The Brothers K (16 page)

The third big thing was that right at this point who should come tromping up to Hugh’s doorstep like a somewhat overweight cigar-chomping Angel from Heaven but the famous Chicago White Sox scout Bucky Koter! And what should Bucky do but offer Hugh a $3,000 bonus plus a guaranteed $2,500 per year salary for two years to sign! And the whole time Koter is doing this, what should Marion be doing but brewing him up a cup of coffee made out of half soy sauce, half almond extract, half stale Postum and half used MJB grounds boiled up in a filthy soup not fit for rats! And what would a great scout like Koter do but calmly drink it! This is an absolute true story, ratty coffee included! This was also one of the biggest bonuses and first two year contracts in Baseball History offered to a Schoolboy Wonder up to that point in time, which was not only a great honor but 8,000 Big Ones, more money than any young man Hugh’s age ever dreamed of! And in a way the even greater honor going on while Hugh
read the fine print of the contract was when Marion asked Bucky if he’d like a second cup of rat-puke coffee, and Bucky calmly rejoindered, “Almost certainly, Mam! How delicious!” and drank Hughs’s health to the bitter dregs! Obviously, Smoke Chance was one hot prospect! So Bucky Koter and the 8,000 Big Ones were the third big thing.

The fourth big thing was just a little thing really, just a little thought that started weighing Hugh’s mind as he was pouring over Koter’s offer while his mom was pouring out the ratlike coffee. Hugh’s thought was simply that even if they weren’t the Cubs, the White Sox were still Chicago. And the instant Hugh thought this he remembered how his own dad’s famous last words to him were written in the exact same type of screwed-up logic! Remember? He’d wrote,
Although my Piper
is not a
Chicago
it is
still
a
Cub!
So, WHAT A COINCIDENCE! was Hugh’s next thought, if it was even his own thoughts thinking by now and not the ghost of his dead dads’s brain doing the job for him! CHICAGO! MY BABYHOOD TOWN! the Mystery Brain continued, AS WELL AS THE TOWN MY OWN FAVORITE DAD ONCE CHERISHED FOND DREAMS OF ALMOST PLAYING PRO BALL IN! Okay then. These strange and ghostly reflections were the fourth big things!

So there he was with four big things on the one hand and the one huge thing of A COLLEGE EDUCATION on the otherhand. What a decision for a young man to make of such an age!

Yet in the end Love, and also Money, won out totally as they so often do! Hugh signed with the ChiSox! Then him and Laura were happily married in a small ceremony made slightly smaller when furious Marion Becker Chance refused to come. Marvin was Best Man, and an Adventist gal from the fake meat factory, Dotty, served as Best Woman. But whereas Marvo is now my favorite old hair-ratting dirt-farming uncle, nobody knows what became of Dotty, which is just about par for the course isn’t it? The first person you meet becomes your uncle while the next just drifts off like a cobweb. Somedays it’s a mystery just to be alive!

Meanwhile everything looked about perfect for young Hugh and Laura if old Marion would only cool off, which she gradually started to do, like at about three o’clock last Wednesday. (I’m only kidding!) The main catch in life for the good-looking young couple at this point was how Everett Senior’s death by Germans happened before he got around to showing Hugh how to throw a decent curveball. Revealing
to her husband that she had more than just another pretty face lurking between her shoulders, clear-thinking Laura pointed this no-curve problem out right off the bat. “High school ball with no curveball was one kind of ball, Hugh!” she cried. “But Pro Ball will soon be another!”

“Hay I know I know I know I know!” was Hugh’s somewhat curt reaction, for he was already working his arm to the bone on the problem. Nevertheless, how right the young wife was!

I
t’s Sabbath afternoon. Papa and me are sitting in the papermill parking lot, waiting for his friend Roy to get off work. Roy was supposed to be through at 3 o’clock, but the mill clock says 3:14, and nobody argues with the mill clock: its hour hand alone is half the size of a telephone pole.

