The Brothers K

by David James Duncan

  6. Distance Between Studs

  At about 9 A.M. on May 30, Elder Babcock laid aside a hot pen and the climax of a sermon, slipped on his suit coat and frown before answering the front doorbell, swung the door wide open hoping to cow some tedious church member into shame for the interruption, and immediately regretted it when he saw a tall, leathery-faced stranger standing on his new I FOUND IT doormat, smoking a filterless cigarette. “Yes,” the Elder said. “May I help you?”

  “Is the missus home?” the man asked.

  “No,” Babcock said. And immediately regretted this too.

  “Are you Denzel Babcock?”

  “I am.”

  “May I come in?” the man asked, stepping his cigarette out on the mat.

  Babcock was a big, burly man, and no coward. But this stranger, physically, was a specimen. And the look on his face, the body language … “Do I know you, sir?”

  “The name is Chance,” Papa said. “Hugh Chance. I’m Laura’s husband. Irwin’s father.”

  Babcock’s scowl deepened, but he extended his hand. “So,” he said, and they briefly shook. “We meet at last. But why, I wonder? Nothing wrong with Laura or Bet, I hope?”

  This kind of division was automatic and unconscious with Babcock: nothing wrong with the two “saved,” tithe-paying church members, he hoped, but why waste breath on the rest? Papa closed the division: “There’s something wrong with all of us,” he said. “It’s Irwin.”

  “Ah. Yes. Laura has told me all about the, uh, the breakdown. And now he’s taken a turn for the worse, has he?”

  “We don’t see it as a breakdown,” Papa said. “And if things were any worse, I think he’d be dead.”

  Babcock sighed, led Papa to a chair in his livingroom, took a far larger wing chair himself, and gave his Ministerial Sympathy Dial a twist. “Most unfortunate. And so hard on the family, I’m sure. As it happens, I’m giving the guest sermon for the Bread of Life radio program this Sabbath. Many thousands of listeners. And if you like, Brother Chance, I’ll mention Irwin and your family in our prayers.”

  “That wasn’t what I had in mind,” Papa said.

  Babcock switched off the dial. “What do you have in mind?”

  “I’d like you to write a letter to a fella named Keys, the head of the mental hospital where Irwin is staying.”

  The Elder looked tentative now. “Your wife mentioned him to me. A difficult man, it seems. But competent in his field, I should think.”

  “I don’t know about his field,” Papa said. “But you and I both know Irwin doesn’t belong in his asylum.”

  Babcock forced a smile. “Mental health is not my profession, Brother Chance. And though I’m flattered that you’ve called on me in a crisis, I doubt that my opinion, pro or con, would mean much to this Keys fellow.”

  “No flattery intended,” Papa said evenly. “And I’m sure Keys is no more interested in your opinion than I am. But I still want you to write a letter.”

  The smile was long gone as Babcock asked, “What sort of letter?”

  Papa got right to it. “One that retracts all the lies you wrote last year about Irwin not being a genuine Christian or a Conscientious Objector.”

  All pretexts of civility and concern vanished as Babcock said, “I am not a liar, Brother Chance. And I’m afraid I can’t help you. So now”—he started to his feet—“I’d like you to get out of my—”

  But before he’d finished the sentence or even quite straightened up from his chair, Papa was standing so close to him that he had to lean slightly backwards. “Like I said,” Papa told him. “I’m not interested in your opinion. I’m here for a letter. I won’t be leaving without it.”

  Babcock forced another smile. “Are you threatening me, Brother Chance?”

  “Not at all, Brother Babcock. But I am promising you, before God Almighty, that if you don’t write a letter saying that you lied about Irwin to get at the brothers you hate, I’m going to do to your head and face what your lies have done to Irwin’s.”

  It seemed that Papa, three hundred miles to the south of Churchill’s Pub, had been listening to some of Nelson the barkeep’s advice.

  Babcock was defiant. “You can’t bully me!” he huffed.

  The next thing he knew he was splayed back over his chair, garroted by his tie, listening to Papa whisper, “Then you’re a brave man, aren’t you?”

  “It’s going to be a pleasure,” Babcock gritted, “to see you thrown in jail for this!”

