The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint

by Brady Udall

  I climbed down from my bed and padded around the curtain until I could see through a gap in the cloth about six inches wide. Art sat in his bed in the small rectangle of yellow light, weeping. Not loud boo-hooing, but more like humming at a pitch so low you could barely hear it, his face red and shining with the effort of trying to hold it in. He had a number of objects laid out on his bed: some photographs I could only see the edges of, a battered old book, a bottle of Wild Turkey with a couple inches of whiskey still left and a Mason jar filled with dirt. I knew what the Mason jar was; a few months before, not long after I’d come out of my coma, a wiry man in a dark wool suit—probably a pastor or maybe the funeral home director—brought the jar one day during visiting hours, handed it to Art and told him it was dirt from the graves of his wife and daughters. In a low monotone the man said that since Art had not been able to attend the funeral, he thought he might want a memento of it.

  The man tried to go on, to offer Art his condolences, but Art told him that he didn’t ever want to see him again, that he better get out of the room now while he still could. The man stood up, his eyes wide and his head moving back and forth with alarm, and backed out of our room as if Art had a gun leveled at him.

  I never saw that Mason jar after that, but here it was now, on Art’s lap as he shook and clutched at his face as if he were trying to fight back something inside that was trying to make its way out. From where I stood I could smell the whiskey, sour and sharp. Weeping harder now, Art picked up the jar, fought to wrench open the lid with his good hand while gripping the jar between his thighs. Grief and anger had twisted his face into something desperate and horrible and I was terrified by it. Once he got the jar open he lifted out some of the dirt with his fingers, calming just a little as he watched it spill into his lap. He dug out more dirt and this time looked at it for only a second before scooping it into his mouth, poking with his thick fingers to make sure it stayed in. He shoveled in more, trying hard to swallow, his teeth making gritty crunching noises as they came together, until black, oozing mud began to seep from the corner of his lips and down the hollow of his neck. He sobbed harder, almost noiselessly, his blackened teeth and tongue standing out against his pale, stricken face.

  “Goddamn,” he said, his voice thick with mud. “Goddamn.”

  I thought about yelling at the top of my lungs, anything to make him stop, but my chest felt like it was wrapped in cables pulled tight with a ratchet. I watched until I couldn’t stand it anymore. I backed away, looked over at Ismore, who was awake and glaring at me like the devil himself, and stumbled to my bed and lay there until the weeping stopped, rubbing my urinal puck on my cheek until I slept.

  THE LIGHT OF DAY

  THE NEXT DAY, Edgar was taking his morning stroll down the Ward B hallway, greeting and glad-handing the sick and infirm, when Delancey, one of the orderlies, walked up behind him, took his hand and said, staring straight ahead, “Edgar, my man, walk with a nigger for a minute.”

  Delancey was big, still a teenager, and his hand was like a huge hairless spider locked onto mine. We took the elevator to the first floor and walked down a little-used corridor past doors marked MAINTENANCE and SUPPLIES. Delancey stopped at a door without any markings, knocked twice, took a quick look each way to make sure nobody was around, and pulled me inside. The room smelled like old oil and was filled with a dusty, dim light provided by a single window half hidden behind a stack of boxes. Besides the boxes, the room was filled with broken or unused machinery: several old wheelchairs, a massive dialysis machine, rusted parts strewn across a desktop, a couple of floor buffers hunched in a corner.

  “Hey,” Delancey whispered into the empty air. “I got the kid here.”

  As if it were a trick of light, Dr. Pinkley appeared from behind the dialysis machine. Delancey jumped like he was being jerked off his feet by wires and said, “Fuck, man!”

  Barry folded his arms and smiled grimly. He wore a white doctor’s smock and, instead of four or five days’ worth of beard, was clean-shaven and had a pink, just-scrubbed look about him. To me, Barry had always been just another ghost in the night, so seeing him like this, with a new buzz cut and smelling of Listermint, real and substantial in the hard light of day, made the hairs on my arms stand up.

