by Brady Udall
My mother didn’t take long to decide; even though she thought Arnold was the strangest person she’d ever met, fifty dollars was a lot of money, more than she would make in her three days at the rodeo. She thought of the dresses she could buy, the nice shoes—she thought about getting herself a pair of sunglasses like Marilyn Monroe wore in Some Like It Hot. My poor mother wasn’t aware that the gift certificate was for a feed and tack store.
With his good arm, Arnold guided my mother out to the parking lot, opened the door to his old, dented Ford, and helped her in. Down the road they went: Arnold, my father, worked the pedals and the steering wheel and Gloria, my mother, shifted. Exactly nine months and two days later I was born.
THE AMBULANCE
A GLOWING-WHITE mailman weeping over a boy with a broken head leaking blood and spinal fluid out of his ears, a throng of Apaches standing back at a safe distance, an old grandmother off to the side in the hackberry, already beginning her funeral wail, two fat crows in a tree full of blue-and-white cans presiding over it all: this is the scene Ed and Horace Natchez, twin brothers and tribal ambulance volunteers, came upon when they pulled up in the makeshift reservation ambulance. Ed and Horace lived only a quarter of a mile from Grandma Paul’s house, and they were pissed off that there hadn’t been enough open road for them to really get that ambulance hauling ass.
It should be noted that what Ed and Horace were riding in was not a true ambulance. It was actually a huge black Dodge van the tribal police had recently confiscated from a group of German hippies who had been caught selling marijuana from the side of the highway. Nobody had gotten around to painting it yet, and there was no money in the budget to outfit it with modern emergency equipment. All it had was an oxygen tank, an emergency field kit no bigger than a bass fisherman’s tackle box, and a World War II army stretcher someone had found in the cellar of the elementary school. It wasn’t much, but as could be said about most things on the reservation, it was better than nothing.
Ed and Horace had only minimal training, so when they got their first good look at me, they came to the same conclusion everybody else had: the boy with the mailman’s clothes wadded around his head was a goner. They didn’t even bother with any pulse-taking or pupil-checking, they simply pried the mailman’s hands away from the boy’s shoulder and gently put the limp body on the stretcher, which, in its time, might have transported wounded boys on the battlefields of France or Okinawa.
“Hey, will you guys bring me back a pack of Pall Malls from Globe?” Emerson Tuskogie asked. Emerson had to shout to be heard over Grandma Paul’s wailing.
“Don’t got no money!” Ed shouted back.
Emerson began digging through his pockets for change while Ed and Horace got the stretcher situated in the back of the van.
Horace took the clothes from around the dead boy’s head and handed the bloody clump to the mailman, who knelt in the gravel, his face gone blank.
“You don’t want to get sunburned,” Horace told him.
Ed shut the heavy rear door of the van and Emerson said, “Damn, I only got thirty-five cents.”
Off in the mesquite bushes, Grandma Paul’s praying got even louder. She prayed to Jesus, and to Yusen, god of all living things, and to the ghosts of the dead. She prayed not that I would survive, but that I would find my way through the perils of the afterlife, that I would be free from the wily clutches of the devil and make my way home to Jesus. Grandma Paul wailed and prayed and paused only for a second to watch as Ed and Horace got into their seats, slammed the van’s big black doors and started out over the damaged reservation roads, carrying me away into a strange new life.
THE RESURRECTION OF EDGAR
FOR ME, IT’S a little hard to accept—my own death and I have no recollection of it. Like most of what occurred in the first seven years of my life, I’ll have to take someone else’s word that it ever happened.
All I can say for certain is that at some point between the time the tire flattened my head and I was wheeled into the tiny emergency room of St. Divine’s Hospital in Globe, I stopped living. My ravaged brain threw in the towel and my other vital organs gave in shortly thereafter. My heart quivered to a stop, my lungs shut down and I became an inanimate object; just as alive or dead as a cereal bowl or a park bench.
