The Brothers K (12 page)

Not so sad but more illegal was another arm story that happened when he was thirteen and bet several Cougar ballplayers that he could bust the back window out of the Twin Falls Flyer caboose with a baseball in one throw, and I mean the
back
window here, not just some side window such as any moron or juvenile delinquent could
bust. This means the Flyer is flying sixty miles per hour straight away from you so that you’ve got to throw the ball faster enough than sixty to bust glass plus accurate enough to even hit it, the caboose window being quite small. The whole bet however turned into a humble lesson in overcockiness for young Hugh, who bet three guys a buck each then made such a perfect throw that he hit that little cross of wood dividing the older type wooden cabooses’s windows into four pains dead center, and never busted a thing. Cutting cordwood with a bucksaw at a dollar per cord was how Hugh payed off his debts.
Such was
a
youngsters’s future when
it
came
to
gambling
! is the lesson Hugh claims he learned this time out as he sawed and sawed and sawed and sawed and sawed and sawed and sawed and sawed and sawed and sawed and sawed and sawed and sawed. Imagine if you can the blisters! While you’re at it imagine a whole cord of wood costing but one dollar! How the world changes is beyond me!

But getting down to baseball here, what young Hugh had going for him in his gifted southern paw was a big strong body for a boy his age plus a fastball that hopped “like a dang jack rabbit!” as Mel Franks, one of the Cougars always striking out on it, used to say. This blazing hopping fastball was also extremely accurate as you can see from the caboose. Which was lucky. Because the odd thing was how every time Hugh went to throw a curveball Everett Senior turned purple and screamed at him. “SAVE THAT ARM!” he screamed. “YOU’LL BE NEEDING ALL THOSE LIGAMENTS AND TENDONS CURVEBALLS TEAR OUT OF YOU AT SUCH A GROWING AGE WHEN YOU ARE A THIRTYSOME YEAR OLD VETERAN STILL PLAYING PRO BALL!” he screamed. This had been Everett Seniors’s own mistake as a youngster, Hugh reports, and being the type of young man who hung himself upon his dad’s every word Hugh never learned a curveball worth a hang due to this screaming, which later had serious aftereffects. But there are payoffs to be had hanging from a dad’s words too, such as getting so sharp at math, science and other subjects that they skipped him a grade, I think maybe the fourth. And even without a curveball as an eighth grader a year too young for his age, Hugh pitched two no-hitters, went 8 and 0, got straight A’s and hit over .500 if you can believe those numbers!

In high school, however, Life was soon to take a far more serious bent for Hugh and his family, especially Everett Senior if you can call getting killed a bent in Life. First off the Depression had ended. Secondly W.W.2 had started up. The third thing: Everett Senior was
too old to join the military unless he wanted to. But all along as I have not yet mentioned he had an expired pilot’s license left over from his youthful talents as a barnstorming pilot of small airplanes. So when America started losing the War a little, such as at Pearl Harbor and such, Everett Senior decided we could use a good man who flew and signed up for the Air Force wing of the United States Army.

In Everett Seniors’s (now known as Master Sergeant Everett Chance’s) last letter home to Hugh and Marion, he told how he had started flying a little Piper Cub recognisance plane around France, Switzerland, Beljum and such. “I have finally made it up to the Cubs,” was how he put it, “even if it is only the Piper and not the Chicago!” Young Hugh cracked up heartily over this. Old Marion however never grinned a lick, for as a Pacifist she hated Piper Cubs, Churchill and Hitler, ovens and bombs, Eisenhower, Italy, and all else to do with the World Situation at such a tough point in History.

Hugh on the other hand decided he should try even harder to do all the things which he decided to try and do, and to prove it he made the varsity baseball team his freshman year and went 6 and 2, then as a sophomore went 9 and 1 and hit .420, including his first no-hitter. But smack into the middle of this great ballplaying dropped the bombshell him and Marion had hoped all along not to be waiting for. Everett Seniors’s Piper Cub had either broke down or run out of gas deep behind enemy territory. The lousy Germans had him captured!!

For many months the terrorized pair of Hugh and Marion went about their business in a daze of sad suspense, hearing not a word of what was happening to their nearest and dearest prisoner in all the world at a time when it was crawling with them. As a junior on the ballfield Hugh played his worried-sick heart out, going 12 and 0 with two one-hitters, one two-hitter, three three-hitters and no no-hitters, all of them shut-outs, as his high school Marcus Whitman High (named after the famous missionary and his wife who told the Indians Jesus would help them and when He didn’t massacred them) won the State Championship. To top it off Hugh got Straight A’s, made first-team All-State, and was elected Scholar Athelete Of The Year for the whole state of Washington for his age, thereby putting one heck of a crimp in Marions’s bichbichbiching about the study-time he wasted playing ball.

