The Brothers K (29 page)

“Or with the honest!” Everett shouted.

“Please, Everett!” Irwin begged.

“Deliver me not over unto the will of mine enemies!”
Mama cried. But in the meantime Everett had darted into the livingroom and returned with Mama’s enormous old family Bible.

“I can recite recipes too!” he bellowed, flinging the thing open and slapping pages around till he’d hit on the Psalms. “I can roast and fry and poach
you
too, Mama! Just listen!
When mine enemies and mine foes came upon me, they stumbled and fell! Though an host shall encamp against me, my heart shall not fear …”

Mama couldn’t compete in volume, but there was a maddening self-righteousness that gave her screech terrific piercing-power: “
For false witnesses are risen against me, and such as breathe out cruelty! I had fainted, unless I had believed to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living …”

“Draw me not away with the WICKED!”
Everett thundered, easily drowning her out,
“nor with the Workers of INIQUITY, which speak Peace to their DAUGHTERS, but snivel MISCHIEF unto their SONS!”

“You’re making that up!” Peter said, grinning in spite of himself. It shamed me, but I’d begun to smile a wooden smile too. Everett had a marvelous voice and accent. He sounded like some power-crazed English king in his huge stone castle, reveling in the sheer rock-and-roll power of his lung-blasts.

“Thou hast lifted me up!”
Mama quavered, sounding forlorn, in comparison, as a violin bowed by a chimpanzee,
“and hast not made my foes to rejoice over me!”

“Plead my cause O Lord if there is One!”
Everett roared gloriously.
“Plead my cause with her that strives against me! Fight against her that fights me!”

And now even Irwin and the twins began laughing. There is a trigger in even the most mannerly children that is pulled when one of their peers refuses to back down from the ruling adult—and Everett had found that trigger in all of us, and was squeezing it again and again. Our laughter meant little. It was helpless, not cruel. Yet by the sound of her voice we knew that Mama was mistaking it for a mass revolt—a veritable six-headed outburst of the satanic. And her misapprehension, her desperation, somehow only made us laugh harder.

“But in my adversity they rejoiced,”
she half shrieked, half groaned.
“The abjects gathered themselves against me, and I knew it not! They did tear me, and ceased not! Hypocritical mockers, they gnashed upon me with their teeth!”

“Nice!” Everett called out. “Very nice! But listen to this!” And trilling his r’s, swinging his arms operatically, bastardizing verses as he went, he boomed,
“Deliver me, O Lord if there is One, from the woman who imagines mischiefs in her heart! Continually is she primed for war! She has sharpened her tongue like a serpent! Adders poison her lips! So SHEBANG! Let the mischief of her own lips cover her! And KABLAM! Let burning coals fall upon them! And A-HEY-BABA-LUBA-AND-A-BIM-BAM-BOOM! Let her lips be cast into fire, into deep pits, that they rise not up and—”

There was a report, like a gunshot, and pages were suddenly everywhere, floating like the feathers of a shotgunned grouse as what was left of the family Bible flew through the kitchen, slammed the far wall, then slid to the floor, a dead thing. There stood Papa, his clothes and hair drenched with rain and sweat, his face black with fury. “Lord,
how long wilt thou look on?”
came Mama’s stricken wail.
“Rescue my soul from their destructions, my darling from the lions …”

“He just did,” Peter whispered. But Papa spun round and, with a single, lethal glance, silenced not just Peter, but all of us.

Towering over Everett, he pointed at the Bible body crumpled on the floor. “Next time,” he said, speaking
very
softly, trilling no r’s, moving nothing but his lips, “that’s
you.”

Everett turned white as a newborn baseball, took one cautious, backward step, nodded his head, and collapsed in a chair.

Papa turned, and stalked off down the hallway.

“Where is now the heathen’s God?”
Mama screeched.

Then Papa flung the bedroom door open so hard she must have gone flying, because his first words were, “Oops. ’Scuse me, Laura. But for God’s sake stop that squawking and tell me what the hell’s happened here?”