  Papa spun him around, kicked the chair away, banged his forehead against the wall hard enough to stun him, then held him there, hung him there, by the back of his collar and pants. “I throw things for a living, Babcock. I’ll do the throwing here. You’ve taken the only son I have who trusted you and damned him half to death with your lies. Now you’re going to undamn him. Or I’m going to put your skull through this wall. It’s your choice. But your time is up.”

  Babcock’s situation reminded me of Peter’s easy use, in his early letter from India, of the words “transcendence” and “crucifixion”: it’s one thing to say “You can’t bully me” to a man who has threatened you verbally; it’s something else again to say it when you’re staring straight at a wall of sheetrock, trying like hell to remember just how far apart the carpenters placed the studs.

  “It’s possible,” the Elder said, “that I’ve misjudged one of your sons.”

  7. Sinking Moon, Sinking People

  Everett was driving home in the wee hours, using another car’s taillights to help track the road, watching for deer’s eyes in the salmonberry, staying alert by chewing a whole pack of Wrigley’s in time to any rock-’n’-roll-like static he could find on the radio, doing forty or so through the curves along the lower Little Nessakoola, when the car in front of him slammed on its brakes—“Jesus!”—fishtailed, released its brakes, sped on. Everett slowed, suspecting already what had happened …

  And sure enough, there they were: a pair of eyes, bright green in the headlights, right in the center of his lane. “And look what it is! God damn it. An otter.”

  The curve where it lay was sharp, banked and blind, so he pulled his rusty Olds to the shoulder, then backed up alongside. Rolling down his window, he peered out. But the moon was casting shadows there. Couldn’t see how bad it was hurt. No flashlight in the glove box, no flares, not even a book of matches. “What else is new, Mr. Equipped?” He backed up further, cocked the car as best he could. The headlights mostly lit the brush across the road, but he could make the otter out now—decent head movement; eyes plenty alert, watching him as he closed the car door. But a rivulet of blood running down the banked asphalt. And the rest of the long body inert, just lying there. “I’ll get a rock,” he sighed, “and get you outta this.”

  He started looking. But to his surprise, he couldn’t find one. Nothing along the shoulder but fine gravel and blackberry shoots. Nothing in the car but an old coat and used spark plugs. Nothing in the trunk either: hocked his jack, spare and tire iron to pay for fruitcake phone calls. It went against his usual dark religion, but Everett decided to hope there was a reason for this. “Maybe you’re not so bad off,” he told the otter. He fetched the old coat from his car. “Maybe we’ll wrap you in this,” he said, easing toward it, “take you home, patch the holes, fix you up with a skateboard, roll you around for company. My pet Porta-Otter. Get ya a little surfboard too. Troll you behind the boat. And a ski for snow. You might like this new life. I’m Everett, by the way. How ya doin’?”

  But when he came close the claws on the one good paw started scrabbling at the pavement, trying to run. And when he knelt down beside the dark form he saw shattered bone and a loop of intestine; saw two little rows of distended nipples, one row crushed, oozing milk with the blood. A female. A little mother. Eyes still fully alive, fur still wet with river water. But beyond any help Everett had to offer. “Busted, aren’t ya?” he whispered. “Ruined, aren’t ya?”

  The otter quit scrabbling, but still watche
d him. And her gaze made him feel nervous. Nervous and inadequate. “Shouldn’t drive a car,” he muttered, “without a good song to chant over road kills.”

  He looked out at the river. He looked up at the moon. He couldn’t think of a thing. “Ought to put ’em in the damned driver’s manual.” He sat down beside the otter anyway, thinking the least he could do was talk softly to it. “Remember footpaths?” he asked. “Remember the people who rode horses, or rivers, to go visit each other, and worshipped Raven and Bear and Killer Whale? Well, those people are gone, you otters have got to know that, and we’ve got these mumbo-jumbo gods now, with names like Progress and Luxury and GNP, that make us crazy, make us killers, when we travel. What’s really nuts is that a lot of us are sorry about making this a shit world for you. We’d love to stop our damned gods. But we can’t figure out how. Not yet. So …”

  His voice drifted off. He felt like a fool. This otter didn’t need his politics. She needed to die. So it was his inner ineptitude that Everett was feeling, and his lack of a good death song, when, faster than seemed possible, a dead-earnest log truck came barreling around the curve …

  No time to even stand: he somersaulted to the road’s shoulder. The air horn sounded, the jake brakes fired off, he turned to watch the worthless miracle of fourteen wheels straddling the dying otter. But in the glare of headlights just before the wheels arrived he also glimpsed something impossible: a nightmare thing: a pulsing red thing, yards from the crushed body, but moving. Crawling. Coming toward him. My God! Some organ? Her heart, trying to return home to the river?