But a lot of thanks he got! For next came the bitter pill any boy on earth hopes never to have to swallow! In a Defense Department envelope arriving practically minutes before the War would of ended
with everyone fine, there it was, the bitter pill: Hugh’s dad had gotten shot! probably in the back! hundreds of times for all we know, knowing the stinking Germans! while escaping from prison camp.

It was official: he was now DEAD!!!!

For Hugh this came as quite a shock. Barely knowing who or what he was, he entered into an awful period of what felt like thick fog all around him during which he started smoking Lucky Strikes, his brand to this day. After this long Fog Period he reports entering more of an Angry Period where his senior year on the ballfield he spent like some strange machine or zombie mowing down team after team on almost pure fastballs, getting nicknamed SMOKE because of it, going 14 and 0 in the middle of it, setting a State Strikeout Record that will never be broken since they play a different number of games today, and winning a second straight State Crown for Marcus Whitman High practically one-handed.

On the other hand I have to report his grades that year went totally to pot. He just didn’t care was the problem, he later reported. Marion was a basketcase, Hugh himself was in his Foggy then his Angry Periods, Pro Scouts were after him like flies beating down him and Marions’s door trying to talk the sad-faced young man and his gereaved mom into becoming a Bonus Baby his eighteenth birthday instead of heading on to College as planned, etc. Life in general was such a total mess overall that before long Hugh could do nothing but throw fastballs, smoke Lucky Strikes, and hold on tight to one last straw. “If a scout from the Cubs comes and makes me a square offer, I will sign, in memory of DAD!” was the straw. “Otherwise it’s college for me!” was the other segment of it. But no Cub scouts ever came, and later on Hugh forgot his own good advice. And no wonder, for,

“YOU ARE READY!” those clowns the Scouts kept screaming while “YOUR SCHOOLING!” screamed his destroyed mom while “SMOKE! SMOKE! SMOKE!” screamed Whitman Highs’s berzerk fans while “DAD! DAD!” Hugh screamed in his own brain. For what Everett Senior would have said concerning all these mixed-up compartments in life was what the big lonely southpaw was wondering at this rugged point in time.

This was a year of great confusion for young Hugh Chance.

W
hen the time comes, all you have to do to get out of The Corner is tiptoe over and whisper the Memory Verse to Sister Durrel. If you blow it she even helps you with it. Then you go take a seat in Brother Beal’s crowd while he polishes off the morning with a short sermon that’s like a pre-game warm-up to get you a little bit bored before the Big Bore of Elder Babcock’s sermon upstairs in church.

Today’s Memory Verse is in red ink in my Bible. Red means it’s Jesus talking. “Whosoever shall humble himself as this little child,” He’s telling somebody or other, “the same is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” I repeat the Verse to myself seven times without looking. Then I peek at Sister Durrel, and start trying to suck up courage. This is the hard part …

I know what’ll happen first. I’ll say, “I’m ready, Sister Durrel.” Then she’ll say, “Call me Nancy, Kincaid. You make me feel like a nun!” Then I’ll feel horrible for making her feel like a nun, but I’ll keep calling her Sister anyway, because I’d
die
if I ever called her Nancy. That’s one thing about Brother Beal. The guy can walk right up to her and say “Nancy” as calmly as if he was saying “soup” or “cement” or “pencil.” I guess if Sister Durrel had to get engaged, it might as well have been to Beal. I didn’t feel that way at first because he acts like such a big weenie here at church. But last summer at Camp Meeting a thing happened that showed me there is a lot more to him than you’d ever guess from knowing him on Sabbaths only.

It was a Friday, near sundown, and we’d been playing softball all afternoon. I was pitching for both teams to make it even—just underhand bloopers—and Brother Beal was coming to bat for about the tenth time. Beal was a baseball star at Walla Walla Adventist College a couple years ago, and even went on to play semipro ball till his manager canned him for refusing to play on Sabbath. It’s hard to blame the manager, though. Beal, like all Adventists, believes the Sabbath begins and ends at sunset, so he was missing both the Friday night games and the Saturday doubleheaders, which were about three-fourths of his team’s schedule.

