The Brothers K (90 page)

There was a brief silence, during which I saw that, at the very least, I had offended Mama, both the Beals and Sister Harg. But then Elder Joon, of all people, burst out, “Yes! Yes yes yes, Kincaid! And maybe on our journey, or once we are there, the Lord will show us the best way to help!”

The stares that most of our group gave him were more stunned or miffed than grateful. But his outburst set off a remarkable chain reaction. First Mama said, “Does this mean you’re coming with us, Elder Joon?”

Then I asked Mama, “Does that mean
you’re
coming with me?”

“Why, of course!” Elder Joon told Mama.

“What do
you
think?” Mama snapped at me.

“The crooks at Motor Vehicles stole my license when I took their damn volunteer test,” growled Sister Harg. “But I’ve got a good car if one of you will drive it. And I’m coming too, whether you want my old bones or not.”

“We want your old bones very much,” Mama said. “But we won’t be needing your car. I’ve got the transportation taken care of.”

This was a neat trick, since I’d just conceived of the journey a few seconds before.

“Count us in,” said Nancy Beal. “Me and this one, that is,” she added, patting her huge belly. “Randy’ll have to stay here and watch the kids.”

Turning pale with terror, Brother Beal, with real passion, blurted, “I’m coming! I’ll use some sick leave! My mom can watch the kids!”

Nancy burst out laughing, but shrugged and said fine.

“It’d take ten of me to make one of you, Laura,” Dolores McKibben put in. “But what I’d like to do, if you want it done, is take your calls while you’re gone, maybe handle your mail, and just do what I can to keep your businesses operating.”

When Mama grew teary-eyed at this offer, and Sister Harg let loose with one of her museum-piece
Amens
, I had a sudden vision of the whole godly clump of us sitting outside a chain-link-and-barbwire-fenced compound in the California heat, watching Irwin and the other bideeps drool on themselves while we crooned “Bringing in the Sheaves” and fired off Big Heartfelt Prayers. Trouble was, I had no better plan. And there was this too: though the prospect of our journey gave me no hope whatever, it filled me at once with a surge of completely unfounded joy.

·  ·  ·  ·

W
hat Elder Joon, the Beals, and the Sisters Harg and McKibben all failed to realize was just how quickly Mama changes from PFC to Field Commander once a course of action has been set. Ethel Harg’s
Amen
was still ringing in our ears when Mania jumped up, marched into the kitchen, grabbed a notepad, pen and telephone, and turned her attention to logistical matters—where her true genius soon shone. Her first move was to enlist Uncle Marv and Aunt Mary Jane as allies and their gas-guzzling Nomad RV as a combination hotel/personnel carrier. Her second move was to return to the livingroom, thank everybody for coming, adjourn the meeting, and send everyone but Dolores McKibben home to pack. “We’ll leave the minute you’re all back,” she announced, leaving no room for discussion or objection. “It’s a long drive, and past time we got there. We can sleep in shifts on the road.”

It fascinated me to see how, when faced with Mama in Command Mode, even the formidable likes of Ethel Harg and Nancy Beal just nodded and followed orders.

Her third move was to call up her mystery brother, Truman. And the instant he answered we overheard this lopsided exchange: “Truman? Laura here. Listen. Make some coffee. Eat a meal. Sober up. Close your shop. And have your camper, your automotive tools and your ugly mug on my doorstep in six hours’ time. It’s a matter of life and death.”

When Truman asked whose, she answered, “Yours, if you’re late. But drive safely. You can sleep when you get here. And one more thing, just to show you I’m serious. I’ll have all the cold beer you want waiting here in the icebox. Yes, you heard me. Yes, I swear it on my Bible. No, this is not one of Marvin’s pranks. Now shuttup and come on. Bye-bye.” Click.

This was the first time we’d heard it so much as hinted that Uncle Truman was a drinker. At last we knew why we never saw him. And an even greater surprise: never before had Mama offered anyone on earth a beer. We all understood that she had just swallowed her deepest, most visceral prejudice to recruit a competent mechanic for our caravan. She was playing for keeps now—same as the U.S. Army.

“Kincaid,” she said the instant the phone hit the cradle. “Would you change the oil in the Dodge, please? There’s a filter under the spare in the wayback. Check the tires while you’re at it. Then run down and buy some beer. Whatever’s cheapest. But lots of it.”

