by Brady Udall
I stepped outside the barn and tried to steer Brain in the direction of the house; I wanted to get back in there, take off my shoes and walk around on the carpet some more.
“There’s one other thing you should know,” Brain said when we got to the back door. “Three years ago my little brother Dean died. He was two when it happened. He’s the reason all these animals are here. He’s why Trong’s here, he’s why you’re here. He’s the reason for everything.”
SETTLING IN
A MOTHER, A FATHER, a sister, a brother, a soft bed, ten new pairs of new underwear, three square meals a day with snacks in between—Edgar, for once in his life, had everything he needed. And more. The Madsens bought me two new pairs of Keds, a whole wardrobe full of flashy polyester shirts and tight-fitting pants, a Sunday outfit with a white shirt, tie and platform shoes, even a wristwatch that had a picture of a flaming race car on its face. About two weeks after I arrived from Willie Sherman, I asked Brain if he had a bicycle; I hadn’t seen one around the house. The next day Clay brought home a chopper-style two-wheeler with a banana seat and multicolored tassels on the handgrips. The bike was painted a speckled, metallic gold and I believed, for awhile, that it was gold—only a metal of great worth could have sparkled with such brilliance.
“Saw this at a garage sale the Willards are having,” Clay said. “Thought maybe Edgar could put it to some use.”
With everybody out on the porch watching, I wobbled down the hill, lost control, veered off into an irrigation ditch and ended up tangled in the Christensens’ barbed-wire fence. I unhooked my shirt, quickly looked the bicycle over to make sure that it hadn’t been scratched or marred, and came up grinning like a wild man: Edgar had his bike.
And the food. Who could have imagined such food? Aside from the late night omelets and pancakes at truck stops with Barry, I had no memory of ever eating a meal that was not cooked by some underpaid worker and served on a tray. Lana liked to make casseroles—tuna casserole, hamburger casserole, broccoli and potato casserole—and every time I could, all by myself, eat half the pan. Sometimes when no one else was around, I would pick through the cupboards and pantry and refrigerator and sample whatever I might come across: a hard-boiled egg or two, a handful of chocolate chips from a plastic bag in the pantry, a sleeve of soda crackers, a family-sized tub of Dream Whip, maybe a cold piece of Shake ’n Bake chicken. Once I’d had enough I’d wash it all down with a stiff swig of pickle water.
And ice cream! Who needed an ice cream truck when there was all the ice cream you could ever eat, right there in the freezer?
I loved the long days when everyone was at school or work and it was just Trong, me and the animals haunting the house. It was very hard for me not to steal anything; the house was so full of stuff: a ham radio in the basement, stacks of magazines, records and church books, a chess set made of ivory and obsidian, trophies, tools of all kinds, jewelry, old toys and sports equipment and board games. Like an archaeologist at the site of a lost civilization, I discovered things I never knew existed: wheat grinders and hair dryers and douche bags, castanets and BB guns, life-size dummies of biblical figures, tampons and soldering irons, doodads and thingamajigs without name or apparent purpose, all of it out in the open, waiting to be taken. I searched every nook and cranny, every drawer and closet and cubbyhole. In the attic I rifled through the boxes of photos and keepsakes and Christmas decorations. I took the lacy, satiny things out of Sunny’s drawers and piled them on top of me while I lay on her bed, pressing her pastel-colored underthings to my face. Like a dog, I sniffed around that house for days. How good everything smelled! I had come from an olfactory hell—the ammoniac smell of urine, the stench of the shithouses rising up like deadly fog on hot summer days, the odor of sweaty towels and disinfectant and moldy mattresses and floor wax, and the dusty smell of history blowing out of the heater vents—and had managed to fall into a fragrant paradise: clean laundry appearing in my drawers as if by magic, fresh bread in the kitchen, a bathroom that breathed a fine mist of lavender and lemon and perfume, comforters and pillows that smelled like a sharp winter morning.
