The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint

by Brady Udall

  This went on for five or six years until all at once, it seemed, they had exhausted their hope. By some silent mutual accord they agreed that they would no longer talk about it, no longer pray to God to bless them with the desire of their hearts. They came to believe that God, in His own way, had already given them their answer.

  And now, after so many years of quiet evenings and languid afternoons, there was something strangely discomfiting to Rosa about the sudden commotion this Indian boy was causing. She didn’t like the way Nicholas carried on so easily with him, spinning him around in the air and tickling him until he squealed for mercy. She was out back, hanging up Edgar’s newly washed clothes, and she could hear Nicholas at the table, trying to teach him how to sing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” in Ukrainian. She stepped inside and leaned against the doorway to watch them. Sitting at the far end of the table in nothing but a towel, the boy had stuffed an entire sandwich into his mouth, which wasn’t helping his Ukrainian any. Nicholas began to laugh so hard he slid halfway off his chair, and Edgar, wide-eyed, started giggling until he had to struggle to keep the sandwich in his mouth. Rosa couldn’t help herself: she began to laugh too.

  Eventually they drove Edgar out to the reservation. They’d questioned him thoroughly and all they’d found out was that he was seven years old, his mother was named Gloria and he lived in a house with a beer-tree out front. It didn’t take them long to find the beer-tree house and when Gloria came out to retrieve Edgar, stumbling into the afternoon light with the glazed expression of someone who had been shaken out of a deep sleep, she made no attempt to explain where she had been or why her son had been left alone in the parking lot of the Safeway.

  Before they went home, Nicholas wrote down their address and phone number and told her they’d be more than happy to baby-sit Edgar anytime, all she needed to do was give them a call. The next Saturday, at ten in the morning, Gloria called from the pay phone at the Circle K and asked if Nicholas and Rosa could look after Edgar for the day while she went out with friends. And so it became a weekly ritual: Nicholas and Rosa would get up early so they could fetch Edgar, feed him a big breakfast, and have the rest of the day to take him to the river or the dog track or the municipal swimming pool, where he would splash around in the baby pool with toddlers half his age. Often he would stay the night and after he was sleeping soundly in the G.I. Joe pajamas they had bought for him, they would bring chairs in from the kitchen, sit outside his door, and watch him sleep. Nicholas would balance an ashtray in his lap and they would smoke and drink chilled vodka out of a jelly jar. At first, they both felt a little ridiculous, but how could they ever have known, in all their imaginings, what a sweet and blessed thing it might be to have a child sleeping in their house?

  During the week, the house seemed vacant, full of echoes. Rosa and Nicholas went about their lives as always, but at night in the dark of their bedroom they talked about the boy. He was a quiet, pokerfaced little guy, but he was smart, they didn’t doubt that one bit. Even though he had not spent a day in school he could pick out certain words on billboards and street signs and was a whiz at checkers. He had a pretty good arm on him and Nicholas thought he might make a good ballplayer one day. They weren’t sure if it was funny or disturbing how he would sit on the couch to watch cartoons and immediately begin to bounce his head against the cushion, back and forth in steady rhythm, like a peg on a metronome. They couldn’t help but laugh at his habit of walking around with a hand locked securely on his crotch.

  Then one afternoon Gloria showed up at the house in badly applied makeup and a pair of alligator pumps. Rosa had her sit at the dining room table and offered coffee. In a slur of words, Gloria explained why she had come: she wanted Nicholas and Rosa to take Edgar. She knew they were fond of him, and it was clear that he liked being with them. She knew she wasn’t a good mother and wanted him to have a better life. All she asked in return was enough money to settle her debts and buy a bus ticket to Los Angeles.

