The Brothers K

by David James Duncan

  Ramos gave Gil an apologetic look, as if the intricacies of his language were all his fault, then explained, “Suelo ees thay soil doort. Basura ees feelth, or doort. Tierra, she ees thay planet Doort.”

  “Hey, Gil,” said Jim McGeorge. “What is tequila?”

  “What is a señorita, hombre?” Ty Daniels chimed in.

  “What is beisbol, Gil?” McGeorge asked.

  “I get the point, assholes,” Jarrel muttered.

  “So where would you say our fine planet is located?” asked Doctor Dave.

  The right fielder, Jimmy Sims, gave it some thought, then answered, “Space.”

  “Astute,” Dave said. “And where do you suppose this ‘space’ is located?”

  No First Name Walker: “Everywhere. Nowhere. Fuck if I know.”

  “Help him out, Jaime,” said Doctor Dave. “Where is space?”

  The third baseman sucked his cheeks, bugged his eyes, then pointed at the sky.

  Doctor Dave smiled, then pointed his pen at Gil Jarrel.

  “Hey, Ramos,” Gil said. “How do you say ‘nail’?”

  “Clavo.”

  “How ’bout ‘head’?”

  “Cabeza,” Jaime said.

  “Well,” said Gil. “I’d say our man Ramos hit the ol’ clavo smack on the cabeza.”

  Jaime smiled. The men laughed. Doctor Dave said, “So what is space, anyhow?” And his ballpoint started bouncing.

  Jim McGeorge: “What I don’t know about space’d pretty well fill it.”

  Jimmy Sims: “Space? Hard to say what space is, Dave. But don’t you worry. They’s plenty of it.”

  Ty Daniels: “Space is space, Dave. It fills the universe.”

  No Last Name Darrel: “But space is empty, Ty.”

  Ty Daniels: “Hey, man. If you’ve got everything there is floatin’ in you, I’d say you’re full, not empty.”

  Doctor Dave: “New question. Who’s right?” His pen pointed.

  B. G. Anderson: “I’d say they both are. I’d say space is the full emptiness that keeps all the stars and planets and other pieces of universe from getting hideously mangled together into an unthinkably thick glob.”

  “I’m gettin’ a fuckin’ headache,” groaned No First Name Walker.

  “New question, then,” said Dave. “World’s easiest. Name one of the somethings that float in the nothing called space.”

  Jim McGeorge shrugged. “Planet Doort.”

  Dave nodded. “Name another.” The pen pointed.

  Jaime Ramos, still a little stage-frightened, piped, “El sol?”

  “Damn betcha,” said Doctor Dave. “And how would you describe the relationship between planet Doort and el sol?”

  Gil Jarrel: “Warmly.”

  Jim McGeorge: “Distant.”

  No Last Name Darrel: “Essential.”

  “Warm, distant, essential. Which is it?” asked Doctor Dave. The pen pointed.

  “Boaf,” said Jimmy Sims. “Sun’s like a woman, Dave. Too close she’ll burn ya. ’Thout her you die.”

  “That was poetry, Jimmy,” B.G. sighed.

  “Wudn’t exactly math, though,” said Ty. “One ’n’ one ’n’ one makes boaf?”

  Jimmy shrugged. “Woman do that to a man’s math.”

  “Which is why he invented polygamy,” said Doctor Dave. “But what else? What else goes on around the sun?”

  No Last Name Darrel: “Planets, Dave. Our particular planet, Doort, shares space with eight others, just like a ball team. And they all circle the sun, same as us.”

  “So tell me more about the eight.” The pen pointed.

  Hector Harris: “We’re the only one with life, except for bugs or lichen or something, on Mars, I think.”

  No First Name Walker: “Venus. Thas a planet. An’ Saturn got rings.”

  Jim McGeorge: “There’s one named Pluto, and one named Goofy.”

  Ty Daniels: “How important planets are to us isn’t clear, exactly. Like there’s people, called astrologers, who think planets are so powerful they control the whole way we act and feel. And there’s normal folks who say things like ‘There’s the Evening Star,’ not worrying about how it’s really a planet. But then the astrologers turn around and say it’s their planets that allows ’em not to worry.”

  Doctor Dave turned back to Jaime and pointed at the sky. “Anything else worth mentionin’ up there?”

