The Brothers K (76 page)

“Please,” said the Major. “Please calm yourself and try to listen, Mrs. Chance. I’m very sorry to say this, I’m sorry if it shocks you both. But it is my belief—based on the testimony of every rational witness at your son’s hearing—that this ‘boy’ Irwin keeps referring to simply does not, and never did, exist.”

Linda and the twins were watching Mama when Keys said these words. They say that she turned gray instantly and sat down on the bed. And for the rest of the call she never spoke a word. I was in the kitchen with Papa, and had no idea what Keys was saying. All I knew was that one moment Papa was standing at the sink staring angrily out the window, and the next he had sunk down in a catcher’s squat. But he didn’t look like a catcher. He looked like a man who’d been kicked in the stomach. Very quietly, very cautiously, he said, “Let me ask this, Major. How would Irwin need to behave, what is it you’re waiting to see, in order for him to be released, or at least transferred to a facility closer to his home?”

“Well.” Keys gave it some thought. “We’d have to see a complete cessation of the singing episodes, the religious delusions and the violent mood swings. And of course the physical attacks on our staff—those must be months behind him.”

“Months!” Papa cried.

“We can’t release a man who attacks nurses and orderlies, Mr. Chance.”

“Attacks,” Papa said, shaking his head. “It’s so hard, for us who know him, to believe, Major. You’re saying that Irwin sometimes just stands up, undrugged and unprovoked, attacks people, and then sings, or somehow conveys, that he’s doing it all for Jesus?”

“We’re not careless enough to allow him to hurt people, Mr. Chance. But you’ve read what he did to Captain Dudek. And he still lashes out. You and your family, for your own safety, had better start to accept the fact that your son’s condition makes him dangerous.”

“This violence,” Papa said, and now I could see him fighting panic. “May I ask if he’s already drugged when it happens? Or if he’s just refusing the sedatives? Because in the first case, couldn’t the drugs themselves cause the behavior? And in the second, he hates pills, Irwin does.” Papa heard his voice rising, heard his anger and fatherliness and frustration all spilling out. But he couldn’t stop himself. “Chewable vitamins, baby aspirin even. He spits ’em, hates ’em, can’t handle ’em at all. That’s
normal
for Irwin, Major. And the songs. They’re juvenile, I know, and the lyrics are silly, some of them. But he’s sung them since childhood, and not just at church. In bed at night, at work, in the hallways at school, football practice—the other players used to gripe to the coach. He
always
sings. Always prays too. This kid is
loud
, Major Keys. And he wears his heart on his sleeve. It’s an embarrassment at times, we know, but he really does love his cockeyed Jesus. It’s what’s inside him, you see. So it’s important,
crucial
even, isn’t it, that you and your staff not try to just wipe that away?”

When Papa finally fell silent, the Major said nothing. He just hung on the line, breathing, until my parents fully grasped the fact that their intimate understanding, their years of experience, their whole history with and love for their son meant absolutely nothing to him. “We understand ‘normal,’” Keys said at last. “And I can see that you’re a doting mother and father. That’s commendable, in its place. And it may prove helpful, after his release. But your son, I must remind you, is psychotic. And it’s the psychosis we’re working to eliminate, not his virtues, whatever you imagine those to be. It’s been very instructive, this chat. Most helpful. I’m grateful to you both. But now, once again, I’m afraid I’m out of time.”

“But can we come down and see him?” Papa asked. And now he looked and nearly sounded like a pathetic, pleading child. “Can we come down tomorrow? The whole family, I mean?”

“During visiting hours, I suppose. If you think it serves a purpose. But
it’s a very long drive, Mr. Chance. And you’d have to visit him one at a time.”

“But it’d be worth it, we wouldn’t mind the drive at all, if there was any way you could just—Listen, Major. Please. Couldn’t you ease up on the drugs enough so we could talk with him? Because he’s probably confused. And all together we could explain, or try, what he has to stop doing, how he needs to behave, to get out of there. Because Irwin really is, how would you say it, on sort of a different program. But he’s not dumb. And he’s not mean. So if you’d just let him out of the haze, I think maybe he’d—”

“Frankly, Mr. Chance,” the Major interrupted, “my best advice to you is to be patient. I warned Irwin’s wife that it’s far too early for the kind of visit you’re describing. I also warned that the sight of Irwin might upset you at this stage. But we’re making progress, believe me. We are
helping
your son. And right now you can help him too, Mr. and Mrs. Chance, by trusting us. We’re very experienced in these matters. So give us time. Show a little faith. Is that too much to ask?”

