The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint

by Brady Udall

  The hall bathroom is the best one. It has pink carpet all over the floor and little soaps like roses and naked babies on the wallpaper. Smells like flowers, but better. There is carpet ON TOP of the toilet, right on the lid, and the seat is padded like you’re sitting on a couch! I stay in there as long as I want until somebody tells me it’s time to come out.

  Also, it’s very CLEAN here.

  Sometimes I went overboard. I told Cecil that, along with a bike, I had my very own Appaloosa stallion, and a go-cart that shot fire out of its tailpipe. I told him I had a girlfriend named Cynthia who made me cupcakes and wrote love notes to me on perfumed paper. I explained that, in Cecil’s absence, I had become quite a basketball player and the high school coach wanted me to try out for the team because of my deadly outside shot.

  There is also this girl I live with, I wrote to Cecil. I see her nipples almost every day.

  They were small lies, but they filled me with shame: I wanted to do the right thing, to keep the commandments, and most of all, I didn’t want God to find any good reason to send me back to Willie Sherman.

  “You lie, you steal, you take the Lord’s name in vain,” Brother Hughes, our Sunday school teacher, had explained to us one Sabbath morning, “and you might as well be stabbing Jesus right in the heart.” I didn’t like the idea that God might not continue to look favorably on me, that he might allow the ghosts to start plaguing me again. And I didn’t want to stab anyone in the heart, much less Jesus, the savior of the world.

  One of the things I did to help me feel a little less guilty was sending, in every letter to Cecil, a five or a ten from the wad Art had given me; I knew his uncle never gave him any money and I figured he could use it to stock up on Dum Dums.

  Brain, who I annoyed to no end, could not understand my typing at all.

  “It’s a waste of time,” he said. “You’re not learning anything.”

  “I’m writing letters to my friends.”

  “Good friends!” he scoffed. “They never write back, do they?” He was right; I’d been in Utah for over six months and hadn’t heard from Art or Cecil. I never really expected anything from Art; he’d only ever written me that one postcard, after all, but I wondered about Cecil. He’d written me twice when I was at Willie Sherman: a couple of brief notes in his blocky handwriting telling me that the Nevada Juvenile Detention Center was not a very good place, but anything was better than Willie Sherman.

  “How many friends do you have?” I asked Brain, and he immediately fell silent. We were in bed, in the dark. It was a frosty February night, the baseboard heaters ticking and shuddering like little mechanical beasts settling into sleep. Brain rarely spoke to me outside the bedroom, but there were nights when he was feeling generous or restless and we would talk. Sometimes we talked for hours; I asked a lot of questions and Brain usually had answers. If he didn’t he would wake up the next morning and go to his Britannicas to find the answers. On those rare occasions when I would give him a few details about my life at St. Divine’s and Willie Sherman he would listen in skeptical silence.

  “I have one friend,” Brain said. “Gordon Dickey.”

  “Dickey!” I said.

  “He’s my best friend.”

  “How come he never comes over here?”

  I could hear Brain turn over and conduct a small wrestling match with his blanket; he sometimes fought with his bedcovers as if they had betrayed him in a fundamental way.

  “You want to know why he doesn’t come over here? He’s afraid of Trong, that’s why. One day he was over here and she creeped him out with that look she gives you out of the side of her eyes. Sunny has all kinds of friends, but how come you hardly ever see any of them over here? Weird people and animals all over the place, that’s why. There you are in the backyard playing with your friend and a vulture’s watching you. It’s impossible!”

  The beam of headlights lit up the frost on the window, throwing rippling permutations of light on the far wall. We listened to Clay’s truck move slowly over the crackling gravel of the driveway, idle for a moment, and then rattle into silence. Clay never seemed to get home before it was dark, and often, like tonight, he would get home well after everyone had gone to bed. I saw him so rarely that he hardly seemed part of the household. Whenever he saw me he would shake my hand as if we were perfect strangers and ask me how things were going.

  Edgar always answered with the old standby: “Fine.”

