by Brady Udall
Often during the course of these visits Art would peek through the crack in the curtain, making sure everything was all right. Sometimes when somebody took an extra-long time, had a long list of grievances or sins to tell, Art would yell out, “Okay, wrap it up, the boy needs his shut-eye!”
As I continued to get better, it became very hard to stay put in my bed. Often I would get up and wander the halls in my sweat-stained leather helmet, just for something to do. I’d walk with my back straight as a board—Jeffrey told me once that I should try to stay upright because the screws the doctors had put in my skull might come loose and if I were to bend over the top of my head might come off, allowing my brain to roll onto the floor. So I walked the halls with exquisite posture, my spine ramrod straight, making sure my brain stayed in my head where it belonged.
Just to have an excuse to get out of bed and walk the halls, to get out among the people, most of whom knew me and would call out “Edgar!” and pat me on the helmet, I was always claiming I had to pee. I could spend fifteen or twenty minutes sitting in one of the bathroom stalls, reading the graffiti. In fact, I became obsessed with the graffiti. Who were all these messages to? I wondered. What did Reggie is a cocksucker mean exactly? And who was Reggie? And why hadn’t he come to visit me?
Every time I used the bathroom I chose a different stall—sometimes even snuck down to the second floor—and memorized as much of the graffiti as I could. I would then race back to my Hermes Jubilee and add to my already long list:
Liquor in the front Poker in the rear
PLEASE PLEASE LET ME DIE
Cunnilingus is next to Godliness
genitals prefer blondes
God bless the farmacy
has anyone besides me checked out nurse falinski’s ass??
I feel better now
Eat shit, Marty!!!
I would secretly pore over these lists, until I had them all memorized. I had certain favorites: Eat shit, Marty!!! seemed particularly hilarious to me and I would giggle to myself under my covers, imagining Marty eating shit, until my sides ached and a nurse would come in to see if I was all right. My only regret was that I could not, however much I wanted to, scribble on one of those stall walls my name or a message of my own.
But I began to feel something—Mrs. Rodale, the social services lady, had asked me that day if I was happy, and I was pretty sure that was what, despite everything, I was beginning to feel: happiness. I was starting to feel comfortable with the place, coming to believe that St. Divine’s would be a good place for me to stay, when Dr. Barry Pinkley, the man who had saved my life, crawled through the window one night and threw everything out of whack.
FIRST BEER
FOR THE SEVEN years my mother and I were together, I was nothing but an inconvenience to her, a burden, a source of pain, and her pregnancy with me was no exception. Once Arnold’s sperm had penetrated one of her eggs to create a single cell that would eventually become little Edgar, everything went to hell; she fell violently ill, puking every other hour, unable to do much more than lie on the old mattress and get some sleep between attacks of nausea.
During the two weeks after Arnold had run off into the street my mother held out hope that he hadn’t really left her; maybe the sight of her pregnant had spooked him, maybe Grandma Paul had scared him off, but she knew the hard truth: he was never coming back.
My mother didn’t know why her being pregnant could have frightened him away. On a few of those sweet nights in the back of Arnold’s pickup after making love, the moon out and the river rustling the dry stalks, they had talked about having children. Arnold said that he wanted to have a family, wanted to buy some land far away from Grandma Paul and the reservation, maybe raise a few horses and cows along with a handful of kids.
The only real reason my mother could come up with was this: Arnold was a white man. If nothing else, Grandma Paul had taught her that white men are strange, white men make no sense, and always, without fail, white men will tell you one thing and do another. Grandma Paul said she knew of only one trustworthy white person in all of human history and that was Jesus Christ Himself. Grandma believed that even the pastor of her Pentecostal church, Reverend Bernadine, was a fraud.
On a Sunday morning my mother woke up to find an envelope pushed through a tear in the screen sometime in the night. She knew immediately who it was from, and for awhile she did nothing but stare at it, imagining Arnold standing at her window in the silver moonlight, looking in on her while she slept.
