The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint

by Brady Udall

  “You like it here?” I asked him once while we waited in line to get our polio shots.

  Cecil looked slowly around with those soft eyes of his. He made a low whistle and said, “Little bit shabby.”

  The novelty of hanging around with Cecil, of having somebody to be with, was almost enough to keep my mind off Dr. Pinkley and what he had told me about my mother. In bed at night I would try to convince myself that I really hadn’t seen Barry and Jeffrey at all, that I imagined them, or they were ghosts from my life at St. Divine’s, just like the ghosts who’d come to persecute me for not dying as I should have. And my mother—she truly was a ghost, in my mind. She was nothing more than a fleeting whiff of perfume to me, a hazy, decomposing image in my memory, a few seconds of ringing laughter. The ghosts who plagued me at St. Divine’s were much more real to me than she was.

  It had been over a week since school started and still Nelson had not come to me with an assignment to steal, spy or sabotage. I almost wished he would: it would give me something to do at night other than lying there, my eyes cranked wide, wondering when I would hear from Barry again. What’s more, I was beginning to worry that Nelson might not need me anymore, maybe he had found some new boy to do his work for him, and I would be thrown to the wolves once again.

  It was almost a relief when, just before class one morning, Nelson cornered me near the rear stairs of the dormitory.

  “Good summer, eh?” he said, steering me into the shadows. It was early in the morning but already the air was a stifling blanket of heat that made it difficult to breathe.

  I tried to assume the expression I had been working on for a few months now, a look of utter blankness that betrayed nothing.

  “What, you don’t talk no more? Remember, you ain’t no silent Indi’n. You’re a anglo, and anglos love to talk, that’s all they do, talk, talk, jabber, jabber, yah, yah, yah. See? So why don’t you talk to me about this little headhunter you’re walking around with.”

  “Cecil,” I said.

  Nelson tried to stomp on a yellow grasshopper, missed. “I just got done talking with him in the bathroom. I don’t think he’s the kind of kid you should be walking around with. I tried to make friends with him, but he wasn’t so nice about it.”

  “You hurt him?”

  Nelson, big as Humpty Dumpty, smiled broadly. “Hurt? Nah. A little.”

  “You going to hurt me?”

  With a quick snap of his arm Nelson reached out and grabbed my crotch, digging his fingers in hard. I tried to pull away but he began to squeeze until he had my genitals in a thumb-and-forefinger grip, like a farmer milking a cow.

  “This hurt?” he said.

  I immediately went to my only emergency plan, which involved pissing my pants. But he had everything clamped shut—I couldn’t get a drop out.

  “And what about these two white guys the other day? Now you got all kinds of friends, hey? Who are them two guys? They FBI guys? You in the FBI now? They want you to do things for them?”

  I was happy to explain everything, but it was as if Nelson was wringing my windpipe along with my balls; I could only make a popping sound with my lips.

  He took out a neatly folded piece of paper and shoved it into my shirt pocket. “That’s a note from your FBI friends. It’s for you, but it got to me first. You might want to tell ’em you’re busy, you know, you got other things to do. I think maybe that’s what you should do.”

  He laughed, let go of me, and walked away. I sat down in the dirt long enough to recover, to get myself breathing again, and then was off looking for Cecil. I found him in his dormitory room, across the hall from mine. He sat on his bunk, his hair wet and twisted up on his head like somebody had wrung it out by hand.

  I said, “Nelson get you?”

  Cecil explained what had happened, pantomiming most of it. They had rammed his head in the toilet and flushed several times, in the process chipping one of his teeth on the porcelain bowl. Then they had pulled off his pants and towel-whipped him until he was able to make a break for it and hide in the utility closet.

  “You ran from them?” I said. Even though that’s exactly what I did the first time Nelson got me, it seemed like pure foolishness to me now.

  Cecil nodded. “They hitting me Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! I run away fast.”

