The Brothers K (14 page)

Their huge breakfasts that morning Laura remembers as having hot chocolate with whipcream and Eggs Benedict among other treats in it,
all compliments of Hugh, who spared no expenses since he knew his time with Laura was numbered, what with her living so far away and school almost out and all. Unfortunately Marvo had a stomach on him about the size of a lake and nearly cleaned poor Hugh’s wallet out of house and home that day. With Laura to look at though, Hugh pretty much neverminded.

At eleven directly afterward, among the finest box seats in Spokane Stadium, the happy young daters settled down to some serious baseball watching, with Hugh showering corndogs, Nutty Buddies, Cokes and such on Marvin all day, since every time Marv went to fetch them him and Laura got a minute to chat amongst themselves for a change. These chats were where the young couple first encountered the six or seven tons they had in common. For instants it came out during the first few innings that Laura knew baseball almost as insideout as Hugh did, and that both their dads were dead recently (though most likely headed opposite directions in the Here After), and that they both liked Fords better than Chevies, burgers better than hotdogs, dead dogs better than corndogs, and root beers better than Cokes. In case this wasn’t enough already, the last straw to break their backs was when Laura’s birthday turned out to be May 4, 1929, just one day more than Hughs’s! Watch out for those Older Women, Big Fella!

The one thing they found out they didn’t have in common was when Hugh signalled a peanut-vendor to toss Laura a box of Crackerjacks, only to discover to his horror her sticking both hands on top of her head while the corner of the Crackerjacks box drilled her helplessly in the face, nearly jabbing out one lovely blue and green eye. “I can’t catch Hugh!” Laura cried when it was all over.

“Hay! No kidding!” Hugh remarked, handing over his handkerchief for a permanent gift to wipe up all future blood from not catching things with. And seriously Mr. Hergert, to this day my brothers, dad, sisters, uncles, cousins and such have to remember not to toss Laura a thing, because she still can’t catch the broad side of a barn!

The entire Double Header whipped before the young couples’s eyes in about two minutes, as Time is so famous for doing when you’re having fun. Uncle Marv remembers the Indians sweeping Tucson both games. Laura and Hugh however remember the opposite. Marvin also remembers them being the Cleveland Indians instead of just Spokane though, inspite of this is impossible according to the ticket stub Laura
kept along with the bloody handkerchief for a souvenir. So I’d have to go with Hugh and Laura on who won.

After the games they headed back toward Walla Walla, with Laura sliding closer and closer across the carseat towards Hugh till in the dark somewhere down around Steptoe, when bloated Marvin fell to sleep, the young pair pulled quietly off the road to enjoy their first kiss, smack dab in the middle of which “AH HA!” Marvin yelled, jumping up at them, causing Laura to whack him a good one forgetting his injured head so that poor Marvo had to jump out of the car and vomit up all his corndogs and Nutty Buddies, after which they had a good chuckle and drove on, once it quit hurting so bad.

When they got back to Walla Walla around midnight Marv never moved or made a sound, so that the young lovers had to lean down and make sure he wasn’t dead before walking hand in hand into Laura’s clean but somewhat dumpy home, since they were totally poor, and met the mom, Beryl Dubois, a fine looking older woman with serious heart trouble who was not all that well mentally either, thanks to too many years with her late drunk of a husband. The brother Hugh struck out three times, Truman, was inside the abode there as well, and made a dumb first impression on Hugh by holding out his hand to shake hands, then trying to crush Hugh’s hand while shaking hands with it. “Pleased to meet you, Mam!” Hugh told Beryl, ignoring Truman’s feeble monkeyshines on his big right paw.

Then all were saddened and Truman knocked it off when Beryl observed, “Pleased to meet you, Wilver!” and went on calling Hugh Wilver the whole night, who was apparently some guy nobody ever heard of who Hugh closely resembled to Beryl’s harmless but somewhat demented mind, which several heart attacks and a hard life had worn to the nub of its rope.

Seeing how things stood, Hugh realized that whatever went on between him and Laura was going to be just between him and Laura, so to speak. This was both a big fat relief and a very sad thing, he reports feeling at the time. “I’d best be shuffling on home,” he pronounced after an awkward period of all of them sitting around grinning and staring at each other had very very slowly crept past.

“Goodnight then, Wilver!” Beryl called out in her good-hearted but not so accurate way.