Those carefree days of eating and snooping didn’t last long, however. After two weeks Lana decided that I had “acclimated” myself well enough, it was time for me to go to school. I told her I would be more than happy to stay home and feed the animals and watch the soap operas on TV and make sure Trong stayed away from the chicken coop (she had once, as a favor to the family, butchered two of the chickens, none of whom were ever to be eaten, and cooked them up with ginger and hot pepper sauce). But Lana insisted that I start school—she was most concerned, she said, about my becoming a contributing member of the community. Lana was a political activist of sorts, she belonged to various clubs and societies—Audubon and the Sierra Club—and worked for the John Swavely for Congress campaign. John Swavely was a Democrat, which meant he didn’t have a shadow of a chance in Richland or anywhere else in Utah, but Lana faithfully attended the campaign meetings and kept John Swavely for Congress paraphernalia all over the house.
“School is not about figures and conjugating verbs,” she told me. “It’s learning how to get along with your fellow man, it’s all about becoming a social animal. Too bad Brain hasn’t figured that out yet.”
After walking the halls and enduring the stares of the boys and girls I passed, I understood right away that Richland High would be no different from Willie Sherman. It was much nicer: there was a football field with grass so green it looked artificial; an asphalt parking lot full of pickup trucks and Volkswagen Bugs and old muscle cars painted with threatening colors; a rubber jogging track, one of only three, it was proclaimed loudly and often, in the entire state of Utah; a large concrete classroom building with an enormous buck-toothed beaver painted on the outside wall of the gymnasium. The beaver was about fifteen feet tall, smiling goofily and wielding a large ax. Underneath the beaver’s feet large cartoon letters proclaimed: BEAVERS ALL THE WAY!!!
On my very first day at Richland High I found myself sitting alone at an empty table in the cafeteria, staring at my tray of food: corn dog, corn, purple Jell-O, milk. I had tried to make things go differently, to alter my destiny: my tray held formally in front of me, I boldly sat down next to a trio of rather homely girls who were hunched over their food in such a secretive way they might have been hatching a murder plot. They all looked over at me and one of them, who wore makeup in a way that made me think of a clown, turned and said, “That seat is saved.” I had never heard this expression before, but it seemed to carry the weight of law. My seat was saved! What choice did I have but to find an empty table where—I hoped—none of the seats had been saved. All alone with my corn dog, I watched everything around me very carefully: the cafeteria looked and smelled and sounded just like the cafeteria at Willie Sherman. There was no difference except that the kids, in general, were better dressed, and the graffiti scratched into the tables was not nearly as interesting.
I tried very hard not to feel sorry for myself. I had a bike and a family and no one had tried to hurt me yet. I decided then and there, amid the roar of that lunchroom, that when the time came for somebody to try and hurt me, I would be ready.
It took four days, much longer than I had expected. In the locker room before gym class a kid named Clint began to harass me, calling me “chief” and “Nancy” and yanking on my hair, asking why I didn’t get a regular haircut, was I really some kind of Indian? Did I live in tee-pee? I smiled and did my best to ignore Clint but it was clear he wasn’t going to give up. Eventually he recruited another boy to help him and they pulled me down to the cold tiled floor and Clint straddled my chest while the other boy held my arms behind my head.
“Don’t hurt me, please,” I said. I figured it couldn’t hurt to ask.
“We’re not going to hurt you, Nancy!” Clint said. Clint was covered with pink freckles, had the squat build of a wrestler, and wore braces. Braces, now this was a novelty. I had seen other anglo kids walking around with
metal in their mouths, some of them even had straps and wires wrapped around their heads, but this was the first time I was able to get a close look at this mess of crisscrossing metal full of food bits and tooth-scum all strung together with rubber bands. Clint’s mouth scared me much more than he himself ever could.
Resting all his weight on my chest, Clint struck a thoughtful pose. “Hmm. I guess we’ll give you the typewriter. Do you know what the typewriter is, Geronimo?”
I tried to explain that I had a typewriter of my very own, a Hermes Jubilee 2000, in fact, but Clint didn’t seem interested. He grabbed both my ears and twisted them, making a ratcheting mechanical noise deep in his throat. “See?” he said. “I’m feeding in the paper. Get it? Typewriter?”
