The Brothers K (23 page)

Surrounded as it was by miles of scrub desert, the Pentagon’s house turned out to be a forlorn and lost-looking little abode.
But in my Father’s house are many mansions
, Peter thought as he watched. And no one could fault the Pentagon technicians’ thoroughness in stocking this one: they carted in fresh and refrigerated foods, a pantry full of canned goods, a freezer full of meats and vegetables (I
go to prepare a place for you
, Peter thought); they hung never-to-be-worn jackets and hats on an oak coat stand in the front hall, toted in a few unsuspecting house plants, plugged in a radio and TV; they displayed unexpected domestic flair, laying wall-to-wall, never-to-be-tracked-up carpet on the concrete floor, hanging never-to-be-faded dime-store prints of famous European paintings on walls, placing never-to-need-dusting knickknacks on shelves and coffee tables; they even included some live witnesses—white-footed mice, both
brown and white rats, and a variety of “common household pests” such as cockroaches and ants, all in neat little cages. In short, all that was missing by the time the technicians finished was a forlorn and lost-looking little American family to match, and inhabit, the abode. And leave it to the Pentagon not only to recognize this lack, but to do something about it!

They didn’t recruit a family—though with their budget and powers of propaganda they no doubt could have. But they did the next-best thing: they
built
one. When the camera zoomed in on the plate-glass window on the shielded side of the house, when it first showed them all seated in straight-backed wooden chairs round a carefully set, candlelit supper table, wearing dapper Sears clothes and fixed, uncomprehending smiles, Peter needed time to believe his eyes. But the filmmakers gave it to him. The apparition wouldn’t go away. The Army really had constructed four lifelike, white-skinned, 100%-patriotic dummies—a Daddy, a Mommy, a Little Boy and a Little Girl. “The Last Supper!” one of Peter’s pals cracked as the camera finally drew away. But no one laughed.

With the hushed excitement of a TV golf announcer, the narrator explained that a nearly indestructible movie camera had been mounted in a bomb shelter two miles from the house, that a huge zoom lens was aimed right at the plate-glass window, and that by using glare-resistant filters and infrared film they planned on getting accurate, slow-motion footage of everything that went on in the Dummy Family’s diningroom during and after the blast. With that, the camera zoomed in on the four happy, lifeless faces, and the narrator counted down, Five, Four, Three, Two, One … But at Zero, nothing happened. Seconds passed. The house remained standing. The Dummies kept smiling. “Gee, Wally! That wasn’t so bad!” said the boy who’d made the “Last Supper” crack, and there were a few snickers. “Better light another one,” someone said, and half the class began to laugh.

Then the family simply vanished. It was not at all dramatic. The little lost house and everything in it disappeared in a flash of such pure and silent whiteness that Peter thought the film had broken. But then they began to perceive movement within the whiteness. No one, least of all the Pentagon narrator, could describe what they were seeing, but there was clearly a billowing, an erupting, a majestic swirling of heat and light pouring toward them and through them and far, far beyond them. It was mesmerizing. It was even beautiful. And it went on for a long, long time.

Finally the screen darkened, there was a stasis, and the Modern Problems students sighed, thinking the Dummy Family, though deceased,
was at least at rest. But they were wrong. The billowing not only resumed, it reversed direction. The first wind, Peter realized, had been the explosion (I
go to prepare a place for you)
—everything blown effortlessly aside as when a boulder lands in a pool and crushes the water away in all directions. But the second wind the reversed wind, was the im-plosion
(and if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself
…)—the melted molecules of brick and insect and appliance and desert all rushing like water back into place, after the thrown boulder has sunk. And while the explosion’s swirling whitenesses had been photogenic, the implosion grew steadily darker and muddier-looking, and it went on, and on, and on, and on till even the Pentagon filmmakers grew bored with the monotony of the devastation they were seeing, and so cut to the aftermath.

But here too, a full day later, there was little to see or say. Which plume of smoke, which fleck of hot ash, which pile of raped molecules had been cockroach or coat rack or synthetic boy or girl could not even be asked, because these things hadn’t just been destroyed. They’d been uncreated. A piece of planet had been splashed away like liquid, but what returned was not the rubble of what had departed: it was a no-place, an un-place, a seething gray
nada
where even the phrase
“ashes to ashes, dust to dust”
had no meaning, for this dust had been removed from any cyclic process; this ash would kill you if you touched it; this was deader than death.

