The Brothers K (41 page)

“What if,” Peter said, “not knowing this thing, we just can’t love her anymore? It’s getting hard. It’s even hard for you, and you
know.”

“Not one more word,” Papa whispered.

“I only want not to hate her back!” Peter said—and when his voice broke we realized how hard it was for him to defy Papa like this. “I only want not to treat her the way she treats me.”

Papa wouldn’t look at him. He just toyed with his white plastic cup. But there was obvious sorrow, and maybe sympathy too, in the way he was staring at Huckleberry Hound.

I
wish I’d had the love, the wisdom, the empathy or even just the raw curiosity to try and find out, back in the mid-sixties, why Mama would storm off the way she did. She always went to stay with her brother and his wife, outside Spokane. She always left in such terrible hurt and anger that it seemed she would never return. And she always came back, calmer but basically unchanged, after three or four days. I’ve learned enough, in the years since, to know that she was leading a life as intricate and dramatic, as painful, and as worthy of respect as my father’s. But this paragraph is revisionist. Mama’s absences were a relief to me, her returns a mild disappointment, and unlike Peter, I had no great curiosity about, the motivations of either. I felt at times that she loved me. I also felt, almost constantly, that she disliked me. And I was satisfied to reciprocate. It damaged us. But that’s the way it was.

P
apa’s star-crossed pitching career, in my opinion, did more to shape Everett than all the books he ever read and classes he attended put together. Papa’s bum baseball luck had some effect on all of us: for instance, it gave us all a soft spot for snakebit heroes, and made all of us but Irwin quick to smirk at any successful person who thought they got to where they got by simply being gifted. But Papa’s baseball history did so much to shape Everett’s darkish outlook on life that it may be impossible
to understand Everett without a complete knowledge of that history. So here is the rest:

After his Oklahoma conversion from straight power-pitching to power-and-junk, Papa went 10 and 13 for the Tacoma Timbers in 1954 and 9 and 15 in 1955. Before even mentioning the won-loss record, Everett would have put the numbers in perspective by pointing out that Tacoma was a cellar club both seasons, and the worst hitting team in the league in ’55. Papa had the most victories (and most losses), most complete games, second-best earned run average (2.95), second-best winning percentage, and also the best pitcher’s batting average on the team over the two-year span. So when both the Timbers’ parent teams (the Senators in ’54, the Giants in ’55) never called him up for a look, and then, for the ’56 season, the Timbers offered him a one-year contract with no raise, Papa decided he’d seen enough of Tacoma. Shredding the contract, he walked out of the Timbers’ office, telephoned the Portland Tugs (against whom he had a career record of 5 and 0 and an ERA of 1.19), arranged a tryout, and enjoyed a camp that included five scoreless innings and an RBI double in exhibition against Tacoma, and three no-hit innings against the Tugs’ parent team, the Pittsburgh Pirates. Yet when contract time came, the Tugs cited his age, his old injuries and the twenty-eight Tacoma losses instead of the fact that they’d never once beaten him, then offered so little money that Papa asked for an hour or two to think it over. Strolling over to the nearest cafe, he was stirring sugar into a bitter cup of coffee and thinking about cashing in his baseball chips when a guy in a Panama hat and dark glasses walked up, removed both, revealed the face of a stranger who nevertheless grinned like a long-lost friend, and said, “Hugh Chance? The name’s Jinx Dodds. And I’m a
real
pirate, not a Pittsburgh phony. I steal ballplayers from fools who can’t appreciate ’em. And I’d like to steal you.”

“Real pirate” was a slightly poeticized description. But Jinx Dodds really was a part-time real estate broker, developer, slumlord and gambler, and he really did own an unaffiliated Class B team in Washington State, the Battle Ground Bulldogs. He also possessed the piratical clout, cleverness and cash necessary to match the Tugs’ monetary offer,
and
to pitch Papa in a way that would allow him to hold a full-time job on the side.

