by Brady Udall
Jeffrey clucked his tongue. “Tragic,” he said. “Tragic, tragic, tragic.”
Barry knelt down next to me again, put his face close to mine. “I don’t want you to worry about any of this,” he said. “I’m going to make sure you’re taken care of. I don’t want you to be afraid.”
He took a small toy—a red cast-iron tractor—out of his pocket and handed it to me. “I used to play with this when I was a kid. It was my favorite. I want you to have it.”
Far off down the hall, we could hear Night Nurse’s shoes squeaking toward us. Barry switched off the lamp, grabbed his bag and dove through the narrow opening onto the fire escape, his boots clattering against the window frame.
“Hey, you’re coming back aren’t you?” Jeffrey eyeballed the bottle in his hand. “There aren’t that many pills in here. If it’s money you need, I can get that. Money is no object.”
“I’ll be back, don’t worry,” Barry whispered from outside. He shut the window and was gone.
THE GOOD DOCTOR
IT WASN’T UNTIL later that we found out why Barry had to crawl through the window that night instead of dropping by during visiting hours like a normal person. Barry had been fired from St. Divine’s a month after he saved my life. Even though he had done an extraordinary job of reviving me, he had not followed standard procedure in my resuscitation, and the head nurse, who had already developed an extreme dislike for Barry in the two days she had known him, filed a report. The medical board sent Barry a politely worded reprimand, which would have been the end of it, but Barry could not let it lie. He had saved the life of an innocent child and he was being reprimanded for it? He simply couldn’t live with that; his pride wouldn’t allow it. He wrote letters to every member of the board, telephoned the state medical examiner in the middle of the night, sent long angry missives to all the area newspapers and waged such a campaign against the hospital that the board asked him to accept a transfer. When Barry refused they fired him.
During the days between his first visit and second, Jeffrey and Art argued constantly about Barry. Art didn’t want Barry sneaking in at night. If he comes again, Art said, I’m going to sic Night Nurse on him, I’ll tie a knot in him myself if I got to. Jeffrey was wholly and passionately on Barry’s side. Barry was an angel, Jeffrey argued, a man who looked on human suffering with a little compassion, unlike the vampires in white coats walking around St. Divine’s. Within a couple of days, the doctors and nurses began to remark on how pink and healthy Jeffrey was beginning to look, how calm and composed. Every night Jeffrey would stay up, tucked under his covers, watching the window like an orphan on Christmas Eve. By the weekend, Jeffrey had run out of pills. By Monday, he was looking yellow and sickly and desperate.
When Barry showed Tuesday night, Jeffrey nearly fell out of his bed with joy. Barry wrenched open the window and toppled into the room.
“Goddamn window!” he whispered, picking himself from the floor and grabbing his knee. Art gurgled and farted but did not wake up.
Barry went through the same ritual as before: closed the door to the hall, put the paper bag over the lamp and distributed his gifts. When Barry delivered a new bottle of pills to Jeffrey, he got the kind of heartfelt hug usually reserved for men coming home from war. When Barry went to give Art a pint of Jack Daniel’s, Jeffrey, in the middle of gulping down a couple of pills, raised his voice, “Ah, let’s not bother the gentleman. He gets a little violent when he’s awakened. We’ll make sure he gets his liquor.”
Barry put the bottle down on the bed table and came over to me. “Edgar,” he said, and pulled up a chair next to my bed. Tonight he was wearing a dirty overcoat, a white oxford and a tie that looked like it had been used to wipe up a spill. His breath was full of cigarettes.
He pulled a stethoscope out of his pocket and listened to my heart. He seemed to calm down almost immediately—his twitching went away, his eyes quit darting and his breathing slowed.
“That’s one strong heart. A real pure-D thumper.”
“Pure-D,” I said.
“Do you like that tractor I brought you?”
“No,” I said. “How come you didn’t bring something for Ismore?”
Barry looked surprised, as if he didn’t know who I was talking about, then he turned to look at Ismore. Ismore stared back from inside that dead body of his and Barry turned quickly away—nobody, not even nurses, could lock eyes with Ismore for very long.
