by Brady Udall
“Even if you don’t speak the language, son, I think you’ll be able to understand what I’m saying here,” he said as he carefully cleared a space next to his coffee mug. One by one, he took each object out of the bag and placed it delicately on the desk, as if he was handling relics of great value: a bowie knife, a straight razor, a Mexican bullwhip, a slingshot, a baggie of rolled joints and multicolored pills and loose marijuana, a sharpened butter knife, a stainless steel whiskey flask, a pair of homemade brass knuckles, a wire garrote, a small pistol with its chamber removed.
“These are just a few of the things we’ve confiscated in the two years I’ve been here, a small sampling,” he said, a little wistfully. “I want you to know that if you’ve brought anything with you that resembles one of these items and you fail to give it up now, it will be confiscated from you—we will find it—and you will be punished. So if you have a weapon of any kind, drugs, cigarettes, alcohol, do yourself a favor and drop it right here in this bag, right now.”
He held the bag out to me and waited, smiling, a patient trick-or-treater. The knife in my sock felt like it was scorching my ankle and I had to resist the urge to reach down and touch it. I stared at Principal Whipple and he stared back, those eyes of his floating in the space between us. The hospital bracelet I still wore began to itch. Finally, he placed each item of contraband in the sack with the same care he had removed it, put the bag back in its drawer. Then he turned to Uncle Julius and said, “I’ll be in Show Low tomorrow for meetings. Why don’t you come in here and see if you can get that air conditioner up and running again.”
Uncle Julius rose from his chair, put his hat on his head and shuffled out of the room, me following behind. I paused in the doorway for a second, turned around and recited as loudly as I could, “Discipline is of the utmost concern here at WTSS. The atmosphere in your classroom and in the dorms will be determined by your expectations and your efforts to let the students know what their behavioral limits are. Staff must exercise strong authority and always strive for control, discrimination and consistency…” but the principal had already turned away and was now laughing in his girl-like way at what someone was telling him on the phone.
THE MOTHER LODE
AT FIRST, I was glad to move out of Uncle Julius’ basement room and up to the second floor, where I shared a room with sixteen of Willie Sherman’s newest recruits. In the dark, listening to the breathing, the choked noises of someone in the midst of a nightmare, the soft padding of a dorm aide come to check on us in the middle of the night—it all comforted me. Even the weeping, the homesick sobbing those first few nights, made me feel less lonely myself. In the four years I lived at Willie Sherman I never saw anyone cry in the light of day, but doing it in the darkness, anonymously, seemed to be acceptable. There were eight pine bunk beds crammed into that room and it seemed, sometimes, with all the creaking wood and sleeping noises, that we were packed into the hull of some great ship at sea.
The first time I peed the bed, Raymond, our dorm aide, didn’t get all that mad. It was early in the morning and the smell of it was strong in the room. The other boys made their beds and put on their clothes, sniggering among themselves, highly satisfied that somebody else was the bed-wetting fool.
Raymond, a short, stocky Apache man who, for some reason, spoke with a Spanish accent, came in the room, and before he could belt out his one and only wake-up call—Feet on the floor! Feet on the floor!—took one whiff and said, “Man, that’s some bad-smelling pee!” Raymond said it with such cheerfulness that I was happy to take full credit for what I had done. After all, I had often wet my hospital bed and nobody ever got upset about it; the nurses would chirp and scold and the orderlies would mumble under their breaths while they yanked the sheets free from the mattress, but it was all standard; pretty much everybody wet the bed at St. Divine’s.
Apparently, bed-wetting wasn’t so well tolerated at Willie Sherman. The third or fourth time I wet the bed Raymond did not even have to step foot in the room. From out in the hall he yelled in that funny accent of his, “God, Ed-gar, not again? What, we going to have to get you, son kind of big diaper or son-thing, son kind of rubber sheets?”
