The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint

by Brady Udall

  Barry stared at me for a moment, his palms upturned, before his whole body slumped and he sat down heavily on the wire grille that covered the air conditioner. His sleeve was torn all the way up to the elbow. He mashed his forearm against his mouth and started to weep, a low, hoarse keening. He wiped his nose with his sleeve and didn’t look up.

  “I don’t know,” he said, his words wet and thick. “I don’t fucking know.”

  He bent so far over that his head was nearly between his knees. “I’ve tried, everything I’ve done, it’s for you,” he said. “When they brought you in that day on that stretcher, you were a lost cause, but I saw hope in you, I knew there was something there.” Barry snuffled and made a hawking sound in his throat. “When nobody else wanted you I tried to get you out of that hospital. I’ve wanted so much to make you a good home, find a way that we wouldn’t have to be on the run all the time, you know? It hasn’t been easy. I searched you out, followed you all the way up here. What do you think I’m doing here? Getting my kicks? I’m doing this for you. I’m trying to help you.”

  “Please,” I said, my voice a pitiful, ragged thing.

  Barry made a few more hiccuping sobs. “Now Jeffrey is gone and Roberta won’t return my calls and my health is falling apart. Everything is going to shit. Except for you. You’re my ray of hope. Do you see? And then you look at me like you’re scared of me, like I’m the goddamned bogeyman.”

  The hot coal of anger in my chest had crumbled to ash, leaving an empty, burned-out hole. The muscles in my arms and neck went loose and I let go of my knife. It was all I could do to keep myself from telling him I was sorry.

  The air conditioner switched on, blowing up warm air that made Barry’s shirt billow and flap like a sail. He looked up at me, his cheeks shiny with tears. Over the whirring of the fan he said, “Do you hear me, Edgar? Can you understand what I’m telling you?”

  I hung my head, defeated. Barry wiped his face with the hem of his shirt, gulped a few deep breaths. He laughed and dabbed at his eyes. When he looked up he was already smiling again.

  He jumped up from the air conditioner and put his hand on my shoulder and held it there, testing me. He said, “You know enough to keep your mouth shut about this, don’t you?”

  I stared at my feet, gripped with shame.

  He let out a shuddering sigh. He said, “Do you need a ride home? How’d you get here anyway?”

  “I like to walk,” I whispered.

  “Well, all right then, you get on home and I better get into that meeting, it must be half over by now. We’ve got to put up the good fight for John Swavely, you know.”

  I walked with him to the front of the building. Before he went inside he turned to me. “I almost forgot. It looks like my guy came through. We found your mailman. I had to pay extra for all the trouble it took, but you got your wish. Don’t have it on me now, but I’ll give you the address next time I see you.”

  Barry laughed and took off his sunglasses. A single orange berry was still caught in his hair. “Come on, Edgar, smile a little bit, show some life! This is what you wanted, isn’t it? I got you exactly what you wanted.”

  A DANGEROUS PLACE

  TWO WEEKS LATER I came home after the last day of school to find Brain in the zoo hugging a thirty-pound bag of birdseed. He told me that Lana was moving out of the master bedroom into the storage room downstairs.

  “Moving?” I said.

  “We’re going to take all this stuff down to the basement and put a bed in here, okay?” Brain said, his face blank with shock. “It’s temporary.”

  The storage room, not much bigger than a closet, was where all the bags of feed and sawdust and birdseed and old cages and aquariums were kept. It had no windows, smelled like a chicken coop and hardly seemed big enough to accommodate a bed, much less a dresser or anything else. Lana came down the stairs with a box full of clothes. She wore an old sweatshirt and shorts. Her legs, which I had never seen out in the open like this before, were smooth and so pale that a complex road map of thin blue veins showed through the skin.

  “I’m going to stay down here for a bit,” Lana said to me. She forced a smile and brushed her fingers across my hair, which made something in my chest knot up tight. “I already explained it to Brain and Sunny. Clay and I need a little time alone. Getting on each other’s nerves, I guess. It’s nothing for anybody to worry about. A little breather is all.”

