The Brothers K (74 page)

The word “stunning” may describe this meadow. But not “stunning” the adjective: this yellow hit like a fist. This was Stunning the Noun. And in Its presence (odd as this may sound) Everett the Noun vanished.

Want proof that I vanished? Probably not, knowing you. But being the skeptical sort, I do. So let me mull this event over a little:

You and I didn’t make it close enough to Spring for you to learn this about me, but I’ve never liked to pick flowers. Blossoming is a sexual activity, and anything engaged in sex ought, it seems to me, to be left alone. Yet in the lake of buttercups, the instant after I vanished, what remained in my place dropped Stunned to its knees and began, regardless of my opinion, to pick buttercups as fast as it could work its fingers.

Looking back on it now, I suspect this was an act of pure gratitude not on my part, but on the part of the entire headland. My part, I think, was just to stumble into some sort of primordial Gratitude Zone. I’m making this up as I go along, but doesn’t it seem obvious that when a wild headland feels the sun after six months of rain, colorlessness, cold and whatever it calls its winter loneliness (only the
old spruce trees can pronounce this word right, and it takes them all six winter moons to do it), it, the headland, goes on a growing and blooming and mating and sprouting spree? And at the height of this spree isn’t it possible that all that burgeoning life and energy could pile up in certain places, just the way dead leaves and melancholy pile up in places in the Fall, forming little springtime ecstasy zones—places you might call “over-joyed”? And having survived the same rain, cold and six-moon-spruce-tree-word-for-loneliness, couldn’t my bones and blood have become sufficiently entwined in the whole process that when I stumbled into the Buttercup Zone, kapoof! I vanished in it, and was able to think and feel nothing but the headland’s rapturous involvement in sunlight and groundwater and warming soil and rising sap and photosynthesis and blinding color and life, life, life? That’s sure how it felt, Tasha. And knowing my taste in these matters, it seems even now that it could only have been a piece of the headland itself, not an Everett, that dropped to its knees and began, without thinking or qualm, to admire itself by harvesting a few of its own beautiful blossoms.

Was that a proof? Sure doesn’t look like one to me. Yet when the headland let me go today I had its small, ecstatic, bright-yellow answer to Winter in my hand. And as I write these lines that answer is standing in a red and white Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup can (I’m eating the can’s previous tenants) in the center of the bright red kitchen table. And I wish I was poet enough to show you how they take the red table-top and the two blue candles and the grease-pearled bowl of industrial broth and even the label of the can (“SOUP IS GOOD FOOD!” it cries) and turn it all into a still life, a work of art, a thing of beauty. But boy am I not that poet.

I feel myself on the verge of getting silly now—probably to hide from another bad habit of mine: loneliness. But I promised when I sat down tonight to try my very best to show you two simple things without voicing my silliness, or my loneliness. One was this bouquet of buttercups. The other was the moment I vanished, and allowed them to harvest themselves.

Here they are, Natasha.

Goodnight.

I
rwin was not court-martialed for his attack on Captain Dudek. What the Army chose instead was to give him a battery of psychiatric tests and a sanity hearing.

Ten days after this hearing, a pale green nine-by-twelve envelope arrived at our house in Camas, addressed to “Mrs. Irwin D. Chance.” It had come from the Colonel James Loffler Mental Health Center—a military-run mental institution in Mira Loma, California, east of Los Angeles. There were two documents inside. The first was a three-page letter from the head of Loffler Center, an Army major and doctor of psychiatry named Richard Keys. It told, briefly and technically, of the attack on Dudek, of the damage to his lips, tongue, gums, teeth and hands, of the two concussions and “slight” skull fracture Irwin had received from Dudek’s rescuers, of the eyewitness accounts, expert psychiatric testimony and other evidence given at the hearing, and of Irwin’s permanent release from active duty on psychiatric grounds. It said that Irwin had been flown shortly after his hearing from Saigon to Los Angeles and Mira Loma, where he’d been diagnosed as psychotic and violent and confined in the appropriate ward. It did not once mention the Vietcong boy. It did say that by the time we received the letter, Irwin would have been given “EST”—a term that baffled us till Major Keys began to elaborate on its benefits. Then it terrified us: EST, we realized, was electroshock therapy. Major Keys added that Irwin’s chances for “the fastest and most complete recovery possible” would be “enhanced by a simple, carefully controlled environment.” For that reason, he said, “the presence of any visitors, especially his loved ones, would add little but agitation and confusion at this delicate juncture.”

