The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint

by Brady Udall

  We went inside, where a short, barrel-shaped woman in a uniform waited behind a counter. Clay, holding the cardboard box that contained Cecil’s dinner, told her that we had come for visiting hours.

  “Name?” she said.

  “Cecil Jimenez,” I said. I had my bag of Dum Dums. I thought about offering the lady one of them. She wore false eyelashes and maroon lipstick and something about the tired lines of her face reminded me of the nurses at St. Divine’s.

  She told us to wait, picked up the phone and talked into it with her hand cupped over her mouth. She put the phone down, sighed, fidgeted, looked through some papers.

  “Look,” she said. “I can’t seem to locate my boss, you’ll need to talk to him about this.”

  “We made an appointment,” Clay said. “My wife called last week. This is visiting day, isn’t it? We just drove three hours.”

  The woman looked around, as if for somebody who might help her, but the office was empty except for us.

  “What’s your relation?” she said.

  Clay said, “My relation?”

  “To the inmate.”

  “We’re his friends, ma’am, and we’re here to visit with him. I don’t see what the problem is.”

  The woman picked up the phone again, slammed it back down, mumbled something under her breath. “All right,” she said. “Sir, if you’d step over here with me I’d like to have a word with you.”

  Clay walked around behind the counter and the woman met him next to the far wall under a poster that read, in orange fiery letters, POT is NOT so HOT. She whispered, her voice no more than a rustle, but in that quiet office I heard every word: “I’m sorry to tell you this, sir, but you can’t visit the inmate because he’s, ah, deceived.”

  “Deceived,” Clay said, as if he was trying to get his tongue around a word he had never heard before.

  “Oh shoot,” the woman said, stomping her feet. “I meant deceased. This makes me nervous. Deceased.”

  “Deceased,” Clay said.

  The woman was breathing fast. “As of Thursday morning. That’s when they found him. Looks like he tried to escape through the heating system and fell down one of the old incinerator shafts from the original building. They should have grated those things off a long time ago but nobody got around to it. It’s been in the paper. Family’s been notified but nobody’s come to claim the body. There might be lawsuits in the offing, you see. That’s where everybody is right now, at a meeting with the Board of Corrections.”

  Clay put the box of food on the counter and his big hands fell to his sides, dangling as if from loose ropes. Clay and the woman stood very close to each other, almost touching. I could tell neither of them wanted to look at me. He backed away from her, turned quickly and told me we needed to go, but I already had my arm locked around the push-handle of the glass door.

  “No visits today,” Clay said, his face pale. “We’ll talk about it in the truck.”

  “I want to see him,” I said.

  Clay tried to put his hand on my shoulder but I reared back. I kept one arm around the door handle. I wasn’t going anywhere.

  “You think he heard us?” said the woman.

  “I’m sorry, but we can’t see him today,” Clay said. “There was an accident.”

  “He heard us, oh Jesus,” the woman said. She sounded like she was going to cry. “Just take a look at him. No doubt about it.”

  Clay knelt down at my side. He put his arm around my waist and pulled me close until I could feel his whiskers on my cheek. His breath smelled like Big Red gum and his voice was so hoarse and low that it crackled in my ear. “I’m sorry, Edgar. He’s—there’s nothing we can do.”

  “I want to see him,” I said. I was not going to leave this place without seeing him, without giving him these Dum Dums I had stolen for him.

  Clay asked the woman where Cecil was and she wrote the directions for the hospital on a blue slip of paper. We rode in the truck for a few minutes and stopped in front of a brick building almost identical to the one we had just left. A warm mist fell in slow waves, making no noise at all. We walked down long white hallways, our wet shoes squeaking on the tile floor, and passed into a room where a young, chocolate-skinned man sat at a desk eating beef jerky. He wore a light blue hospital uniform and a name tag that said NARCISCO.

  “You the funeral home?” he said to Clay. “They’s supposed to send somebody this morning.”

  “We’re here to see Cecil Jimenez,” Clay said. “The people from the detention center told us this is where he is.”