The envelope contained a two-page letter and eighty-five dollars and thirty-five cents, Arnold’s entire pay for the previous two weeks. Arnold began his letter like this: Dear Gloria, I am SORRY, I am SORRY, I AM SORRY. He went on to tell that he was leaving that very day for Rock Springs, Wyoming, where he and one of his new buddies from the Hope ranch were going to get on with a real cowboy outfit. Arnold was still hoping for his chance to ride a horse.
He went on to say in his convoluted and overly polite way that because he was from Connecticut he hadn’t understood that white folks and Indians were never meant to be together. I AM SORRY, he wrote. I just wish somebody would have told me about this sooner! Please take this money and buy some nice things with it. Give my best to Grandma Paul. Good luck! Your friend, Arnold
My mother tucked the letter back into the envelope next to the money and put it on the floor where she’d found it, hoping that if she left the room for a minute, it might disappear. She went outside under the ramada and knelt next to the slop bucket, desperately wanting to vomit but unable to. Looking down into that bucket she was reminded of how her father, Grandpa Lonny, used to sit out under the ramada and drink all day until he puked into the very same bucket. She remembered how serene he always looked, how particularly unworried and careless, sipping at his Pabst Blue Ribbons, sometimes chasing the beer with a swig of homemade bathtub gin. Even when he puked everything inside him into that bucket, puked so hard his jaw came unhinged, he would keep that perfectly calm expression, as if the cycle of drinking and puking were a meditation.
My mother stood up, went back into the bedroom and picked the envelope off the floor. She took out two bills—a one and a five—and held them up to her nose, hoping to find some trace of Arnold on them, but to her the money smelled like just what it was: betrayal, loneliness, other terrible things she now knew had been chasing her all her life.
She went out into the front yard and called for Nola Herrera, the little mestizo girl who lived across the street. She told Nola that she’d give her a dollar bill to take the five over to Arliss Sloan’s house (Arliss was widely known as a prepared drunk; he always had his refrigerator well stocked with beer and homemade pickles) and exchange it for a couple of six-packs, Pabst Blue Ribbons if he had them.
When my mother got the beer she went out back under the ramada and sat in Grandpa Lonny’s old chair next to the slop bucket and popped open the first beer of her life. She drank and drank, and during the entire rest of her pregnancy never vomited again.
GHOST IN THE NIGHT
IT WAS IN the middle of a hot March night that Edgar woke from a dead sleep knowing a ghost was coming for him. For two weeks now he had been using his urinal puck to ward off the ghosts who came in the early morning hours and until now it had seemed to work: as long as he slept with the puck under his pillow, the ghosts hadn’t shown themselves.
There was a muffled clanging that seemed to vibrate through the floor, converging toward me. I sat up in bed, instantly wide awake. I took the puck from under my pillow and rubbed at it fiercely, its sharp, disinfectant smell burning my nostrils. The clanging stopped and a figure appeared in the window, a black cutout without face or depth, backlit by the lights of Globe and a sky glittering with stars.
For a long time the figure stayed motionless, as if trying to survey the room through the darkness. I did not blink or swallow. There was a tapping noise and the window opened an inch, then another, shrieking with each pull. The figure, a man, swore under
his breath and yanked at the window, but he couldn’t seem to make it budge any more. This was definitely not like any other ghost who had come before.
Art continued to snore like he was sleeping submerged in a bathtub and Jeffrey made little yipping sounds and whistled delicately through his nose.
The figure stuck his head through the window, looked around, pulled his arms inside, and just about had his torso in when he slipped forward, his weight dragging him down and pulling his legs through the opening, so that he was dumped all at once on the tiled floor.
Art turned over in his bed and bellowed, “What in Judas—” and the figure scrambled on his knees over to Art’s bed and whispered fiercely through his teeth, “Mr. Crozier, it’s me, Dr. Pinkley! Please keep it down.”
Art reached out with his good hand and grabbed a handful of Dr. Pinkley’s shirt and pulled him nearly onto the bed. “Who is this?”
“Please!” Barry Pinkley almost screeched, “you’ve got to whisper! I’m Dr. Pinkley. I used to come by here on rounds a few months back. I’m a doctor.”