  “A breather,” Brain said, nodding. “A short-term situation.”

  Lana took the clothes from the box and set them on a chair. She hummed and went bah-bah-bah with her lips, like someone who didn’t have a care in the world.

  That day at the community center, I had not walked home right away, but hung around behind the old depot waiting for the meeting to end. Barry was one of the first to come out. He sat in his car, drumming the steering wheel with his fingers and checking himself out in the rearview mirror. People walked in bunches out of the glass doors, and Barry saluted them as they went by, nodding and saying “Hey” and “Bye-bye now” and “Have a good one.” Lana was the last one out. Her arms full of papers and campaign leaflets, she locked the doors behind her. She walked casually over to Barry’s car and they chatted through the driver’s window like two people commenting on the lack of rain or the sorry excuse for a football team the Beavers had fielded last year, her blond hair reflecting the light like a sheet of falling water. Barry took her by the wrist and kissed each knuckle of her hand, carefully, one by one. When he pulled out of the parking lot and turned left on Pratt Street, Lana, in her station wagon, was following right behind.

  Now she was filling the empty box with bottles and tubes of medicine: salves and dewormers and iodine. On a long and lonesome highway, she sang under her breath, east of Abilene. From just outside the door, Brain watched her with a kind of sick wonder.

  “You can have my room,” I offered. Brain gave me the evil eye. The bag of birdseed was beginning to put a real strain on him.

  “We’re not about to kick you out of your room,” Lana said. “Anyway, I’m kind of looking forward to being down here with the animals. I’ve been ignoring them these past few months. It’ll be nice to have a change.”

  For the rest of that week I hardly saw Lana or Clay, and never once together. Lana now used the door on the right, the one that led into the zoo, and she would pass through to the other side only to make dinner and breakfast and clean the kitchen at night. Clay would come home late from work as usual and Lana would already be in her temporary room, reading or listening to records on a small turntable. Having her in that room was like living with a stranger: none of us knew how to act. If we spoke at all it was in whispers; when we watched TV we kept the volume so low you could barely hear it; when we ate dinner there was nothing but the scraping of chairs and the clink of silverware. When I passed Brain or Sunny in the house, we only looked at each other and went on, like prisoners under the watchful gaze of a guard. I assumed, like me, that they were wishing for the good old days when Lana and Clay cared enough to bicker and shout at each other into the deep hours of the night.

  One muggy midnight found me sitting up in bed, the quiet of the house pressed on my eardrums like a weight. The strain was getting to be too much, the silence too heavy; I wasn’t strong enough to lug this secret around on my own anymore. I put on some jeans and a T-shirt and stole down the hall, passing through the beads so slowly, with such care, they made no noise at all. I stood in front of Sunny’s door for a good five minutes, shifting from one foot to the other like somebody waiting for a bus.

  Lightly, I tapped my knuckles against the door so that it sounded like nothing more than the timbers of the house popping, expanding with the new heat of summer. I knocked again, waited, then turned the knob and stepped inside. Sunny’s room, which in no way reflected her personality, was crammed with puffy quilts and pillows and stuffed animals and Raggedy Ann dolls, a room so soft you felt, even in the dark, like you were stepping into a dense, downy cloud.
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  I let the door whine shut behind me. I whispered her name and she groaned in her sleep. I could just make her out, lying on her side with her back to me.

  I took a few steps closer. “Sunny, it’s me, Edgar.”

  She rolled over and blinked furiously. “Who?” she said. “What?”

  “It’s Edgar,” I said. “I’m in your room.”

  She sat up and kneaded her face with her palms. She was wearing white panties and a tight sleeveless T-shirt with three stars embroidered in the space just above her breasts.

  “I can’t believe you’re in here,” she said, her voice cobwebbed with sleep.

  “I was wondering if you could come outside with me.”