  It felt to Rosa as if all the light in the room had gathered into her chest. “Anything you want, we’ll give it to you,” she said. “First thing to do is get a lawyer to make some adoption papers—”

  “No,” Gloria said, slamming her china cup on the table. “No adoption, nothing like that. You say adoption and here come the government people, sniffing around like dogs. They almost took Edgar one time before, put him in some foster home. I know about it. They got papers and it’s waiting around for this and that and they’re stopping by your house every other day, snooping and poking around like they know better than God.” She was shaking her head now, swirling the coffee around in her cup until it spilled on her hand. “I’m leaving for L.A. in two weeks. I’ll find the money I need one way or the other. You don’t want Edgar, I’ll take him with me.”

  That night Nicholas called up one of his old war buddies, a jolly Greek who had started his own law practice in Baltimore. “It’s dicey!” the Greek roared over the phone. “Suddenly the mama changes her mind and the whole game is up, kiss all your time and money good-bye. Take my advice, go down to Mexico and bribe a priest at an orphanage if you’re really dying for a baby right quick. There’s no faster or cheaper way to do it. They’ll doctor you up all the necessary paperwork and—zoom!—you’re on your way.”

  For three straight nights Nicholas and Rosa talked about it until the light came up over the hills, going over every possible scenario, trying to convince each other of what was already a foregone conclusion. There was no decision at all to make, and both of them knew it. God, on his own terms and in his own time, had brought them their child. They would take Edgar back to the place where they had begun, and start all over again.

  The next day they put their house on the market for such a low price the realtor laughed with great hilarity until he realized they were serious. Nicholas took two weeks of sick leave from the post office and flew out to Stony Run to prepare their new home. It was the one Nicholas had grown up in, and it had sat vacant since his mother’s death. Rosa stayed behind to pack up their things and show prospective buyers around the house, which sold in ten days.

  On the day before they were to meet Gloria at the bus station so they could make their transaction and go their separate ways, Nicholas drove out to San Carlos to talk to Gloria and to drop off some of the money they’d agreed on as an offering of good faith. It was his last day on the job and he was too nervous to wait any longer, so he abandoned his route and, with a jeep full of mail sacks, headed for the reservation.

  Gloria was inside the house at the kitchen table with four cans of beer set out in front of her and a bowl of melting ice cubes. Edgar was nowhere to be seen and the whole house ticked like a heating oven. Gloria was so drunk Nicholas had to yell at her to get her to respond. Finally, he put a hundred-dollar bill on the table and told her he and Rosa would be back that evening.

  When Nicholas stepped out into the hot white light, he wondered where Edgar might be. Probably in the back, he decided, digging holes or destroying anthills or spying on the neighbors. He wanted to tell the little guy good-bye, but knew he would be seeing him again soon enough. On his way out of the yard he ran his hands through the hanging beer cans. He sat on the hot vinyl seat of his jeep for a moment and listened to the strangely soothing music of the beer-tree. Then he cranked the ignition, started forward and crushed the life out of the boy he had come to love as his own son.

  Rosa was in the basement and did not hear her husband drive up and go into the garage. She was pouring out a bucket of water when she heard someone coming down the stairs. She turned and there was a man, naked except for his shoes and underwear, covered in blood and holding an ice pick.

  At first she didn’t recognize Nicholas and gathered herself to scream. Even when she saw who it was, her husband, this shy and courteous man who, after eleven years of marriage still asked permission to kiss her, the fear that had clutched at her throat did not fall away. It was not the blood that frightened her, smeared over his mout
h and arms and dabbed across his chest in dark rosettes. And it was not the ice pick, so obviously the cause of the small hole to the left of his Adam’s apple that leaked a single thick rivulet of blood. It was the look on his face, the lost and ravaged look of a man whose heart had been ripped right out of him.

  With the hem of her wet skirt she wiped the blood from his mouth and neck. She begged him to speak but he could only shake his head and whine like a child who wanted something but didn’t know how to ask.

