by Brady Udall
After Lana left to throw the wet sheets in the washer, I sat naked and heedless on my damp, stripped-down mattress. Brain stepped to the left and to the right, craned his neck, squinted.
“Hey,” he said. “You have hairs on your tally-whacker.”
He nodded slyly as if he had just obtained a very important clue, as if suddenly everything made sense. “I was wondering,” he said, “when you were going to move out of my room.”
I knew this was coming, I just didn’t expect it this soon. The night before, during Family Home Evening, Lana had made two announcements, the first of which was that Trong, who had gone to visit her cousin in Kansas City, had decided to stay there and would not be returning. Now that her room was free, I could move in any time I wanted. Of course, I didn’t want to move in, I wanted nothing to do with a room where a beautiful baby had strangled to death in his own crib. I knew little Dean’s ghost was in that room and I knew if I moved in he would haunt me to no end.
But I didn’t say anything, made no objection. Family Home Evenings were about harmony and positive feelings, not about conflict, this is something our church leaders had made clear to all of us. Every Monday night we were to come together, sing hymns, discuss the gospel essentials, play a game or two and have some refreshments, always refreshments. We were supposed to find joy and comfort in each other’s company. We were supposed to learn how to love each other.
Lana would round us up and we would sit together in the overstuffed, sweet-smelling family room, facing off warily, Clay and Lana’s grim pioneer ancestors watching us from their places on the wall. Sunny would sigh and bite her nails, Brain would mumble under his breath whenever somebody said “who” when they should have said “whom,” Edgar would sit perfectly still and do his best not to utter a word, Clay would sink into his recliner until he drifted off, and Lana would talk herself frantic, trying to fill the silence, reading out of the Family Home Evening manual, which had on its cover a picture of a toothy, ecstatic family paddling a canoe.
Last night, though, was a little different. First was the Trong announcement and then Lana got really serious, her voice taking on an unusual amount of gravity. Instead of lounging in his La-Z-Boy, Clay sat next to her on the couch. Brain and Sunny gave each other questioning looks. Clay and Lana were almost touching.
“Your father and I have been discussing this over the past couple of months and we decided to bring it up with you tonight. It’s something that affects all of us and something we should decide together. It’s something we’ll all have to agree on, and even then there are no guarantees that we can make it happen. We were wondering what you would think about Edgar becoming a permanent member of our family.”
There was a stretched-out moment in which I heard the grandfather clock tick six times.
“You mean forever?” Brain said.
Lana nodded. “Of course. But that’s only if it’s something Edgar wants and something you and Sunny would accept. It also depends on Edgar’s uncle, who is his legal guardian, and the government will have a say in it, adoption is something that’s complicated and can take a lot of time, so we don’t want to rush into it. I want you all to think about it, pray about it. It’s something we’ll have to decide on together.”
The only word I heard in all of that was “adoption.” I looked at Brain, who glared darkly back at me. Even Sunny, whose face never seemed to deviate from its look of disaffected boredom, wore an expression of mild shock.
Adoption, Edgar said to himself over and over. It was a word that sounded too much like hope.
And that was it for Family Home Evening. There was no lesson from the manual, no opening or closing hymn, not even a prayer. Lana said, “Well, refreshments in the kitchen!” and we sat around the dining room table, eyeing each other nervously and stuffing ourselves with warm peach cobbler topped with ice cream.
Now, only twelve hours later and Brain was already trying to boot me out of his room. I got off my bed and pulled on a pair of cutoffs.
“You’re not going to take a shower?” Brain said. “You just got done peeing all over yourself, like in the old days.”
I had forgotten that during one of our late night conversations, I confessed to Brain that I had once been a bed-wetter. I promised myself right then I would never tell him another secret again.
“I’ll shower in awhile,” I said. “Right now I’ll be going downstairs.”
Brain followed me. He wasn’t about to let me off the hook. Down in the zoo I pretended to feed the fish.
“I’ll help you move out today after school,” Brain said. “You don’t even have to ask me.”
“I’m not moving,” I said.
