The Brothers K (24 page)

That explains how Irwin and Scooter Basham (Duffy’s son, and the other defensive tackle on McLoughlin’s third-place team) ended up in the Basham basement shooting a few friendly games of eightball after school. But nothing (or nothing very complimentary) can explain how Irwin let himself get talked into playing for a dollar a game. Scooter was a notorious eighteen-year-old hustler who’d lived beside this very table for a decade. Irwin was a fifteen-year-old nudnink who called a cue “a pool pole,” the rack “the triangle,” and didn’t know stars-and-stripes from snooker from slop. There were also psychological factors to be considered: Irwin, though only a sophomore, was an all-league tackle and the apple of Coach Basham’s eye, whereas Scooter, a talentless senior, wouldn’t have played football at all if his virulent old man hadn’t been a hundred and ten percent determined to whip his great sulking hulk of a son into something more than a pool-hustling democrat. There was an economic factor to consider as well: Irwin was flat broke. But the existence of factors to be considered was never any guarantee that Irwin would consider them. He preferred to entertain happy thoughts, like how the flatness and greenness of the pool table made it look like a football field, and how he’d get to play offense instead of defense, and how the pockets gave him
six
places to make touchdowns instead of just one, and how he was ten times the footballer Scooter was, so what he lacked in experience he
could make up for with hundred and ten percent effort. It’d be close, he figured. “Sure, Scooter! Let’s play!”

The remarkable truth is that Scooter Basham never took a game from Irwin. He didn’t get the chance: Irwin sank the eight ball five straight games (once on his second shot, once on the break!) while Scooter just stood there clutching his eventually to be legendary belly and laughing till his jaws cramped. Then Irwin got serious: reaching deep down inside to tap his Hundred and Ten Percent Power Source, he opened Game Six with a great lunging “pool pole” thrust—and ripped a ten-inch gash in the felt of Scooter’s table. That took care of the laughter. It also brought on a pathetic little Basham basement catharsis: “If my old man wouldn’t kill me for wrecking his defense,” Scooter snarled, “I’d bust this cue right over your empty fuckin’ head!”

“Good thing he’d kill you!” Irwin chuckled.

“You owe me fifty-five bucks, shit-lips,” Scooter sputtered. “Five for the games, and fifty for a new surface.”

“Fair enough,” Irwin said. “But this is fun, Scoots! Let’s keep playin’.”

“Let me explain something,” Scooter fumed, grabbing the cue from Irwin’s hand. “This was
not
fun. I invited you here ’cause I needed some bucks and took you for a sucker. But I was the sucker. You’re too
dumb
to be a sucker. You’re too dumb to be a
shithead!
My old man says you’re dumber’n anything on four legs, let alone two. He says that’s why he likes you!

Feeling himself beginning to get angry, Irwin conjured an image of the Lord Jesus, smiled sadly, and said, “Sorry you feel that way, Scooter Booter.”

Scooter snatched Irwin’s rain slicker off a chair, started to fling it in his face, then had a better idea. “I’m keepin’ this for collateral,” he said. “Now get out ’fore I take your shoes and pants.”

“Fair enough,” Irwin said. And off he set—hatless and coatless in a cold November rain, with two miles to cover on foot—thanking Jesus that he hadn’t lost his temper.

The highway was flooded from shoulder to shoulder. The first passing truck soaked him so thoroughly that water filled his shoes. Some people may have found this situation conducive to resentment or regret. Others may have found it conducive to hypothermia. Irwin took a look at the impassable wetness and sopped shoes, whispered, “Perfect!,” stomped straight into an ankle-deep rivulet, and at the top of his lungs began to warble, “I’m
seeeeenging in the rain! Just seeeeeenging in the rain! There’s a smiiiiiiiiiile on my face! I’m haaaaaaaaapy agaaaaaaain … ”

As if he hadn’t been terminally happy in the first place. People in passing cars began honking and waving and spraying him on purpose. He sang and kicked and tried to splash them back. By the time he reached the two-lane bridge over the Washougal River he’d totaled his penny loafers but earned several horn ovations from vehicles in both lanes. His goal, he decided, would be to coax a few millworking football fans out of the taverns downtown to do some dancing and singing with him. But as he stepped out over the river he said, “Holy
smoly!”
and froze in his tracks.