  In an examination room at the hospital, after the doctor had given him a tranquilizer shot and put a couple of sutures in his neck, Nicholas explained to Rosa what had happened. He told her all of it in three or four sentences, short and to the point: He had gone out to San Carlos. He left some money with Gloria and told her they would come back later. He didn’t know how it happened, but somehow he had run over Edgar. I killed him, he said. I killed our boy.

  Rosa asked him if he was sure that Edgar was dead and Nicholas nodded, shuddering, his eyes gone dark. He wasn’t breathing and his head was crushed, he told her. I put my hands on it and I could feel it give.

  Even in her panic and grief, Rosa knew what had to be done. She led her husband out of the hospital, where the sun was a fierce white ball overhead, and took him home. While he sat slumped in the front seat, his face glazed with shock, she loaded up the suitcases she had already packed for their trip. They drove down to Phoenix, got a room in an airport motel and flew out the next morning, the empty seat next to them a silent accusation.

  For six years they lived in the old family house in Stony Run and hardly mentioned Edgar again. It wasn’t long before Nicholas’ jungle sickness returned, reinvigorated by the wet heat of the Pennsylvania summers. Their life became one long series of doctor visits, a never-ending regimen of pills and drops and tonics and powders and experimental diets. Still, every morning, six times a week Nicholas would pull himself out of bed and go to work at the packing plant where he’d been hired on as a freight manager. He worked long hours, came home in the evenings and sat in his plaid easy chair in the TV room where he took his dinners and watched game shows until he lost himself to a droning sleep.

  Sometimes Rosa wanted to sit down with him and talk it all out; she thought, if nothing else, it might ease his nervousness, might help the ulcers that were burning holes in his stomach. But whenever Rosa brought up the subject, Nicholas closed his eyes, grimacing a little as if waiting out a cramp in his bowels, until she left him alone. An uneasiness had come between them and she felt close to him only when he’d drink his vodka on Friday nights, which usually turned him childlike, even a little impish. He would talk to her then, and wasn’t afraid to touch her. Sometimes he’d even pull out his dusty accordion and play polka music that would make the dishes rattle in the cupboards.

  Mostly it was a sad life they led, full of hard silences and the cycle of Nicholas’ ailments. Many of their old friends did not know what to make of these two strangely morose and withdrawn people who used to host Hawaiian pig roasts in their backyard and had once taken second place in the Kiwanis Harvest Talent Show for their piano duet of “Be My Showboat,” which they played with their elbows. Worse than anything, they could no longer go to each other for solace. Rosa simply accepted this as their fate, as their just reward for wanting too much, for reaching beyond their bounds, for trying to take what was not rightfully theirs.

  Then one winter Nicholas came down with viral pneumonia and for three weeks lay in his hospital bed, grinding out each breath, until finally he gave up, tired of fighting his own worn-out and contaminated body, and one morning let himself drown in the fluid that had swamped his lungs. The family doctor, a World War II vet himself, claimed that it was the war that had killed Nicholas, it just took thirty years to do it. Rosa knew better.

  Since his death she had made the half-mile walk to the Joy of All Who Sorrow every Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday to attend services, to pray and ask for direction; she wanted to know what the Lord had in mind for her. For a year and a half she waited for an answer, until Edgar Mint, like Lazarus from the tomb, walked out of a rainstorm and into her life a second time.

  EDGAR’S ROOM

  MY HANDS HELD on to each other in my lap and I felt hard and brittle, as if I might fall apart at the slightest touch. I had kept my head down and eyes closed the whole time Rosa talked, her words washing into my mind like the images of a dream. When I looked up I was struck by the strangeness of the light coming through the windows, where water ran down the glass as thick as oil.

  Rosa watched me over her reading glasses. Her face was fixed in lines, rapt and unmoving, the dark skin of her cheeks tracked with tears. She went to a mahogany cabinet on the far side of the room and took a small stack of pictures from one of the drawers.

  “Nicky wanted me to throw these away,” she said. Her voice was pitted and rough and her accent clipped her words around the edges. “But I kept them down under the stairs. I like to look at them, see?”

