The Brothers K (60 page)

“He’s the bitch!” Bet shrieked.
“He
is!
He
is!”

I had to shout to be heard, but I tried to shout calmly. “She’s hysterical,” I told Freddy. “Try to help her. Linda, we’re sorry about all this. But maybe you can help with Bet too.” Then I picked Mama up again, carried her straight into the kitchen, and kicked the door shut behind us.

I kept her in the bear hug even after she’d quit struggling. It felt weird, sick, wrong as could be, but I was afraid to let her go, so there we stood, breathing hard, listening to Bet’s frenzy. Not knowing what else to do, I tried polite conversation. “What do you do for hysteria anyway? Breathe in a paper bag?”

“I’m sick of this too,” she murmured into my shoulder. “I’m sicker than I can say of all this.” It wasn’t the answer to my question, but it sounded halfway sane. So I let her go, even tried to smile at her. And she smiled back—insanely—and raked her fingernails across my face. I grabbed her again, begged her to calm down. But she was crazy now, biting, kicking, throwing her skull back against mine, so
“Hoooof!” “Hoooof!” “Hoooof!”
we went. This was an astute businesswoman, this was my boss I was crushing. “I
hate
him,
hate
him,
hate
him!” Bet kept shrieking, while Linda just sobbed, and Freddy begged Bet to stop. My face hurt like hell. I was close to vomiting. And Mama just wouldn’t quit.
“Hoooof!”

Everett came staggering, hate-blasted and blood-smeared, through the door, glanced at us blindly, and left the house without a word.

Bet stopped screaming, but started gasping uncontrollably.

Linda and Freddy, both crying themselves, tried to soothe her.

Everett’s car started, died, started, roared, and tore wildly away.

Mama finally quit struggling, so I put her down, shielded my face, and jumped away from her fast. But she just stood there.

“You’re not a bitch,” I told her. “Nobody thinks that. Not even Everett. But you and he are nuts. You make each other crazy.”

She just stood there. Her blouse had my blood on it, and was ripped at the shoulder. The lipstick Ellen G. White said never to wear was smeared down onto her chin. I’d squeezed her so hard there was snot stopping one nostril. I said, “I hope I didn’t hurt you. But it’s sick. You two are killing this family. You’re hurting
everybody.”

She just stood there.

Papa was in Arizona with a head full of voodoo, breaking stuff and low outside corners. Peter was in Cambridge contemplating sutras, Sanskrit, bhajans and ghazals. Bet was still gasping, Linda still sobbing. “It’s okay,” Freddy kept lying. “It’s okay, it’s okay.”

I wished to hell I was smarter, or better at baseball.

You got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em, know when to walk away, know when to run
.

—Dostoevsky,
The Gambler
^*

A
few days after I punched him, Everett announced that he was going to Canada, then burned his draft card in front of a cheering campus throng that included FBI agents and a
Post-Intelligencer
photographer who immortalized the moment for Mama (the AP photo is still in the “EVERETT” box in the attic). Had he refused induction and been arrested, his punishment would have been real enough, and going to Canada meant that he’d made a choice to take a certain amount of suffering upon himself rather than to inflict it upon Vietnamese people. Yet his action seems to me to have meant far less than it might have.

The first flaw in Everett’s act of self-sacrifice was that it was aimed entirely at an audience. Not only did he announce his card-burning intentions and the exact place and time in his newspaper column, he also mailed letters to Olympia and Washington, D.C., inviting the likes of Dick Nixon, Dixie Lee Ray, Melvin Laird, Scoop Jackson and J. Edgar Hoover to come watch—and announced
that
in his column too. His devil-may-care example proved contagious: twenty other young men were inspired to stand beside him and burn their draft cards while hundreds of well-wishers cheered, sang and even wept. But that brings me to the other flaw: some of those twenty others were genuine students, so their
sacrifices were real. Everett’s academic career, on the other hand, had long been (what else?) a farce. By avoiding professors like Dr. Gurtzner, practicing plagiarism, cheating on tests, and stuffing his schedule full of fluffy Pass/Fail courses he’d been able to tread academic water into the spring of ’70. But for Everett the Legend, classrooms were just a guaranteed series of small crowds and coeds in front of which to perform.

