by Brady Udall
“Words,” I said, shaking my head. “Too many words.”
We scraped the trunk along the walkway, across the gravel and up to the car, where it took both of us to lift one end into the backseat. One of the neighbor’s dogs, a drooling Lab named Gringo still hopped up over all the excitement earlier this evening, came up to us, wagging his tail and making friendly woofing noises, and stuck his nose in Barry’s butt. Barry slung a handful of gravel at Gringo and chased him down the street, hissing through his teeth, “You better run you fucking dog!” When Barry came back we situated ourselves on the other end of the trunk and with one last heave managed to slide it in, the shocks groaning, the back end settling so low that the wheel wells nearly rested on the tires.
Barry slammed the door shut and slumped against it. “Unbelievable,” he gasped. “It’s really happening, hoo-boy. Good thing I brought the Victoria.”
I told Barry to wait a second and ran into the house, where I left the note I had typed on the coffee table in the living room.
Dear Madsens (Clay, Lana, Sunny, Brain),
I am going away. Don’t worry, I’ll be fine. I was happy living with you and I’m sorry I have to go.
You were kind to me. Thank you.
Your friend, Edgar P. Mint
For a few seconds I stood in the silence of that house, a numbness spreading over me like thick oil. Somewhere out in the dark Gringo yowled a sad canine tune. When I ran out to the car Barry was already at the wheel, sucking on a cigarette with unabashed desperation.
He looked over at me, as if waiting for me to speak. I asked him the only question left in my head: “Do you have the mailman’s address?”
He slipped a yellow piece of paper out of his shirt pocket, then tucked it back in. “Got it right here,” he said. Curling ropes of smoke snaked out of his nostrils. “I have it on very good authority that this is our man. But we can talk about that later. Right now we’ve got to figure out what we’re going to do with you.”
He left the headlights off until we got to the highway, quizzing me like a detective. He wanted to know exactly what had happened in the Madsen house, what the fight was about, where Lana had gone. I stared out my window, at the dark world falling away, and said as little as I could. When he pressed harder, I turned to him. “It doesn’t matter anymore, right? Now we can go away somewhere. We don’t even have to stay around here. Maybe we could go back to Arizona. I’ll bet that’s where Jeffrey is.”
Barry laughed. “We’ll put you up tonight at my place until we figure out our plan of action. But I can’t just up and leave like that. My business investments are starting to pay off, and Lana, she needs a little support right now, it sounds like things might have reached a head tonight.”
“No,” I said. “You’re not going back there.”
Barry sighed, gave the steering wheel a little shake. “You need to understand something, Edgar. I’ll admit that I struck up a relationship with Lana as a way to gather information, to assess the situation. It was for your own good. I wanted to know what kind of people you were living with, what kind of things they were trying to put in your head. And you know what? I found Lana to be not the person I expected at all. She’s smart and funny, and the greatest thing about her is her desire to help people. Look at what she’s done for you. And I share that desire. That’s why we hit it off. And now I can see she needs support. She’s in a bad marriage, she’s unhappy at home—I mean, this guy she’s married to, come on. She needs help.”
His face glistened with sweat and his eyes gave off a strange, otherworldly glow. He patted me on the leg. “You know me. You know I wouldn’t abandon somebody in their hour of need. I’m not that type of person.”
I felt my chest constrict, as if caught by a slowly winding chain, and I covered my head in my arms. The hot night air swirled in from the window and the car door hummed against my head. Eventually I fell into something very much like the coma I had lived through all those years before: I sank so deeply into myself, became so disconnected, that everything outside my body seemed to exist on some other, distant plane.
“Edgar?” Barry said, and it was like he was shouting at me through a windstorm. I made no answer, no movement; I’m not sure I could have had I wanted to.