  Ramos, with his four-hundred-word English vocabulary, was looking almost scholarly now. “La luna,” he said, giving his head a jaunty wiggle. “Thay moon.”

  Papa had been sitting quiet, eyes closed, basking in the friendly pointlessness of the game. But at the words Thay moon he heard a high, piping echo: Thay moon is lellow … And saw Irwin. His face at age one and a half or so. Beaming up at him. One fat little finger pointing. And just that fast Papa was struggling not to sob.

  “So what do we know about the moon?” asked Doctor Dave.

  “Got a lost golf ball on it,” said Ty. “And an American flag.”

  “An’ pro’ly a bag or two o’ astronaut shit,” said No Last Name Walker.

  “So they best be watchin’ out,” said Jimmy Sims, “where they be takin’ the next giant step for mankind.”

  The men roared. Dave’s pen pointed. “It’s round like a world, the ol’ moon is,” said Gil Jarrel. “But it’s lots different than Earth. Like it’s cold. Whereas we’ve got fire inside. And it’s got no water. We do. And no air, I don’t think. Does it?”

  The pen pointed. “Nope,” said No Last Name Darrel. “No air, no water. Doesn’t spin on its axis either. Moon keeps its same face towards us all the time. Which is why, until that space capsule with the camera orbited, nobody knew what the back side even looked like. And it was better that way, didn’t you think? Didn’t you love, as a kid, to look up at the moon and wonder what might be hiding on the dark side?”

  Lellow … Papa couldn’t get a grip, couldn’t shake the little voice—or the shaved head, the scars, the jittering eyes.

  “You can still wonder plenty,” B. G. Anderson said.

  “Naw.” No Last Name shook his head. “The astronauts wrecked it, for me.”

  “I knew an old guy,” B.G. said, “a damn strange, damn smart fella too, who told me the moon is really a dead world. I don’t know how he knew it, or even if he knew, really. But that’s what he said. And the way he said it, I believed him.”

  “Thay moon,” said Jaime Ramos, “she’s fool tonight.”

  “Theeeeere’s a dead world on the rise,” sang Ty.

  “There could be,” B.G. insisted. “There really could be. And if it is a dead world, then there’s still plenty to wonder about. Like maybe we all came, human beings I mean, from the moon. Like maybe it was our world once, in ancient times, and it was dying. So maybe we rode it here—you know, drifted here through space. Or even propelled it here, maybe, like if we were advanced then, and lost or forgot the advancements later. So maybe the first man and woman on Earth, or first non-cave-type man and woman, were just two people from that dying world who found some way to get down to this one. And once they got here, and got settled, maybe they would look back up, knowing that all the rest of their people were still there. Maybe they’d have to hold each other when it rose, all orange and full and close. Maybe that’s where our romantic notions about the moon first came from. Two people holding each other to keep their hearts from breaking, because everybody they knew was dying in the cold rocks and dust piles a quarter million miles away …”

  The sheer joy on Irwin’s face as he’d pointed. As if he was the first one ever to see it. And his first impulse? Share. Thay moon …

  “And tonight,” B.G. was saying, “while we play ball here on Earth, there it’ll be—the cold, empty world we came from. No sign of the people, nothing left of ’em now. But still shining down. And still trying to maybe tell us, Enjoy it down there. Live like you mean it. ’Cause once upon a time, this was a world too.”

  Whether from awe or mere poli
teness, the players were silent for a bit. Then Jimmy Sims said, “Shit, man. You tryin’ t’give us nightmares.”

  “By the light,” crooned Gil Jarrel, “of the silvery dead world …”

  “If it’s so dead,” said Ty Daniels, “how’s it do the stuff it do?”

  “Except for shine,” Heck Harris asked, “what does it do?”

  “Makes ee woomawn half thee baby,” said the scholarly Jaime Ramos.

  “Makes ee ocean half thee tides,” said Ty.

  “Makes ee hoot owls hoot an’ ee coyotes howl,” said Jim McGeorge.

  “Makes me horny,” said Jimmy Sims.

  “That’s ’cause you’re one o’ them escaped moon people,” said Heck.

  “Don’t take no moon,” said No First Name Walker, “t’make me horny.”

  “That’s ’cause you’re a mooncalf,” said Heck.

  “Full o’ moonshine,” said Jim McGeorge.

  “Who gonna moon you in a minute,” No First Name said.

