by Brady Udall
He went to the car and got inside. I could only see his head, which rested against the back of the seat. Behind the silver sunglasses that blanked out his eyes his face was completely slack. When he came back, he walked with a loose-jointed shuffle, a big smile on his face. A light, weird and cold as a glacier, came off his skin. “I forgot my glove,” he said, looking all around. “And the ball too!” It didn’t seem to matter to him. We sat down on a picnic table and he smoked a cigarette without saying anything. He smelled like sweat and chemicals. I glanced around to make sure no one I knew was watching us. The park was deserted except for an old guy trying to get a kite up into the air. I asked Barry where Jeffrey was.
“Disappeared,” Barry said, waving his cigarette in a circle. “That night in the snow is the last I saw of him. He was getting to be a drag anyway. I have the feeling he’ll show up again when he needs something. You can do all the favors in the world for somebody, you can offer them friendship and loyalty, and they’ll abandon you every time when things get rough.”
He took off his sunglasses and looked at me under heavy lids. His eyes were bloodshot and watery and without focus.
“Are you sick?” I said.
He jammed the sunglasses back against his face. “Look, you don’t worry about me. You worry about yourself. You worry about these Mormons turning your brain into egg salad.”
I scanned the table. The only interesting bit of graffiti was a message scrawled in magic marker: Jim Jr. Has Large Balls.
For a time Barry kept perfectly still. I tried to see past his mirrored sunglasses but was unable to tell what his eyes were doing. Slowly, like a sinking ship easing into the great deep, he leaned forward, slumping until his head rested on his folded arms. Within seconds he was lightly snoring. He slept like that for nearly half an hour. I finally had to shake him awake so I could make it home in time for dinner.
Now, Alan and I watched as Barry rummaged around in the El Camino and came out with his black doctor’s bag. He faced us and I could see that he was in much better shape than the last time I’d seen him; he was neatly shaved, with his shaggy hair parted on the side and combed back over his ears. He put on his sunglasses and rolled up the left sleeve of his shirt. He took a few things out of his bag, looked them over closely.
“Oh no,” Alan said.
“What?” I said. I was having a hard time getting a good view through all the leaves, and had to pull back a branch to get a better line of sight. He’d already wrapped a piece of surgical tubing around his biceps and was pushing the needle of a syringe into his forearm.
“Please, please no. This is too much,” Alan said. “This is drug abuse if I ever saw it.”
Gone suddenly limp, Barry dropped the syringe and tubing into the bag and lay back on the hood of the car with his arms outspread. He slid off the hood in a slow, leisurely way, took a few stumbling steps and splayed himself out on a sandbar next to the creek.
“We’re going to have to call the cops, that’s all there is to it,” Alan said. “Oh man, this is unseemly. This is about as serious as it gets. He gives himself a little too much of that stuff and it’s an overdose. He could die. I know all about this.”
I felt like wringing Alan Lovejoy’s skinny neck. I said, “Let’s go. I need to go home.”
Back at the house, Lana’s car was in the driveway as if everything was normal, as if everything in the world was still in its rightful place. Alan turned off his dirt bike. “We’re going to have to go to the authorities about this,” he said. His breathing was heavy and labored, his face lit with a fevered righteousness. “Sister Madsen is being corrupted by some kind of drug addict. We have to do the right thing here.”
“Come inside for a second,” I said. “I want to show you something.”
We entered the door on the right, the one that opened into the zoo, and Alan followed me up the stairs. I got into my trunk, moved some papers around and took out the knife Art had given me. I opened the blade while Alan watched, and put the point of it into his belly.
“Hey!” Alan said. “Ouch!”
He tried to back up, but I stayed right with him, keeping the knife pressed into his belly button until I had him pinned against the wall.
“Promise you won’t tell anybody what you saw,” I said.
“Edgar, we have to do the right thing…”
I pushed the knife in a little harder. “Swear to God,” I said.
“What?”