So that’s what Papa did. After finding—with the ubiquitous Dodds’s help—both a rental house in Camas and a full-time job at the Crown Z mill, Papa celebrated turning twenty-seven years old by winning twenty-seven games for the Cascade League Champion ’Dogs, including six shutouts, three two-hitters, eight home runs and a .364 batting average
that would have led not just pitchers but the entire league if he’d had a few dozen more at-bats—

and all summer long a diminutive, lippy, worshipful batboy named Everett handed him his antique Rawlings and his holy Adirondacks and became so hopelessly enamored of the idea that this rare summer of glory was the way the world was meant to be that almost everything that would happen to his father or himself for the next decade or more would strike him as a cheat, a stroke of hideous luck, or an intolerable bore.

Papa’s was an almost unheard-of sort of minor league season, in that anybody who plays that well for even a month at that level is usually sent up to a higher league. But the players who get sent up are usually twenty-one or younger and consider any higher league “up,” whereas Papa had played so much Triple A ball for so little money that he was no longer interested in any definition of “up” but the highest. He actually turned down two modest but honest Pacific Coast League offers late that summer, simply because his two-paycheck Bulldog/Crown Z arrangement was too lucrative to give up. He even promised Jinx Dodds to come do it again next year if no major league offers came his way.

By September, though, news of his spectacular season had wended its way to the top, and by October so many teams had hinted at so many offers of such wildly varying concreteness that he was shopping around for a sports lawyer to help him sort things out. In November, though, when he learned that Mama was pregnant yet again, he suffered a fit of caution and career doubt that ended in a down payment on our Clark Street house instead of the lawyer. And that was when and where it all ended. Handling his own negotiations, Papa was leaning toward Cincinnati (who was offering him more money to play two months of winter ball in the Dominican League than he could make in four months at the mill) when Mama began to hemorrhage, found out she was carrying twins, and was told to stay in bed if she wanted to keep them. So Papa had given his regrets to the Reds and stayed home to help her, but was still talking tryout with St. Louis, Baltimore and Cleveland when he crushed his thumb at the mill.

B
ut eight years later, in January 1965, that perennially dissatisfied, neversay-die ex-Bulldog batboy, Everett, undertook a second dial-a-prayer project on his ill-fated father’s behalf. Trying the same lucky downtown phone booth he’d used to contact the miracle-producing Doc Franken, he piled in his hard-earned bag-boy quarters, dialed Oklahoma, and,
mirabile dictu
, conjured up the white cracker drawl of the infamous G. Q.
Durham as easily as Abraham used to conjure down the ineffable drawl of God.

Unlike Abraham, Everett didn’t just listen when he got G.Q. on the line. He’d written out a veritable soliloquy beforehand, rehearsed it in front of Irwin, Pete and me, and even allowed us to critique and embellish it. And in finished form, as delivered by Everett, the spiel was a tailor-made purple-prosed phone-filibustering masterpiece. It began with the triple admission that (1) Papa was too old for the minors, (2) he had too many kids to leave the Crown Z money, and (3) he’d apparently lost all desire to throw a baseball outside his backyard. But from there it went on to say that although Durham was unquestionably
the
Junk Genius—the greatest wrecked-ballplayer-rebuilder who ever lived—it was our very own Papa who, right here in downtown Camas, had brought Durham’s philosophy to new and epiphanic heights by taking a thumb made of half his own damned
toe
for chrissake, and twisting it into a tool that had perfected the Kamikaze—the most devastating diving fastball that four visiting baseball experts had ever seen. (He neglected to mention that these “visiting experts” were us four brothers.) True, Papa threw his killer pitch only at night, and only as a kind of contemplative exercise. But since it was G.Q.’s peculiar genius that had inspired this paragon, Everett felt we owed him an invitation to come see it for himself. Not to arrange any sort of tryout or comeback, mind you, but just to drop by the next time his scouting duties brought him out our way, quaff a few ice-cold tubes of the amber liquid, and partake of the purely artistic joy of watching the crowning achievement of his own career fly, like an epileptic beam of light, through the soulful squalor of a mill-town backyard night …