  Delancey was still trying to get over the fright Barry had given him—swearing under his breath and stomping his feet—when Barry Pinkley told him to be back in exactly three minutes to pick me up and take me back upstairs. “And if anybody asks you what you’re up to you tell them the boy got lost and you’re taking him back where he belongs.” Delancey went out the door mumbling to himself, “Damn, did that fucker scare me.”

  Barry grabbed me under the arms and hoisted me up so I could sit on the desk next to him. “Look at this helmet they’ve got on you,” he said, shaking his head. “The third world.”

  He took the stethoscope from around his neck and handed it to me to play with. This must have been some kind of ploy he had learned in medical school; I knew I was supposed to treat it like a toy, put it in my ears like a real doctor, be amused and comforted by it, but I held it away from my body as if it were a dead snake. “You scared me, too,” I said, looking down at my lap.

  “I didn’t mean to scare anyone, but I have to be careful in here. If they knew I was in here they’d have me in the slammer before you could say boo.”

  I thought about yelling “Boo!” at the top of my lungs, loud enough to be heard down the hall.

  “We don’t have much time so I want you to listen,” Barry said. “They’re going to take you away from here. They’ve decided your mother is a lost cause so they’ve found a legal guardian for you, put you with some long-lost relative you’ve never met before. Do you hear what I’m saying, Edgar?”

  I stared at the stethoscope in my hands. Barry took my chin between his finger and thumb and turned my head so I was looking him in the eye. “Do you understand what I’m saying? They’re going to send you away, get rid of you. They don’t want to deal with you anymore. So they found the easiest way out.”

  He put his face closer to mine and I could see the packed, feathery folds of his irises. “I’m going to take you away from here. There’s nobody here that cares about you, nobody anywhere. Your mother abandoned you, Edgar, left you for dead. Two different times the Indian Health Service had to take care of you while your mother was in the hospital for alcohol poisoning. Once, when your grandma was in New Mexico visiting relatives, the social worker stopped by and found you sleeping in the crawl space under the house with the family dog, your mother nowhere to be found. I know you don’t like to hear that, but it’s the simple truth and it’s something you’ve got to understand. They don’t care. The doctors, the nurses? Just looking for a paycheck. You might think Art is your friend, but he’s just a sick old man who needs somebody to talk to. And now they’re trying to pawn you off on some seventy-five-year-old janitor who’s never even met you. I’m not going to let them do this to you, Edgar. I’m going to take care of you.”

  “Eat shit, Marty,” I whispered.

  “What?” Barry said.

  “Eat shit,” I said, this time without any whisper at all.

  I saw the muscles in Barry’s jaw spasm, but then his face softened. He put his hand on my shoulder then took it off quickly. He couldn’t seem to decide if he was angry or sad. “I think…” he said, stopping short, gathering himself, then bent down so we were face to face again. He locked eyes with me, his antiseptic breath puffing into my face.

  “I know maybe you’re a little afraid of me. I know Art says bad things about me and the hospital thinks I’m a blackhearted criminal, but I’m trying to help you, I really am. This is not a trick, I don’t want anything from you. But I know what it’s like to be alone, to not have anybody. I’ve dealt with it my whole life. It’s terrible, Edgar, the worst thing in the world. You need someone who’ll take care of you. That’s why I’m here now. Thursday night I’m coming to get you. I’ve made my decision. I�
��ve got it all set up and I want you to be ready. I’m going to take you away from this place and give you whatever you want. You’ll be happy, I promise you. I’ll take care of you.”

  For a few moments we stayed like that, eye to eye, and it was very clear to me that Barry meant what he said, that he believed it.

  He took the stethoscope from me. “Is that okay with you?”

  I waited for a few beats and then said it: “Okay.”

  Barry gave me an awkward half-hug and just then Delancey slipped through the door, bouncing on the balls of his feet, nervous as a rabbit. Barry helped me off the desk and slipped some money into one of Delancey’s big hands.

  “Be ready,” Barry whispered to me as Delancey led me out into the hall. “And not a word to anybody.”