Art scrutinized Barry’s face for a second, then let go of his shirt so that Barry had to grab the bedcovers to keep from sliding onto the floor. Jeffrey kept up his nose-whistling and through the open window came the smell of dust and fumes and the faint barking of coyotes. It was the first time the window had been open since I had been there, and those smells and sounds—the chuff-chuff-chuff of sprinklers, the dry, sagey heat of the desert you could taste on your tongue—were as much a shock to my senses as this ghost crawling into our room in the middle of the night.
“Jesus, Art,” said Barry, pulling himself to his feet and clamping his hand over his face. “You still wearing that cologne? I think my nose hairs just fell out.”
He moved to the foot of Art’s bed and stood in a narrow band of light coming from a streetlamp in the parking lot. To me, Barry looked like a baby, a six-foot-tall baby. His face was round and soft and he had pink cheeks and fleshy lips and fine, curly hair that was damp around his ears. His skin had a milky white cast that allowed the branching blue veins of his temples to show through. Even the long threadbare trench coat he wore could not hide the way his belly protruded and his chest seemed to suck in with each breath. He was sweating so much that his face sparkled in the dark room.
Art groaned, twisted himself into an upright position. “It’s got to be three in the got-danged morning.”
Dr. Pinkley squinted and scanned the room but it was dark except for the light he was standing in. “Just came by for a visit, see how things are going.”
“It’s three in the morning and you just crawled through the window.”
“I truly apologize, but I didn’t have a choice. The bastards here won’t let me through the front door. They’ve barred me from the place altogether, if you can believe that. You call that America, somebody barred from visiting his former place of employment? It’s fucked up, Art, that’s why I’m crawling through the window this time of night.”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“It doesn’t matter. Is he here?”
“Who?”
“Edgar Mint. I got word he was still in this room.”
Art leaned forward, tried to grab Dr. Pinkley by the arm. “Now don’t go waking the boy.”
Barry pulled a penlight out of his pocket and waved the beam across the room until it rested on me. I kept quiet, squinting into the light.
Barry knelt next to me, his face very close to mine, and switched the light off. I could see that he was smiling at me, his teeth tiny and square and evenly spaced—the teeth of a baby. Barry might have looked like a baby but he did not smell like one; the stench of cigarettes and gasoline came off him in waves.
“God, Edgar,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder. His eyes were lit with a keen, fevered light. “I’ve wanted so much to stop in and see how you’re doing. I’ve been hearing great things about you. How are you feeling?”
I about gave in and said “Fine” but I kept my mouth shut. Just when I thought I was pretty much free of the medical profession, here came another doctor, through the window in the middle of the night no less, with his penlight, his tie, his “How are you feeling?”
“He’s peachy,” Art said. “Now why don’t you git.”
“Why don’t I git?” Barry spun to face Art. “I’m not going to git because there has to be somebody to look out for this boy’s welfare. His parents are gone, he’s trying to recover from head trauma the likes of which I’ve never seen, and they’ve got him here in this piece-of-shit hospital with the likes of you. You might have forgotten, but I saved this child’s life and it seems I’m the only one who gives a damn about him.”
“That’s it,” Art said. “I’m calling in the cavalry.” He reached out to hit the call button next to his bed, and knocked a steel medication tray to the ground, causing a tremendous clatter. Jeffrey shot up clutching the air and shouted, “Please, not my fingers!”
Barry Pinkley sighed. “Look, I’m not here to cause problems.” He shined his penlight at his watch. “Nurse Lovett is on rounds down in the second wing, will be for twenty more minutes, so you don’t need to bother with the call button. You’re not dealing with an idiot here.”
“And who is this?” Jeffrey wanted to know. Barry shined his light on Jeffrey, whose eyes throbbed and hair swayed back and forth on top of his head like seaweed.
Barry went to the window and pulled something off the fire escape: an old-fashioned leather doctor’s bag with a silver clasp. From it he took out a six-pack of beer and handed it to Art, the gold cans dully glinting. He then took the paper sack the beer had been in and pulled it over the lamp next to Art’s bed. When he turned the lamp on it gave off an orange, smoky glow, just enough to see everyone by.
