The Brothers K (70 page)

He propped open the window behind the stove, tossed Chekhov three celery sticks, and the goat demolished them so fast that Everett tossed him a brown paper bag for dessert.
“Yehhhhhhhh?”

He left the window open so they could “talk.” He then gathered his inadequate cooking tools, marshaled his wits, and commenced to devise a Tasha/Dominic lasagna synthesis he hoped might put them both to shame. Spreading ingredients over every flat surface in the kitchen, he chopped garlic (he didn’t own a press) and yellow onions, chopped Parmesan (didn’t own a grater), made his balsamella sauce—and it turned
out perfectly, first try. He poured the balsamella into a plastic yogurt container, set it aside, rewashed his only cast-iron skillet, threw Chekhov another brown bag. Then he chopped celery, a carrot, some whole canned tomatoes, opened the ricotta, sliced the mozzarella, began simmering the ground neck meat (a Papa Dominic victory), started boiling olive-oiled water for the Creamette brand lasagna noodles (an ignominious Dominic defeat).

He grabbed his cracked blue MOM mug, filled it with Chablis, sipped sedately as he worked, and realized that he was enjoying himself semithoroughly. “There’s something missing,” he told Chekhov, handing him the last brown bag. “But there’s always something missing. Having things missing, even indispensable things, is a fact of life, don’t you think? And life goes on anyhow. Except for the missing parts. Which were indispensable, so of course it goes on all out of whack. But that, hell and damn, is why we prefer things like cooking and eating brown paper bags to philosophizing. Don’t you think?”

Chekhov stared at the falling snow, chewed his bag, voiced no opinion.

Looking from Natasha’s recipe to his own notes on Dominic’s ravings, Everett combined their most irresistible thoughts on Bolognese meat sauce. And by the time the sauce was simmering and the lasagna boiling, he felt perfectly happy: he stood steeped in delicious smells that he alone had caused to burst forth in his kitchen. He was seeing Natasha, for the time being, as nothing more than one of two schools of thought on meat sauces. He was on his feet again. “I’m back!” he told Life. Then he opened the cupboard to grab the two fourteen-inch bake-and-serve lasagna pans he’d given Natasha for Christmas—and realized he hadn’t seen them in forty-some days.

“Yehhhhhhhh?”

He looked out the window. The driveway had vanished, and it was still snowing hard. His Olds was half buried. The store in Port Renfrew would be closed by now. They wouldn’t have lasagna pans anyhow. Even if they did, he was broke. “Damn.”

He poured more Chablis into his MOM mug, took a slow sip, realized for the first time that it was not, by any stretch of the imagination or taste bud, good. He drew a breath. He started to sing:

“Damn! Don’t I wish.

“Don’t get suicidal on me, Everett. How ’bout

“Damn. How does Bobby D. do it? Don’t he just say ‘Hey, no problem’ and let her rip?

“Hey. No problem. Let ’er rip:

“Damn. Don’t think at all, hombre. It
ain’t
all right.”

He smelled his Bolognese meat sauce burning. He set down his wine. He stalked over to the stove, dumped everything he’d bought, chopped, sliced, and simmered into the skillet, stirred it up into an overflowing mash, dumped some mash onto a bowlful of by now gluey pasta, threw the rest of the pasta out the window into the night. He devoured his bowlful of mash. He belched. He poured another MOM mug. Then he gave in to an impulse he’d been staving off all evening:

Sitting down on the antique milking stool he’d bought Natasha for a Valentine the very day she’d vanished, he allowed himself to conjure the circumstances that had inspired the purchase: the two of them, in bed that morning, Natasha looking out the little window at the river and rain as he stared in stunned gratitude at the perfection of her back and bottom, the gray light on her white skin, the memory of sunlight that never quite left her hair. Then she’d turned to him, smiled, and said she wanted to buy a nice nanny goat for Chekhov, so that he could be as happy as the two of them.

