by Brady Udall
It was a warm summer evening and twilight drifted into the house like a shimmering cloud of powdered crystal. Crepe streamers hung from the ceiling and the cake on the table said The Big Ten!!! in blocky candy letters. Wearing his Sunday shirt and a green clip-on tie, Brain sat in the place of honor looking sour. Lana had parted his hair down the middle and plastered it to his head with water, which made him look like an angry muskrat.
Uncle Larry, who was Clay’s uncle and lived in Reno, was providing the preparty entertainment. “Okay, you honyocks,” he said. “Who can tell me what kind of animal it is that says ‘moof’?”
“A dog?” said Gordon Dickey.
“That was a pretty mediocre guess,” said Uncle Larry. “Anybody else want to take a pop at it?”
“A bear?” I said.
Uncle Larry shook his head sadly. “Humor doesn’t come easy to you boys, I guess. I ought to have started off with some easier jokes. The answer is a buck-toothed cow. Moof!”
Gordon Dickey said, “You have hair in your ears, Uncle Larry.”
Lana, who was in the kitchen with Sunny, came out with a pitcher of Kool-Aid. “Your dad’ll be here any minute, honey,” she said to Brain. “I’m sure he just had to finish up a job or something.”
“It’s one thing to work hard,” Uncle Larry said, holding out his paper cup, which had fat little rocket ships on it, “and it’s a whole ’nother thing to know when to stop.”
We drank Kool-Aid and ate chips with onion dip. The presents stayed where they were on the table. Uncle Larry told us about how, for his tenth birthday, he had received nothing but a four-foot length of rope. “We was poor and I was happy to have that rope. I had an active mind, is what I’m trying to relate to you here. I made it into whatever I wanted, a pet rattlesnake and a bullwhip and a Winchester lever-action rifle and all kinds of other things I can’t remember at this point in time. When you get old like me you lose your imagination. I know I tied my sister up with that rope. Tied her up so good I couldn’t get the knot undone and left her in the milking barn till Grandma Madsen found her a couple hours later. Oh you should have been there for the butt-whippin’ on that day. It was a time to remember.”
Lana clattered some plates and silverware onto the table. “Why don’t we go ahead with the piñata. Maybe Clay will make it in time for the cake.”
The piñata, a multicolored bull, hung from a plant hook out on the porch. The bull had stubby horns and bulging white eyeballs that stared off in different directions. Uncle Larry manned the rope and yanked on it like a monk in a belfry, the bull bobbing up and down crazily, nearly impossible to hit. One of the sad sacks, now in a blindfold, swung wildly with a yellow Wiffle ball bat that didn’t once make contact.
“Come on, Uncle Larry!” Gordon Dickey said. “Let him hit the bull.”
“Looks more like a steer to me,” Uncle Larry said, pausing for a moment to peer between the piñata’s hind legs. “Anyhow, you keep your undies on straight, you’ll get your chance.”
When it was Brain’s turn he waited calm and blindfolded, holding the bat out in front of him like a samurai master, his ear cocked for any sound of movement. He had hardly said a word to anybody since the party started and now his mouth was set in a determined grimace. Grinning with mischief, Uncle Larry slowly lowered the bull so it was right in front of Brain, who lashed out with a sudden, vicious whack across its spine. Brain missed a couple of times before he connected solidly again, the sound of it like a gunshot echoing out over the neighborhood, and then he went berserk, swinging in a wild, all-out frenzy and yelling yah! yah! yah! The blindfold slipped down around his neck and he zeroed in, the bat a yellow blur. A horn broke off, bits of crepe paper flung up into the air like parade confetti, but still the bull would not break. One of the sad sacks started to cry and Lana yelled at Brain to stop, but he kept it up, his cheeks pink and his eyes on fire, until his arms gave out. The bull was now hornless and badly dented and missing all of its shaggy crepe-paper fur, but hadn’t given up a single piece of candy.
Uncle Larry, who’d stopped pulling on the rope altogether and let Brain clobber it nearly to a pulp, said, “I’ll tell you what, this young fella might have a future in the mafia.”