  He ran his thumb along the nick in his front tooth and began to idly pick his nose. He pulled a pineapple Dum Dum from a hole in his mattress and went through his little wrapper ritual. He gave the yellow sucker a good once-over, held it up to the light as if checking for flaws, and placed it solemnly on his tongue.

  I was confused. Nobody made him eat shit? Nobody put a hot wire on his pecker? Head in the toilet, a little towel-popping—that was something—but it seemed like maybe Cecil had gotten off easy, which had never once, as far as I knew, ever happened to me.

  Cecil rolled the Dum Dum around in his mouth and began combing his hair down in a straight line above his eyebrows, the way he preferred it. No doubt about it: I was jealous.

  I remembered the note in my pocket. It was written on a pink prescription slip, with the words Dr. Barry Terrence Pinkley, M.D. printed in the upper left-hand corner. It said:

  Edgar,

  I’ll pick you up tonight 11:00 at the gate. Don’t tell anybody. I have a big surprise for you!

  See you soon,

  Barry

  EDGAR’S MOTHER

  THE HOUSE SAT back from the road under the spreading limbs of a thick-trunked poplar. Covered with a shaggy coat of white stucco, it had lounge chairs and card tables and dented aluminum kegs scattered all over its flat roof and a couple of woolly dogs chewing on a bicycle tire on the hard-packed dirt of the front yard. Every window was lit up with yellow electric light and I could hear the garbled hum of voices, the low rumble of drums. Overhead, a full moon shone over everything like a spotlight.

  “Is this your house?” I asked Barry, who had just turned off the engine of his Cadillac. Earlier tonight, I had snuck out of the dorms and met him at the gate, and we had driven for nearly an hour, Barry quizzing me on everything from the conditions at Willie Sherman, to the nutritional quality of what I was eating, to what I was learning in class. When I asked him if my mother was going to take me home he only waved his hand and said something about putting the carriage before the horse. He continually checked the rearview mirror and fiddled with the sunglasses he wore even in the dark.

  “A friend’s,” Barry said. “Don’t worry about those dogs. They only bite the police.”

  The dogs didn’t even look at us as we walked to the door. Inside the house, which was filled with a low pall of smoke as if a round of firecrackers had just gone off, people were everywhere, slumped on couches, leaning against the walls, drinking and smoking and talking in low tones. In a far corner, a woman with an eye patch was slapping a pair of large African drums.

  Holding my hand, Barry led me through the house, greeting people, shaking hands, laughing and winking, stopping every couple of feet to have brief whispered conversations. We stepped over a man facedown in the aqua shag carpet before coming to a door at the end of a narrow hallway.

  “She’s in here,” Barry said. “She may be a little tired, but you can talk to her for awhile.”

  My mother sat at a Formica-topped table in a small, brightly lit kitchen. Her hair was short now, badly cut, and there wasn’t a single ring on any one of her thin brown fingers. I had come here telling myself that it would probably not be my mother at all, but some other person, an impostor, or even the ghost who lived in my head, certainly not the flesh-and-blood person who had given birth to me. I felt something move in my chest like a stone rolling over in a riverbed.

  “Gloria,” Barry said in his phony, doctorly way. “This is your son Edgar. He’s waited a long time to see you.”

  My mother looked everywhere in the room but at me. “Got any more?” she said to Barry in a light, airy voice that made my insides clench and hold.

  Barry sighed, yanke
d open the fridge and pulled out a can of beer. “This is the last one. We’ll have to get more later.” He set it on the table in front of my mother and gave her chair a gentle shake. “Gloria, it’s your boy. Here he is.”

  My mother pulled off the tab and drank half the beer before she looked at me. She seemed to be seeing me from a great distance. Her eyes were bloodshot and clouded and her face twitched. “He’s so big,” she said. She held her hand over her mouth and began to cry.

  Barry had me sit in a chair across from her and set a warm can of Pepsi in front of me. “You two go ahead and talk,” he said. “I’ll come get Edgar in a few minutes.”