It was a young, baby-faced doctor named Barry Pinkley who decided he was going to bring me back from the land of the dead. Any other doctor would have taken one look at me, recorded an approximate time of death and called the hospital chaplain. Not spitfire Barry Pinkley, a graduate of Johns Hopkins who had recently finished his residency at Hartfell Memorial in downtown New Orleans, where he saw enough grisliness and gore to make a combat surgeon shudder. It was only Barry’s second day at St. Divine’s and he was so thoroughly bored with the slow pace of everything that when a seven-year-old half-breed was brought in with a crushed head and no vital signs, he decided he was going to liven things up and perform a miracle.
Barry later said, with a touch of doctorly arrogance, that he was not about to see his first real patient head for the morgue instead of the ICU. (He had had two previous patients, who, in his mind, didn’t count: a man with a fishhook in his eyelid and a two-year-old girl who had swallowed half a quart of motor oil.)
The first thing Barry did after checking little Edgar’s vital signs was to start an IV and insert a tube down his throat. After half a minute when no pulse came, he took the next step: chest percussion. Instead of placing his palms on the boy’s sternum and pumping, as you often see in the movies, Barry hammered on little Edgar’s chest with the meaty part of his fist and he was not at all shy about it: he lifted his arm over his head as if the boy was a vampire and he was going to drive a stake into the heart of him. He pounded him with such force that the small body jumped a few inches off the gurney and the attending nurses gasped and backed away as if Barry might go after them next.
It took twelve solid hammerblows to the chest, he told me later, to persuade my heart to start pumping again. “Wherever you were, you must have liked it there,” he said. “I had to beat the hell out of you just to get you to come back.”
After that, Barry couldn’t do much more than give me a shot of steroids in hopes of bringing the swelling around my brain down. Barry reluctantly allowed me to be rushed to Phoenix (in a real ambulance this time) where a neurosurgeon was waiting. Barry had brought me back, and like Dr. Frankenstein who gave the monster life, I think Barry felt a kind of ownership toward me, a responsibility. He didn’t like it at all when he had to relinquish me to the care of a two-thousand-dollar-an-hour champion neurosurgeon.
This neurosurgeon didn’t do much more than give my head a few X rays, staple the jigsaw-puzzle pieces of my skull back in place, and drill a few burr-holes from which fluid and blood could be drained. After the three-hour operation he snapped off his gloves and told the attending nurses he’d buy them all dinner and drinks if I made it through the night.
I stayed in Phoenix less than a month. Everyone agreed that my survival was either an absolute miracle or a freak happenstance, however you wanted to look at it, but there was also general agreement that simple survival was as far as the miracle would go: there was no chance on earth I was going to be anything but the mental and physical equivalent of a turnip. Even though I was off the respirator within two weeks, even though my heart was strong, they simply couldn’t believe that a brain which had received such trauma could ever work properly again. That is why they shipped me back to Globe. The official reason for sending me back was that I would be closer to my family. The real reason was that they wanted to fill my bed with somebody who actually had a chance.
EDGAR IN A COMA
SO FAR, EVERYTHING I’ve told you is secondhand, no more reliable than gossip in church. It is my story, but all I’ve related until now either happened out of my presence or while I was unconscious or dead. A small luxury, then, to be finally getting to a portion of my life I can actually remember.
After three
months in a coma, I guess the only thing dramatic about little Edgar’s return to consciousness was that nobody expected it. I had been shoved into a corner of a room which I shared with three men who were quite pleased to have a new roommate so quiet and unassuming, so perfectly well behaved.
Edgar lay in his bed completely still, like a fish on ice, the windows and doors of his brain nailed down tight. After a week or two they pretty much forgot about him—he was nothing more than a piece of unused furniture pushed into the corner of the room. He was especially easy to disregard because during those entire three months he never once had a visitor.
Not that I was completely ignored; each day doctors shone penlights into my eyes, raked their knuckles across my chest, dug their fingers into my eye sockets, pressed the point of a paper clip or a pencil into the beds of my fingernails, did whatever they could to get a response, any response at all. Orderlies massaged my muscles and worked my joints, nurses changed my IV bottles and bedpans, all of them thinking the same thing: What an incredible waste of time.