  They were mostly pictures of little Edgar: little Edgar at the carnival trying to heft a rubber sledgehammer over his head, little Edgar posing with a clown, little Edgar in a buckaroo getup sighting down the barrel of a cap gun six-shooter, little Edgar sweaty and asleep in the backseat of a car, little Edgar doing a Superman impression in his underwear, a beach towel clothespinned around his neck. There were a few others with Rosa and Nicholas and then I came to one of me with my mother. We were standing in front of a plain brick wall. She had her hand draped over my chest and I held tightly to one of her silver-ringed fingers. She was smiling.

  A pressure built in my chest, expanding against my ribs. Rosa had gone into the kitchen and come back with a hand towel. “Look at this!” she said, suddenly flustered, dabbing the towel at my hair. “I let you sit there all wet and cold.”

  “How much,” I said.

  “How much?”

  “How much money were you going to pay for me?”

  She stepped back, looked down at her hands mechanically folding the towel into a tight square. “Oh Edgar, please—”

  I said, “I’d like to know, I guess.”

  She hesitated. She tucked the towel up under her chin. She said, “Nine hundred dollars.”

  I asked if I could use the bathroom. My feet had gone numb and I could not feel them make contact with the floor. I stood at the bottom of the stairs to check my balance and grabbed the banister with both hands, going up fist over fist, like a mountaineer scaling the face of a cliff.

  A claw-foot tub and a chipped sink filled most of the small bathroom. The faded, rose-colored wallpaper was peppered with scorch marks and black speckles of mold. A bunch of empty shower curtain hooks hung scattered along the length of the circular steel bar suspended above the tub like a halo.

  I closed the door behind me and sat on the tub’s curved lip. I began to choke up and I didn’t know if I was going to vomit or suffocate. I put my hand on the toilet lid, but it was something else coming up, a wind gathering deep in the hollows of me and pushing into my chest and throat. I tried to hold it in but it blew through the cracks of my teeth and out my nose with a sharp hissing whine.

  I could hear Rosa on the other side of the door and though I knew she was listening I couldn’t stop. There were so many things I had never cried for. But I cried for them now. My body slacked and I sobbed. I coughed and gagged. I pulled my shirt over my face and cried so hard that I could feel my once-broken skull strain at its seams.

  Through the door Rosa called my name. “It’s not your fault,” she said. “None of it.”

  After a time she came in and took a towel from the rack. I cried and she dried my face and hair. She helped me off with my wet shirt and draped the towel around my shoulders. It wasn’t long before I had settled into hiccuping and sniffling and rubbing at my eyes with the heels of my hands. Rosa ran her fingers through my hair and along the top of my head, pressing on it, testing its strength.

  “It’s lumpy,” I told her, and we l
aughed.

  “Come on with me,” she said, giving my wrist a little shake. “I got one more thing for you to see.”

  She took a ring of skeleton keys from the top of the banister post and led me down to the end of the upstairs hallway. She tried five or six keys before she found the one that fit. She twisted and rattled the glass knob until the door opened, scraping unwillingly across the floor.

  Along the edges of the room were stacked boxes and great, rolled-up bolts of fabric and different-sized spools of vinyl and leather. Under one window squatted an industrial sewing machine with a polished metal ring like a steering wheel. Everything was covered in a furry layer of dust and a few cobwebs swayed from the blades of the ceiling fan.

  “Mess, mess, mess!” Rosa cried, slapping the dust from a pillow which was leaking cotton batting from an open seam. “My arthritis got too bad and we had to move it all up here.”

  She pushed aside a moldering slab of foam rubber to reveal a small child’s bed and, behind that, shoved into a corner, a three-quarter-size desk with a matching chair. Cowboys tossed lariats and herded galloping mustangs across the bedspread. The headboard and desk and chair had also been designed with a Western theme; they were trimmed with rope and showed boots and spurs and crossed pistols in bas-relief.