by Brady Udall
Right now, instead of watching Mrs. Whipple ficky-ficking with an Indian guy in the back of a truck, we were supposed to be scrubbing mildew off the walls of the dorm bathrooms with five or six other boys: part of our new work detail. But we had walked off the job risking an entire month of detention time and kitchen detail. We had made a good gamble, it turned out. Not only were we able to witness a full session of ficky-fick in the broad light of day, but we caught a brief glimpse of Mrs. Whipple’s famed and completely uncovered nipples.
Before they got in the cab and drove off, Mrs. Whipple and the man she was with yipped and yowled so loud a flock of small brown birds startled out of a wild oak and zoomed off in alarm.
On our way back I tried to ask Cecil why he wouldn’t join Nelson’s tribe, do him a few favors—steal a few things, maybe light something on fire—it really wasn’t all that hard. Then we could be together in the dorms or on the playground and there would be nothing to worry about. Cecil didn’t seem to be listening; he was watching a fat little horned toad sitting in the bowl of a rusted hubcap, huffing tranquilly in a warm patch of sun. He snatched it up easily and turned it over, stroking its shiny belly until it closed its eyes and went still, its miniature alligator arms twitching. Cecil took out a steel box cutter he kept hidden behind his belt and with the tip of the razor blade, neatly sliced open the toad’s broad belly, making two rectangular flaps that could be pulled back to reveal the glistening, multicolored innards, like jewels packed in oil. The toad never struggled or fought, just seemed to smile with a dazed, bleary-eyed contentment.
Cecil pointed to himself, then to the toad. “I’m Nelson and this you. See?”
I looked at the toad. “This is me?”
Cecil nodded. “And I’m Nelson. See? Okay?” He puffed out his cheeks to add to the effect. These kinds of charades, full of gesticulations and props, were how Cecil liked to make his points. I nodded to show Cecil I understood: he was Nelson and I was the toad.
Cecil took the box cutter and, with the delicate care of someone removing a pearl from an oyster, lifted out the tiny, still-beating heart. The toad did not seem to miss it at all. Cecil turned to me grinning widely, showing all his teeth—a perfect imitation of Nelson—and held the twitching heart up to his mouth for a moment before sliding it past his lips and biting into it, filling his smile with blood.
WILLIE SHERMAN CHRISTMAS
CHRISTMAS AT WILLIE SHERMAN was just one more punishment. Everyone escaped for the two-week break except for a few permanents and a couple of staff to watch over us. Raymond, who was as much a permanent at the school as I was, always tried to make things cheery for us. He’d lead us up the mountain to find a Christmas tree, slogging through the wet snow in our inadequate loafers, sawing down a too-big tree and covering ourselves with sap and scratches as we heaved it down the mountain, groaning in sync like galley slaves, to the empty gymnasium where we would decorate it with construction paper cutouts and stale popcorn chains and never look at it again.
On Christmas Eve, members of the Ladies Aid Society of Show Low would stop by with a home-cooked meal and a bag of presents for us, all of which we had to earn by singing carols we didn’t really know the words to and present a Nativity scene, which mostly entailed standing around with towels on our heads. The ladies—broad-rumped old matrons toddling about in a cloud of perfume—would clap politely and comment on what cute, brown-faced little things we were. With the women watching over us but not joining in, we would wolf down the turkey and potatoes and cranberry and finally open the presents, which were always the same: a plastic bag full of ancient rock-hard candy, an assortment of trial products (shampoo, toothpaste, shaving cream, deodorant, mouthwash), a comb, a yo-yo, a set of colored pencils.
Under Raymond’s supervision, we would thank the ladies profusely—Thank you, ma’am, Merry Christmas, ma’am—and once they had gone home feeling like good Christian women, we could hunker down and eat our Civil War–era candy until we were sick—one year I ate my entire tube of toothpaste and washed it down with a swallow of Listermint—and go to sleep with no visions, of sugarplums or Saint Nick or anything else, dancing in our heads.
That year, though, we had a surprise. We woke up and looked outside to see not one but two Santa Clauses, wandering across the parade grounds looking lost, dragging a couple of heavy, army-issue duffel bags through the snow and calling out, “Ho, ho, ho! It’s Christmas! Ho, ho! Where the hell is everybody?”
