The Brothers K (73 page)

He cleared his throat, stepped up to the guards, and in his best imitation of Dudek snapped, “Excuse
me
, gentlemen! But there’s been a slight change of—”

“Get gone, muthahfuck!”
went Alabama, and spit flew with the words and landed, burning, on Irwin’s chest.

“He means it, suckbrain,” smiled New York.

Why? Why wasn’t it working? He looked down at the spit.
His shirt
. Without his shirt they couldn’t know he outranked them. Trying to regroup, he took a single backward step, taking care not to turn his face from the boy, who was watching him keenly now.
Shout!
he told himself.
Everett versus Babcock! Curse and spit right back in their faces …
But before he’d regained his lost step he heard murmuring in the shade behind him, heard distant footsteps, turned,

and saw Dudek and his four handpicked, armed and angry white men marching straight for them. Terror washed through him like a poison. He took another step backward. Strength gone, thoughts gone, he gawked at the boy, thinking:
Lost
. And the boy read it. He read Irwin’s face, gave him a look that shot across a spectrum—
confusion, betrayal, hatred, despair
. Then the brown eyes glazed. The light fell out of them.

Struggling to hold his ground, Irwin glanced toward the Captain, recognized fury even at a distance, then looked down at himself as if to find some talisman, some magic weapon, with which to combat the fury when it arrived. In his right hand was a tube of toothpaste. On his left wrist was a watch. Gleem, said the toothpaste. 12:01, said the watch.

Lost
.

Pray then
, he thought. But for what? Divine intervention? Enemy attack? Rapture? The boy’s soul? Had this kid heard of Jesus during his ten or twelve years of life in a hell zone? And if not, was it Irwin’s Christian duty to tell about Him now?

“Show’s startin’, fucknose,” New York said with the same terrible smile.

Then Alabama stepped right up to him, stabbed his bare chest with one finger, and shoved as he snarled,
“Fuck off!”
And as Irwin fell another step back the words bore into him, all the way in and down, where they echoed and howled and set fire to every rote-learned, impotent Sabbath School truth he’d ever learned about prayer or souls or the mechanics of salvation.
Help this boy!
his heart cried.
Help him now, or fuck off!
But
everything inside him except his heart wanted to run for its life. And his heart was breaking.

Alabama and New York snapped to attention. Men appeared, standing in doorways, peering out from shaded walls, saying nothing, just wanting to watch. Camp Meeting again. Camp Meeting before a baptism. Even the song was back: I’
m gonna let it shine …

Straining a little at the handcuffs now, the Cong boy peered down the road in the direction opposite the approaching men, way down beyond the snarls of concertina wire enclosing the base. The road was empty, except for a couple of little birds, yet for ten, maybe fifteen seconds the boy craned his neck and peered. Then, without warning, his mouth fell open as though his jaw had been broken. His tongue shone pink. His thin chest began to heave. The chain rattled and scraped against the bumper. Blood beaded, then dripped from his writhing wrists. Strange, strangled sobs began to rise from deep down his throat. The same sounds began to rise from Irwin. And hearing this, sensing this one man’s useless compassion, the boy looked straight into his eyes and uttered, in a language no one understood, some sentence, some final plea—

and yes, his voice was high and piping. Yes, it was a child’s voice, not even about to change.

Weeping now, but still trying to smile, Irwin said,
“Good Christ! Give him courage.”

Then Dudek stood before him, red-eyed, red-faced, and so beside himself with fury that he could barely whisper,
“Go!”

“But I, this Gleem!” Irwin gasped. “I can, he, let me take him, Captain! ’Cause I … for Bobby! Let me mess him up good with this tube of—”

“GO!” the Captain roared.

