The Brothers K (22 page)

The POWs froze. The elders paled. The infants all smiled. The Lord God grinned.

E. M. gave the elders a little eye juju, sent a black fist skyward, yanked it back down, and his twenty-piece blues band crashed in behind the choir:

Back in the stifling gray banality called “reality” the Walla Walla saints were marching out, and when Irwin and a few other kids started to cheer for them, Elder Babcock and all the other old war-horses who’d figured out that God hates gratitude quickly squelched it with massive scowls. But Everett didn’t know it. His eyes were shut so tight his lips were drawn up like a mummy’s; he was covered with goose bumps, shining with sweat. Bet nudged Freddy, Freddy nudged Irwin, and Irwin nudged Everett and whispered, “Jeez! Looks like you liked the music!” But Everett didn’t hear that either: he just upped an eyebrow—raising his Blacks Plus Cracker Choir one step higher—and beamed beatifically as they roared:

“What’s he
doing?”
Bet whispered.

“He’s all sweaty!” said Freddy.

“An’ he’s getting so jumpy!” Bet added.

“Uh-oh,” Irwin whispered sideways to Everett. “Mama’s watchin’.”

But Everett was gone.
“Last verse!”
he told his choir. “Jump it, tromp it, whomp it!”

“Everett!”

“Everett!”

“Huh? Oh. Yes, Mama.”

“You tighten that tie!”

“Oops. Sorry, Mama.”

“Quit fidgeting!”

“Okay, Mama.”

“And get that
look
off your face!”

“Sorry, Mama.”

“I
t’s all in the mind,” Papa said.

“The mind,” I repeated.

“Strike zones live in the mind.”

“In the mind.”

“Don’t forget.”

“I won’t.”

And with that, Papa froze. Or didn’t freeze, exactly. But he grew so still, there in front of his troublesome chalk drawings, that it seemed he might remain there all night long. Then, in an instant, he scared the hell out of me by winding up and firing his piece of chalk clear up over the roof of the Fir Haven Apartments. And the very next instant, there he stood again, perfectly calm and still. A classic Peter gesture. But this didn’t surprise me. I’d noticed this resemblance many times before.

“Another variable, even with real, mental strike zones, even after you’ve figured out the ump,” he said in his quiet new voice, “is the whole voodoo element.”

He paused to glance around the yard, checking shadows and shrubs as if he feared someone might be out to steal the truths he was about to impart. “I’m not kidding, Kade,” he said. “And I’m not talking crystal
ball crap either. If a strike zone is just a shape in an ump’s head, which it is, then there ought to be ways of climbing inside that head and tinkering with the shape. Which there are. Pitchers of course want to expand the zone. Hitters of course want to shrink it. Either way, this ability to reach into an ump’s gray matter and distort his whole strike concept,
this
is what I’m calling voodoo.”

Obeying an impulse, I casually said, “I don’t believe in it.” I was lying. I not only believed, I was enthralled. But listening to Peter’s stories I’d often noticed that the more skeptical Everett or I pretended to be, the more powerful his stories became. So I said, “If it’s real, name somebody. Name one guy who really uses it.”

“Williams,” Papa said without hesitation. “Unquestionably, Ted Williams. The greatest voodoo hitter of our time.”

After Cobb the Demon, Gehrig the Cherub and Ruth the Dumb Deity, Williams the Curmudgeon was my favorite ballplayer. But I kept playing the skeptic. “How?” I demanded. “Tell me how he does it.”

“Any big crowd-pleaser,” Papa said, “any Mantle or DiMaggio or Mays can pull off a little voodoo at home games. Ump calls a strike on the corner, hometown hero turns and gives him a disgusted look, and all hell breaks loose. Strikes called on heroes aren’t what the fans pay to see. And the fans are a factor, Kade. They’re scary when they’re roused, believe me. Where hometown voodoo backfires, though, is when the ump is stubborn. And lots of ’em are. Fans start raggin’ a muley ump, he just gets pissed at Mr. Hero for showing him up and calls ’em even meaner.”

I nodded, and switched hands; I’d been stirring the Dutch Boy so long I had cramps. “Ted Williams, though,” Papa said, “was anything but a hometown hero. He had a coolness, a remoteness, that people mistook for arrogance when he first came into the league, and the fool Red Sox press, even the fans, managed to despise him for this. It was just small-minded nonsense. What they were booing was his concentration, after all. And Williams concentrated so well he didn’t give a damn about the press or fans. But after a couple seasons he realized that the hometown dislike
was
robbing him of the ump intimidation that creates hometown voodoo. If he was ever going to enjoy the advantages of a hitting hero, he was going to have to come up with something a lot more ingenious than the Disgusted Hometown Stare, see? So now listen to what he did!”

Papa paused at this point, put his palms together in front of his nose, and rubbed them so hard and fast it looked like he was trying to generate friction and set his face on fire. It was one weird gesture. I’d no idea
where
this one came from. “First off,” he went on, “Williams always understood
a crucial fact. He knew that it’s by working with what we’re given that we get really good at a thing. Our natures, our character, the way we feel at gut level, this stuff is as unchanging as the color of our eyes or hair or the shapes of our bones, is what I think. And since slobbering crowds and fawning reporters only distracted Williams from his job, which was crushing baseballs, he went right on snubbin’ ’em. Do you follow?”

I nodded.