Anyhow, he was quite the slugger when he played. But there at Camp Meeting he’d just been bunting all day to tease us, since he was so damned fast we couldn’t get him out anyway. Right as the sun was
sinking, though, Sister Durrel showed up with a lawn chair and sat down to watch, and Beal gave her a big cocky grin, and she smiled back a smile so much more beautiful than anything he’d ever deserve that when he kept right on grinning as he stepped to the plate, then said, “This one’s for you, Nancy,” I just couldn’t take it. I decided to wipe the grin right off his face.

Fast pitches are illegal in Camp Meeting softball. Overhand pitches are even more illegal. I threw one anyhow. Winding up fast to increase the surprise, I blazed a perfect strike in there—and Beal’s grin
did
vanish. The problem was, so did the softball. The problem was, Beal’s body coiled and uncoiled in a split second, there was an eerie
boaf!
, and that flat blob of a ball just disappeared. He obliterated it. The speed of the illegal pitch only made matters worse. I turned to the sky and started looking, finally spotting an ugly little grass-stained moon, still rising in the company of a flock of swallows, high over a meadow so far beyond anything we’d ever considered “outfield” that it was like something out of the Book of Revelation had happened. The ball flew so high and far it made our diamond and players and the entire afternoon’s playing seem as if a bunch of pygmies had been shooting marbles on a rug and calling that a ballgame. But it was what happened after the ball returned to earth and bounded on into a lily pond that changed my mind about Beal for good.

About the time he reached second base, a few of us began to notice something odd about the Brother’s baserunning. It wasn’t hard to put a finger on, either. He wasn’t running bases at all. He was
dancing
them. Our first reaction was to gawk. There stood our big pious weenie of a Sabbath School teacher on second base, eyes closed, body motatin’, zonked face impossibly unembarrassed as his hands mojoed a solo on a sax no more visible than the Holy Ghost. Then he stepped off the bag, swivel-hipped his way toward third, and the second reaction set in: kids started to laugh. Their parents didn’t, and I didn’t, but almost everybody else did. They couldn’t help it. Beal’s neck was working like a chicken’s; he was doing snaky, Egyptian-looking things with his arms and hands; and he was sliding his big sneakered feet sometimes forward, sometimes back, and sometimes into such quick, drunken, graceful tangles that you weren’t sure whether he’d fall on his face or take off flying.

But what really won me over was his butt. What finally made it impossible for me not to like the man was how right out there on the Adventist basepaths, right in front of eighty or ninety of the kind of pious adult spectators who spent their every Sabbath if not their entire lives trying to
forget the existence of things like butts, Beal’s buns were trying to light a fire by friction inside his jeans; they were gyrating like a washing machine with its load off balance; they were thrashing against his pants like two big halibut against the bottom of a boat. And the wonderful thing, the amazing thing, was how once his older audience got over the shock of it, they began to look amused at, then fascinated by, and finally downright grateful toward his writhing reminder that yes, buns did exist, and yes, every one of us owned not one but two of the things, and yes, like the God who created them in His Image, they did indeed move in mysterious ways. Meanwhile the sun was sinking and the softball was floating serenely among the lilies of the pond until
kerrfloosh!
Dougy Lee Babcock dove in after it. And the Elder himself—our stern umpire—had turned so crimson watching Beal’s stern that his face looked like a big fat paintbrush trying to add its frantic scarlet to the sunset to hurry on the Sabbath, since once Sabbath began, dancing would become a sin and he could order Beal to stop.

But it wasn’t Sabbath—not yet it wasn’t—and when Beal rounded third he danced clear off the basepath and started orbiting his half-moons round and round the planet that was Sister Durrel, who blushed a little but managed to smile beautifully back at him—and at
all
of him, top to bottoms. At which point the sky got so red and the light so golden that I couldn’t even look at her, she was so pretty, and all over the ballfield kids were collapsing from over-laughing as, far off in the pond water, Dougy Lee Babcock surfaced with a lily pad on his head, shouting tiny, jubilant shouts and looking like a chip off the old Elder as he raised the dripping ball aloft like the newly baptized pate of some saved sinner, while Beal waltzed, a whole world away, onto home plate, and kept waltzing on it throughout the waves of wild cheering and applause. Beneath the cheering I heard Elder Babcock snarl that Beal was out, for leaving the basepath, and that he ought to be ashamed for acting like he was acting in front of all us innocent children. To which Beal responded by cranking his butt a little more, grinning over at Sister Durrel, and singing out so everybody could hear him, “But I’m not
acting
. Elder. This is
exactly
how I feel!”