O
ut of pride—out of some ineradicable pride that must be rooted in the body alone, in the purely structural integrity of tissue and bones perhaps, for even the lowest of men, convicted child molesters, say, or mass murderers, will use it to hold their heads high when thrust on display in front of other humans—out of this unkillable kind of pride Irwin was able to take a few slow, almost leisurely paces away from the jeep, the watching men, Dudek’s fury and the boy. But the Sabbath School song had sprung up in his head again,
This little light of mine …
And Irwin’s Sabbath School God was the sort who saw everything. So where was there to go? Wanting distance, wanting oblivion, wanting some nonmilitary greenness or blackness to swallow him whole, he took aim at a blur of fire-stunted
weeds and low vines at the farthest corner of the base. But the farther he moved from the jeep, the harder his insides strained back toward it. All the secretions of fear swirled through his brain, screaming
forget! run! save me! go!
But the back of his skull had thinned away into a paperlike membrane that took in every sound back around the boy, and when Dudek’s voice, puffed with righteousness, slammed against the membrane, shame flooded Irwin’s fear, turned him nauseous, and his heart and footsteps began to detonate in time to the music, left, right, systole, diastole,
Hide it under a bushel, no!

You can’t fool a good song.

The blood left Irwin’s face, left his mind, left him shambling along like some boot-mangled insect. His good green target spun out of sight, changing into a khaki tent wall which he clutched, trying to right himself. Then even the khaki spurned him, bursting into some warm, impossible abomination that gushed like pus between his fingers and oozed down the back of his hand. He fell with a groan, hit the tent, then the ground, gaped again at his hand. And it really
was
oozing—

toothpaste.

He had crushed the Captain’s Gleem.

L
ying in the dust there with his toothpaste, Irwin had finally rolled onto his belly and peered back toward the jeep. And what he’d seen at first, back through the watery heat waves, was about what he had expected and feared:

the four salts—two with rifles, two with shovels—all of them motionless, gazing with something like hunger and something like lust at the captive;

the Captain, also motionless, and stern and martial-looking for a while; but then wincing, then wiping at sweat, then cursing outright and rubbing his boiled temples as New York fumbled interminably through a foreign ring of keys;

Alabama, not quite snorting, not even quite smirking at Dudek, but clearly thinking,
Hot out here, ain’t it, white muthahfuck;

nothing but cigarette smoke moving through the crowd in under the tree …

But then New York found the right key, freed the boy’s wrists, and the salts moved in close, pausing to listen to Dudek’s last few instructions before leading him away—and during this lull Irwin realized that he had been looking, all along, at something unexpected:
the prisoner too was motionless
. Abandoned though he was, minuscule though he was, he
stood steady as the heat now, facing the crowd, the salts and the Captain with a look almost regal for the purity of its hatred. It was then that Irwin remembered his own blurted words:
Christ, give him courage
. And it was then that the boy calmly reached, with a tiny brown thumb and forefinger, to his bleeding left wrist—

where he began, with just seconds to live, to wind his enormous watch.

T
he great biblical descents of grace—the kind of church-advertised descents that Irwin as a boy had so blithely admired—had all shared certain characteristics. For example they were always invoked by faith-filled prayer, by an honest cry from the heart, or by a great and selfless love; they could always be depended upon to alter even the most dire course of events—with flagrant disregard for the laws of science—in order to bring about the spiritual and physical salvation of their protagonists; and they were always comprehensible enough to allow a witness, or the recipient of grace himself, to compose a pious and grateful story about the wondrous descent afterward.

The winding of the watch marked the end of Irwin’s blind love for that kind of story. Not that he doubted that he was seeing his prayer answered: his faith, despite everything, was still firmly in place. But all that his glimpse of Other Power engendered was shame for not having prayed a better prayer; all that the boy’s unspeakable courage made him feel was an even greater, even more hopeless love; and after the salts led the boy away and the men under the tree, the Captain, the entire fire base grew still and listened for the shots, all that this great love did was make Irwin start to weep and gibber like an insane man. Or maybe he
was
an insane man. Hunched in the dust, crazed fingers fumbling, he was a filth-covered, sobbing ruin of a man trying to clean, to reshape, to reload a mashed tube of paste when the salts squeezed their triggers. Irwin’s head snapped back. His mouth flew open. Blood ran from his nostrils and spattered the ground. And the body the bullets were striking, the life that was ending, was a quarter mile away.
“Christ!”
he kept gasping.
“Good Christ.”