Raymond, hungover in boxer shorts and clutching his hair with one hand, was the first to get to them. “Hey, what’s this?” he yelled from the front door of the dormitory.
“Where are the kids?” one of the Santa Clauses hollered. “We got presents!”
I could recognize Jeffrey’s high, reedy voice anywhere. He swung his duffel bag around a little too enthusiastically, which threw him off-balance. He ended up sprawled in the snow, his feet pedaling the air. “Fuck!” he cried. “I lost my beard!”
In the foyer of the boys’ dorm they passed out presents. We gathered around, bedraggled and stupefied, while they handed out G.I. Joes, squirt guns, Barbies, cowboy pistols, water rockets, oranges and apples, matchbox cars, an avalanche of candy bars and bubble gum. They had obviously thought there would be more kids around, but it was only us: four boys, three girls and Raymond, all of us sleeping on one floor of the boys’ dorm to save money on the heating bill.
Jeffrey was missing his beard, and both of them reeked of cigarettes and pine-scented car deodorizer, but they played their parts with enthusiasm, slapping their pillow-bellies, and ho-hoing until they were hoarse. It was the first time in my life, I think, that I had ever experienced the joyful chaos of a true Christmas morning: there was shouting and fighting over who got what and the wide-eyed ecstasy of ripping open boxes. Raymond looked on in a foggy stupor. “Now who…what…” he said, turning around in place and scratching his belly. Chester Holland, a little Pima boy with an enormous gob of bubble gum in his mouth, got so excited he dashed around the room in his underwear, unable to stop long enough to play with any of his toys.
One by one, Jeffrey took everybody on his knee, just like a department-store Santa, and asked questions: “Have you been a good boy this year?” or “Do you brush your teeth every night?”
When he got his chance, Barry pulled me aside, hooked his arm around me and asked me if I was having a good Christmas. I was clutching two G.I. Joes, a Lone Ranger doll and a fire engine; I wasn’t particularly interested in the toys myself but I knew, in the long run, they would be worth something to somebody and it would be a mistake to let the other kids take them all.
This was the first time I’d seen Barry since he’d taken me to see my mother. A few weeks before, he’d sent a cryptic letter that said he was very busy and that he would come and visit me when he thought things were safe. He’d enclosed a twenty-dollar bill and signed the letter You know who.
“Is my mother here?” I asked him. Maybe she was waiting out in the car. Maybe she would show up in a Santa costume herself. With Barry, it seemed, anything was possible.
“What do you think about these toys?” he said. Now he had me up on his lap, just like Jeffrey with the other kids.
I asked again about my mother. Barry ho-ho-hoed and whispered that we could talk about it later.
“You’re such a serious little boy,” he boomed in his fake Santa voice, which sounded more like a bad Count Dracula. “Try to have some fun!”
Eventually, Barry and Jeffrey were able to get away before Raymond could really start questioning them. From a clear patch in the fogged-up window, we watched them strike out across the parade grounds toward the road, swearing when they tripped on the hardened snowbanks, constantly losing the hats off their heads, the pillow under Jeffrey’s coat tearing at the seams as it worked its way out, leaving a trail of swirling feathers. Standing behind us, Raymond said, “What in the name a goddamn hell.” We tried our best to keep our eyes on them, but even in their bright red suits they grew
smaller and less distinct, dissolving into the drab colors of the clouds and the trees, and then they were gone, vanishing as quickly as spirits or angels or beings from another world.
A HOLE IN THE GROUND
SNOW FELL IN heavy, wet flakes the day Principal Whipple took me out of my homeroom class. It was late February and he trod ahead of me through the dirty clumps of hardened slush and said nothing. I had been found out, I knew it. My stealing and spying and sneaking around had been found out and I was now being marched away to take my punishment. Edgar was so delirious with relief he almost collapsed into the snow at Principal Whipple’s heels.