  “Moon Darrel,” Gil suggested. “He likes the dark side.”

  “Up your dark side,” said No Last Name.

  Jimmy Sims grabbed Doctor Dave’s ballpoint and pointed it at the doc himself.

  “Moonbeam,” said Doctor Dave. “Moonbow. Moonblind.”

  “Moon-unit Zappa,” said B.G. “John Blue Moon Odom. Reverend Moon.”

  Lellow, said Irwin. The tiny finger, delighted eyes. Of course he’d meant pink. In those days he thought that “dreen” was “boo” too. But when Papa had looked up to where the little finger pointed, there it had been in the boo-black sky—the cold dead world we maybe came from.

  2. Letter to Natasha, pp. 210 & 211

  The same situation that had Papa hearing echoes from early fatherhood had thrown Everett into a different sort of regression. For several days he’d been stalking the deer trails, logging roads, beaches, hills and headlands of Greater Shyashyakook with his old revolutionary blood boiling, wracking his brains for some fiendishly clever Free Irwin Plan. The problem so far was that while Everett hadn’t come up with even the rough outline of a rescue operation, his old Hippie Churchill persona had come up with several. Irwin’s plight, it had told Everett right off the bat, was all Washington D.C.’s doing, and D.C. had no fucking scruples whatsofuckingever: it was therefore fair and necessary that Everett “get real” about the enemy he was dealing with—and jettison his own scruples. This deft little cerebration made things exciting for a while. It freed him up to contemplate false identities, bureaucratic trickery, political bribes and blackmail schemes; it allowed him to think long and hard about bomb threats or actual bombings, kidnap threats or actual kidnappings, exchanges of hostages, guarantees of diplomatic immunity, FBI-proof getaway plans. With the help of an eggs-reefer-and-beer breakfast after an almost sleepless night it finally even vouchsafed him the vision of an army of pissed-off hippies in BONG THE PENTACONG! T-shirts mounting a full-scale, heavily armed, FREE WINNIE NOW! asylum invasion led by Che Chance himself. By the time he’d imagined all that, though, Everett was so exhausted that he had to sleep away the entire afternoon.

  And later the same evening, as the full moon Jaime Ramos had predicted was sure enough rising over the Little Nessakoola, Everett sat down on an old spruce stump on the ridge behind his cottage, took a deep breath of clear night air, and realized in the time it took to exhale that not one of his schemes took the actual Irwin, the actual Linda and Nash, the rest of the family, gross reality or even the actual Everett into account. Another breath, another exhalation, and he realized that he’d just wasted two days in an insurrectionist dither—while Irwin remained in hell.

  He didn’t feel he had time for remorse. He settled for slapping himself—just once, but hard—in the face. He then walked back to his cottage, brewed up a cup of cowboy coffee, grabbed his Bic and Big Chief 500 tablet, sat down by the buttercups at the red kitchen table, and wrote—on two more pages of his unmailable letter to Natasha—the following description of what now struck him as the crux of his problem:

  Remember in sex education class, back in high school, reading about the ovum? Remember how it’s got this soft protective wall around it which hundreds of sperm reach at about the same time, and then they all bombard it, trying to fight their way through? And then remember how just one sperm finally breaks through the wall, and the instant it does the ovum undergoes a drastic chemical change that seals out all the others? Well, it’s kind of a transvestite metaphor I’m making, Tasha, in that it’s my heart that’s playing the ovum and you who I’m casting as that first sperm. But the whole idea of a walled-off center or an irreversible transformation—that’s what I’m getting at. That’s what I think has happened.

  Because you’re in my center, Tasha. You’ve invaded my heart and I can’t get you out. So no one else can come in. But you’re gone. You vanished. So I have no center.

  Not very romantic, this sperm and egg imagery. But what can I say? My situation here ain’t so romantic either. It’s not even sad and bluesy anymore. It’s just a fucking disaster, frankly. Because, another thing it’s time I told you: you’ve created hurt. Real pain, real hurt. Maybe your love was just a veiled wish to crush me from the start. And maybe I deserved it. But the part of this I hate, and the part I think you’d hate too, is that it’s not just me you’re hurting anymore.

