The Brothers K (46 page)

“So what’s he up to now, Coach?”

“Ain’t heard boo. Shall we ask Katie?”

“There you go.”

“Hey, Chance!” Bunnel bellowed. “Come on over here, li’l buddy!”

I turned around, faked a “Who? Me?” look, then trotted over, trying my li’l buddy best to outgrin them. “Coach, Coach, Coach,” I said, giving a democratic nod to each. “What can I do you for?”

“We were just wonderin’,” Edson said, “what’s become of that brassy brother Herbert of yours.”

“You mean Everett?” I asked.

“What I tell you?” the JV wazir crowed.

“Now why do I want to call him Herbert?” Edson muttered.

“So what’s he up to now, Katie?” Bunnel asked.

“My name,” I said, as politely as possible, “is Kincaid.”

“Picky picky picky,” smirked Bunnel.

But I’d just had a minor brainstorm. “It’s not me that cares, Coach,” I said in a stage whisper. “It’s my big brother Pete. He gets
wild
about teasing! Why, he just flat
quit
his summer camp softball team when the coach kept calling this boy named Pat ‘Patricia.’”

Bunnel turned pale for a second, then grinned and clapped me on the shoulder. “So then,
Kincaid!”
he cried. “What did you say ol’
Everett
was doin’ these days?”

“He’s up at Washington,” I said. “Got a pretty decent scholarship.”

The grin vanished. All three coaches gaped at me in disbelief. I didn’t get it for a second. Then, reading their one-track, one-diamond minds, I added, “An
academic
scholarship. He aced his SATs is all.”

“Ohhhhhhhhh!”
went the coaches, relaxing completely. “A Husky now, is he?” “Up at U Dub, is he?” “Damn!” “That’s great.” “Good for him!”

“A good student, Everett,” opined the JV emir, “when he kept his trap shut.”

“But good as he was,” Bunnel gloated, “he wasn’t near the student my Peter is.”

“I hear your peter’s quite the little student all right,” Edson sniggered. “I heard all about you and the new Español teacher!”

Unison:
Hawr hawr hawr hawr!

“Hey now!” Bunnel huffed. “Clamp it, Bobby!”

“Yes, Bobby!” Edson moaned. “Please! Clamp it harder—
she
said!”

Repeat chorus:
Hawr hawr hawr hawr!

“Uh, er, you’re a pretty fair student yourself, I hear, Kincaid,” Bunnel sputtered.

“Not ol’ Kincaid!” wheezed Edson. “He hasn’t
touched
that Spanish teacher!”

Hit it:
Whaw whaw whaw whaw!

McLoughlin’s coaches were not complicated men.

“So what’s Everett studying up at U Dub?” the JV wazoo asked.

“Typing, I bet,” Bunnel cut in. “Like types o’ taverns, types o’ beer, types o’ hell-raisin’, types o’ hangovers …” But he was a temporary outcaste now: nobody deigned to
hawr-hawr
with him.

“How ’bout types o’ coeds, Donny?” Edson cracked. “Types o’ positions, types o’ lubrications, types o’ hot water to get into with the wife, types o’—”

“Stow it, Bobby!”

“Oh yes, Bobby! Please! Stow it harder—
she
said!”

Whawr whawr whawr whawr!

“What’s Everett really studying, though, Katie?” Bunnel asked.

“Kincaid,” I said.

“Oh, damn!” Bunnel looked genuinely panic-stricken. “I’m sorry, Kincaid! I didn’t mean it.”

“He meant it!” Edson hollered. “He meant every filthy word!
Katie
he called you! So tell Pete to quit the sumbitch’s ball team pronto, and come on out for track!”

Whaw whaw whaw whaw!

Red-faced and outnumbered, Bunnel lamely repeated, “So what did you say Everett was studying up at U Dub?”

Without even thinking, and while the other two coaches were still chuckling, I answered, “He seems to be focusing on modern poetry at the moment.”

Then a wonderful thing happened: for maybe five full seconds the coaches went dead, like three big TVs the word “poetry” had somehow unplugged—

and the day grew not perfect, nor still, but still enough to hear perfectly the singing of a thousand fed-winged blackbirds in the swamp beyond our diamonds—a choir, tremendous, convening there daily, their ecstasy reduced to white noise by our first catch or throw—till this moment: the coaches’ decommissioning: a word … “poetry”… and their song came raining out of the cottonwoods, innocent, joyous, pouring over anyone willing to listen. The rush of understanding was too quick and condensed and physical to call a “thought”: I simply knew, via song, sunlight, redwings and cottonwoods, that there was a world I was born to live in, that the men I was standing beside lived in another, and that as long as I remembered this their words would never hurt me again. I knew—the redwings were all telling me—that there was ancient ground here, and ancient songs, and that if I laid my mitt, cleats and uniform aside I could stand on that ground, and maybe learn to sing on it too …

“Modern poetry,” Coach Bunnel repeated, looking as though Everett had somehow betrayed him. And I was suddenly hard put not to laugh—or to start singing.