For months the entire school had done extra work detail, missed Friday night movies and special events and morning recess, suffering because of me, not only because I would not take responsibility for my crimes but because I continued to commit them. In spite of the principal’s crackdown, Nelson never stopped coming up with projects for me: ice-picking a certain teacher’s tires, sneaking into the girls’ dorm in the middle of the night and pulling the fire alarm so we could see them in their underthings, running packets of pills or cigarettes or bottles of glue, stealing town passes off Maria’s desk right from under her nose. I was not the only criminal at Willie Sherman, but I was becoming one of the more accomplished; I never got caught, never once was questioned.
A small woman wearing a gray dress suit and galoshes was waiting for us in the office. “This is Edgar,” Principal Whipple announced and immediately disappeared out the door.
In a confidential tone, the woman explained that her name was Penny Miller and that she worked for the BIA and that she was sad to have to tell me that my mother had passed away.
I tried to understand. Was this the punishment I was supposed to receive?
“Your mother has passed away,” Penny Miller said, enunciating each word clearly.
“Passed away,” I said. “Did she go back to California?”
Penny Miller narrowed her eyes at me. She stood up, as if to call for help from the other office, but then sat back down with a sigh. She checked her watch.
“Listen to me. Your mother died. She’s dead.” Penny Miller ruffled through her papers. “You’re Edgar Presley Mint?”
“I saw her awhile back,” I said. My voice sounded far away to me and my vision seemed to be going dark at the edges. “We talked in a kitchen.”
“Be that as it may,” Penny Miller said.
I stared into my lap. At that instant I felt hate for this woman Penny Miller grow inside me like a black cloud. I thought about opening the drawer of Principal Whipple’s desk and taking out the sack of CONTRABAND and stabbing, choking, shooting, torturing her with all the weapons and implements therein. I picked up a brass letter opener on the desk and thought about the different ways I could make her hurt. I thought about ripping out her hair with my hands. Then, as quickly as it had come, that feeling bottomed out and left me feeling lost again, everything before me gone fuzzy, out of focus.
“I think you know she hasn’t been well for a very long time,” she said, scanning one of her sheets. “It says here that she suffocated in her bedding, no doubt alcohol-related. We had some trouble locating next of kin. Things took awhile to make it through to our agency, but we’ve notified the grandmother and funeral arrangements are being made. Edgar, I’m very…” She put her hand to her nose and looked up at me. While she talked, I’d opened the floodgates; my piss was not only filling up the seat of my orange plastic chair but dripping out of the left cuff of my jeans, dribbling down my shoes and onto the floor.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and this seemed to puzzle her because it’s exactly the thing she had started to say to me. I wanted her to be angry with me, to hit or curse me, but she only looked irritated and confused.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
Penny Miller peered at me and closed her file. She pursed her lips and said, “That’s quite all right.”
After Penny Miller hurried away, Maria came in to clean me up. She looked down at me with a sweet, sad face and said, “Oh, honey.” She knelt to dab at my shoes with a tissue and I put my hand lightly on her shiny black hair and held it there.
Two days later, I was sitting in the cab of an old green GMC between Uncle Julius and Raymond, who was driving us down to San Carlos for the funeral. We slid down the icy mountain roads, the old truck’s tires spinning and throwing slush, until we leveled out gradually as the snow and pine trees disappeared and were replaced by sage-covered hills and low, wind-twisted cedars. Uncle Julius gripped the dashboard with both arthritic hands, letting go only to take a pull on the flask of whiskey from his coat pocket. It was the first time he had been in a moving motor vehicle in fifteen years.
It turned out there was not really a funeral at all, but a brief graveside service in the San Carlos cemetery, which was full of sunken, unmarked graves and looked like a landfill with bleached plastic flowers scattered everywhere, shards of pottery and colored glass, small animal bones tied up in bundles, graves piled with rotting carnations and matted stuffed animals, a child’s tiny shoes hanging by their laces from the arm of a wooden cross, layers of windblown trash snared by the rust-eaten wrought-iron fence. Except for the gravediggers and the fat preacher who sat in his Volkswagen Bug puffing on a hand-rolled cigarette, we were the first to arrive.
The rough pine coffin sat suspended on ropes above the black mouth of the grave.
