The Brothers K (95 page)

We howled.

Except for Bet. Who said, “Well, look who’s comin’.”

Major Keys had stepped out of the building and was marching toward us across the lawn. But it’s odd what a difference a little strategy can make: yesterday Keys’s approach would have filled us with panic. Today, according to our schedule, it wasn’t yet time to deal with him. So he suddenly didn’t matter. “Irwin made a batch o’ cards too once,” Marvin said, “when he was visitin’ us on the farm. I can’t think how old he was, but his front teeth were missin’. Christmas cards, they were, the usual Jesus and Mary and shepherds and cows. Except there was one we just couldn’t figure out. ‘Merry Christmas,’ it says across the top of the page. But the picture below is just this crayon drawing of a bloated-up, brown-bearded fat guy in a blue shirt and green trousers.”

“That was us!” Nancy Beal blurted. “I mean he sent that one to Randy and me! We never figured it out either!”

Marvin held up a hand. “Then listen! ‘Who the hell’s this guy?’ I ast ’m. ‘Geth!’ Irwin yells back. ‘This poor schnook’s got somethin’ to do with Christmas?’ ‘Yeth!’ he yells. ‘Santa in his youth?’ I ast. ‘NO!’ ‘Joseph on vacation, dressed for golf?’ ‘NO!’ ‘Give us a clue then, dang ya,’ Mary Jane says. ‘He’s from “Silent Night!”’ Irwin yells. Well, that left me outta the race. Janey’s the expert there. So she mumbles her way through every blasted verse, but doesn’t turn up a word about any overweight schnooks in blue shirts and green britches. ‘We give up,’ we finally tell’m. ‘Dummies!’ Irwin yells. ‘It’s Round John Virgin!’”

There was another roar of laughter—till we noticed that Major Keys had joined right in. “Who invited
him?”
Uncle Truman muttered.

“Mind your manners,” Mama said. But I sided with Truman. It irks me to see people enjoying the very things they’re destroying.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” Keys said. “But seeing you out here—and noticing a pregnancy, and a senior citizen, and the baby and all—I wasn’t sure you were familiar with our Southern California heat. You know, sunstroke is not uncommon here.”

“We appreciate your concern,” Mama said.

“One other thing.” The Major was wincing now, as if it physically pained him to inconvenience us in any way. “I’m afraid the grounds-keepers are about to turn on the sprinkler system. Not to force you back into the parking lot, you understand. We just need to keep things spruced.”

“If you were familiar with our Southern California heat,” Nancy Beal said, “you might water after dark so as not to scorch your grass.”

“Please mind your manners, Nancy,” Mama said.

“It’s how I treat my own lawn,” she muttered.

“Your group’s health and comfort in this heat, ma’am,” the Major told her. “That was my concern.”

“You
should
be concerned,” Sister Harg growled. “She’s nine months pregnant, I’m eighty-three years old, driving down here wore us out, and it
is
hot. We’re not sleeping nights either. But we were Irwin’s Sabbath School teachers, Major. We believe what we taught him. He believes what he learned. And knowing what you’re doing to him for holding to that belief, we couldn’t leave here if stayin’ killed us.”

“I doubt that staying is going to kill you, ma’am,” Keys replied. “But in a moment I’m afraid it’s going to get you wet.”

He’d begun to make me furious, but my fury was feeling impotent,
when an odd thing happened. Apropos of nothing, Uncle Marv said, “There was a fine major named Keys, who thought love for the Lord was disease …”

I was so surprised that my mind went blank—and Mary Jane just spun around and glared at Marvin in disgust. But Sister Harg, hardly missing a beat, growled, “Till a bunch of dumb hicks from the Washington sticks came and brought the big lug to his knees.”

“Amen,”
said Papa. And there was a fresh roar of laughter. And this time the Major didn’t join in. Papa looked around in the grass, located a sprinkler head, scooted right over next to it, and lit a fresh cigarette. Nancy Beal found another head and aimed her big round belly at it. The Brother set his little blue football on one, and got ready to try to catch it. Harg and Mama didn’t move. Neither did the rest of us. It was pure childishness. But childishness seemed appropriate to an army drafted by love for a guy like Irwin.

“You’re holding us captive, Major,” said Sister Harg. “You’ve got something that belongs to us. We can’t leave without it.”

“Believe as you choose, ma’am,” he said. “But don’t blame me for the consequences.”

He spun on his heel, and marched back the way he came. But he was looking less and less the smug autocrat, and more and more a thrall to regulations that had utterly failed to take the likes of us into account.