“Oh yes you are. That’s your room now. That’s where all the guests are supposed to stay. That’s the guest room.”
“I don’t want to stay there.”
“It doesn’t matter what you want. Do you think this is your house now or something? Do you think because you’ve been sleeping in my room you’re in charge?”
“I don’t think that.”
“Good, because you’re not. I tried to be nice and let you take my bed. Then you pee all over it. That’s what charity will get you. Now Trong is gone and you won’t even get out of my room. What’s the point!”
I walked over to where Keith the Rat was spinning furiously on his wheel. I tapped the cage, dropped a couple of feed pellets next to him. He went on without pausing, a manic glint in his beady eyes. I was trying to keep as much distance between me and Brain as possible; if he got too close to me I was afraid I might throttle him. He stayed right at my heels, but I made a point of keeping him at my back. He stepped up next to me and said in a low voice, as if he didn’t want the parrots to hear, “The only reason my parents want to adopt you is because they feel sorry for you. It’s because you’ve got no father and a dead mother and a dead best friend and nowhere else to go.”
I turned and grabbed him by the shoulder, gouging my thumb into the tender flesh just below his clavicle—something Rotten Teeth often did to me when he wanted to cause pain without putting out a whole lot of effort. I wanted to tell Brain that he should be careful too, he might end up dead like my mother and Cecil, death is what seemed to happen to the people who were close to me, but I had my teeth clenched in such a blind, flashing anger that I couldn’t get the words out. Instead, I delivered the message as best I could by driving my thumb into his shoulder like a railroad spike.
He wrenched himself out of my grip and backed slowly up the stairs, his left hand on his right shoulder, his face flushed so red it looked like it had been turned inside out. “You don’t ever touch me again,” he growled. He had not cried out when I’d grabbed him, but now his eyes were filled with tears and he moved stiffly, still in pain. The scar on his forehead where Omar the monkey bit him had turned a dark, pulsing purple.
“I’m sorry,” I called from the bottom of the stairs, but even to my ears it sounded like a hollow apology, made more out of habit than anything else.
Brain shook his head. He went all the way to the top of the stairs. He looked down on me from that great height and made a pronouncement that seemed to carry the difficult weight of truth.
“You will never be my brother,” he said, his voice grating and full of tears. “You’re a stranger. I don’t know who you think you’re kidding.”
EDGAR AND SUNNY
ON A BREEZY, moonless night I waited for Sunny. Earlier I’d listened from the top bunk as she creaked open her bedroom door, passed through the clicking beads of the upper portal, went down the stairs on the zoo side and out the back way. It was a Friday night, and I’d learned over these past few months that Friday night was her preferred night for sneaking out into the mysterious world of sandwash beer parties and cruising Main until the early hours of the morning.
Restless, I lay in bed for an hour or so, and then put on jeans and a sweatshirt over my pajamas. I crept out into the backyard and waited for Sunny to come back. Since the first time I
talked to her months ago we’d had a few late night conversations sitting next to the water tank. In the light of day she ignored me, hardly looked at me, but late at night in the secret confines of the backyard she tolerated me, even seemed to like me a little. Maybe the fact that she was usually drunk had something to do with it.
On one of those nights she had found me next to Doug the vulture’s pen, digging a hole with a gardening shovel. That night, unlike most of the others, I was not in the backyard waiting for her to come home, hoping to talk to her. I was there to bury my crucifix. It had always spooked me a little, but now I couldn’t stand to look at it, couldn’t bear having it anywhere near me. It reminded me too much of Cecil: the bloody, half-naked Jesus, his head lolling to one side, his mouth open as if in the middle of one last agonized groan. Along with everything else, Mormons were against crucifixes and crosses of any sort. We should remember Jesus as He was in life, they said, not in gory, gruesome death.
As if it were that easy.
What kind of father, Edgar typed, could do this to his own son?