I don’t know how long we drove. Barry called my name again, put his hand on my back. “Are you sleeping?” he said. When he got no response, he slowed the car and pulled over. With the engine off, the sudden, heavy silence was almost painful. I heard movement, paper rattling and the clink of glass. I turned my head just enough so that I could see him through the slits of my eyelids. He already had the rubber tubing around his arm and was pushing the needle in with a desperate, shaking hand. Once he had injected himself, he went instantly loose and a low moan of pleasure eased out of him like a few notes of a lullaby. His head lolled to the side and the hand that held the syringe fell to his lap, leaving it dangling, still in his arm.
I sat up. Barry did not move, did not seem to breathe; his body had gone so slack it was as if he had melted into the seat. In slow motion I reached across and eased the syringe out of his arm. In that moment, when I held the empty needle in my hand, it came to me, a thought that rose up from someplace cold and deep: It would be so easy. I rummaged through his open doctor’s bag, came up with one of the small glass vials—there were eight or nine of them, all the same—and drew out as much of the amber liquid as the syringe would hold. At St. Divine’s I had seen it done hundreds of times and the whole procedure felt natural to me, like a ritual I had performed every day of my life. The rubber tubing was still wrapped snug at the base of his biceps and his veins stood out against the bruised and pitted flesh of his inner arm. On one of those veins quivered a tiny jewel of blood and that is where I placed the end of the needle. His face caught in an expression of serene rapture, Barry kept utterly still. His chest did not move and even in the quiet bubble of that car I could not hear the push and pull of his lungs. So easy, I thought, and this time I did not falter, I did not give in to fear or doubt or weakness. I slipped in the needle and pushed the plunger down.
EDGAR AT THE WHEEL
IN THE LIGHT of a low half-moon the road shone like the bottom of a greased skillet. I kept the speedometer on thirty and even though this section of desert highway was nothing but straightaway, my back and arms strained with tension; this was the first time I had ever driven a car.
A few minutes earlier I had pushed Barry to the far side of the seat and now he lay slumped in the corner, his chin resting on his chest. I didn’t know if he was dead or not. Two or three seconds after I had given him the injection he had stiffened and made a childlike whimper of surprise, but since then hadn’t stirred. With my heart tapping hard against my sternum, I had watched him: his jaw clenching and unclenching, his eyes fluttering under their lids, his arms making tiny jerking movements as if pulled by wires. When he was still I got his stethoscope out of my trunk and placed the bell on his chest. All I could hear was a cosmic hiss, like the sound of solar storms brought to earth on radio waves. I held my breath, straining, and thought I could detect a certain drumbeat of blood, but I couldn’t tell if it was coming from his chest or my own ears.
The big car was an automatic, so now all I had to do was keep a steady pressure on the gas pedal, but it seemed that it wanted to speed up, to hurtle down that road with the whole rumbling enterprise of its engine. Working the accelerator with my right, I tapped the brakes with my left, which made the car halt and lurch. Every time I hit a bump Barry’s head wavered like the needle on a compass. A cold sweat had broken out at my hairline and my eyes burned from the effort of trying to keep inside the lines. I hugged the enormous steering wheel like it was a life preserver.
Up ahead, at the side of the road, a man materialized suddenly as if he had stepped out of a fold in the air. He straddled the white line and held out his thumb. I swung out into the other lane and then something made me lay on the brake so hard that I cracked my nose against the steering
wheel and Barry slid to the floor. I looked back and the man was jogging up to the car, still a couple of hundred feet away, red as a demon in the glow of the brake lights. I grabbed Barry under the armpits and pulled him onto the seat next to me, propped him up as well as I could. The man slipped into the front seat without saying anything. He was an Indian, with matted, shoulder-length hair and a heavy brow that stuck out over his face like an eroded riverbank. He gave off the odor of bus seats and cigarettes and wine. He looked straight out the windshield, waiting patiently for us to be on our way.
“I’m trying to get to Globe,” I said. “It’s in Arizona.”
His words were quiet and clipped. “Okay by me.”
“Is this the right way?”
For the first time the man looked at me. “Might want to take 270. Few miles back. Maybe put on your lights.”