He went back in the house and came back unwrapping the hammer he’d bought earlier. “That flyswatter don’t got enough weight behind it. Give this a whirl. If it don’t work then I’m going to buy my own piñata to keep my personal valuables in.”
Brain swallowed hard, his face screwed up into a desperate scowl, his lips wet and shiny with spit. He grabbed the hammer and with one sweeping blow took half the bull’s head off. “Olé!” Uncle Larry said. The piñata tipped forward and all the candy came out in one crackling gush, fanning out over the wooden deck at our feet.
After we dutifully scooped up the candy and stuffed our pockets with it, we went back inside, where the birthday song was sung, the presents opened, the cake and ice cream eaten. Light drained from the windows like water from a sink. Still Clay did not show up. Brain’s friends went home and Uncle Larry, who had taken Lana into the kitchen and, in a voice loud enough for everybody to hear, told her that she should lay her husband upside the head with that hammer for not showing up for his own son’s birthday party, left so he could get back to Reno before his own wife decided to commit similar violence upon him. Lana made calls to three of Clay’s crew, who said they’d left him at the job site at six o’clock. Just when Lana was on her way out the door to look for him, we heard Clay’s truck pull up in the driveway.
Brain and I were laid out on the rug in the living room; I watched “Hawaii Five-O” while Brain created elaborate contraptions with the Erector set he’d gotten from Gordon Dickey. We immediately got up and looked out the window. Clay was still sitting in the cab of his pickup, not moving. Lana had started to walk out toward the pickup, but stopped halfway there; something, it was clear, had frightened her. The truck door creaked open and Clay stepped out, speckled head to toe with wall plaster. It was caught in his hair and beard and spattered across his blue jeans in spiraling constellations, and in his hand he held a piece of paper. He stood next to the truck for a moment without speaking. It was full dark now and in the light spilling out from the porch his face looked hard and blank, like something made out of varnished wood.
He held out the paper to Lana. “I want you to read this and I want you to tell me if it’s the truth.”
Lana took a step back as if she’d run into a cobweb. “Clay,” she said, a thin wire of pleading in her voice.
“I want you to read it right now,” he said.
She retreated up onto the porch, her car keys jangling in her hand. “Whatever it is, we should talk about it upstairs.”
She came inside and he followed her up the stairs, neither of them looking at us, moving forward blindly, like two people passing by in a dream. They shut the bedroom door behind them and there was silence. Sunny came out of her room and said, “What? What is it?” Brain and I climbed the stairs and we stared down the hall, waiting. We heard the sound of Lana’s voice and then something struck the door with such force that the jamb splintered and the wall shook. There was shouting and crying and a muffled commotion and it seemed that all the strife and grief that room had contained for so long was trying to break out, rattling the door like a hard wind. Clay’s voice rose above everything else and I only heard one word, clear and loud, like a spade hitting wet dirt. Slut.
Eventually Clay came out, his sad eyes now lit with some internal voltage, the piece of paper crumpled in his fist. The knuckles of his other hand were scraped a bright red. Lana clutched at his shirt and tried to pull him back. “Listen to me,” she said. “Please listen.” He grabbed her wrist and yanked at it forcefully, trying to free himself, wrenching her arm side to side, and they struggled like that, locked together in a desperate clinch, until Sunny, crying no no no no no, rushed in and pushed them apart.
Clay stalked past us, went downstairs into the zoo and began to wreck
it: he pushed over the aquariums, swept the mice and gerbil cages to the floor, flushed the parrots out of their cages and into the living room, where they went squawking and flapping, searching for an escape, swooping into the kitchen and up the stairs, their wings going thup-thup-thup-thup against the ceiling. Lana screamed at him to stop but he kept going, his face grim and contorted, knocking over the feed cans and bags of sawdust and the box where Tom and Marcus, the two guinea pigs, cowered and shrieked.
Next to me, Brain, still in his birthday tie, trembled as if he’d been struck.
