The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint

by Brady Udall

  The other students did not have to hit themselves with bricks or jump out of windows to escape Willie Sherman—they simply ran. They had homes, families and friends, places and people they could run to. And did they run. For the first few weeks of school, someone would make a break for it nearly every day. Usually it was the newest ones, the ones who had never been away from home or family, who did not speak English well, who had never sat at a desk, who had never slept on a bed, they were the ones who took off and never looked back. But others ran for different reasons. Some ran to be with a boyfriend or girlfriend, some ran out of simple homesickness. Some ran, I think, just to hear the wind in their ears.

  The school had what they called a “Search and Rescue Plan.” Because a student could disappear at any time during the day or night, roll was called every morning and night, at the beginning of each class and at every meal. Sometimes in the middle of the night, the whistle above the boiler room would blast three times and we would straggle out onto the parade grounds, wrapped in our army surplus blankets, and line up according to height so that roll call could be taken. They told us these middle-of-the-night roll calls were fire drills, but we knew better. They wanted to keep us off guard, to know that we were always being watched and checked up on—if we tried anything in the middle of the night they would be after us.

  When a student did go missing, a search of the grounds would be conducted, an AWOL report sent to the tribal police, the parents notified, and the real search would begin. If a student was gone for more than twenty-four hours, their name would be written in red ink on the AWOL list outside Principal Whipple’s office and within five minutes everybody would know that one of our own had a chance.

  I remember one evening, just after dinner, when a tribal police car pulled up and two deputies with beer bellies dragged a skinny Chiricahua girl named Sylvia Ortiz out of the backseat. Sylvia had been missing for five days and it looked like she had spent all of them out in the mountains; her long hair was matted and full of debris, her clothes crusted with mud, her lips so badly sun- and windburned they were peppered with black scabs. She tried her best to kick and bite the deputies, and though her hands were cuffed behind her back it was clear those two big men with pistols and billy clubs were afraid of her.

  To keep Sylvia from running again, she had to be strapped onto her bed at night and handcuffed to her desk during class, her table during mealtimes. During recess, they handcuffed her to a pole outside the administration building where she doggedly yanked and rattled the short length of chain until her wrist bled.

  This went on for three or four days until one morning we heard a commotion outside and went to the windows to see Sylvia Ortiz running across the parade ground, stark naked and handcuffed to a metal chair which she dragged behind her. Mrs. Theodore had handcuffed her to the chair so that Sylvia could take a shower by herself without supervision—Mrs. Theodore had other things to do besides guard the door while one of her girls took a shower. But once Mrs. Theodore was out of the bathroom, Sylvia made a break for it, hefting the heavy metal chair over her head and creeping down the stairs.

  It was Principal Whipple himself who saw her tiptoeing behind one of the school vans. He chased her twice around the dorm building and then she struck out across the parade grounds. She gave up trying to carry the chair on her head and let it drag behind her, clattering and kicking up dust. Behind her, Principal Whipple seemed to be running in slow motion, his heavy glasses threatening to rattle off his nose, his long wing tips clapping through the weeds like clown shoes.

  “Somebody grab that girl!” he cried, waving his arms like he was trying to bring a plane in for landing.

  Nobody made a move to join in the pursuit. All of us, the students, the dorm aides, the cafeteria workers, the secretaries, watched from our various places to see how the chase would unfold. Eventually Sylvia began to tire. The chair, which seemed to be yanking on her arm, rearing back like an animal on a leash, was having an effect on her. She was slowing up, occasionally looking back to see if Principal Whipple was gaining any ground. It was on the gravel road by the cafeteria that he finally caught up to her. He could have simply grabbed her—she was not a big girl—but he tackled her, knocked her down from behind, and they both sprawled out together in the middle of the road, kicking up a great cloud of dust.

  Principal Whipple, whose glasses were now misted opaque, put all his weight on top of her, pressing her into the ground. Sylvia, chalky with dust and covered with bright red scrapes, clawed and kicked and screeched “Fuck! You fucker!” until finally she gave up, and lay there scraped and bloody and naked, the spirit gone out of her.