  “You can ask me right here,” she said. “You can even sit down on my bed if you want.” She peeled the comforter back so that I could see her legs all the way down to her ankles, on which she wore a pair of anklets hung with the tiniest silver bells. She patted the mattress. I wanted so much to sink into that mattress, to press my nose into her T-shirt, into her hair, into her skin, and breathe it all in until I could breathe no longer.

  I said, “I don’t think your mom and dad would want me in here.”

  “Who cares what they want.”

  “Just for a minute,” I said. “Please.”

  Sunny sighed and flung the comforter to the side. I opened the door and descended the stairs with those silver bells tinkling behind me.

  She sat next to me on the back steps. It was warm and still, and somewhere far off a cow bawled and was quiet. I glanced sideways at her and could see she hadn’t put anything on; her smooth bare legs reflected the moon, and her painted toenails shone like jewels. On her chest, just above the line of her shirt, swirled a small galaxy of freckles.

  “I haven’t heard you sneaking out in a long time,” I said.

  Sunny looked up into the vast spill of stars and shrugged.

  “Did you know that I’m going to find out where that mailman is?” I said. “You didn’t think I could do it.”

  “That’s what you brought me out here to say?”

  “No, I just haven’t talked to you in awhile. You don’t go out like before.”

  Sunny tucked her knees under her chin. “I’m not into it anymore, not with those people. You think you have friends and then they’re saying all kinds of crap behind your back. I had enough.”

  I sucked in a mouthful of air, let it out. “I wanted to ask you about something.”

  “Look,” she said. “If you’re wondering about this whole adoption business, I’ll tell you the truth about it right now. It’s just one more thing Mom and Dad cooked up to keep themselves distracted. They’ve never mentioned adoption with any of the others before, so you should probably feel flattered about that, but it won’t happen, I can see it already. You notice how they were all gung-ho about it in the beginning, filling out the forms and making the phone calls, and now they hardly mention it anymore? I just think you should know what’s going on.”

  “I know,” I whispered.

  “And now Mom moving into that little room, it’s pathetic, as if that’s going to solve anything, as if it’s going to help them love each other again.” Her voice broke and she leaned her forehead against her knee for awhile, breathing hard. The chickens, roosting in their coop, murmured and groused in their sleep.

  Sunny lifted her head. “I guess you probably want to kiss me?”

  She turned to me, her mouth a tight gleaming circle, her chin a little cup, and something in the way she looked at me made me feel such a deep, tugging sadness at the root of my stomach that I could have wept. I turned away from her and stared at my hands.

  “Well?” she said.

  There was this image I couldn’t get out of my mind: Barry kissing Lana, the way he touched her, his fingers snagging like hooks on the shiny fabric of her blouse. I felt myself sliding ever so slightly away from Sunny.

  She stood right up and crossed her arms over her breasts. “All right, then,” she said. “Forget it.”

  “No.” I clambered after her, but she was already pulling open the screen door, the one on the left. I entered through the door on the right. The portal downstairs was closed, but I could hear her on the other side, at the bottom step, and we started up our respective staircases. I went slowly, my ear close to the wall, and followed her measured, deliberate creaking, the muffled tinkling of bells. I kept my hand pressed against the wall as I went, as if I might feel her through it, and it seemed that in my fingertips I could detect a certain rippling heat. As much as I was confused and angry at Lana for giving into Barry, for letting a person such as him infiltrate her life and put her family at risk, I understood right then, and all too well, the desire to touch and be touched, even when it was wrong, especially when it was wrong.

