by Brady Udall
“Lana hung these things. For the life of me I still haven’t figured out what the point of ’em is.”
He quietly opened a door to our right and came out with a paper bag from which he took a new pair of pajamas, still in the plastic, and a whole package full of new underwear along with a toothbrush, my own bar of soap and bottle of shampoo. He explained that I would have to share a room with Brayton for awhile because the guest bedroom was being used by a woman named Trong, who needed a place to stay while she waited for the rest of her family to arrive from Cambodia.
I brushed my teeth, slipped into my new pajamas, and Clay helped me up onto the top bunk in the dark bedroom. Below me, a boy, my new roommate, my new brother, rolled over and grumbled in his sleep.
“That’s Brayton,” Clay said. “He moved to the bottom bunk because he thought you might want the top one. We’ve been working with him on being more charitable. That was his charitable act for the week.”
Compared to the bunks at Willie Sherman, it was like heaven: the mattress was thick and soft and the sheets were fresh with the barest scent of soap. Clay put one of his big hands on my chest and gave me a light pat. “You okay?” he said.
I tried to tell him I felt fine but my throat caught and I bit down on the words because I knew if I opened my mouth again I might, for reasons I couldn’t really understand, begin to weep.
Before he left he said, “Anything you need, you let us know. You sleep tight and we’ll get you introduced to everybody tomorrow. We’re real happy to have you, Edgar.”
For a long time Edgar lay in the darkness, listening to the boy below him tossing and snorting in his sleep and the night-jungle sounds from downstairs. This was not at all what he had expected. But he would take it, yes he would.
THE MADSENS
I WOKE UP to find a little boy hovering over me, his face suspended in a white haze of early morning sunshine. I blinked to get everything in focus and the boy, who had thick brown hair smoothed down over his forehead, looked me over warily.
“You’re Apache?” was the first thing he said to me. He was short, thick in the chest, and had a certain hangdog look to him that made you want to give him a hug, tell him to buck up, everything would be all right. He had a round face and a little nub of a chin like half of a rubber ball.
I nodded, propped myself up on my elbow. The room, I could see now, was painted yellow, which made it seem as bright as the sun itself. Glossy posters of classic cars and astronomical formations ricocheted light around the room. I hoped the kid wasn’t here to tell me to get up because I didn’t want to ever leave this soft and wonderful bed.
“Among Mexican slave owners the Apache were prized above all others,” he said. “It didn’t matter if they were beat up or starved or abused, they always cost the most because they could tolerate anything, could outlive anybody. Did you know that?”
“No,” I said.
“General Crook—you ever heard of him?—called them the lions of the human race.” He frowned a little. “You don’t look very tough to me.”
“I’m not,” I said.
“These are all facts, you know. The Apaches disemboweled—that means to cut the stomach open so the guts spill out—their enemies, scalped them alive, poked out their eyeballs with sticks, cut off their, you know, private regions. They liked to bury people in anthills and smear their faces with honey. Sometimes marmalade, if they had it.”
“I’ve only done some of that,” I said, smiling. The color drained out of the boy’s face, but he stood his ground.
“What’s your name?” I said. I knew that Clay had told me the night before, but there was too much to take in at once. All I could remember was that somewhere in the house was a rat named Keith and a woman named Trong.
“Brain,” said the boy.
“Brain?” I said.
“It’s not my real name,” he said. “But that’s what everybody calls me.”
“I’m Edgar,” I said.
“I’m aware of that,” said Brain.
“How old are you?”
“Seven. But I’m smart for my age. I read a lot. I go to the library every day. I have a set of Britannicas, which I prefer to read on the toilet.” He walked to the far side of the room and pulled open a narrow door, which revealed a small bathroom with a commode and a sink. Right next to the toilet, there was indeed a row of shiny books on a shelf, their slick covers glistening red as wet blood.
“Please don’t touch them,” he said. “I’m sure you know about germs.”
