by Brady Udall
“Look,” Elder Turley said, “I wasn’t supposed to say anything until later, but maybe this will make you feel a little bit better. Brother Kalb from the placement program called to tell us they’ve got a family for you. He didn’t tell me who they are, but he says they live up in Richland. That’s only an hour from my hometown, can you believe it? It’s a great place, Edgar, you’re really going to love it.” Elder Turley’s grin had taken over his entire face. He gave me a playful chuck on the shoulder. “Go ahead and smile now. We’re going to get you out of that school. You’re going to have a real family. Real, God-fearing people. Your own kind.”
In the chapel, they had a short prebaptismal service in which Elder Spafford and an Apache man named Brother Mendosa offered a few words about the meaning of baptism, how it was a symbol for death and resurrection: to be buried in the water and to rise again. A couple of hymns were sung. I sat in front, next to a straight-backed Elder Turley who couldn’t hide his loopy grin, and hardly heard any of it. I was thinking about Richland, Utah, and this family that was going to take me in, imagining what kind of people could want somebody like me to come live with them in their home. While the congregation sang “There Is a Green Hill Far Away” I constructed in my mind a vast, panoramic picture: a little town with painted houses and the green lawns that Prissy had described to me—weedless and perfectly square—and children riding on bicycles down smooth blacktop streets, trailing a truck that played music and made ice cream available to anyone who wanted it. It all seemed impossible to me, right then—a dream—something I had absolutely no right to believe in or hope for.
In no time the service was over and we filed outside. Far off on the horizon the bottoms seemed to be dropping out of the clouds where a purple wall of rain had come down. A steady breeze carried the wet, clean smell of it. A flock of sparrows shot over our heads, tittering with alarm, and I heard a kid in the back ask his mother or father if he could someday have a karate suit like mine. Elder Spafford ushered me up near the tank and Elder Turley made a big show out of gingerly poking one finger in and yanking it out like somebody testing the water on a stove. Everybody laughed and an old man in a stained cowboy hat said, “Let’s get that boy wet before we do.”
Elder Turley knelt down in front of me. “You ready?” he said. “It’s all right now, go ahead and breathe.”
He clambered into the tank and lifted me over the edge, gently set me down into water so cold it burned. It hit him about waist-high, but was up around my shoulders and seemed to be making my heart miss every other beat.
“Well water,” Elder Turley grinned at the congregation. “Maybe next time we’ll do like headhunters and build a fire under this thing.”
Elder Turley led me to the middle of the tank, where my feet sank down in a soft, spongy carpet of algae and moss. He had me grab hold of his forearm and took my right wrist tightly in his hand. “Okay,” he whispered to me, “here we go.” He lifted his right arm, palm outward, and waited for a clap of thunder to skip across the sky before he said the prayer: Having been commissioned of Jesus Christ, I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, Amen.
Slowly, he eased me backwards. When the water closed over the top of me I did not shut my eyes, and in the instant he held me there I could see the world above me as if through a sheet of uneven glass—the gray rim of sky, the small brown faces crowded around, the warped, faraway form of Elder Turley. I lay back, suspended in that perfect moment before I was lifted up with one great rushing pull and I broke the surface, blinking and sputtering and weightless, made of nothing but air.
RICHLAND
WELCOME HOME
IN HIS NEW BED, in his new home, Edgar dug his face into his soft down pillow, the darkness around him alive with animal sounds: the scritch-scritch of claws on glass, the chirrup of a guinea pig, the muffled squawking of parrots. He felt like he was caught in a dream, and the only way to come out of it was to fall into a deep, distant sleep.
Earlier that day, I had stood in front of the Alchesay Mercantile in Whiteriver with Raymond, waiting for the bus that would take me to Richland, Utah. I had my new steamer trunk, which contained a few clothes, my small collection of knickknacks, my knife, my Hermes Jubilee and the 11,789 pages that bore every last word and line of gibberish I had ever struck on paper (except for the letters I had sent to Cecil and Art)—all in all, more than a hundred pounds’ worth of typewritten pages.