I had already stripped my bed, but my undershirt and briefs were soaked—they were all I had until laundry day. Raymond grabbed me by the neck and marched me into the bathroom. While the other boys watched from under the spray of the gang showers, I stood naked over a sink, rubbing my sheets and underwear with a pink brick of Primo soap, my testicles shriveling up into nothing. Raymond stood by the entire time but never offered to help; he was determined to teach me a lesson. So when I had rinsed and wrung out everything as best I could, I put the sodden sheets back on my bed, dressed in dripping wet underclothes, and spent the entire day in soggy Fruit of the Looms and that night in sheets so dank they began to turn black with mildew.
My bed-wetting episodes did nothing to enhance my social status at Willie Sherman, but I was beginning to learn how to make things a little easier on myself. My first stroke of genius: dropping my helmet down the same shithouse hole Rotten Teeth had fished the turd out of. I would miss that helmet—it was one of my few possessions, and the plurt it made in that shadowy muck made me wince with remorse—but I understood that, in the end, it was doing me more harm than good. My second modification was more subtle but just as important: I began to develop a knack for anonymity. In class, I said absolutely nothing. When asked a question, I gave only blank stares. When the students passed their assignments to the front of the class, I handed forward a blank piece of paper. The teachers seemed to approve of me and my approach. Occasionally they patted me affectionately on the shoulder the way you would a blind person or a very old dog.
I was so quiet and well behaved I was often asked to lead the Pledge of Allegiance, which we all jabbered incoherently, as if we had come up with a whole new language to express our boredom and disregard.
The playground was a little more difficult to figure out. For a week or two, my main concern was avoiding Rotten Teeth, which involved camouflaging myself as best I could, becoming invisible. To do this, I had to find a way to join one of the groups which had formed on the playground as naturally and quickly as oil beading up on a rain-slick road. Though Willie Sherman was on the Fort Apache Reservation, the students came from various tribes (there were, in fact, very few Apache): Pima, Papago, Yavapai, Maricopa, Havasupai, Hopi. WS had become a dumping ground for the schools in the BIA system, the last stop along the line for the troublemakers, castoffs, delinquents, strays, head cases and orphans like me. We were all Indian in some form or another, but that is pretty much where the similarities ended—we spoke different languages, some of us came from big cities like Phoenix or Albuquerque, some of us from places in the desert where electricity and running water were only a rumor; except for our black hair and our various shades of brown skin, the only thing we had in common was that we were here because nobody else would take us.
It is true that the playground clans formed themselves along tribal lines, but there were also alliances of other kinds. One group, which consisted of five or six young boys who were new to WS and fell in with each other because not even their own brothers or cousins or fellow tribesmen would have them, seemed to be my best bet. During recess and free time after dinner I shadowed them, hoping to be included by virtue of proximity alone, but they scowled at me, turned their backs, and acted as if I did not exist. I was a bed-wetting, brain-injured crossbreed and they knew I drew exactly the kind of attention they were trying hardest to avoid.
I was persistent, though. While the other boys played furious games of pickup basketball or sent mysterious sign-language messages across to the other side of the parade ground where the girls played, my little group shot marbles in a wide patch of dirt over in the shadow of the old cavalry bell. Their pockets were always bulging with marbles—agates, cat-eyes, steelies—which they traded back and forth and used as viable currency for goods and services of all kinds. The games the
y played were various and complicated and almost impossible for me, the freckle-nosed dummy, to understand.
I would like to get me some Marbles, Edgar typed, as if his typewriter might have the power to grant wishes. Blue ones and Green ones and the Clear kind with the Ribbon in the middle. I LOVE MARBLES!
How much did Edgar lust after those marbles? He would have gladly eaten another turd, even two, just to have a single cat-eye for his own.
The game I liked best—one of the few I could make sense of—was called “pit.” It was a simple game of winner-take-all: a small hole was dug and each player placed three or four marbles in the hole to start. From a distance of about twenty feet they would each roll a marble, tossed underhand like a bowling ball, trying to get it into the pit. If they missed, their marble would be added to the pot; if they made it, they won it all—the jackpot.