“Damn. Oh damn. God damn.”

So much for Day 45.

·  ·  ·  ·

A
nd at first light the next morning, Day 46, Everett woke from heavy sleep to the sight of cobalt Steller’s jays dragging beige toboggans up into a sunlit, snow-covered spruce. He rubbed and blinked his eyes, but yes, there they were, looking like crazed kids in electric-blue snowsuits dragging lasagna sleds up a blinding white hill. So he gently reached, without thinking, behind him …

then caught himself: too late. The moisture was already rising to his eyes, the familiar lump forming in his throat. Forty-six days of wrong don’t erase a wondrous right: he had reached back to wake her, to share the little toboggans, the beautiful blue on white.

F
rom the day he shot the man in the tree, Irwin stopped telling us anything substantial about how he was making out in ’Nam. He wrote the one long letter to Nash, and he still sent Linda a letter per week full of unmentionable molasses about her soft-little-this’s and sweet-sweet-that’s. But to the rest of us, after the Zaccheus incident, he sent nothing but picture postcards with a “Love you!,” “Miss you!” or “Pray for Peace!” scrawled across the back, and the inevitable “XOOX, Winnie” at the end.

We did discover a secondhand way of finding out about him, though. I’m not sure what inspired the mutual trust; maybe their very different but simultaneous exiles, maybe their very different but simultaneous heartbreaks. Whatever it was, Irwin kept an intimate correspondence going with Everett, right up until the end. I found this out when I sent a copy of the Zaccheus letter up to Shyashyakook, and soon received the following in return:

Dear Kade and Family,

Got the Mekong letter. No comment for now, except to say write to him, all of you, and tell him you love him. I just did. And tell him, reassure him, right away, please, that he’s still a Christian. He needs to hear that badly—and from you guys, not me. It’s truer than true, by the way. Why else would he shatter like this?

Before anyone writes him off as doomed, though, consider the card I got last week, which I copy here verbatim:

As I read it, this is great news. We can’t know how secure his fire base is, but
anything’s
safer than long-range recon, and as an aide he probably won’t be told to do any more shooting, which, given his reaction to Zaccheus, could save him from court-martial. So I don’t know. Tell Linda, Bet and Mama to spit on their Bibles and Papa on his baseballs and maybe we’ll get him back in one piece.

As you see, he didn’t say a word to me about “popping” anybody. Wish I’d known. I’m afraid I reacted to his promotion news with my usual off-brand repartee. “Butt-boy to a Captain now, eh?” is, as I recall, what I wrote back. Irwin’s reply will relieve you, though. Received a ’Nam-velope just two days ago containing nothing but the ace of hearts from a Sumo Wrestler card deck, featuring a rear-end view of a whale-sized specimen, upon whose dimpled cheeks he wrote:

Mine’s still plenty tighter than yours, Big Fella. XOOX, Winnie

Give my love to anybody who still believes in the stuff. I miss most of you—no, sorry:
all
of you—a lot.

Everett

F
rom what Everett remembers, their correspondence must have been one of the odder exchanges going on in the world at the time: letter after intimate letter hopscotching the Pacific, half by a conscience-stricken, Bible-thumping SDA living out a Mekong Delta nightmare, half by a countryless, Natasha-less outlaw/anarchist holed up in a sodden nowhere in B.C. Whoever censored Army mail had a surprisingly light touch: Everett said that, judging by Irwin’s responses, everything he sent must have shot through unscathed—and he enclosed all the most rabid antiwar editorials, nightmarish photo essays and harrowing stories of American atrocities, South Vietnamese corruption and D.C. hypocrisy he could find in his efforts to “give you and your bullet-spraying buddies a less parochial view of Uncle Sam’s little overseas endeavor.” What made the correspondence really interesting, though, was that Irwin
did
show Everett’s
offerings to his “bullet-spraying buddies,” inspiring a number of them to make suggestions (which Irwin passed on, unexpurgated, to Everett) as to how repeatedly and deeply the “chickenshit motherfuckin’ turncoat Canuck-suckin’ know-nuthin’” (etc. etc.) draft-dodger could shove his next batch of clippings up the various manholes, ducts and portals of his person. Everett’s reaction, however, was to pen genial responses to each of his verbal assailants, to thank them for their creative suggestions, and to claim to have tried and enjoyed them all. This amused most of them, won a few of them over, and an odd correspondence had developed.