  The tail wind blinded him. The truck was gone. Dark and silence returned. But he could still make out the shape. Could even faintly hear it, dragging itself across the dry asphalt, inexorable, coming for him. Everett’s flesh writhed, his breath stopped. The heart-thing reached the edge of the shadows. It crept out into the moonlight—

  and he saw a crayfish. A half-grown crawdad. Alive and well. But as confused as Everett himself by the kind of night it was having.

  Too scared to laugh, he picked it up by the back and congratulated it. It had just broken the world’s record, he told it, for quantity of terror inflicted upon a hominid by a crustacean. In answer the crawdad strained backward with both claws, trying to inflict a little something more on his fingers. “Cool it,” Everett said. “Don’t you know a personal lord and savior when you feel one?”

  He ferried it down the highway to an opening in the briars. He said, “Remember there’s a god, and its name is Everett,” gave it a toss, watched the moonlit splash.

  He then climbed back in his car, rolled down his window, took careful aim with his left front tire, sighed, “Save the cold-blooded, kill the warmhearted. That’s politics.” Then he finished what the first car and the log truck had left undone.

  He didn’t look back. If he’d left anything moving, he didn’t want to know. This too was politics.

  But a few minutes later he was rolling along the road as it followed the Strait-bound Nessakoola. Window down, transmission in neutral, he was gliding along, exhausted, under stars and sinking moon, driving at swimming speed, otter speed, watching the same moon-silvered riffles and silent glides she’d navigated moments before. And when he pictured again the way she’d watched him—one small, rounded ear up, listening to his babble, the other ear down, listening to the world beneath the asphalt, crushed and alive, two worlds at once—it touched something in him, unlocked something, and he felt himself fall through a, kind of false bottom, felt he was driving now, down, into a vast, dark pool. A pool of sorrows, it seemed at first. And not just his own, not just crushed otters and lost Tashas. The stuff of small and large losses, and of recent and ancient ones—poxed Kwakiutl and napalmed Asians, leveled cities and leveled minds, lost tribes and understandings, broken bridges between worlds—it was all somehow suspended here. Immense sadness on all sides, yet immense depth—there was room down here for all of it. And in his exhaustion he didn’t panic, didn’t try to escape, didn’t close his mind around any one hurt. He just kept easing the Olds down through it all, watching the road and the river, the small sorrows and huge ones, Irwin thrashing on a gurney, Natasha laughing in a cloudburst, the one good paw scrabbling at the road. No matter how much he saw, more kept coming. Sorrows were endless: he’d always known this. But so, he discovered as he kept sinking and sinking, was the spaciousness of this great black pool.

  I dreamt my way, as a boy, into a similar pool once. Knelt beside it in some kind of kingdom, saw perfection in it, minuscule and dressed as me. We’d touched fingers for an instant, that perfection and I. Then fear, and a dream train conductor, scared me shut. But Everett was older, and sadder. He was emptier. And I think he was braver too. Because he reached a point where he could no longer see to even glide. But he just pulled the car over. And kept sinking.

  8. Pidgin Kwakiutl

  “Yulie! Wake up! C’mon, hurry! It’s Everett! I know it’s early, but I’ve gotta—Oh. Hiya, Corey. Where’s your big mama?”

  “Where do you think?” snapped Corey MacVee, sticking only her miffed face out the door of their digs behind the Muskrat. “It’s five-thirty. She worked till two. And don’t call her big, you idiot.”

  “Okay. Huge, then. Go wake her up!”

  Corey tried not to laugh, but something in Everett’s mood overwhelmed her. “She’ll kill me,” she objected.

  “No choice,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “’Cause I love you guys. And I’m here to tell you goodbye.”

  Corey’s face fell. “You’re not!”

  “Car’s packed,” he said, pointing. And it was.