A couple of days before, I had caught a ride into Show Low with one of the cooks and spent an entire morning scouring the secondhand stores and pawnshops until I found the trunk under a stuffed antelope head at an establishment called the True Grit Trading Post.
“That there’s an antique,” said the grizzled proprietor, who was working on his own false teeth with a wire brush. He had carved himself a small alcove out of the avalanche of ancient farm implements, stuffed pheasants, railroad lanterns, milk bottles, high-button shoes, leather holsters, hatchets, lengths of collectible barbed wire, hand grenades, rusted bear traps and animal skulls, all attached to their own oval price tag on a string. High up on the far wall, presiding over everything with a sign that said NOT FOR SALE, was a mummified stingray.
For the life of him, Edgar couldn’t figure out what somebody might want with a piece of barbed wire.
“A relic, that trunk,” the proprietor said. “Seen more of the world than the whole ignurnt population of this town.”
The tag on the trunk read 40$. I took out the wad of cash Art had given me when I left St. Divine’s—money I had not spent a single dollar of—and carefully laid two twenties on the counter.
The man set down his teeth on an old yellowed ledgerbook and eyed the money suspiciously. I watched the teeth carefully to make sure they didn’t move. The guy looked like he was on the verge of sucking his entire face into his mouth. “Where’s your folks?” he said.
“Don’t got any,” I said.
“Probably a couple a wild drunks, am I right? Too many drunk redskins running their pickups into trees around here. Far be it from me to say so, but they don’t know how to manage their liquor.”
He swiped the money off the counter and pointed a bent, tobacco-stained finger at me. “That trunk’s not to be used for keeping comic books or smelly sneakers or goddamn empty whiskey bottles or other shenanigans. That thing has historical implications, you hear me? It deserves to be treated proper, with some dignity, not as if a little scalp-grabber like yourself would know about that.”
I took hold of the trunk’s cracked leather handle and hauled it out the door, knocking over an oil portrait of John Wayne on my way.
Two days later, when the bus pulled up in a punishing cloud of diesel smoke, Raymond and I began to attempt to wrestle the trunk into the luggage compartment, but the driver—a big black man with a hulking beer belly—waved us off. On the expanse of white shirt that covered his chest and belly his tie looked like nothing more than a small length of blue string.
“Back up now,” he said. “You let me do my job here.”
He positioned himself in front of the trunk like an Olympic weight lifter and grasped the handles on either side. He strained to heft it off the ground and let loose a thunderous, rippling fart which made the woman next to me flinch and backpedal as if one of the bus tires had blown.
The driver looked at Raymond and me, then up at the passengers, who were watching from their open windows. His smile was wide and full of pink gums. “No piece a luggage has ever done that to me before.”
Raymond shook my hand and I climbed up the steps. His parting words to me were, “Don’t let them white folks boss you around too much. It’s their favorite thing to do.”
I sat down next to a woman with a cat snuggled up under her sweater and almost immediately, despite my best efforts, fell asleep. It had taken nearly three months after my baptism for the necessary paperwork to find its way back and forth among the various church and government agencies, and during that time my
insomnia had only intensified; my head was bursting with all the possibilities: Would I have my own bed in my own room? Would there be a TV to watch? Would they allow me to type whenever I wanted? Would I be sent back if they didn’t like me?
During the days, I wandered the grounds, and on the weekends the Elders stopped by to study the scriptures and to assure me that the paperwork was going through, it would take a little time, there was nothing to worry about. In those three months I hardly spoke to anyone, ate my meals at the back of the cafeteria, and used all of my energy to turn myself invisible once again, to make sure I did nothing that would jeopardize my escape from Willie Sherman. The entire week before my bus trip, I didn’t sleep more than an hour at a time.
