by Brady Udall
He switched off the light and I could see he was blinking as he crept up to the bunk beds, trying to get his eyes to adjust to the darkness. He climbed the first two rungs of the ladder, still making that little laugh of his. Just as he held the glass out over me, I grabbed his wrist, which caused him to jerk, sloshing some of the water in the glass right back into his face. He fell off the ladder, went down hard on the carpet and sat up sputtering and rubbing his eyes like a toddler in a bathtub.
“You!” I said.
“What?”
“You did it!”
“What? Edgar, it wasn’t…” Water dripped from his eyelashes and nose. He clambered to his feet and backed up toward the bathroom until all I could see clearly were the whites of his eyes. “Are you going to hurt me?”
I was seriously considering it. Over the past few months he had been telling everyone who would listen that Edgar was a bed-wetter. The last time it had happened he stood next to me while Lana stripped off the bedding and said with a resigned sigh, “I hate to say it but it looks like it’s about time for rubber sheets!” He had even used my Hermes Jubilee to write a letter to Dr. Pete, a retired physician who had his own newspaper column and dispensed medical advice to people who wrote in with their questions. In his letter, Brain told Dr. Pete that an “acquaintance of the family” was having trouble holding his bladder during the night. Dr. Pete had responded by saying that bed-wetting was normally the result of some sort of psychological upset, and if it continued after the age of six or seven should be treated by a trained therapist. Brain had cut the article out of the paper and pinned it to the bulletin board in the kitchen, where it stayed for most of the day before Lana saw it and took it down.
“It was you,” I said. “This whole time.”
In the darkness, I thought I saw Brain smile. “You don’t belong here,” he said. “I don’t know why you can’t figure it out. And I don’t know how you could go this long without figuring out that your pee didn’t smell like pee. Give me a break.”
Brain had been doing everything he could think of to make life difficult for me. He had pretty much stopped talking to me, had reduced my typing time to an hour and a half a night, had made me confine all of my belongings to a six-by-six space around my steamer trunk, which he had marked off with masking tape. At first I thought he just wanted me out of his room, but it didn’t take long for me to see that he wanted me out of the house altogether.
When I had told Lana and Clay that I didn’t want to move to Dean’s room, they seemed perplexed, maybe even a little miffed. They told me I could stay where I wanted, but every once in awhile they would politely inquire if I hadn’t changed my mind. What a shame to let a nice room like that go to waste, they said, where I could type at my leisure and have all the elbow room I needed. I came to understand that for the Madsens, little Dean’s room was more than a room: it was a space that needed to be filled.
So I gave in. I didn’t want to seem ungrateful, I wanted only to please. Two days after I caught Brain trying to pour a glass of water on my crotch, Clay helped me move my trunk, my typewriter, my ever-growing wardrobe and collection of accessories. The room had two windows and wallpaper with dancing bears and ducks wearing galoshes. Even though a succession of exotic strangers had lived in it over the past three years, the room seemed to breathe the sweet, powdery smell of baby.
For the first time in my life I had a room all to myself. I was terrified. I lay awake, listening to the unsettled rasp of my own breathing, expecting at any moment to hear the strange echo of a baby’s laughter or the desperate snuffling sound of a little boy suffocating to death in his own blanket. I would stare at the ducks on the wallpaper, who often seemed to shift around in their galoshes ever so slightly, and I would wonder if my bed was situated in the same part of the room as Dean’s crib, if he had died right here, in the very spot where I now lay. The buzzing silence would get to be too much and I would have to get out of bed to creep around the house, checking on the animals, eating whatever was available in the refrigerator, trying to put my mind on other things.
And I always listened for Sunny. Over the winter she went out infrequently and it was too cold for me to wait in the back for her, so since that windy night we kissed on the back steps we had hardly talked. It was one of the reasons I had wanted to stay in Brain’s room: to be close to Sunny. I liked to imagine her sleeping on the other side of the wall, her smooth skin bathed in moonlight, her small hands clasped on top of the pink flowers of her comforter. Now I felt like an outcast, all the way down at the end of the hall. The weather was getting warmer and I might not be able to hear her sneaking out.
