by Brady Udall
After Mrs. Rodale had gone and a nurse had pushed back the curtains, Art sat up in bed and said, “That woman certainly had a hairdo.”
I laid my head on my pillow, pulled my knees up to my chest. Art looked over at me, then out the window, where a windstorm was going on: sand blowing by in sheets, a muffled howl. He started talking about bat shit. He said, “Did you know bat shit—ah, guano, bat guano—is something of a valuable product?”
He told me how, when he was growing up in New Mexico, his family made a living by digging bat guano out of caves and turning it into fertilizer. “My brothers and me, we spent most of our childhood years knee-deep in it, like shoveling cold gray pudding all day in the pitch dark. You couldn’t get away from it, see. Everything smelled like bat guano: house, car, dog. Bat guano don’t smell all that great, if you weren’t aware. When we’d go to church people would clear out of the benches front and behind. Even our cat was treated bad by the other cats in town. Maybe if my mama hadn’t a died a way back when—we sure coulda used her. No woman around to get the right kind of soap or to make us take showers every day, it was difficult. What I’m saying is you’ve got a mama, she might not be right here right now, but she’s around and she loves you, that I can tell you for sure. Mothers love their children. That’s God’s rule, the only one you can count on.”
I didn’t say anything, didn’t look at Art. I closed my eyes, listening to the swirling grit outside blast and scour the window, and tried to go to sleep.
THE DUNGEON
WHAT IS THE difference between an accident and a miracle? Most people would try to tell you the distinction is clear, but I’m not so certain—my life has been so rife with both I couldn’t tell the difference. My early days at St. Divine’s, though, were full of what most anybody would call miracles. With me, it was one miracle after another.
First, I had survived a mail jeep running over my head. Then, after three months in a coma, I had simply awakened, almost without warning, and with only minimal brain damage. According to science and simple common sense, I should have been a vegetable, lucky to spend the rest of my days diapered and spoon-fed, my skull full of jelly. But I was progressing so well the doctors didn’t know what to make of me; they’d shake their heads, muttering under their breaths, checking and rechecking their charts, utterly perplexed, as if my continuing miracle was causing them to lose faith in the things they’d held most sacred all along.
The miracles continued: two months out of my coma I could sit up in bed and feed myself; by Christmas I was able to start physical therapy; by Easter I could walk to the bathroom on my own. Just like a baby figuring out the fundamentals, I was complimented on my bowel movements, my appetite, and anything, no matter how incoherent, that came out of my mouth. In no time I was learning to read, passing all the coordination tests without much effort. In a hospital full of mostly cranky old people waiting to die in some unpleasant way, I was the man of the hour, the star of the show. When the Mexican women from the cafeteria would come up to the room to touch their crucifixes to my forehead, Jeffrey would call out in a mocking falsetto, “All hail, Saint Edgar, blessed coma-boy!”
Of course, I was not getting off scot-free. There was the distant throbbing in my head that would occasionally intensify and turn into a pain so furious and insistent I would curl up around myself and hope for the simple miracle of death. Most of the time the world seemed to smolder around its edges, sometimes shriveling and bunching like burning plastic. There were the ghosts I saw, too, figures outlined in white and yellow light, disappearing and reappearing again, their voices like warped, underwater sounds in my head. And then my spells started up—because the doctors didn’t really know what they were, they called them “non-epileptic mini-seizures.” My head would fill with sizzling bursts of light and I would black out for a second, go completely unconscious, and instead of thrashing about like your run-of-the-mill epileptic, I would, in Art’s words, “vibrate like a Buick with shot bearings,” my eyeballs popping out of my irregular head.
The first time I had one of my non-epileptic mini-seizures was down in the Dungeon, the huge, low-ceilinged basement room where all the physical and occupational therapy was conducted—a place where I would spend a lot of time during the rest of my stay at St. Divine’s.