Back in 1960—not long after Papa lost the lawsuit that could have fixed his dead thumb—Jan Lacey, the guy who cleans the pigeon shit off the mill clock’s numbers, fell backwards out of the 0 in the 10 when a yellowjacket stung him. It was lunch hour, I guess, because a bunch of people saw it happen. They said he did a slow, sloppy backflip but landed right side up on the asphalt, neat as you please, right between two parked cars. He broke his pelvis, as I remember, and several bones in his legs and feet, but was healthy enough to be on the TV news later the same evening, so we all gathered round to watch. They showed the huge, high clock first, then panned slowly down the concrete wall to the place where Lacey landed. Next they took you right up to his hospital room, where he lay grinning at the bright lights and camera despite the casts and pulleys and cables holding all his broken parts in place. The TV news lady came up with a pretty good question, for a change. “What were your exact thoughts, Mr. Lacey,” she said, “what flashed through your mind as you plummeted down toward what must have seemed like certain death?”

While the camera slid in for a close-up, Jan screwed his. face up and thought hard about it. He thought for several seconds—which seemed like an awful lot of thinking for somebody on TV. Then he said, “Oopseedaisy.”

The news lady cocked her head, obviously not understanding. “Yep,” Lacey said, all solemn and nodding. “Oopseedaisy. Those was my very words.”

We all found this funny, and laughed pretty hard. But when Papa heard it he almost died. I mean he writhed and howled in his chair till the tears streamed and his face and stomach cramped and he started coughing and choking. Then he caught his breath and started in all over again. All that evening, clear to bedtime, all any of us had to do was whisper “Oopseedaisy” and he would lose it again. I remember his whooping, his writhing, his wet, helpless face. I remember it all perfectly. I remember it because he hasn’t laughed once since.

When I was little and Papa first started working the mill, I once heard him say that he’d become “a time-clock puncher”—and immediately I imagined him somehow climbing that huge concrete wall and literally punching the mill clock to a standstill. I thought he could do it if he wanted. I thought he could do anything, I really did. I’d never seen him play baseball, but from what I saw of him at home and gleaned from Everett’s and Mama’s stories, I believed Papa was Bob Feller, Solomon and Pecos Bill rolled into one. In one of my earliest memories, Papa is still in uniform, and so sweat-drenched it seems he’s been swimming, after an incomprehensible but apparently glorious feat called “Afore-hid Shudout.” Leaping from the back of some ballplayer’s old pickup, he dashes to the front porch, plucks me out of Mama’s arms, kisses my nose, then throws me so high in the air that at the summit of my flight I look down and glimpse an exquisite little forest of baby maple trees growing in our old wooden gutters. I dreamt of that forest for
years
afterward; beautiful dreams they were too—because in them Papa would throw me up again, and I’d just stay there, floating and looking for as long as I pleased. And there would be animals in the forest! Ant-sized coyotes, perfect little elk, mothlike owls, all grazing or gliding through the minuscule maples. I dreamt this so often that the wall between dream and memory finally gave way, and when I’d conjure the one time Papa really tossed me over the gutter, I could swear I really did see buff rumps and antler-flashes as the tiny elk dashed away through the trees. And though I mentioned it to no one for fear they’d think me selfish (or worse, think me adorable), when I was six and Papa crushed his thumb and had to quit baseball, I never cried or felt any real pity for him till I realized there could be no more Afore-hid Shudouts, and that he’d never throw me up over the tiny owl and elk forest again.

And now. Now he’s sitting here beside me, gray-eyed, gray-templed, gray-faced, smoking a Lucky. Now he is
always
smoking a Lucky. It seems there’s nothing else in the world he really want’s to do.

It’s foggy out, and getting dark already; I can barely make out the 10
that Jan Lacey fell from. It’s also cold. I don’t mention this, though, because the Fortyford’s antique heater is so full of exhaust leaks that Peter pukes and the rest of us get headaches if we ride any distance with it on, and neither Papa nor Roy nor even Uncle Truman can fix it, and there’s no point in griping about things nobody can fix.

We’re giving Roy a ride home because his Travelall is in the body shop. He spun out on an icy bridge on the upper Washougal last weekend and raked one side of it along the guardrail. He caught two nice steelhead that day, though, and said the scrape was almost worth it. Even Papa hooked a fish that day, but he didn’t stick it hard enough and lost it on the third jump. He got skunked again this morning while we were at church. He almost always gets skunked. Roy has better luck, or maybe more skill. He loves fishing like Papa loved baseball, and has pounded the Washougal ever since he was a kid. He says the salmon and steelhead runs this year are the worst he’s ever seen, and that the shit the papermill keeps dumping in the river is the reason. Then Monday through Friday he works at the mill. He feels bad about it, but says that nothing else pays so well. Fishing sure as hell doesn’t.