“Good flick!” one boy cracked as the film ended. Then the lights came on, and Peter’s buddies were dumbfounded to see their cool, collected, .500-hitting compadre sitting there committing the ultimate faux pas for aspiring macho men: he was weeping. Pete, and a couple of girls. He made no sound, but the tears were just streaming down his cheeks.

He left the room without speaking, and groped his way down the empty hall. He couldn’t stop crying, and had no idea where he was going. But even so, it couldn’t be said that he was haunted by what he’d seen. He was not, for instance, seeing visions of his hometown billowing in the whiteness; he wasn’t thinking that history, or life, or school had lost their meaning; he wasn’t even thinking thoughts like
Russia is real
or
Hate is real
or
The Dummy Family is my family
. It was worse than that. He wasn’t able to use his mind at all. His strong, clear thinking had simply imploded, leaving him groping down a hallway in sheer, mindless panic, like a fly trapped in a jar. And when he came to the plate-glass window at the end of the hall, when he pressed his face against it and began groping for
a catch, lock or lever, his blind hands discovered that in big public high schools the windows don’t open. So he had no place to vomit.

“O
f course a good catcher can play voodoo games too,” Papa said. “I’ve seen hitters jook a foot or so of strike zone out of an ump’s head, then seen my catcher steal the shrinkage right back. But voodoo’s rare in a catcher. It’s a mind game, voodoo is. And when it comes to brainpower, well, let’s just say that when they call catchers ‘backstops,’ they’re barely exaggerating in lots of cases.”

“But Everett’s a catcher!” I laughed.

“Everett
plays
catcher,” Papa said, “but he’s a second baseman if he’s a ballplayer at all. He just catches ’cause he’s stubborn. But he’s too hot-headed for voodoo anyhow. And the way he argues, he’ll never need it.”

I laughed again.

“Now, Jack Henry up in Tacoma, he was a
real
catcher, and he could voodoo umps. Did it by following his nature too, same as Williams. Except in Jackie’s case the trick was to play dumb. He was a bright guy, really. A whiz at accounting, of all things. Did his whole team’s taxes in the off-season just to relax, became a CPA when his knees went to hell. But he had a rustic sort of face, so he cultivated a fresh-off-the-farm manner to go with it, and all during a game he’d keep this dumb commentary going, I mean some real numbnut drivel. But underneath it, see, he’d be slowly, strategically eating away at the ump’s freedom of thought. His best trick was to grunt
Myuh!
, like that, every time a clean strike came blowing in on a batter. Except Jackie’s
Myuh!s
sounded so accidental and dumb they made you feel sorry for him. But by the sixth or seventh inning those same
Myuh!
s would be sounding for pitches a hair outside or a tad low, and the ump’d be so used to ’em he’d still be yelling
Steee-rike!
without quite catching where the ball had actually gone.” Papa snorted, picturing Jackie.

“What about moving the mitt after you catch the ball?” I asked. “I’ve seen Everett practicing that.”

“Framing the pitch?” Papa shook his head. “That’s not voodoo. You see it in the bigs, I know, but I say it’s stupid. The trouble with framing, see, is that even though the ump’s concentrating on the trajectory of the pitch, his peripheral vision sees the catcher’s mitt move, so that gradually he gets this peripheral feeling that his intelligence is being insulted. And
believe me, anything that insults the plate ump’s intelligence is a
bad
idea. What happens pretty soon is, anytime the mitt moves, even to grab a legitimate strike on a corner, the ump thinks ‘Frame!’ and calls a ball. That’s why when my catchers tried it I told ’em to knock it off, loud, right in front of the umps and everybody. Of course Jackie’s
Myuh!s
were sort of like verbal framing. But they seemed to insult his
own
intelligence, which made it very different. Voodoo’s subtle, see? It’s simple mind control, really. But it seems magic at times. And it’s part of most every game. The guy who first convinced me it’s important was that one-eyed Haitian you’ve heard me yammer on about …”

“Which guy?” I asked, playing dumb again. I’d heard his Benito stories a dozen times each, but I loved the way he told them.

“Benito Lhosa,” he said, knowing I was faking.

“Remind me,” I said, knowing he would.