Except for a few quick junkets to the radiology center, I had not left my room in five months, and I was giddy with excitement just to be going somewhere. By the time we made it down to the Dungeon by way of an ancient, creaking elevator, I wasn’t so sure. I sat in my oversized wheelchair, a tiny king in his makeshift throne, and tried to take it in. They’d been doing therapy in the Dungeon since the early fifties and it was still filled with dusty, little-used contraptions, relics made of leather straps and pulleys and buckles—instruments of torture, if you didn’t know any better. The room, so enormous and shadowed that the snapping fluorescent light overhead didn’t seem to have any effect, was filled with all kinds of odds and ends: a small, algaed water-therapy tank, two or three easels, a slumping Ping-Pong table, a set of drums, an old-fashioned loom, a bandsaw, a battle-worn dinosaur of a piano, long splintery tables covered with paints, scissors, newsprint, wooden blocks, clay, half-made baskets, kitchen utensils.
On the far wall hung a huge, crumpled banner made of butcher paper that said, in dripping red paint, I WANT TO I CAN DO IT WHY DON’T I? The banner still bore the ochre stains from when a former patient lurched out of his wheelchair, tore the banner down in a fit of rage and urinated all over it.
It wasn’t the size of the room, or the contents of it, but the chaos going on inside it that was unsettling. It was a Tuesday morning, the day outpatients came from all around to get their government-subsidized therapy. The room was packed, sick and broken people everywhere: a teenage boy with a mangled hand pounding nails into a board, a bandaged burn victim throwing darts, an enormous woman with bedsores peppered across her back splashing hip-deep in the aqua-tank, a young girl yelping out in pain on a manual tread-mill, a man with no legs hefting barbells from his wheelchair, a palsied old couple—a husband and wife who could not remember each other’s names—rooted to their spots on the floor, expertly swatting birdies over a woman receiving a slap-massage at the hands of a small muscled black man. Sue Kay, the head therapist who had hair so red it stood out like an emergency signal, would float around the room, completely unfazed by the hubbub, like the gracious hostess of a wild party, offering encouragement, making notes in her book, giving orders to her assistants and any of the volunteers who might have been there for the day.
Sue Kay got me situated in the corner at a small table with some Play-Doh and a bedpan full of crayon nubs. “I want you to make something nice for me, pumpkin,” she said. Sue Kay was from the South and called everybody honey or sweetheart or pumpkin. “I’ll come around to check on you every so often.”
I barely touched the clay or crayons; I couldn’t take my eyes off the circus around me. About thirty feet away, a thin man who swayed like an underwater plant did his best to place a couple of metal rings onto a wooden peg, but it appeared his hands were not his to control. Time and time again he would miss, dropping the rings, and each time he would cry in a desperate voice, “This is not fair, this is not fair.”
Under the big banner a tiny dark woman sat alone in a chair, singing. The woman had a thick bandage taped over one of her eyes and she seemed to be missing her nose and she sang beautifully and with great feeling, We will be buried in the stream in Jesus’ blessed name, oh rise, rise, rise, out of the water.
Off to my left, a fierce hopscotch match was going on between a man with a plastic leg and one of the orderlies, a Mexican kid named Pito. They would hop around for a minute, then the one-legged man would call out, “You cheated! Right there, you missed a square!” and Pito would get right in the guy’s face, like a baseball manager arguing a call with an umpire, and shout, “Me cheating? Me? You falling down all the time, missing the squares everywhere, and you say that? I kicking you ass
you one-leg motherfucker and you say cheating?”
I hummed and scratched myself and nibbled at my Play-Doh. It had a nice consistency but was much too salty for my taste. I tried the crayons, which crumbled easily and didn’t have much flavor.
Through all the moving bodies I finally located Art, who was working on his bad arm with a contraption that consisted of a series of ropes and pulleys attached to a bag of sand. He sweated and huffed and grimaced and cursed with that voice of his that carried over everything. Once in awhile he would disengage himself from the machine and stand up to peer across the room at me.
