The Brothers K (25 page)

“You shuttup!” Hervano roared, bonking his head with the sole of the sopped shoe. “This is
my
version. Wait your damned turn!”

Irwin managed to keep quiet, but from that point on Hervano’s story was interrupted by blasts of giggling, especially from the twins, who, by the way, were wrapped in under the bright yellow cop poncho still draped round Winnie’s shaking shoulders, both of them fawning over the stinky little mutt that lay curled in the Smokey hat in Irwin’s lap, wearing the same idiot grin as its savior.

“Anyhow,” Hervano continued, “the boys saw I was having trouble and let me be, so I was just standing in the gloom there, thinking stuff like
Why do the nice kids get it while the scumbags live and thrive?
and
Why didn’t I grab ankle instead of shoe?
and
Maybe if I stand here long enough the damn bridge will wash out and drown me too, and I won’t have to go face the boy’s family
, when all of a sudden I hear this hollow voice over toward the south bank, going
Eeech! Aach! Oooch! Awch!
like somebody walking barefoot across gravel. And, honest to God, I think,
It’s his spirit!”

We drowned Hervano in laughter.
“The voice of his poor drowned spirit!”
he shouted over us.
“And it’s cold, the poor thing!
This is exactly what I think. I even notice, and feel touched, that his spirit voice sounds just as out-to-lunch as his earthly voice did. But when I look toward the end of the bridge where the spirit voice keeps ooching and eeching from, I’ll be hanged if this pardon my French
dog
wasn’t standing there shaking river off itself! So what did I do? What did I think? I’m telling the truth now. I thought:
His spirit has entered the dog!”

Our laughter buried his story again, but Hervano’s face stayed fierce. “You think it’s
funny?”
he asked us. “You get a chuckle out of the fact that
your
tax dollars are going to pay the salary of a guy who, seeing a presumably dead dog suddenly appear on a bridge, puts his academy training, his ten years of experience, and his steel-trap mind to work and thinks,
It’s Irwin! He’s gone into the dog! And he’s cold, poor thing!?”

He waited out another storm, then put a finger to his lips. “Stupid, it would seem. Dumb, it would seem. But let’s not forget
this!”
He held up the soggy penny loafer. “Because isn’t it possible, isn’t it even likely, that if you stay in contact with any part of this contagious idiot for too long” (he bonked Irwin’s head with the shoe again) “you start to think just like him?”

We all dissolved, but Hervano remained ferocious. “So there I stand in the glum and dumb, haunted by dogs and loafers, when I’ll be hanged if the little Spirit Dog doesn’t turn around, peer back down into the bridge
footings, and set its dingle-berried little
tail
to wagging. Then a big white hand pops up onto a girder. Followed by the pure-white, toeless foot of what I figure is going to be a regular ol’ Casper of a friendly ghost. But lo and behold, not five minutes after dying—though even Christ himself had the good manners to stay down three days—up onto the girder swings the
ugliest
pardon my French face of the
stupidest
excuse of a hero I ever hope to see. And why I ran to help it up, why I didn’t just kick it straight back in the river it keeps trying, summer and winter, to commit suicide in, is beyond me!”

As we applauded and howled and hugged and thanked him, Officer Hervano allowed himself a tiny smile at last. But Irwin didn’t. In fact his face had turned red and he’d stopped shivering as he muttered, “What I did wasn’t all that crazy. I knew there was a crawl space above the water main on the downstream side of the bridge, ’cause Everett and me crawled out it ten times at least, last summer, to jump. So I knew if I could just undo Sparkle’s chain before we washed out from under the bridge, we could—”

“Wait wait wait wait wait!” Hervano interrupted, bonking Irwin yet again with the shoe.
“Sparkle?”

“His name,” Irwin said, reaching into his pocket. “It’s on his collar.”

Hervano started to check the tag, but caught a whiff of dog and decided to take Irwin’s word. Mange or age or all-purpose scrofulosity had stripped most of the fur from Sparkle’s back two-thirds, leaving it looking (to borrow Everett’s description) “like an exposed brain with legs and acne.” But the stench rising from the fur still clinging to his head and shoulders made you think it might be best if the disease denuded him completely. “You know,” Hervano said through a plugged nose, “I think Irwin’s spirit might’ve entered that mutt after all.”

“Anyhow,”
Irwin blored, trying to ignore our raucous laughter, “I knew that if we could get up on that pipe we’d have it made. And that’s just what happened! And here we are, safe and sound!”

“Except
—” Hervano said, bonking him with the shoe.

“Except what?”

Bonk! “You
know.”

