The Brothers K (2 page)

I can tell by the heaviness of step that it’s my brother Irwin back in the kitchen. When I hear the icebox open, I know that neither Mama nor Papa is in the house. I hear him gulping milk straight out of the bottle.
Germs …
I hear the careful folding and refolding of wax paper round a plate of leftovers.
Thou shalt not steal …
I hear a shout somewhere
outside, and Irwin darts into the diningroom, his mouth stuffed full of something, his eyes bulging, then, seeing no one, relieved.

“Where’s Papa?” I ask.

He jumps, bolts the food, chokes a little, laughs. “Where are
you?”

I sit up in the chair.

He laughs again, starts back toward the kitchen, then calls back to me, “Battle Ground. Playin’ ball.”

The screen door slams.

I
am alone on the floor of mine and Irwin’s room now, picturing Battle Ground. I’ve been there, Mama says. It’s got the big park with the pool where I waded with my boats when it was too hot to be in the bleachers, she says. I can’t remember the bleachers, I can’t remember the ballfield, but I remember the pool. And now I think I remember the tall men with caps and gloves running over the grass, splashing in and out of the water, throwing and hitting baseballs and singing
Aaaaaa! Aaaaaa!
and
Hum Babe!
and
Hey, Batter!
My oldest brother, Everett, showed me how they sing. He said that
Hum Babes
are special, because Papa is the pitcher and it’s his pitches that hum. I said, They call Papa a
babe?
No, Everett said, they just sing
Hum Babe
to the pitches, but some players call him Smoke because of his Lucky Strikes and fastball, and some call him Hook because of his curveballs and nose. I said I thought they were just plain baseballs. He said they were, but that curveballs and fastballs are kinds of pitches, and pitches are special throws nobody but the pitcher knows how to make, and Papa has seven different kinds, not counting his different deliveries. He didn’t say what a delivery was, but he said Papa had a kind that went
ffffffffwirp!
called a sinker, and a kind that went
ffffffffweet!
called a slider and a kind that went
ffffffffwow!
called a forkball and a kind that went
bleeeeeeeeeeurp!
called a change-up and a secret kind too, called a knuckler, which he only used when he was red-hot since it might go
rrow!rrow!rrow!
or might do nothing at all, and I felt almost like crying by then, I was so confused and wanted so much not to be. Everett noticed, and shoved me in a gruff, friendly sort of way. Don’t worry, he said. Next summer I’d be old enough to go watch him pitch, and soon as I watched him I’d understand everything fine …

But I don’t want to understand next summer. I want to understand
now
. So I have the sports page here beside me on the floor, open to the ballplayer with the serious face. And this is not an orange crayon in my mouth. It’s a Lucky Strike.
“Fffffffweeet!”
I tell it. This isn’t the lid of a mayonnaise jar in my hand, either. It’s an ashtray.
“Bleeeeeeeeeeurp!”
And
Bobby, my bear, is the neighbor man and this salad fork is his pitchfork and these piled blankets are the pile of burning brush. Because I am not me. I am Smoke! I am my father! and the harder I suck the Lucky the hotter burns the brush!
Aaaaaaaaaaa!
the fire hums, babe, the flames
ffffffffwirp
and
ffffffffwow!
And when I spin my ashtray the neighbor man is helpless: I spin, spin, spin it, he whirls round and round and round. Then I throw, I forkball, I pitchfork my Lucky clear up to the sky and
rrow!rrow!rrow!
flaming leaves and limbs and papers knuckle every which way and the trees and batters and people and houses burn! burn! burn!

I saw.

I saw what Papa was doing.

And next year I’ll go with my brother to watch
all
the ballplayers splash and throw and sing.

M
y parents are sitting on the old purple sofa. Mama is peeling oranges on a dish towel spread across her lap, but she’s so hugely pregnant that the peels are collecting clear out between her knees. Papa says that she grew Everett, Peter, Irwin and me inside her one by one, but that she’s gotten so good at it she’s decided to grow two at once this time, to save money, time and trouble. “Now wait just a minute!” Mama always says to this. “Who’s the greedy farmer that planted two seeds at once?” Then they laugh. I don’t get it. They say this and laugh every time anybody stops by these days. If they don’t say it the people look sort of sick, Mama’s stomach is so big, so sometimes they even say it to the same person twice. I still don’t get it. Anyhow she’s huge, and the new two inside her are called The Twins, and once they’re born I won’t be the youngest anymore, and they might be sisters, which might be fun, and Mama will supposedly shrink back to her same old size and act more her same old way. So I guess it’s a good thing.