I wouldn’t say that it was meaningless when Everett burned his draft card. When the repercussions set in, suffering would add some retroactive dignity to his initial performance. I’m just saying that his card-burning would have meant far more, on the day he did it, if he hadn’t already incinerated his life.

A
paper, written for Thurman Broyle’s eighth-grade Social Studies class, typifying a whole series of papers that earned Bet both her first F and her first eight mandatory interviews with the school counselor:

What I know about war isn’t much, but I do know we’re in one with Russia called The Cold War where no one wins because we all die a few minutes after it starts, and another one with Vietnam which my best brother is stuck in and my sickest brother ran away to Canada to skip out on. From listening in class I also know that the way to get a D on this paper is to say the solution to the Vietnam part of this problem is to quit fighting and bring our troops home. And since good grades mean more to me than anything, even my favorite brother’s life and his wife and new little baby’s happiness who I can hear downstairs crying as I write this, my solution to this problem is for us to
fight fight fight
and
kill kill kill
until we
win win win.

The big thing I’ve noticed about political assassinations is how my older brothers admired a politician named Lincoln and somebody shot him and one named Gandhi and somebody shot him and two named
Kennedy and somebody shot them both and one named Martin Luther King and somebody shot him too. Then I noticed how first President Johnson and now President Nixon pretty much talk gibberish and lie like rugs and all my older brothers except Irwin hate them. But nobody shoots them. So creeps survive. That’s my main political theory. Satan takes care of his own is what I believe, whereas look what God did to His only Son. So my solution to this modern problem is simple. All this country has to do to stop political assassinations is keep electing gibberish-talking, lying politicians who all my brothers except Irwin hate.

Thu-that, thu-that, thu-that’s all, folks.

—Porky Pig

A
pparently no self-respecting Folk Hero can depart for the Life of Exile directly. The legendary thing to do is hang around till your induction papers arrive, then Defy Authority yet again by rendering yourself Incognito and going Underground. To that end, Everett partied it up in the same old U-district haunts till he was on the verge of arrest. Then, in one busy day, he shaved his prodigious beard, chopped off his hair, closeted such telltale decals as his earring and Old Glory knee patches, purchased some nondescript wash-and-wear clothes from various secondhand shops, traded his big ol’ Pontiac battle cruiser in on a spent Oldsmobile 88 as nondescript as his clothes, and vanished.

But vanishing into an Underground turned out to be a bewildering disappointment to our hero. There is less to vanishing than meets the eye. A hundred percent less.

E
verett’s Underground, I found out months later, consisted of a series of cheap suburban Seattle motels furnished with telephones, upon which he spent several days fuming to various old cronies over the fact that with the exception of the one
Post-Intelligencer
photo, no campus, underground or city paper took any note of his departure. What was worse, Stoner Steve rented his room in the old hippie house to some squash-playing
business
major, “Give Chance a Peace” was replaced by a culinary question-and-answer column, and very few of his old friends seemed to
miss him at all. “Tough luck!” they’d say—as if his intentional sacrifice had been pure accident. “But I hear B.C. is really pretty. And don’t forget your fishin’ pole!” they’d add—as if lifelong political exile were some nifty little vacation. The only people who expressed any real regret over his expatriation were:

1. Papa—but then Papa, in the Hippie Churchill’s opinion, was just a naively apolitical, ball playin’ gomer. And his parting gift—a fly-tying kit—was almost as offensive as the “fishin’ pole” reminders of his friends.

2. Irwin—but in the same telephone conversation in which Irwin expressed sympathy, he claimed to actually be
liking
boot camp! His drill instructor was “funny,” he said. “Chewed up an entire orange, peeling and all, then spat it out and made
me
eat it! I about busted a gut!” he said. So it appeared, to Everett anyhow, that the once invincibly sweet Winnie was well on his way to becoming a typical brainwashed ’Nam grunt.