The pit games were always the most hotly contested; the players were jittery and tense, biting their lips and slapping their pants, shouting and pulling at their hair when their marbles barely missed, gloating and greedily digging the marbles out of the dust when they prevailed.
One Thursday afternoon after daily duty, which had me scrubbing the stains out of cooks’ aprons, an epic game of pit was underway. The players were having a hard time getting the marbles into the hole, so it began to fill up, and it wasn’t long before everybody was beginning to run out of marbles; whoever won this one would be taking home a pile of marbles so large kids were coming from all over the parade ground to watch.
“The fucking mother lode!” a kid named Delvis kept shouting, as if in great pain. Every time another player’s marble missed, he would throw himself on the ground in relief, kicking his legs and rubbing his nose in the dirt like a pig.
I got so caught up in the game, so delirious at the thought of somebody winning all those gorgeous marbles, that during a pause when the players were jawing at each other about somebody fudging over the line, I stepped up and tossed the only thing I owned that might roll well enough to have any chance of going into that hole: my urinal puck. Right off, it started wide left, bumping along the uneven ground, the sun glinting off its milky, ice-white surface, but as it got closer to the hole it careened off a small clump of weeds, wobbled lazily, and miraculously veered into the hole, making a nice click-click as it landed on the pile of marbles.
No, Edgar wasn’t any stranger to miracles.
I hollered and jumped while the other players looked at me, their mouths hanging open. I headed for the pit to ascertain that my puck had actually gone in the hole and the other boys were on me in a second; they thought I was going to take off with their marbles. One grabbed me by the arm and another had a handful of my shirt and they were doing a little tug of war with me while I struggled toward the pit, twisting and throwing elbows; I wanted to get my puck back. I heard somebody say “Get away” and they let go of me so suddenly I pitched forward into the red dirt and landed right on my face.
I was lifted up off the ground and turned to find myself looking up into the enormous smiling face of Nelson Norman. I had seen Nelson around and heard his name; Nelson was impossible to miss. For one thing, Nelson was old; though he was in the sixth grade, Nelson was fifteen—an adult, any way you cut it. His real distinguishing feature, however, was his size; he weighed easily over three hundred pounds and was as wide as a love seat. Nelson was a Pima, and though most Pima are hefty, Nelson was in another category entirely; his head was like half of a watermelon sitting on his shoulders, his fingers as thick and blunted as saltshakers, his feet so wide there wasn’t a pair of shoes made that would fit him; even in the midst of the coldest winter months, in ice and snow and mud, he wore flip-flops.
And Nelson was merry. He had the look of a person prepared and willing to laugh at anything, and when he smiled his eyes would disappear into the creases of his face and his cheekbones would stand out like those on a drugstore Santa Claus.
Nelson laughed at me so cheerfully I couldn’t help but grin up at him. He said, “I been watching and I guess you won some marbles.” He went over to the pit and with a great, ponderous effort, went down on one knee. He picked up my puck, turned it over in his hands, shrugged, tossed it to me. Then he lifted up a handful of marbles and let them fall through his thick fingers. “You better come over here and get all these marbles you won. Whole big pile a marbles.”
I filled my pockets, front and back, until the seams of my pants began to come apart. When I had found a place on my person for every last marble—I had to put some in my sock and a couple in the band of my underwear—I looked up to see Delvis and the others standing back at a safe distance, their faces confused between anger and fear. I immediately began trying to dump the marbles back into the hole—the last thing I wanted was to have those boys mad at me—but Nelson grabbed my arm and said, “Those are your marbles. You keep ’em. Come on over here with me.”
I followed Nelson over to the old guardhouse, a stone building now in ruins, way over on the side of the school grounds behind the girls’ dormitory. There was an imaginary line halfway between the boys’ and girls’ dormitories, a line we were forbidden to cross; who knew what might happen if Indian boys and girls were allowed to mingle? But Nelson plodded right across, without even looking for the teacher on playground duty or at any of the girls who stopped jumping rope or gossiping in huddles to stare. I followed at his heels like a humble squire, clicking and clacking as I went.