Irwin reddened. “Except I didn’t think the river’d be so fast,” he admitted. “I mean, I’d just hit the water and I was
already
to the pipe. No time to undo the collar or anything. So I just grabbed on, looped the chain round a bolt, and hoped. But if the current hadn’t snapped the chain, if the house had pulled us away, I’m not sure what would’ve happened.”

Peter and Papa shook their heads. Mama thanked God. Hervano bonked Irwin. “What else?”

Irwin sighed. “I didn’t think it’d be so cold either, really. I mean, even after I got hold of the pipe and Sparkle was safe on it and I was hanging in the current there, I couldn’t work my legs. Almost, I mean. I mean I couldn’t get ’em onto the pipe. At first. But then I did. So, like I said, it wasn’t all that crazy.”

Bonk!

“Okay okay! It
was
crazy. But we made it.”

Hervano patted his holster.

“Oh yeah.” Irwin grinned. “But if Greg ever sees me jump off that bridge—”

Bonk!

“—off
any
bridge, or even into any moving water, ever again, I, uh, I gave him written permission to just, uh, go ahead and shoot me.”

For the first time all night, Hervano was positively beaming.

“He filled out a ticket, and we both signed it,” Irwin admitted. “But on the same ticket it says I get to keep his Smokey hat.”

Bonk!

“Oh yeah. On one condition. He keeps my shoe.”

Bonk!

“Oooch! And gets to use it on me whenever he likes.”

Bonk!

“Such a deal,” said Everett.

If I were God
I wouldn’t answer my prayers either

—Tom Crawford

A
ll our lives Mama had made it a point to keep supper waiting for Papa when he had to work overtime. Even if it meant dining directly before bed, then thrashing away the night in the throes of peptic nightmares, we all had to wait. The intended effect, I think, was to increase our respect both for the soothing presence of the family provider and for the bland but bountiful cuisine of the family cook. And, for years, Mama’s stratagem worked as intended.

But Papa’s alternating runs and pitching-shed workouts were a new twist. In the scheduling department, they were not an occasional but a nightly delay. In the culinary department, they resulted in night after night of soggy or oven-dried suppers. In the biblical department, they
had nothing to do with his sacred role as provider. And in the aesthetic realm, by the time Papa finally showered and joined us he was usually such a limp, spent rendition of himself that it threw us off our feed just to have to look at him. It was therefore decided, six or eight months into his new regimen, that Mama would serve the main family dinner at six o’clock sharp, provider or no provider. “It’ll be good to feel like a baseball widow again,” she said to Papa the night they informed us of the new program. And I remember the wave of affection I felt as she said it; I remember thinking what a close-knit family we were.

But any gathering of eight human beings has an astounding potential for complication. Picture a toy castle made of alphabet blocks. Blocks don’t touch, smell, hear, think, vie for food, philosophize, sing, punch, pray or passionately read, misread, believe and disbelieve auctors as varied as Dr. Freud and Dr. Seuss, Billy Martin and Billy Graham, Yogananda and Yogi Berra or Henry Miller and Henry Huggins, so our toy castle is a gross oversimplification. But just to illustrate one of the crucial principles of what Everett calls “suppertable psychophysics,” consider how a single block down at the base of an alphabet-block castle is visually just an insignificant detail. It’s removal might pass unnoticed. But stomp hard on the floor after such a block’s removal and the whole edifice may well go tumbling …

Well, Papa’s presence at the Chance family suppertable—or, more specifically, the anemic little grace he’d mutter every night before we fell upon our food—turned out to be such a block. I’d never questioned this prayer, had never thought about it, had scarcely listened to it, really, but all our lives Papa had deployed the same
Book of Common Prayer
standby, and had invariably uttered it in exactly the same way: speaking so swiftly and monotonally that he sounded more like a bashful auctioneer than a supplicant, he’d mumble
GiveusgratefulheartsourFatherandmakeusever mindfuloftheneedsofothersthroughChristourLordAmen
, and that was that. Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am. This, in all its unprepossessing glory, was the indispensable block. Of course it was only after the thing was removed and the whole fam-damn-ily exploded like a barn in a tornado that any of us realized what a paragon of spiritual diplomacy the little prayer had been. That Papa had learned it as a child from his ballplaying, war-victim father had made it acceptable both to Everett (who loathed piety but adored old baseball heroes) and to his antipode, Mama (who adored piety, the more ostentatious the better); the rapid-fire monotone was an inane but serviceable counterweight to the subtle passion of the language; the solemnity of Papa’s face and manner balanced the inanity
of his tongue speed; and the whole holy diphthong spilled out of him so fast that there was no time for Freddy to clown or for Bet to fuss or for Mama to genuflect or Everett to apostasize or Peter to cerebrate or Irwin to guffaw or me to lust after my dinner. Papa’s prayer was a three-and-a-half-second masterpiece—a rustic but reliable footbridge that led us so blithely over the deadly crevasse of our religious differences that we scarcely realized the crevasse existed—

until
the night he left us alone, and stepped out to his backyard bullpen to throw little round prayers of his own.