I pushed and pulled on all the buttons I could find until the headlights came on. I was startled to see the way the road lit up in front of me. With the hazards clicking and wipers flapping, I swung the car around, scraped over a few clumps of sagebrush and spun out in the soft dirt on the shoulder before I got us headed in the opposite direction. A jackrabbit dashed into the glare of the headlights and I gave the wheel a yank, which made the car fishtail and swing out into the other lane, the tires screaming sideways over the asphalt, before I could get everything straightened out.
“I don’t know how to drive,” I told the Indian.
For the next few miles I slowed down to a crawl, wandered all over the road, hit the brakes occasionally, just to illustrate my point. Finally, I asked the man if he didn’t want to take the wheel for awhile.
“Looking for a ride,” he said.
So I went out into the other lane of the deserted road and stayed there, inching along. I pushed on the gas and watched the Indian out of the corner of my eye as we sped up to forty, then fifty miles an hour. Implacable as a mannequin, he didn’t even seem to blink. I stopped the car in the middle of the road and fished around in Barry’s front pockets until I came up with a large wad of crumpled bills.
“You can have this,” I said, “if you’ll drive us down to Globe.”
“Don’t want your money,” he said.
I opened Barry’s doctor bag and showed him the contents of it. “What about this?”
He didn’t bother to look in the bag. “Don’t got a license. Cops stop us, they’ll haul me back to jail. Maybe I should try my luck with somebody else.”
I rested my head against the back of the seat and closed my eyes. My skull was filled with a dense and heavy fog and I wanted nothing more than to go to sleep.
“You Indi’n?” the Indian said.
“No,” I said. “Yes.”
I looked over at him and he smiled, which made it clear that he was not in possession of all of his teeth. He pushed open the passenger door and stepped out. I thought he was going to walk away, but he came around the back of the car and stood next to my open window.
“I’ll drive,” he said. “But if the cops stop us, I’m making a break for it.”
We changed places and the Indian adjusted his mirrors, checked his gauges and laid on the gas as if it was something he was born to. The wheels squealed and we were off, hurtling south, our headlights cutting a wedge into the darkness that lay like dense smoke over the broken desert terrain. We drove for hours, stopping once to get gas at an all-night station in Flagstaff. The Indian didn’t say a word the whole time, even when Barry, gradually slumping to the side, came to rest his head on his shoulder. The Indian kept his hands perfectly positioned on the wheel and never once took his eyes off the road. Only when we hit the northern outskirts of Globe did he speak. “Where you want to go?”
To the east the sky was beginning to pale just a bit, but night hadn’t yet lifted. I looked out the window at the medical supply store we were now passing, a gray cinder-block building whose display window sported several flesh-colored dummies dressed up in leg braces and hernia trusses. As much as I wanted to, I had not been able to sleep the whole way down, and in a carsick stupor did nothing more than stare out at the wide mouth of the car sucking in the illuminated road. I glanced over at Barry and the Indian, nestled together on the far side of the seat like lovers. At one point I had worked up enough courage to reach out and touch Barry’s hand and found that it was neither warm nor cold.
I said, “Polar Bear Motel.”
We searched the winding streets for awhile before the Indian stopped at a Circle K to ask for directions. We looped around a particularly tight corner and Barry lurched across the seat and slid down until his head was next to my hip. I heard what I thought was a low groan of air escape from his mouth. The Indian drove on, unperturbed.
I felt an odd sense of déjà vu navigating these avenues that snaked among the old sandstone storefronts and darkened cowboy bars, streets that felt entirely familiar but were not known to me at all. Eventually the sign for the Polar Bear Motel rose up over the top of a small hill like a neon beacon. The Indian swung the big car into the parking lot and I got out before we came to a stop.
Only the office, with its burnt-out NO VACANCY sign, had a light on. I found the door with the number 9 on it and knocked. When no answer came, I peered through the cracked window and could see that the room was bare, the bed made up. I went to the office and rang the buzzer by the door. A couple of minutes passed before a thin woman in a long T-shirt opened the door a crack and blinked at me, light pouring through the snarl of her hair like sunshine out of a storm cloud.