It didn’t seem right to throw the crucifix away, so with my doctor’s penlight poking from my mouth, I dug a hole as deep as my arm could reach, hacking through a network of tree roots, and dropped the crucifix inside. While she watched me fill the hole back up with dirt, Sunny launched into a breathless monologue about how she and her friends had almost rolled their car into a culvert on their way home from a party in the cedars south of town. She didn’t bother to ask what I was doing. She had long since accepted that in the early hours of the morning Edgar could often be found in the backyard jacking off or talking to animals or burying crucifixes.
Sunny and I had begun to share secrets. She told me about her late night escapades and the boys she was in love with and what was going on between Lana and Clay. She rambled and flipped her hair around wildly, sometimes seeming to forget that I was even there. I found out Lana was seeing a psychologist for depression and that ever since little Dean’s death she had been trying to convince Clay that they should move, get as far as they could from this small-minded town and this house haunted by Dean’s presence. She’d had several job offers in other states, but Clay refused to go; he could not abandon his son’s grave.
In return, I told Sunny bits and pieces about my life at St. Divine’s and Willie Sherman, steering clear of any story that included my mother, Cecil or Dr. Pinkley. Sunny laughed in horror at the shit-eating episode but squinted suspiciously when I told her I had jumped off a cliff and not suffered any damage to speak of. Because she had shown interest in my head, and the way it had become broken and put back together, I told her about the mailman and about how he had run over me.
“They should have thrown that mailman in jail,” Sunny had said.
I shook my head. “No. It wasn’t his fault. He didn’t know I was under there. He tried to save me afterwards.”
“He should have looked. It’s in the mailman code of conduct or something. Any moron knows that. Mailmen are supposed to look under their jeeps before they drive away. It’s part of their job.”
“They couldn’t throw him in jail because he ran away,” I said. “He thinks he killed me, but he didn’t. He hurt himself because he thought he killed me. I’m going to find him and tell him I’m all right.”
I went into the boxcar and dug out one of the more simple drafts of the letter I planned to send to the mailman. I held my penlight for her while she read it.
Dear Sir,
My name is Edgar Mint. A long time ago when you were a mailman in Arizona you ran over my head. I know you felt bad about it. I wanted to tell you that I’m not dead. I’m not even damaged too much. I get seizures and my skull is lumpy but that’s it. Also, I was in a coma. Now I live with a nice family in Utah. I don’t know where you are, but I hope to find you some day. Don’t worry about me, I am fine, I am not dead. I hope you don’t feel bad any more. Everything is all right.
Your friend, Edgar P. Mint
p.s. I can not sign my name because my brain has one other small problem. I can’t write. Don’t worry about that either, I have a typewriter.
I was hoping Sunny would be impressed with my noble intentions, but she handed the letter back to me, sighed, picked up a pebble and plinked it into the water tank. She said, “How are you going to find him anyway? You don’t even know his name. Come on, Edgar. Be real.”
That crushed me. Be real. Even the slightest indication of disapproval from Sunny could keep me moping for days. But the most offhanded compliment or show of interest could keep me floating in a warm, happy fog for a week. I was an orphan and, like orphans everywhere, wanted little more than to be loved.
Tonight I was prepared to captivate her with a few more of my stories. In my fist I had the rock that had fallen out of my head, and I planned to show it to her, maybe even offer it to her as a token of my feelings. I couldn’t imagine how she could fail to be impressed with it; it had fallen out of my head, after all, and there were still bits of crusted blood on it.
I was also considering making up a few episodes which might make me come off as a little more gallant and dashing; I didn’t think jumping off a cliff in despair or being made to eat shit cast me in a particularly heroic light. But it seemed to be taking forever for her to come home. For more than an hour I walked around in the dark among the pens and corrals, trying to stay warm, scratching the goats between their horns, watching Otis the insomniac armadillo bang around in his cage like a little gray tank, talking to Dorothy the mule who was my favorite conversation partner because she would keep one big round eye on me and nod in resigned agreement at everything I said. Eventually, I lay down on a bale of fiberglass insulation and fell asleep.