Papa managed, by sinking again into a squat, to lie that it wasn’t.

Mama couldn’t make herself say anything at all.

S
o it was Imagination Time at the Chances’, and Try to Sleep and Not See This, I Dare You, Time. It was Close Your Eyes and Watch Irwin on the Gurney Time, rolling down the white corridors, strapped down, preferably unsedated (“Better that they feel it,” a nurse had confided to Papa), singing some one of his favorite songs, “Down in My Heart,” say, or “Yes, Jesus Loves Me.” Too scared to ad-lib, just the straight Sabbath stuff now. But it was this singing, Keys assured us, that lay at the heart of his “dyscrasia”—a fine term, dyscrasia, pettifogging, mist-enshrouded, immune to puncture by any sort of point,
verbum sapienti sat est
, eh, Major?, one magic word,
dyscrasia
, and Keys’s ignorance became science, Irwin’s singing became raving, his faith became violence, his memory became delusion, the joy joy joy down in his heart became his disgrace, and his mind could be raped and emptied with moral exaltation. “Trust us, Mr. and Mrs. Chance.” It was dyscrasia that brought the Cong Boy Phantasm to life, dyscrasia that cost noble Dudek his teeth, dyscrasia that fired off every time the sedatives ran down, forcing another nurse with a syringe, or better, two orderlies with a terribly snug but stylish jacket to come running—Snowmen, Irwin called them, when an unintended lapse in medication once allowed him a moment’s speech. So back in Camas, on the Deccan Plateau, by the Juan de Fuca Strait, in the
back bedrooms, classrooms, dugouts and train cars of our lives, we the lifelong admirers and teasers and cultivators and sharers of his dyscrasia heard him constantly—singing as they rolled him into the place he called the Snow Room; singing as he smelled, through all the layers of antiseptic, the stench of terror that burst through the pores of the myriad mad who lay in that room before him; singing as they doubled the straps on his wrists and ankles (Keys: “his robustness a problem”), the Snowmen laughing at the futile little lyrics, J
esus loves me, this I know
as the conductive salve was rubbed into his temples,
For the Bible tells me so
as the electrodes were taped to the salve,
Little ones to Him belong
as they slid the thing like a Little League batter’s helmet onto his head,
They are weak but He is strong
as they jammed the soft plastic mouthpiece straight into the singing—“Spit this out” (the fierce Snowman named Denny) “and your lunch’ll be the sausage your teeth make of your tongue”—impossible to make words now, so trying to hum through the mouthpiece, to hold fast to a chorus or melody, to a Name, or to naked love alone, when the explosion came. Then the unbearable lull, the insane-making wait, any man or woman, any poet-saint or bodhisattva on earth a gibbering lunatic now, knowing as they waited that their plastic-clogged humming could not possibly be enough; knowing that no mind, in mid-explosion, can hold to even the simplest thought; knowing they’d be blasted away, erased, pure white again; and not knowing whether a rebuildable rubble, a few shards of selfhood, would remain when, from the wreckage, the body next arose.

We all had decent imaginations. We knew about how it would go. Because Zaccheus kept clutching as he drifted down the Mekong, because the boy kept winding his watch, because of the mathematical theories of Christ and Coach Basham (“seventy times seven,” “a hundred and ten percent”), we knew how hard Irwin would try when it hit:
Yes, Jesus loves me, yes, Jeeeuuach! Aeeucch! Aeeucch!
But we also knew there could be no remnant of his mind in the body that slammed up and down on the table, no remnant of song in the voice going
ungh! ungh! ungh!
, no similarity between the delicate blend of muscle, affection, nonsense and faith we called Irwin and the thing the orderlies rolled, still jerking and flopping like a fish with no river, back down the long white halls.

We knew this, were scalded by it. We saw and heard it night and day.

And still we couldn’t help him.

T
ony Baldanos—the Portland Tugs’ backup catcher—was a passionate amateur photographer. He was no lowbrow Kodachrome shutterbug either. Though economic considerations reduced him, during baseball season, to cheap color film and Fotomat slides, his photographic aspiration was to one day create classic black-and-white landscapes in the Edward Weston, Ansel Adams tradition. His motivation was sound too: as a third-year second-string catcher, Tony knew he might soon be needing a second-string career. But, as is often the case with Two-Art Artists, his baseball and his photography were terribly at odds.