“Mighty quick with the ol’ limerick there, Ethel,” Mary Jane remarked when he’d gone.

Sister Harg shrugged, and glared innocently off across the lawn.

“I think we got ourselves a little security leak,” Marvin said, grinning.

The Sister managed to keep glaring, but her mouth had begun to twitch wildly—when the sprinklers came on, and saved her.

T
he following morning we gathered our troops and transportation early, donned our best duds (which wasn’t saying much), drove to the headquarters of the Southern California Seventh Day Adventist Conference down in Anaheim, made a rickety but memorable mass entry into their lobby, and listened with utter earnestness (“as if you’re sitting in church, but liking it” was the stage direction Peter had given us) while our spokesman, Elder Joon, told a gaping secretary, then a stunned Elder, and finally one Dr. Bryce Brumfeld, president of the Conference, that he was
himself an ordained Elder from Loma Linda University, that we’d come to them with a life-and-death crisis, that we believed no one but the Conference could help us, that time was of the essence, and that we would like to describe our difficulty to as many distinguished churchmen and Elders as could conveniently be convened.

It was not your ordinary business greeting. We were soon jammed, again en masse, into Dr. Brumfeld’s office, where we attracted four glowering Elders, a couple of deacons, and one nervous secretary. Elder Joon tried to be quick but hard-hitting in outlining Irwin’s situation. Puffing himself up like a rooster, he painted for the Elders, in their own pompous vernacular, a picture of a war which virtually all of America’s conscientious congressmen, clergymen and churches now publicly opposed, then portrayed Irwin as a young man who, “thanks to the admitted confusion of an esteemed but tragically mistaken clergyman” (Babcock), had been sent “directly from his wedding to this fine Adventist girl” (Linda blushed beautifully, right on cue) “straight into that un-Christian chaos in Vietnam.” At this point Peter handed each Elder and deacon a xeroxed copy of Babcock’s letter of retraction. He then had Bet illustrate the result of Babcock’s mistake by reading a few passages from Irwin’s “Zaccheus” letter. With that, Elder Joon moved on to the present crisis. He briefly described the capture and execution of the Vietcong boy. He described Irwin’s toothpaste attack on Captain Dudek. He scrupulously avoided mentioning that Irwin’s Army peers and Captain Dudek were united in their claim that the Cong boy was a nonexistent delusion. He then handed the Elders copies of Irwin’s sanity-trial testimony, pointed out that Irwin had been sedated, admitted that the testimony might have been somewhat difficult for military judges and “secular psychiatrists” to interpret, but majestically concluded that “to unbiased Christians such as yourselves, Irwin’s words and actions can clearly be seen as a devout Adventist’s misguided but courageous attempt to stand by his faith in an impossible situation.”

Joon was proving a marvelous diplomat. I couldn’t imagine a much better presentation of Irwin’s case. But the situation had obviously strained the Elders’ imaginations to their limits. He next tried to tell them about what “the prodigal brother, Everett,” had done for Irwin’s sake. “An agnostic and a draft-dodger,” Joon marveled, “yet he knowingly returned home to a prison sentence just to deliver his heartfelt message to his brother’s church! And I tell you, gentlemen, I’ve heard some wonderful sermons in my life, but I have
never
been more deeply moved!”

This was his first major blunder: all but one of the men Joon was
addressing were preachers who thought rather highly of their own sermons. And to think they’d been outdone by an agnostic! You could see the Elders closing up like anemones. You could feel our scruffiness begin to grate against their conservatism. But then I heard sniffling, turned—and saw that Bet and Freddy, then Mama and Linda, and finally even Brother Beal were all in tears at the thought of what Everett had done. (What had happened was that Peter, seeing Joon’s crisis, had given a secret
“Cry now!”
signal to the twins. But when they’d started to sniffle, the other three had spontaneously joined them—and the twins were so moved that their forced tears became real!)

Though Randy Beal got some odd glances, the Elders seemed to grow receptive again. Then Joon threw down our only real trump card: he described the symptoms of Irwin’s so-called insanity. Told them, for instance, how up until the electroshock and sedatives stripped him of his ability to speak, he had recited Memory Verses and sung Sabbath songs day and night, and had begged Christ for forgiveness constantly. “The sole response to this behavior by the asylum staff?
Up the dosage!”

Some of the Elders—Brumfeld in particular—had begun to look a little riled. But then one of them, the most wizened and sly-looking, said, “Sometimes insane people feel they
are
Christ. How do we know this young man isn’t one of
those?”

Elder Joon was about to say something to reassure this old earwig, but Mama blazed up first. “He was begging the Lord for help and forgiveness! That’s called
prayer
, Elder!”