“Goodnight to you, Mrs. Dubois!” Hugh rejoindered understandingly.

Then him and Laura walked deep in thought to the car, booted out
the slumbering Marvo, and looked far into each others’s eyes there under the late stars of night. “So! Goodbye then!” Hugh remarked in a joyful whisper. “But hay! Not for long!” he tacked on, placing a gentle peck on Laura’s forehead, which was the best he felt he could do what with strange brothers and moms practically crawling out of the woodwork around there.

“I hope not!” Laura claimed, all smiles as well.

And with that smile in his brain like a huge iron magnet Hugh shot on home to Pullman like a house afire, arriving home at 2 a.m. with 299 miles on the faithful Fortyford for the day, so that he decided to wheel her on around the block a couple times to make it the even Three Hundred their famous first date is now named after. Dog-tired but dead happy, the young man next staggered happily on in to bed!

A
t first glance the kingdom of heaven looked a lot like a golf course. I’m not interested in golf, so this was a complete surprise to me. Another odd thing is that when people talk about heaven they usually refer to it as being “up,” but I had no feeling of upness. The place felt right around sea level to me. The temperature was cool, maybe 55, 60 degrees. The sky was partially cloudy, with maybe a ten percent chance of rain. There was no wind, but the air was so fresh I felt we must be near an ocean, and the kingdom stretched on and on in such a rolling, barren way that the land itself seemed like a sea.

There were no trees in sight—another surprise. There were also no heavenly mansions, no pearly gates, no gold harps, gaudy thrones, winged cherubs, or any of the heavenly claptrap you worry about thanks to churches. The truth is, I’d never been in a place less like a church, and can hardly say what a relief this was. There was no God in sight either, which was a little disappointing, since I’ve always wondered what He looks like. The only living beings in sight weren’t heavenly at all, actually. They were the other people in the tour group I was part of. But that might give some idea just how beautiful the place was: even being part of a
tour
group was fairly easy to take!

To describe it in words makes the kingdom sound stark and empty, like the scrub desert of eastern Washington or something. But this is only because words can’t paint the feeling that everything had. The fewness of
things only made you notice this feeling more. The air, for instance, smelled something like sea air, but whereas sea air makes you hungry, kingdom air made you full, and it wasn’t a fullness like when you’re stuffed from overeating: it was more like that foodless fullness you get at the end of a really good movie. Like when the Captured Girl is about to be killed because she won’t tell The Secret, and she takes a last look at the hills with tears in her huge brown eyes, and there comes The Hero you thought was dead, riding down out of nowhere with his sword flashing or gun blazing, making hamburger out of Evil while the music surges through you and the goose bumps shoot up and down you. That sort of fullness. Like I said, I can’t explain it.

The swells of land rolled away far as the eye could see, every swell covered with a grass softer and prettier than any golf course grass on Earth. But maybe the nicest touch of all was in the dips between grassy swells, where there were hundreds of little pools, like tide pools (though there was no ocean to fill them). Just looking at the way the grass crept so carefully down to the edge of these pools, and at the way the moss- and lichen-covered rocks ringed them in, I felt they must be the key to the whole place, so naturally enough, I started strolling down toward one. And that was when the conductor first turned, scowled, and motioned me to stay with the group. (I didn’t mention that we came on a train, or that it had a conductor. It was just a grimy old diesel engine and a couple of beat-up boxcars, really. It seems flagrantly sinister, looking back on it. Why would people go to heaven in
boxcars?
I didn’t worry about it at the time, though, since we’d already climbed out of the cars when the dream began.)

I tried to describe the special feel of the air. I should mention the feel of the colors. Take anything, take the grass for example. You would have to say that it was a combination of green and yellow. But it was not, by a long shot, any sort of earth green or earth yellow. It was a Kingdom-Only Green and Yellow—unbelievably beautiful at first, then beautifully believable—that looked as though rays of sunlight were trapped and glowing inside each blade. The glass-blue and star-blue and sky-pink wildflowers had that same glowing-on-the-inside look. So did the purple mosses and scarlet lichens round the pools. And so (though this sounds impossible) did the quiet colors, like the tans, browns and grays of the stones.

Except for the tour group and the train I could see only one flaw in the entire kingdom. You couldn’t see the sun, but the sky was full of broken
clouds, and there were a lot of golden sun-shafts slanting down between them. To me, these shafts seemed overdone.