Set free by his arrival, Bet and Freddy came scampering into the kitchen, grinning like imps as they inspected the remains of the Bible. The bedroom door closed quietly. “Good action!” Bet giggled, parroting a phrase she’d stolen from Irwin. When she and Freddy began to babble, though, Peter pulled them both into his lap and kept them quiet. We waited a solid ten minutes, the twins squirming afresh every twenty seconds or so. But Peter wouldn’t release them. He sensed, we brothers all sensed, that the impassioned mumbles and cries and sobs behind the bedroom door would very likely determine just how much love would be left in our family from this day forward …

It did not bode well that Papa, when he finally emerged, looked every bit as angry as when he’d gone in. Nor that Mama didn’t follow. Slowly, meticulously, Papa washed his hands and face at the kitchen sink. When he’d finished, he dished himself a huge plate of macaroni and salad, sat down with the rest of us, and muttered, “There’s been enough praying for one night. What say we try to eat without choking ourselves to death?”

We did as he said.

Mama didn’t come out.

I
t was nearly midnight and there was school in the morning, but my brothers and I weren’t even close to being sleepy as we lay side by side by side by side on Everett’s and Peter’s beds. It didn’t help, I’m sure, that our faces and flesh were a lurid red and the room was wracked by the nerve-wringing buzz of a scarlet neon OLY sign that Everett had scavenged from a Dumpster bin a few days before, or that Mama and Papa were still arguing, often savagely, downstairs in their bedroom.

We’d been talking about everything under the sun but the blowup with Mama. But after a long, OLY-raped silence Everett finally broached the subject with his usual light touch: “I got us all in deep shit,” he grunted.

Irwin and I just looked at him, but Peter nodded.

“I think Mama’s nuts on this religion crap,” he said, “but I got you guys in hot water with me, and I’m sorry about that.”

“Heck, we don’t mind,” Irwin said, smiling beatifically. “It’ll work out.”

“I mind,” Everett said flatly. “And it
won’t
work out. Not between me and her.”

“Sure it will,” Irwin said blithely. “Everything always works out.”

“The
hell
it does,” Everett growled. And, hearing his tone, I wanted to warn Irwin to concede the point.

But he just let out a yawn and said, “Sooner or later everything comes out in the wash, just like the good Lord intended. That’s what I believe.”

“Then explain concentration camps to me, Mr. Sunshine!” Everett snarled. “Explain six million dead Jews, or even Grandawma’s dead family. Explain that woman up in the Tri-Cities last week who didn’t like the sound of her baby crying so she threw it down on the kitchen floor and stomped it to death? How did
that
come out in the
wash
, Winnie the Pooh? And if you say the baby went to heaven, buddy, I’ll bust you! Because what about the mother? What sort of wash’ is
that
crazy bitch going to come out in? And if you say ‘hell’ I’ll hit you again, because how did she get so fucked up in the first place? What sort of life, what sort of a world, turned her into a monster in the first place? Huh?”

Irwin looked ashen, even in the red light. It’s dangerous to wax mindlessly sunny around a dark cloud like Everett. No one spoke for a good while, and in the silence I realized that my splitting headache, though partly due to what had gone on with Mama, was mostly due to Everett’s neon OLY. It was obvious to all of us that the thing had been chucked because its buzzing drove people stark barking mad. But on the day Everett brought it home, Mama had ordered him to trash it, and in the battle that ensued he’d sacrificed his fifty-cent weekly allowance, and now he was so proud of what the thing had cost him that we no longer had the courage to ask him to shut it off.

“What would you have said,” Peter suddenly asked, “if Mama had let you finish your prayer?”

Everett made a face. “It was silly. Forget it.”

“Now wait,” Peter reminded him. “Like you just said, we’re in hot water with you. I for one would like to know why.”

“Me too,” I put in. Irwin said nothing, though; in fact his eyes were closed, his face was still pale, his lips were moving, and I’d have bet ten
thousand dollars that he was praying about or for that woman up in the Tri-Cities who’d stomped her baby. He was like that with his praying: he liked to take on the big jobs.