I didn’t blame Mama, but that could have been the ballgame right there: you don’t go telling a roomful of Adventist patriarchs what prayer is. But Dr. Brumfeld and Elder Earwig were apparently on the outs—because Brumfeld immediately defused the situation by smirking at Earwig, then asking exactly what it was we wanted of them.

So Joon filled them in on Operation Squeeze. And—bless their self-righteous souls—all the Elders but Earwig seemed mildly intrigued. If I’d been Sister Harg I think I might’ve put the spurs to ’em with one of those gnarly
Amens
of hers. But when Brumfeld mused aloud that they might in fact be in a position to help, Linda dashed forward and gave him a hug and a kiss on the cheek. (Peter’s stage directions again: the guy was shameless!) But Randy Beal’s eyes welled when she did it. And old Brumfeld looked pretty stoked himself.

The Elders got down to business. Phone calls were made, and medical experts enlisted; times were set, and rendezvous points established. Hands were solemnly shaken, and gratitude copiously expressed.

·  ·  ·  ·

W
e drove back to the Red Desert Motor Inn, spent the rest of the day preparing for what we hoped would be a final showdown, then tried our best to sleep. But at 1
A.M
., fed up with tossing and turning, I stepped outside, snuck up alongside Truman’s camper, heard my uncle snoring, just as I’d hoped, then nearly stepped on Papa, who was sitting alone on the camper’s bottom step. He’d snuck out for the same reason as me, though: soon as he saw me he slipped inside, stole three more of Truman’s beers to go with the one he’d already been drinking, and we strolled round to the little dead lawn on the far side of the motel to drink them.

The night was clear—or clear for LA. Not many stars, but lots of airplanes and crickets. We were just pouring the beer down, hardly saying a word, when Papa stirred and said, “What we really need, you know, is a song.”

I didn’t know it, actually. I’d been leaning more toward a third beer myself. And when Papa started singing, “I Gave My Love a Cherry”—my childhood favorite—it embarrassed me. It felt a little sentimental, a little forced. It wasn’t like him to act like this. But after just a few bars he started to cough. Which sort of left things hanging.

So I sang it. Soft as I could. But twice—that was our tradition. It was the first time I’d ever sung to anyone but Nash, or Bet and Freddy when they were little. It felt odd the first time through—as if I was the father and Papa the kid. But by the second time I was pretty well used to it. And when we went in afterward, we both fell right to sleep.

I
don’t know what Major Keys thought, the next morning, as we stepped once again across the asylum parking lot. All I know is that at some point he must have looked out, seen us, and realized in an instant that the game between us had changed. It wasn’t the glowering trio of three-piece-suited, Bible-toting patriarchs who changed things: self-important as they appeared, they were obviously just disgruntled churchmen. The two earnest-looking professional men weren’t a worry either. Though one of them
was
carrying a medical bag, there was no regulation or reason that forced Keys to let him in. No, it was just the frizzy-headed young woman and the hippie fellow who changed things. She with the notebook, in which she was busily scribbling. He with the two cameras hanging
backwards from his neck and the long-lensed Nikon busily in hand. And over by the palm trees, the big bald guy: yes, that
was
a TV camera on his shoulder. And yes, it was rolling as we marched up to the MP-guarded gates …

A frightening invention, mass media. The alchemical equivalent of a military uniform, in a way. Slip a uniform on a young man, whoever he may be, and his values, his judgment, even his relationship with his own inner world instantly change—
must
instantly change. But train a media camera or journalist’s pen upon a united group of men, women and children, whoever they may be, and they too don a sort of uniform. We could feel it as we approached the asylum: the cameras were casting us in an entirely new light. On a TV screen or in a photo essay the same hick-town homeliness that made us laughable to Keys became our most potent weapon. THE BIBLE VERSUS THE PENTAGON! headlines could roar. We were no longer people: we were images. The tearful wife, infant at her breast (
CAPTION
: “I
only want to see my husband!”)
. The grimly pious mother and appropriately haggard ballplayer father (
CAPTION:
“They drug him because he prays!”)
. The defiant old Sabbath School marm, growling out a hymn as she dragged her tweaked carcass along behind a walker (
CAPTION:
“Hallelujah!”)
. How we looked to Keys no longer mattered. In the eye of the camera we were a walking, talking Norman Rockwell painting. Or worse. The climax of one of those abysmally happy old Frank Capra flicks, maybe. And Keys surely saw at a glance that he hadn’t a snowman’s chance in hell of landing the Gary Cooper or Jimmy Stewart role …