull fracture Irwin had received from Dudek’s rescuers, of the eyewitness accounts, expert psychiatric testimony and other evidence given at the hearing, and of Irwin’s permanent release from active duty on psychiatric grounds. It said that Irwin had been flown shortly after his hearing from Saigon to Los Angeles and Mira Loma, where he’d been diagnosed as psychotic and violent and confined in the appropriate ward. It did not once mention the Vietcong boy. It did say that by the time we received the letter, Irwin would have been given “EST”—a term that baffled us till Major Keys began to elaborate on its benefits. Then it terrified us: EST, we realized, was electroshock therapy. Major Keys added that Irwin’s chances for “the fastest and most complete recovery possible” would be “enhanced by a simple, carefully controlled environment.” For that reason, he said, “the presence of any visitors, especially his loved ones, would add little but agitation and confusion at this delicate juncture.”

  The second document in the envelope was a stenographer’s transcript of the account Irwin gave, at his sanity hearing, of his attack on Dudek. Major Keys had included it, he told Linda, “to help give you and your family at least a partial picture of your husband’s unfortunate condition.” But it did better than that. It painted us a near-complete picture—of a man declared insane for simply being himself.

  Here is the transcript:

  I know I hurt Captain Dudek and I like Captain Dudek. But the thing is, Linda. Nash has your ears she wrote me. So think. An ear. So small! I never met my son yet, but picture him. Picture his ears, like I did on that Cong boy. Because don’t they, ears, work because of tiny little bones? Doesn’t nothing but the wiggles our voice makes on air vibrate them? So imagine! The perfect delicateness! Or delicacy the word is. Of such bones. And my son has your ears she said. Linda. Then here this little Cong boy was, see? With one ear, my son I never met, all bloody where that guard, that idiot New Jersey hit him, never thinking, good God, what we must have done to make him want to kill Bobby or us or anybody else on earth. I mean how many little kids you know want to kill? And if they do, why? Who did what to them first? So what we did to his father, or to the mother who carried and bored him, or birth [laughs], you know, gave birth, I’m bad at words. But what happened to her, who he loved and who loved him. That’s what I was feeling. And now paint her white or black or some American color. Make her my mother, or yours. Then make her dead. And now make him your own little brother, out there trying to kill her killers. Now it’s different, isn’t it? Now he’s courageous, isn’t he, and you love him, don’t you, because.

  Ha [laughs]. Okay. I see you don’t want to. They’re the enemy, I know, we’re here to kill them, I know, and if I wasn’t raised like I was or didn’t have a baby or hadn’t seen him so close maybe I could have kept him an enemy too. But after they shot him and I lay there knowing it was a child, a brave little brother, it was my own baby’s ears we’d just shot, how can love ever operate in the Army is what I started feeling. Because isn’t that the real problem here? It sure is my problem. ’Cause I’m a Christian. Or was. And Christ’s love doesn’t work, is what we feel in the Army. That kind of shit gets you killed here, it’s an eye for an eye here, if Christ’s love was real this whole war couldn’t be happening. That’s what we feel. But after he was gone and I’d so barely tried to stop them, how would I know, is what I started feeling. Because how can Christ’s love operate anywhere, ever, if some fool doesn’t just start to operate it? Some do, you know. Operate it I mean. Like here! This guy right here! Take a bow, Sergeant Felker! Okay don’t. But he saved my life, this big fella. He doesn’t even like me [laughs], but he crawled back to a place that could’ve got him killed just to save me. And that’s love, see? Right here in the United States Army.

  Except usually, I started thinking, right before the toothpaste thing, these thoughts were, usually it comes too late. Army love I mean. Retroactive! That’s the word! Ha. These sedatives aren’t so bad.

  Retroactive love. That’s the kind the Armed Forces has. The one kind that never does anybody any real good. Because Bobby Calcagno, let’s get him into it here, let’s admit he’s the reason for every bit of this. But I loved Bobby too, and knew him better than most of you, maybe. And a little enemy boy, killing him out of love for Bobby, do you think that helped anything? Do you think Bobby wanted that? He would’ve hated it. Hated it! Retroactive! That’s all it was. But that’s how we’re programmed, that’s the button Captain Dudek pushed. So stuff the goddamned programming, was what I started feeling. Smash the goddamned armor the Army stuffed your heart in! Because an eye for an eye is smart, see, but love is dumb, lovers are fools. And I should’ve been fool enough for that boy, like Sergeant Felker was for me, to operate a little love by that jeep [laughs, begins to cry]. Don’t you see? While his brown eyes, his ears, those tiny bones were still wriggling I should have been fool enough to beg them, or fight them, or scare them some way. I could’ve rammed that jeep with my head! I could’ve ate dirt! I could’ve stripped naked, shredded my face, anything, anything! till they saw you can’t take a child, not ours, not theirs, you just can’t take a child and treat him like a, like [cries]. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. But you do see, don’t you? I had to hold on to him. My way, my truth, my life [laughs, cries]. That’s all that little boy was. So too late, out of love for what I’d let die, retroactive as hell again, see, I took everything the Army turned me into and jammed it back into the mouth, Dudek’s mouth, that said the boy doesn’t exist, shoot him.

  You don’t understand [laughs]. I can see that. It’s just too simple, is maybe the trouble. Just Irwin again, I wanted to be. Just this fool who loved kids. But I’m the moron who joined you. So do what you have to. Let it shine [laughs].

  And hey. Thanks for listening.

  4. My Brother’s Keeper

  For the first time in years, our ragged Camas household shared a passion: we all longed to disobey Major Keys’s advice and visit Mira Loma as soon as possible. But Southern California was a long way off, and there we
re serious obstacles for all of us:

  Linda had Nash to take care of, she didn’t yet drive, and the news about Irwin seemed to render her almost catatonic with fear. Her reaction was so extreme that it struck me as cowardly at first, or at least annoyingly pathetic. Then Mama quietly reminded me that, sometime this coming summer, Linda’s dad was due out of prison.

  The twins were in their last week of school before eighth-grade graduation, they were indispensable part-time employees of Mama’s, and they were also very busy, since Linda had come unglued, taking care of Nash.

  Mama’s housecleaning and dessert-making businesses were thriving, in fact our household economy would have collapsed without them; but they were also so dependent upon her arcane knowledge, energy and hands-on expertise that they would disintegrate if she didn’t take a few days to train a proxy.

  Unfortunately for my own longing to visit Irwin, I was that proxy. On top of that, I was trying to gear up for finals and write three different term papers. And on top and under and around and through that, I had fallen in love.

  Her name was, and still is, Amy. And she was not a chapter in my life: she was, and still is, the central figure in an enormous subsequent volume. So suffice it to say in this volume that she was the person who gave me the courage to see that in order to love and serve one’s land and people, in order not to betray the very things that patriots claim to hold dear, one must sometimes defy what is called “one’s country.” I never took my finals, never wrote the term papers, never went back to college though I knew it would cost me my deferment. And Amy and I had made meager preparations—as I awaited my induction papers—to join Everett in British Columbia, if it came to that. But, as I mentioned already, at my induction physical late that summer, my left eye kept me in the country of my choice.