“I forgot about him. You’re right, I should bring him something. Where are my manners.”
“You know,” said Jeffrey, who already had that lost, beatific look on his face, “we should probably go ahead and kill Ismore. That could be his gift. I’m sure that’s what he wants. What do you think? A hypodermic full of insulin into his IV tube and that would be the end of it. Then he wouldn’t have to be so pissed anymore.”
“I’ve been doing some checking around,” Barry said to me, glancing at Jeffrey from time to time. “I found out where your grandma is. She’s in a place for sick old people. I was thinking, if you want, I could go see her myself, see how she is, tell her I’ve seen you.”
“What about the mailman?” I said.
Barry raised his eyebrows.
“The mailman in the accident,” I said. “Where’s he?”
“He must be…look, Edgar, I don’t think the mailman is the important thing in all of this.”
“Can you find him?”
“Hey Doctor?” Jeffrey said. “I wanted to ask you something. Why is it that we wash our hands after we go to the bathroom and not before? I mean, shouldn’t I be a little more concerned about getting certain germs on a certain part of my body than on my hands?”
“Would you shut up?” Barry said.
“Yes,” said Jeffrey.
Barry pulled his chair closer to me and said over his shoulder to Jeffrey, “I’d like to talk to Edgar here without any interruptions. Do you think that would be all right with you?”
“No interruptions,” Jeffrey said, waving his hands. “I cease to interfere.”
Barry turned back to me and went through the standard battery of doctor-questions, beginning with the well-worn opener, “How are you feeling?” I gave all my standard answers until Barry got to a question I’d never heard before.
“Are you homesick?”
“Homesick?”
“Do you want to go back home?”
“No.”
“Well, I don’t blame you. From what I saw it’s not much of a place. A shack is what it is. Do you miss your mother?”
I thought about it for a minute.
“Yes,” I said.
“Yes, yes you do. What about your grandma, do you want to see her?”
“I don’t know.”
Jeffrey began to whistle a peppy rendition of “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.” Barry snapped his fingers, which silenced Jeffrey instantly.
“Are you lonely?” Barry said. “Do you feel sad sometimes?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, it’s difficult, no way around it. I don’t want you to worry. I’m going to take care of things.”
Barry got up and opened the door a crack, peeked out into the hall. “I better get going,” he said, doing a pantomime of a tiptoeing burglar. “These bastards would have me shot if they knew I was in here.”
“Not to interrupt, but I’m getting some money so I can pay you,” Jeffrey said to Barry. “I told my mother to take my turntable to the pawnshop.”
“I don’t want any money,” Barry said. “Just make sure that Art gets his whiskey. And be good to Edgar. He doesn’t have anybody.”
Jeffrey held up his new bottle full of pills as if it was a glass of champagne and he was making a toast. “You, sir, are a saint,” he called.
Before Barry slithered back out the window, he came over to my bed, bent down and left a light, dry kiss on my forehead, right between the eyes.
BIRTH OF A HALF-BREED
THE DAY EDGAR was born it snowed i
n the desert. A freak thunder-and snowstorm had rumbled through and dropped an inch of dry snow-pebbles that instantly froze together and formed a grainy crust—the first snow to hit the ground in San Carlos in four years. My mother woke up just after midnight with her first contractions and after two or three hours could not lie quiet in the bed anymore. She got up, threw her blanket around her shoulders and walked out into a star-bright night, down the hill to the river, to get some beer.
My mother kept her beer in the river because Grandma Paul didn’t want it in the house and she liked her beer ice-cold. On the way down the hill another contraction stopped her in her tracks, nearly dropped her to her knees; little Edgar was clamoring to get out.
