The Brothers K (13 page)

Ah, what a moment …

In the long run, though, the memory makes Beal’s transformation here at church all the sadder. He looks great strolling in the door in his dark blue suit, but the instant his hand touches a hymnal or podium
poof!
, he shrivels down into his collar, wrinkles up his forehead like an organ
grinder’s monkey, and holds his body so stiff you’d think he believed God would strike him dead if he ever so much as flexed one bun.

Which is one more reason why I stay in The Corner.

But of course the main reason, the real reason, is Sister Durrel.

What made young Hugh’s confusion even worse, but a lot better too that sad year of his dad dying, was a gorgeous young girl whose dad was also dead recently known as Laura, though with her dad it was not Germans but a smaller enemy commonly known as The Bottle which did him in slower but just as totally. This didn’t stop Hugh and her from finding out they had about six tons in common however.

From Cleveland Ohio with a full name of Laura Vivien Dubois, Laura moved with her mom and brothers to Walla Walla Washington to escape the disgrace of the dad partly, and partly because her mom and her were good Seventh Day Adventists full of high hopes that the two young brothers, Truman and Marvin, might let Jesus into their lives away from the streets of Cleveland they ran so wild in and maybe go on to the Adventist College there in Walla Walla, which however they never did.

What the brothers did do though, one fine May day, was strike out five times between the two of them in a ballgame with big sister Laura watching proudly to make it worse, against a handsome young southpaw by the name of Smoke more commonly known as Hugh. They would of struck out six times, too, if Marvin hadn’t decided to wreck the Perfect Game Smoke had going by stepping into an inside pitch his last time at bat and getting bashed by it, which you’ve got to admit if you’ve seen Smoke throw took a ton of guts, though not all that many brains.

Unfortunately Marv picked a high fastball, which coldcocked him so royally the doctors said it would of killed him if it hadn’t been a glancing type of blow. On the more fortunate side however, the injury aroused an occasion where Hugh and Laura ended up leaning worriedly over the same blacked-out maniac named Marv in the same bed there at Walla Walla Adventist Hospital.

For a while Laura and Hugh just sweated blood, said “Oh dear Oh
dear,” rung there hands and so forth. But “She sure smells good!” Hugh couldn’t help thinking after a while. And “He is so softhearted for a guy who hurls that ball so hard!” Laura started thinking. Then, leaning closer and closer over the fallen young warrior, they began falling so far into Love At First Sight that by the time Marv opened one eye and said “Who am I?” they had more or less forgot, for who the heck cares who Uncle Marv is in such situations? (Really he’s a great guy! I’m only teasing for when he reads this!)

At this point Hugh had one of the many brainstorms that sprinkle his fertile mind from time to time. Pretending to feel horrid over how Marv had bashed his own brains out, Hugh invited him to let bygones be bygones the coming Saturday and go watch a Walla Walla VS Lewiston Bush League Pro Game with him, compliments of Hugh.

“Hay! Great!” Marvin replied.

“But hay!” Hugh added. “Better bring along this sister of yours too, since she’s had quite a serious shock due to that pitch that got away from me and needs a brief vacation as much as the both of us!”

“Fair enough,” said Marvo.

To Hugh’s surprise, though, Laura’s face here took on a more serious bent. “Much as I’d love to, we can’t, dangit!” she observed, “for Saturday is our Sabbath.”

“Hay! Not mine!” grinning Marvin chuckled back.

“It is so!” Laura yelled in no uncertain terms, worried sick over which eternal place starting with ‘H’ Marv might end up spending Forever in if he didn’t shape up.

“No way!” rowdy Marvin informed her.

“Hay! No fights now,” Hugh clucked. “What are you guys anyways? Jews?”

“We are of the Seventh Day Adventist persuasion,” Laura reported proudly.

“You mean YOU are!” butted in Marv.

Laura said nothing, but her beautiful eyes stabbed holes in Marvin’s face like two big daggers.

“Hay now!” Hugh stated soothingly. “Whoever is what, do not fuss, for I’ve just had another one of the brainstorms that have sprinkled my mind like fertile rain from time to time my entire history! On Sunday afternoon Tucson plays the Indians up in Spokane. A Double Header no less! It’s a long drive, but I don’t mind. What say I take the both of you on up to that?”