Brain informed me that breakfast was on the table, if I was interested. “Waffles with peaches and cream,” he said. “That’s what we have whenever we get a new guest.”
Regretfully, I got out of bed and followed Brain down to the zoo, where the animals were putting up a real racket—the gerbils and mice spinning on their exercise wheels, the parrots chatting nonsense with one another—and through the narrow door to the other side. How can I explain the wondrousness of walking barefoot across carpet for the first time? Right then I didn’t care about getting my own bicycle or free ice cream. Standing on that carpet in my new pajamas with the smell of waffles in the air—what else could I possibly need?
In the kitchen, I was introduced to my new mother, Lana, who gathered me into the folds of her terry cloth robe, hugging and kissing me on the forehead and telling me how long they had waited for this day, how pleased they were to have me. She locked her arms around me and delivered such a strong, heartfelt hug that it nearly took the air out of me.
At the table sat my new teenage sister, Sunny, a miniature version of Lana: they both had the same pale skin, so delicate it looked as if a pinch would crumble it, and long, ash-blond hair parted in the middle, like the two panels of a curtain. Sunny slumped in her chair, her eyes showing a half-lidded look of disdain. She glared at me flatly for a second and then turned her gaze toward the large bay window, where hummingbirds hovered and dove around a feeder. Suddenly I felt ridiculous in my new red pajamas, with my wild bed hair and my I’m-so-happy-I-could-die grin. I made a grab for my crotch but was able to stop my hand at the last minute.
“Sunny,” said Lana, “the least you can do is say hello.”
Without looking at me or even turning my way, Sunny said, “Hello. Nice to meet you.”
Lana sighed, stacked my plate high with waffles and scrambled eggs. She said, “Brain, are you being nice to Edgar?”
“Not really,” Brain said.
I began to eat, shoveling the food in, my fork gripped in my hand like a weapon. I could not seem to stop myself, even with Brain and Sunny watching me, hardly touching their own food. Lana flitted around me, pouring orange juice and milk, replacing waffles as they disappeared, ignoring her own children completely. She told me that Clay had brought my trunk in, that he would help me get it up the stairs after he got home from work.
While she talked, I ate like a hog at a trough—not only because I was famished but because it gave me something to do. I didn’t know what to say or how to act, so I ate until I could not force another forkful down my throat.
“We’ll have to introduce you to Trong before too long,” Lana said. “She’s around here somewhere.”
“She doesn’t speak English,” Brain said. “And all she eats is rice and some fish paste that makes the house stink. I’ve never once seen her take a shower.”
“Brain,” Lana said.
“I take showers,” I said.
“Of course you do,” Lana said. “I guess Brain isn’t old enough to understand that different people of different cultures do things differently. We’re all different.”
“Only most of us don’t eat fish paste and forget to wash up after ourselves,” Brain said. “Plus, she has a mustache.”
Sunny sighed through her teeth. “I’ve got to get to school.” She put on a green windbreaker, picked up a stack of books, swung her hair in a wide, slicing arc and marched out the front door. As she went, I couldn’t help but notice how her tig
ht jeans gripped her behind like two hands.
Lana gave me another quick hug. “I’ve got to get going, too. I’m sorry this is so rushed, Edgar, but tonight we’ll get properly acquainted. I told Brain he could stay home from school today and show you around, help get you settled. He says he isn’t learning anything at school anyway.”
Brain shook his head in disgust. He said, “The second grade.”
Later, after I’d dug some clothes out of my trunk and Brain had spent a half an hour or so on the toilet reading his Britannicas (he was currently becoming versed in West Indian trade routes and the internal combustion process) he took me out into the backyard, which was enormous: two and a half acres fenced with barbed wire. There was a small barn, a split-rail corral, a large, elaborate chicken coop filled with chickens of all colors, an old yellow train car and rows and rows of what looked like rabbit hutches. A shaggy patch pony stood with its chest against the fence, asleep on its feet, and next to it a blue-gray cat stretched out in an empty tin water trough.