The last time he’d crossed here there’d been a thirty-foot drop to a slow green pool below. He knew both bridge and pool exceptionally well, because he and Everett had been arrested and hauled into Juvenile Court the previous summer for jumping off the former into the latter. Today, though, the thirty-foot drop was filled with twenty-eight feet of caramel-colored floodwater …

What struck Irwin, what froze him at first, was sheer contrast: the long fall through warm summer air, all that empty space, solid water now. But as he moved out onto the bridge what began to impress him even more was the deception. Flooded though it was, the river was not raging: it was smooth-surfaced, like muscles, and surprisingly quiet as it shot beneath his feet. Yet the entire bridge hummed and vibrated with the force of the current, and there were trees in the water—not just driftwood logs but entire Douglas firs and massive old maples—moving easily as fast as the cars and trucks that passed just over them. Irwin watched a hundred-foot fir slide toward him, saw it slip, tip-first, down under the bridge, felt the sidewalk gritch and quake as limbs and chunks of root wad were torn from the tree by the girders beneath his feet. “Holy
smoly!”
he repeated.

At the far end of the bridge, three police cars and a metallic-green state motor pool sedan pulled over and parked in a row. Five Washington State troopers climbed out of the squad cars and huddled up, looking, in their bright yellow ponchos and big Smokey hats, like something that had escaped from a toy store. Meanwhile a man in a suit got out of the sedan, opened an umbrella, stuck a clipboard under his arm, bustled out onto the bridge, and commenced leaning out over rails, peering down at footings, and studying the vibrations set up by passing trucks and underpassing trees. Realizing they might be about to close the bridge, Irwin started toward them, hoping to eavesdrop. Then he noticed Greg Hervano among the troopers—the same cop who’d nailed him and Everett for jumping off the bridge last August, but a gung ho McLoughlin High football booster. Which explains the greeting Irwin gave him. “Hey,
fuzz!” he bellowed at the top of his lungs. Then he jumped into the gutter-stream and put some of his best Gene Kelly moves on. He’d just begun to wonder why he got so little response when he noticed that all five Smokey hats were now aimed upriver. Then he heard the yipping, turned upstream himself,

and saw the dog. Off-white, sopped, tiny—maybe nine inches at the shoulder. And it was looking at, yapping at, almost pleading with Irwin as it scrabbled and clawed to stay aboard the roof of a three-quarters-submerged doghouse that was drifting, fast, straight toward him.

“F
unny story about Lhosa,” Papa had said as we’d cleaned the paint paraphernalia. “Because of the eye, I guess, Benito didn’t like knuckleballs. Didn’t handle ’em any worse than anybody else, just hated ’em worse. For which reason, after we’d worked a few games and grown fond of each other, I started unleashing a surprise knuckler at him now and then, just to piss him off.” He glanced down at his paint-lined knuckles, and laughed.

“First few times I tried it, he just chewed me out in Español. When I kept it up, though, he got serious and took to firing the ball back so hard, in English, that it about burrowed through my hand. But baseball gets dull without the stuff and nonsense, so I still teased him with one once in a while. Then, late in the season, Benito came up with the perfect retaliation. What he did was start throwing knucklers back at me, right out of the crouch. Best damned floaters you ever saw. It was all I could do to knock some of ’em down. So it became a thing between us—me trying to catch him off guard with my half-ass knuckler, him making me dance around like a dolt trying to knock down his great one.

“So one time, against Freeport it was, in the ninth inning of a 3-to-2 or 4-to-3 game—can’t remember which, but it was our favor—I opened the inning by striking out a guy on straight fastballs, then went and hung a curve that some big meat bounce-doubled over the left-field fence. That put the tying run on second with one out, which was bad. But it also got my adrenaline going, which in those days was good. Benito signaled two fastballs, and this poor kid who was pinch-hitting swung so late on both he came closer to hitting Lhosa’s tosses back to me. So with the count at 0 and 2, Benito asked for a third straight heater, and I nodded, fine. Then I wound up and sent in a big fat floater. Damn good one too. Kid swung a
half hour early this time, and that was strike three and out number two. But before I could gloat or grin or anything, Benito caught it and squeezed it and fired back the damnedest revenge-knuckler I ever saw. A butterfly on dope, this thing looked like. I mean it was
everywhere
. I put my whole body in front of it, stuck out my mitt, missed it by six inches easy, but luckily the thing dove, smacked me dead in the thigh, and landed at my feet. Unluckily, though, my funny bone was turned on full blast now. And when that big meat of a base runner feinted toward third, even though he was the tying run, he struck me funny too. I stooped to get the ball to chase him back, but I was in stitches. And I just booted it,
smack!
A regular soccer kick, right toward the plate.