“THE INDIANS ARE COMING TO SPOKANE?” Marvin screamed, nearly coldcocking his sore head again with his own loud noises.

“We originated from Cleveland,” Laura explained after Marv had fainted back onto the pillows.

“Well,” Hugh remarked with a sneaky sparkle in one eye, “Spokane is called the Indians, too, because they are Cleveland’s Triple A Farm Club.”

“CLEVELAND’S FARM CLUB IS IN SPOKANE? WAHOO! OKAY! OH OW! MY HEAD! HURRAY!” responded the hospitalized voice from the pillows.

Here I must butt in to report that this Cleveland-Farm-Club stuff was a small but harmless load of crap Hugh was feeding them in hopes of making Laura more interested, for he knew all along that Sacramento was really Cleveland’s Triple A Farm Club, and Spokane was only Baltimores’s. The important thing here was this: Hughs’s load of crap worked like a charm!

“Sounds fun!” Laura agreed with Marvin in a gentle whisper, looking at Hugh and visa versa with red hot looks on their faces!

So that settled that! The very next Sunday the whole threesome of them tore on up to Spokane on a trip now known amongst our family history as The Three Hundred Mile Date!

W
ith one finger she beckons me toward her. My face is instantly burning—but this always happens. I clear my throat and force myself to speak. “I’m ready, Sister Durrel,” I say. But it is Mickey Mouse’s voice, or even Minnie’s, that comes piping up out of me. This always happens too.

“Call me Nancy, Kincaid,” she whispers. “You make me feel like a nun!”

She smiles up at me, and I try to smile back, but my cheeks and mouth seize up as if I just got back from a dentist, so I gape at her, novocaine-faced, instead. She takes the same finger she beckoned me with, hooks it deep in her thick, brown, freshly cut hair, pulls the hair back behind her ear, and tilts the ear up toward me. I gulp. This has never happened! There’s always been plenty of hair between my mouth and her ear! And now I’m supposed to talk into it! She looks at me. I look at her ear. “Well?” she says.

I lean a little closer.
Violets
. She smells like violets! And I see tiny violet veins pulsing in her neck, and her ear is like a blossom, and the skin of her cheek looks so warm and soft that as I lean down to recite the verse I wonder, for just an instant, what would happen if I kissed her: I picture her slapping me, picture her kissing me back, picture her saying she’s always loved me in secret, picture Brother Beal’s fist boafing my face the way his bat did that softball.

Then I try to picture the Memory Verse …

It’s gone. Vanished. This has never happened either! I try to breathe, but can’t; try to remember, but can’t; try to swallow, but can’t. She tries priming the pump.
“Whosoever therefore shall humble,”
she whispers—but my brain is melted wax.
“Himself as this little child,”
she says—but my eyes and mind are both stuck to my shoes now, glued like dogshit to the scuffed little Buster Browns I thought were so neat when Mama bought them for me, and which now hurt my feet and resemble the whole half-grown, shabby, stupid rest of me so much I’d like to puke all over them.
“The same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven,”
she whispers. But I say nothing.

She aims both big green eyes at my fat red face. “What’s the matter today?”

“I just can’t,” peeps Minnie Mouse.

“Try,” she says, and her breath smells beautiful, like Dentyne.

“No!” I squeak, my cheeks burning like a butt that just got a hard spanking.

“Do it for
me
, Kincaid,” she pleads, and her voice sounds encouraging. But now I can see that she’s biting her lip to keep from laughing, and that though the teeth doing the biting and the lip being bitten and the green eyes watching me are all beautiful, they
know
that they’re beautiful,
know
that’s why I’m like this, and even
like
me to be like this—because me being like this is proof that she’s beautiful. So that’s what I am. Her proof. I am the butt-cheeked Buster Brown-shoed mirror she holds in front of her face to study her beauty in. And I would rather be the floor, or a chair, or a smear of grease on the wall.

She is still smiling as she unhooks the beautiful hair from behind the beautiful ear. The hair bounces once, beautifully, then lies beautifully still. “What’s the matter?” she whispers. “I won’t bite you.” But her teeth look sharp.

“I’m sorry!” squeaks Minnie.

She laughs, and looks at herself in my face some more. “Okay,” she says.

I nod my head enthusiastically, but haven’t the slightest idea what she wants.

“We’re finished,” she says, smiling. “We’re done. For today, anyway.”