On the bus, I slept so hard I was twice jounced out of my seat and into the aisleway. Both times I scrambled to my feet, wild-eyed, ready to fight or run, but the other passengers who weren’t asleep themselves gave me dazed, half-lidded looks.
“Somebody tie that kid to his seat!” the bus driver boomed from up front.
The next time I woke up, the bus was empty and dark. I could hear crickets chirping and the sound of cars shushing by on a highway somewhere close by. Cool air drafted in through the window and I could hear the bus driver’s voice below me.
“Never seen a kid sleep like that,” he said. “Never, never. Five pit stops, dinner at the truck stop, one flat tire, and he never stirred. I’d call back, ‘That boy dead or something?’ and they say, ‘Nope, still breathing, his chest is moving up and down.’ People knocking him on the head with their bags on the way out and he’s drooling all over hisself like a baby. I’m telling you, that boy can sleep.”
“Is it all right if I wait here for him awhile?” This was another voice, a man’s but lower and softer than the bus driver’s. “If he’s that tired maybe I should let him wake up on his own. I don’t want to scare him.”
“Suit yourself,” said the bus driver. “Frank’ll come in awhile to take her back to get gassed up and serviced, you can wait till then. But I’m telling you, you let that kid go and he’ll sleep till Chinese Christmas. And watch yourself with his luggage. I think maybe he’s got a couple of his brothers hid up in there.”
I heard the bus driver walk off with a jangle of keys and I knelt up on my seat and put my head out the window. A man stood on the concrete platform by himself. A streetlamp shone down on him, obscuring his face in shadow, limning his hair and beard with a nimbus of yellow light. He was tall and lanky and had enormous hands that hung down at his sides like a couple of heavy rakes.
“Hello?” I said.
“Is that you, Edgar?”
“Yes,” I said.
“You’re awake?”
I nodded.
“My name’s Clay,” he said. “I’m here to pick you up and take you home.”
“Okay,” I said.
“You want to get off the bus and we’ll get your things loaded up?”
“Okay,” I said. “Where am I?”
“You’re in Cedar City. Richland’s not too far from here. You slept the whole way.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. The bus took longer than it was supposed to. I’m glad you made it.”
I got off the bus and showed Clay my trunk. He didn’t comment on it, just clapped his big hands over the handles and hefted it up on his hip. He swayed for a moment, fighting for leverage, his knees quivering, then began a slow deliberate walk, each short step a contained struggle, out into the parking lot. With the muscles in his neck pulled so tight they looked like they might snap, he did his best to act casual, as if he was carrying nothing more than a sack of groceries home from the store. When he heaved the trunk into the bed of his red GMC, the truck’s shocks screeked with alarm.
“It’s heavy,” I told him.
He nodded and gingerly stepped up into the cab. He worked to catch his breath and seemed to be having a hard time straightening out his back. He shook his head and smiled at me. He said, “I think I just about busted my spine on that one.”
We drove for awhile through the dark desert and then came to the scattering of lights that was Richland. We passed houses lined up neatly along the road, big houses with new paint and two or three cars and almost always a pickup of one sort or another parked out front. We pulled up next to a large white house, its front so veiled in the foliage of two ancient weeping willows that I could see only the deep porch, a single window with a small balcony supported by ornate brackets, and the steep slanting roof, as dark and blank as an empty blackboard.
“What do you say we leave your trunk in the pickup for tonight,” Clay said. “Tomorrow morning I’ll round up a few neighbors and we’ll haul it inside.”
There was, indeed, a lawn of lush grass, sparkling with an early dew and perfectly square and green and level as a billiard table. I looked around for bicycles but in the darkness couldn’t see any. Hanging on the eave over the porch was a small banner painted in thin blue letters: WELCOME HOME EDGAR!!
“Lana and the kids wanted to wait up to meet you,” Clay said. “But it took you longer to get here than we expected. I’d guess they’re asleep by now—school tomorrow, you know.”