“I’m looking for Art Crozier,” I said.
She said, “Do you know how late it is, buster?”
“He used to live in room number nine. Maybe two or three years ago.”
Her hand on her brow, she sighed with a deep, uncomplicated weariness. “He moved, honey. Right up the hill here. God, my head hurts. He pays Lucinda to clean up around his place every week. Take this road till you can’t go no more. That’s his place. The one on the right.”
I directed the Indian up the hill according to the woman’s directions until we came to a small beige duplex surrounded by a chain-link fence. I looked at the Indian and he said, “I’ll wait for you. Don’t got much on my schedule.”
I stood in front of the door on the right and gave it a solid knock. I heard a series of unidentifiable noises, then what sounded like an angry, muttering voice. I knocked again. Someone came thumping closer to the door and a voice boomed out like thunder, “WHO THE HELL IS IT?”
“Man,” said the Indian from the open window of the car. “That guy’s got a set of pipes on him, hey?”
I yelled, “It’s Edgar! Edgar Mint!”
The door swung inward and there was Art on the other side of the screen, haggard and loose-skinned, leaning on an aluminum walker. The yellow glow from inside lit up his white hair, which was as fine as the fluff of a dandelion and looked like it might lift off his head if you were to breathe too hard.
“Is it…?” he said.
I pulled open the screen door. “It’s me,” I said. Despite everything, I must have been smiling. “It’s Edgar.”
Art could have been smiling or scowling, there really was no way to tell. I realized that I was now nearly as tall as him. He wore a pair of baggy painter pants and a sleeveless undershirt. He reached out and put his hand on the back of my neck, his fingers as cold and heavy as granite on my skin. He gave me a good shake. “Look at you,” he said. “I’ll be damned.”
I stepped into a small room which was dominated by an old, decimated leather recliner. The plank floor under my feet was pitted with cigarette burns. To the left was a galley kitchen, its tiny counter space cluttered with bottles of pills and liquor bottles of all sorts. The paneled walls were bare except for an old calendar that showed a big-breasted blonde brandishing a chain saw.
“Well God bless you,” Art said, shaking his head. “Here you are.”
I sat on a folding chair next to the massive television with a small green sc
reen and Art leaned against the arm of the recliner. He looked a little better than the last time I’d seen him through the window of the motel room. His eyes were clearer, his face less swollen and red. The mass of scar tissue on his jaw had gone from pink to a milky gray and his forehead and arms were peppered with liver spots, though he could have been no more than sixty years old.
In less than a minute, I told him everything that had happened, everything I had done. The words rolled right out of me and I kept my eyes closed against the bright overhead light. And then I had nothing left to say and it was quiet.
For a time Art stared blankly at the floor and then with great effort he pushed himself away from the recliner and shuffled the short distance over to me without his walker. He put his hand on my shoulder and I could feel him lean into me, steadying himself. He put his face close to mine and I got a whiff of hair oil and wallet leather and sweat. I could detect no trace of his infamous cologne. “You done the right thing,” he said, looking me level in the eye. “Don’t you worry about it now. We’ll get it took care of.”
He hobbled into the back room and returned wearing a faded denim jacket and a pair of scuffed brogues. Instead of his walker, he now employed two canes, one that had four little rubber-tipped legs for extra support. Outside, the Indian sat on the hood smoking a cigarette.
“Borrowed a butt from the ashtray,” he said.
Art peered through the windshield for a moment before opening the passenger door and putting his fingers against Barry’s neck. His bones creaked and popped when he bent down to place his ear next to Barry’s face.
“He’s dead?” I whispered.
Art nodded. He was wheezing and already a layer of sweat glistened on his forehead. “If he ain’t, he’s at the very door.”
“I didn’t use the knife, like you told me to,” I said.
Art gave his head a rueful shake. He said, “I guess it’s the thought that counts.”