I nod some more, but stand frozen.

“You can
go
now!” she laughs.

“Oh!” I squeak. “Oops! Okay! Thanks! Goodbye!” Quick as I can I turn, take half a step, and crack my leg against a chair. It crashes over. I stand it back up, but hear the inevitable swiveling of suits and dresses as sixty-some faces spin around to gawk. My own face bursts into flame. I move fast down a long row of kids, heading for the furthest empty seat, but somebody, Micah Barnes, sticks his foot out: I trip, fall to my knees, my right hand flies out, my fingers catch in some girl’s hair, the girl shrieks, Micah hoots, everybody looks, the girl shrieks louder. “Sorry!” I croak, staggering away.

“Knock it off, Barnes!” Brother Beal shouts. “Kincaid! Sit down!”

I plop down in the first empty space I come to. Luckily there’s a chair in it. My face is scalding me. I can’t focus my brain or eyes. I loosen my tie to keep from strangling. I hear Micah snickering, because he tripped me I think at first: then I glance sideways and realize I’m sitting right beside Vera Klinger—and she’s blushing and beaming like she thinks I’m here all because of her! Micah pants and squirms in his chair. Half the kids in the room are smirking at me. I notice Brother Beal wrinkling up his forehead: time for the closing sermon. My brain is a furnace inside my skull. I consider bolting for the door, but if I tripped again or Beal yelled at me I’d flat out die, so I try something even more desperate: I decide that, come hell or high water, I am going to listen, for once, to every last word that Brother Beal has to say …

But it’s even harder than I’d expected:
“GrownupsareGod’schildrenjustaskidsarethechildrenofgrownups”
he wheedles in a voice so inflectionless and stale it seems to brown the very air.
“ButinourMemoryVersetodayJesus isnotsayingthatgrownupsshouldactlikechildren,ohno,it’snogoodforanybodyto actchildishnonofwhatOurLordJesusissayingtoeachandeveryoneofusheretodayisthatGodistheUltimateGrownupandJesusHimselfistheUltimateChild andwhatthistrulymeanstousherebelowisthatweshouldallstriveourveryvery hardesttobuh-blah,buh-blah,buh-blubble …”

Vera is staring at my pant leg!

I cross my legs, and cover the top one with both hands.

She stares at my hands!

I stick them in my pockets.

She stares at my pockets!

No escape! I strain to focus on Beal again, but the heat in my brain makes his body wriggle like a phone pole miles off down some desert highway.
“Andlistennowyouyoungpeople,”
he drones.
“Payveryveryveryclose attentiontomenow,becausethis,accordingtoHolyScripture,isthekeythatunlocksthegatetothekingdomofheaven. Areyouallwithme? ‥ Good,because buh-bleah,buh-blah,bluh-bloobly …”

There’s some faint promise here, though—something in the words
kingdom of heaven
that I swim for, in my ocean of misery, as if toward a life raft …

Oh yeah. The dream. I had a dream about the kingdom of heaven, just a few nights ago. A very real sort of dream, it was too. So real that when I woke up and saw Irwin awake too, I told him all about it. But all he said was, “You’re lulu, Kincaid.” So I went in to Everett and Peter’s room, woke Peter, and whispered my dream to him. And
he
said it didn’t sound like a dream at all, but like a vision. He said it sounded as though my soul had left my body, and had actually flown off to the kingdom. “You’re lulu, Pete,” I told him. But as Vera keeps staring at my legs and Micah keeps sniggering and Beal keeps bluh-blobbling I begin to wonder:
was
Peter lulu? Or is it possible? Could I, without killing myself, get my soul to fly right on out of this godforsaken room while my body just sits here and waits for things to end? I have no idea, but I decide to try. I begin by remembering, as carefully as I can, every last detail of my dream of the kingdom …

The Three Hundred Mile Date started out on late May the Something 1947 at seven o’clock on a Sunday morning, with young Hugh at the wheel of his late dad’s 1940 Ford screaming down the highway like a bat out of a certain Hot Place we’ve heard plenty about but hope never to visit. Hugh made it to Walla Walla around eight, picked up sleepy Marv and thrilled Laura, and the hungry threesome of them shot north like bad news, hitting Spokane by ten thirty, a town Marvin would have died at the time if you’d told him he’d one day set up his fine ladies’ hair parlour The Butee Bar in it.