by Brady Udall
For Nelson’s purposes, I was perfect. Unlike most of the others, I was small enough to slip through the window bars. I knew every inch of the school grounds, had the duct systems memorized and had access to Uncle Julius’ tools whenever I needed them. And I was a natural burglar: thorough, cautious and patient as a statue. But more importantly, I was a brain-injured retard who didn’t have the good sense to dodge an apple when it was thrown at him—I was never suspected of anything.
In return for my services, I was kept under Nelson’s protection—in a sense, I now had a tribe of my own. Though I didn’t really understand how it had come about, this is the pact we had made. I would do his dirty work, and Nelson let everyone know that he owned me and I was not to be messed with or used by anyone else. Of course, this only made people like Glen and Rotten Teeth resent me all the more. While nobody threw anything at me on the parade grounds or towel-whipped me in the showers, every so often I’d get a surreptitious punch to the gut in lunch line, or a homemade dart stuck in my back during class.
It was an enormous relief when May rolled around and everyone, except five or six of us permanents, went home for the summer. What a luxury it was to be able to spend three or four hours a day pounding on my Hermes Jubilee, getting it all down. I typed because it felt good, because I had nothing else to do, because I thought by getting it on paper, by turning the nameless into words, I might understand things a little better. I made up stories about my mother in California, how she lived on a beach with palm trees and every day wrote letters to the police trying to find out where I was; about Art, discovering that it was all a mistake, his wife and daughters were not dead at all but had been living in a castle with a bunch of nuns; about the mailman who had run over me, who every day took letters and packages to people and told them, “I am a bad man, I killed a boy.” I typed because typing, for me, was as good as having a conversation. I typed because I had to. I typed because I was afraid I might disappear.
I helped Uncle Julius with his maintenance work, snooped around the teachers’ houses, tried to spy on Mrs. Whipple whenever I could. Every once in awhile, a tourist or two, usually foreigners—Danes and Swedes and Germans who idolized the noble red man and his spiritual worldview—would come to look at the old historic buildings, to see the place where the last remnants of the wild, rampaging Apache had been hounded into submission. The tribe had put up a few markers indicating anything of historical significance, and even started a tiny gift shop out of the old post office, but Fort Apache was so far out of the way that we could go a whole week without seeing a stranger.
The first tourist I ever talked to was an enormous hippie pushing around all his belongings in a shopping cart. He wore only a pair of grime-stiffened shorts and leather sandals and he strolled around the grounds, maneuvering his cart through gravel and weeds like the happiest of shoppers.
When he saw me watching him, he came over and looked down at me through the matted bramble of his hair. Then he opened his arms wide, gesturing at the officers’ quarters, the old barracks, the cavalry stables up on the hill, the mountains in the distance.
“Wild,” he said slowly, drawing the word out. “It’s all wild.”
He stayed like that, swaying just a little bit, then turned his attention back to me. “Can you say something, you know, in your native tongue?”
“Cunnilingus,” I said.
He squinted at me for a moment. “Wild,” he said.
By the time August came to an end, I was so shot through with boredom I couldn’t help but be happy at the thought of school starting, of having something to do. The first day of school I managed to remain invisible until lunch recess started and I saw the older boys rounding up the new ones, herding them into the center of the parade grounds like wayward cattle. I was startled when Rotten Teeth came up behind my hiding place under the bleachers, grabbed the short hairs of my neck and yanked me toward the scrum of terrified boys. I tried to protest, reminding him that Nelson and I were on good terms, but he yanked harder.
“This is for all the new kids, don’t matter who,” he said.
“But I’m not new!”
“You’re new enough.”
Scotty Pena, a slope-chinned Papago, was the master of ceremonies. He indicated how the other older boys should make two parallel lines about three feet apart, and then grabbed the first new kid he saw, a chubby yellow-skinned guy. The older boys pulled off their belts or searched the ground for sticks. I could see Sterling, way down at the end, slicing the air with his new arm crutches, which he could no longer get around without. “This is how the old Indi’ns used to do it!” Scotty called out gleefully, to nobody in particular. “I saw it on TV!”
The yellow-skinned boy was already blubbering before he took the first hit, and as he bounced his way through the gauntlet, he cried out mournfully with each kick, punch and swat of the belt. The worst of his beating came when he fell down and was crowded around by a knot of older boys, laughing and gritting their teeth while they stomped him and swung their belts in short vicious arcs. Once he emerged from the other end he collapsed on his belly and puffed like a fish heaving onto the banks of a river.