“So where does following his nature get him? It makes him some nasty enemies in the stands and the press box, that’s for sure. Those enemies cost him at least two MVP awards. But down on the field it keeps him loose, let’s him live for his hitting, wins him a reputation as a player’s player and a real no-nonsense guy. And—getting back to the voodoo potential—it also earns him nothing but respect from every ump in the league. Because, believe me, umpires hate fans as much as fans hate umps.

“Fine and good. Next Williams strings together a couple great years at the plate, so that the sportswriters, much as they detest him, have to start begging him for interviews, because the fans, much as they hate him, are dying to know what makes the arrogant creep tick. But Williams sticks to his guns: he slams doors at reporters, slams line drives at the clucks in the bleachers, and leaves it at that. But writers have to write
something
, don’t they? That’s
their
nature. So they start winging it. They start making things up, churning out legends—Williams the Recluse, Williams the Crank Scientist, Williams the Genius, Williams the Unsung Hero—till first thing you know he’s baseball’s answer to Greta Garbo. And of course once this happens the writers forget all about their old dislike: they’d cross Boston on their
knees
to get an exclusive with the mysterious Splinter. And seeing all this, sensing the time is ripe, Williams finally strikes …”

Papa tried and again failed to ignite his nose. “One bleak Boston winter’s day Mr. Theodore No-Nonsense Garbo Splinter Williams finally grants some overjoyed worm of a writer an exclusive audience. Just asks the guy over, sets him down in his comfortablest chair, lets him fire away with the questions. Of course the dolt starts off with the usual: ‘What’s your favorite breakfast cereal?’ ‘Who do you like for President next election?’ ‘What’s the meaning of life?’ ‘How long’s your weenie?’ and so on. But Ted’s a fisherman in the off-season. He knows how to be patient. He sincerely and scientifically answers every query but the last. Then out pops the question he’s been waiting for: ‘How the heck do you
hit
so good?’

“And it’s voodoo time, folks!

“No-Nonsense leans back in his chair, looks as sincere and scientific as ever, and says, ‘Well, I study the pitchers very closely. My mechanics and bat speed are good. And I’ve got good concentration. But listen …’ And he suddenly swoops down and stares, like the hungry old owl he is, deep into the journalist’s little mouse eyes …” (Papa swooped down and stared into mine.) “And he says, ‘Everybody knows that there are quick wrists and slow wrists, but not many know that there are quick and slow
eyes
too. And
my
eyes …’ (Papa did some eyebrow push-ups, to let me know that these were the voodoo words) ‘are the key to my hitting, they’re my secret weapon. Because my eyes are so quick that I can see any pitch, even a fastball,
all the way in to where it jumps off my bat …’”

Papa stopped just long enough to squeeze back a laugh.

“Well, Kade, the writer is just hoodooed. Nobody has
ever
said anything like this! Hell, Ty Cobb hit .367 lifetime, and even
he
admitted that a good fastball was a blur and that every swing he ever took at one was just an educated guess. But not No-Nonsense. Not Theodore. He sees the
whole pitch
, clear on into and off his bat! So the writer humps it home to his typewriter, bangs out his story, flashes Williams’s astounding secret to the world. And when the umps (who already admire the dust Williams spits on) pick up their morning papers, they think
Jeepers creepers, what peepers!
and buy it lock, stock and barrel.”

Papa shook his head, and finally let his laugh fly. “That’s all it took, Kade! When the next season rolled around, Williams found his strike zone was damned near anywhere he wanted. The inside and outside corners had vanished. Every ump in the league had become his personal Wally MacCloud. Because what ump would
dare
contradict the baby blues that saw in a fastball not a blur, but a hundred and eight scarlet stitches on four fat white cheeks?
That
was voodoo, Kade. One well-placed fib, a lot of fan-snubbing, and Ted Williams puts together maybe the last .400 season we’ll ever see. If World War II hadn’t eaten his next three seasons, his career average and slugging percentage would’ve been right up there in the Next World with Tyrannosaurus Cobb and the Sultan himself. No doubt about it, Kade. Williams’s eyesight was good, but his voodoo was downright splendid!”

O
n August 6, 1945, Edward Conze—arguably the greatest Buddhist scholar of this century—was riding in a train through England when he opened his morning paper and read of Hiroshima, and of the world’s first nuclear attack. He later wrote, “I have a very deep stomach, and normally cannot be sick. But on this occasion I vomited straight out the window. This was prophetic insight. For at that moment, human history had lost its meaning.”

Two decades later, in the fall of his junior year of high school, Peter was forced in a class called Modern Problems to watch a film about a possible solution to the modern problem roughly known as “Russia.” This film was a black-and-white documentary, produced by the Pentagon. Its subject was one of the late-Fifties’ aboveground H-bomb tests in Nevada.

The military technicians who engineered the test may not have been the most artistic filmmakers of their day, but they were far from unimaginative. They recognized, for instance, that in blowing up an expanse of uninhabited desert there must be something more than miles of barren sand and sagebrush for the cameras to film and for the viewers’ minds to grasp. They therefore decided (rather like the third of the Three Little Pigs) to build a little brick house, to situate it exactly one mile from Ground Zero, and to make it the poignant, underdog star of their show, first by stocking and furnishing it with an array of animate and inanimate items that might be found in any American home at the time of a Russian nuclear attack, and then, of course, by attacking it.