Clay propped open the door and stumbled into the back, where he moved with a methodical fury, opening every pen and hutch and corral. Out came the blattering goats and Dorothy the mule and Mimi the milk cow, and in no time the dogs in the neighborhood had put up a great howl, roused by the sudden ruckus. Clay charged into the chicken coop and stomped around in circles, sending the chickens out the door in a blur of thumping wings. By now some of the mice and parrots had made it outside, and the barn cats zigzagged around, unsure of who or what to chase, and then, one by one, half a dozen neighbor dogs showed up and began a crazed, incessant barking, pausing only to chase the cats and snap at the goats and the flapping, terrified chickens.
Dorothy, in a fit of panic, had run right into the barbed-wire fence and had become tangled there, honking like an air horn, her legs splayed out under her. One of the big spotted tomcats darted into the house and came out with an angelfish quivering in its teeth. All around, chicken feathers floated slowly down, swirling suddenly with some turbulence of air, and gerbils whizzed underfoot and parrots flew low overhead, flashing green and yellow in the dark, and above everything, in the lowest branch of the cottonwood tree, sat Doug the vulture, calmly watching the chaos below, solemn and quiet as a shadow.
A CONCERNED BROTHER
AFTER THE ANIMALS were captured and put back in their rightful places and the neighbors had gone home and Clay had driven away to stay the night with his brother, Edgar sat on the wet carpet of the zoo, comforting Keith the Rat, who was hunched in the back of his cage, shivering and burying his head in the sawdust. Everything had been put back in its place, more or less, but there was still turquoise aquarium gravel strewn across the floor, and bits of wet shredded newspaper and clumps of sawdust stuck to the walls and tables; the zoo smelled even worse than it usually did. Even though Keith the Rat’s cage had been knocked over like most of the others, he was one of the few who did not make a break for it. When I came back inside I found him hiding behind the bookshelf, his tail twitching in plain sight as pink and hairless as an earthworm.
Neighbors from up and down the street helped us round up all the animals. Within three minutes of the time the commotion began, they were out in force, chasing chickens and rabbits, extracting Dorothy from the barbed-wire fence, casting about in the bushes and poking under piles of lumber, searching for mice and gerbils. Bobo Boyd, Timothy Boyd’s big brother, got out his new lariat and ran down the goats who had gotten into the Christensens’ alfalfa field. None of the fish could be saved, but all but two of the parrots had been retrieved and Doug the vulture made it easy on everybody by having a dizzy spell and falling off his branch. Our neighbor four houses up, an old guy named Brother Shields, came by holding Marcus the guinea pig out in front of him and said, “I don’t know what the hell this is, but I found it runnin’ for its life down the middle of the road.”
All of this had taken place in a matter of forty-five minutes, and now the house was quiet again. Sunny and Brain were in their rooms and Lana was in the upstairs bedroom, talking to her mother on the telephone. Clay had disappeared almost immediately, but had called home and talked to Sunny, told her he was sorry for what he had done, to ask forgiveness from all of us. He said he would stay at Uncle Richard’s place for the night so he could think things through.
Just after I had returned Keith the Rat to his cage, I found the paper that Clay had come home with on the floor of the zoo. It was crumpled and wet, but still legible:
Dear Brother Madsen,
I have agonized over writing this letter for weeks, and in the end have decided to do it because I believe your family and marriage could be at stake. On several occasions over the last two months I have seen your wife, Sister Madsen, with another man. I don’t know this man’s name or occupation, and I can’t say that their relationship goes beyond the kissing and touching I witnessed, but I decided, for the sake of your eternal marriage, that it is something you should know about, before it is too late. I have no doubt that Sister Madsen is a good, upstanding daughter of God, but I also know that God created us in the flesh, and that the flesh is weak.
I have kept this knowledge in all confidentiality, and now I leave it in your hands.
Sincerely,
A Concerned Brother
I guess I had underestimated him; Alan Lovejoy was so righteous, so filled with the power and spirit of God that he couldn’t be intimidated for too long by the likes of me. I considered going to his house and delivering on the promise I had made to him a few weeks ago but decided instead to do what I should have done in the first place, what might have saved this family from coming apart as it had tonight.
I went into the kitchen, my feet squishing in the wet carpet, and picked up the phone. Lana was off now and a dial tone blared from the receiver, which felt as heavy as a brick in my hand. I swallowed and dialed the number from the card Barry had given me. The man who answered told me Barry wasn’t living there anymore and gave me another number. The phone rang two dozen times before Barry picked it up.