  THE SMELTER

  ART WAS HAVING a hard time keeping his arm down. A few minutes before, they had cut off his cast, and now he was sitting on his bed, his big feet with their horny nails sticking out, looking at his arm, which was angled out from his body like a chicken wing.

  “Won’t that beat everything,” he said. He pushed his floating arm down with his good hand and watched it come right back up. “It won’t stay down for nothing.”

  Art’s newly liberated arm was as pale and limp as a noodle, covered with pink scar tissue where the flesh had been scraped away, but it didn’t seem to bother him much. I pulled back the curtain so Ismore could see and we all watched Art’s arm float up like a thing with a mind of its own.

  “Entertainment for all,” Jeffrey said. “Too bad they’re finally kicking you out of here. What will we do for our amusement?”

  Art’s arm suddenly stopped its levitating act. He glared hotly at Jeffrey and turned away from both of us.

  Earlier that day, one of the doctors had come in and, loud enough for us to hear, informed Art that everything looked good for him to go home once and for all. They’d send a therapist to work with him there until he was well enough to make weekly trips to the Dungeon.

  Yesterday I’d had similar news: Mrs. Rodale stopped by to confirm what Barry, in his spooklike way, had already found out. Uncle Julius, Grandma Paul’s half brother, was going to take over my care and upbringing. Uncle Julius, Mrs. Rodale informed me, was a janitor at the Willie Sherman School, a BIA boarding school for Indian kids. It was a perfect situation in many ways, she told me, sticking a pencil into her hair so that it disappeared from view. Not only would I be with a member of my family, but I would be living right there in the dormitories with the other students, learning and playing sports and participating in all manner of social activities. She made it sound like I was going to live in a carefree place of sunshine and happiness, a place like California. All they needed, she said, was to put the paperwork in order, get the clearance from the doctors and I would be on my way to Fort Apache.

  I had planned to tell Art all about my talk with Barry, but now I wasn’t so sure. I didn’t want to go with Barry, but neither did I want to live in a school with a man named Uncle Julius who I had never met before. I thought maybe Art could help me come up with a way for me to stay at St. Divine’s—he had done pretty well keeping himself in the hospital against all odds—but now he was going home and I didn’t particularly want to spend my days with only Jeffrey and Ismore to talk to.

  For the next two days, Art seemed to get back to his old self. He told me I was spending way too much time henpecking on that typewriter of mine, so he accompanied me down the hallways on my walks and even took me outside to the courtyard, where we played a little game of trying to kick a half-inflated volleyball into the fouled fountain. In the middle of the fountain was the crumbling, ochre-stained statue of some cowled female saint. When I was able to get the ball in the fountain, Art clambered over the edge, grabbing his gimpy leg with both hands and hauling it up like it was a piece of luggage. He stood on his tiptoes in a puddle of green mosquito water, put his arm around the statue, his hands on her buttocks, and kissed her right on her stony lips. I laughed like I never had before, fell on my back and howled like a lunatic until a voice came from one of the second-floor windows, “Would somebody shut that boy up?”

  On Wednesday evening, the day before Barry was to come in the middle of the night and steal me away, Art took me up on the roof to watch his smelter. “I think they’re going to start her up tonight,” he said, nodding seriously. “Got a feeling. Been trucking that ore in two days straight now. I was hoping maybe we might catch them pouring off the slag. Oh, it’s something to see in the dark.”

  We were supposed to be in the cafeteria eating our dinner, but instead Art grabbed some Saltines, a couple of mealy apples and a bottle of dairy creamer, stuffed it all in the pockets of his bathrobe and took me up a flight of stairs that led out onto the flat roof of the administration wing. The sun had just gone down and the sky was pink at its edges, the moon faint and indistinct like a patch of frost on a window. Across a flat expanse of scrubland were the hills of Globe, where heat-buckled asphalt streets zagged and switchbacked between shanties and mobile homes perched on the slightest out-cropping. Down below a thin line of smoke drifted out of the smelter’s single enormous smokestack.

  I shoved crackers into my mouth and sipped at the dairy creamer while Art took out his little telescope and looked the whole operation over. The tar paper we were sitting on was still warm and I felt like leaning back and falling asleep.