The Madsens lived on the outskirts of town, where the ostentatious polygamist houses with deep, Midwestern porches and filigreed balconets were interspersed with newer, single-level ranchers of clapboard or brick. All of the houses hedged up close to the dirt road with their acreages stretching out behind. To the north the neighbors kept an immaculate flower and herb garden with a greenhouse and a fishpond, and to the south a labyrinthine puzzle of galvanized stock tanks, pickup shells, brush hogs, PVC pipe, pallets of cement block and gooseneck hay trailers clustered around a couple of homemade Quonset huts. Beyond each fenced-in property was raw, untouched scrubland: mesquite and cedar and occasional outcroppings of Navajo sandstone.
I followed Brain out around the barn and there was a small brown woman sitting in the sun, her back against the bright red planks, so thin that she looked like she had been carved out of a shadow.
“There’s Trong,” Brain said. “She’ll probably give you the willies.”
Trong smiled at us—a flash of white—and went back to some kind of sewing, her small hands moving secretly in her lap.
“Why’s she here?” I said, trying to hold off the neighbor’s spotted cow dog, who had run up and was nosing me vigorously between the legs.
Brain shrugged. “She needed somewhere to stay for awhile. We’ll take in just about anybody.” He looked up at me, then back at the anthill he was kicking apart with the toe of his tennis shoe. “It’s my mother that finds all these people. Before Trong there was an exchange student from Syria, his name was Ibrahim. All he wanted to do was play Ping-Pong. He smelled funny too. For a month and a half we had a whole wetback family living with us. They took over the whole upstairs and I had to sleep downstairs with the parrots yelling in Spanish all night.”
“Can I ask you something?” I said.
“You may,” he said.
“I don’t smell, do I?”
He gave me a sniff. “You don’t smell bad,” he said, “but you don’t smell good, either.”
With the bored air of a tour guide, he showed me the backyard and all the animals in it. He explained that his mother worked down at the State Wildlife Office, had a doctorate in zoology and took in any animal that any stranger wanted to dump off on them. So, along with the chickens, a dried-up milk cow, a couple of goats and a whole population of farm cats, there was a three-legged armadillo named Otis, a deaf mule named Dorothy and a turkey buzzard by the name of Doug. The one species of animal the Madsens didn’t have was a dog.
“My dad hates all these animals,” Brain said. “So do our neighbors. That’s why we name the animals after them. Every time we get a new animal, we name it after somebody on this street. Mostly, they’re just old people who complain a lot.”
Across the way, Dorothy let loose an earsplitting honk as if to affirm what had just been said. We stood in front of Doug’s pen, watching the big vulture preen on his perch, slump-shouldered and solemn, and Brain explained that Doug had some kind of ear infection that had permanently disrupted his equilibrium, making it impossible for him to fly. Somebody had found him flopping around out by the cement plant and brought him in because everybody knew that Lana Madsen would take any animal of any kind, even a spraddle-legged old vulture.
“He eats dog food,” Brain said. “Alpo. Anything else he turns up his nose.”
I told Brain about Cecil, my friend, who used to play tricks on the vultures down in Arizona, play dead and then scare the daylights out of them when they swooped in close.
Brain eyed me skeptically. “Just because they eat dead things doesn’t mean they’re stupid. They’re smarter than you think.”
“Not that smart,” I said, with the tone of someone who knows what they’re talking about. I looked back at the house. “Hey, this house has two back doors, just like in front.”
“So what?” Brain said. “Anyway, I was going to tell you about the worst pet we ever had, a monkey named Omar. He belonged to the wetback family, and when they disappeared without even saying thank you to anybody, they left their monkey. A spider monkey, if you know what that is.”
“You had a monkey?” I said. The last time I had ever seen a monkey was King Kong night at Willie Sherman, the same night I slipped through the window of the Thomas household with my pockets full of marbles. After the uproar over the movie that night, Mrs. Theodore decided she’d had enough with all the laughing and shenanigans and threw the film reels onto the trash heap the next day. So I had only gotten to see the first fifteen minutes of it—I never found out what had happened to the big monkey.