  My mother wept noiselessly, one hand trembling wildly in front of her face, the other locked around her beer as if it might get away. I watched her and said nothing. She took two deep breaths, gathering herself, and drained what was left in the can. “You’re getting a lot bigger,” she said, nodding, tilting her head and wiping her mouth with her wrist.

  “Ppfft,” I said, just to hear myself make a noise, to make sure I was really there.

  My mother looked up at me, surprised. Her face tensed and it looked like she might start to cry again, but she relaxed, picked up the saltshaker, put it back in its place. She shrugged and said, “We all thought you were dead.”

  Out in the other room somebody said, “A one…a two…a one-two-three,” and a chorus of voices began to sing “I’m All Shook Up.” There were whoops and shouts and clapping and somebody hollered, “You’re killing me!”

  My mother picked up my can of Pepsi, inspected it for a moment, then pushed it slowly back across the table. I watched her fingers vibrating against the tabletop, her lost, hungover eyes searching the room for her next drink, and I knew without a doubt that it was I who had done this to her.

  We listened to somebody on the other side of the door go to town on the drums, thumping out a rhythm that made the windows shake. When the cheering and hooting quieted down I said, “I lost some teeth.” Though I had pretty much lost all the teeth I was going to lose, there were a couple that hadn’t completely come back in yet and I made an exaggerated smile to show these off. My mother reached out and ran her finger into the narrow crevices. I wanted to bite down, draw blood, but I kept my mouth open until my jaw burned.

  For the rest of the time until Barry came back, trailing smoke and the pungent incense, my mother I stared at each other, two strangers in a room, passing the time. I stopped at the door to tell her good-bye but she had already turned her back and was ransacking the drawers and cupboards of the kitchen for something, anything, to drink.

  BUZZARD-BAITING

  WHEN WE COULD, Cecil and I walked in the hills. Evenings, in the couple of hours after classes let out and before dinner, we would hike up past the cedars and alligator juniper to the foot of the mesa where thick-barked ponderosas shaded everything. Cecil showed me a cave he had found in the red cliffs and we would hole up in the stale, dusty dimness and do nothing but sit in the absolute silence of the place, the security of it. Sometimes, on weekends, we would venture farther out, walking along dirt roads and game tracks under the shadows of the pines. We saw coyotes and mule deer and enormous, snorting elk crashing through the brush on the slopes above us. At dusk we would watch quietly as the trees were taken, one by one, into the great wash of dark.

  Cecil showed me how to follow butterflies to find home brew buried like treasure around the outskirts of Willie Sherman. Malt, yeast, maple syrup, potatoes, corn flakes—home brew could be made with just about anything a student could get his hands on. I had stolen the ingredients for it many times, but never got to see it made. I only knew that it was usually done in the middle of the night and the ingredients, according to some arcane recipe, were poured into a bucket or a barrel or a wooden box made watertight with kerosene and tar. Buried and left to ferment into a vile concoction, it could get you drunk so long as you could keep from vomiting it back up.

  Whenever we found a new batch—there was always a swarm of yellow and orange butterflies careening madly above it—Cecil would claw away the dirt with his hands, pull off the lid and scoop out some of the noxious, foaming brew with a cupped hand. Everybody made their home brew differently, and every batch had its own unique bouquet. Sometimes it smelled like gasoline, sometimes like bile, often like a rotting fruit. Cecil would always offer some to me first and I would always refuse. He would take only the tiniest little sip, which would throw him into convulsions of disgust, his face contorting, his eyeballs popping. He would clutch his throat with both hands and gasp, “Bad! Ach! Oh bad! Wow!”

  We would watch the butterflies cluster around the edges of the hole and get drunk until they couldn’t fly anymore, only flop and flutter helplessly like paper confetti caught in a breeze. This was good entertainment as far as we were concerned.