So on those sleepless nights I would often get up and look out into the hall, which was always kept lit, on the off chance that I might catch her tiptoeing down the stairs. One night I did see Clay and Lana’s bedroom door open and Clay step out. I jumped back in bed, pulled the covers up to my chin and listened to his creaking footsteps coming closer, past Sunny’s room, through the beads and past Brain’s room and then he was in my doorway, skinny as a nail in nothing but his temple garments, the light behind him eroding the thin cutout of his frame into almost nothing. I watched him through the blur of my eyelashes. He stood there for a minute or so, taking deep, shuddering breaths through his nose, and then he was gone.
Every three or four nights I would hear the beads of the upstairs portal swing and click and the same creaking as he padded down that long hallway. And then one night the arguing started, Clay and Lana’s voices traveling like surging electrical currents through the walls. Even down here, all the way at the other end, I could pick out an occasional word. So? I heard Lana say, her voice high and sharp. Is that all? I pictured Sunny in her bed, straining to hear, and Brain in his, listening with his entire body, his eyes wide, and even Keith the Rat and the guinea pigs and the dozens of nameless gerbils and all the parrots, suddenly awake, the entire house poised around the disturbance at its center.
After twenty minutes the shouting was over and it was quiet again. The grandfather clock chimed and one of the parrots hummed part of a TV commercial in its sleep. I knew he would come and I waited. When he filled up my doorway with his shadow it felt as if the room became bigger, expanding all around me. He stayed much longer this time, sucking air through his nose, holding, blowing it out through his mouth. Then he stepped into the room, quietly, and stood over me. I closed my eyes all the way and lay rigid under my blanket, light flickering under my eyelids. I felt the pressure in the mattress when he knelt, placing both hands on the bed for support, and lowered his face to kiss me on the side of the forehead, a gentle father’s kiss. With his fingers he touched my hair and then he got up, his knees popping, and stumbled out into the light to make the long walk back.
THE GOOD SAMARITAN
“I’VE GOT SOMETHING very important to show you!” Alan Lovejoy shouted over the tearing wind and the brup-brup-brup-brup of his dirt bike. “You won’t believe this, you’re going to flip out!”
Alan Lovejoy and I had become friends over a Sunday school lesson. Sister Dill, who was the new Sunday school teacher for the fourteen-to-fifteen-year-olds, had presented a lesson on the importance of being kind to the lowly, the powerless, the unpopular, the weak, the abused. She inflicted the parable of the Good Samaritan on us once again (our teachers had a way of sneaking it into just about every lesson) and showed us a picture of Jesus with His arms around three of the kind of undesirables she was talking about: a cowled leper, a chubby prostitute with tears running down her cheeks, and a disheveled publican, who peered over his shoulder as if he was worried about getting beaned with a rock. Sister Dill challenged us all, in the upcoming week, to become more Christ-like, to seek out the downtrodden and lowly, and to offer them our friendship and love. Three seconds hadn’t passed after the closing prayer before Alan Lovejoy was at my side.
“Hey Edgar, I was wondering if you’d like to go take a ride on my new dirt bike some time.” He whacked me on the back like we
were old pals. “I’ve got my permit and now I can drive on-road.” For a moment Alan and I eyed each other. This was the first time he had ever said a word to me. We both knew what was going on, but I decided I’d play along as long as I got a ride on a dirt bike out of it.
“Okay,” I said. “You can come pick me up after school. Wednesday would be fine.”
Alan was tall and handsome in a sort of prissy way, with his pointed nose and thin, pale neck and blue eyes as shiny as new paint. Alan was the kind of kid who was popular and well liked and managed not to have any real friends—he was just too righteous. He organized service projects, had been the president of both the deacons and teachers quorums, became an Eagle Scout before he turned fourteen. He was one of those kids who made a point of praying over his food in the lunchroom. When he was asked to talk in sacrament meeting—which seemed to be every other month or so—he did not read from prepared notes but quoted scriptures from memory and told Book of Mormon stories in a way that made even the children in the congregation sit up and listen. When he bore his testimony, it was like poetry, each word singular and carefully placed, his hushed voice an instrument of beauty and conviction.