  Eventually, they let Sylvia go home to her grandmother and grandfather, who lived in a shantytown on the outskirts of Nogales. What else could they do, what else could be done with a girl like Sylvia Ortiz? They took her away, and even though we never saw her again, never spoke her name, to me and every other student at Willie Sherman, Sylvia Ortiz was a hero.

  A CARD IN THE MAIL

  IT WAS A LONESOME little Edgar who wandered through the rest of his first year at Willie Sherman, hiding in the weeds during recess, steering clear of trouble, dodging the crab apples that came from the old gnarled tree near the water tank. That fall the students would fill their pockets with the hard, bitter apples and zing them at each other when the playground monitor looked the other way. Because I was as defenseless as could be, walking by myself, I was a favorite target for everyone, even the girls, who could chuck those apples as hard and low as any boy. I never ducked or jumped out of the way—that would only draw attention and invite more throwers to try their luck. I would take an apple square in the small of the back or on the side of the neck and it was all I could do to stand up straight and keep walking, to not let them know how much it stung.

  Dashkin! (“White boy” in Apache), they shouted at me. Hey Freckles! Retard! Whitey-ho, whitey-hey!

  Mrs. Rodale had told me I was coming to Fort Apache to be among my own kind. If I was sure of anything, it was that these kids, these teachers, were not my own kind.

  I’m the only one, Edgar typed on his Hermes Jubilee. I’m all there is.

  When I got a postcard from Art, this kind of thinking vanished like smoke. The picture on the card was of a donkey wearing a straw hat and suspenders and on the back Art had written, in a quivering seismic scrawl that was barely inside the margins of human communication:

  Dear Edgar,

  Meaning to come see you, but they wont let me drive, my legs is bad. Its tipical. Please type me up a note on your typewriter. They say Ismore is dead. Fell out of bed, unhooked all the machines. Doctors say its impossible to happen, but it happened, just like everything else. How is your new tooth coming along?

  Your friend, Art

  I read the card hundreds of times during the next week, wanting to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. Then I began my letter. What was a letter supposed to contain? I wasn’t sure, so I included everything: I told Art how I came to Willie Sherman, about the cold nights and my bed-wetting. I told him about Nelson Norman and Rotten Teeth and my shit-eating episode. I told him about falling onto the toilet and how now I had not only a wounded brain but a wounded penis as well, with a little red scar like a question mark. I told him that I still had the money he had given me, I hadn’t spent a cent of it, and I still had the knife. I asked what might happen if I found my way back to Globe one day. Could I stay with him? Would he recognize me without my helmet?

  When I finally typed From, Edgar, I had thirteen pages of extended, meandering paragraphs, all single-spaced. I carefully made an envelope out of two sheets of paper, addressed it on my Hermes Jubilee and took it over to the secretary’s office. Maria was there, working on her nails with a filing stick. She had long, blue-black hair and hoop earrings big enough for a small rabbit to jump through.

  I announced that I wanted to send a letter.

  She took the letter from me, looked it over. “This don’t got no stamp. You go
t to have stamps on it or it won’t go nowhere.”

  I could only stare at her. She smelled sweet and clean, like cinnamon candy and what else? Rain, maybe. Or new grass. She smelled even better than a nurse.

  She looked at me and sighed, which made the hoops in her ears swing and jangle. “All right, I’ll get some stamps for you, but next time you’re going to have to pay, little man.” She took two stamps from one of the drawers, licked them with a pointy, pink tongue and slapped them on the envelope. “There it is, all ready to go.”

  She put the letter in the mailbag and looked up, surprised that I was still there. “You can get on out a here now.”

  I didn’t budge. I cupped my groin, staring at her with a strained smile, unable to move.

  “Shoo fly!” she cried, waving her hands at me and laughing. “I got work to do!”

  In my dorm room I lay on my bunk and tried to preserve in my leaky head exactly the way Maria had smelled so I could call it up whenever I needed to. I thought about going down to my typewriter and somehow getting her smell down on paper, but I knew even then that there are some things words just can’t do. Instead, I imagined where she might go when she was done working each night, the kind of house she lived in, the things she did there. I wondered if she lived alone, or if she shared that house with a man, or her grandparents, or a daughter, or maybe a son.