We climbed up on the wraparound porch and the first thing I noticed was that there were two front doors instead of one. The doors were identical, spaced about five feet apart. What did I know about houses? I figured one of them was for coming in and the other for going out. We entered through the door on the left and came into a large dim family room with overstuffed couches and shelves lined with books and plants, walls crowded with pictures: drooling babies, toddlers in plastic swimming pools, happy couples getting married, old people trussed up in suits and high-necked dresses, staring grimly into the camera. The house was glutted with knickknacks of every description: ceramic figurines and trinkets made of brass and a collection of tiny silver bells and crystal bowls and in the far corner a grandfather clock with a pendulum swinging smugly inside its glass belly.
God help me, but the first thing that went through little Edgar’s mind was this: So many things to steal.
“You tired?” Clay whispered.
I shrugged. I felt like I might never sleep again.
“Are you hungry? Should I scare up something to eat?”
“I’m okay,” I said. I hadn’t eaten anything since yesterday and the mention of food made my throat fill up with saliva so that I had to swallow constantly.
Clay stood back and gave me an appraising look. “Bet you could use a sandwich. Come on in the kitchen and we’ll get some grub.”
After we ate—I had two turkey sandwiches and nearly finished a bag of potato chips by myself—Clay showed me around the house a little. Clay was made mostly of shoulder blades, kneecaps and ribs, and when he walked his boots clapped loudly on the wood floor. He told me the house was built by his great grandfather, a polygamist. “He had two wives, is what that means. Used to be common thing back in the old days, some had ten, even twenty wives, but they quit it a long time ago.” Clay laughed. “Now we only get one, which is probably best for everybody.”
I didn’t say so, but it seemed that having an alternate wife or mother, a backup in case something happened to the first, wasn’t such a bad idea.
Clay showed me how the house was almost two houses in one, separated by a wall down the middle, the two halves perfectly identical, each the mirror of the other, each with a downstairs and upstairs, a house with four chambers, he said, sort of like a heart. There was one small door at the base of the stairs that led from one side to the other, a door through which the polygamist husband used to pass back and forth from family to family, wife to wife. The two families didn’t mix very much, Clay said, because the one wife didn’t much care for the other.
The door, which had always been called “the portal,” was narrow and low enough for Clay to have to duck, and when we passed through it was like we were passing from one world into another. On one side was a quiet, clean family room tha
t smelled like lemon and incense, and on the other, a combination of smells and sounds that reminded me, in an odd way, of St. Divine’s. The only illumination in the room came from two large aquariums, humming and gurgling and glowing with an amazing blue light, like pieces of a noonday sky caught in a box. Multicolored fish darted and dove, glinting in the water like tumbling coins. All around the room were cages and boxes and I could hear the shuffling of small bodies in sawdust, the squeaking of rodents, the rustling of wings. It smelled like wet newspaper, like alfalfa pellets, like urine, like feathers and fur. It smelled musty and rich and ammonial—it smelled animal.
“This part of the house we call ‘the zoo,’” Clay said. Under our feet was an expansive oriental rug that glowed like a garden of exotic flowers.
“Chingada puta!” I heard somebody say.
I noticed Clay wince a little. He pointed to a large, dome-shaped cage, covered with a bedsheet. “That was Abelardo, one of the parrots. He only speaks Spanish.”
“A bird said that?” I asked. This was getting stranger by the moment.
“We’ve got seven parrots in all,” Clay said. “Some talk more than others. We also have some parakeets, a couple guinea pigs, I don’t know how many dozen gerbils, some kangaroo mice and a rat named Keith. And that’s just inside. We’ll have Brayton introduce you to all the animals tomorrow. Right now, why don’t we get you to bed.”
I followed Clay to the top of the stairs, where he showed me how he had knocked out the wall to create another passageway, one more portal, to join the two upstairs sides of the house, creating one long hallway on the second floor. The doorway Clay had built was hung with a few strands of wooden beads and Clay brushed his hands along them so that they swung lazily, clicking together.