The only thing that Alan Lovejoy and I had in common was that we were both converts. Alan’s family, Ohio Catholics who had never met a Mormon until coming to Utah, had moved to Richland when Alan was eleven. Within a year, Alan had been converted and baptized, but his parents and little sister were still holding out. In Richland, as in pretty much all of Utah, if you were not a Mormon you were a “nonmember,” and if you were a “nonmember” you had to be constantly on the ready for the barrage of pamphlets, missionary visits and invitations to sacrament meetings, firesides, ward parties, dances and potluck dinners. A few years ago at Christmastime, in a foolhardy show of defiance, Alan’s father had erected not one but three fifteen-foot-high crosses on his front lawn and strung them with Christmas lights. For two days a group of neighbors and members of the ward, including Alan himself, kept a vigil in front of the Lovejoy home, softly humming hymns and Christmas carols until Mr. Lovejoy came out in his Notre Dame T-shirt and yelled “Good Lord, enough already!” and took the crosses down.
For several weeks Alan had come by every Wednesday to pick me up on his motorcycle. Sometimes we would go out on the trails south of town, sometimes back to Alan’s house, where we would sit in his basement and play foosball or throw darts and drink the lemonade his mother made. Alan believed this kind of thing was bringing joy and fulfillment to my pitiful existence. Often he would have me quiz him on his scriptures; he had been the seminary scripture-chase champion three years running and was not about to relinquish the title. But today it was a Friday, and Alan had shown up unannounced in front of the house, revving his engine until I came out onto the porch.
Now I held on tight as he leaned expertly into the curves of an old railroad access road. I shouted, “Where are we going!”
“You’ll see!” he shouted back. “It’s right up here.”
He pulled over and parked the bike behind a thicket of wild oak. Off to our left was a gravel pit dug into the side of a small butte. It was the time of year when spring was giving way to summer and the afternoon light was so flat and bright it was like brass against your teeth. Far off to the west a storm was coming over the horizon, turning the air the color of a bruise. Alan said, “We have to walk in the rest of the way. And try to be quiet.”
I followed him up the road a ways before he cut out through some cedar trees and crept down a gradual slope that descended toward a small, swift-running creek choked in places with young cattails and willows. He positioned himself behind a low, stickery bush and peered down at something by the creek. “They’re here,” he said. “I knew it.”
I squatted next to him and looked through an open space in the bush. What I saw gave me an instant, muscle-locking chill, like ice water at the roots of my hair. Down next to the creek, about seventy-five yards away, Lana and Dr. Pinkley sat together on the hood of Lana’s Country Squire station wagon. I closed my eyes for a moment, felt my innards heaping themselves up behind my ribs. When I opened my eyes they were still there. Their backs were to us and they were sitting about six inches apart. The sun made eerie, rippling reflections between them on the hood of the car.
I studied them, trying with all my might to turn them into two strangers I had never before laid eyes on.
“You know who that is?” Alan whispered.
“Who?” I said, my voice nothing more than a hollow scratch.
“That’s Sister Madsen, can you see? I don’t know who the guy is, but I saw them together at the Swavely meetings. My mother caters those things, you know, and I help with the layout and cleanup. I noticed this guy getting really friendly with Sister Madsen, sitting next to her and getting her punch and all that. Then one day they sat outside by his car and drove away together. I knew something was funny so I followed them. This is the third time I’ve seen them out here.”
Alan’s blue eyes smoldered with a pure, virtuous heat. “This has really been eating at me, Edgar, I don’t know what’s the appropriate thing to do here. I’ve prayed about it but haven’t received a clear answer. I felt prompted to bring you out so you could help me make the right decision. This isn’t right, it just isn’t. Sister Madsen is a married woman, and this guy, I don’t think he’s even a member. He smokes, and look at that hair.”
“Have you told anybody?” I said.
“I thought about telling Bishop Newhauser, but I wanted to bring you out here first. Do you know who that guy is?”