I was tempted to salute before starting out the door. I was also tempted to hug her. But at the rate she was moving, either would have seemed like a waste of time.

“Okay,” I heard her muttering as I headed out the door. “We got our
transportation. Got our accommodations. Bet, could you gather up the decent sleeping bags, and plenty of kitchen and bath towels? Freddy, would you mind watching Nash? Linda honey. There’ll be thirteen people, and maybe three, four meals. Start thinking about food. Dolores. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this. Come on in by my desk and we’ll talk business …”

W
ith the prisons full and the war beginning to wind down, most draft-dodgers at the time of Everett’s sentencing were getting eighteen months. Everett got three years. According to his court-appointed lawyer, the arrest record from his radical days may have been the judge’s excuse for the harsh sentence, but the real reason for it was the fact that the judge—one Saul Gosman—was a University of Washington alum who used to read Everett’s “Give Chance a Peace” column in the school paper.

“Looking on the bright side,” Everett wrote in his first letter home, “what a thrill for any writer to be so vividly remembered. And what a thrill for any reader to get to whack actual fractions off a hated writer’s life! True, it’s my life being whacked. But think how happy I made Judge Gosman. ‘You think
you
write a mean sentence,’ he was in effect telling me. ‘Try this one on for size.’”

There was a strained quality to this good cheer. Everett was frightened, and the comic tone was bravado. But once the gavel fell, what choice did he have? It takes toughness to endure punishment—and he was trying, without losing his sense of humor, to make himself tough.

His sentence was to be served at the Wahkiakum County Work Camp outside Kashelweet, Washington, a minimum-security facility in the gloomy heart of the Coast Range. “Early parole is rare,” he wrote, “which is good, since I won’t have to betray my true nature trying to earn time off for good behavior.” He then went into a description of the camp, and of his fellow inmates—and as he warmed up to his topic I was happy to hear him sounding more and more like himself:

A penitentiary this is not. That was the first pleasant surprise. No guard towers, no searchlights, no electric or barbwire or any other sort of fence. Nothing but a cinderblock wall around us, and this wall, I kid you not, is
three
feet
tall
. They take the term “minimum security”
very seriously here! But since we’re nine miles up a gravel road from Hwy 101 and twenty from a logging town whose inmates are meaner than the camp’s, there’s really nowhere to go but into the hills. And the guards almost seem to encourage escape attempts, since then they get to play army with their expensive bloodhounds & dirt-bikes & four-wheel drives & radios & guns & shit.

The camp’s population is three hundred—all men, guards included. At first it reminded me of an Adventist Summer Camp, but lately I’ve seen that it’s really more like a hippie health-food restaurant, i.e., it’s cooperative, and the food sucks. Prisoners do the laundry, the cooking, maintain the buildings, fix the roads—we’re nearly self-sufficient. If, as I keep suggesting, they’d just fire the warden and guards and put us on the honor system we could even be cost-efficient. We live in eight block “dorms,” three dozen or so men to a single wide-open room, with latrines at one end, which we keep incredibly clean, but the vents are so small the main dorm smell is still piss smell. (Pray they never serve asparagus!) Our bunks line the walls, and we’ve got footlockers for private property—books, smokes, shaving kit, writing utensils,
mail
from
loved
ones
hint
hint
. All mail in and out except letters to and from lawyers or Senators is stamped with my prison number, and supposedly censored. But I’ve heard the censors are so lazy that if you write sloppily and longwindedly (two gifts God gave me at birth) you can say most anything. Even stuff like “Meet me with the machine guns at the front gate at noon tomorrow.” (If you could read that last sentence you’ll know the rumors were true.)

We rise at 6:30 for a choice of cold cereal or oat glue in the mess hall, are on the job by 8, and work till 5 like the rest of America. Only big difference is the six or eight head-counts a day and the lack of hair on the heads being counted. (They gave us pig-shaves. Not a real happening look for me.) I chose a tree-planting crew for the fresh air, physical labor, chance to see the outside world. What a bonehead! The only world we see is clearcuts. We get ready-made sack lunches and a half hour to eat them—which is half an hour too long for this cuisine. Then it’s back to the camp for showers and “dinner,” which is one of six or seven versions of instant spuds and hamburger unless there’s a newspaper reporter coming. Then we get steak.