He commenced tapping on my chest with the ends of his blunt fingers, doing a pretty good imitation of typewriter keys being struck: tik-tik-tak-tak-tik-tik-tak-tak with his tongue. Every once in awhile, he would call out ding!—the sound of the carriage reaching its end—and would give me a solid slap on the face as if to return the carriage to its proper position. It did seem that Clint knew his way around a typewriter.
It was excruciating, this tapping on my chest, a very painful kind of tickling, and I squirmed and kicked, but Clint was a big boy and Clint’s accomplice, who I didn’t get a good look at, held my wrists with a solid grip. Clint began to type harder, his fingers bruising my chest like little ball-peen hammers, and the slaps he was giving me got harder as well, so that I could feel my left eye begin to swell. I looked up at Clint’s homely face and knew, despite the terrifying aspect of his mouth, that he could not really hurt me. Immediately, I relaxed, stopped fighting it, which made Clint type and slap all that much harder.
He began to narrate the letter he was typing. It was a love letter, he said, to my mother. “Dear Squaw,” he typed, his fingers drilling into my chest with each word. “Thank you for the top-notch blow job you gave me behind the dumpster last night. I appreciate it very much.” The boy holding my wrists began to cackle and I felt his grip loosen. Clint continued, “I know I am hung like a mule, which can make it difficult for some people, but you did your best.”
The kid behind me choked with laughter and I yanked both wrists free at the same time, bringing the heel of my hand up against Clint’s snubby nose with all the force I could muster. He fell straight backwards like a tipped-over statue and I was on top of him, just as he had been on top of me a second before. I delivered five or six punches to his face, aiming for those braces with each shot, his head ringing out each time with a hollow tup against the tile floor. Every time I hit him he made a surprised, high-pitched squeaking noise—heek! heek! heek!—which sounded very much like the sound Keith the Rat would make whenever he got agitated or hungry. By now there were a dozen boys standing around, but none of them came after me as I might have expected. Clint lay there quiet for a moment, both hands pressed over his bloody face, and then said, with an air of almost cheerful resignation, “Would you take a look at this!”
Somebody went to get Coach Miller, who wore a tight green T-shirt and very small gym shorts which were barely capable of containing his genitals.
“Well,” Clint gargled, “I think my fucking nose is busted.”
“No swearing,” Coach Miller said.
Coach Miller took a look at Clint’s nose, which was now bleeding freely down the sides of his face, and decided that it wasn’t broken, but sprained. “People don’t think there could be such a thing as a sprained nose, but that’s where they’re wrong,” Coach Miller paused in his ministrations to inform us. Once he had Clint on his feet with a towel pressed against his face, he asked what had happened. I knew things looked bad: Clint lying on the floor all bloody, his lips turned to hamburger on those braces, me standing over him. I didn’t even try to explain myself, I knew it would do no good, but in the end I was saved by a tattletale. Some chubby kid with an out-of-control cowlick and the complexion of a salami piped up with the entire story, how Clint had harassed me, then had given me the typewriter with the help of Paul Halloway—he pointed at Paul Halloway with a dramatic flair, like a lawyer in a courtroom—and how Clint made some dirty comments about my mother, which made me go wild and punch Clint out, even while he was down I kept punching, which was understandable after the things he had said about my mother, things having to do with oral intercourse. The kid went on and on until Coach Miller said, “Do me a favor, Jeremy, and shut your piehole?”
There was one difference, I would come to learn, between white kids and Indians. Among white kids there are tattletales everywhere. Indians? An Indian wouldn’t tattle to save his own mother. Indians, over the years, have learned the value of keeping their mouths shut.
Coach Miller had heard enough from the tattletale and decided that Clint had got what he deserved. “You mess with somebody”—he looked around at all the boys, staring each of them in the eye, keeping his gaze on Paul Halloway for the longest time—“and you might just get messed with yourself. You think somebody’s easy pickin’s, maybe they’re scrawny or slow in the head or what have you”—here he put his hand on my shoulder—“but they might just have it in ’em to whip your butt. Remember that next time you want to pick on somebody.”
We all looked at Clint. I felt sorry for him standing there with his sprained nose and hamburger lips and the bloody towel jammed into his face. He didn’t seem to want to hold a grudge. He came over to me and gave me a slap on the back. “I shoudda nebber said anything about your buther,” he said. “Dat’s where I went wrong.”
