The Brothers K (89 page)

“Today’s other sermon,” said Elder Joon when it was over, “is from the Book of Isaiah.”

A
s they drove up over the crest of the Clark Street hill, Mama and Bet were relieved to see Everett’s mud-splattered rustbucket Olds 88 parked at the curb in front of our house. No police yet. They could tell him goodbye …

But no matter how much we may admire each other’s occasional acts of heroism, our basic characters remain as definite and unchanging as our eye color, our facial structures, the shapes of our bones: as she neared the driveway Mama couldn’t help but notice that the butt end of Everett’s car appeared to be virtually Band-Aided together with bumpers tickers. She took care to ignore them at first, knowing they were certain to contain material corrosive to her resurrected love. But bumperstickers are to devout mothers almost what naked breasts are to prodigal sons. Who can resist a look? She read,

and was relieved that she didn’t get it. She read,

and thought,
Well, that one is Hugh’s mother’s fault
. But then she read,

and

and

and

and Everett’s sacrifice for Irwin already seemed like something she must have dreamed. Then she read,

I believe I’ll have another beer

and a small but wonderful thing happened. Turning to Bet, Mama began to laugh a kind of dry, openhearted laughter that had eluded her for years. “Your big brother,” she said, suddenly relishing the obvious, “is an incorrigible idiot!”

B
ut Bet didn’t join in the laughter. She just pointed—and Mama turned, and saw two men coming out the front door, each with a hand round one of her incorrigible idiot’s biceps. Enormous men, with enormous hands. He looked like a child in their grip.

When Mama saw their suits her first thought was: “Adventists,” and she wondered why on earth they were handling him in this rude manner. But when she noticed the look on Everett’s face—anger, sullenness, defiance, though in his father’s huge suit he looked incredibly helpless—she realized they had to be government authorities of some kind. “Sorry, Mama!” he called out as she and Bet got out of their car. “About Papa’s suit, I mean. I came to say hi, and to turn myself in. But these guys, they’re FBI, were hiding inside. And they won’t let me change.”

Mama couldn’t speak.

An unmarked black Buick with tinted windows came gliding up to the curb behind Everett’s inflammatory Olds, and a third agent—the best dressed and biggest of the group—climbed out. The other two leaned Everett against the sleek car, hands flat on the roof, and began to search
him. Meanwhile Freddy, Linda, Nash and I stepped out of the house to watch. Then Mama turned, and looked at us. And something in the sight of us there—something about seeing the morose remnant of her family gathered on the cracked concrete porch of the crummy but only home she’d ever owned, watching two feds prod and slap at her husband’s shabby but only suit and at Everett’s smallish but only body—threw her into a state. I recognized it at once by the body language: it was the same sense of violation, the same domestic outrage she had so often unleashed upon Everett. And what a twist, what a joy, to see it aimed, for Everett’s sake, at three employees of the FBI.

Crossing her arms and narrowing her eyes, she scrutinized the three agents, quickly and correctly ascertained that in their protozoan world the biggest specimen was the most important, lowered her head, and started marching grimly toward him. When she drew close he reached in his suit, produced his ID, and flashed it. But Mama ignored it. Or didn’t ignore it exactly. But she uncrossed her arms, stepped right in past it as if past a left jab, glared right up into his eyes, and—in the same baton/scepter/cattle prod voice that had created six pretty decent childhoods out of what would have otherwise been an endless round of teasing, lunacy, pugilism and pataphysics—said, “Would you mind telling me just what you’re trying to accomplish here?”

The big fed gazed down at her, looking like some zoo-worn rhino or elephant who was sick of humanity but stuck with it, so thank God his eyes were small and his hide and skull both about six inches thick.

“Just tell me,” Mama demanded, “in your own miserable words, what it is you think you’re doing here!”

The agent was not what I’d call cowed. But something in him found her sufficiently annoying to speak. “Your son is under arrest, ma’am,” he said. “For draft evasion. We read him his rights in the house.”