Another culinary problem: the thieving. The con cooks get butter, for instance, but steal it for bartering and use lard in our bread. Fresh fruit and vegetables arrive by the truckload but never reach our plates. (I figure the guards cut a deal with a retail grocer somewhere.) Cons
and guards both steal the good stuff, everybody knows who hoards what, and if you want something bad enough you can pay some free-enterprising son of a bitch through the nose. But I’m not that American. I live on cold cereal mostly, which tastes just like it did back home, and you can take it to the “dorm” and eat alone if you want—like me and this box of Shredded Wheat are doing this instant.

Not that I haven’t made friends. Like the camp itself, the inmates aren’t as scary as I’d feared. The breakdown, according to our sagacious prison officials, is:

30% “Serious Criminals”—which you’d think would mean drug-dealers, manslaughterers, grand larcenists, embezzlers, counterfeiters, etc., but mostly turns out to mean a bunch of poor yo-yos being lavishly punished for possession of minuscule amounts of pot.

30% “Mexicans”—not criminals at all, these poor pedros, but the second or third time they cross the border without papers Uncle Sam hands ’em an all-expenses-paid trip to this vacation haven.

40% “Draft-dodgers”—over 120 men in this camp alone—who our scholarly prison officials further categorize as follows:

1. “Jehovah’s Witnesses”—more commonly known (thanks to me) as “T.I.’s” (stands for Theologically Impaired). And it’s a rip that Uncle Sam won’t give ’em C.O. status, since they spend every waking hour trying to infect the rest of us with their Impairment.

2. “Activists”—among whom I find myself lumped thanks to my various sittings-in, peace-disturbings, FBI record, SDA membership and so on … (Ha! Gotcha, didn’t I!? SDA membership? Students for a Democratic Advent?)

3. “Pacifists”—by far the most likable, least selfish, most reliable men in the camp. And it breaks my heart to think how beautifully Irwin would have fit among these militantly soft-hearted clowns. But that’s water under the bridge, ain’t it.

4. “Hippies” is what the prison staff calls the fourth group. But what they really mean, I think, is “Guys Who Failed To Report For Induction When Reality And Unreality Got So Indistinguishable They No Longer Knew Which One To Report For It In.” Or “GWFTRFIWRAUGSITNLKWOTRFII’s,” for short.

“Like I told my judge,” one named Moonfish explained to me the other day, “judge I said,
truly,
to like
punish
a person, like with prison and shit, for failing to carry out black-and-white-type instructional material printed on two-dimensional-type surfaces such as induction papers is foolish in the
extreme,
man, scientifically speaking, since with
relativity happening, like with energy equalling mass and shit, the Following-2-D-Directions-Back-Out-Into-A-3-D-World Situation has gotten totally out of control. What I’m driving at your honor, in story form, is how you yourself, to cite one razor-sharp-minded example, could park your actual two-tone Ford LTD well within the white or possibly yellow lines of an actual supermarket parking space, step inside for some shopping, tote your brown bags of products back out to said space, and find an alpaca standing there, same two tones as the LTD, man, but ready to spit in your face if you stick in the key, which could brown you off so bad you say screw the car and drive the grocks home in the alpaca anyhow, figuring (righteously, I would say) that the two-tones means the beast is, molecularly speaking, yours. Except that when you like
canter
in the driveway—and here we reach the scientific heart of the matter—even with E equalling MC, let alone squared, there could be a fuckin’ thunderegg in the middle of your lawn where the split-level used to be. Or a small lake full of duckweed. Or just sand, and a fuckin’ yucca plant. That’s all I’m saying. But looking again at the old where-and-what-is-my-draft-board-type questions in light of events such as these, we see the truly answerous answers are not so easy to locate. So think hard, is my good word to you, your judgeship, before jailing up your fellow man for one of these 2-D hey-what’s-induction? type errors.”

Moonfish got three years too, by the way. But enough Wahkiakum.

The good news is, we’re allowed two visitors from 1 to 3 p.m. on the first and third Sundays of every month. The bad news is, which two of you? I’ll leave that to you, as long as
somebody
shows up! Meanwhile my needs are simple: I only want to hear
everything,
from
everyone.
Especially about Irwin. Write soon! Write tons!