  Another thing Cecil showed me was buzzard-baiting. While I hid under a tree, he would find a nice open spot to lie down and wait until a buzzard spotted him—it usually didn’t take more than fifteen or twenty minutes to have half a dozen birds funneling in the drafts directly above us. Slowly they would descend like great black shadows, banking as they turned, their wing feathers splayed like outstretched fingers. I don’t know how he was able to do it, but Cecil could lie perfectly still without even the slightest rise or fall of his chest, without the tiniest twitch. And here those buzzards would come, lower, lower, craning their big pink turkey-heads for any sign of movement, for that telltale whiff of death, and when the first one was so low to the ground that you could hear the soft shoosh of it bearing down through the thick air, Cecil would leap to his feet, wave his arms and cry, “Dirty-fucker buzzard! Watch out! Ha-ha!”

  The poor buzzards would nearly drop out of the air with astonishment. They’d jerk back and flap like crazy, trying to scratch out some altitude with those big clumsy wings made for gliding, and off they’d go, looking back at us under their wings, embarrassed as it is possible for a buzzard to be.

  One November afternoon after a satisfying round of buzzard-baiting, we heard voices in the trees below us. Immediately, we scrambled for cover; we both understood what would happen if Nelson or some of the others caught us together. On the playground, in the dorms and cafeteria, we now had to ignore each other; Cecil was being routinely persecuted for refusing to join Nelson’s tribe and it would only get worse—for both of us—it they knew we were together at all.

  We slunk around a couple of cedars until we could see a black Dodge pickup with two people in the back. The man, an Indian, sat up against the cab. As for the other person—a woman it looked like—we could only see her maroon hair bobbing up and down in the man’s lap. The man, for his part, seemed very happy, and once in awhile he’d pick up a small pair of binoculars and look off in the direction of Willie Sherman.

  The woman stopped bobbing and we heard her say, “Is he up there?”

  “Nah,” the man said, “he’s off paddling girls on the butt or something.”

  The woman rose up and kissed the man, a low moaning rising out of her like the purring of a cat. She began to make a yipping noise—ai, ai, ai—and the blouse she wore billowed out for a second to reveal a pair of dark nipples, like two mysterious eyes. It hit me at once that not only was this woman Mrs. Whipple, but she was also the person I heard yipping that night in the Thomas house, the owner of those pink toenails. We watched and listened and my throat began to tighten and my heart beat against my ribs with an audible thup-thup.

  “What are they doing?” I managed to whisper to Cecil.

  “Ficky-fick,” Cecil said.

  “Ficky-fick,” I said.

  “Oh mama,” Cecil said.

  It was only a couple of days before that Principal Whipple had stood on the stage of the auditorium and told us, with a righteous thunder in his voice, that it was time to pay the piper. He had been distracted by other things, he told us all at the special assembly, he had let things get too lax. There had a been a rash of robberies, personal items taken from
the dorms, certain papers from the administration offices, tools from the maintenance hut, food from the kitchen, the American flag right off the pole. There were fights nearly every day on the parade grounds, vandalism all over the school grounds, drunkenness at school functions, abuse of the teachers and staff. A student had been cut with a razor in his sleep, another dragged into the woods and tied to a fence post. As he went down the list, barking out the various offenses, his steamy glasses inched slowly down his nose and white specks of saliva sailed out of his mouth, arcing like tiny comets into the bright stage lights and disappearing into the darkness over our heads.

  Where are your morals? he asked us, slapping the podium so that the mike whined with feedback. Did we know what decency was? Were we savages? What would it take for us to act like moral, upright, civilized human beings?

  Out in the darkness somebody—probably William Dye—let fly a loud, wet fart. Oh, we laughed, the tee-heeing and ha-haing drowning out the teachers trying to shush us up. Principal Whipple slumped a little, shaking his head, then stepped to the side of the podium, straightened up and seemed to glare at us individually in a way that said: I will not be defeated by a fart.

  “Until discipline is restored,” he declared, “until we find out who is responsible for these acts, everyone is going to suffer. No more morning recess—you will sit at your desks and do homework during this time. No more Saturday night movie privileges, no more bimonthly dances. Every student, I don’t care who you are, gets Saturday morning work detail. Standard detention times will be doubled. When will you get your privileges back? When you earn them.”