The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint

by Brady Udall

  “Huh,” Arnold said.

  My mother propped herself on her elbows. She had the distracted, frantic look of somebody who is going to puke any second. “Arnold, I’m sick,” my mother said. “I think I’ve got a baby.”

  Arnold felt his knees go loose. Welts were rising up all over his neck and arms and he began to feel sick himself. Just then Grandma Paul came up behind him and gave him a shot in the right kidney that buckled him in half.

  Straightening up and clutching his side in pain, Arnold wheezed, “Pardon me,” and yanked the bone away from Grandma. He tossed it on the roof of the house, where it clattered loudly on the tin until it came to rest against a rusted TV antenna.

  Arnold turned toward my mother and watched her dry-heave into an old coffee can by her head. He started toward her, holding out his hand, then backed away. He yanked at his chin in desperation. He said, “How…?”

  Grandma Paul grabbed an old shovel resting against the house, which got Arnold’s immediate attention, but she did not go after him with it. Instead, she went over by the bean patch where the dirt was soft and dug a small hole, no more than a foot deep. She dropped the shovel, walked up to Arnold and snatched his beloved Stetson, still showing the effects of Wicked Joseph, off his head. She had to make a little jump to reach it, but once she had it she crammed it into the hole and began saying Apache words over it, looking up at Arnold occasionally and making tiny circular gestures with her hands. Gloria yelled out for her mother to stop, but Grandma Paul kept it up until she had covered the hat with dirt and stomped on it.

  Arnold was rooted to his spot, the sun beating down on his white, thinning scalp. At that moment Arnold wished he was back in Connecticut, where things were easy, where everybody knew what was expected, where things made sense.

  He couldn’t look at my mother. He looked anywhere else, up at the ramada that shaded her, as if trying to figure out how it had been constructed, down at his boots, over at a couple of ragged donkeys munching knapweed in a vacant lot.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Grandma Paul shouted something in Apache, picked up a softball-sized dirt clod and hurled it at him, just missing his head.

  Arnold glanced at the final resting place of his hat, wiped his forehead with his hand, then turned—dirt clods zinging past him on both sides—and sprinted across the street to where his Ford waited for him, motor running.

  HERMES JUBILEE

  DESPITE A BAD FIRST DAY, I grew to enjoy my time in the Dungeon. In the hopes of preventing further injury they got me a special helmet, a padded leather thing with straps and buckles. The helmet was old and ravaged, like something used in the National Football League before plastic and face masks.

  Everywhere else, I had to be pushed around in a wheelchair, but in the Dungeon Sue Kay allowed me a little freedom. Once I had finished with my blocks and clay and puzzles, I was allowed to roam the room, retrieving things for Sue Kay or her assistants, playing checkers with somebody who needed an opponent, helping a senile patient relearn how to use fingernail clippers. Sometimes Art would take me in my wheelchair outside to the ruined courtyard, where the dry heat would hit us like a slap and we would watch men with plastic legs and hooks for hands hitting a volleyball over a rope stretched between two crumbling statues. Once or twice a month Sue Kay allowed me to swim in the aqua-tank. I remember splashing around, gulping copper-tasting water, happy to be alive, while next to me a man hung suspended from the ceiling in a harness, like a beached whale about to be returned to the wild, kicking his legs in the water and groaning with a deep, unfathomable suffering.

  I wasn’t really sure what was going on in that room; to me it mostly seemed like a bunch of people trying to have a good time and not really succeeding. There was a hopefulness that verged on desperation: we were broken and afflicted and maybe if we played enough badminton, painted enough pictures, weaved enough baskets, we could make ourselves whole again.