“She’s in there?” I asked Uncle Julius, but he only looked at me with those wooden eyes of his and said nothing. I wanted to know if I could open the box and have a look at her—I wanted to make sure it was really her, that some kind of trick wasn’t being played on me.
We got out of the truck and walked over to the grave. Low gray clouds scudded across the mesas to the east and a cold wind rose up suddenly, yanking at our clothes, then sucked itself away, leaving us in a vacuum of utter stillness.
The preacher toddled up behind us. He was a flabby Indian man in a beige suit, with a coiffed hairdo that was having a hard time keeping itself together in all this wind. The preacher kept patting at it like a woman just back from the beauty parlor. “Is that all that’s coming?” he called out cheerfully.
“Keep your trousers on,” Raymond told him. The preacher smiled and nodded and reached out to rub his fat fingers along the edge of the coffin as if he was proud of it, as if he had constructed it himself. Behind us, the gravediggers—two men in orange jumpsuits with black serial numbers stenciled over their hearts—squatted next to a wild growth of prickly pear and drank from a bottle wrapped in a paper bag. I wanted to put my ear against the coffin, to find out what I might hear.
A green van rolled up and two orderlies in white uniforms opened the side door to let out Grandma Paul, already wailing like a siren. The orderlies tried to help her down but she swatted at them with the aluminum canes she carried in both hands like six-shooters. She was a small woman, with eyes like buttons and stark-white hair wrapped up in a bun at the back of her head. She wore her Mickey Mouse sweatshirt, a yellow one so threadbare that it was translucent in places, patched with multicolored thread and pieces of a red handkerchief. That Mickey Mouse unlocked something inside me and I felt a pang of homesickness so sudden and fierce that my knees felt like they might buckle. I choked to breathe and moved closer until I could mash my face right into Mickey Mouse’s little red shorts. Grandma Paul’s smell—a mixture of sweat and woodsmoke and lavender skin cream mixed with the sad, antiseptic smell of hospitals—made the pain in my chest even worse. I held on to her shirt until I could feel my legs beneath me again.
The orderlies went over to join the gravediggers and one of them said, “That old squaw is nutty as they come.”
Grandma planted both canes in the ground on either side of me and continued her angry wail—a high, arching cry that sometimes fell into a thrumming moan—while the preacher did his best to carry on with some kind of ceremony. He read from his Bible and yelled over the racket about the resurrection and ho
w we will all rise together on that great and glorious morn, God’s children every one. He pointed at the sky and hollered. He called on Jesus, oh Jesus please, to heal us in our sorrow. Jesus, won’t you take away our sins. Jesus! Oh Jesus now! Cleanse us with your blood!
He never mentioned my mother’s name, never said anything about her.
When he was finished, he snapped his Bible shut and told the gravediggers to stop swilling the devil’s bathwater and get to work. With a lot of grunting and cursing in Apache, they let out the ropes and lowered the coffin into the hole until it settled with a rattling thump. They picked up their shovels but Grandma beat them back with both canes, spitting at them. She knelt in the yellow mound of dirt and began pushing it into the grave with her twisted, bony hands. The first big clods made a reverberating thonk thonk thonk on the lid of the casket but it gradually became muffled until there was only the soft hiss of falling dirt.
Grandma Paul did not attack me with her canes when I climbed up on the mound next to her and began shoveling in dirt with my hands. She began her wail again, which became more of a song with high keening notes, an old Apache song that didn’t have any words. Eventually someone came to take the gravediggers back to jail and the preacher putt-putted away in his little car. The orderlies smoked cigarettes and remarked to each other that at least they were away from the puke and shit and moaning for awhile. Raymond and Uncle Julius sat in the truck out of the wind and watched.
It took us more than an hour to get that hole filled. We worked at the dirt until our hands were raw and our fingers bled from underneath the nails. The gray, misting clouds were so low that occasionally one would tail down, dragging across the ground, and for a moment we would be lost in an obscuring whiteness. When we had finished, when we had finally humped all the loose earth into an oblong mound, I kept a last fistful of dirt to myself. Grandma Paul was quiet now and we stood together, looking at our handiwork, no sound but the wind like static in our ears.