The second document in the envelope was a stenographer’s transcript of the account Irwin gave, at his sanity hearing, of his attack on Dudek. Major Keys had included it, he told Linda, “to help give you and your family at least a partial picture of your husband’s unfortunate condition.” But it did better than that. It painted us a near-complete picture—of a man declared insane for simply being himself.

Here is the transcript:

I know I hurt Captain Dudek and I like Captain Dudek. But the thing is, Linda. Nash has your ears she wrote me. So think. An ear. So
small! I never met my son yet, but picture him. Picture his ears, like I did on that Cong boy. Because don’t they, ears, work because of tiny little bones? Doesn’t nothing but the wiggles our voice makes on air vibrate them? So imagine! The perfect delicateness! Or delicacy the word is. Of such bones. And my son has your ears she said. Linda. Then here this little Cong boy was, see? With one ear, my son I never met, all bloody where that guard, that idiot New Jersey hit him, never thinking, good God, what we must have done to make him want to kill Bobby or us or anybody else on earth. I mean how many little kids you know want to kill? And if they do, why? Who did what to them first? So what we did to his father, or to the mother who carried and bored him, or birth
[laughs]
, you know, gave birth, I’m bad at words. But what happened to her, who he loved and who loved him. That’s what I was feeling. And now paint her white or black or some American color. Make her my mother, or yours. Then make her dead. And now make him your own little brother, out there trying to kill her killers. Now it’s different, isn’t it? Now he’s courageous, isn’t he, and you love him, don’t you, because.

Ha
[laughs]
. Okay. I see you don’t want to. They’re the enemy, I know, we’re here to kill them, I know, and if I wasn’t raised like I was or didn’t have a baby or hadn’t seen him so close maybe I could have kept him an enemy too. But after they shot him and I lay there knowing it was a child, a brave little brother, it was my own baby’s ears we’d just shot, how can love ever operate in the Army is what I started feeling. Because isn’t that the real problem here? It sure is
my
problem. ’Cause I’m a Christian. Or was. And Christ’s love doesn’t work, is what we feel in the Army. That kind of shit gets you killed here, it’s an eye for an eye here, if Christ’s love was real this whole war couldn’t be happening. That’s what we feel. But after he was gone and I’d so barely tried to stop them, how would I know, is what I started feeling. Because how can Christ’s love operate anywhere, ever, if some fool doesn’t just start to operate it? Some do, you know. Operate it I mean. Like here! This guy right here! Take a bow, Sergeant Felker! Okay don’t. But he saved my life, this big fella. He doesn’t even like me
[laughs]
, but he crawled back to a place that could’ve got him killed just to save me. And that’s love, see? Right here in the United States Army.

Except usually, I started thinking, right before the toothpaste thing, these thoughts were, usually it comes too late. Army love I mean.
Retroactive!
That’s the word! Ha. These sedatives aren’t so bad.

Retroactive love. That’s the kind the Armed Forces has. The one kind that never does anybody any real good. Because Bobby Calcagno, let’s get him into it here, let’s admit he’s the reason for every bit of this. But I loved Bobby too, and knew him better than most of you, maybe. And a little enemy boy, killing him out of love for Bobby, do you think that helped anything? Do you think Bobby wanted that? He would’ve hated it.
Hated
it! Retroactive! That’s all it was. But that’s how we’re programmed, that’s the button Captain Dudek pushed. So stuff the goddamned programming, was what I started feeling. Smash the goddamned armor the Army stuffed your heart in! Because an eye for an eye is smart, see, but love is dumb, lovers are fools. And I should’ve been fool enough for that boy, like Sergeant Felker was for me, to operate a little love by that jeep
[laughs, begins to cry]
. Don’t you see? While his brown eyes, his ears, those tiny bones were still wriggling I should have been fool enough to beg them, or fight them, or scare them some way. I could’ve rammed that jeep with my head! I could’ve ate dirt! I could’ve stripped naked, shredded my face, anything, anything! till they saw you can’t take a child, not ours, not theirs, you just can’t take a child and treat him like a, like [cries]. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. But you do see, don’t you? I had to hold on to him. My way, my truth, my life
[laughs, cries]
. That’s all that little boy was. So too late, out of love for what I’d let die, retroactive as hell again, see, I took everything the Army turned me into and jammed it back into the mouth, Dudek’s mouth, that said the boy doesn’t exist, shoot him.

