The Brothers K (7 page)

“If you can’t sit still and watch,” Papa says, “go get the mail. I think I just heard it come.”

I want to watch, but I want to bang around and jump and roar and wonder about the Wind and Darwin and steelhead and not being in church too, and look! A commercial.
Run! Catch the mail! Great catch!

The screen door slams behind me. I sprint like Roger Maris after Piersail’s long drive. But the day is so bright I can’t see where I’m going, the air’s so hot my lungs burn, and who wants to be Roger Maris anyhow? I slow to a walk.

It’s more interesting, walking. I can see, and try to think if I want, though I doubt I’ll want to. There’s a mirage lake in the street that almost looks worth fishing. The mailman’s jeep is in it up to the hubs. Everywhere I turn the air is watery, wiggling upwards. The whole world looks warped. I hope steelhead like weather like this. The local animals and people sure don’t. The whole neighborhood has disappeared except for one small bunch of starlings, who are running through a sprinkler like a bunch of ugly little kids might. They act just like kids, the starlings do, till one of them stops to eat a bug. But come to think of it, some kids will even do that. There’s this kid at school, Meredith Starr, who’ll eat flies for a penny apiece till he’s had three, then with the three cents he buys an extra milk to wash down his lunch. It looks so awful when he snorfs them that you can’t help laughing, but it’s actually kind of sad, I guess. Meredith is one of these kids who smells but can’t help it. He was born without a dad and his mom’s too crazy to cook, so he eats about a ton at school. I give him everything from my lunches I hate, which is called Charity, which is something the Babcocks tell us at Sabbath School always to give to wretches like Meredith Starr. I’d do it anyway, though, since he really seems to want it, and when it’s pukey stuff like eggplant or mashed cabbage it’s fun to watch. He can gulp it down almost as fast as Gomorrah.

The mailman is feeding a row of boxes two blocks down the street, up to his hood now in another fake lake. Even the shade is hot and bright: I think the sunlight must be bashing the top side of everything so hard that some dark-colored version of light is starting to leak clear through. It would scare me to hook a steelhead. I’ve never caught a fish, except minnows by hand, so I hope I just catch a trout. Everett caught a steelhead once and wasn’t a bit scared, but he’s not scared of anything except Grandawma’s dead family, and maybe Mama’s dead dad. I might not be scared either, except last summer Irwin brought a catfish home from the Columbia for a pet, and the first time I tried to pick it up it spiked me so bad my hand got infected and hurt for three weeks. I was glad when the chlorine in our water finally killed it, though it made me sort of wonder why it doesn’t kill us. We buried the catfish by the trash burner, and Irwin made a wood cross for it, and a sign that said: HERE LIES TYRUS
COBB JUNIOR. That’s what Everett said to name it, since Tyrus Cobb Senior liked to spike people too.

I open the mailbox. A letter from Everett, addressed to me! Postcards from Irwin and Pete! The commercial! It must be over!
Run!

T
he screen door slams behind me. I try to dial a wider opening into my eyes, but the TV’s so dim compared to outside that the ballplayers look like ghosts. I tell Papa we got mail from the Three Stooges. He says, “Great!” but just goes on watching the game. When my eyes finally adjust, though, I see why:

Roger Maris is up, no outs, top of the ninth. Maris homered in the third with nobody aboard. That’s the only mistake Mudcat Grant has made all day, Papa says. And even Maris’s homer was just a routine fly, he says, except for a hard wind gusting into right. I can’t wait to see the other Wind, I tell him. The river, I mean. No, it won’t be too windy there, he says when I ask him, it’s just called that. Yes, it’s sheltered, he says, it’s in a deep canyon. Yes, there are trees in the canyon, and yes, there will be steelhead, but that doesn’t mean we’ll catch one. Spikes? Like who? No, they won’t have spikes like Ty Cobb. No, not even the bucks. No, no antlers either. Yes, it’ll be great, he says. QUIET! he says. He says he’ll only answer baseball questions from now till the game is over.