  THE JUMPING PLACE

  LUNCHTIME ON A windy spring day and I was lurking around behind the old log ruins of the officers’ quarters, doing my best not to be noticed. From where I stood I could see Principal Whipple up in the lookout tower above his house, scanning the hills with a pair of army recon binoculars. The slim turret, which jutted twenty feet above the house like a chimney gone haywire, had been used during the Apache Wars as a meteorological station and observation tower, but now the principal would spend an hour or two up there each day, with his binoculars and maybe a lemonade or a soda, and do his best to keep tabs on his maroon-haired wife, Mrs. Whipple.

  Mrs. Whipple, a woman whose perpetually erect nipples never failed to catch the immediate attention of every boy in school when she sauntered across the grounds to her husband’s office to take him lunch, liked to go for long walks in the hills or take drives out into the narrow dirt roads of the reservation backcountry. I was completely out of the rumor and gossip circuit at WS so I was left to decipher odd references. I heard some of the boys call her “Mama Beaver.” I heard something being said about her “headlights.” In shithouse number three, there was a prominent piece of graffiti carved out next to the seat that said I want to suck on Mrs. Nipples. The boys, especially the older ones, would grab their crotches and grin at each other when she worked outside in her garden or sat on the porch of that big stone house sipping whiskeys brought to her by her little humpbacked maid, Aurelia.

  I heard a metallic jangling sound and looked down the slope to see Sterling Yakezevitch, partially obscured by underbrush, stomping around near the edge of the canyon, those steel and leather leg braces of his creaking and jingling. What kind of Indian could be named Sterling Yakezevitch? It was a mystery to everyone. Sterling was the only one besides me who stayed away from the parade grounds at recess, the only one who wasn’t part of any playground tribe. I don’t believe his name had anything to do with it. His hair was braided into one thick rope and the bowlegged way he walked with the saddle-and-spurs sounds of his brace made me think of the cowboys—Tom Mix, John Wayne, James Coburn—that we sometimes saw on movie night.

  I looked up at Principal Whipple, who was engrossed in his spying, and then I crawled down the slope, creeping under overhanging branches of gambel oak and paloverde, but didn’t get too close. A few months before, back when I still believed I could find somebody to be my friend, I had tried to sit next to Sterling on the steps of the classroom building during recess and he gave me such a vicious elbow to the ribs that for a week afterward even the most shallow breath was a painful enterprise. Sterling Yakezevitch was a loner like I was, and a cripple, but nobody ever bothered him. Nobody threw apples at him, nobody taunted him and teased him in the showers, nobody ever pushed him to the back of the lunch line. I wanted to know what his secret was.

  He stood at the edge of the cliff, looking down into the canyon at something I couldn’t see from my place behind a bush. The canyon was called East Fork and it was one of the reasons Fort Apache had been built in this particular location; more than sixty feet deep in places, with a fast-running river at its bottom, and over a mile long, it was a perfect defense against an army of Indians coming down out of the hills from the north.

  It wasn’t long before Sterling noticed me watching him. He glared up at me and I considered making a break for it, but after awhile he yelled up at me, “Hey! What’s you looking?”

  I shrugged, did my best to act like I was minding my business, half concealed in a bush as I was. Sterling looked around to make sure no one could see us and waved me down. I came the rest of the way down the slope but stayed a good ten feet away from him—I hadn’t forgotten that elbow, and I now knew enough to be wary of any gesture of goodwill, no matter who it came from.

  “Look down there,” Sterling said, pointing at the canyon floor, which was about fifty feet below us. “You see them rocks down there?”

  The canyon floor was scattered with rocks. I could see a lot of smooth, gray and white river rocks, which were now mostly covered with the flooding White River, and the giant black boulders of pitted volcanic rock which had, over thousands of years, slowly cracked and broken away from the canyon cliffs.

  Sterling was pointing almost directly below us. “Them red ones.”