Everett’s side of the exchange, when it hadn’t been ribald or blackly comic, had apparently been preachy and condescending in the beginning. But when a guy named Bobby Calcagno wrote a letter that called Everett’s missives “inartistic,” it hit him where he lived. Or wished he lived.
Artistic?
he’d thought at first.
Strange word in the mouth of a ’Nam grunt!
But Calcagno had gone on to write a letter which even Everett admitted
was
artistic. He remembers the best part as saying something like: “Most of us are in ’Nam for the same reason you’re in B.C., Chance. We thought we had no choice. We were wrong, of course: we could have been there with you. And you were also wrong: you could have been here with us. But what we have in common is that we’ve all been kicked out of the house. And we don’t like it any better than you do. So let us proceed to please shuttup about which ear we landed on, left or right, and show each other a little courtesy and compassion.”

Everett was so impressed by this that he tossed his next batch of
Berkeley Barb
and
Village Voice
clippings in the trash, took a ferry clear to Vancouver, went on a little shopping binge, and mailed his new pen pals the first of several shipments of what he called “kicked-out-of-the-House Warming Presents”: he sent back issues of obscure literary journals, joke books and comics, the best
New Yorker
cartoons, the quirkiest baseball stories and box scores; he sent peppermint, cinnamon and anise-flavored rolling papers, a book of exploding matches (“my contribution to the War Effort”), a few original poems, some home-tied wet flies that imitated raw rice (“for possible paddy or Delta carp fishing”) and any other heartening thing he could squeeze into a manila envelope. The arrival of these enhanced letters apparently became a series of little off-color Christmases for the guys on Irwin’s fire base. A couple of them even went so far as to apologize for having told Everett where to stick it, and admitted to wishing they’d dodged the draft themselves. To this, though, Everett said, “Hey, wait a minute!” And he sat down and penned a litany of
the negative attributes of permanent exile in Canada. Which of course only inspired the grunts to fire back letters of the “You think
you
got problems!” sort. As a result, Everett rounded up a few other draft-dodging contestants, put up a twenty-dollar (Canadian) first prize, and appointed himself, Irwin and Bobby Calcagno the judges of what he called “THE FIRST, LAST & ONLY V.C. VERSUS B.C. HOMESICK TEARJERKER ESSAY-WRITING CONTEST.”

But before a winner could be declared, neither Irwin nor Bobby Calcagno were in any shape to judge.

I
am incompetent, in obvious ways, to talk about the war in Vietnam. Though I finally did lose my student deferment, I discovered at my induction physical that I was 4-F due to legal blindness in my left eye (thank you, Vera, thank you, Papa). In other words, through what is known in some circles as
tariki
and in others as idiot luck, I was not forced to choose between serving in or running from the military, and so know nothing firsthand about this war.

Nevertheless I have one ’Nam story to tell. It was pieced together from conversations with four men over a period of years. None of these men was entirely sober when we talked. Two weren’t entirely sane. But all four were veterans. And all four remembered Spec 4 Irwin Chance. To these and any other ’Nam vets who might read this, I apologize for my ignorance of the intricacies of your lives. The only claim I make for what follows is that I knew my brother as well as anyone at the time these events occurred. And the only excuse I make for it is that Irwin, when the story ended, was unable to speak for himself.

Say what you want about Hitler, but he trained killers. You train kids in their early years and you can do anything you want with that child
.