It’s Peter’s turn for Papa’s chair, and he’s lolling in it like a cat on the hood of a warm car, trying to make Everett and Irwin jealous. They don’t even notice. They’re belly-down on the floor with their chins in their hands, watching some baby ducks on TV waddle through a dish of Purina Puppy Chow. “What does
that
prove?” Everett asks the TV.

“Yeah,” says Irwin. “What does that prove?”

“Ducks’ll eat
slugs,”
Everett says. “That don’t prove a thing about Purina.”

“Yeah,” says Irwin. “That don’t prove a
thing.”

Everett turns to Irwin and glares. Peter watches them and laughs. Irwin’s bigger than Everett, but two years younger, and whatever Everett says or does lately, Irwin says and does the same. Peter thinks it’s funny. Everett thinks it’s idiotic. Irwin doesn’t care if it’s funny or idiotic, he just keeps doing it.

The ducks waddle off. Ed Sullivan waddles on.

“Ed Cellophane,” says Everett for the thousandth time this year.

For the thousandth time this year, Irwin laughs.

Ed Sullivan introduces Perry Como. Everybody on TV claps.

Perry Como climbs up on a stool, smiles sort of wistfully, and sings a song about catching shooting stars, sticking them in buckets, then pulling them out again in dreary weather to cheer yourself up with. “I’m
sure,”
Everett snorts.

“We’re
sure,”
says Irwin.

Perry Como snaps his fingers to the beat.
“Never let it fade away,”
he sings,
“never let it fade away …”

Then his voice fades away.

Everybody claps. Ed Sullivan comes out, clapping too. Perry Como chuckles and says something into Ed’s ear, and Everett chuckles and says, “You sure are ugly!” into Irwin’s ear at the same instant. Then Ed Sullivan pooches his lips out and Perry Como saunters away, so that it really does seem like what Everett said is what Ed Sullivan heard. Irwin laughs.

Ed Sullivan talks for a while now, nodding his head as if to show how much he agrees with everything he’s saying. Then he holds out one hand and asks if we won’t please give a very warm welcome to a big Russian word I can’t pronounce. The audience applauds. The curtains open. And suddenly the stage is dark and shadowy, no one in sight, and a hidden choir of men with deep Russian voices begins doing some kind of chant with crazy little owl-hoots mixed in where you least expect them. Then, out of the darkness, a V-shaped wedge of shrouded humans comes sailing like geese into a pond, doing something impossible so effortlessly that we watch for some time before Mama whispers, “Lord! Will you
look
at that!”

There must be twenty-five or thirty of them, all in black hooded robes that reach to the floor and hide their feet, faces and shapes completely. And what’s impossible is that they’re gliding as quietly and smoothly as skaters on ice—and there
is
no ice. Heads bowed, bodies hidden, the
Russians slide through the shadows and over the floor as if they weigh nothing or there’s no one in the robes, the spiraling lines and leaning rows of them passing each other so closely you’d think they’d crash, yet they never touch, and the thick dark cloth doesn’t even quiver.

“They’re so
ghostly!”
Mama shivers.

“They don’t have any feet!” Irwin yells.

“They have feet all right,” Papa says, “but they’re taking such smooth, tiny steps in under those robes it almost looks like they’re flyin’.”

“But they
really
don’t have any hands!” yells Irwin.

“They have hands all right,” says Papa, “but they’ve got ’em stuck up their opposite sleeves. I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if they yanked ’em out and flashed ’em at us any second now.”

“Isn’t that just like a Russian,” Mama says, “hiding his hands up the wrong sleeves?”

Papa laughs at this—so Irwin laughs too, though I doubt he has any idea whether it’s just like a Russian or not. But Papa’s right about their hands: when the stage suddenly fills with light the monkish chanting flares into loud, full-throated singing, away fly the robes, out dart the hands, up pop the heads, and there they are: the Russians! And now they’re wearing black boots and pants, puffy white shirts, and fur hats the same size and shape as their beards as they laugh and fly and flip over and under each other, and Everett’s and Irwin’s mouths are hanging open, and Mama and Pete are bug-eyed with wonder, and even Papa makes a stunned little bark when they huddle like football players then somehow send one dancer flying most of the way up to the ceiling, doing four or five flips before he sails back down. We’re all so sorry when the dancing ends and Ed Sullivan shambles back out that this time it’s Mama, of all people, who says, “You know what? He
is
ugly.”

