The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint

by Brady Udall

  The rest of that day, just like every other summer day, I spent typing in the boiler room, wandering about the grounds, missing Cecil, sitting at the jumping place with my legs hanging over the edge, trying not to think too much about Grandma Paul, which in turn made me think of my mother in her coffin, the way it slid into the dark hole, the way I had helped to cover it up. I had fantasies about finding my way down to San Carlos, digging her up with my own hands, opening up the lid, and my mother sitting up, like she’d just had a long nap, saying, Thank you, Edgar, thank you, I’ll never drink another beer again.

  At night, this kind of thinking would always drive me into insomnia and I would climb out my window and break into the kitchen to get a few things to eat, or creep around the grounds and spy on any of the teachers who had stayed on for the summer, sleeping peacefully in their beds. I broke into the empty houses sometimes and snooped in closets and bathrooms, stealing only the things that nobody would miss. I lay for hours in the empty, stripped-down beds, imagining how it would be to have a mother or a father come in from the next room to bring me a glass of water and tell me good night. Often, I would crawl through the duct system that led to Maria’s office to sit in her chair and smell her perfume.

  When I got so bored that stealing or typing wouldn’t satisfy me, I would lie on my bunk and look at the old medical books Barry had brought for me. He told me I might think about becoming a doctor someday, though he certainly did not want to pressure me into anything.

  I was terrified by the ones with pictures in them. The gore bothered me some—an eyeball hanging out of its socket, festering sores and wounds withering with gangrene, a pitted, tumorous growth clapped like a barnacle on somebody’s throat, a bloody bone jutting from a thigh, an arm burned until it was blistered black, intestines slithering out of a wound—but it was the pictures of naked people, boldly lit in stark black and white, that bothered me the most. The men and their penises like clubs, the women and their dark-nippled breasts, the mysterious hairy absence between their legs.

  Is this what it all comes to? I wondered. Is this how it is supposed to turn out? You have your accidents, your broken bones and diseases, and then there is a strange hairiness that overtakes you and pretty soon you’re dead, put in a wooden box and buried under a pile of dirt?

  The other permanents would sometimes get so bored themselves that they would actually talk to me. A big Ute girl name Prissy liked to sit next to me on the steps after kitchen detail and tell me stories about her big brother, who was a criminal of the first degree. Even during the summer, boys and girls were not supposed to socialize, but that would have made things even more unbearable. Prissy told me she got sick of the other two girl permanents and she had to talk to somebody else, even if it was me. She told me proudly that her brother had robbed grocery stores, stolen a zebra from a circus, burnt down a restaurant (accidentally) and killed two old white women in Texas who called him a nigger.

  “You tell anybody about this, I kill you,” she warned. “Warren’s escaped from prison and nobody knows where he’s at. He might be around here. He might come and get me. He knows I’m here, I’ve wrote letters, and he wouldn’t like it one bit. Warren hates school.”

  One morning she was explaining how Warren the criminal once blew up a stray goat with a stick of dynamite, when two young white men in white shirts came pedaling up the road on bicycles. Even from a distance, we could see them smiling, their teeth bright with the sun.

  “Them guys are called the Elders,” Prissy told me. “They talk to you about Jesus Christ and all that.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said.

  “And if you join up with them, join their church, they’ll send you to live with a rich anglo family somewhere. Utah, mostly. My cousin Bertaline joined ’em and got sent to some place where everybody’s got this square patch of green grass in front of their house and all the kids have red bicycles, new ones, and a truck drives around when it’s hot handing out ice cream. Bertaline told me all about it. The only problem is it’s you the Indian and everybody else anglos. They’ll ask you stupid questions.”

  We watched the Elders coast around the far end of the parade grounds and stop in front of Mr. Hansen’s house. I sometimes doubted what Prissy told me, but I knew she was telling me the truth about these two young men. They looked like they had just pedaled out of this world she had described, a world filled with green lawns and smiling people, shining with the kind of happiness that could only come from new bikes and free ice cream.