“He was a bully, that monkey,” Brain said. “My mom stretched a wire between those two big trees there and put him on a pulley leash so he could roam all over the place. He’d sit up in one of the trees all day long, in the same spot, waiting for one of the neighbor’s dogs to forget and wander underneath. Then he’d drop out of the sky like a kamikaze and land right on top of the dog, biting him on the neck and riding him around. My mom said Omar was just playing, that’s what monkeys do. Well tell that to the dog.”
Brain kicked at an old bale of hay, exasperated.
“I was afraid of him too, this was a couple of years ago when I was pretty little, so I decided to make friends with him. I took some Smarties and put some on the ground for him. He ate them up really fast and then sat there holding his little wrinkled hand out, like he was waiting for his change at the grocery store.”
“What are Smarties?” I said.
“Candy?” Brain said. “You know what that is?”
“I know what Dum Dums are.”
Brain squinted at me. “Is that supposed to be a joke?”
He continued, “I gave him some more Smarties and the next thing I knew he crawled up on me and was hugging me around the neck, giving me these little kisses. His breath smelled like garbage but I gave him the candy until it was all gone. When I tried to set him down, he bit me on the forehead”—Brain pointed to a faint puckered scar above his left eye—“and then he crawled back into my lap like we were best friends again, giving me more hugs and sticking his fingers into my pockets. I sat there for an hour, yelling for my mom, my dad, anybody, but our neighbor over there, Sister Brindle—that’s who the donkey’s named after—came out of her house and told me to keep it down, she was trying to watch The Price Is Right. Well I got mad and gave Omar a slap on the head and made a break for it. He bit me pretty good on my behind, but I got away. My mom was in Seattle at some conference and my dad said it was my decision about what to do about Omar. ‘Put him to sleep,’ I said. He was just going to keep biting people and dogs. I had to go get three shots at the doctor’s office, which was worse than getting bit. The doctor says, ‘So what happened to you?’ and I say ‘Got bit by a monkey’ and everybody laughs.”
“So you killed the monkey?” I said.
“I didn’t kill him. My dad called up Marvin Johnson, some kid in our ward who likes to shoot things. He came by in his pickup and took Omar out to the desert. I hear
d Marvin tell somebody that he gave Omar a ten-second head start. Omar didn’t deserve it, though. He was a bad monkey.”
Brain smiled. “We told my mom that we took him up to the zoo in Salt Lake. Don’t tell her or she’d shoot us all.”
Brain showed me how to feed and water each animal—he said I was going to have to learn to “earn my keep”—and then went and sprayed the chickens with a hose while I transferred fifty-pound bags of alfalfa pellets from the back of an old horse trailer to the shed where the hay and oats were stacked. I heaved the last bag onto the pile and collapsed on it. There had been only fifteen bags but it felt as if my arms had been yanked out of their sockets.
Brain continued to spray the chickens, who squawked and flapped their wings in great goggle-eyed alarm.
“Why are you doing that?” I called out to him.
Brain yelled back, “Because chickens hate water!”
He eventually turned off the hose and came to stand in the doorway. “I wish I could have helped you here, but that’s what I get for being small.” He sat down next to me and folded his hands in his lap in a studied, formal way. “I can tell you a couple of things that will make it easier on you here. First of all, don’t touch any of my things. Second, don’t pay any attention to my sister. She’s on medication for some kind of condition she has, her brain has problems. Third, don’t worry if it seems like my parents don’t talk to each other much. They say they’re working things out. About what, I don’t know. Fourth, when you eat, hold your fork like a regular person.”
“Are other Mormons like your family?” I said.
“Oh no, no,” Brain shook his head. “They’re a lot worse.”
He waved his hand at the dust motes that dove and circled in the light coming through the gaps between the wood slats. He edged closer to me and whispered, “Do you know anything about sexual intercourse?”
“No,” I said.
“Dang,” said Brain.