Mama snorted in his face. “You walk
right
into my house when I’m not even home. You
arrest
my son, who only came back here to help his brother. And then you don’t even have the decency to let him change out of my husband’s only good suit of clothes!”

The agent reached in his pocket, pulled out a pack of Clove gum, and eyed her with some dim form of wonder. “We arrest criminals in the clothes they’re wearing, ma’am,” he said, smirking slightly. “That’s the way the job works.”

“Then get a
real
job!” Mama retorted. “My boys are good boys! Every darned one of them! Do you hear me?”

The big fed glanced at his partners, shrugged his shoulders, and
smirked again. But he’d quit trying to meet Mama’s eyes. And though he still held a stick of Clove between his thumb and finger, he hadn’t yet remembered to put it in his mouth.

“Do you
hear
me, you big lug? Are you listening to me? Who do you think you are anyway? We had a
family
here once. A tax-paying, Godfearing family. This was a
home
once, dammit! And it still could be, if know-it-alls and hotshots like you would just leave my boys alone! So why
won’t
you? Huh? Why don’t you? Why can’t you just let my sons live their lives?”

Linda and Bet were in tears now, and Everett and Freddy were sending Mama two of the most radiant smiles I’ve ever seen smiled. But the big fed was hanging tough. He looked kind of like a mailman now, eyeing Mama as if she were some rowdy, yapping little yard dog. He still wasn’t much disturbed by her: he was far too large and well programmed for that. But his hide had gone from rhino to mailman thickness in just moments, and you could see his mailmanness kind of squirming around in there, wondering whether, when he turned his back to leave, this irate little yard dog of a woman might not dart forward and chomp him on the back of the leg. “Get a hold of yourself, ma’am,” he said finally. “You can speak your piece at your son’s trial. You can write the President.”

Mama fired off another snort, but the agent had had enough. He darted around his big government car, climbed on in—and he never did remember to start chewing his stick of Clove. The other agents shoved Everett into the back, piled in themselves, the doors slammed shut, and that was that. We couldn’t see a thing through the car’s tinted windows.

But we could still see Mama, standing alone at the curb as the car pulled away, still trembling with domestic outrage, but also waving on the off chance that she could be seen. And we could hear her in the sudden quiet, murmuring, “Son. Everett. My son.”

No discuss, just try
.

—Kaka Baria

W
e received just three phone calls from curious churchgoers on the afternoon of Everett’s sermon. But in all three cases Mama handled the calls, and in all three cases she really filled her listener’s ear, pounding home the fact that Everett’s return had been made at the cost of a prison sentence, that every word he spoke was true, that Irwin’s disastrous circumstances began with Elder Babcock’s betrayal, and that Babcock himself—after what she called “a little discussion with Papa”—had agreed to write a letter to Major Keys at the Mira Loma asylum, admitting as much. She added that if Irwin’s old church mates were not interested enough in him to ask what they could do on his behalf, she would not be attending the First Adventist Church of Washougal again. Not much of a threat on the greater scale of things, maybe. But pretty strong talk from a
petite little tithe-paying church lady. And it made an impression. It must have. Because on Sunday—after church and small-town gossip had had time to work their unreliable magic—we received fifteen or sixteen more calls. And these included a few tangible offers of modest economic help and so many offers of vague personal help that Mama scheduled an equally vague “What To Do About Irwin Meeting” for seven o’clock, in our livingroom, that same evening.

T
hat our feelings had finally boiled out into the open had me in a state of euphoria all day. Our love for Irwin was no longer just a futile gnawing in our minds and chests. It was careening around the real world. It had lifted a pitch clean out of a stadium and a mother up onto a pew; it had inspired a church-hating agnostic to steal a pulpit, preach, and pray; it had hung an elder in the air by the back of his pants, had tried its flagrant and subtle best to get God’s attention, had even made the sports page. Our love for Irwin had become an incarnate force, and all that remained to be done—so it seemed in my euphoria—was figure out how to bring that force to bear upon the Colonel James Loffler Mental Health Center.