When I woke up, Sunny was already there, sitting on the back steps. She had her face in her hands and she was sobbing. The breeze of earlier tonight had turned into a stiff wind which made the trees creak and groan, their bare branches clattering together like the legs of enormous horror-movie insects. I stood next to her for awhile, wringing my hands, trying to think of the best thing to say or do, the wind lifting my hair up off my head and setting it back down again. The insulation had gotten into my pants and under my shirt, making me gyrate in an ecstasy of itching. Sunny’s face was wet with tears, her eyes bleeding mascara.
“What,” she said, “are you just going to stand there forever?” She choked on another sob, gagging and coughing until strings of mucus-thickened saliva stretched out of her mouth onto her shoes.
I sat down next to her and said, “Are you all right?”
“Ha!” she shouted into the wind and cried some more. I put my hand on her puffy nylon jacket, so lightly that she didn’t notice me touching her. She cried for a long time. Each time I thought she was finished, she started again. My arm was beginning to ache and my butt itched unmercifully. When it seemed like she was finally settling down I said, “I have this rock here—”
“You know Mark Jacobsen?” Sunny said suddenly, looking up at me. I nodded. Mark Jacobsen was one of the boys she liked, maybe the boy. I had seen him a few times at school. He was tanned and loose-limbed and wore a puka shell necklace. He walked the halls with a slouched confidence, pointing slyly at everyone he knew. I hated him.
“Mark Jacobsen is such a bastard,” Sunny said, swiping her mouth with the back of her hand. She started crying again, but not with as much conviction as before. In gradual, infinitesimal progressions I felt myself sliding closer to her until our thighs touched. I held my breath and then let it out as slowly as I could, my muscles rigid and slightly trembling. Sunny’s hair kept blowing into my face, the ends whipping my eyes and tickling my ears.
“I’ll bet you’ve never kissed anybody, have you,” she said.
“Well,” I breathed. “No.”
For some reason, this made her laugh. “Would you like to?” she said.
“Like to what?”
She gave me a slap on the shoulder. “To kiss someone, aren’t you listening?”
/>
“Kiss who?”
“Who do you think? Do you see anyone else around here?”
My blood ran like water in my veins. “I don’t know,” I said. “I could probably think about it.”
She laughed again, and as she did she leaned into me and I felt her slick face touching mine and I turned just enough that our mouths were lined up and she kissed me, a soft wet movement of flesh that sent a tingling all the way to my toes. Her fingertips moved like raindrops over the peaks and valleys and plains of my puzzled-together head. The wind lifted her hair up on each side of our faces, leaving us, for a moment, in a small contained space, the only sound the moist friction of our lips.
She pulled away and scooted a few inches away from me on the steps. I felt as if I had no strength in me at all and I wanted to let myself fall into her, like an exhausted man falling into a feather bed, but somehow I managed to keep myself upright. For awhile, neither of us said anything. We looked out into the blue darkness and listened to the wind.
Sunny made a funny, hiccuping laugh and stood up. Before she went inside she said, “Well, at least I kissed somebody tonight.”
A DRIVE IN THE SNOW
I’ll be waiting for you tonight at 12:00 at the stop sign at the bottom of the hill. I have somebody special I want you to meet! Don’t be late!
Love, Barry
I found the note before classes started, resting on top of my book in my locker at school. I looked around, seized suddenly by the feeling that I was being watched, the blood boiling in my ears. But it was just the same students cruising the halls, shouting at each other and guffawing and bumping shoulders, not giving me a thought.
The last time I’d seen Dr. Pinkley was the day after Thanksgiving; I was with Lana and Brain at Shearer’s department store and I looked out the window and there he was at the gas station across the street, talking on the pay phone. It was the first time I’d seen him since he showed up at the house dressed as a missionary. He was wearing his mirrored sunglasses and gray overcoat and he began shouting into the phone with such a ferocity that it looked like he was going to take a bite out of the receiver. I tried to read his lips but his mouth was moving too fast. The only words I could make out were “ripoff” and “Mexico.” He then jumped into his car, a blue Torino, and disappeared going down Hamilton Street.