  I got bored pretty quickly with the clay and the Lincoln Logs and the puzzles. Sue Kay started me on a reading program; even though I had been well past the age at the time of my accident, I had never been to school. I caught on quickly, though; it wasn’t long before I was wearing out the few children’s books they had on hand and I eventually moved on to the pulp novels that filled the Dungeon’s library, which was actually a pile of two hundred or so molding, falling-apart books that had been donated by past patients, mounded together behind the piano. Not exactly a lot of great literature in that pile—a couple Dickens, an untouched Jane Austen, a ragged copy of Huckleberry Finn. Mostly, they were books with titles like Widows Won’t Wait, Cold Night, Hot Stranger, The Groom Lay Dead and A Corpse for Christmas—books with lurid covers—women sporting cleavage, mustachioed men on horseback, shadowy figures in alley-ways—that you could read almost without looking at the words.

  If I wasn’t sleeping, eating, or down in the Dungeon I was probably reading one of those books. I liked the Westerns best. They were the most straightforward, the easiest to understand. A man kills your brother? Hunt the son of a bitch down and shoot him through the heart. Somebody steals your horse? Hang him from a bridge. There was something beautiful and simple about the way things worked in these books, something the romances couldn’t claim.

  When I didn’t understand a certain word, I’d usually ask Jeffrey. Though he was a complete mess, he had a vocabulary. I could wake Jeffrey out of a dead sleep, ask him what “sarcophagus” meant, and he’d say, “Huh? Oh, ah, sarcophagus—uh, big stone coffin favored by mummies,” and be right back to sleep.

  Art, on the other hand, had more of a difficult time with my questions. The better I felt, the more energy I had and the more thinking I was able to do: little Edgar had a lot of questions. And Art was the only one around with the time or the patience to deal with them all, though sometimes even he would get fed up with me.

  One morning I noticed one of my bottom teeth was loose. Though my life was full of much more serious complications, I had never had a loose tooth before—it concerned me. I asked Art what I should do about the tooth while we were eating breakfast in our beds: powdered eggs, Spam, and a biscuit you could hurt somebody with.

  “It’s going to fall out on you, no way around it,” he said. “But the good thing is you can put it under your pillow and the tooth fairy will leave you a dime or a quarter, something like that.”

  “Tooth fairy?”

  “You don’t know about the tooth fairy,” he said, shooting me the skeptical eye. “All right,” he sighed, “the tooth fairy. This is the fairy that lifts up your pillow in the middle of the night and takes your tooth. She collects teeth, you know, for some reason. She’s a teeth collector. She leaves a quarter under your pillow for your trouble.”

  “What’s a fairy?”

  “It’s like this little old lady with wings who flies around.”

  “The lady has wings?”

  “Well, she’s not exactly real, like me or you, she just floats. I think.”

  “Like a ghost?” I didn’t want to have anything to do with a ghost who floated around lifting up pillows.

  Art struggled to keep his voice down. “She’s not a ghost. She’s nice, dangit. She’s a fairy.”

  Art taught me all kind of things but there was one thing he certainly learned from me: patience. He was tired and bitter, a wreck of a man, but he took the time to make sure I understood how things worked; he would field my questions, asked at all hours of the day and night, until he looked like his face might explode. He did his best to keep me informed, but the one thing I am most grateful to him for is the little idea he had just after breakfast down in the Dungeon. “Why don’t we just get the boy a damn typewriter?” he said to Sue Kay that morning.

  For a few weeks the doctors had been working on a solution for one of the lingering effects of my brain damage: Edgar could not write. He could read like a champ, could recognize shapes and letters without any problem, but for some reason when he put pen to paper to make the
letter A or T or L, no matter how much he concentrated and sweated and willed his hand to do it right, it always came out looking like scribbled knot, a complicated hieroglyph. He could not make so much as a circle or a simple straight line.

  As with everything else about him, the doctors were dumbfounded; they had never seen anything like this. “Dysgraphia” was the word they were finally able to attach to my condition, a word that means, simply “the inability to write.” “You have dysgraphia,” they told me, relieved, as if this diagnosis were a solution to something.

