The Brothers K (32 page)

My brothers and sisters and I had burst out whooping and cheering before he could even finish. But Papa neither smiled nor moved. Our cheering died. “What is it, Papa?” Everett asked.

“We’d work hard!” Irwin shouted. “We promise! You wouldn’t have to lift a—”

“Now cork it right there!” the doctor cut in. “Pop’s got a head on his shoulders. He sees this whole deal for the potential screw job it is. So let me add a few extras. I’ll provide the anesthesiologist, the prosthetic toe, the hospitalization and any plastic surgeries you’d need in the months following. All you’d have to wangle is the time off work. And as for
Operation Landscape, I’ll supply the pickup, materials and tools. But after seeing Winnie here, I’ll tell you this: you supply your
own
damned lunches!”

We all exploded again—except for Papa, who just looked blank. “I’m no saint as a boss, either,” Franken said. “You and your band of illegal child laborers are gonna have to whip a briar patch like the one that Disney bitch planted round poor Sleepin’ Beauty and turn it into a landscaped park fit to appease the troubled souls and malpractice-happy minds of countless clucks and cluckesses upon whose loved ones I’ll be inside carving. So that’s the deal. What do you say, Chance?”

Papa said nothing. He just glanced at the doctor, looked down at his knees a while, then abruptly stood—and left the room.

Doc Franken turned to Mama, his bluster and cheer suddenly spent and gone. “Christ, Laura! Have I offended him or what?”

“I don’t know what’s the matter,” she said. “Excuse me.” And she left too.

The rest of us stayed put, watching the doctor, but he looked so preoccupied and nervous now that we were afraid to speak. After a while Freddy got up off the floor and, with a heart-melting smile, climbed right into his lap. But even this got almost no reaction. Then Mama reappeared in the doorway.

“He says he doesn’t know yet,” she began, her lower lip trembling. “I mean, he doesn’t know whether he can accept, or what to say, except … except that this is the kindest, most generous offer that
anybody, ever
, has—”

“Aw horseshit!” Franken bellowed, turning red as a geranium and nearly tossing Freddy on the floor as he stood and bolted for the door. My brothers and I jumped up and tried to follow, but he was already down the porch steps when he turned and hollered back over his shoulder, “You tell that sap to wait’ll he sees those briars ’fore he decides I’m bloody
Santa
Claus! And tell him I need to know
tomorrow
, Laura, because I needed this job done yesterday!”

By the end of that sentence goodbyes and thank-yous were out of the question, because he was already in his Mercedes, spewing high decibels and diesel and radial smoke out the driveway, all down the street, and over the crest of the Clark Street hill.

“W
hat a guy!” Irwin managed to gasp when the smoke had finally cleared.

“I’d do his landscaping just to listen to him talk!” I sighed.

“Where did he
come
from?” Irwin marveled.

“And why’d he come now?” Peter wanted to know.

Then we noticed the way Everett had leaned himself up against the mailbox and started smirking at his nails, smug as a cat with a mouthful of feathers.

“All right,” Peter said. “What went on the day you two met anyhow?”

“That’s just it,” Everett said. “We
didn’t
meet.”

“Aw come on!” Irwin blurted.

“I swear. I never set eyes on him till today.”

“Then why’d he come?” I asked.

Everett obviously wanted to loiter there a while, savoring the spectacle of our rabid curiosity. The trouble was, only Irwin and I could be depended upon to remain rabid. We all knew from experience that Peter, if teased an instant too long, would just walk away and never show any curiosity about the subject again. The odd thing was, his ability to take it or leave it made every one of us want to tell him every secret we had, whether he was interested or not.

“All right,” Everett said. “Okay. Listen. Here’s what happened. I figure there are basically two ways of seeking unseen help in this world. One’s called prayer. The other’s called the telephone. So when I got good and sick of the one that doesn’t work, I walked downtown to a phone booth and tried the one that does. The Bible says it best, guys.
By their fruits ye shall know them …”

The way this glib little speech poured out, I wouldn’t have been surprised to find that Everett had composed, memorized, and rehearsed it—perhaps even in front of a mirror. And judging by the triumphant look on his face, I think he expected us to draw drastic religious—or antireligious—conclusions from it. So when, instead, Irwin darted forward, threw both arms around him, picked him high up off the ground, and started twirling him round and round in circles, cooing, “The
sneaky
guy! The
wise
guy! Thank you, Jesus, for my sneakiest brudder!” the sight of Everett’s face plummeting from glory to horror was, for Peter and me, pure joy.