  “And anyway, back to our original subject, most of that typing you do is just typing to nobody in particular, don’t think I don’t read it all, you leave it lying around and this is my room. And then there’s this stuff you’re typing to God. You think God is going to read it? Give me a break.”

  “Those are my prayers,” I said. “We’re supposed to pray every day.”

  “Yes,” Brain said. “But a prayer is something you say, not write. You’re supposed to talk to God. What, you think you can just lay out those pages and God’s going to look down and read them? Good luck!”

  In fact, that’s exactly what I had done—it never occurred to me that God might be able to hear prayers but would not be able to read them (maybe, I wondered, he couldn’t see through the roof of the house?). Usually, my prayers did not go more than one page and I would simply set down that page next to my Hermes Jubilee so God could have a good look at it if He wanted. In church, we had been taught that before we started asking for favors, we should first list all the things we were thankful for—they called it counting your blessings. They even had a song:

  Count your many blessings

  Name them one by one

  Count your many blessings

  See what God has done

  So every day I whipped out a new prayer and left it next to the typewriter for God to read.

  Dear God,

  Thank you for getting me out of Willie Sherman. Thank you for the Madsens and for my bed and this house and for the carpet and all my clothes. Thank you for the televisions and the cop shows. Thank you for peach pie. Thank you for keeping Dr. Pinkley and the ghosts away. Thank you for potato chip casserole. Thank you for the new toothpaste which tastes better than the blue kind. Thank you for my bike it has a loose chain and a tire that keeps getting flat. What else? I’m thinking about it. Thank you for the model spaceship I got for Christmas. Brain put it together.

  Please bless Art. And bless Cecil in Nevada until he gets out of the detention center and I can see him. Bless Uncle Julius who might be dead already. Bless Maria and Raymond and the Elders. I hope you’ll help me find the mailman. Please bless my mother who should be up there. Maybe Grandma Paul too but I doubt it. Bless the animals especially the gerbils who won’t stop dying. I’m sorry for stealing and the violence on Clint Crosby and for bad thoughts. I’m working on it please believe me.

  IN THE NAME OF OUR SAVIOR

  AND LORD JESUS CHRIST, AMEN.

  From Edgar P. Mint

  Beneath me, Brain sighed. “It probably doesn’t matter. Prayers don’t really do anything anyway. We can say prayers all day long and nothing important will ever happen. Don’t tell anybody I said that though.”

  “I think maybe you’re wrong,” I said.

  “If you knew anything at all, then maybe I would take your opinion into consideration,” Brain said. “Do you have anything you want to ask me? I think I’m about ready to go to sleep.”

  I was silent for a moment. “I’d like you to tell me where Nevada is.”

  “You want me to tell you where Nevada is?” Brain said, his voice rising ominously. “You really want me to tell you the location of Nevada?”

  I didn’t answer him; I knew it was best to wait out Brain and his moments of aggravation.

  “Have you ever heard of a map, Edgar? What do you do in school?”

  Edgar bided his time: an answer would be forthcoming sooner or later.

  The bunk bed shifted as Brain threw off his blankets. He got up, eased the bedroom door shut and flipped on the light. He stalk
ed into the little bathroom and removed one of his Britannicas from the shelf. He placed it ceremoniously on his desk and opened it, carefully shuffling through its pages. His dark blue pajamas showed chubby astronauts cartwheeling through the outer reaches of space. Without looking up, he said, “Are you coming down here or not?”

  There in the book was a picture of Nevada: a state shaped like something out of my geometry book in school. Brain had his stubby little finger digging right into the middle of it.

  “I’m looking for Ely,” I said. “Ely, Nevada.”

  “Right there,” Brain said. “All you have to do is look. You’ve got rods and cones like the rest of us.”

  “Is it far away?” I said, shielding my eyes like somebody gazing out to sea on a sunny day.

  “Look, that’s Utah, right there, right on the border. We live in Richland. You see this thing? This means an inch equals fifty miles.” He pulled a ruler off the shelf. “It’s three and a half inches away. Do a little math, and you get approximately a hundred and seventy-five miles. It’s all right here, I really shouldn’t have to show you this. You’re in high school.”