My mother hardly noticed the snow. She walked barefoot across the dry, buckling crust of ice, holding her belly with both arms, and without so much as a flinch waded out into the freezing river, casting about with her feet in the shallows for the two six-packs which were kept tied to a tree root like a bunch of trout. When she couldn’t feel the cluster of cans right off she panicked, bending awkwardly to search the shallows with her hands, splashing and groaning, nearly losing her balance. Just as her hand found one of those Pabst Blue Ribbons another contraction hit—the worst yet—but in the midst of it she was still able to pull the tab off the can and pour the beer past her clenched teeth. The bitter taste, the feeling of it foaming down her throat immediately calmed her and she stood in that river, her feet numb, and had three more beers, calmly sucking them down, until her water broke and the warm, soupy fluid which had surrounded and cushioned and contained little Edgar for the whole of his existence ran down her legs and mixed with the freezing waters of the San Carlos River on its way to the muddy ponds and cement irrigation canals of the Sonoran Desert.
My mother dropped her beer and cried out. The pain of the contractions had been one thing, but this, the sudden gush between her legs, the fluid draining out with the warmth and consistency of blood—nobody had prepared her for anything like this. She thought about sitting down in the river and letting it all go, giving in completely, but something made her pull herself out of the river and start up the hill toward the house on numb, ice-crusted legs, dragging her precious beers behind her at the end of a mossy length of twine.
Grandma Paul was already outside, building a fire in the pit next to the ramada and situating my mother’s mattress next to it. Grandma Paul had the power of premonition; she could not foretell the weather, or see the future, but she had an uncanny sense about tragedy and pain. She could feel them coming like a wind.
My mother’s labor lasted all day and into the next evening. She lay propped up on the mattress, heaving and crying out and swigging Pabst Blue Ribbons in between. During her entire pregnancy she had only had three or four beers a day, not enough to get her truly drunk, but sufficient to keep the nausea down, to help her forget about Arnold and where he might be, to help her forget about the baby inside her. Now she was truly tanked, obliterated. In between contractions she shouted at the turkey buzzards orbiting like dark planets in the blank white sky, kicked at Grandma Paul when she tried to take away an empty can collapsed in her fist, laughing until she began to choke.
Bright-eyed and furious, Grandma Paul commanded my mother to be quiet, to have some dignity, but my mother did not care. She chugged her beer, laughed at the sun and shouted until she was hoarse, “Arnold!” She giggled until she choked, as if the name itself were the funniest thing she could imagine. “Arnold! Arnold! Ar-nold!”
Out in the street a few kids were attempting to sled down the street in cardboard boxes but the snow was now just loose slush and their boxes soon melted away into a heavy, fibrous mess. As the day wore on and the autumn sun consumed the snow completely, more of the neighbors stopped at the fence, peering through the rickweed to see what all the racket was about. Folks were starting to get annoyed with the incessant noise, but nobody complained. The closer I got to making my appearance, the more people showed up to watch. The birth of a half-breed was not a common occurrence on the reservation; people wanted to see if I would come out with some kind of freak characteristic, like pink albino eyes or, better yet, a long hooked tail.
It was dusk when my mother stopped babbling and really began to scream, a high wordless wail. Most of the onlookers had gone home to cook up their beans and fry bread, watch TV and drink their own beer, so they did not get to see my grand entrance (or exit). I came out bloody and squinting and did not cry even when Grandma Paul grabbed me by the neck and shook me like a doll. I gasped and gulped in silence like a dying fish and the last few spectators were left to straggle home disappointed: I was not strange or different in any way, just another black-haired, red-skinned baby born on the reservation.
A JAR OF DIRT
SOON BARRY PINKLEY became a regular part of the routine at St. Divine’s: every Wednesday around 1 A.M. his dark outline would block the lights of town and he would clamber through the window like some low-rent incarnation of Santa Claus, clutching his doctor’s bag full of liquor, cigarettes and drugs.
It took awhile, but Barry and Jeffrey were finally able to ascertain what it was that would make Ismore happy: porno magazines. Every week Barry would show up with a couple of well-thumbed issues of Gent or Dude which he placed in front of Ismore on a scarred, graffitispangled music stand which he had paid one of the orderlies to swipe from the local high school.
“Just keep those things away from the boy,” Art would say every time.