  The Elders disappeared into the Hansen house and I planned to wait until they came out, maybe ask about the possibility of joining up, but a long blue convertible drove up with a woman in a scarf and a little boy next to her. This was a record day: four strangers and it wasn’t even ten o’clock. The license plate on the car said CALIFORNIA and the mother held the boy’s hand as they walked around the grounds pointing at the run-down houses in their crisp, new clothes, reading the misspelled markers. I followed them, hoping to hear what they were saying, to smell the woman’s perfume. I tried to imagine the house they lived in—some big white thing next to the ocean with palm trees and acres of green grass—and I tried to figure out why they would want to come to a place like Willie Sherman.

  They were looking at the cavalry bell when the boy turned and saw me. He had rust-colored hair and freckles that covered his face and arms like he’d been splashed with tomato juice. He came up to me and looked me over, put his face close to mine.

  “These Indians stink,” he said. His mother turned, took off her sunglasses and smiled at me. The boy smirked and pinched his nostrils, his pinkie finger sticking out.

  Right then, I hated that boy a hundred times more than Nelson or Glen or Rotten Teeth. I took a few steps back, snatched a rock out of the dirt and drilled him in the belly with it. He made a tiny, surprised sound—pooh!—and the mother screamed, which brought Raymond running out of shithouse number one, where he liked to sit after breakfast reading dirty magazines. “He hurt my son!” the woman shrieked. She grabbed the blubbering boy by the arm and hauled him off toward the car.

  Raymond whacked me over the head a few times with his magazine. “No Edgar! Bad! Very bad!”

  Together, we watched the car swing around in the gravel and roar off in the direction of Whiteriver.

  “What’d you hit him with?” Raymond asked me, once they were out of sight. I could see that Raymond’s magazine was called Big Mamas.

  “Rock,” I said.

  “You get him solid?”

  “Pretty good in the stomach.”

  He patted me on the back. “That’s the way.”

  THE SEVENTH GRADE

  THE LAST FEW days before the start of the seventh grade, Edgar stood out by the cattle guard, waiting for his friend Cecil to arrive. The cars and pickups drove past, filled with families coming to drop off one or two of their own. A bunch of kids were brought in a battleship-gray bus, one girl even came riding up on a bicycle with a duffel bag slung over her back. It wasn’t until late in the afternoon on Sunday that I spotted the black pickup that I knew would be carrying Cecil.

  The big Ford rattled right on by me and stopped in front of the administration building. I jumped the cattle guard and sprinted across the dirt parking lot. Up ahead I could see Cecil standing next to the tailgate, lifting out his bags. He looked upset; his normally expressionless face was red and pinched and when he started to walk away he said something over his shoulder to his uncle, who was sipping on a beer in the cab. The uncle, who wore a striped conductor’s hat, lurched out of the pickup and knocked Cecil to the ground with one blow to the back. He barked something in a language I couldn’t understand and picked up one of the bags and emptied out the clothes all over Cecil’s head. He tossed the bag away, shouted something at Raymond, who was watching from one of the dormitory windows, and drove off, knocking over a fence post as he went.

  I helped Cecil pick up his clothes and take his things to his room. I sat on his bunk with him
and said, “Your uncle.”

  Cecil nodded. “I kill Nelson, then I get him.”

  It turned out, though, that Cecil might not have to kill Nelson at all. Nelson did not show up for classes the first day, and each day thereafter was like a vacation for the both of us. We hardly knew what to do with ourselves; we played marbles with the fifth graders, tried to spy on the girls in the dormitory, walked the parade grounds feeling invincible. Once in awhile Glen would give us a flat-handed wallop or push us down in the showers, but his heart didn’t seem to be in it without Nelson. At night, before bed, I showed Cecil how to slip through the bars and climb up onto the roof, where we sat, listening to the coyotes start up, and tossing paper airplanes across the road until the call for Lights Out came. Rumors circulated that Nelson had gone to prison for selling drugs, had killed his own cousin by sitting on him, had died of an attack from his own fat heart.

  Then one day he showed up, sporting a few red blemishes from his bout with the measles, but not much the worse for wear. The good times were over. Within a few hours Nelson, Glen and a couple of new boys found me hiding in shithouse number three. Cecil and I figured it would be a good idea to split up, but who were we kidding? Nelson would get us no matter where we went.