  “You told me never to touch your Britannicas.”

  “Have you ever tried the library? Have you ever thought of getting some reference material of your own?”

  “I was wondering if I could get a bus to Ely.”

  “You can get a bus to pretty much anywhere you want, excluding overseas travel.”

  “How much will it cost?”

  Brain looked like he was becoming nauseous. He slapped the book shut and covered his face with his hands. “Call the bus company,” he said through his fingers. “Sunny can show you how to use the phone, she’s the expert.”

  Down the hall we heard voices. Brain jumped from his chair and opened our door a crack. It was Lana and Clay talking, their voices suddenly rising, but muffled and indistinct through their closed door. Clay and Lana hardly talked during the regular hours of the day; even on the weekends, they always seemed to be zooming past each other as if they were afraid of being caught in the same place at the same time, but very often, at night, they would talk, sometimes shout, and even if Brain and I were in the middle of a very interesting conversation he would suddenly go dead quiet and I would look over the edge of my bed at him listening with his entire body, his eyes wide and searching.

  Of these late night conversations I could only catch bits and pieces that I would type out on my Hermes Jubilee the next day:

  …can’t talk about this anymore, not one more minute…

  Will you look at me?

  Why? Why don’t you just—why?

  …these damn animals, the smell…

  …listening to what I’m saying?

  …don’t talk, don’t talk, don’t say another word…

  I would look over my notes, trying to divine some sense from these fragments, but it was all a mystery to me. The one time I asked Brain what they were talking about, he snapped at me in a queer, altered voice, “Why don’t you mind your own lousy business.”

  Tonight, Brain stood on the other side of the doorframe, his ear placed directly in the opening. I got down on one knee and, just like Brain, hung my ear in the space between the door and the frame; once and for all, I wanted to figure out what all the fuss was about.

  In no time at all my neck began to ache and stiffen. There was half a minute of silence before Clay said something unintelligible and then Lana said, her higher voice cutting through the closed door at the far end of the long hallway, “I’ve had it! What do you think this is?”

  The parrots downstairs, inspired by the commotion, began a round of yapping and squawking at each other, sending the entire zoo into a frenzy of scratching and squeaking and cage-rattling.

  “Touchdown!” shouted Blondie, a yellow-headed parrot who bullied the other parrots and liked to kick sunflower seeds all over the floor. “It’s overtime! Overtime!”

  Brain’s face twisted into a frightening grimace. “One of these days I’m going to murder every one of those parrots.”

  Just then the door opened, the corner of it catching me on the side of the head. I howled out of surprise more than anything and fell backwards, rolling. I looked up to see Sunny standing in the doorway. She wore a striped T-shirt under which, it was clear, she was braless. Her pointed breasts swung only slightly but with a freedom that was illuminating. Her hair was pulled back into a single braid and from my vantage point on the floor I could see the hem of her panties, just an inch or so of pink, silky fabric that covered a mysterious curve of flesh.

  She glared at Brain, who had taken a few steps back. Her eyes were green and luminous. She said, “What do you think you’re doing, you little jerk?”

  “Don’t call me a jerk. And how about putting some pants on.”

  Sunny’s nostrils flared. “I’ll call you a lot worse you little piece of—” She started toward Brain as if to grab him but we heard Clay and Lana’s door open, and we all froze.

  “What is going on down there,” Lana called.

  Sunny stepped back into the hall. “These two are talking, keeping me awake, and look, they’ve got the light on!”

  “All right you boys, come on out,” Clay said.

  Brain and I glanced at each other, waited for a moment, then stepped into the hall at the same time. Down at the far end, Clay and Lana were framed by their doorway, a soft yellow light behind them. Clay was still dressed and Lana had on her terry cloth robe. Sunny had already passed through the beads, which swung and clicked, and was standing in front of her bedroom door.

  “Brain,” Lana said, “explain to me this instant what you two are doing up at this hour.”