Dying is easy. Comedy is hard
.

—last words of Edmund Kean, actor

I
rwin vaguely knew—when he woke in the darkness—that he had crossed some kind of line. The same crushing pain that made it impossible to remember made it impossible to forget that he had, in some kind of battle frenzy, destroyed the life he’d been leading, so that he would never have to go back to it again. But in the throes of his rage, everything had felt like a dream. From the time he’d heard the salts’ rifles he’d seen nothing with any clarity—till he woke in this blackness.

He was lying on something cool but terribly hard—sheet metal, he guessed finally. And his entire skull felt broken. But when he tried to cradle it, something stopped his wrists. Handcuffs. He was cuffed to a steel floor. He stretched out a leg, found a bulge in the metal, explored it with his foot: a wheel well. A vehicle. He realized he must be locked in
the empty water truck Dudek sometimes used for a brig. And the reason his head felt like it was splitting was that it must really be split. Bandaged too, it seemed. Just like the boy’s.

The boy. The thought of him brought it all back at once. It had not been a dream. He’d done it. He really
had
marched down to the Captain’s tent, the crushed Gleem tube on his shoulder like a rifle. And he had taken his tiny rifle and shot and shot poor Dudek, point-blank and right in the mouth, till fragments of teeth, shreds of lip and metallic ribbons of tube floated in the red-and-white foam.
Take!
he’d sung, ramming it in.
Eat!
he’d sung.
Let it shine, let it shine
, till something slammed his skull.
Crazy muthahfuck!
But he’d pulled Dudek down with him, still singing, still shoving, till the fireworks, the explosion, caved his mind completely in—

leaving him this metal bed, these handcuffs, this utter blackness.

Good, good and good.

So I am not
, he told himself,
a captain’s aide anymore
.
Nor his manservant or maidservant, nor his ox or ass, nor any other thing that is a captain’s. Hell, I’m not even a soldier now, probably. And it’ll be jail or worse, and Mama so sad, and Everett so proud, and fuck off, both of you! Let it shine!

He started to laugh, but a blaze of pain shot straight from his forehead down his throat and left him moaning. Yet he still risked a smile. A little harsh, a little iffy his performance seemed now. But how strange and right it felt as Dudek squealed and gurgled and rolled his eyes. The joy that Samson must have known! Helpless as a child, the Captain seemed, his teeth snapping off like chalk. And the eloquence, the sermon, the Army logic that had been the boy’s true killer had issued from that mouth. Shoot him with bullets, the mouth said, when Irwin wanted to shoot him with toothpaste. He doesn’t exist, it said. So the closest thing to justice had been to show the mouth and everyone it commanded that the boy
had
existed, and that Gleem too can teach lessons that won’t soon be forgotten.

O
n Friday, May 25, Everett spent the evening working on a letter to Natasha. He’d spent a few evenings this way, actually: his letter was on page 208. The Russianistic references, antique ink-pens, parchment paper, peasant shirts and all of that good stuff had fallen by the wayside,
however. His pen of choice these days was a 19¢ Bic, his parchment a Big Chief 500 tablet, and though it’s risky to ascribe pure motives even to a saint, let alone to Everett, I think it’s safe to say in this case that he was not out to show off, to disingenuously woo, or to in any way deceive his lost love with the massive letter—because this letter wasn’t going anywhere: he had no address to which to mail it.

We never know, with regard to the inner life, who or when lightning is going to strike. Often we don’t even know when we ourselves are the one so stricken. On the morning of May 25, Everett didn’t even believe in “an inner life.” But that did not prevent him from having one. And this was his best attempt to describe it, that evening, to a woman he believed would never see his description:

I was hiking a south-sloping headland on the Strait this morning, trudging along in a funk the beautiful but long-lost cause of which chivalry demands that I not name, when the sun burst out of the fog, and so did I, I guess, because all of a sudden I found myself standing so funkless that I felt naked in a huge marshy meadow just blazing with early summer buttercups. A sunlit lake of brilliant yellow, Natasha. With me gasping, nearly drowning in the middle of it. And I’d scarcely noticed the coming of spring.