  “The boy in the papers? He’s here. You the family?”

  “We’re friends.”

  Narcisco shook his head. His cheeks were spongy with acne scars and his slicked hair shone in the electric light like a puddle of the blackest oil. “If you ain’t the family or the funeral people then I ain’t got no business with you. You want, I can call my supervisor down here but she’ll tell you the same thing.”

  “This boy was his best friend,” Clay said. “He just wants to see him one last time.”

  Narcisco shrugged, went back to gnawing on his jerky. He said, “Can’t do nothing for you.”

  Clay took out his wallet and pulled out all the bills inside, dropped them on the desk. Narcisco stared at the money for a long time, not blinking or moving. “Carajo,” he said. “I’ll give you one minute. If I pound on the door, that means you get your asses out of there. I don’t feel like getting fired today.”

  He got up and pulled the lever on a wide stainless steel door. “They was going to do an autopsy on him, then decided not to. Autopsies ain’t free, you know.”

  Narcisco pulled the door open and waved us in. “He’s the one on the left, I think, and don’t touch.”

  Clay went in first and I followed. The room was small and cold and there were only two gurneys there, shoved against opposite walls, both covered with the same light blue cloth of Narcisco’s uniform. The door clicked shut behind us. Clay went to the gurney on the left, lifted the cloth, his hand shaking, and let it back down. “Ah, damn,” he said. I stared at the shiny brass drain in the middle of the floor that seemed to gather all the light in the room.

  “Edgar, I don’t know…” Clay said. His eyes were red and wet and his jaw hung slack. I watched my hand reach out to pull away the cloth. Clay made no move to stop me.

  Cecil lay on his back, his face tilted toward us. His skin was yellow-white and his eyes, both ringed with dark purpling bruises, were closed. His left hand, crusted black with blood, hung slightly off the edge of the gurney, and his hair, always so carefully combed down over his forehead, was matted and pressed in odd, swirling configurations against his scalp like a wheat field after a hailstorm. From inside the darkness of his slightly opened mouth I could see the tooth he had chipped on a toilet bowl struggling with Nelson and his tribe.

  I held my shirt in my fists and tried without luck to tear it in half. Since the moment we had left the office, I had not stopped praying, mumbling please please please, begging God to wipe away everything the woman had told Clay. In the cab of the truck and walking down the long corridors of that hospital, I made bargains, promising God that I would never sin again if He would make it all a mistake, a lie, a misunderstanding. I longed for my typewriter, wanting to put my promises down in ink, wanting to make them last. The words I whispered into my hands disappeared the moment they came out of my mouth, but I said them anyway, and with all the faith I had: Please, I will do anything, I will give anything, it will be okay, please.

  But here he was, death written all over him in stark light and shadow. Against every reasonable explanation, here was this thing that had once been my friend Cecil, stiff and pale and empty, something to be shoved against a wall and draped with a cloth. I tried to cry or laugh or yell, to make some noise of protest, but every bone and muscle in me was locked tight and I stood there trembling with fury, the paper bag of Dum Dums rattling in my hand.

  In an instant the tiny flames of f
aith and hope I had borne into that room flared into oblivion, leaving a single black desire, hard and cold as a cinder at the center of my chest: I wanted to kill the God who had done this to Cecil, who had done this to me. He might have been able to forgive me for stealing, for all my other sins, but I knew I would never forgive Him for this. Right then, if only it were possible, I would have taken Art’s knife from my sock and with all the strength of my child’s body, driven it into His heart. Forget about forgiveness and repentance, I would have murdered God the Father, I would have slashed and stabbed and gutted Him for what had been done to Cecil and to Art’s wife and daughters, to my mother, to little Dean, to Ismore, to Sterling, to all the dead people in the world and to all the people who had to go on with their lives, remembering.

  The heavy door opened behind us and Narcisco told us to get a move on, it was time. He drummed a pen on the tiled wall, the sound of it echoing wildly in that small space, and then he walked over to me and tugged on my shirt sleeve. “Get your asses on out of here, come on.”