At some point toward the end of those three months, my brain began to make brief forays into consciousness. I can’t say I was exactly conscious during those times; I did not think or want or feel pain. But some small part of my mind would whir to life temporarily, like a pump priming itself, and record what was going on around me. I know this because, even though I was in a coma, there are things I remember.
I remember those damn penlights. I remember the voice of the intercom in the hall, deep and disembodied like the voice of God, calling doctors here and there, making pronouncements. I remember snatches of conversations, the clink-clink of silverware on trays, the subterranean rumble of the mining machinery outside, the nurses’ shoes busily beating the floors like rubber hammers. I remember, word for word, a conversation between two young men—they must have been orderlies—right above my bed:
Orderly one: “I don’t know, man, it’s like everyone on TV is shouting at me. It’s scary. It’s like every room I go into the TV is yelling at me.”
Orderly two: “How much of that tab did you drop?”
Orderly one: “All of it.”
Orderly two: “All of it! I told you to drop, what, half of it maybe?”
Orderly one: “You don’t know what it’s like to walk into a room and have Walter Cronkite start screaming at you. It’s exactly the kind of thing that makes me nervous.”
Orderly two: “The whole tab!”
Orderly one: “You should hear what he said to me.”
Orderly two: “Who?”
Orderly one: “Walter Cronkite.”
Orderly two: “Shit.”
Orderly one: “He called me a hairbag.”
Orderly two: “A what?”
Orderly one: “You heard me.”
Orderly two: “Geez. Maybe you’ll listen to me next time then.”
Orderly one: “Well at least this kid is peaceful. He keeps his mouth shut. He’s a nice kid as far as I’m concerned.”
Orderly two: “It’s the cops that ran him over. He’s nice and peaceful because of the cops.”
I remember some of the dreams I began to have, too: brief, claustrophobic hallucinations that only an eight-year-old boy (during my coma I’d had a birthday) in a semi-unconscious state could have: flying hamburgers and cartoon pigs with fangs and malfunctioning robots throwing themselves out of trees on top of me. I remember doctors whispering to each other about their sexual fantasies involving a certain nurse, nurses bitching about the doctors and the ungrateful patients, patients complaining about the doctors, the nurses and the food.
And suddenly, as if a switch had turned on somewhere, I began to smell things. To this day the smell of ammonia cleaner, the kind they mop floors with, makes me physically sick. The way the nurses smelled, some like sweat, others like soap or perfume; the garlic breath of the doctors as they checked my pupils for the thousandth time; the smell of gauze soaked with mucus and needing to be changed—salty, fecund and dead. There was the chance whiff of flowers, the weak stench of my own shit, and the overpowering smell, almost a rival to the ammonia floor cleaner, of Art Crozier’s cheap cologne.
Art was the patient in the bed next to mine. His face was the first thing, after three months in the dark, that I laid eyes on.
My coming out of my coma was a gradual thing; there was not a scene, like in movies and soap operas, where I suddenly sat up and asked for a hot fudge sundae and the New York Times. During the last weeks of my three months of coma, the doctors noticed that I was showing signs of life—I was beginning to react to some stimuli, I was moving my limbs during the night. Then one bright afternoon I opened my eyes and looked around. And there was Art, his small, terrifying face hanging over me. Luckily, my vision was screwed up by the utter whiteness of the place. Everything in hospitals is white—white walls, white floors, white sheets, white people walking around in white clothes. Why so much white? I have no idea. I only know that whiteness and all the ricocheting light it creates can be a shock to the retinas of somebody who’s been living in a world of black for so long. So I really wasn’t aware that the misshapen thing in front of me was actually a face.
“Lookit!” Art shouted through his reconstructed mouth, loud enough to make my eardrums ring. His voice carried like a shout in a cave. “The kid’s got his eyeballs open!”