I watched three or four boys go through, little poofs of lice powder rising each time they took a shot to the head, and I came to this simple conclusion: run fast and, no matter what, keep your feet.
When it was my turn, I did not hesitate, did not give the tiring gauntleteers a chance to gather themselves from the last beating. I covered my head with my arms as best I could and ducked forward like somebody stepping out into a hailstorm. I veered crazily, bumping into knees and stomachs, taking a few good shots here and there but keeping my feet under me and eventually emerging at the end, feeling like I had accomplished something; I had managed, for once, not to get too badly hurt. Despite a split lip and a stinging scrape on the back of my neck, I felt strong, full of juice. I thought I might be getting the hang of things after all. That’s when Rotten Teeth came up behind me, and with a doubled length of rusted baling wire whipped me across the lower back so hard that it felt like I was cut in half. I let out a high yelp, like a dog, which gave everyone a good laugh.
The two playground monitors that day, Mr. Stevens and Miss Oliver, sat at one of the outside tables two hundred yards away, their backs to us, eating their lunch and chatting about their carefree adult lives. From the other side of the grounds, the girls had gathered to watch and pretty soon they were rounding up the new ones and organizing a gauntlet of their own.
At lunch, the new boys, cut up, bruised and hangdog, commiserated silently at one table, shoveling food into their mouths while keeping an eye out for any sign of further danger. I wanted to shout at them—This isn’t the worst! If you only knew!—but I passed on by. I could have joined them and nobody would have complained, I might even have been welcomed, but a certain pride rose in me—I was not a new boy, I had experience, I was a sixth grader. Despite being only ten years old and never turning in a single assignment or saying a word in class except to ask about using the bathroom, I had passed the fifth grade.
At the far end of the seething lunchroom I saw someone sitting alone in my space under the basketball hoop. There was no mistaking it was another new boy: purpling welt at the side of his eye, dusty clothes, blood-crusted nostrils. I placed my tray on the table just across from him and began to eat. He sat stock-still and looked at his food as if he didn’t know what it was. He had a flat, padded face, a thin gash of a mouth and perfectly bowl-cropped hair that was as black and shiny as crude oil. Except for his rough flannel shirt and jeans, he looked exactly like one of the Winomami—mostly naked Amazon aborigines I had read about in the National Geographics Art had given me. Could he have really come all that way to live at Willie Sherman? I knew that some of the kids came from places far away, but the Amazon was a jungle.
I caught his eye and said, “Winomami?”
He met my gaze but said nothing.
I tried another of the jungle tribes I rem
embered reading about: “Kayapo?”
He might have raised his shoulder ever so slightly—a shrug—but that was it. If he was an Amazon tribesman, I guess he didn’t feel like discussing it.
We kept silent for the rest of lunch, occasionally sneaking looks at one another. He didn’t touch his food and when he stood up to go, he held out his unopened carton of chocolate milk. I took it and drank it down, keeping my eyes on him, and was almost sure I saw the barest hint of a smile. We were both bruised and bloody and white on the edges with lice powder. His name was Cecil and he would become the best friend I’d ever have.
REUNION AT THE CATTLE GUARD
IT WAS THE very day I met Cecil, just before dinner bell, when William Dye came into the kitchen where I was standing in a garbage-can-sized aluminum pot trying to scrape the burnt oatmeal off the bottom with a small collapsible army shovel.
“Some guys out there who want to talk to you!” he yelled over the grinding roar of the automatic dishwasher. William was kind of the school clown, a sore-eyed kid who made cat noises in class and could fart on cue.
“Guys?” I yelled back.
“Two guys over by the cattle guard,” William said, hauling me up out of the pot. “They gave me a buck to find you. If they give you any money, you’re giving it to me, right?” William dug his fingers into my arm. “Okay?”
I crossed the gravel road, still wearing my stained, oversized apron, squinting to see through the dust to the cattle guard, where I could make out two men leaning against a car in the shade of the old scarred elm. A little twitch in his brain, a nervous shudder, something like instinct told Edgar to turn and run like hell, but he walked slowly closer, circling around the car, keeping his distance. Both men were young, thin and wearing sunglasses, but that was it with similarities. One was clean-cut and verging on dapper, dressed in a blinding white shirt and pressed slacks, while the other, with wild hair and a patchy beard, wore a tight, striped T-shirt and plaid bell-bottoms which bloomed out over a pair of pointy-toed cowboy boots.