  Clay turned and gave Narcisco a sudden, fierce shove, sent him reeling backwards into the thick steel door, which boomed and shook on its hinges.

  “You stay away,” Clay whispered, his voice cracking like ice.

  Narcisco picked himself up, checked to see that his uniform was still situated properly. “You, pendejo, you’re lucky I don’t beat you all to shit right now, fucking Ichabod Crane, fucking Abraham fucking Lincoln.”

  Clay asked me if I was ready to go. I nodded and he pulled the cloth back over Cecil’s face and that was all.

  We left in a hurry, Narcisco yelling down the hall that he was going to call the cops if we didn’t get the hell on out. Outside, we sat together in the cab of the pickup for a long time, staring out the windshield at a sky that was beginning to clear, the low sun pouring itself under the edge of a vault of dark clouds.

  Clay mumbled, shook his head. He was pale behind his dark beard and he kept his eyes closed. “It’s not…” he said, his voice a falling whisper. His hands, covered with hairs glowing bronze in the slanting light, gripped the steering wheel and let go again. “It’s not fair.”

  Eventually we drove, the sun at our backs, the desert full of elongated shadows, all pointing us in the same direction. On one side was a range of low mountains, mute in the distance and on the other sandstone buttes that blazed in the dusk like red coals. I opened up the bag I still held and took out a Dum Dum. It was pineapple flavored and instead of sucking on it, as Cecil used to do with such care and love, I crushed it between my molars, the violent crack it made loud and satisfying. The highway hummed, the world grew dark around us and one by one I ate them all, gnashed them into a thick, crunching syrup—cherry, root beer, watermelon, mystery flavor, cream soda, lemon-lime, all mixed together—their sticks littering the floor under my feet like tiny bones, their gritty sweetness a poison on my tongue.

  THE FINAL RESURRECTION

  FOR THE REST of that summer I lived in a daze, a sense of desolation trailing me like a swarm of flies. All my desires had dried up, my pastimes gone sour; I no longer had any interest in eating or watching television or jacking off—I felt hollow and ungainly, like a jerry-rigged mannequin constructed of wood and scrap metal and rope. During those long empty summer days that replaced each other without variation, I would sleep most of the morning, making my rounds with the animals, feeding and watering them, cleaning out the pens and cages, and then spend a good part of the afternoon typing, which Brain was wise enough never to bother me about.

  Mostly I typed jibberish, descending into a kind of trance where there was nothing but the clicking of the keys and the hammers striking paper, the rhythm getting the best of me, speeding into a heedless, breakneck pace that often ended with the hammers jamming together like too many fingers reaching for the last piece of pie. Sometimes the rhythm would slow—I can’t say I had much control over any of this—stretching out until each hammer stroke was the ticking of a clock or the beating of a worn-out heart. I could type for two or three hours at a time, my fingers pounding out words and phrases without sense or meaning except to express the blackness inside me.

  One day Lana found me typing in my room and asked me to stop for awhile so she could talk to me. It was late afternoon and strips of light from the window shade fell across her face like the bars of a cage. She looked at the stacks of sheets I had typed, each nearly blacked out with a storm of letters, and asked me to sit next to her on Brain’s bed. In kind, whispered words she explained the concept of resurrection to me, how at the time of Christ’s Second Coming all mankind would be resurrected, we would all rise up out of our graves, our bodies youthful and without blemish, never to die again. She held her hand on my arm and her eyes grew damp and soft as she talked. I knew that she was thinking of little Dean and looking forward to the day when she would be able to pick him up and hug him close again. But in my state I found no comfort in anything she told me. I imagined the entire population of the world, everyone who had ever lived, clawing themselves out of the ground all at once, disoriented and groggy after the long sleep, clods of dirt falling from their hair and clothes, dust rising off them like smoke, and the teeming confusion of millions of people trying to find their lost loved ones at the same time. Those lucky enough to die or be buried together would have it easy—but what about the rest of us? How would we ever find each other? For weeks I had dreams of wandering dirty and lost through milling crowds, searching the blighted earth for my mother, for Cecil, calling out their names until I was hoarse. In the worst of the nightmares these millions of frustrated, worn-out people, grimy and abject as refugees, would become agitated, tripping over each other, pushing through the tangle of limbs and faces, shouting for their fathers and mothers and children and grandparents, getting so fed up and angry that somebody would end up bumping somebody else and a fight would start, punches thrown and faces scratched and the next thing you know there would be a worldwide brawl, millions of dirty, resurrected people gone berserk, grappling and yelling and biting, throwing rocks and yanking at each other’s rotten clothes, and Jesus looking down sadly from His golden throne wondering how it had ever come to this.