The old guardhouse was dark and musty inside, its dirt floor covered with cigarette butts, pieces of rotting mattress and the bleached pages of a Sears catalogue. The whole structure leaned to one side and there were holes in the wall where large, round river stones had fallen out, loosened from the mortar by rain and frost.
“You’re Edgar,” Nelson said, and I nodded, hitching up my pants, which now weighed about fifteen pounds and threatened to pull themselves down around my shins.
“You got something wrong in your head?”
I nodded again.
“What’s wrong with it?”
I put my finger just above my left ear, where I could feel the narrow metal plate, cold and rigid, that helped keep the pieces of my skull together. “Mailman ran over it.”
Nelson laughed. The jolly, high-pitched sound of it echoed off the stone walls and rang loudly in my ears. He slapped his huge thigh, which quivered alarmingly. “So you’re retarded then, hey? Some kind of idiot?”
I yanked at my pants again and said, “I’m a goddamn orphan.”
Nelson peered out through one of the breaches in the wall, scanning the playground, a huge smile still pressed into his face. “Okay then, Lone Ranger,” he said. “I was thinking you could help me out. I think you’re probably a smart guy. That’s what I think.”
This was as close to an offer of friendship as I had ever heard. I carefully inserted one finger in my pocket (one finger was all that would fit) and fished out a marble, a gorgeous clear-blue one with a swirl of red in the middle. I handed it to Nelson and he looked at me for a second, then took it out of my hand, put it into his mouth and swallowed it like an aspirin. He said, “That’s what we’ll do then, hey? We’ll help each other.”
KING KONG NIGHT
IT DIDN’T take long for Nelson to find a way for me to help him. Two days later, after dinner, we all gathered in the gymnasium for one of the few treats that Willie Sherman had to offer: movie night. Boys on one side, girls on the other, we’d sit in creaking metal chairs and watch Jimmy Stewart talking to an angel, John Wayne swaggering up the bloody sands of Iwo Jima, Audrey Hepburn dancing with some rich guy on a tennis court—all projected twice as big as life against a chipped and cracking cement wall. (Movie night had been a tradition here way back to the days of old Fort Apache. One particular night in the winter of 1898, one of the officers of the post invited a number of Apaches to come see the “moving pictures” in the post amusement hall, where a Projectoscope was set up on one end and a sheet hung up on the other. The hall was packed and
everything went just fine until a scene showing a steam fire engine drawn by three enormous horses at full gallop was shown. As the horses barreled toward the camera, growing larger and larger, the officer alternately banged on a gong and blew a whistle for added effect. It was all too much for the assembled Apaches, who clambered out of the assembly hall and gathered outside in the snow where they whooped and brandished knives in a riot of protest until well after midnight.)
That night the movie was a Willie Sherman favorite, one that was shown over and over again, often twice in one semester: King Kong. King Kong was a real favorite, partly because most of the other movies Mrs. Theodore had in the film closet were boring romances involving old guys like Cary Grant or Montgomery Clift, but mostly because of a little tradition that had started years back; the first time King Kong the great beast of the jungle showed himself on screen, someone—the person must have been chosen beforehand—would yell out with feigned terror, “Oh no! It’s a big monkey!” and everyone would fall apart laughing, egging each other on, until the movie would have to be stopped, the lights turned on and order restored.
It all happened according to plan that night, and though the eruption of chaos, the raucous hooting and foot-stomping panicked me for a moment, I was soon laughing with everybody else in the dark until I felt a hand on my arm. It was Nelson, laughing so hard he was starting to choke. “Come on!” he said, gulping air. “Before the lights come on.”
Nobody noticed us as we made our way to the rear door and emerged into a clear, cool night, full of crickets chirping and nighthawks diving and chittering. There was still a strip of pink just over the mesas to the west and stars were beginning to pop out overhead. I followed Nelson, who kept sighing and shaking his head, around the building to the front, where another Pima boy, this one smaller and younger than Nelson, was sitting on the steps. From here we could still hear the laughter in the gymnasium crackling like static.