  More than my fits or headaches or the ghosts in the night, this dysgraphia (a word I would chant over and over again, hoping to lessen its power over me) tormented me. The doctors believed that with enough therapy this was something I could overcome. I spent an hour or two every day gritting my teeth, trying to make the most rudimentary of shapes—a cross, a square, a circle—but I could never get it right. Instead of jaunting about the Dungeon as before, I spent my time at my little desk trying to copy shapes and letters into old elementary primers, grinding my crayons into the paper until I cried. I would bite my hands, punishing them for not obeying my will, but it was my brain, my own mashed-up brain, that was the real traitor. Some tiny part of it was ruined beyond repair, as useless as spoiled hamburger, and so I could not perform the fundamental act of writing my own name.

  So it was Art who came up with the solution. Get the boy a damn typewriter.

  I have to say it was not love at first sight for Edgar and the Hermes Jubilee 2000. Sue Kay carried it into the room one day after therapy, holding it out in front of her with a formal stiffness, as if it was a velvet pillow with the crown of England on top. She had just stopped by Art’s empty house, according to his instructions, located the thing somewhere in his garage, and rushed it over like an organ that needed transplanting.

  “This is for you, sweetheart,” Sue Kay beamed, setting it on my bed. “It was Art’s idea.”

  The machine was shiny black and sinister-looking, something made to cause pain. After being in a hospital all this time, especially one with a Dungeon, I was certain that there was no such thing as a machine that could do anything besides draw blood or clean out kidneys or make X rays, a machine that could actually offer some kind of pleasure. I slid my legs away from it and looked up at Sue Kay.

  “Ooo look,” Jeffrey said, pulling his pillow over his head, “we’re going to turn the miracle-boy into a secretary.”

  Art grabbed the rails of his bed and swung his legs to the side, grunting and wheezing like a worn-out accordion. He shuffled over to us, his face alive like I hadn’t seen it before. “This is a machine right here. Built like a Panzer. Drop it off a skyscraper one minute and you’re typing up a love poem for your sweetheart the next. Hoo-boy.”

  “Oh fuck,” came Jeffrey’s muffled voice from beneath the pillow.

  “It’s a typewriter, pumpkin,” Sue Kay said to me, in the same slow way she talked to the senile or retarded people down in the Dungeon. “We think this will help you. You can write all you want and forget about that bad old pencil and those primers.”

  “Lookit,” Art said, ripping one of my progress sheets from the clipboard at the end of my bed and spooling it into the machine using only his good hand. “You feed paper in it like this here, see, and then you can type up words, however you want. Watch this.” He stabbed at one of the keys with his finger and the ratcheting thump the hammer made striking the paper made me flinch as if a gun had gone off.

  “See that? Hit the button with the K on it and there you’ve got a K on the paper.” Jabbing at the keys with one finger, Art typed out, “T-y-p-i-n-g i-s a h-o-o-t.”

  Sue Kay picked the machine up and put it on my bed table. “Maybe he can try it out tomorrow.”

  “Let him give it a try right now!” Art protested.

  Sue Kay stood in front of him and guided him back to his bed. She said under her breath, “Come on, honey, let’s give him some time.”

  I had felt Art’s impatience with me, sometimes even his indifference, but never in the time I knew him had I ever felt disappointment. For two days, he hardly spoke to me or looked my way. And the Hermes Jubilee squatted on my table like an evil presence, untouched.

  The next morning over the din of the Dungeon I heard him say to Sue Kay, “He’s afraid of a typewriter?”

  The whole thing made me feel horrible. Art was disappointed in me, I was a victim of dysgraphia, I was afraid of a typewriter. It could get no worse than this.

  It took me a few days, but I got up the courage to have a go at the typewriter. Art’s disappointment in me was too much; I would have dived headfirst out of our third-story window to win back his acceptance, to get things back to the way they had been.

  One morning when everyone but Ismore was gone down to the Dungeon, I got out of bed and retrieved the typewriter from the table. It was even heavier than it looked; it was like trying to heave an anchor onto my bed. I sat cross-legged, playing absently with my loose tooth, and regarded it for awhile. With its strange shape and exposed mechanical guts, I half expected it to try to scuttle away, but it stayed where it was, giving off its oily machine-smell. I read over and over the sentence Art had typed a few days before: “Typing is a hoot.”

  “Typing is a hoot,” I said out loud, hoping it would make me feel encouraged.