At some point I decided I needed a drink of water; the Play-Doh had made me thirsty. The fountain was no more than fifteen feet from where I was sitting and I thought I could make it without the wheelchair. Already, with a nurse’s help, I had taken a few mincing steps around my bed—I was certain I could walk anywhere I needed to. Just getting to my feet made me dizzy, but I took two or three small steps, my legs stiff as chopsticks, got some confidence, took a couple more. It was when I got to the fountain, feeling exhausted and weak, that an electrical current traveled up my legs like a lit fuse and set my whole body trembling, flashbulbs popping off behind my eyes.
I don’t remember blacking out, only waking up to find a frail, walleyed woman smiling over me like a deformed angel. She put a gnarled finger to my head which came away with blood on it. She said, “Boo-boo.”
It took a minute for anybody to notice me wedged in the corner against the water fountain. Pito arrived, then a couple of others, and I could hear Art shout from across the room, “Doctor! Nurse! Shit!” Apparently I had hit my head on a pipe that fed the water fountain—a small gash that would need five or six stitches. In a hospital, you wouldn’t have thought the sight of blood could cause such an uproar—people began shouting and crowding around, their distressed faces pressing in: Edgar the miracle-boy was wounded and down.
Later that day up in my room, after they had strapped me on a gurney and carted me up to the same emergency room where I had temporarily died eight months before, after they had shaved away a patch of my hair and sewed me up, Art asked me a question I would be asking myself for the rest of my life.
“Boy,” he said, “why can’t you keep your head out of trouble?”
The next morning a nurse came to check the stitches and to wash what was left of my hair. She was busy massaging my scalp when something dislodged from my head and fell into my lap. I picked it up and looked at it: a small shard of black rock, about as big as a nickel and crusted with blood and flakes of dead skin.
“My God,” said the nurse, “where’d that come from?”
“My head,” I said.
“Can I see it?”
“No,” I said and held it tightly in my fist.
She ran off and grabbed Dr. Waters, a balding man with a round, coarse face like a pomegranate. They came back together, with the nurse explaining to the doctor how something had fallen out of my head.
“It fell right out of his head,” she kept saying, her eyes wide.
Dr. Waters wanted to see the rock, too, but I wasn’t having any of it. It was my rock. I didn’t own a thing in the world except a hospital shift and a stuffed animal, a furry carrot with eyes that one of the nurses had given me.
Finally, we settled on a compromise; I could keep the rock if I would just open up my hand so Dr. Waters could see what it was.
“I won’t even touch it,” Dr. Waters said.
I opened my hand and let Dr. Waters, with his arms behind his back, have a look at it. He peered at it for a minute and then inspected my head.
“Came out right here,” he said, touching a place just above my right ear. “Would you look at that? Must have been in there since the accident. I’ve seen little pieces of glass work their way out months after an accident, but never a rock.”
He gave my head a thorough inspection but was unable to turn up any more rocks. “Just a few lumps,” he said. “You’re going to have to take things a little easier for awhile, Edgar. No walking. You want to go anywhere, make sure it’s in a wheelchair.”
I was thrilled with that rock. I felt I had accomplished something by keeping it in my head for so long without anyone finding out about it. I would get under my covers and study it in the dim light for a moment, then jam it under my mattress in case anyone might be watching. It was like owning an important clue; this rock had been a part of the accident that I couldn’t remember, the accident which had sent my mother away and put me in this hospital.
The rock turned out to be the first in my secret collection of odds and ends. During the rest of my stay at St. Divine’s, I began collecting things. I became a connoisseur of whatnots and knickknacks. I had no inclination to keep or collect things that were given to me; I only kept things which I could take, things I wasn’t necessarily supposed to have. I filched a deodorizing puck from a urinal in the bathroom, a chess piece from a set in the Dungeon, a penlight from the pocket of a doctor’s smock hanging on a chair, a crucifix with a little bloody Christ I had found behind one of the radiators. I kept these things in an empty Kleenex box and when everybody was asleep or doing something else, I would pull the box out from under the bed and arrange the objects between my legs, turning them over and imagining what they meant, what purposes they had once filled, what histories they contained. It seemed to me that they were pieces of some vast, complicated puzzle, and if I kept up my collecting I would finally understand it all.