  Art lost himself in a brutal coughing fit for at least a full minute. “Ah,” he said when it was all over, “I got about as much strength as a squashed cat.” He was silent for awhile, spying at the smelter through the glass. Then he pointed to the flat expanse of desert between the smelter and the hill on which St. Divine’s had been built.

  “You see that hole in the ground right there, surrounded by a fence? That’s called Bob’s Drop. It’s a old mine shaft. Ever since the mine played out, they been dropping dead folks down that hole. A half mile deep, and they won’t close it off because they think there’s more silver to be had. I think everybody’s forgot about it by now, but it used to be the most popular place around to make a corpse disappear. I’ve thought maybe I’d go down there sometime and take a leap, spare somebody else the trouble.”

  I looked up at Art and he laughed and patted me on the back. “I’m only thinking out loud, Edgar, don’t worry. I couldn’t jump into a hole if I wanted to. Heights scare the billy heck out a me.”

  He turned the glass toward the glowing lights of town. “That’s my house, right over there, the little green one under the water tower. I’m going to burn it down, I think, just to see the flames, and then I’m going to find a motel to live in. I don’t even know how to make my own bed, you know. It’d be a disaster for me to live in any place except a motel.”

  Art removed a quart whiskey bottle from the pocket of his robe and took three large swallows, his Adam’s apple moving like a piston. He shook his head, not bothering to wipe away the whiskey that had run out of the damaged side of his mouth and down his neck. “Now that you’re going off, seems like I should give you some advice, words to live by, you know, but I ain’t got nothing. Be polite, that’s about as far as I’ll go. Anything more and it’s likely to backfire on you.”

  “Backfire,” I said. “Okay.”

  “Do you know your right from your wrong?”

  “No.”

  “Well, okay then. Stay away from girls, but you probably already heard that one. Women’ll betray you every time. Don’t take crap from nobody, eat your got-danged vegetables, I don’t know.” Art’s words were beginning to slur. “I’m a wreck. Any questions you wanted to ask me? I’m as useless a friend as you could likely find.”

  “Is tomorrow Thursday?” I said, after some consideration.

  “I believe it is, yes. You’re making it easy on me.”

  “And today’s Wednesday?”

  Art nearly choked on another swallow of whiskey. “Well, I guess it is. I don’t believe there’s any doubt that it’s Wednesday.”


  From somewhere far away came the sound of voices, a man and woman arguing in Spanish, the woman suddenly screeching as if in pain. We listened for a moment and Art sighed like he was trying to get every bit of air out of his lungs. “Lord help us this world is a horrible place.”

  It fell dark around us. We didn’t say a word for a long time, just watched as lights blinked on around the smelter, but not much else happened. The humps of slag rose up dark and foreboding against the starblown sky. Art sipped his whiskey and I worked at the crud in my belly button. Suddenly there was a swish around our heads, a disturbance of air, a strange high squealing like BBs whizzing past and Art began waving his hand around and calling out in a slurred staccato, “Jumping Jesus Christ!” And then, “It’s just bats. Whole tribe of ’em out looking for skeeters.”

  I watched the swarm of bats move through the yellow lights of the parking lot, clearing out the moths and gnats in a matter of seconds, and I thought about Art and what he told me about his days shoveling bat guano from caves, and the way he and his brothers stunk like pigs and how his wife and daughters were dead forever and not coming back. I thought about my father, Arnold Mint, who was also never coming back, and my mother in California and Grandma Paul sick in a hospital not too far from here and the red-haired mailman who had run over my head, living out there somewhere in the dark thinking he’d killed a boy. I thought instead of going with Barry Pinkley or with Uncle Julius off to the boarding school, maybe I should take off by myself, go find some of these people, search them out on my own to tell them that I was fine, I was going to be all right, there was no need to worry.

  We waited in the dark for something to happen down at the smelter, for it to miraculously bloom into a beautiful nighttime spectacle, but it just sat there, the warning light on its smokestack blinking red in the dark. The woman screamed once or twice more, but that was it for excitement.