After my checkup, Barry would usually stay about half an hour or so. He could go on at length about all the hospital gossip coming down through the grapevine, which nurse was sleeping with which doctor, which orderly had been caught filching morphine from the narcotics cabinet. He would walk up and down the aisle between the beds as he ranted about the bastards on the medical board doing their best to destroy the practice of medicine as we know it, pausing every so often to turn the page of Ismore’s magazine.
One night, after Art had dozed off and Jeffrey was absorbed with his pills, Barry sat on my bed and said, “I’m glad all of this has happened, Eddie.”
“Edgar,” I said.
He chuckled and shook his head with false amusement. “You wouldn’t think your getting run over and me getting fired would be good for either of us, but look at us now! If I was still a doctor here, I’d never get to talk to you like this man to man, it would all be, ‘How are you feeling, what color is your urine these days?’ There’s no such thing as feelings when you’re a doctor. Everything’s quantifiable, no such thing as mystery. That’s why the brain is the most interesting of all the organs, the most mysterious.” Here he touched my head with his fingertips, felt around a little and sighed with satisfaction. “People would try to tell you it’s the heart, but the heart is just a pump, no more complicated than a lawn mower engine. It’s our brains that make us who we are. Our hearts don’t have anything to do with it.”
Barry patted my cheek, smiled down at me, and I said, “I don’t know whether to shit or go blind.” This was something I’d heard Art say a few times and I liked the sound of it.
Often I would type while Barry talked, tak-tak-taking away like a courtroom stenographer, which, I could see very clearly, aggravated him to no end. His shoulders would creep up toward his ears and a muscle in his jaw would start to quiver. The more agitated he became, the harder I typed. He would try to talk above my typing, giving me nervous glances and finally he would stop, go completely rigid and shout, “Christ! Would you put that thing away for a minute?”
Even though Art, I’m sure, was just as agitated by my typing, he always told Barry to watch his mouth. But whenever Art stood up for me like that, I began to detect a weakness in his voice, a kind of resignation, that I’m sure Barry picked up on as well, because he began to ignore Art, began to realize the power he had over the sorry-sack lot of us: a quadriplegic, a drug-crazed crony, a grief-stricken drunk and a head-injured boy.
It was with the intuition of a child that
I knew the arrival of Barry spelled the end of my short-lived happiness at St. Divine’s. I had found a small oasis of contentment; I was relatively pain-free, I had a friend and protector in Art, and I felt like I was part of something. I believed that my life had been spared by some miracle so I could stay and live out my days in this run-down, foul-smelling hospital. Most important to me, I had come to believe that if I were to leave someone might actually miss me.
Barry made me feel uneasy and sometimes half-panicked, but his visits seemed to affect Art worse than anyone. Art, never a talkative man, became even more closemouthed, going days on end without saying a word to anyone, except for calling the nurses “sour-faced old heifers” under his breath or the orderlies “wisenheimers of the first degree.” He even stopped wearing his cologne, which allowed the smell of alcohol on him to become noticeable for the first time. He grew increasingly impatient with my questions and my typing, and once, after I followed him around in the Dungeon wanting to know what the word “bungholer” meant (I had heard an old man with a botched cleft palate use it on one of the new orderlies), Art turned to me and growled, “No more questions, please, could you keep quiet for a single minute?”
He might as well have kicked me in the stomach. I backed away from him and sat down at my little desk, my eyes stinging, and pounded my Play-Doh into one colorless lump.
Back in our room that night, Art kept the curtain pulled around his bed, something he had never done before except for a few times during Barry’s visits, his mouth set hard as a doorknob. Once the lights were out I could hear him swallowing his whiskey at even intervals, the quiet pop of suction when he pulled the bottle from his mouth. I was finally able to sleep but woke up in the dark morning hours when I heard Art moving around. He shuffled along the floor in his slippers, clicked on the lamp next to his bed and opened the drawer of the Formica-topped nightstand on which the lamp sat. He grunted, climbed back onto his bed and was quiet for a moment before a whining hiss came from the other side of that curtain, a sound like air escaping from a break in a hose.