Papa’s window wing is open to let smoke out, but it seems to me it’s just letting cold in while the smoke gathers in a cloud all round his head. I stay slumped so it floats above me, but Papa’s hair and clothes, his breath and hands, everything about him reeks of Lucky smoke. Outside, though, the cold has spread mill smoke over Camas thick as a frosting over a cake, and even Luckies smell better than mill frosting. So I guess Papa’s window wing doesn’t matter.

Tired of cold, stink and silence, I ask Papa what makes a papermill smell the way it does. He shrugs. He hates talking about the mill. Or I assume he hates it, since he never does it. But I hate being ignorant too, so I say, “I mean like scientifically. I mean, what chemicals or whatever make that awful yeast and sewer smell?”

He just shrugs again, but now I feel like talking, even if it’s just to myself, so I do: “Remember those Adventists that came from Ohio last fall for a visit?”

He doesn’t even shrug this time, but I go on with the story: “The World Series was on, but Mama made us go out and greet ’em anyhow. And it was a nice clear day, with a nice strong breeze. We couldn’t smell the mill at all. But the first thing the Ohio people did when they climbed out of their car was go,
‘Eeeeeeuuu!
What’s that
smell?’
Mama started apologizing, as if it was our fault, saying it always smelled like that around here. But before she could explain why, Everett cut in and told
’em, ‘Yep. Don’t you folks worry. It’s just a little medical problem. Poor Winnie here. It’s his crack.’”

Remembering their faces, and Irwin’s face, and Mama’s, I burst out laughing. Papa just sits, staring off into the fog. “That wasn’t even the
best
part!” I gasp. “The great thing was how, even after Mama explained it was really the mill, for the rest of their visit every time Irwin walked past one of them, they’d start copping nervous peeks at his rear!”

I laugh so hard it warms me right up. Papa doesn’t even smile. “Remember?” I ask, and he tilts his head toward his left shoulder, then straightens it again. But I can’t tell if that means yes, or that his neck is stiff. So I give up. I stare into the fog too.

There’s nothing in sight but the mill clock, but you can actually watch time pass on this clock, so that’s what I do: I watch the tip of the phone-pole-sized aluminum minute hand glide across the concrete face of the building. I remember Irwin once saying that he liked the mill clock because it made a person stop and think. And I remember Everett replying that it made you think all right: it made you think it might not be a bad idea to go buy yourself a big ol’ horse pistol and blow your brains out. I don’t feel quite like blowing my brains out, but when I try for a while to move my hand as slowly and steadily as the mill clock’s hand is moving, it’s sure not fun. The human mind and body just aren’t built for anything so slow and boring. If Father Time has a brain, I’ll bet it’s about the size of a BB.

I guess what the mill clock makes me stop and think about is the Aesop fable of the tortoise and the hare. The clock seems like the victorious tortoise, and the men filing in and out of the mill seem like the stupid speedy hares. I’ve always hated Aesop’s stories. Especially the little punchlines at the end where he plays preacher and tells you what everything supposedly means. If Aesop was alive today I’ll bet he’d be writing yarns for
Pathfinder Magazine
, calling them things like “Why Tommy Tortoise Told Satan No.” I’ll bet Aesop’s brain wasn’t much bigger than Father Time’s. I wish there really was such a thing as a Time-Clock Puncher, though. I wish some gigantic, surly, stone-fisted, Soap Mahoney-type guy went wandering around the world smashing every clock in sight till there weren’t any more and people got so confused about when to go to the mill or school or church that they gave up and did something interesting instead.

Papa snaps on the radio, twists knobs, punches buttons, and gets several kinds of static before he remembers the thing went dead last summer. He sighs in Lucky smoke, then sighs it out again. I wish he’d say
something. Maybe he’s tired of me always joking. Maybe he’d like me to be serious for a change. “What’s it really like,” I ask, “I mean, what do you actually
do
inside the mill?”

“Nothin’ much,” he mumbles.

“Do you ever do anything you
like
doing in there?”

He sucks his Lucky right down to his fingertips. “Don’t matter,” he says. “I’d still have to do it.”

“What does Roy do?”

“’Bout the same.”

“But what really goes on?” I ask. “After all these years I don’t even know.”