“You macaroni!” he fumed, both arms writhing but pinned by Irwin’s hug to his sides. “You pinworm, you maggot!” he sputtered, both legs kicking backward at his captor’s shins. “Did
Jesus
phone Doc Franken?”

“No sirree bob!” Winnie laughed, flailing him round like a rag doll to keep the kicks from landing. “He phoned
you
, Big Bubba! Heart to heart! Then
you
phoned the Doc and the Doc saved the day, thank you, Jesus!”

Hearing this exegesis, Everett quit kicking and just hung there, looking
like he’d swallowed a quart of rancid mayonnaise, while Irwin jounced and flounced him around God’s blue sky any old way he chose. “Jesus’ angry li’l buddy!” Irwin chortled. “God’s sneaky li’l switchboard operator! What a beaut he is, Lord!
Thank! You!
for
this! guy! Jesus!”

P
apa’s vacation time was gone, his sick leave was gone, our savings were gone, and it would be another month before he could go back to work at the mill. But on the day Grandawma came palsying into the livingroom to inspect Doc Franken’s handiwork, Papa was able to slip off a brace, lift a pale left hand, give her a crooked little grin, and barely but perceptibly wriggle a discolored, disfigured, but decidedly thumblike appendage at her. “Hiya, Mombo,” he said.

Grandawma darted forward, gave his cheek a quick, dry peck, pulled away before he could kiss back, dragged her bifocals out to the tip of her nose, leaned down, and gave things a thorough inspection. “It’s grotesque,” she concluded at last.

“It’s a wee bit top-heavy,” Papa admitted. “It was a good-sized toe.”

“It looks like a
mushroom
cloud,” she said disgustedly.

“Irwin said a hydroplane, Laura a toadstool, Freddy a toilet seat. At least your description lets me feel dangerous. But look here. What do you think of this?” He pointed at the cast on his left foot, and wiggled his new prosthetic half-of-a-toe.

“He’s certainly not
shy!”
she sniffed.

“Hear that, Leona?” Papa said to his toe. “She thinks you’re a he!”

“I was not addressing your toe, dear boy. I was talking about this
miracle
worker, this medical
genius
, this Dr. Frankenstein of yours. The man has gleefully crippled you at both ends, to what purpose I can’t possibly imagine.”

“Imagine this,” Papa said curtly. “Two inches of dead thumb, or two and a half of dead toe. Which would
you
prefer?”

But Grandawma was ignoring him—and pulling something out of her handbag. “I’ve brought you a kind of … oh, ‘get-well present,’ I suppose you’d call it. Though you’re hardly ill, and why you would volunteer to be a surgeon’s guinea pig is beyond—”

“A stale scone?” Papa interrupted in a falsetto, deliberately offensive English accent. “Or a tin of salmon paste? A kidney pie, perchance, or a moldy crumpet? I daresay you’re too kind, Mother.”

“Your opinion of the British,” she sniffed, “is about as trite and demeaning as—”

“—your opinion of ballplayers,” Papa cut in.

She nearly smiled. “Perhaps. At any rate, I’ve brought you this.” And without further ado, she handed him a cashier’s check for two thousand dollars.

Old habits are hard to break, and Marion and Hugh’s habit of concealing every honest emotion they aroused in each other was a lifelong one. This time, though, she’d stunned him so deeply that all he could do was puff his surprise up into a parody of itself. “What the hail’s
this?”
he drawled, gawking like a hayseed.

“What does it look like?”

“Like you rolled a tycoon,” he said. “Like you struck oil under the rec-room floor. Like you sold Irwin to science. Like—”

“That will do,” she sniffed.

“It’ll do all right. It’s where it
came
from that worries me.”

Drawing in a slow breath, and speaking with even greater precision than usual, Marion Becker Chance replied, “It’s just a little something I put away …” (sniff!) “… during my illustrious career up in Pullman …” (sniff sniff!) “… as a Pacifist and Atheist tea-party hostess.”

This time Papa couldn’t mask his feelings at all. “You’ve been waiting
fifteen years
for this touché!” he marveled.

“Seventeen,” she replied without a trace of a smile. And at that, they burst out laughing at the same time, for the same reason, for perhaps the first time in their adult lives. Of course Grandawma, as usual, snapped her pleasure off as if it were a light switch, leaving Papa to wind down alone. Waste not, want not. But since it had apparently been this same obsessive frugality that had made her lavish gift possible, he was in no position to resent it. In fact it gave his laughter a second wind.