Euphoria, however, is a fragile companion: my sweetheart, Amy, put the first big hematoma in mine when she phoned shortly before seven to say that her boss refused to give her the night off (she was working two jobs that summer to keep her college career afloat) but that she was sending us her “prayers and best wishes” anyway. It wasn’t till I’d thanked her, hung up, and conveyed her message to my family that the hematoma was inflicted: that was when Bet told me that prayers and best wishes were the two very things Everett had promised would do Irwin no good at all.

Then those who
could
get the night off began to arrive. An old church mate and dessert-making employee of Mama’s, Dolores McKibben, joined us first. A sweet lady, seventy-five years old, astigmatism so severe that friends had given up trying to straighten her crooked wig and lipstick. Sister Ethel Harg and her walker clattered in next. Eighty-three years old. Loved to tease “kids” like Dolores. (“Astigmatism, hah! Have I told you what happened last Christmas to my colostomy bag?”) Sister Harg was escorted by that dynamic orator, Brother Beal, and by my preadolescent heartthrob, Nancy (massively pregnant for the third time). By the time the little Korean pastor, Elder Kim Joon, ducked in, kowtowing and glad-handing even Freddy’s dog, the five feet two inches of him looked like a veritable loose cannon compared to the rest of the group. We waited another half hour for our forces to swell. No such swelling
occurred. Nancy Beal finally remarked that we could increase our ranks by one if we’d just wait a week or so for her to hatch. “But by then you might lose
me,”
Sister Harg pointed out with a desiccated chuckle.

“Not to mention Irwin,” Bet said, with no chuckle at all.

My brother’s rescue committee had arrived. So much for euphoria.

M
ama and Linda started things off with cookies, milk and coffee.

Those with appetites, teeth and functioning colostomy bags ate and drank them.

Everyone then began tsk-tsk-tsking at Irwin’s plight and marveling at Everett’s heroism, tsk-tsk, marvel-marvel, over and over, till it grew obvious that we were an army with no weapons, no leader, no plan of attack and no notion of where or how to acquire them. Dolores McKibben asked about Babcock’s letter of retraction—a hot topic for those interested in church scuttlebutt. But none of us had seen the letter. Mama said that Papa had described it over the phone as “brief but extremely sincere.” But sincere or not, it hadn’t helped. She then told how Papa had broken down on the phone, saying that it couldn’t have been worse if the Vietcong had Irwin. And the only thing that had changed since that call, she added, was that Papa and Major Keys had “had words,” that the Major had banned
all
visitors for Irwin, and that he’d promised to have Papa arrested if he so much as set foot on hospital grounds.

At this point in our gathering even the tsk-tsking stopped and we fell into a silence so long and boggy that Brother Beal finally took it as a cue. “Maybe the best thing we can do under these terribly trying circumstances,” he said in his worst Sabbath School wheedle, “is get down on our knees together, right here and now, and all send our dear Irwin one
heck
of a big, heartfelt prayer …”

I am not normally the public-speaking type. In groups larger than two I’m seldom even the speaking type. But when Beal’s suggestion met with murmurs of approval, something jolted me to my feet, and before I could think I was shouting, “Forget it! No
way!
We have to
act!
Now!”

I came to at that point and turned scarlet-faced, confused and cotton-mouthed—my usual forensics tactics. But my heart remained full enough to enable me to explain. I said, “Papa and Everett aren’t kidding. Irwin isn’t just dying down there. He’s being killed. We can’t lose sight of that. Because when someone you love is being killed, you don’t just sit home and pray. You steal time from your life and money from your till and try your damnedest to go
save
them. The very least we can do, the least I can do anyhow, is join Papa outside those locked gates in Mira Loma. And if
the gates won’t open, if it still seems hopeless once I’m there,
that
will be the time for the heartfelt prayers.”