Ballplayers need sleep, second-stringers especially so. But on the average baseball day Tony didn’t even get to play. He therefore convinced himself that there was no harm in working on a photographic series he called “Motel Dawns.” The series was not ambitious. It only required him to rise with the muezzins each morning, to wake up just enough to step outside with his camera, and to take an eastward-facing color photo of whatever neon-lit motel and city the Tugs happened to be ensconced in—with the hopefully beautiful or incongruous or artfully depressing or somehow interesting urban dawn dawning in the background. He would then, according to plan, jump back into bed and catch up on his baseball rest. The crimp in the plan, though, was that the artistic process got Tony so excited that he couldn’t get back to sleep. So when—eight or twelve or sixteen hours later—Manager Howie Bowen would decide to pinch-hit or play him (never with any warning, never with any warm-up, and usually terribly late in a late-night game), Tony would be half sick with the need for sleep. As a result, he would play ball about like Ansel Adams. And so would think afterward:
I’ve had it as a ballplayer!
And so would reach, as he crawled into bed that night, for his camera (to be sure his backup career was loaded), then for his alarm clock, which he’d set once again for dawn.

This artistic struggle is why—on May 29, at 4:55
A.M
.—Tony Baldanos was half dressed, out of bed, and looking out the third-floor window of the Whitetail Motor Lodge in Spokane, Washington, when he spotted what he considered a photo opportunity. What he saw didn’t fit into his “Motel Dawns” series, but Tony dug out his camera and took the shot anyway. It turned out so nicely that the first print he ever had made of it—a now badly faded color 8 × 10—sits on my desk as I write these words.
Tony presented it to me because that day, May 29, happened to be my twentieth birthday. But enlarged and framed prints of the same photo now hang on walls in the homes of my mother, my Uncle Truman, my Uncle Marv and Aunt Mary Jane, every one of my brothers and sisters, and in the homes of several ex-Tugs, all with the same little inscription hiding, handwritten, on the back:

“Art
heals.—Tony Baldanos, 1971.”

The first thing most people notice in the photo is the bright purple and pink of the sky over the black, pine-covered ridge in the distance. Maybe the next thing most eyes are drawn to is the same pink and purple reflected in the Spokane River, which eddies from the upper right corner of the photo, down through black silhouettes of junipers in the foreground, and on out of the frame. Fishermen like to point out the swirls on the pink river surface, and usually surmise that they’re trout rises. But those who know the river there (Uncle Truman, for instance) say they’re most likely squawfish. Freddy—a gung ho birdwatcher—once said that the white patch in the largest juniper could be a small hawk or prairie falcon, or at the very least a magpie. Bet, though, thinks it’s trash—maybe Styrofoam, blown over from the freeway on the other side of the motor lodge.

Be that as it may, about the last thing anyone notices is the thing that caught Tony’s eye in the first place: the man on the big riverside boulder in the foreground. He’s wearing a plaid flannel shirt, brown leather belt, baggy tan trousers, but you can’t really see the colors: everything but his head is in silhouette. As Tony opened the shutter, though, the first rays of morning sun were striking his hair, turning it a vivid, almost flaming silver. And at the very same moment the man was exhaling smoke, which the same ray of dawn sunlight turned a lovely pale pink.

On the rock beside him stands a large Styrofoam coffee cup. (“Another falcon!” Bet likes to tell Freddy.) Beside the cup is a morning paper, folded open to what Tony sensibly assumes is an account of the previous night’s doubleheader, which the Tugs and the Spokane Indians had split. The man on the rock had pitched five outs in the losing game, and had given up two runs on a single. But he’d inherited loaded bases. The story of his life. The story of all our lives.

It had been a wet spring—lots of rain cancellations: there would be another game against the Indians clear down in Portland that night, and a second doubleheader the very next day. The silver-haired man would almost certainly see action, and so would (like Tony Baldanos, who is now a successful but somewhat bored commercial photographer, but a near-legendary
Babe Ruth baseball coach) very much need the sleep he was missing. He also did not need the cigarette. Yet it’s the cigarette, more than anything except maybe the hair, that makes the photograph so striking in terms of color, and so haunting to those of us who know the man.