The score has gone:

   
NEW YORK: 001 000 00 …
CLEVELAND: 100 010 10 …

Roger Maris takes a ball, then a strike. His hair’s so short the sides of his head look like wads of skinned chicken meat, and there’s dark bags under his eyes, and he’s incredibly sweaty and nervous-looking. I usually like watching home runs, but there is something about Roger Maris that makes even his homers boring. I don’t hate the Yankees like most people, so it’s not that. I just don’t care to watch Roger Maris. Everett feels the same way, only worse. Everett says he’s from Mars, which is why he’s named Maris, so maybe it’s a racial thing. Whatever it is, it worries me a little, because one of the things Jesus used to say was to love everybody the same whether they’re geeks, Yanks, Wops, Micks, Meredith Starrs or what have you, and when I look at Roger Maris I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to pull it off.

Peter says there was once this Italian saint called San Francisco (the same guy they eventually named the Giants after) who loved Jesus a ton
and was a truly wonderful person, except for one small thing. He couldn’t stand lepers. And I guess they were coming out of the woodwork, there in Italy in his day. But one night in a dream, Pete says, who should come walking up to San Francisco but Jesus Himself, and what does Christ do but order poor San to go out and kiss the first leper he sees! Pete says San Francisco woke up quaking in his boots or sandals or whatever. And of course, no sooner does he step out the door than the skankiest-looking leper ever invented comes dribbling right toward him down the road! For a minute there, Pete says, poor San can’t figure out whether to shit or eat a doughnut. But he loves Jesus so much that he somehow staggers up to the leper, puckers his lips, shuts his eyes, and manages to get the job done. Except (here’s the great part, Pete says) right while they’re smooching San peeks and sees that this walking oozeball was actually Jesus all along! This was the big breakthrough the saint needed, apparently, since afterwards, Peter says, he went out and converted all the Italians and fish and wolves and sparrows to Catholicism, and eventually got himself crucified on a Miraculous Cross up in the mountains that wasn’t even there really. Anyhow, Peter says, the thing is, everybody on earth must eventually face up to their own personal leper. In other words, he says, someday Everett and me will have to get past our feelings about Roger Maris. We may even have to kiss him if we don’t watch it, he says. Of course Everett told Pete straight off that it’d be a snowy day in hell before he kissed Roger Maris. But Peter just laughed and said what if Jesus
forced
him to? What if He forced him to walk right up and lick Roger Maris’s crewcut? Everett about barfed.

I think I might do it, though. That is, I think I might do it if I knew that licking it would turn Roger Maris into Jesus. But then again, what if the Jesus I turned Roger Maris into just went on playing right field for the Yankees? They’d be even more unbeatable! Everett would
murder
me. And all the Catholics would be running around with a little ballplayer on a cross around their necks, and the ballparks’d fill with holy water and priests instead of ice-cream and peanut vendors. It’d be chaos, most likely. So I don’t know. Hopefully the chance to lick it will never arise.

P
eter reads lots of religious books, like the one about San Francisco. That’s where he gets most of his weirder stories and ideas. He has this oddball teacher at school, Stefan Delaney, who thinks Pete’s a genius and started giving him stacks of special books to read. But not long ago Mama flipped her lid over one called the Bog of Vod Geeta, which she felt was filling Pete’s head full of heathen ideas and turning him away from God.
How could it do that, Mr. Delaney wanted to know, since God was exactly Who the whole book was aimed at? And I wouldn’t know, since I’ve never read the thing. But I do remember the day Mama flipped her lid, and I didn’t blame her a bit. …

We were all in the car coming home from Spokane, and Mama was reading an adventure book about Tibet that Uncle Marv had loaned her. Being a good Adventist, Mama was against books about things such as Tibet unless a missionary wrote them. But she’s the opposite of practically everybody on earth in that she has to read in a car to keep from getting carsick, and the Tibet book was the only one her skunk of a brother would loan her. So anyhow, at some point in the book the author-adventurer got himself invited into this smoky little Tibetan house, sat down to dinner with the whole Tibetan family, and started eating stuff with names like
Zahpahhayabrugmancharya
and drinking stuff with names like
Padmaywhang
. And as she was reading about this, Mama started squirming all over the front seat, giggling and muttering to herself and acting all delighted, till every last one of us was gaping at her. And when Papa finally asked what on earth was going on, Mama just turned to him with this wonderful, dazed smile on her face, smacked her lips, and said,
“Yum! Yak butter!”
And we almost died laughing—literally—since Papa gawked at her so long he nearly drove off the road.