  “Edgar wanted me to show him where Nevada is.”

  “Ha!” Sunny said. “You see what I’m saying?”

  “You keep your voice down, young lady,” Clay warned.

  “She hit Edgar with the door!” yelled Brain.

  “You little shithead!” said Sunny.

  Suddenly everyone was hollering at once, including the parrots, and in the midst of it all, Blondie shouted “Touchdown!” a little more jubilantly than usual. Trong had come out of her room at the other end of the hall and smiled her enigmatic smile. As suddenly as the tumult began, it quieted. We all stood outside our respective rooms, looking at each other from a distance like beasts who had just been freed from their cages and didn’t know exactly what to do with themselves.

  So this is what it’s like, Edgar thought. This is what it’s like to be a family.

  FOR YOUNG MEN ONLY

  A BRIGHT SUNDAY morning and we were all packed into a cramped, unventilated room listening to Brother Hughes reciting Book of Mormon stories. Brother Hughes had long, drooping ears that seemed to be in the process of melting off his head and stray hairs that curled out from his temples like guitar-string ends. While he spoke of great, bloody battles waged in the name of God, Edgar sat in the back near the radiator, locked in mortal battle with his own pecker.

  I knew it was a serious transgression to have a hard-on in church—it was one of those sins that needed no explanation. Even worse was the procession of bad thoughts through my head—I couldn’t stop them. In front of me sat Brenda Hollander, whose bra strap lay exposed on her smooth, tanned shoulder and that, by itself, was enough to keep my stubborn erection in a constant struggle to shoulder its way out from between my thighs.

  I shifted in my seat, crossed my legs, yanked at my pants, quietly hummed “How Great Thou Art,” anything to find a little relief. The tie I was wearing—Lana had knotted it for me—felt like a length of baling wire cinched snug around my neck. I was going on fourteen and had only now found myself subjected to the peculiar assaults of puberty; like everything else, puberty had come slow to Edgar. The wet dreams, the odd tenderness in my nipples, the sprouting hair, the numbing haze in my brain when I encountered a member of the opposite sex, the hard-ons ambushing me at all hours of the day. An innocent word like “nudist” could keep me in
a state of rabid horniness for hours. Suddenly I was remembering all those dime-store novels I read in the Dungeon, the phrases that pulsed in my mind like neon signs in a dark window: the wet, palpitating flower of her sex and her warm woman’s cocoon and he plunged his thick heat into her pulsing cleft and a longer one that intrigued me with the sheer dizziness of its mystery: his tongue flicked across her nub and into her very center, bringing her closer to the brink of bliss she felt herself climbing toward, as though she were on a ladder, taking one rung at a time, and each of the rungs was made of roses, lifting her higher and higher into a churning thundercloud of pure ecstasy.

  Even though I had a pretty good notion of what it was all about, it was Brain who, in cold hard language, actually explained the mechanics and ultimate purpose of sex to me. One evening after chores he asked me if I might have picked up any new scuttlebutt about sexual intercourse at school, and I told him that I hadn’t learned much of anything, but that when I lived in Arizona I had seen it taking place not once, but twice.

  “You mean you saw two people…?”

  I nodded. “A man and a lady.”

  He said, “I’ve seen gerbils do it, they do it all the time, but it’s hard to tell what’s going on, exactly. I once saw Brother Harper’s cows, but never humans.”

  “Humans have to take their clothes off,” I told him. “Then they press together, rubbing, and then they make sounds.”

  I made the sounds for Brain. He narrowed his eyes.

  With an exaggerated nonchalance he wandered into the bathroom and came out with one of his Britannicas. He opened it up to a bookmarked page, took a couple of deep breaths and read, “Human reproduction begins with sexual intercourse, in which the male sexual organ, the penis, is inserted into the female vagina. If the reproductive act comes to fruition, sperm cells are passed from the male body into the female, in the process fertilizing the female egg and forming a new organism.”

  Brain looked up at me, blinking. “Does this sound like correct information to you?”