  We made it to the top of the stairs at the same time and looked at each other through the hanging beads. After a pause, she walked through them and they slithered across her body like snakes and fell away. We sat on the top step together, and when our hands touched the first time a blue spark of static electricity snapped between us, making me jump. Sunny held her hand over her mouth, trying to hold in a laugh, and pressed her shoulder into mine. She put her face into my neck and I could feel her mouth, cold and so soft, moving down the length of my collarbone as she pulled the collar of my shirt away. I could smell talcum powder and the herbal conditioner she used on her hair and her own musky scent that seemed to breathe out of her pores in a dense mist. I had forgotten all about Lana and Barry and wanting to talk to Sunny about it, my mind was a whistling void. I felt so weak and without weight or substance that I could not make myself move away or toward her. She worked her way back up my neck to my chin and mouth and kissed me with such an insistence that I felt myself leaning back a little, like a man in a stiff wind, not strong enough to hold myself up straight. Her hand began creeping up my leg at an excruciating pace, and then she was undoing the button of my jeans and pulling down the zipper, so slowly that the zipper teeth released one at a time: pop…pop…pop…pop…pop. She reached inside my pants and pressed her hand against me and I could feel the heat of her skin through my underwear, her fingertips tracking small circles, moving just enough to bring on an orgasm that brimmed in me with such an overwhelming rush that I didn’t notice the fit rising up along with it, didn’t notice the surging pulse along the net of my nerves, didn’t notice anything but that warm whirlpool of pleasure that sucked me in until I felt only the abrupt sensation of pitching forward, of dropping away into space. And then I was lying on my back at the bottom of the stairs, coming to with the echo of Sunny’s scream ringing off the walls of the house.

  Even then, at the bottom of the stairs with my legs rolled back over my head and my butt straight in the air, I was still not sure what had happened. I heard Clay yelling down the hall, wanting to know what was going on, and Sunny jabbering something about how she had heard a noise and come out of her room to find me exactly as I was at the bottom of the stairs. All around me the zoo was in an uproar, the gerbils squeaking, the guinea pigs hooting and scrabbling, the parrots rattling their cages.

  “Look,” I heard Brain say from the top of the stairs, “he fell down so hard it knocked his pants off!”

  It was true: in the course of my descent my jeans had been pulled down around my knees. I felt fortunate that my underwear was still in place.

  Clay bounded down the stairs and looked at me through the V of my legs.

  “Can you move?” he said, his voice warbling with panic.

  I groaned and managed to roll over into a more natural position. Then Lana was there, helping me pull up my pants while Clay checked me for broken bones or other injury. Do I even have to say it? Except for a sore neck, Edgar was fine, perfect: not a scratch, not a bruise, not a bump on the head.

  “What happened?” Lana said. “Can you talk?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I woke up like this.”

  “But you have your clothes on,�
�� Lana said.

  Brain slapped the banister. “Sleepwalking,” he said. “I knew it!”

  “That’s probably what it was,” Sunny said. I looked up at her and her eyes were still wide with shock.

  “I’ll bet, in his sleep, he didn’t pull his pants on all the way and that’s what caused him to trip and fall down the stairs,” Brain said. He was so excited he could hardly stand still. “That’s my initial theory.”

  I gingerly got to my feet and made sure that my pants were buttoned. My shorts were full of a sticky mess. Clay and Lana both helped me up and then they stood together, eyeing me quizzically. In his panic, it appeared, Clay had forgotten himself and had his arm around Lana’s waist. They stayed that way for a couple of seconds before Lana pulled away from him to pat me on the cheek.

  “You’ve got to watch yourself, honey,” she said. “I guess this world is just a dangerous place for you.”

  We were quiet for a moment and then Brain said, “How about we all go and have some hot chocolate?”

  We looked at each other and Clay shook his head. “Let’s get back to bed. Come on. Morning comes early.” And we all went back to our separate rooms, Clay in one distant corner of the house, Lana in the other.

  LETTING LOOSE THE BEASTS

  BRAIN’S TENTH BIRTHDAY, and we all sat around the dining room table waiting for Clay so the party could begin. Gordon Dickey was there, as were a couple of sad sacks from Brain’s Sunday school class who moped around like they’d rather be at the dentist’s office waiting to get a tooth pulled. And there was one unexpected guest: Uncle Larry. Uncle Larry was a big lug of a man with a silver flattop and a bolo tie in the shape of a dollar sign. He had stopped by on his way home from a horse auction in Flagstaff to say hello, and when he’d found out it was Brain’s birthday he’d run off to the nearest store—Kreckinger’s Hardware—and bought Brain a framing hammer, which he’d wrapped up in a sheet from the Sunday funny pages.