T
here are, as far as I can tell, just two types of people who can bear to watch baseball without talking: total non-baseball fans and hard-core players. The hard-core player can watch in silence because his immersion is so complete that he feels no need to speak, while the
persona non baseball
can do it because his ignorance is so vast that he sees nothing worthy of comment. For the rest of us, watching any sort of baseball-like proceeding without discussing what we’re seeing is about as much fun as drinking nonalcoholic beer while fishing without a hook.

That’s why, if it weren’t for the new freeway just a block and a half south of our house, Papa would have heard Everett and me jabbering in our hedge hideout the first night we crawled into it. As baseball aficionados and mediocre players both, it was doubly impossible for us not to converse loudly and at length about the intricacies of the one-man ballgame being played in our backyard, and thanks to the freeway’s riverine roar we could do it without getting caught. It was odd to have something to thank a freeway for.

We snuck out to check on Papa’s shedball progress once a week on the average, and as time passed both his pitching and Everett’s hedge-bound analysis of it became far more skillful than I’d at first thought possible. Despite the dead thumb, Papa gradually developed four distinct pitches. And despite our laurel-leaf-and shed-obstructed view of the proceedings, Everett was able—by pointing out the varying spins, speeds and trajectories—to teach me how to identify all four. He dubbed them “the Heater,” “the Hangman,” “the Knucklebrain” and “the Kamikaze.”

The Heater was a fastball, and Everett said that Papa’s was more effective than ever in that it was still lightning fast, but was also so wild now that it would scare the living guano out of anybody on earth except
maybe our Uncle Marv. The Hangman was basically just a hanging curve—the sorry remnant, Everett guessed, of the darting slider that had once been Papa’s money pitch and had earned him the nickname Hook. The Knucklebrain was a no-spin no-dance no-account knuckler that any .250-hitting Single A musclebrain could have kabonged into the bleachers of his choice. But the Kamikaze was our favorite: it was a high-speed sinking fastball that dove as violently and late as any Zero-flying pilot who ever bought the farm for Tojo. More often than not the thing went up in flames ten feet in front of the plate, or missed the mattress altogether and blammed the garage siding. But when it managed to hit the strike zone, the Kamikaze looked so actionable and unhittable that it really did seem like something piloted, something more flown than thrown.

For all its perspicacity, Everett’s shedball analysis was, for him, a melancholy business. Hunching in a damp niche in a dirty hedge watching pitches being flung into a wall by a crapped-out millworker was, after all, a far and farcical cry from his boyhood dream of catching Smoke Chance in a major league, or minor league, or at least a sandlot game. Hooked as he was on the idea that Papa’s new hobby was a surreptitious comeback, and haunted as he was by memories of Papa’s glory days, Everett couldn’t help but be depressed by most of the pitches that limped out into the light.

But to my mind, hunching in that hedge stands out as the best thing I did that year, and one of the best things I’ve ever done, period. The dank laurel, the darkness and the need for low-voiced secrecy created an atmosphere that made our talk more considered than the ebullient, hormone-garbled yammering we were prone to elsewhere. And with an eight-piece family crammed in a house the size of ours, it was a balm to discover a place, however squalid, where intimacy with one of my brothers was not a necessity but a choice. But it was that maimed little remnant of what had once been Papa’s great art form that has really stayed with me. There is a part of me that wants to state flat out that I learned more in the hedge about the defiance of dullness and career death, about the glory hidden in defeat, about the amazing inner capacities of a straightforward, no-frills man—even a man stripped of hope—than I’ve learned anywhere since. But such grandiose claims and language clash with the swaddling clothes my hedge insights came wrapped in. All I remember feeling at first was the sad satisfaction of knowing that, whatever he was doing in that shed, he was doing it partly for me, and that watching even his most brain-damaged Knucklers and hungest Hangmen beat watching him chain-smoke himself to death in front of the TV. But as the weeks passed
and he kept slamming bucketful after bucketful of baseballs against that padded wall, a wall in me began to give way: I began to sense a new realm of athletic possibility, or a different sort of scale upon which to weigh a life …