And he did, beginning, as always, with the same formula portrait. “You know who I’m talking about. My catcher, that last year in Schenectady.”

“Oh yeah.”

“Not a big guy, Lhosa. Maybe six foot and 170. Willowy for a backstop. Said he lost the eye as a kid. Fell out of a tree, stick went right through the lid. He could still open and close it, but the lid was scarred up and the eyeball was out of round, bumpy like a broken marble, and skewed off to one side. So Benito kept it shut.

“Didn’t matter much, though. The man’s hands hung off his arm-ends like oversized crawdad claws, his fingers were long and strong as an ape’s, and with an arm like his, what does depth perception matter? I mean, you squeeze one eye shut to aim a rifle anyway. And that’s what Benito’s arm was. A damned rifle. Any base he threw to,
zing!
the ball just vanished and reappeared there. I told you ’bout the time we played the White Sox in exhibition and he picked their so-called speedster, Dickie Waters, off second from a squat. Of course Waters was an imbecile. Which was fortunate, with a name like that. But still, what a throw!”

He whistled, remembering it.

“Benito hit .225 the year I played with him, and that was good for him. The bat was his downfall, naturally. Takes two eyes to fine-tune a swing. But he belonged in the majors anyhow. Hell, he played Two A ball for G. Q. Durham clear into his forties, which is unheard-of for a catcher. He was thirty-seven the year he caught me, and the best field general and defensive catcher you or I will ever see. With two eyes he’d’ve been immortal. As is, he’s a bush league legend. And who knows? Maybe with two eyes he wouldn’t have had that same crazy fire …”

Papa went on talking, but I found myself distracted, wondering why the crushed thumb couldn’t do for Papa what the eye had done for Benito, why it didn’t give him “that same crazy fire.” But then I glanced around, with two eyes, at his whole cockeyed backyard baseball arrangement—and it hit me:
maybe it had …

“Lhosa never learned English,” he was saying, “but it didn’t much matter. He did his voodoo without saying a word. It was beautiful, it was so simple. He made a point all game of never so much as glancing at an ump, never protesting, never squawking at all, until they
really
missed a call. I mean missed it so bad that even the worst ump knew it himself. Then, very slowly, Benito would turn till the ump could see his face. He’d appear to just be looking off into the stands with his good eye, see. Except he knew, from years of voodoo experience, exactly what angle his bad eye skewed off to. So there he’d stand, aimed and cocked so to speak, till the ump got tired of it and said, ‘Play ball!’ … Then, ever so slowly, the lid started lifting … till there that mangled, milky, off-center dead thing would be, staring the poor ump right in the face while Benito just kept looking off into the stands like an innocent bystander …
Brrrrrrrr!”

Papa shook his head. “That did it, believe you me! One attack from Benito’s blind eye and our strike zone’d swell like wet oatmeal. I’d put nothing across the middle for the rest of the game. And
that
, my friend, was voodoo!”

What happened next was odd: after all those stories, all the careful consideration, Papa suddenly snatched the paint can and brush away from me and slopped a careless but indelible white rectangle up on the canvas. “The whole point,” he muttered as he worked, “the gist of all this, Kade, is that what shape I paint here makes no damn difference. ’Cause this ol’ wall has got no mind to jook.”

Stepping back from the mattress, Papa held up his dead thumb the way the kind of painters who wear berets do, and squinted over it at his handiwork.

“Very nice,
oui?”
he asked.

I just shrugged, feeling sad for him suddenly. But he had himself a strike zone.

“R
ain,” in the bizarre but rather poetically expressed view of McLoughlin High’s head football coach, Duffy Basham, “is a democrat. It falls on both teams alike, it don’t hurt when it hits you, it helps out on defense by causin’ fumbles. Face it, men. Rain, like most democrats, is your basic wimp. An’ so are
you
if you let it affect the way you play football.”

For these “reasons” there had never been a rain torrential enough to inspire Coach Basham to cancel a McLoughlin High varsity football practice, and he held a “hundred and ten percent belief” that there never would be. But when, one week in mid-November 1964, we had six inches of wet snow one day, followed by a warm southwester that melted every flake of snow and brought three inches of “democrats” in a single night, Coach Basham discovered something new about rain: when enough of it falls, gridirons become lakes in which you can’t play football no matter what percent of you believes what.