You don’t understand
[laughs]
. I can see that. It’s just too simple, is maybe the trouble. Just Irwin again, I wanted to be. Just this fool who loved kids. But I’m the moron who joined you. So do what you have to. Let it shine
[laughs]
.

And hey. Thanks for listening.

F
or the first time in years, our ragged Camas household shared a passion: we all longed to disobey Major Keys’s advice and visit Mira Loma as soon as possible. But Southern California was a long way off, and there were serious obstacles for all of us:

Linda had Nash to take care of, she didn’t yet drive, and the news about Irwin seemed to render her almost catatonic with fear. Her reaction was so extreme that it struck me as cowardly at first, or at least
annoyingly pathetic. Then Mama quietly reminded me that, sometime this coming summer, Linda’s dad was due out of prison.

The twins were in their last week of school before eighth-grade graduation, they were indispensable part-time employees of Mama’s, and they were also very busy, since Linda had come unglued, taking care of Nash.

Mama’s housecleaning and dessert-making businesses were thriving, in fact our household economy would have collapsed without them; but they were also so dependent upon her arcane knowledge, energy and hands-on expertise that they would disintegrate if she didn’t take a few days to train a proxy.

Unfortunately for my own longing to visit Irwin, I was that proxy. On top of that, I was trying to gear up for finals and write three different term papers. And on top and under and around and through that, I had fallen in love.

Her name was, and still is, Amy. And she was not a chapter in my life: she was, and still is, the central figure in an enormous subsequent volume. So suffice it to say in this volume that she was the person who gave me the courage to see that in order to love and serve one’s land and people, in order not to betray the very things that patriots claim to hold dear, one must sometimes defy what is called “one’s country.” I never took my finals, never wrote the term papers, never went back to college though I knew it would cost me my deferment. And Amy and I had made meager preparations—as I awaited my induction papers—to join Everett in British Columbia, if it came to that. But, as I mentioned already, at my induction physical late that summer, my left eye kept me in the country of my choice.

Papa, on the day we phoned to read him the contents of the pale green envelope, was in Phoenix, Arizona, with the Portland Tugs. Phoenix was only an eight- or nine-hour drive from Mira Loma, but Papa was in the middle of a three-city Southwest road trip, and his baseball situation, after six amazingly stable seasons, had become tenuous again. What happened was that his friend and manager, Johnny Hultz, had jumped to the Seattle Pilots in 1969, then moved with the entire Seattle team to Milwaukee in ’70, where he became the expansion Brewers’ first hitting coach. The Tugs had been through three managers since. The third was a semifamous ex-Pirate infielder who as of this writing is still busy fucking up the mood of a major league team. We’ll call him Howie Bowen. The Tugs were off to a fast start anyhow, thanks partly to luck and partly to Bowen’s heavy but unacknowledged reliance on the advice of the team’s pitching coach, stupid-situation reliever and philosopher king, Papa Toe
Chance. But the good start only seemed to intensify Bowen’s toxic personality. His response to Papa’s request for permission to leave the team long enough to visit Irwin, for instance, was to shout, “What are wives for, Chance? We need you here, dammit!”

Papa didn’t argue. He just quietly informed his manager that he’d rejoin the Tugs in Tucson the following night, and that if Bowen didn’t like it he could fine him. “I was
kidding,”
Bowen lied, slapping Papa on the shoulder. “Mellow out, Papa T.” He then proved his goodwill by autographing a baseball for Papa to take to Irwin. Papa was polite. He waited till he was outside Bowen’s office before he rifled it into a trash can.

P
apa rented a car, drove straight through the night to Mira Loma, and reached Loffler Center on Thursday, May 24, just as a pair of military police were unlocking the chain-link front gates. And he was surprised, as he crossed the sterilized-looking grounds, by the rush of gratitude he felt: just knowing that Irwin was back on North American soil had him trembling with something close to joy.