  They dragged me out, blinking in the stark light. Nelson smiled and Glen grabbed me by the neck and gave me a hearty, good-natured shake. He said, “Hi, retard!”

  The new boys had a good laugh at that. They both looked terrified; it was only their second week at Willie Sherman, and like most new boys, they were so scared they laughed at everything.

  “They tell me you’re still running around with your fag-friend, hey?” Nelson said. “Too bad his asshole don’t work no more.”

  I glared at Nelson, then at Glen. I said, “Fuck off, fat-asses.”

  During the summer, with all that time to think, I had decided that I could take over where Sterling had left off, that I could become Sterling. I didn’t ride around in a wheelchair but I did have a broken head. Certainly it couldn’t hurt to try.

  Glen stepped forward and slugged me a good one, right on the side of my broken head, and I have to say it hurt quite a bit.

  Nelson told the new boys to finish me off. They came at me, throwing haymakers. I rolled easily away and got to my feet. I was not much of a fighter, but for the past two and a half years I had taken so many punches and kicks that I knew how to spot them coming and minimize the damage. Even with my ears buzzing from the shot Glen gave me, I toyed with these boys, giving them a good jab when they got too close; I was in seventh grade now and was not about to let a couple of new boys work me over. Occasionally, Nelson stepped in and gave me a cuff to speed things along, and finally the new boys were able to get me down and punch away until their arms got saggy and loose with the effort. I tucked my knees up to my chin, covered my head, and let them have at it. When they couldn’t raise their fists anymore, I jumped to my feet to show them they hadn’t hurt me a bit. Nelson and Glen had already lost interest and had gone over to send hand signals to some girls across the borderline. The two new boys knelt in the dirt, exhausted, and I hit the bigger one in the mouth as hard as I could, so hard that he fell onto his back and began to spit blood.

  The smaller one, kneeling, took one look at his friend, then at himself, scraped up and covered with dust, and wailed, “I hate this place.”

  That night, I snuck out and met Cecil in the boiler room. Uncle Julius, who was going on eighty-five, was getting to be as deaf as a stump. He had started to walk with a kind of sideways shuffle and his arthritic hands had twisted up on themselves like old tubes of paint. Sometimes, he couldn’t distinguish me from other boys.

  Cecil and I could talk, roust around the room, bang on the old boiler with a shovel if we wanted to and he would never have known the difference. We stole a few pieces of butter toffee out of the front pocket of his overalls and hunkered down on a couple of crates to suck on them. Cecil had a pretty good scrape on his jaw and he told me he was tired of it all, he really was going to kill Nelson first chance he got.

  “With what?” I asked. Even though I was terrified about what might happen if he actually went through with it, I was curious about how he planned to do it.

  Cecil shrugged. “Get a gun, shoot ’im. Bow and arrows, maybe. Chop ’im with a machete.” Cecil took out his box cutter and drew it across his throat. “Like this, and dead, ploop, right on the floor.”

  “You could hit him with a hammer when he’s sleeping,” I offered.

  Cecil sighed. “Many ways. Many, many.”

  I showed Cecil the knife Art had given me. I kept it hidden inside my Hermes Jubilee, in the little recess behind the keys. When they conducted their searches, they went over every inch of the dorms, even Raymond’s room, even Uncle Julius’, but in all that time they never discovered the knife. Cecil turned it over in his hands, letting the light play on its mother-of-pearl handle, and I thought about the day Art had given it to me, what he had told me to do with it. I had long since stopped hoping for another letter from Art—he was just one more disappearance from my life—but seeing that knife made me miss him, even made me feel guilty: I had not, like I promised him, stuck Barry in the ribs with it first chance I got. Even though he was far away and I knew I’d probably never see him again, I felt like I’d let him down.

  I told Cecil that if anyone was going to kill Nelson, it should be me. What could they do to me? I was just like Sterling Yakezevitch. I knew it, but nobody else seemed to.

  Cecil laughed at me. “You kill Nelson? How?”

  “That knife,” I said. “You stick it right in the ribs, right here”—I gave Cecil a poke in the side—“and maybe give it a turn. That’s how you kill somebody.”

  “You stick ’em right here?” Cecil said, jabbing me a good one in the ribs with his stubby finger, grinning. “Kill ’em like that?”