“Well,” Everett began, “I warned you it’s stupid. But the other night, after Freddy’s little prayer, I got to thinking about how easy my life is compared to Papa’s. Then I started thinking what a strange notion it is that Jesus supposedly got strung up on a cross to save zillions of other people—as if his one life, in exchange for zillions, was some kind of even trade.” (Irwin visibly slammed the brakes on his prayer, and turned to listen.) “It didn’t make much sense to me, really,” Everett said, “but what I thought was: What the hell. If that’s how things actually work, why not propose a similar swap—on a much smaller scale, of course—to help Papa out. Why not ask God, if He exists, to let me do for Papa what Jesus supposedly did for everybody on earth. Why not ask to trade some of my good luck for some of Papa’s bad, just to get his life back on track. That was the general idea.”

“That’s not stupid at all,” Peter said.

“I don’t think so either,” I agreed.

“Me neither,” Irwin said. “Except … I don’t quite get it. Yet.”

Everett stood up and started pacing. “What I was feeling, Winnie,” he said, “was that maybe the reason prayers never get answered is that everybody prays the wrong way, and for the wrong things. People ask God for
good
things all the time, and never offer anything in return. But if God exists, if He really made the world and is all-powerful and all-wise and all that, then I figure He made
all
of the world,
including the bad stuff
. So if He ‘saw that it was good,’ He meant just that. From His point of view, bad stuff must somehow be ‘good,’ or at least must serve some sort of divine purpose. I was trying to give God the benefit of the doubt, see? And look where it got me!”

“But Satan!” Irwin blurted. “You’re leavin’ the devil out.”

“If God exists,” Everett said, “He made Satan too.”

“Sure He did,” Irwin nodded. “But then Satan got proud and mean and was cast down out of heaven, and that’s why the world has evil in it! That’s why things like concentration camps and that lady in the Tri-Cities and—”

“Stow it, ‘Iron Man’!” Everett said. “I’ve been to Sabbath School too. I’ve read the bloody material. And none of it changes the fact that if God knows
everything
, He sure as hell knew what His little dark angel would do after he was invented. If God is God, Irwin, there’s just no way some
devil could be a match for Him. Just look in your Bible. Look for even one line that shows
God
worrying about Satan. It’s not God who worries about him, it’s
religious
people. And the reason
they
worry about him is because preachers tell them to. Preachers make big fat incomes by shoving Satan down people’s throats, so of
course
they dress him up in fangs and pull him like a rabid bat from their hats every week. But if you ask me, people sin because they
want
to, not because Satan makes them.”

Irwin looked like he’d bit into a lemon, and Peter looked like chocolate was melting in his mouth. But Everett just looked like he was saying exactly what he believed—and I half wished Mama was there to hear it. “Anyhow,” he said, “the way I see it, God either made everything there is, Satan included, or He didn’t make anything, because He isn’t there. He either knows everything, or He’s nothing. He’s in charge of
all
of it, or
none
of it. So what I was thinking about prayer—especially
ours
lately—was that when people turn it into begging, when they use it to try to blackmail God into giving them nothing but miracles and money and new cars and babies and marriages and all that, what they’re really asking Him is to remake, or even unmake, what He’s already made. They’re asking Him to eat His words, His inventions, His art, His creation, all of it. If God is God, the only sort of prayer that seems to make any sense to me might go something like:

“‘Hello there, God. I know Thy Will is being done today, as usual, and I think that’s terrific as usual. Of course to
me
Your Will looks like a crazy mess that’s getting the rich richer and the poor poorer and the innocent killed and babies stomped and starved and the whole world in danger of being blown up any minute by atom bombs and all. But You know all about me thinking that, since You made me. So, uh, sorry. And please, go right ahead and do Your Will no matter what I think, even if it kills us. Talk to You tomorrow, Lord! Love, Everett.’”

Peter and Irwin were both grinning, but Everett looked dead serious from beginning to end. “That,” he said, “is why, at supper, I was gonna propose to God, if there is one, not that He change His will, not that He remake or unmake the life he gave Papa, but just that He hand
me
enough of the rotten part of Papa’s life, and Papa enough of the good part of mine, to get him back out on the ballfield. You see? But now”—he sat down, sighed, and shook his head—“now I see that I was just being stupid.”