  Remember, when it was really rainy and boring, how I used to tell you Irwin Stories? Remember how hard we’d laugh? Remember the time you told me I better never introduce you, because you were afraid you’d love him more than me? And remember my answer—that if you did we’d be even, because I loved him more than anybody else on earth? Well, the morning after I wrote you last—the morning after I picked these poor severed buttercup heads and thought life was so wonderful and maybe it is, too, but that only makes it worse—I got a message from my father saying that Irwin is in a terrible trap. Dying, maybe. Or worse. So naturally I’ve been busting my brains, spiking my smarts, I’ve been a fucking factory of inauspicious ideas up here, trying to invent an escape for him. But that, I’m afraid, is where you slip back into the picture. Because what good are brains, Tasha, and how is one thought any better than another, if you haven’t got a sixth sense, a heart, a center, to sort them out with?

  I need my center back. The part you invaded and transformed and closed off and disappeared with, Natasha or Laurel or whoever you are. I need it back fast. Someone I love, someone you’d love too, is dying for me to find it. So please. Right now. Feel this. Feel me calling. I know you can’t reverse what’s irreversible or make it all better or any other sort of fairytale shit. All I need is to hear what happened to us. Just enough to undo the chemical damage. Just enough to get my godforsaken center back.

  When he’d finished writing these words Everett went out on his porch and sat down on the steps to listen. He heard a ferry’s horn in the Strait, miles off in the distance; heard an owl on the ridge—a great horned, maybe; heard, down on the moonlit tideflat, a killdeer cry, just once. He did not hear, feel, intuit, or expect even the faintest message from Natasha. And when the night breeze eased into the spruces, when he heard the big trees begin to pronounce the nine-hour-long word that meant Warm Full-Mooned Spring Night, even another instant of waiting was suddenly unthinkable.

  He charged back into the cottage and stuffed his wallet and car keys in his pockets. He shoved his 211-page letter into a manila envelope, wrote “Laurel Lee” on it, slapped on a few stamps. He went to his bookless bookshelves, grabbed her abandoned cookbook, Thoroughly Modern Menus, and copied her deceased grandmother’s 1932 Knoxville, Tennessee, address from the inside cover onto the manila envelope.

  He was careful to add no return address.

  One hour and thirty-nine miles later his three-month-long letter was irretrievably locked inside a downtown Victoria mailbox, and Everett was parking his foot on the rail at Churchill’s Pub and calmly telling his friend the barkeep, “Evenin’, Nelson. I’d like to get fucked up. Then I’d like to ask
your advice.”

  “We’ll see what we can do,” said Nelson.

  3. Worthlessness

  Though we had very little time to spend together, things were going awfully well between Amy and me. So well that I would sometimes forget Irwin, the draft, the war, my family; so well that the whole suffering world would vanish for hours at a time; so well, in other words, that to the world, and to my family and friends, I had become almost worthless when Amy was available.

  I worried about this worthlessness. Even agonized over it, when I could find the time. But I finally concluded that it is an inalienable right of lovers everywhere to become temporarily worthless to the world. It may even be their duty. Because when the love of two people produces things that the world deems valuable, the opportunists of the world find and exploit that value—and then God help love and lovers. Look at Irwin. Putting Linda’s needs before his own, as any good romantic would, he had stopped being a student, opened himself up to the draft, and so been left with a brutal choice (as that great deck-stacking opportunist, the U.S. Government, knew he would) between exile, prison or Vietnam. Again thinking of Linda, he chose the only option that provided pay, public honor, cheap loans and widow’s pensions. In other words, because Irwin loved his wife, Uncle Sam was able to purchase, for a pittance, another big strong lower-middle-class body to hurl at the gooks.

  After watching what this purchase had cost Irwin and Linda, Amy and I chose a different path. Love, we figured, may be the best thing that ever happens between two people. And that the best thing is of no worldly worth struck us as a beautiful paradox—and an endangered one. We therefore began fighting to defend the worthlessness of lovers everywhere in the only way we knew how: by vowing to remain as inseparable from each other, and as utterly useless to all opportunists, as the rest of our responsibilities would allow.

  4. War Prayer

  Watching Papa Toe pitch through the years—the body language, the easy grace, the pure focus, time after time—any fan who didn’t know him would have sworn that there was nothing more important to this man than the game he was playing. Of course, his family knew better. Most ballplayers’ family members know better. But the good players are all like Papa: their faces tell you nothing. And professional baseball is beautiful to watch largely because of this.