“Are you even going to thank me?” she finally asked.

“I want to apologize
and
thank you,” he said. “I’m sorry I offended you all those years ago—and even sorrier you took the trouble to
remember
it all this time! But listen. This is really too much. I mean, I just can’t accept this.”

Instantly angry, Grandawma snapped, “Then it’s not
yours
to accept! I’d intended to give it to Laura in the first place.”

Papa said, “I seem to see my name here under
Pay to the Order of …”

“Only because I wasn’t sure that Laura would be home,” she replied, getting madder by the second, “whereas you, after being maimed by that
grotesque surgical personage, could be depended upon to be
potted
like a
poinsettia
in this
vile
chair.” (Papa was laughing hard now, but it didn’t distract her.) “Keep it or don’t. It makes no difference to me. Laura can divide it among your children if his
nibs
is feeling compunctious today. But
that
money is for
this
family while those …” (sniff!) “… those
ridiculous …
” (sniff sniff!) “… while those
digits
of yours heal.”

When she fell silent, Papa quit laughing, and at last let his real concern show: “What about you, Mother?”

“What
about
me?” she huffed.

“Where did this come from? What is it, your life’s savings?”

“What use is a life’s savings to an old crone with so little life left?”

For the second time in moments, she’d surprised and worried him. “I thought you were a stoic. Is this self-pity I’m hearing?”

“It’s third-grade arithmetic, you nitwit!” she snapped. “I’ve got one dependent: me. You’ve got
eight
counting your maimed self. And my dependent, saints be praised, has very few years left, whereas yours, if they live to be my age, have a cumulative four or five centuries! Self-pity indeed! It’s
you
I pity! I’ll be well out of it when the likes of
Everett
hits his prime! That boy needs college
badly
, Hugh. So let’s be honest. Who needs this money more?”

He still resisted. “Things change, needs change. You know how broke we always are. So seriously, Mother. What about
your
needs? What if you decided you’d like to go back to England for a visit? What if you lost your mobility, or needed some kind of surgery yourself? What if you wanted to buy a—”

“What if, what if, what if!” she fumed. “Don’t argue contingencies with me! My travels are traveled, and in any medical emergency it would be my very great pleasure to burden the United States Government for every penny I could filch. Now take the money and be still!”

“But what about the—”

“Take it!”

“I really think we ought to be considering what—”

“Take it!”

“But—”

“Take it.”

B
y the time we’d finished landscaping Doc Franken’s clinic—a story in itself, characterized by such wonders as an unasked-for goldfish pond, a flock of pink plastic flamingos, a herd of larger-than-life plywood dairy cows compliments of the old Jazzy Jersey connection, and also by a water-balloon war between Irwin and the good doctor, which grew so ruthless in its final stages that Irwin sneak-attacked and drenched his adversary just seconds before he was to deliver a keynote lecture to two hundred physicians at a surgeons’ convention, thus inspiring Franken’s first and last visit to the First Adventist Church of Washougal, where, disguised by a mouse-colored fedora, dark glasses, slicked-back hair and a huge briefcase labeled HOLY BIBLES, he slipped up behind Irwin, Mama and the twins as the faithful were pouring into the church, opened the briefcase, whipped out a latex prophylactic swollen beyond recognition (thank goodness) by an easy half gallon of jet-black disappearing ink, and exploded the thing squarely on top of Irwin’s head—by the time this enjoyable but decidedly digressive episode was over, then, Papa had healed enough to return, toe in hand, so to speak, to his backyard pitching.

Once again he insisted that no one watch. Not Mama. Not Roy. Not even his deus ex machina, Doc Franken. He’d gotten fussy about his shedball accoutrements too: we were no longer allowed to borrow his mitt, his resin bags, his plain or rubber-coated baseballs, or any of the rest of it. Worse yet, while pruning the laurel hedge one day shortly before the surgery, Papa noticed a sizable hole in it, fetched some twine to tie the hole shut, poked his head in, and found himself staring at an inch-deep layer of gum wrappers and sunflower-seed husks, and two apple-crate bleachers worn smooth by boy-sized bottoms. To my surprise, he didn’t get angry. He didn’t even bother to ask whose hideout it was. He just gathered all four of us brothers together and said that anyone caught in the hedge while he was pitching would move everything they owned directly out into the laurel, and proceed to live there, rain or shine, world without end, amen.