“Swear to God that you’ll never tell anybody about seeing Sister Madsen and that man.”
Alan tried to yell for help, but his voice had deserted him.
“Swear,” I said.
“I swear,” he croaked.
“To God.”
“I swear to God.”
“And Jesus.”
“I swear to God and Jesus.”
With my free hand I picked up a Book of Mormon off my desk. “Kiss this and then swear to God and Jesus.”
I held it up so he could kiss it. Some dark part of me was enjoying this. He swore to God and Jesus and then made a whimpering sound when I eased the knife away.
“I don’t know why you’re doing this, but you need to think about—”
“If you ever tell anybody, I will sneak into your house at night and cut your throat,” I told him. “Your mom and dad and little sister too. And that dog you have. Poochie.”
Alan slid away from me along the wall and practically dove out the door. I followed him down the stairs to make sure he didn’t talk to anybody on his way out. Down in the zoo he tripped over a bag of feed pellets and went down in a full knees-and-elbows sprawl. He didn’t bother getting to his feet, just scrambled forward like an infantryman under heavy fire until he made it to the door.
He hauled himself up, pushed open the screen door and turned to me. He had regained a little of his composure, though his skin was still as pale as milk and his chest heaved. His expression was sad, Christ-like.
“God bless you, Edgar,” he said.
Edgar laughed right in his face.
FAMILIES ARE FOREVER
IN THE DARK, sleeping house Edgar lay awake in his bed, listening. There was nothing unusual, only the regular night sounds: the queer mewling voices of the parrots, Keith the Rat doing laps on his wheel, the grandfather clock and its chimes, the old bones of the house settling and creaking, pipes ticking behind walls, and occasionally, from out of nowhere, a strange little hiccuping noise that I assumed was the ghost of little Dean making itself known in the black of night. No Sunny creeping down the stairs, no late night arguments between Lana and Clay. There was, though, something new in the air of that house, a pressure, a nearly undetectable change in atmosphere that I could taste on my tongue. Sometimes, when I listened very closely, I thought I could hear the pioneer ancestors mumbling and whispering restlessly from their places on the wall.
It was three weeks ago that I had seen Lana and Barry down by the creek, and during that time I had done nothing but wait and watch and listen, sick in my guts with dread. I scrutinized every move Lana made, her dress and habits and posture. I rifled her purse, combed every inch of her car, looked under her bed and in her closet, but found nothing out of the ordinary. The only change I discovered was her perfume. She no longer wore the sandalwood oil she had used since I had lived here. Her new perfume was flowery and sweet, and each morning, when she came into the kitchen smelling strongly of it, it made me feel so queasy I couldn’t finish my Eggo waffles or bowl of Wheaties.
Even though I knew better, I tried hard to believe that what I had seen out by the creek was an isolated occurrence, that Lana and Barry’s relationship was not a relationship at all, but something without past or future, a singular event. All I knew was that every Friday Lana left for the Swavely campaign meetings and usually didn’t come back until well into the evening. I considered doing all kinds of things, from calling Barry and threatening to expose him, to telling Lana that her new friend was an off-of-center drug-addicted former docto
r who had once tried to kidnap me. But in the end I decided to sit tight, wait, see how things turned out. To take some kind of action now, I was sure, would only make things worse.
In the meantime I couldn’t sleep. I’d stay up half the night, listening for something—I wasn’t even sure what—and the next day in class I’d end up snoozing with my head propped in my hand. Tonight I threw off my sheets and went downstairs. I checked on the animals—Keith the Rat was sleeping peacefully for once—and passed through the portal into the living room. Unlike the zoo, which was always lit up by the aquariums, this room was dark and shadowed, the only light slanting in from a streetlamp outside. I walked in a circle, the carpet thick between my toes, and looked at the pictures on the walls, which I had to peer at to see clearly. There was Sunny, four or five years old with ribbons in her hair, glowering furiously from Santa’s lap; Clay and Lana on their wedding day in front of the St. George temple, holding hands next to a pine tree, Clay looking ridiculous in a crew cut and Lana so young and beautiful and shining I could hardly take my eyes off her; a school picture of Brain, refusing to smile, as somber and constipated as all of the ancestors put together, probably angry that his valuable time was being taken up with picture taking when he could be back in the classroom reading up on the Revolutionary War or doing long division; the four of them standing together next to a churning fountain with the Salt Lake temple in the background and a caption underneath that read FAMILIES ARE FOREVER. Nowhere, on any wall in the entire house, was there a picture of little Dean.