It wasn’t long before there was a crowd of doctors, nurses and other patients gathered around my bed. Someone would move and I could see an after-image of that person moving slowly behind, like a spirit too slow for its body. People were muttering, elbowing in, jockeying for position. I wanted nothing to do with any of it, with the light, with the roaring, obnoxious noise. I worked at my tongue, which felt like a hunk of old bread. There was one word in my head, and that word croaked out of my mouth, dusty and hoarse: “No.”
That got a response. I had intended to shut everyone up but it only made things worse; the real griping and jostling started, the doctors giving out orders, the nurses calling for the orderlies to clear the room, the patients protesting and complaining. Over the din, in his booming voice, Art hollered, “Give the child some space, got-dangit!”
I shut my eyes tight, hoping to block it all out, but there was nothing I could do; for better or worse I was back in the world.
A RESERVATION ROMANCE
IF MY LIFE could be contained in a word it would be this one: accidents. Not only do I share in a notorious family history of calamity and accident, not only was I involved in a life-altering accident at age seven, not only would I be involved in a few more accidents in my time, I actually was an accident; as you might have imagined, my birth was not a planned one.
Two days after leaving the rodeo together my mother and Arnold Kessler Mint checked into the Wig Wam Motel on Highway 70 just west of Holbrook. At the Wig Wam tourists could pay for the privilege of spending a night in one of twenty-five thirty-foot-high pink or purple (your choice) cement teepees which were furnished with a bathroom, a TV and a vibrating bed. It was off-season, only a few Japanese tourists were about clutching rubber tomahawks and snapping pictures of everything in sight, so Arnold was able to convince the manager to give them a discount rate for the week.
I don’t believe my mother ever really knew what she was getting into. In a family of drinkers and daredevils, my mother was the reserved one, the cherished and protected little girl who never had a drink until she became pregnant with me, who never had sex until, at age eighteen, she slept in a purple cement teepee with a white man named Arnold Kessler Mint.
During that week they had alone together, Arnold blew his whole savings, everything he had made shearing and tending sheep, on my mother. He treated her to huge pancake breakfasts, took her to the movies, bought her perfume and dresses and a pair of dark green alligator-hide pumps that she would cherish above all her other possessions. Arnold Kessler Mint was in love.
And what about my mother? I don’t know if she was in love with Arnold then; to her, this week s
pent at the Wig Wam Motel might have been nothing more than her first fling in the big wide world, but the fact is, if she didn’t love him then, my mother came to love Arnold in a way that would color the rest of her life. I like to think that at least she had that week of freedom and unrestraint, because things were going to turn sour very shortly.
First of all, there was Grandma Paul, waiting down in San Carlos. Grandma Paul was not known as a patient woman, or a forgiving one, or even a particularly nice one, and she was overprotective of her daughter. She had already lost her husband and two sons to early deaths and the world be damned if she was going to lose her last surviving child to a white man.
When my mother showed up in front of the little house sitting shotgun in Arnold’s blue ’56 Ford, Grandma Paul marched out across the weed-ridden front yard and yanked my mother out of Arnold’s pickup as if she was pulling her from a house in flames. Grandma Paul was not a big woman, but she locked both hands around my mother’s elbow and began towing her toward the house, my mother screaming protests, Grandma Paul cursing my mother in shrill, arm-shaking bursts, and Arnold Mint standing next to his truck, grinning and sweating like somebody was holding a gun to his head.
Grandma Paul wrestled her all the way to the front door before my mother was able to break free and sprint back to where Arnold was standing. She was able to tell him, in a whispered rush, that he should leave and come back tomorrow, that they could meet at noon out by the stop sign—and then Grandma Paul was on her again, pulling on her shirt and rearing back like a tiny, determined dog.
Arnold got into his pickup and rode away. He drove slowly down the cratered dirt road and waved to the people who had come out of their houses to see what Grandma Paul was up to now, but nobody waved back. Arnold didn’t know what to do; he was nearly out of cash and he surmised, correctly, that spending the night alone on the reservation might not be the best idea. He ended up driving to Globe, where he bought a ten-cent hot dog for dinner and spent the night in the back of his pickup in the parking lot of the Safeway.