  I reached out and put my fingertip lightly on the E, then the D. The keys were lacquered and smooth and as big as pennies and I rubbed my fingers along all of them, listening to them click and settle against the slightest pressure—I could feel a power in them, a quiet, mechanical volatility. I jabbed my finger at the E key. I jumped when the hammer struck the paper, lightning fast, I almost couldn’t see it, but nothing worse than that happened, nothing blew up or reached out and bit me. Nothing happened except that there was an E on the paper where there hadn’t been one before.

  It had spooked me when Art had done it, but now that I was the one hitting the keys it felt like magic. An E where there was not an E before, in the blink of an eye. I was so delighted I cackled.

  I hit the D and the G and then gave up immediately trying to write my name—what was the use of that?—and began hitting the keys helter-skelter, drumming up a good rolling rhythm until the letters ran off the page. It took a minute or two of panic before I figured out how to return the carriage so that I could continue my key-striking. There was something so satisfying about hitting those keys—the slight resistance at first, then the key finally giving way, like pulling the trigger of a pistol.

  By the time Art and Jeffrey had returned from therapy I had torn off and pretty much blacked out everyone’s progress sheets.

  “Look,” I said when a nurse wheeled Art into the room, “I have decided to type.”

  Art took one of the typed-over progress sheets and inspected it. “I’ll be a redheaded chinaman,” he said, looking it over as if inspecting it for errors. “Yessir. Hmm. I see. Real good, Edgar. I believe you got it nailed.”

  From that day on I have been a typing fool. I cannot think of a day since that February morning that I have not spent at least an hour together with my little typewriter, getting things down on paper, trying to make sense of them, or simply striking the keys without regard to sense or meaning, like a drummer lost in the beat, pounding away, losing myself in the letters and words mounting up on the page.

  Having the Hermes Jubilee seemed to complete something about my stay at St. Divine’s; I was beginning to settle in. My health was nearing a hundred percent. I loved going to the Dungeon, loved my typewriter, loved the time I got to spend with Art, even enjoyed listening to Jeffrey and his theories. As Sue Kay put it, I was beginning to be a “full-fledged member of the hospital community.”

  Because I had no visitors, nobody from the outside to bring flowers or balloons like most of the other patients, Sue Kay, with the blessing of the staff, had begun a campaign to get people to come talk to me during visiting hours—she cornered just about everyone in the ho
spital and made them promise to pay me a visit. Most likely, she thought few of them would actually come, but was she wrong. I practically had to make appointments there were so many people stopping by: patients, nurses and staff from the south wing, secretaries from downstairs, relatives of other patients I had never met before.

  The nurses would pull the curtain around my bed, place a chair next to it, and I would be ready to accept visitors. A few of them came only once, but many kept coming back. There was a housewife with a stomach virus, a teenage boy named Moony who’d lost most of his foot to a lawn mower, a sad old mechanic who talked with a buzzing microphone held to his throat, a hydrocephalic young woman, a downtrodden marine with a botched buzz cut who raked his groin with a letter opener shaped like a sword.

  “Sorry,” he would apologize. “My privates tend to itch.”

  Edgar lay in his bed, still as a lizard on a rock, and listened to people talk about themselves. What is it about a child that makes an adult want to open up and share his secrets, his darkest sins? Maybe it was the cramped atmosphere of the curtain room, just like a confessional, and me, the miracle-boy, lying in the bed like a tiny, benevolent priest. Most of the people, like Art, began by telling me about how things were when they were kids, or telling me about their own kids—they just wanted to relate, I guess—and then, often, they’d wind their way into deeper, darker territory; their teenage screwups, their misunderstanding parents or ungrateful children, their business failings, their worst moments, their doubts about God, their misdeeds and regrets, their broken hearts.

  I heard just about everything you can imagine, and though I didn’t understand all of it—didn’t understand most of it, actually—I enjoyed it just the same. My fingers would be itching to type as they talked, wanting to get it all down. There is truly something satisfying, maybe even entertaining, about people you barely know sitting at the side of your bed, divulging all the gritty details.