In the dark cave of the kitchen the old refrigerator hummed to itself, then quieted. For a time I did nothing but listen, the only sound the insistent ticking of the grandfather clock. I opened its glass door, stopped the swinging pendulum with my hand, and a dead silence filled the room like water rising in a tank. The old house was still, the animals asleep. And then I snapped alert: I could hear something, a faint rumble, not much more than a vibration underneath the layer of silence, a sound which at first I took to be nothing more than the coursing of my own blood, the soft stirring of every wet thing inside of me, but then realized it was coming from outside. I went to the window. On the other side of the fence, in the gravel under the dangling branches of the willow tree, was a car I had never seen before, a green Pierce-Arrow with its engine idling. Its headlights were off and there was nothing but pure black behind the windows. I knew without a doubt that it was Barry Pinkley in that car, watching.
It was too dark for him to see me, for me to see him. Then his face flared out of the void in bold orange, lit by the flame of a match. The light was gone in an instant, leaving only the tip of his cigarette pulsing and twitching like an ailing firefly. Barry was a mystery to me, even a threat, forever lurking beyond the edge of sight, and yet I was not scared of him, not really. I knew that he loved me, in his own way, more than anyone in my life ever had. And I knew that if I looked hard enough, I could find some small part of me that loved him back.
We are fools for those who’d have us. At a family reunion I’d heard Clay’s uncle Bart say this while clutching his fat wife Sharon in one hairy arm. I’d typed it on my Hermes Jubilee the minute we got home. We are fools for those who’d have us, he’d said, grinning like somebody who didn’t know any better. And I’m the biggest fool of all.
I knew I could walk out the front door right now, get in that car, and tell Barry to take me away. Off we would go, never to be heard from again, and the Madsens would be safe. They could go on, trying to figure out how to be a forever family, just as they had before Edgar and his damaged head had shown up in their lives. With me gone, the animals would still get fed, the chores would get done. There would still be waffles with peaches and cream and Family Home Evening and church on Sunday. Tomorrow morning, somebody would find the clock stopped and set the pendulum swinging again. There would be no pictures of me on the wall for anyone to take down.
But I didn’t move. I stayed where I was, my feet planted in that carpet that was as soft and plush as a bed of moss. The ember of Barry’s cigarette retreated slowly toward his face, sometimes casting just enough light that I could see the faint image of his lips and nostrils. Then the cigarette went out and he sat again in the blank darkness of his car like a fish in an aquarium filled with ink. I stared out that window through the ghost of my own reflection and nothing happened but the beat of my heart. I didn’t move until the car pulled out into the road, gravel snapping under the tires, and glided slowly away, headlights off, past the quiet, shadowed homes of the good, the righteous, the unsuspecting.
WHAT EDGAR WANTED
I EMERGED OUT of the clamor and crush of school, walked right past the yellow bus and headed east toward the center of town. The Orson Niehart Community Center, where the John Swavely for Congress meetings were held every week, was near the old depot on the opposite side of Richland, which meant I had a long way to go.
After a mile or so I was wishing for my golden bike, even with its perpetually flat rear tire. It was already May—school would be out in only two weeks—and the hot sun poured down like molten metal on top of my head. I walked along Canal Street, with its traffic lights and tourist shops that sold Indian jewelry and clocks made of petrified wood, and took a shortcut through Pioneer Park, where a statue of Brigham Young, looking paunchy and irate and wearing a cap of white bird droppings, presided over the wrought-iron benches and the dry grass and a couple of Mexican guys sleeping under their hats. By the time I made it to the community center, soaked with sweat and nursing a stitch in my side, Lana’s car was already in the parking lot.
