The Brothers K (56 page)

Everett swiveled round to face her now. The eyes were definitely not bright, the hair a lank blond, the clothes impossible. On the other hand, the hips and thighs were trimmer and the legs not as short as the belly led one to expect. And the breasts, truth to tell, were really
quite
large. “Don’t get excited,” he said, “but I
am
Cat Stevens.”

Hearing this, the woman skooched her legs around each other, jingled her bells, leaned toward Everett till their shoulders touched, and laughed and squirmed the sorts of laughs and squirms that Jehovah may have witnessed on the day He created misogyny. The Cosmos kept its balance, though, because Everett was meanwhile leering the sort of testicular leer that Kali may well have had in mind when She inspired Man to create asbestos, carcinogenic beer and the trenches of World War I. Somewhere along in here Peter finally did begin to feel nauseous. But, again contrary to Everett’s theories about him, this nausea was not self-centered or self-preserving: it was entirely on his brother’s behalf. “What is
wrong?”
Peter was thinking. “What’s happened to Everett?” Because to be doing what he was doing, it seemed obvious to Peter that Everett must despise himself. The irony was that Everett was trying to love himself—and it was coming to the same thing.

At any rate, Pete wanted to help him. And the only way he could think to do this was to break the claim these two strangers were making on each other. He had no idea how to go about it. He felt stupid and half sick as he spoke. But he loved his brother. So in his dorkiest, most overstated attempt at a G. Q. Durham accent, he drawled, “Don’t get yerself all excited ’bout this either, ma’am, but I’m Cat’s younger brother, Dog!”

Maybe it was the word “ma’am” that got her. Too close to reality. Whatever it was, the woman, or old girl, or female bellbottomed person turned and looked at Peter so coldly that a big part of him wanted to just pour his beer on her head and walk away. But then he noticed Everett giving him the same cold look! It was a shock. It sent a jolt of despair through him. But it also made him mad enough to keep on fighting. “You’ve caught me out!” he said in a stuffy New England accent. “Most astute of you,
ma’am
. The truth is, I’m Cat’s older brother, Wallace. I sell insurance mostly, but write the occasional poem. Do you know my work at all?”

This separated them a little: Everett’s poetic pretensions compelled him to smile faintly, while Bellbottom-Person just lit a Salem, then eyed Peter’s face as though, in a moment, she might need a place to stub it out.
Okay
, Peter thought.
Stick with Stevens. Divide and conquer them with verse
. And fortifying himself with a glug of beer, he turned to Bellbottom-Person and said, “Let me refresh your memory.” Then he shut his eyes, and slowly, pompously recited:

This did seem to divide them, but not in the way Peter had hoped. It confused the wiggles clean out of Bellbottom-Person. But Everett spun around to give him a look that said there’d be blood spilt if he didn’t back off.

Peter considered it. Out of anger, but also out of regard for his deluded brother, Peter the Hindu/Buddhist/Pacifist seriously considered punching his lights out and dragging him out the door. But when he noticed the woman eyeing them, thrilled to think that she’d been the cause, in less than one Oly, of both poetry and potential violence, he sighed, turned away, and refilled his glass.

Getting back to what she apparently considered the point, Bellbottom-Person
showed her canyonesque cleavage to Everett and said, “Why, silly boy, did you think I wouldn’t like Cat Stevens?”

“The truth is,” Everett told her, “I could tell you loved Cat Stevens the instant you sat down. I just wanted us to have an argument. That way we’d have a little history.”

“Your strange!” she gushed. (She meant “You’re,” but Peter felt absolutely certain that she was one of those people who spell it “Your.”)

“It worked.” Everett shrugged.

“Your sweet,” she cooed.

“I know,” said he.

That did it for Pete. He jumped off his stool and gasped, “Gimme your car keys. Gimme your address. I gotta get outta here.”

“What kind of car do you drive?” the woman asked Everett, somehow ignoring all of Peter’s outburst but the word “car.”

“A big ol’ Pontiac battle cruiser,” Everett growled, duplicating her feat.

“I think maybe
your
the big ol’ Pontiac battle cruiser!” she giggled.

“The keys!” Peter wheezed. “Now.”

Everett spun on him a second time. “Lay off!”

Then, with a wriggling and giggling and tinkling of bells, Bellbottom-Person said, “I can, uh, give you a lift, Cat. I drive a li’l ol’ ’68 Firebird!”