“My mother’s dead,” I told him.
He waggled his chin sadly. “Dat’s edzactly what I’m togging about.”
Something like justice seemed to have occurred and I was confused by it. Just to be safe, for the rest of PE I hung as close to Coach Miller as I could, but nobody came after me, there was no attempt at retribution. Clint even played volleyball on my team, able to use only one arm because his other one was occupied with pressing an ice pack against his face.
Later that day, back in class, everyone turned to stare at me. This was when I was still in special ed; it took them six weeks to discover that I could actually read and do a little math and write with the aid of a typewriter, which eventually landed me in the regular class with everybody else. There were eight other students in special ed, all of them boys, and a teacher, Mrs. Cuthbert, who spent twenty minutes of each hour having coffee and gossiping with the assistant principal in the teachers’ lounge.
Directly in front of me sat Pendleton Rittenhouse, a fat kid who continually dug wax out of his ear and smelled it before depositing it on the hem of his shirt. I had been called retarded a few times—I knew it had to do with my damaged brain—but I was pretty certain that Pendleton, brain-damaged or not, was about as retarded as a person could get.
“You broke Clint Crosby’s nose?” Pendleton said.
“Sprained it.”
“What’s your name?” said another kid, Kyle, who sat up front.
“Edgar.”
“Somebody said you were in prison before you came here. A prison for Indians.”
I shrugged. They were all looking at me. Mrs. Cuthbert was nowhere to be seen. I said, “I’m Apache. Apaches kill people sometimes.”
In front of me, Pendleton Rittenhouse’s eyes gleamed. He put his hand up to his mouth and did the Indian war whoop, the kind you see them do on television: ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo. Then everybody in the class joined in, all of them whooping it up and looking at me.
Apparently, I was a hero.
When I got home that afternoon, Sunny was sitting at the kitchen table, checking on her eye makeup with a compact mirror, which she seemed to do every two minutes or so. She looked up at me. “I heard you whipped Clint Crosby’s butt.”
In the month I’d lived in the same house with her, it was only the second time she’d said a word to me.
EDGAR COUNTS HIS BLESSINGS
SO BRAIN AND EDGAR struck a bargain: I would do most of his
chores and he, in return, would allow me to type in his room between the hours of four-thirty and seven o’clock. I would rush through the chores—Brain would usually hang around and toss hay to Dorothy or clean the newspaper out of the parrot cages, just to make it look good—and then I would sprint back up to the room where I had my Hermes Jubilee situated on top of my trunk and try to get as much typing in as I could before dinner. Lana had offered to get me a desk (Brain had refused to let me use his, he said it would interrupt his “processes”) but I came to enjoy kneeling at that trunk—the carpet was soft and easy on my knees, and whether I was typing letters to Art or Cecil or to God Himself, it always felt a little like prayer.
While I typed Brain would sit on his toilet reading his Britannicas and thinking his thoughts. Sometimes I would hear him give a strange little laugh, a soft coo-hoo-hoo—it sounded like a couple of doves had been trapped in the bathroom. Even though Brain had expressly forbidden me to touch his Britannicas, I had browsed through them on occasion, scanning the pictures of various species of penguins or reading up on the Corn Belt. Never once had I come across anything remotely funny.
Each week I would send a letter to both Art and Cecil, usually four or five pages of unimaginably boring descriptions of the life I led. In the letters to Cecil, especially, I included every detail of my new life, the chairs and the carpets and the lawns. I told him about the savory casseroles, the pies, the hamburgers cooked on a grill, the ice cream in big vats in a freezer out in the garage; I described for him the thickness and softness of my mattress, the fluffiness of my pillows (two pillows!), the underwear and tube socks, all bleached white, in such numbers that I could not wear all of them in two weeks’ time; I described for him every piece of clothing I owned, their color and cut, and the 22-inch TV and the big stereo and the pool table in the basement. I told him all about the grandfather clock and the animals. I wrote to him about the hall bathroom, which to me seemed like an attempt to create an earthly version of the Celestial Kingdom, the Mormon version of heaven:
