The Brothers K (61 page)

Fortunately, the owner of this body was not repulsed by the little
Velella velella
who drifted over and began to express—with a poetic and practiced suavity rendered ridiculous by his fresh-peeled, boyish appearance—his boundless appreciation of her person. Unfortunately, she was bored.

Fortunately, the fresh-peeled boy just happened to have, out in the trunk of his Oldsmobile, an entire suitcase full of Radical Hero memorabilia, and had no qualms about lugging it into the bar in order to reveal to her who he really was, or had been, or wished he’d been, before he’d shaved and so forth. Unfortunately, the tall, lean woman loathed student radicals.

Fortunately, she was so strongly attracted to Celebrity that the sheer bulk of the pile of clippings, writings and photos by or about this baby-faced Folk Legend Gone Underground somehow convinced her to invite both the howling red lust and its owner to bivouac upon, beside, beneath and all about her spectacular body—and not only that first night, but night after night. Unfortunately, for the first time in his redundant but really rather limited experience, our hero found that the multiple nightly deaths of his howling red lusts did absolutely
nothing
to diminish the appetite of this insatiable and mysterious woman.

H
er name, we can be almost certain, was not Circe. But Circe will have to do, since in his post-Circe depression Everett’s opinion was that she could only have been a gift sent by a vengeful God, god or goddess, or perhaps by Circe herself, or perhaps she
was
Circe herself, come to teach him at last the meaning or unmeaning or inescapable outcome of an all-out surrender to loveless lust. What Everett was to Circe he never discovered. But what Circe was to him was “an absolutely gorgeous conquest,” which several wild and increasingly kinky nights forced him to redefine as “a co-competitor in a grim erotic marathon,” which an incalculable confusion of bitterly contested nights-days-or-whatever forced him to ultimately define as an indomitable, terrifying, utterly victorious demigoddess whose sole purpose in indulging him had been to reveal to him the thing he feared most: his true inner condition.

Allow me to preface this grim revelation by describing a syndrome unknown to most women, but nightmarishly familiar to a great many men: struggle though we do to “grow up,” millions of us American males spend our entire adult lives involuntarily blundering, into slightly revamped
but clearly recognizable replays of the same tedious inabilities and fears, the same pedestrian self-conceptions and the same uncorrectable limitations we first experienced during our boyhood baseball careers. To fully understand the nightmarishness of these karmic recrudescences it’s important to bear in mind that, unless we happen to be major leaguers at the moment, our baseball careers invariably went up in some form of flames. It’s also crucial to note that there is no simple escape: those who had no boyhood baseball career often spend their manhood reliving, repressing or rationalizing this lack.

So then. Picture our virile young campus hero doing with and to the long, lean Circe what he fancied he did best. And imagine his confusion as it dawned on him that while he had grown sated and then some, she hadn’t and then some. Now picture the ferocity of his determination as he sensed her dissatisfaction, summoned his infamous radical defiance, girded his loins, again mounted her beautiful body, and threw everything he had into his efforts. And then, for the eternally recurring Little League coup de grace, imagine the sick shock of recognition when he suddenly saw in these efforts not the legendary love-warrior of the U district but Coach Donny Bunnel’s inadequate little second sacker, still struggling after all these years to “make up in desire what he lacked in ability,” still “giving it his very best shot,” still “doing some real scrapping out there,” and still impressing his devastating opponent no more than he’d once impressed the North Wenatchee High varsity with his quadruple-K effort in a 15 to 2 loss. These are the unsung dangers of an early life in baseball! Yet even at this sorry pass Everett remained so terrified of the
Velella velellaness
his life had become that he would probably have gone on “scrapping out there” indefinitely. Only a scare of epic proportions, only a Jonah’s whale or a Balaam’s ass could alter his course now. And that was what Circe gave him …

The mythical event occurred on their last night-day-or-whatever together, when—having exhausted him, fed him, besotted him with wine, exhausted him again, revived him with an unnamed drug, and exhausted him yet again, only to goad him, everywhere and with anything, fingers, breath, tongue, teeth, fury, unthinkable curses, unthinkable curves, all to no avail—Circe finally pinned him, straddled him, and held a mirror over his face. “Look
at you!”
she’d whispered. And he’d tried. But when he peered into her mirror, Everett swears to this day that what he saw peering back at him was the bristle-chinned, beady-eyed, insensate face of a spent young pig.

Or swine, in the FitzGerald translation.

Endless objections can of course be raised. What about “Circe’s” point of view, for instance? What was her story? Does the wretched Everett really expect us to believe that she was more than human? Or that he was really less? And what did the swine transform
her
into, poor woman, assuming she
was
a woman? And of course she was! Wasn’t she? Valid questions and confusions all. But whereas most stories interest us because of all that they are able to tell us, the tale of Everett and Circe is most interesting for what it is
not
able to tell us. After sorting through his pig-eyed, pig-minded impressions, Everett later swore not only that he couldn’t remember Circe’s eye or hair color but that
she had none
. Naturally. For pigs see only in black and white. All that he recalled of his grim goddess were an approximate contour and weight in pounds, some eccentric angles from which he viewed those contours and pounds, a few of her quaint nicknames for the various entanglements of their anatomies, her initially exciting but ultimately terrifying “love” cries, and above all the craving for and stamina during erotic activity which first inspired, then exhausted, then crushed, disgraced, and routed his own.

Oh. There was one modern, non-Homeric, “literary” sort of detail. A Virginia Slim cigarette—the first of that brand he’d ever seen—which she jammed into his chest after he failed to react even to the sight of the shoat in the mirror. It was the sight of it burning his flesh, the slowness of his reaction even to the smell of it and the porcine squeal that finally came flying out of him which together convinced him to leave, that very night, for Canada.

S
o Everett the Campus Legend became the run-of-the-mill, unromantic and now sexually humiliated type of drifter/criminal known as “a draft-dodger.” And unless he wanted to become an equally run-of-the-mill American convict, he would have to remain one for the rest of his life. His leftist years were over. Their tangible fruits were these:

1. an immeasurable but undoubtedly minute contribution to the “early” (only two and a half million dead) end of the Vietnam War;

2. an immeasurable but undoubtedly huge contribution to Babcock’s sabotage of Irwin’s Conscientious Objector status;

3. the permanent sabotage of his own academic career;

4. an unresolved estrangement from the government he hated most (his own);

5. an unresolved estrangement from every human being and place he’d ever known or loved;

6. a brief metamorphosis into a pig;

7. the play
Hats
. All copies of which have been lost. Though thanks to Mama, one wrinkled program, a Seattle
Times
review and a rave letter Irwin wrote her describing the play all made it into the “EVERETT” box in the attic.

God created an impossible situation
.

—Tom McGuane

O
n the first Sabbath after Everett left for Canada and the third after Irwin left for boot camp, Mama, Linda and Bet all went to church. And when they got there, Mama did not spit in Elder Babcock’s face. “I’m
proud
of my son,” she told Papa when she got home. “I’m proud of what Irwin’s doing, proud of his choice of a wife, and I wanted all my friends, and Elder Babcock and Elder Barnes, and God Himself to know it. So I went to church. Is that all right with you?”

Papa just looked at her. And went on looking at her. Till it was obvious that his silence was his answer.

W
hen I got home that night after a fourteen-hour day of homework, the house was completely dark, not even a porch light. I thought it was a power outage till I unlocked the door—and stepped into the wall of cigarette smoke.

I backed up onto the porch and stood there a long time, afraid of what I’d find inside. Then it occurred to the optimist in me that there could have been a party, a visit from other ballplayers, a chain-smoking overnight guest asleep on the couch maybe. So I stepped inside, tiptoed to the kitchen, snapped on the light, looked back through to the livingroom. And there sat Papa, alone in his armchair, drinking Old Crow straight out of the bottle, and chain-smoking Lucky Strikes.

For a long time we just blinked at each other, me because of emotion, he because of the light. Then, in a voice slurred and scorched beyond recognition, he said, “I’m sorry, Kade. I’m very shorry. But Laura’s taken girlsh up to Marvin Janes, see. An’ her Jeejus wants me drop dead, see. So this the Lord’sh work I’m doin’. See?”

He tried to laugh, but could only make a rasping sound. He avoided my eyes. And I had no plan whatever as I walked slowly toward his chair. But when I got there I felt no qualm or hesitation as I took off my glasses,
held them straight out in front of me, and dropped them into his ashtray. “No,” I heard myself say as Lucky butts scattered all over the floor. “No, I
don’t
see, Papa. Out my left eye I can hardly see a thing. And I thought Td completely forgiven you for that. But if it was for nothing, if I can’t see for nothing, then I’m afraid I don’t forgive you at all.”

“Kade,” he said, struggling for air or for clarity. “Kade, listen. Listen … Listen … Thish a one-night deal. Thas all this is. An’ it’s over. See?” He tried to pull himself up, knocked the ashtray off his chair-arm, lunged for it, and spilled his bottle.

I didn’t move to right it. Neither did he.

He said, “My wife dudn’t love me, Kade. Thas all this is.”

We watched the whiskey pour out onto the carpet.

“Laura hates me, is all. An’ my boys ’cept you are gone. An’ my girls, Kade, are so scared, an’ Linda. I used to love comin’ home here, is all. For a while I loved this little place. So I got sad. See? Thas all this is.”

Wait for the promise of the Father
.

—Acts 1:4

F
reddy was out in the backyard with a tipless bamboo fly rod she’d dragged up out of the basement. Papa had promised to take her fishing this morning, so she was trying to practice casting. But no sooner would she get the fly line airborne than her wonderful new dog with the terrible new name (Suncracker) would tear after it, bounding high as a deer, till sooner or later he’d catch it, bring it to earth, and shake it as if it were an anorexic snake whose neck needed breaking, causing Freddy to burst into laughter, drop the rod, grab the dog, sing “No no no!” then cover his muzzle with little kisses, so that of course he couldn’t wait to do the very same thing again.

Papa sat slumped in his chair at the kitchen table. Because of his promise he would glance up at Freddy and the dog now and then. But
even while watching them he wore the immovable expression Irwin used to call “the Face,” and though none of us knew exactly what this expression meant, we did know certain implications: one was that there would be no change of mood or activity for a good long while; another was that if we spoke to Papa, he’d be unlikely to hear, let alone answer.

Of course our father was a promise-keeping man. But he could be driven to break them. Last spring, for instance, when Mama went right on going to Babcock’s church after Irwin left for boot camp, he broke his promise never to speak to her again after just two weeks, when it became obvious that if he didn’t speak to her he would soon be forced to break the promise made on the day they married.