For a moment Pete kicked himself for bringing up the fatal subject of cars. But when Everett flashed his perfect teeth at her and replied, “I think maybe
you’re
the li’l ol’ ’68 Firebird!” Peter realized he could have said, “The oracle demands your exhausted crustaceans!” or “Fire off the Number Eight flea coffin!” and the results would have been exactly the same. Then he realized something else: he had just seen enough of his big brother to last for years. And Peter has always been quick to act on an understanding: saying nothing, he headed straight for the door.

“Need these?” Everett smirked, jingling his keys.

Pete kept walking.

“Takin’ a taxi?”

Peter never slowed or turned.

“I didn’t give you my address!”

The windowless door opened. Everett squinted. Peter’s silhouette was black, the day bright white. Then the door closed, he was gone, the silhouette remained long enough to turn from green to red, then it too vanished. “If you ask me,” Bellbottom-Person declared, “your brother Wallace is a real jerk!”

“Who asked you?” Everett muttered, feeling as shabby, suddenly, as he really was. For the instant Peter vanished he not only missed him, but
realized that he was using the woman to punish Peter for trading baseball in for Buddhism, and to punish Natasha for not buying into his revolution, and to punish Mama for her Puritanism and Babcock for his peabrain and Camas for being Camas and on and on and on.

I’m an idiot!
he thought. I
should run after him!

But even as he thought it he settled down on his stool, turned back to the woman, and slowly refilled their glasses.

P
eter made his way, by city bus and thumb, to the airport, spent the night on three molded plastic chairs, flew to Boston the next day, and didn’t set eyes on Everett again for nearly four years.

Everett and Bellbottom-Person drank two more pitchers, smoked up her Salems, made a plan to drive to a nearby motel, stepped outside together—and in the rich evening light, as he strolled along with his arm around her, Everett looked down and saw a face so incurably forlorn and sad and hungry that even the breasts she now rubbed against him were no help at all.

They reached the li’l ol’ Firebird. It was the same lime green as her pants.

The mind rushes on, a drunk elephant
.

—Kabir

A
nother Friday night, another party for Everett, and in the crowd again this evening was the incomparable Natasha, whose garb, goddammit, he aimed to vaporize and whose parts he planned to plunder just as soon as he hit on the correct technical approach. He was getting frustrated, though. He’d had to put himself rather heavily under the influence of Dr. Alcohol to protect his magic tongue from Natasha’s debilitating gaze, and so far the difference between mute imbecility and drunken magniloquence had not seemed to impress her. His first assault had consisted of inserting himself in a political argument she was having with some drooling poli-sci prof, and pouring out some icebreaking innuendo which used diplomacy as a metaphor—“all hostilities must be suspended,” “opposing forces must sit down face to face, in the same quiet place,” “meaningful maneuvers must come from both sides,” et cetera.

“Are you drunk?” she’d interrupted. And her eyes! They physically hurt him!

“No,” he lied.

“Then you’re an asshole,” she said.

“I’m drunk!” he cried.

“Too late,” she said. “I believed you the first time.”

Which wasn’t so unbearable. But it was her eyes that really did the damage! So beautiful, so expressive, and no mistaking their message:
“Asshole!”
they said. Damn! A few more seconds in the heat of that gaze and his nose would have spiraled up his sinuses and left a big red sphincter sitting in the middle of his face! It took him a full hour and two beers to regroup.

His second assault was made on the tail of an outburst by his old buddy Hank, a staunch SDSer (“Suckers for a Dumb Slogan,” Everett called them). Hank was a doctoral student in philosophy and, once upon a time, an eloquent guy, but several years of demonstrations, knee-jerk Marxism, hash-smoking and daytime TV had pared the tree of his knowledge down into a sort of bonsai. This evening, however, Hank had dusted off an old brain lobe or two, entered a sewing circle that included Natasha, and was soon loudly proclaiming that the bloody Gandhians, Martin Luther Kingians and Catholic peace workers should stop trying to shove their nonviolence doctrine down everybody’s throat. “It’s time the People got pissed!” he was soon happily bellowing. “It’s time some honky butt got kicked!”

It fascinated Everett to get to watch it from a distance: with a smile so beautiful that Hank didn’t seem to mind, Natasha serenely informed him that he was a moron. Hank looked miffed—till he glanced at her eyes: then he accepted her assertion without protest. But since he was only a moron, not an asshole, she was polite enough to offer a little corroborating evidence; she even tried to couch it in bonsai vocabulary. “The thing is, Hank,” she said, “if you kick the right honky butt, it’ll turn around and make tear-gassed, riot-clubbed hamburger out of your defenseless own.”