  During those days that yawned into weeks I tried very hard to convince myself that God and Jesus and the resurrection were just a bunch of lies told by some well-meaning anglos, but it was no use. God was out there. He had touched me and I had felt His presence, which was more than I could say about my own father.

  I believed in Him in the same simple and dogged way Grandma Paul had believed in Him. But because I believed He existed did not mean that I had to trust Him, or even like Him. Just as much as I knew He lived, I also knew that He wasn’t the kind, benevolent guy everyone had made him out to be, and I vowed never to be caught begging anything from Him again. From all that I had witnessed and been a part of in my short life, I could come to only one of two conclusions: either God was a crazed lunatic or He was just plain mean.

  The only comfort I could find during that time was in my dreams and fantasies about the mailman. I didn’t have any idea where he was, but every day I drafted a different letter to him, telling him that I was alive and well. These letters, like my letters to Cecil, were often full of lies: I told him that I was living the carefree life of a child who had everything he needed. I told him that I was happy.

  I had begun to feel some kind of kinship with this man I didn’t know, a connection: I understood what it meant to be responsible, by accident or fate, for the death of another human being. More than anything, I became obsessed with the idea that I could relieve him of that burden—I could track him down and knock on his door and say, Look! It’s me! I’m alive! How thrilled he would be, this child he had killed years ago suddenly appearing at his door, in his own way resurrected, grown and whole and healthy, once dead but now alive and full of good news, nothing less than a miracle. I fantasized about such a moment endlessly, shamelessly; it was the only way I could relieve myself of the steady hur
t, the guilt that burned in my throat like bile. I imagined him with his white skin, his orange hair and blue uniform, the pants of which he had wrapped around my head to stop the bleeding that summer day long ago. He would invite me into his house and I would tell him my miraculous story. He would listen in awe and he would hug me, weeping, Thank you, Edgar, thank you, I am so happy, transformed in an instant from a man twisted inside out with guilt and grief to someone struck with the realization that our worst mistakes can be retrieved, that death can be traded in for life, that what has been destroyed can be made whole again.

  STRANGER

  ONE BRIGHT SEPTEMBER morning I came out of a deep, troubled sleep to find my sheets soaked: that familiar clinging chill. I jumped up, threw the blanket off and pulled at the sheets, hand over hand, like an islander hauling in a net full of fish. How could I have ever wet them this badly? It was as if Edgar’s bed had been run through a car wash.

  Brain rolled out of the bottom bunk, his hair in a tangled commotion, and watched me strip off my wet pajamas, the elastic waistband snapping against my legs. “What happened?” he said.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Don’t worry about it, go back to sleep.”

  Brain walked out of the room and I yelled after him to come back. He returned with Lana, who immediately began trying to pull the sheets away from me, saying it was okay, nothing to worry about, Edgar, it happens to the best of us. Soon we were engaged in a tug-of-war, Lana full of soft, soothing words while she heaved and yanked, Edgar apologizing with everything he had, digging his heels into the mattress and twisting the ends of the sheets around his forearms. It was a struggle, but eventually Lana was able to break my grip and wrest the sheets away, which she dropped on the floor next to my wet pajamas. “One more thing and it will be all over,” she said, and with the no-nonsense attitude of a nurse went to work peeling my underwear down to my ankles. Now I didn’t complain or resist; I had reached the dregs of humiliation and could go no lower.