  They were hard to see, jumbled in among the river rocks as they were, but there was no doubt they had been brought from somewhere else, five or six shards of red sandstone, each more or less the size of a dinner plate, embedded in the dirt like stepping stones in a garden.

  “If you jumped from here, you think you could make it to ’em?” Sterling asked me in a whisper.

  I backed right away from that edge. I wasn’t jumping anywhere.

  Sterling regarded me with his hot, dark eyes. There was something in them that reminded me very much of Ismore. “You’re scared, eh? You ain’t a brave little anglo?”

  “What are those rocks?”

  “Them’s what you jump for. When it’s time, you go for them rocks. Only one boy ever made it to that farthest one, that’s why they marked it there. Anybody ever gets it past that one, they get their own marker.” Sterling let out a high wail of a war whoop that echoed off the canyon walls and shot up in the sky, loud enough to get Principal Whipple to turn his binoculars on us for just a moment before he resumed his spying.

  I stepped forward to take another look at the rocks. They looked impossibly far from where we stood. If somebody was crazy enough to jump, he would have to take a full running start to land anywhere near them.

  “You don’t tell nothing to the teachers, or nobody. I know you’s anglo, but you’s Indi’n too, so you should know about it.”

  “About what?”

  Sterling shook his head in the same way my teachers did when they looked at the blank pages I turned in: a gesture of utter pity. “This is the jumping place, right here. Shit, man! This is it. And you don’t tell nobody I told you. These days, you know, some’ll eat a bunch of pills or shoot theirself in the head with a pistol, but this is the way here, this is it.” Sterling took a couple of steps forward—the squeaking of his brace almost an animal sound—and stood so that both of his scuffed boots hung over the edge a couple of inches. “Been guys jumping off here since this school started, probably before. Hundred fucking years and only one guy made it that far. That fucker could just about fly, I bet. Some got close, them’s marked by the rocks behind that farthest one. Some never got close, didn’t even get a rock, which is the worst thing you can do. Every one of their blood is down there, all mixed together.”

  Sterling was so intent on the rocks below that I was able t
o back away, slowly, carefully, without him noticing. As I edged back up the slope, I realized I was following a faint path through the weeds and bushes that bore down in a perfectly straight line to the spot where Sterling stood, considering distances, dreaming about death. It was like a narrow runway, a little overgrown but still perfectly useful.

  Faster now, I began to clamber up the incline. Sterling started after me, grunting and throwing his legs forward with a violent twisting of his hips, but there wasn’t any way a cripple like him could catch up with me.

  “Don’t tell anybody, fuckhead!” he shouted up after me. “Or I will throw you off a here myself!”

  THE GAUNTLET

  THE REST OF that spring and summer I dreamed about sprinting down the runway, launching myself off the corroded cliffs, windmilling my arms and legs like a long jumper, yearning for those blood-red rocks fifty feet below. The whole idea terrified me, gave me a hard jolt of adrenaline each time I thought about it. From then on, I did everything I could to keep away from Sterling, whose legs each day seemed to become more twisted and uncontrollable, like two wild animals trying to bust out of the braces that held them.

  I continued putting a lot of my energy into avoiding Nelson, too, but slowly he began to reel me back in. He did a few favors for me: pulled off a couple of bigger girls who were trying to steal a carton of juice I’d saved from breakfast, found me an extra pair of sheets I could make a quick change with when I peed the bed, had Glen and Rotten Teeth beat up a kid named Frankie who had jumped me one Sunday morning when no one was around and kicked and punched me senseless, seemingly just for the sheer entertainment of it. Before I knew it, I was doing him favors in return. It started with the simplest of things: swiping a bathroom pass off Mrs. Theodore’s desk, for instance. But it wasn’t long before I was breaking into the cafeteria kitchen at night to steal cans of syrup and yeast to make home brew, bags of white sugar that Rotten Teeth liked to keep under his bunk and eat at his leisure. Soon, I was slipping into the teachers’ lounge in the middle of the day to take beer out of the refrigerator or siphoning gas out of the school vehicles so Nelson and his buddies could snort the fumes until their eyes spun in their heads.