COWBOYS AND INDIANS
WHEN ARNOLD MINT hooked up with my mother he had no idea what he was getting into; being from Connecticut, he simply didn’t realize the dangers involved with keeping the company of an Indian woman. It took a bunch of backward, greasy ranch hands to explain it to him.
Because Arnold had blown every hard-earned dollar on impressing my mother, he couldn’t spend all his time hanging out on the reservation, trying to look inconspicuous, waiting for the hour of rendezvous when they would make love in the back of the pickup down by the river for an hour or two before she had to go home.
Arnold needed a job. He spent a week checking in at the employment agency in Globe, scouring the want ads he fished out of garbage cans and siphoning gas from old ladies’ Cadillacs in the parking lot of the Safeway. There were all kinds of listings for fix-it men and secretaries and temporary track layers, but Arnold didn’t bother calling on any of these—he had his pride. He had come to Arizona to ride fences, to punch cattle, not to fix water heaters.
When he finally found work it was with an old leathery whip of a guy who ran a calf and heifer outfit just outside a little town called Hope. The man needed an extra body for the summer and was willing to pay Arnold minimum wage to do the grunt work around the place.
For two weeks Arnold cheerfully worked his ass off, building fence, shoveling out corrals, clearing ditches, hoping all the time that at some point he might get to sit on a horse. When he got his day off he drove up to San Carlos, picked up my mother and took her back to the ranch. He wanted to show her the cattle guards he’d dug out and the barbed wire he’d strung. The other hands were polite when he introduced her as his fiancée, but once she was gone, they got all over him. What did he think he was doing with a squaw? And an Apache squaw, the very worst kind. He was from back East and obviously didn’t know his own asshole from the bathtub drain, so they filled him in on everything: squaws are full of diseases, they have sex with their own fathers, and no matter what, even if you wore a condom, even if you wore five condoms, they always got pregnant, no matter what, it’s this power they have. They want you to get them pregnant so you will take them away from the reservation and their daughter-buggering fathers. It’s a goddamned fact.
Arnold tried to protest, saying he’d had quite a bit of sex with this particular Indian girl and he was pretty sure she wasn’t pregnant. Also, his pecker was in good shape, as far as he could tell.
You just wait! they all shouted at him. You stupid son of a bitch! Just wait
and see!
For the next two weeks Arnold worked and worried, and did his best to endure the taunts and jokes. They started calling him “chief” and “Geronimo” and every day they asked him if his pecker had fallen off yet. Each morning when he woke up Arnold checked on his pecker and every day he was relieved to find that it hadn’t suffered any noticeable alterations.
It was a confused, miserable Arnold Mint who drove up to San Carlos to see my mother that Sunday. He waited around in the white rippling heat at their prearranged meeting place, a small, faded billboard by the side of Highway 60 that said ASK JESUS under which somebody had scrawled don’t bother. When she didn’t show up after half an hour, he drove over to the house. Nobody appeared to be home—the front door was closed, which was unusual, and everything was perfectly quiet. After waiting for fifteen minutes in the cab of his pickup, he got out, cautiously hopped the little ragged fence which was laced with all manner of windblown trash, and peered into the dust-caked windows, hoping to spot my mother. He was just rounding the back of the house when Grandma Paul ambushed him, began beating him about the shoulders and head with some kind of thick bone—the femur of a long-dead deer or cow—that she gripped with both hands like a baseball bat.
Arnold smiled—it’s what he did in any stressful situation—and tried to keep things cordial by asking questions: “I was wondering—twop—do you think you could tell—twop—ow! All right then—twop twop—I was hoping you could tell me—twop—where—twop—Gloria might be?”
Arnold didn’t have much choice but to quit with the polite questions and get the hell out of the way. He ducked past Grandma Paul, his arms shielding his head, and went into the backyard, where he saw my mother, laid out on an old mattress under the shade of the beargrass ramada. Gloria didn’t look well at all; her face and arms were polished with sweat and even in the open air the sharp smell of vomit lingered.