“Of course the runner broke for real now. But of course so did Benito. And even though I knew I should be running in to back up the plate or some such basebally strategy, I also knew Lhosa’s arm was so good and I’d booted the ball so hard that there was only one way this thing could turn out. So I just stood there, laughing myself sick, while sure enough Benito sprinted out, pounced, gunned it to third, nailed the poor meat by two yards, and that was the ballgame. But the great thing, Kade, was how the fans loved it—and they were
Freeport
fans. The great thing was, the Freeport
team
even loved it. Hell, the meat we’d gunned down at third even grinned and nodded to us as he left the field. Dumbest game-ending putout we’d all likely to live to see, and everybody seemed aware of it, united by it. They gave Benito and me a standing ovation, we gave them a bow, and for a minute or two there it felt like the Brotherhood of Man. The next day the Freeport paper said we’d obviously rehearsed the whole thing. Mama saved the piece, it’s in the attic somewhere. ‘The ol’ Fake-Miss, Kick and Throw Play,’ the writer called it. Baseball’s answer to the Harlem Globetrotters, he called Benito and me.”

O
fficer Hervano said later that it all happened incredibly fast. Irwin ran to the place where the doghouse would hit the bridge, clapped his hands to get the dog’s attention, started whistling and yelling, “Come here, girl—or boy! Come on, boy!
Good
boy!
Jump!”
And the dog whined and wagged its tail as if it wanted to do just that. Then Hervano spotted the chain attached to its collar, realized it must be attached to the doghouse (why else would the dog have stayed on the roof as a flood washed it away?) and, knowing Irwin as he did, set off at a dead run. Just as quickly,
Irwin climbed onto the concrete rail of the bridge. The other cops began waving their arms and bellowing
“No!”
Ignoring them, Irwin hooked the heels of his feet behind the aluminum handrail, then hand-walked his upper body down the concrete face of the bridge. One of the cops, Officer Worth, began firing off his gun. Irwin ignored that too. Hervano saved his voice and put everything he had into his sprint, but at the sight of Irwin’s hair and fingers dangling in that river his dash turned into the sort of lead-limbed, slow-motion running one does in nightmares. Worth fired more shots, and the whole Greek chorus of cops kept bellowing,
“NO! STOP! NO!”
Then the submerged doghouse hit the bridge and cracked like an eggshell, the dog slid with a
yipe!
into the river, Irwin sank one hand deep in its fur, and the crushed house was sucked under the bridge. Hervano was so close now that he could see the hopeless flex and strain of Irwin’s entire body as the river pulled the house and chain and dog effortlessly down
(I go to prepare a place for you)
. Then one heel slipped from the handrail—and still Irwin kept his grip on the fur. The river sucked the chained dog under; Irwin drew a deep breath; Hervano gasped
No!
as he lunged, got a hand on Irwin’s penny loafer, got two hands on it, started to pull.
But if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself
… The foot slid from the shoe.

Greg Hervano fell back onto the sidewalk, the ruined shoe in his hand. He said he could only hear, he couldn’t see, Irwin slide quietly into the river.

“T
he longest minutes of my life,” Hervano told my family and me that night, “were the ones I spent at the downstream railing, watching that smashed-up doghouse wash away down the Washougal—with no dog. And no Irwin.”

Papa shook his head, and stared at the pathetic shoe in Hervano’s hand. Mama smiled through tears.
“God
, Winnie!” Everett kept saying. “Why’d you
do
it?”

“I’ve been a cop ten years, and have seen a lot,” Hervano said. “But this one got to me. Milford and Worth blocked off the bridge, and Hymes called State, Search and Rescue, but we knew it was hopeless. We knew the body had to be right under that bridge, jammed up against a girder maybe, or tangled in a pile of limbs and logs. And it was that closeness, the fact that he was
right there
under me—”

“I was right thu-there under you all ruh-right!” Irwin shivered. “Bu-but I—”