I
rwin’s first memory is as complicated as Irwin himself is simple. It’s of a hot dry evening in what he later learned was Kincaid, Oklahoma, of a sinking red sun hanging over an endless green expanse he later learned was a minor league outfield, of being set down, wearing nothing but diapers, at the edge of that expanse, and of crawling as fast as he could, way out into it. Lying down on his side in order to better study the infinitude and chlorophyllitude of it all, he heard Mama’s dry, distant, incomprehensible voice drift over him
(yeah, out in left field as usual)
, snorted happily as he turned to crawl still further off, but found his path
barred by two big black shoes and a pair of tree-sized, blue-stockinged legs. Thinking he’d discovered his daddy, he snorted again, grabbed the stockings, used them to pull himself up to a standing position, peered up the legs—and sure enough, there was his father’s gray-and-blue uniform. But it had somehow been bloated (the heat? the round red sun?) into something so moon-shaped and -sized that he couldn’t see past the belly, couldn’t find the face, so he leaned back still further to peer still higher—and fell flat on his head and back. It didn’t hurt much, thanks to the grass, but by the time he’d regained an up-down orientation and turned to relocate the shoes, the stockings and legs and entire beach-ball body had blopped down onto the grass beside him. Goo-sound-that-precedes-the-word
“Papa!”
Irwin cried, crawling right up onto the belly. But as he salamander-walked up over the summit and caught sight of the face, he froze: it wasn’t Papa! It was the most tiny-eyed, multi-chinned, lobster-red, bloated human visage he’d ever seen. Even before the lips zipped open and the mouthful of brown teeth flanged out, Irwin’s infant mind knew that he was in serious trouble. When a horrid, henlike cackling began to quake the belly beneath him and a stream of swampy fluid phoooted sideways out the snaggled teeth, he realized this trouble might prove fatal. He therefore did the only sensible thing: diving face-first onto the grass, he gathered his hands and knees together and started sprint-crawling off into the infinite greenness for all he was worth …

It was while tearing along, listening to the plaintive cries of his mother
(Dont worry, he won’t hurtcha!)
, the hooting of distant ballplayers, and the cack-’n’-hack of the blubberman blollopping along after his diapered behind that Irwin felt the pure instant of despair that nailed the episode to his memory for life. As this despair decreed, the creature soon caught him in its fat red claws, reared up on its hind legs, let out another cackle, and—
bye-bye, Mama! bye-bye, red sun and green world!
—lifted his tender infant abdomen up to the putrid-toothed mouth. But when, instead of ripping him open, the monster only gave his belly a wet, snorffling kiss that stained him brown and sent a blissfully cool shiver shooting from pate to toes, Irwin’s despair was transmuted on the spot into the infant version of one of the world’s most ruthlessly optimistic philosophies.

Flopping onto his back, the moonman grabbed Irwin’s tiny fat hands in his huge, even fatter ones, stood him up on the lunar belly, hollered
Play ball!
, and Irwin began stomping round and round the bounding surface, gaping joyously down into a hobbling chaos of brown and red teeth and chins, soaking cackle-vibrations in through the soles of his bare feet, and roaring with a delight so loud and contagious that soon the fat
man and spectators and an entire Two A ball team were infected with it too.
All right that’s enough!
came his mother’s tiny and for some reason stricken wail as Irwin flopped down on his pet monster’s gut, squeal-begged for more, and down or up the kisses rained, onto his ears, his neck, his arms, legs, belly
(Stop them, Hugh! Please! Stop him!)
—rough, wet, wildly aimed dog, bear and walrus kisses tattooing him with stains that would later be scrubbed away mercilessly as sins
(You’ve got to stop them!)
, but which now covered him, after a squirmy eternity of heat (which eternity, he later learned, was only the length of an afternoon’s ballgame), with wave after wave of cool, ecstatic shivers …

A
nd on Groundhog Day 1965, we had just gathered for our third consecutive Mama-less supper when someone rang the front doorbell, and Everett gasped “Elder
Babcock!”
so convincingly that Papa had clenched his fists and reddened before he caught Everett’s expression, and laughed. Then Irwin ran to the front door, swung it wide open, and there stood a shabby, tavern-odored, red-eyed, corpulent old stranger he figured must be some lost wino or panhandler. But when the old guy let out the kind of wheezy tenor cackle that by then reminded us TV-news-watching Northerners of nothing so much as the KKK, and when that cackle sent a cool, ecstatic, embarrassingly nonsequacious shiver shooting up Irwin’s legs and back, his body instantly knew who he was seeing, though his mind and tongue were still groping for a name. “G. Q. Durham!” he finally gasped.

“Hot
damn!”
the old man cried. “This is great! This is good! Look at the size o’
this
son of a Hubert!”