“You’re saying there’s a trade deficit,” Hank put in.

Natasha smiled. “More like a missile gap,” she said. She then went on to assert that Gandhian nonviolence and “every other deep New Testament or Buddhist or Vedantist value” was an inextricable condition of peace whether Hank liked it or not. “You just can’t fight for peace,” she said, “without fighting for what lies at the heart of the world’s great spiritual traditions.” And Everett was suddenly reminded, uncomfortably, of a certain long-lost brother of his.

“You call
hellfire
a value?” Hank roared in rebuttal.

“I call hellfire a threat,” Natasha said, “and ‘love thy neighbor’ a value. But I believe in hell, or something close to it. I think hell is what we get right here on earth when people trade their spiritual and political values in on spiritual and political threats.”

Hank seemed impressed, though it may have just been the scenery. But then Natasha committed the rookie mistake of trying to say something sincere and complicated at a party. Her little speech had to do with the tension between Christianity’s belligerent, supremist dogmas and its original universal compassion, and Everett found himself reluctantly liking her general drift. But when she tried to illustrate her point by reaching into her favorite cookie jar—Russian lit—and declaring Tolstoy’s late Christian novels inferior to his earlier, nonsectarian work, the buzzer went off on Hank’s attention span. “I understand what you’re driving at,” he said. “But it’s just book talk, Natasha. Student and professor talk. A campus is a flat little world, sweetie babe. And when you sail out over the edge, you really do fall off. By which I mean it’s weirder and uglier than you think out there. By which I mean I speak from experience. By which I mean screw Tolstoy. You wanna find out what Christians really believe these days, just flip on your TV Sunday morning. I hate to disappoint you, Natasha, but there’s no tension left between dogma and compassion out there at all. It’s pure-D belligerence all the way!”

“Now wait!” Natasha interrupted. “I’ve got Catholic Worker friends who bend over backwards to cooperate with—”

“Catholic Workers!”
Hank howled. “Listen, honey bunny. Catholics, outside our flat little campus, are just a pack of archaic weirdos. Their Latin, their Eucharist, their wine and bread and Pope may have wowed the Middle Ages, but that’s all a lotta Satanic hooey to the TV believer of today. The blood and body have had it, toots. What the Christians want now ain’t wine and bread or even Tolstoy’s worst novels. What the Christians want now is—”

“Sugar!” Everett interrupted.

“Huh?” went Hank.

“C&Hianity!” Everett said.

“He’s drunk,” said Natasha.

“You wish,” retorted Everett. “But think about it. The Crusaders, the Conquistadors, the British Navy, the U.S. Cavalry and every other form of Christian Soldier has had it. They
already
stole all the gold from all the brown people. And like Hank was saying, Neo-Christians don’t want gold anyway. After a brutal day at the factory, office or bulldozer and a deadly
drive home through the rat-hour rush, the evening cocktail has become to Industrial Man what vespers was to the Medieval Christian. But those who total-tee for Jesus fight the same traffic, get the same deep-fried nerves, have the same basic need. And for them that cocktail is taboo. For them the sugar rush is the only legal buzz remaining. And that’s where the pure cane white folks at C&H come in.”

“Told you he was drunk,” Natasha said to Hank.

“You wish,” Everett shot back. “But the Fundamentalists’ terror of cocktails, and their resultant mass addiction to sugar, has enabled C&Hianity to quietly replace Christianity as the principal religion of the industrialized world.”

“Right,” Natasha sighed.

But Everett scrupulously avoided her eyes, and by now a little crowd had gathered, and Everett loved nothing—not even the sight of Natasha’s blue jeans—more than he loved to play a crowd. “There’s more than one kind of gold to squeeze out of a tribe of brown folks, and more than one way to squeeze it. C&Hianity’s way is to buy up vast tracts of tropical rain forest, pay the native people to clear-cut, burn, bulldoze and plow their own homeland, and quickly plant that land in sugarcane so that when the natives come to their senses they’ll have nothing native left to return to. They then keep a very close eye on the natives’ teeth—because C&H scientists have discovered that it takes
exactly
as long for a native people to forget their traditions and become brownish but otherwise reliable White Folks as it does for their lovely white teeth to turn brown.”