But Peter—who is so soft-spoken most of the time—didn’t laugh at all. Instead he got red in the face and shrill in the voice and started drilling Mama with pointed questions, trying to get her to cross her heart and hope to die admitting she remembered a past life as a Tibetan. It was strange. I mean, there he was trying to prove some mysterious point about Buddhism or rebirth or some damn thing, but all he reminded me of was ol’ Mrs. Babcock at Sabbath School bullyragging us about how we must praise Jesus and hate sin all the time, whether we feel like praising and hating or not. I don’t know yet, between Pete and Mama, whose beliefs are better or truer. All I know is that by the time he finished grilling her, nobody felt like laughing about her yak butter anymore.

When she got over being stunned, Mama got good and mad and started firing pointed questions back. That’s when she found out about the Bog of Vod Geeta, and about Peter believing in past lives and Hindu Christs and the world being a kind of gigantic delusion and everybody really being a Drip of God and I don’t remember what all. Then Pete started this big stupid fight with her, arguing about how Krishna and Buddha and several other guys were actually Jesus in different human disguises, and vice versa, which any fool could see was a wacko thing to
fight about even if they were, since they also obviously weren’t. By the time it was over Mama had strictly forbidden him to read any more of Mr. Delaney’s heathen religious books. So of course now he reads
tons
, every night, under the covers by flashlight. Mr. Delaney even gives him batteries. And Mama was right: Peter’s head
is
getting filled with heathen beliefs and stories—and they’re really great! Pete’s just a kid, but already he has more interesting ideas and tells better tales than anybody I know, even Everett, though Everett makes better pissed-off speeches and tells funnier jokes. I think I might even agree with Mr. Delaney about Pete being a genius, though it’s an odd thing to think about your own brother. And in his feisty way sometimes I think maybe Everett’s one too. Irwin, though, is practically a dunce from a schoolteacherly point of view, yet sometimes just watching him laugh and eat his dinner and grow new muscles and tickle Bet and Freddy and misunderstand Pete and Everett’s discussions and stories and punchlines is more fun than the discussions and stories themselves.

When you get right down to it, it’s a great family I got. But then it’s easy to love everybody the same amount when they’re your family. It’s not nearly so easy when they’re weird Yankees like Roger Maris or total bideeps like Meredith Starr. At times it seems to me like it might have been more practical of God to make everybody in the world blood relatives with the same last name. Everett says that if God had done that, though, brothers would have had to marry their sisters and the kids would’ve turned out to be mutants. So maybe it’s for the best the way things are. Then again, it might be all right being some sort of mutant, lolloping down the street doffing your hat at all the other lolloping mutants, all of whom you knew loved you like a brother or sister, and all of whom you loved. Then again, it might not be so great. I don’t know. Some things you can’t figure out until you do them.

R
oger Maris takes a ball, then a strike, then poles one of his typical boring high fly balls out into right. Harvey Kuenn gathers it in. One out.

I open Everett’s letter:

Dear Everybody but Gomorrah,

My counsellor is making us write to say we’re fine and dandy and learning oodles of wholesome Adventist propaganda, but the fact of the matter is a terrible thing has occurred to us. Our beloved Irwin was killed and eaten this morning by a cougar this morning, and is
with Jesus now, unless he is in “Heck.” Oh well. No big loss, except sizewise. But we’re all pretty concerned about the cougar.

Wolverton Lake is pretty. Pretty lousy fishing, that is. I would of took canoeing but can’t paddle with this stupid arm which by the way itches like a dirty bottom (ask the twins if you can’t understand what I’m saying here, guys), so I took Trekking. So did Pete. We’re learning to read maps and compasses today, and how to follow the ol’ Drinkin’ Gourd if our compass busts (provided it’s night and not raining and we’re stupid enough to hike in the dark, which our counsellor definitely is). We’ve found two secret lakes already though, and will be climbing a mountain 9,383′ high (big deal).

The food is the usual vegetarian dog-doodoo, especially the “meat,” which is fake of course. But the loss of Irwin more than makes up for a few inconveniences.

That’s it for now. Until next week, I remain your lovely son (or brother where applicable),

Everett

Mama isn’t going to like Everett’s letter. She believes Jesus and “Heck” are not joking matters. I pass it to Papa, but he just sticks it in his shirt pocket. “In a minute,” he says. “One out, nobody on. The Yanks have just about had it …”