For awhile I hung back behind the old brick depot, its high windows and arched front entrance boarded over, and watched a few more people drive up and go inside. There were maybe two dozen cars in the parking lot, none of which I recognized as Barry’s. After fifteen minutes or so, a banana-colored Monte Carlo with bad shocks barreled into the lot and pulled cockeyed into one of the handicapped spaces. Barry slipped off his sunglasses and stood in front of one of the windows for a moment, parting his hair with a big green comb, before he went inside.
I stepped out onto the sidewalk into open view. I tried to call out to him, but it felt as if my lungs were two sacks of sand, and what rose out of them was more of a hoarse whistle than any word you might be able to look up in the dictionary.
Barry swiveled his head around, looked up into the sky. I came across the street and he peered at me through the falling afternoon light. He put his sunglasses back on as if to see me better.
“Edgar,” he said. “Holy sh—what are you doing here?”
I stopped about ten feet away from him. I said, “I want to talk to you.”
Barry looked around. “How did you know I was here?”
“I saw you with Lana,” I said. “I saw you.”
“What did you see?”
“I saw you kiss her.” It made me shudder to say it. “She’s a married woman.”
Barry turned his head slightly and the low sun flashed off the mirrored lenses on his face, making everything in my vision go red.
“Come here,” he ordered. “We can’t stand out in the open like this.” He shepherded me around to the side of the building where a squat green air-conditioning unit sat at the end of a squared-off hedge rife with orange berries.
“Look,” he said. He shook his head and looked down at his shoes. “I know you probably don’t understand…”
I had to unclench my jaw to speak, and what came out was nearly a growl: “You stay away from her.”
Barry raised his head in surprise. He wore a clean striped shirt and jeans. The sharp alcohol scent of aftershave wafted off of him. “You need to calm down a little here. Okay? You need to listen to me for a second. Jesus.”
I carried my backpack in front of me against my chest, and had my right hand slipped inside it, clutching my knife. For the last few weeks I had been packing the knife in my sock in hopes of encountering Alan under the right circumstances so I might reiterate my thr
eats, but he avoided me like I was sin itself. Even in church, he sat on the other side of the Sunday school class and refused to look at me. Once, when I approached him after sacrament meeting, he saw me and sidled up next to Bishop Newhauser, praying, I suppose, that the bishop might emanate some kind of righteous force field that would repel me and my kind.
Barry kept his gaze leveled at me. In the shade at the side of the community center, his pupils had dilated, flooding his eyes with darkness. The knife felt heavy and smooth in my hand and it alone gave me the confidence to hold my ground.
“Stay away from her,” I said. “Don’t ever come to that house again.”
“Hold on, Edgar—”
“I don’t want to see you anymore.”
Barry jerked still, as if he had been seized suddenly from within, and his face shriveled in anger. He was standing against the hedge and with one hand he grabbed a handful of leaves and gave a stiff yank, causing a shower of berries to spring into the air as bright as gumballs. When he tried to pull away, the cuff of his shirt snagged on a twig and in an attempt to extricate himself he pivoted and writhed, his ears turning pink, his face pulsing. All at once he gave up trying to escape and attacked that hedge. With a sudden crazed energy, he punched it, kicked it, tore at its leaves and branches with his hands, trying to rip it out of the ground, a hail of berries slingshotting and ricocheting every which way, bouncing and finally settling in the grass around his feet.
When he was done, he stood with his back to me, breathing hard. “Hah…I’m sorry,” he said. In an instant, his skin had become clammy and slick. “I’m really sorry about that. I haven’t been feeling all that great.”
He walked around in a tight circle, stopped, put his hand on my shoulder. When he tried to pull me closer to him I yanked my arm away and stepped back, still gripping the knife inside my backpack.