3. Natasha—but the first and last time Everett phoned her from Underground she shouted, “You dolt! You peabrain! Did you stop to think what you were doing? Do you know you can never see your family again? Do you know you’re a Canuck for
life
now? Did you know I happen to
like
this stupid country? Did you know I might have liked you too if you’d’ve just stopped being such an asshole? Do you know you should have
asked
me about this? Do you know I never want to see you again?”

“Huh,” our hero replied, long after she’d blammed down the receiver.

B
ecause of his need to remain invisible to law enforcement officials, Everett was plunged into an idle solitude which he found physically unbearable. He therefore began to take long, destinationless walks—fifteen, twenty miles a day—through all the sprawling parts of Seattle he’d considered too bourgeois to explore before. As these districts tended to be either industrial or suburban, and as his clothes and hair allowed him to blend in with the rest of humanity for the first time in years, this regimen of destinationless drifting left him feeling perfectly secure as far as FBI-avoidance was concerned. Where it did not leave him at all secure was in regard to his own identity:

Since he had no one to regale with political witticisms and no one to fume against, his two habitual energy sources—an audience and enemy resistance—had been stripped away, leaving him aimless and intellectually listless. And after three years of possessing the classic Revolutionary Hippie’s high visual impact, it was terribly disorienting to find himself ensconced in a face and garb that fit right in among the off-duty Boeing
workers, school kids and scuttling housewives. All the dash and glamour he’d come to think he exuded from his pores had abruptly ceased to exude. He now attracted no one, offended no one, felt like no one. Or less than no one—for in his purposeless wanderings he’d begun to feel inferior to every suburban man, woman and child he passed. These other folks carried tools, toys, purses, thermoses, wore purposeful expressions, spoke words to each other, went places for reasons. While he without his hair, earring or Old Glory patches drifted the rain-washed streets like some insignificant, diaphanous species of jellyfish. A common species at that.
Velella velella
perhaps.

But this was only life in the streets. It was when he’d return “home” to his featureless motel room that his new featurelessness grew truly aggressive, for it was here that he was forced to keep company with the disgustingly innocent-looking, bald-faced, boyish stranger who, according to the mirror anyway, was none other than himself. Could he really be this twitchy little shit who couldn’t sit still in a chair, couldn’t read anything longer than a magazine article without half falling to sleep, couldn’t fully fall to sleep without getting drunk, couldn’t do
anything
without talking to himself, justifying himself, narrating his life to himself, trying to cast himself in a thousand increasingly empty, soap-operatic, politically or sexually heroic roles? Had revolution revolutionized him so little? In his various stark motel rooms he now felt
constantly
the way he used to feel for only an hour a week—at the First Adventist Church of Washougal! Had three years of radicalism transformed his entire world into some kind of oversized
church service?!
Was he doomed, at least till his hair and beard grew back, to look, feel and behave like the kind of squirmy, whiny, pew-bound brat his mother used to call a “flibbertigibbet”?

He didn’t know. He knew almost nothing about himself. And the little he did know made him want to know less. “No question about it,” our hero told the boring cretin in the mirror at 2
A.M
. one night. “I gotta do somethin’, find somethin’. I need somethin’. Fast. What I must need, what I really really need, maybe, to get me through this thing, this tough period, if she can be trusted not to narc … is a woman. Yeah. That’s what I need.”

What Everett felt was technically only a desire, not a need. But this could have worked to his advantage, since genuine need is repugnant to the kind of robust, physically attractive, nonprofessional female co-athlete he felt the situation required. Unfortunately, when, many nights into his search, our hero spotted an exceedingly long, exceedingly cool, exceedingly red-dressed candidate in an infamous “meat market”-type bar,
his mere desire leapfrogged clean over genuine need and was swallowed alive by a howling red lust.