  “You can’t!”

  “No choice,” he repeated, touching her chin with his finger.

  Two minutes later Yulie stood in the doorway in an immense red bedspread and, as far as Everett could tell, nothing else. Her face was swollen with sleep. Her eyes were slits. She hadn’t lost any weight lately. She looked more chief than ever. “This better be good,” she rasped, scowling at the dawn.

  “Listen!” Everett cried. “This is way better’n good! ’Cause remember the Bear, Yulie? The one you said we’re fleas on? The no-hocus-pocus-no-skookumchuck-no-bullshit thing you told me to stick the winter out watching for?”

  With extreme caution, Yulie nodded.

  “Well, I just met the big bastard!” he roared. “But here! How it happened. This is so great! The car in front of me hits an otter, see, a mother no less. Shit. So I stop to mercy-kill her, I’m talking to her, it’s dumb, my words, she’s not impressed but I’m tryin’, see, when a log truck comes and damned near kills me! But in the lights, my God, this thing from hell is crawling, her heart on the road, oh fuck, I think, they’ve had it with humans, they’ve sent the fiend-thing!” He stopped to cackle. Corey and Yulie just gaped. “But it’s a crawdad. She was takin’ it to her whelps, see? So I pick it up and save it. Back in the river. Splash. Except I can’t help the otter except to kill her, and can’t help her whelps. And something about this knocks me in too. Sploosh. But not in the river, Yulie, not that drop of spit. This was the bottomless well! This was down the Bear’s gullet, clear through the earth and out the other side! And Spirit World? Inner World? Underworld? Disney World? Blah blah blah, man! ’Cause this was, damn!, so oceanic who knows what the heck it was! But after the Bear—let’s still call it the Bear, you and me, ’cause they’re beautiful, bears are, and words! hah!, huh? So after the Bear craps me out and I’m staggerin’ around like some two-legged shit-covered thimbleberry seed, what I all of a sudden for no reason know is exactly what to do about my brother!” He laughed again, triumphantly. “Can you believe it?”

  Yulie and Corey still just gaped.

  “But hey!” he cried. “You’re the chief! You tell me what I figured, Yulie! I mean otter crushed, whelps starvin’, then gulp! Whoa, Trigger! Down I go! Aiieeeee! How fucking obvious can you get?”

  Seeing that he was finished, at least for the moment, mother and
daughter MacVee turned to each other. “Tlingit?” Corey asked.

  “Pidgin Kwakiutl maybe,” said Yulie.

  “Crawdadman talk-talk any English?” Corey asked, with gestures.

  But Everett was just a quivering mass of totemic insights. “That’s it, Corey! I am Crawdadman!” He slammed his chest with his fist. “The thing did possess me! And if I want to keep my crushed brother from becoming the dead otter and Linda and Nash from becoming her abandoned whelps, I’ve got to try—I know it’s nuts, but I’ve at least got to try—to tell the other otters, who of course will be wanting to shell my ass and eat it, to get off their flaccid butts and—”

  “Hey!” Yulie cut in. “You call this English? If you’re leaving us, Crawdadhead, if you really gotta plan to help your brother, then come in, calm down, have a cuppa coffee, and tell us your damn plan.”

  Everett went in. He had the coffee. He told them his damn plan. And when he’d finished, Yulie’s eyes were shining even as she scowled and said, “You know it might not work.”

  Everett laughed. “Do I ever! But it’s the one thing on earth I can see to try.”

  Yulie grabbed him by the shirt then—just the way she had the time she’d called him a white nothing. But this time, as she held him there at arm’s length, it was her hardness and toughness that vanished. And the hint of wryness that never quite left the corners of her mouth or eyes suddenly did leave. Immense warmth welled up in its place. Everett felt his eyes brimming before she even began to speak. “I always liked you,” she said finally. “But I never trusted you. And if you’d left last winter, like I swore to Corey you would, I’d have shrugged. It wouldn’t have hurt a bit. But leavin’ this way, damn you, Everett …”

  She never finished the sentence. She just hugged him hard, long and close. And he was surprised, though only for an instant, to find that being mashed in the arms of this eighth-of-a-ton woman was a little like sinking, all over again, down into the fathomless black pool.