I shook my head, tried to make out their voices, which seemed to dissolve instantly into the sun-scalded air. Slowly, Barry reached behind Lana and moved his hand up her back. She went stiff for a moment, then seemed, ever so slightly, to move toward him.
“Oh no,” Alan said.
Barry Pinkley made circles with his fingers on the back of Lana’s pink blouse, running his hand up into her hair. The first time they kissed I hardly saw it was so quick, then they kissed again, which they held for a few seconds.
“Ah no, no way,” Alan said, his voice taking on a tone of lordly pain. “This is all new. They’ve never done this before.”
Bone by muscle by joint, I could feel myself slowly coming apart. Watching Lana and Barry touch each other in ways I had never seen Lana and Clay come close to, I felt it, that cold, creeping thing—the ruin that I brought with me wherever I went, that had been trailing me my entire life, like a shadow or an infection or a curse, gathering itself together and catching up with me once again. I had believed that I could outrun it, that I could escape into another, better world. I had even made myself believe that God, in His goodness and mercy, had cleansed me of it in the waters of baptism, that I had become a new and improved Edgar, transformed and glorified by the spirit. But then last summer I had walked into the Madsens’ living room to discover Barry, more real than any ghost, sitting on the couch and grinning like a fallen angel, and I knew I had been fooling myself. Then in that cold morgue I had lifted up a sheet to find the dead body of my friend Cecil, just one more person hapless enough to fall under the shadow of Edgar’s life, and I had come to understand that nothing had really changed, that I would never be good or strong enough to escape what, in the end, was part of me, as much a part of me as my heart and guts and lungs.
In an effort to keep my balance I grabbed at the bush we were hiding behind and the stickers speared into my palms, making them bleed. Over the horizon lightning branched out of the sky like a crack on a windshield. Lana and Barry did not sit together much longer. Lana stood, put her face in her hands, turning toward us, and shook her head in what looked like disbelief. Before she got in her car and drove away, she smiled at Barry, and kissed him quickly once more on the mouth.
Barry watched her go, then immediately went to his car, which was partially hidden behind an embankment covered with long grass. It was a blue El Camino with a yellow stripe down the side, the same car Barry had been
driving the last time I saw him, about six weeks before.
On that day he had called me at home during breakfast, presenting himself to Clay as Elder Rivers, and told me he was going to pick me up after school. He had asked me to bring the mitt and ball he had given me; he wanted to take me to the park to play a little catch. I spent an hour digging around the garage until I found an old softball mitt of Clay’s and a few scuffed, gray baseballs. Barry didn’t notice that I didn’t have the mitt or ball he’d given me—he brought a big, floppy glove of his own and threw the baseball like a person who was left-handed but didn’t know it. He looked like a wreck: his face wrung out and pasty, his checkered shirt and denim pants as wrinkled as any two items of clothing could ever hope to be. I asked him if he had found my mailman yet.
“I don’t know what it is with you and the mailman,” he said. “But I’ve got a guy looking into it, says he’s got some leads.” Every time he threw the ball his sunglasses slid all the way down to the tip of his nose and nearly fell off. “Those people you’re with say anything more about that adoption?”
I shrugged, tried my best to act like I didn’t care. “They’re working on it, I guess. People have come over to the house a few times with forms and papers. They said they’ve hit some roadblocks. Clay drove down to Phoenix last week to talk to the government.”
I slung the ball with everything I had. Barry stuck out his glove and the ball sailed by and hit him in the sternum with a sharp crack.
“Good one,” he coughed. “Right on the money.”
A pronounced jitteriness came over him: he bounced on his toes like a boxer, slapped his hand into the glove and called “Hey-batta hey-batta hey-batta-batta-batta” even though nobody was doing any batting. It was a cool windy day, but he was already sweating through his shirt and he dropped every ball I tossed to him. Finally, I rain-bowed the ball over his head, just to make him go after it, and he ran it down like his life was at stake, pumping his knees, his feet pounding hard on the turf, his oily hair flapping forward into his eyes. When he came back he was wheezing and pressing the palm of his hand into the center of his chest, like he was trying to kick-start his own heart. “One second,” he gasped, holding up a finger. “I’ll be right back.”