“I remember you saying this is what you missed most about being in here,” Barry said, gesturing to the beer, which Art held out in front of him like a bomb. “I even brought something for Jeffrey.”
“And who are you again?” said Jeffrey.
Barry produced a brown pill bottle from his pocket and when Jeffrey saw what it was, and what was written on it, he forgot all about Barry’s identity and went to work trying to get the cap off.
Barry checked my pupils, had me squeeze one of his pudgy fingers, asked me to follow his penlight as he waved it in front of my eyes. Then he put his hands into my hair, pressing lightly on my skull with his fingertips in different places, like somebody worrying over a cantaloupe at the supermarket. “A little lumpy, but not bad.”
Barry threw his hands in the air. He seemed exasperated in a happy sort of way. “Well, this is quite extraordinary, isn’t it? I really thought they had to be pulling my leg. Skull fracture, three months in a coma, and here he is looking ready to join the Marines. This just doesn’t happen, no it doesn’t. There’s something special about you, Edgar, you’ve got some kind of destiny to fulfill. That’s the only explanation.”
“Destiny!” cried Jeffrey, who had wrestled open the bottle, sucked down a couple of pills and was now propped up against his pillow, a look of transcendence on his face. It was much too soon for the pills to have begun working but it appeared that just the possibility, the expectation of a high was enough for Jeffrey. He looked like a man who was about to find the answers to everything.
Art said to Barry, “What I want to know is, as long as you’re here, whatever happened to the policeman that ran over him? I don’t know how no policeman can run over no little kid and not have to spend a day in jail.”
“Policeman?”
“The policeman that ran over him.”
“There wasn’t any policeman. It was a mailman. Some mailman in a mail jeep.”
“Ppfft,” Art said. “This is how it is in here. The boy nearly dies, and we can’t get the correct information on it. If we didn’t have this radio they could tell us the moon fell out of the sky and killed every last person in Kansas and we wouldn’t be any the wis
er.”
Barry looked at all of us. “You mean you really don’t know what happened?”
“We don’t know a thing!” Jeffrey beamed.
Art was starting to get himself worked up. “I mean, here is a boy, all alone in here, don’t know what’s going on, and they won’t explain what’s happened. He asks me about it, asks me about his mama and everything else and what am I supposed to tell him? Why won’t they give us the information?”
“They’re fuckers, is why,” Barry said. “This place is full of know-it-all fuckers who don’t give a shit about anything but their own reputations.”
“Watch your mouth in front of the kid,” said Art.
“Fuckers!” Jeffrey cried jubilantly.
“Christ in the early morning,” Art said.
Barry apologized to me for swearing—said he wouldn’t let it happen again—and then told the story, in full and painful detail, of my accident. He didn’t leave out a thing; he told about the makeshift ambulance and the way Grandma Paul wailed and the way the mailman had taken off his pants and wrapped them around my head. He told us of how he had pounded the life back into me with his fists and the newspapers had given credit to the neurosurgeon who had done nothing more than put my skull back together, which any imbecile with a drill and some wire could do.
“I guess that mailman got all tore up over it,” Barry said, smiling and shaking his head. “He thought he’d killed you. Everybody was sure you were dead! Everybody. How could a kid survive a mail jeep on his head? In the end that mailman tried to commit suicide.”
“Suicide?” I said.
“Hey, suicide,” said Jeffrey, “all right!”
Barry shot Jeffrey a dirty look. “He tried to kill himself. Stabbed himself in the neck with an ice pick, if you can believe that. Everybody assumed you were dead and nobody bothered to tell him differently. I sewed him up, right in the emergency room here. He was blubbering incoherent jibber-jabber, and his wife only told me he stabbed himself, didn’t tell me he was actually the guy who’d run over Edgar. So I put a few stitches in him, referred him to the staff psychiatrist and sent him on his way. Next thing I hear he and the wife have disappeared, skipped town.”