“He was always a little different, was ol’ Herbert,” Edson murmured.

“Ol’ Everett,” the JV savant corrected. But it no longer mattered. I suddenly liked the way Edson got the name wrong. I felt free to like all three of these men now, because I’d realized I didn’t have to
become
them. I was standing right next to a world in which Everett was Herbert, blacks were Jabooms, Pete and Irwin were heroes, and I was a no speed, no suds, no arm nuthin’. But I was not standing
in
it. Some simple shift inside me had turned their words into the harmless white noise, and the blackbirds’ singing into the heart of my day.

Ospreys eat fish. Deer eat foliage. Switch their diets and they’ll die.

I gave my first unguardedly friendly nod ever to each coach, told them I had to go, walked back to the locker room, took off my baseball uniform, put on my street clothes, and set out unencumbered into the singing, the cottonwoods, the entire spring day.

H
ey, Kincaid. How’s it hangin’, buddy?

Little limp to suit me, Donny
.

Sing it:
Hawr hawr hawr hawr
.

But hey! What about you? How’s that affair with the Spanish teacher going?

Oh! Hot damn! Just great, Kade! Thickish legs, but what a pair o’ yum-yums! My wife’s flatter’n plywood, y’know. Say, though. Has Everett sent you any more o’ them rapturous letters ’bout Whitman or Pound or Yeats or any o’ them bruisers?

Not lately, Donny
.

Well, when he does, swing on by the office so us coaches can give ’er a read. We’re pretty excited, y’know. We’re thinkin, the way that brother o’ yours used to scrap out there at second base, he’s gonna make one hell of a fine poet!

Hey! Okay, Donny. I’ll do it. And give those yum-yums your best shot for me
.

Hey! Will do, Kade. Wake up! Hey, Kincaid!
Wake up! Your brother’s up.”

“Oh! Hey. Thanks Mr. Ledbetter.”

I was lolling on the sun-drenched bleachers, by the varsity diamond, with old Spaz Ledbetter, a retired janitor, a baseball fanatic, and the only other village idiot besides me who came most days just to watch the varsity team practice. Peter was in the batter’s cage. Lance Clay was pitching—and smiling like a two-hundred-pound gray-haired princess on a parade float as he threw.

Mr. Clay taught math, but he’d played minor league ball ages ago, and had by far the best baseball mind and body on the McLoughlin High faculty. Since he wasn’t the sort of jackass who could bray at kids all day, he let Donny Bunnel coach the team and grab the “glory.” But most of the real coaching that got done, Mr. Clay did. He was also the perfect BP pitcher. He was left-handed, like Papa, had pinpoint control, so the players didn’t have to worry about getting beaned, and since he was in his upper forties the only pitches he had left were a crisp but predictable curve, a no-hop fastball and a change-up he betrayed with a sniff. (“Allergic to deception,” Peter said when he noticed it.) Clay was still too much for most varsity players, but Pete lined every pitch he threw; never popped one, never chopped one, never put anything on the ball but the meat of the bat. And Mr. Clay, as usual, lost all track of time and the rest of his team, and just poured them down the pipe like water.
Zzzooop!
went his pitches.
Fwack!
answered Peter’s bat.
Zzzooop, fwack! Zzzooop, fwack!
The two of them were a show.

Then Coach Donny Bunnel, fresh from his daily gabfest over at the
football field, strutted into the dugout, clapped his hands, and hollered, “Hit-and-run!”

Pete nodded, and punched his next three drives over into right field.

“Sacrifice!” yelled Bunnel.

Peter bunted four or five tricklers down the first- and third-base lines.

“Okay!” he hollered. “Now try for a tater!”

Lance Clay’s parade-float smile vanished, but he dutifully grooved a fastball. Peter bunted it straight back on a line. Clay caught it, and the smile was back. But Bunnel wouldn’t have it. “Come on. Smack it, Pete. I wanna see some loft.”