A commercial comes on, showing a cross section of the inside of a woman’s head complete with the hammer, carpenter’s saw and lightning bolts that are giving her such a terrible headache. “Those,” Papa says, “were some pretty fair country dancers.”

“Poor lady!” Irwin gasps, gaping at the woman’s head.

“They sure were,” Everett says to Papa.

Then the woman swallows an Anacin, the hammer, saw and lightning bolts vanish, and her face reappears, grinning with relief.

“Great stuff!” Irwin says, marveling at the Anacin.

“Why are we supposed to hate Russia?” Peter asks.

Nobody answers him. Maybe nobody knows. Peter scowls at the silence,
then answers himself in a way—by sliding his hands up the opposite sleeves of his sweatshirt.

Hearing Mama stir, I turn just in time to see her set her dish towel full of orange peels in Papa’s lap. He snorts and says thanks-a-lot as if he means the opposite. But she says, “Open it,” so he does. And instead of the mess we expected there are two peeled oranges inside, divided neatly into sections. He says thanks again, this time as if he means it. But this time he doesn’t sound so good—and suddenly he and Mama and all the rest of us are staring at the brace and bandage on his left hand, realizing why she peeled the oranges for him, living all over again the night last month when the graveyard-shift foreman called, long past midnight, from the Crown Zellerbach mill …

H
e said Papa had been hurt by the rollers at the mill, named a hospital, and Mama was so stunned that she hung up before he could say another word. Her shouts woke us and brought us running to the kitchen, but before we had time to think she curdled our brains with a scream—because a man, Papa’s friend Roy, was standing in the dark outside the window. When we recognized him and let him in, Roy sat down and told us what happened—told how Papa had rested his hand, for an instant, on a pair of big metal paper-rollers, how someone somewhere had picked that same instant to flip a switch, how in the next instant his left thumb had spun into the rollers and come out again, flat as newspaper, how the mill sounds like stormsurf when it’s running full-bore, yet at his lathe three hundred feet away Roy had heard Papa’s scream. “Let me drive you,” he said, when a full minute passed and none of us had moved or spoken, because none of us could begin to imagine Papa screaming, no matter what. Then came the rush to the hospital, the interminable wait, and finally the coldness of the surgeon as he called us into his office, angry at himself, angry at us, angriest at the thumb maybe, for being so utterly crushed and ruined that instead of playing the hero in a Miracle of Modern Science he was stuck in a room with four miserable boys and a prodigiously pregnant woman, listening to himself snap that “the man, er, worker, your father—No, son! What’s your name? … Well dammit, Everett, shuttup and listen! I’m trying to tell you no. Not with that thumb. Your father will never pitch, or play any kind of baseball, again …”

Y
et as we watch him now, our own faces falling, Papa is somehow able to maintain his poker face. And then his off hand, the good one, starts
flickering faster than my eye can follow and orange slices go flying like Russian dancers. Everett, Irwin and Peter all catch their slices, and Pete has to whip his hands out of his sleeves to do it; my slice bounces right off my open mouth, but Papa’s everywhere hand somehow darts out, catches it, stuffs it back in; Mama just cringes, hunches, and hides behind her hands, yet when Papa’s hand is through flickering there are three slices in her lap, one for her and two for the twins. So just like that we’re all chewing and laughing instead of staring at braces and bandages. And just about the time we’ve all swallowed and begun wondering just how much consolation a few orange slices can be, Papa, still poker-faced, sends seven more of them flying through the air.

N
ow a white-haired man in a suit like a minister’s comes on Ed Sullivan and the crowd claps hysterically though he hasn’t yet done a thing. “I just
love
Maurice Chevalier!” Mama sighs.

“Me too!” Irwin cries.

“I can’t
stand
him,” Everett mutters.

Mama glances at Everett, and scowls. Papa eyes him too, but I notice he’s smiling out the side of his face that Mama can’t see. I turn to Chevalier and try to decide for myself. He is nothing like a minister, despite the suit. He’s dancing a little now, and singing with a foreign accent, and sometimes in a completely foreign language. Mama says it’s French, and adds, “Isn’t it pretty?”