I suppose the conductor was a flaw too, but I felt sure he was just some hireling from Earth, and anything from Earth has a right to seem flawed. The guy looked Catholic, actually. At least he had a little cross on a chain around his neck. Other than that he was just a regular old-fashioned train conductor, with the bored face, Captain Kangaroo suit and little Union Army cap they all seem to wear. He appeared to know what he was doing, though, since after we’d gaped at the landscape and breathed the air for a while he finally led us over to the nearest pool himself, then leaned down, plucked some bright yellow fungus off a rock, popped it in his mouth, and said in a polite but somewhat bored conductor’s voice, “Everything here in the kingdom is perfectly good to eat.”

Hearing this, our whole tour group started laughing and scrambling and snorfling around, grabbing gobs of wildflowers and grass, stuffing them in their mouths, chewing away. But it bugged me to see such lovely things getting mangled, so I skipped it and bent down to inspect the pool. Once again, though, the conductor eased himself in between me and the water, looked at me like a teacher does when you’re not paying attention, and said, “Wouldn’t you like to taste something too?”

I shrugged, but he didn’t move, so I picked up the plainest thing I could find—a pebble—popped it in my mouth, started clunking it around, and grinned at him. “Give it a chew,” he said. “You’ll be surprised.” So I did chew it—cautiously at first, then harder and harder—and was amazed to discover as I crushed it into sand, then into mush, that my teeth were like industrial diamonds and my jaws were like a vise. I felt like Paul Bunyan, hell, I felt like Superman—and just the pleasure of such godlike chewing got me so excited that when the pebble-mush began melting and turned out to taste better than the best chocolate in the world, it seemed like a waste somehow. I mean, I swallowed it anyway, but I sensed as it was going down that the special quality—the joy that had been in the taste—couldn’t go down with it. It just wouldn’t fit inside me. There was simply no way to squeeze a thing so vast and heavenly into a container as small and earthly as myself.

The instant I realized this I began to feel incredibly sad. Then I looked around at the tour group, and saw that they were all making the same dismal discovery: they were all standing there chewing their grasses or flowers, tasting God-knows-what wonderful flavors, yet their smiles had all faded till they looked more like cattle than people—big, drab old dairy cows working their cuds, dimly knowing that no matter how much kingdom
they chewed and swallowed, the heart of it, the heavenliness of it, just couldn’t be digested. They were just too big and thick and dull. And realizing this, they also couldn’t help but realize that they didn’t yet belong in this beautiful place, and so would have to leave it.

This seemed to be the precise moment the conductor had been waiting for. Pulling out a big gold watch, he gave it a businesslike glance, clicked it shut, and in his bland bored voice called out, “Time to climb back aboard.” Every man, woman and child looked heartsick, but every one of them obediently turned and began to amble toward the boxcars in a cowlike line. I got in line, too, and dawdled along at the very end of it. But something had turned over inside me. I’d begun to feel cheated, and more than a little bit miffed. Our glimpse of the kingdom suddenly struck me as a cruel joke—like some paltry guided tour of a Bavarian castle or Beverly Hills mansion given to a group of retarded people before hauling them back to the skuzzy old asylum they’d come from. I felt helpless, but rebellious too—and it was the rebelliousness that made me think suddenly of my brother Everett. What would he do in this situation? I asked myself. And it didn’t take long to figure out: he’d say
Screw this cattle-car shit!
and start looking for a loophole that’d let him stay in the kingdom as long as he pleased.

Hide
, I thought first. But one quick look at the landscape nixed that idea. The place was so damned bright and pure and open that no one from Earth could possibly hide there: my drabness would stick out like a housefly on a TV screen. Unable to think of anything else, I kicked at a rock in frustration—and
FFffffinng!
it shot off over the grass like a bullet! The conductor spun round to see who’d done it, but I’d already ducked back in line and begun imitating everyone else’s abject, bovine trudging.
But wait a minute
, I was thinking. I
got a kick like a rifle and teeth like diamonds. Who am I here, anyway? And what do I know about what I can do? Maybe I could outrun that stodge conductor. Maybe I can fly! What makes us so damned sure we’re not ready for this place?
And with that in mind I turned—and saw the tide pool.
If the pebbles here are edible
, I thought,
maybe the water’s breathable. Maybe I can just hide inside a pool till that miserable train is gone …