“I don’t hit taters, Coach,” Peter said.

“Your turncoat spear-chuckin’ brother sure as hell does,” Bunnel said.

“Irwin’s no turncoat,” Peter said. “He never was a ballplayer. He was just afreak of nature with a bat.”

“Is that any way to talk about your brother?” Bunnel asked.

“I’m
quoting
my brother,” Pete said. “He’s a lot smarter than most people think. Why do you think he went out for track?”

“Tell you what, hotshot,” said Coach Bunnel. “Just shuttup and show me how far you can hit the ball.”

To my surprise, Peter did. He hit a fly to deep center, a pop-up to shallow left, fanned two pitches completely, then hit two more to center. The flies all traveled maybe 300 feet, and were easily caught. They looked like line drives that got too big for their britches. Pete was leading the league in hitting and the state in stolen bases; he led his team in walks, slugging, RBIs, on-base percentage and almost every other stat that was good. But Irwin, as a sophomore, had hit six home runs in half a season, and in practice had once crushed a Clay fastball 460-some feet. So, like a big bratty kid, Bunnel wanted the brother he couldn’t have. “Put some soul into it!” he goaded.

“He’s gettin’ blisters,” Mr. Clay said. “Next batter.”

L
ater the same day, Lance Clay had pulled Peter aside and told him never to screw with his swing for a meathead like Bunnel again. “Just keep hitting line drives,” he said, “and pretend you can’t help it.”

Pete said he would. Clay then told him that Papa, in his Tacoma days, had been one of the best minor league ballplayers he’d ever seen.

“I think he’s one of the best still,” Peter said.

“So what do you think,” Clay asked, “about your skills, compared to his?”

Peter reddened a little. “No offense,” he said, “but that’s the kind of question I’d expect Coach Bunnel to ask.”

“Well,” Mr. Clay said, “I asked it. And for a reason.”

“I think I’m eighteen and Papa’s thirty-seven,” Peter said. “I think I play high school outfield and he pitches Three A relief. So it’s apples and oranges.”

“I hear you hit his pitching,” Clay said. “Does that imply anything about your apples and oranges?”

Peter shook his head. “It’s just BP. He never knocks me down, never brushes me back. It’s not for blood. You know how huge the difference is.”

“What I know,” Clay said, “I doubt you’d want to hear.”

Peter said nothing for a second. Then he smiled and said, “That’s a good way of making somebody want to hear something.”

Clay nodded, and turned serious. “I think you’re scared,” he said. “Your father’s been your teacher, he’s been like a god to you boys. And I think you’re afraid to outshine him. I think that’s why your hitting fell apart at the end of last season.”

“I was off,” Peter admitted. “But I didn’t exactly fall apart. I hit .280 in the play-offs.”

“Which, given your average at the time, was the equivalent of a .300 hitter batting .065.”

“Spoken like a true math teacher,” Peter mumbled.

“I’m not trying to insult you,” Mr. Clay said. “I just think it’s time you
did
outshine your father … because you’ve got more to be afraid of than that.”

“Like what?” Peter asked.

“You worry about being as good as your dad. But listen to an old baseball man who’s studied you both. That ship has sailed and gone, Peter. You are
much, much better.”

After a soliloquy like that, Mr. Clay must at least have expected some show of surprise. But Pete just stood there the way he does, weighing the words without expression. Then he shook his head. “No,” he said. “That’s not it, Mr. Clay. That’s not what I’m afraid of at all.”

And now it was Clay whose face showed the surprise.

“What I’m afraid of, concerning baseball,” Peter said, “is that I’m going to hurt my father. It might happen soon, too.”

Thinking Peter lacked confidence, thinking he was only afraid of disappointing Papa, Mr. Clay smiled his parade-float smile again, and said,
“How? How do you think you’re going to give your dad this big baseball hurt?”

But Peter had another surprise for Mr. Clay. “I know I’m good,” he said softly. “Maybe as good as Papa, in a different way. What I don’t know is whether, after this season, I’m going to play any more baseball at all.”

Lance Clay knew at once that Peter was telling the truth, but it was completely unforeseen, and it hit him like a beanball. His face drained of color, his crow’s-feet lost their ingrained look of kindness, and his eyes filled with confusion, then hurt, then anger. “Well,” he said. “You’re right. If that’s what you decide, you
will
hurt your father. And other people too, if that matters to you. Me, for instance.”

With that, Mr. Clay turned, and walked away. And though Pete played out the season—and never played better—he never saw the parade-float smile again.