“What?” he said.
“It’s Edgar,” I said, once I had freed my tongue, which felt like it had rusted to the roof of my mouth.
“Who? Who is it?”
“Edgar,” I said. “Edgar Mint.”
“Edgar! My God, what’s going on, are you okay?”
For a moment I listened to his shallow breathing, which came across the phone line as dense static.
“Hello?” he said.
I coughed and cleared my throat, and somewhere inside, found the words. “I want you to come pick me up.”
THE NEEDLE
OUT UNDER THE black sky, invisible in the darkness, Edgar waited like the phantom he was. A hot breeze pushing up out of the south rustled the leaves and bushes and seemed to blow right through him. Watching for Barry’s car, he paced in the gravel by the irrigation ditch and could not hear his own footsteps. It was as if he was already gone, all his substantial parts—his bones and guts and sinews—disappeared, leaving behind a creature made only of air.
I had felt it the moment I hung up the phone: my self vanishing, my atoms scattering away into some other place. I walked up the stairs and it was like I was floating. I knelt down in my room, the door shut behind me, and typed a short letter. I filled my trunk with all my papers and the millions of words I’d typed on them, and on top of those stacks and bundles I put my knife and Barry’s stethoscope and my Hermes Jubilee. Everything else I left: my closet full of clothes, my stacks of clean underwear, my designer jeans, my Sunday ties, my flaming-car wristwatch, the turntable and old Isley Brothers records Lana had given to me for my birthday, my personalized leather-bound set of scriptures.
I made one last circuit of the house. I walked the long upstairs hallway, passing through the beads, and paused at Sunny’s door, where I could hear intermittent sobs. I rested my hand on the doorknob, took it away. Brain was quiet in his room and I heard nothing from Lana’s. There was no longer light coming from under the door and I imagined her in there, staring into the dark, alone on the white expanse of that bed.
For awhile I sat on the carpeted toilet lid in the pink bathroom, taking in the smell of soap and clean towels and perfume. I looked in the mirror and saw nothing but a shadow of myself. Down in the living room I turned on the television for a moment, just to hear the low murmur of voices, and in the dark kitchen I opened the refrigerator. The light that shone out of it was radiant and golden, n
early blinding, like the light that might pour out of heaven itself, and I closed it without taking anything.
I went outside to wait. When Barry pulled up with his headlights off I stepped out from the night shadows of the willow tree to meet him. He jumped out and ran up to hug me, the embodiment of concern. I hugged him back with as much conviction as I could muster.
“What’s wrong?” he said. “What’s going on?”
I told him that I wanted him to take me now, I was ready, I wanted to go away with him and never come back. “I need some help with my trunk,” I said. “Then we can get going.”
“What happened?” he said. I hadn’t told him much of anything on the phone, only that he needed to come and get me right away, it was an emergency.
“There was a big fight,” I said. “I can’t live here anymore, I don’t want to. I want to go with you.”
“Edgar, this is all a little sudden—”
“I’m leaving them a note,” I said. “They’ll think I ran away. Nobody will know anything.”
Barry wore a crumpled felt jacket and an expression of bewilderment. He raked his fingers through the lopsided bramble of his hair and followed me into the house. At the top of the stairs he stopped and looked around intently, his eyes glinting in the low light. He whispered, “Where is she?”
“Who?”
“Lana.”
“She’s not here,” I lied. “She went to stay with a friend.”
He looked down the hall. “Her bedroom’s that one, at the end, isn’t it?”
For a moment it seemed he leaned as if to turn that way but he made an abrupt swivel and came with me into the guest room.
After we slid the trunk along the carpet and guided it carefully down the stairs to keep it from thumping, we had trouble. The floor of the zoo was wet, which made the sliding more difficult and noisy. Fortunately, the animals, dazed and exhausted from their brief dash for freedom, kept still in their cages. By the time we had pushed, dragged, coaxed, nudged the trunk outside, down from the porch and onto the cement walkway, Barry was heaving and making a rattling noise deep in his lungs. “What the hell you got in here, Edgar?”