  I jumped on him, got him in a headlock, and we wrestled around the room, laughing and howling, knocking over crates. We did karate chops, flying kicks, roundhouses, finger jabs to the eyes. We were cowboys shooting at each other, superheroes tossing bolts of lightning; for a couple of minutes we acted just like kids. I chased Cecil around the old rumbling boiler and he put his hands over his head, pantomiming great terror, “Oh no! Big killer boy going to kill me! Ah! Halp! Halp!”

  Next thing I knew somebody had me by the ear. It was Uncle Julius, bedraggled and blinking with fury, yanking us up the stairs back to our rooms, not so deaf after all.

  TRIBE OF TWO

  CECIL SETTLED ON the bow and arrow. Every spare moment for three weeks he put all his energy into creating a weapon that could effectively kill Nelson. He had considered all the options and decided that the bow and arrow was the best way to get Nelson without putting himself in immediate danger. Using a knife like mine, he told me, would be like trying to kill a wild pig with a toothpick.

  I offered to help but he shook his head and blew air through his nose, which meant he was busy and didn’t want to be bothered. I watched anyway, watched him cut—with a butter knife he spent hours sharpening on a stone—a three-foot-long bow from a young, lightning-killed juniper, about as thick around as a broomstick. He smiled a crooked, faraway smile as he whittled and scraped, tapering and notching the ends, and when he was almost finished he rubbed the entire length with lard to keep it supple. Still, he worried over it, shaving off a bit near the hand grip or deepening the notch. Finally, when he had just the shape he wanted, he strung it with a tightly twisted double strand of some monofilament he had found tangled in a branch overhanging the river.

  On our walks he studied the ground for old arrowheads he could use, searched under hawk nests for the best feathers for fletching. In a rare moment when he felt like talking he explained that his grandfather, now dead, had taught him how to make a bow and arrow, taught him how to hunt. He said he hunted rabbits mostly, but he didn’t hit them very often. Rabbits, he said, could hear the arrow whistling through the air, could feel it be
aring down on them and would dodge, always at the last second.

  “You shoot arrow, hit rabbit?” he said. “Dumbass rabbit.”

  I tried to imagine Nelson dodging an arrow and decided he’d be lucky to dodge an apple thrown from all the way across the parade grounds.

  “What about people?” I asked him.

  “People?”

  “Is it easy to shoot people?”

  Cecil grinned. “People ain’t rabbits.”

  All this time, I had been hoping that Nelson would eventually become bored with us, move on to some new project, but tormenting us seemed to become one of his favorite hobbies, along with selling the contraband that his lackeys stole for him and sniffing glue in the guardhouse. Besides the regular beatings we were used to taking on the playground, the towel attacks in the bathroom, the surreptitious knuckle-punches at roll call, the eraser-darts (a straight pin stuck through a pencil eraser and shot through a soda straw) in class when the teachers went outside to have a smoke and complain to each other, Nelson began to orchestrate newer, more creative ways to abuse us. The dead, maggot-ridden skunk stuffed into my pillowcase, the razor blade embedded in the seat of my desk, the cherry bomb thrown into shithouse number three while I sat reading about how somebody named Bardito was forever in love with somebody named Vicky. Or the time on the playground when a mob of new boys bushwhacked Cecil, stole his pants and underwear, and left him to shamble back to the dormitory with one shoe positioned over his privates and a hundred girls gawking and slapping their hands over their mouths.

  I believe that for Nelson, this was no longer revenge or a display of power. He wanted to test our limits, to see how much we could take before we broke. For Nelson, this was entertainment.

  We tried fighting back, a last resort. When somebody hit me I hit back, twice as hard if I could. Somebody got me with a dart in the arm during class? I’d hunt him down on the playground, and no matter if Nelson was nearby or Glen or Rotten Teeth or any of the others, I’d ambush him, inflict as much pain as I could before the rest of them got to me. I bit, I scratched, I howled, I swore. I even started packing my knife in my sock, slept with it gripped tightly in my fist. In the lunch line I let everyone know that the next person to touch me was going to get their scalp taken off, their eyeballs poked out. I felt so mean and terrified and exhausted I was close to tears all day long.