The neat one smiled when he saw me, held his arms out as if in welcome, while the other, now splayed out on the hood, seemed to be asleep in spite of the wild guitar music vibrating out of the car’s stereo. The neat one said something to me but I couldn’t hear it over the jungle thump of bass. He looked around, motioned me over, and after a second of hesitation, I entered the ring of shade under the elm.
The neat one squatted down in front of me and shouted, “Edgar!”
I looked at him, dumbfounded. His face was angular, sheened with sweat, and he was close enough to me that I could see two, bloated, upside-down versions of myself in his mirrored sunglasses. Again, he said something that got lost in the music, then cupped his hands over his mouth, turning back, and hollered, “Turn that down!”
The guy on the car’s hood startled, throwing out his elbows and sliding sideways off the fender before scrambling through the open window to get to the stereo. There was a moment of profound silence before the man in front of me pulled me awkwardly to him. It was not until I felt his hands on my shoulders and smelled his antiseptic breath that I was jarred into recognition: I was hugging Dr. Pinkley.
I must have stiffened because Barry pulled back, looking hurt. “It’s me,” he said in a strange, raspy voice, like paper tearing. He unhooked the glasses from his ears. “You really don’t recognize me?” It was Dr. Pinkley, no doubt about it, but somehow he had transformed from a soft-shouldered ghost in the night with a pad of fat under his chin and the rosy cheeks of a baby to this lank wedge of man made of nothing but angles. His dark hair spiked off his head like the spines of a cocklebur. Even his voice had changed, the result of Art’s forearm shiver that April night a lifetime ago.
The bearded one was now standing next to me and he gave me a light slap on the back. “Hey, it’s Edgar the miracle-boy!” he said.
Dr. Pinkley’s jaw tensed and he turned his head. “Jeffrey, would you shut up?”
I stood there in the shady dust, looking at both of them, feeling like I had stepped out of the sunlight of Willie Sherman into a shadier, alternate world. Since leaving St. Divine’s I had come to believe that once a person disappeared out of my life—my mother and father, Grandma Paul, Sue Kay and Art—I would never see them again, that I was forever cut off. And yet here were Barry Pinkley and Jeffrey—or incarnations of them, at least—with me under a big elm tree on the grounds of Fort Apache, both of them grinning like conspirators. I laughed because I didn’t know what else to do.
Barry grabbed my hand and said, “You probably thought I gave up on you, didn’t you? No, Edgar, no way. It’s just that I’ve had to be careful. People have been looking for me. They still are.”
“A wanted man,” Jeffrey said, flicking ants off his boots with his middle finger.
“Are you ghosts?” I asked them.
“Ha!” Jeffrey slapped his knee. “Ghosts! Ha!”
“I’ve been here a few times before, to check up on you,” Barry said. “But I had to be careful. It’s dangerous just to be talking to you like this.”
I squinted at Barry, trying to reconcile the sleek man with the sandpaper voice who sat next to me now and the lumpy, buttery-voiced guy who had trouble getting through the window at St. Divine’s. “What happened to you?”
“Me?” he said. “You mean what I look like? Yeah, I guess I’ve lost some weight, people have told me that. Things are working out quite well for me these days, but I really came to find out how you are, what I can do for you.”
Barry asked how I was feeling—Were there any more seizures? Headaches? Did the school have adequate medical facilities?—and when I didn’t answer he dragged out his medical bag, which was now stuffed full with bottles and baggies and syringes, and began thumping my belly, squeezing my head, working my joints, investigating my ears. “What’s this white stuff all over you?”
“Bug powder,” I said.
“Jesus,” Barry said.
“Are you all right in this place, is it horrible?”
I shrugged. “I’m fine.”
“Well good, that’s good, we can talk about all of this later, but I came mostly because I have some wonderful news for you. I’ve found your mother.”
Barry waited for me to react but I could only stare back at him, numb. At that point, I would not have been surprised if my mother had leaped out of the trunk of the Cadillac wearing a bikini and holding a birthday cake.
“She wants to see you, Edgar, I’m going to arrange it, don’t worry. You don’t know how much work it took, but I found her and she’s not very far away from here. You’re going to see your mother.”
Just then the dinner bell rang and a clamor like a gathering riot rose up as everyone converged on the cafeteria doors. I tried to pull away from Barry, but he held tightly on to my hand.
“Keep quiet about this and everything will be fine,” Barry said. “Things are looking up for all of us.”
I yanked my hand out of his and headed for the cafeteria, crashing through the bushes and weeds like a spooked deer. Just as I jumped the cattle guard I heard Jeffrey call out behind me, “Run, coma-boy! Run like the wind!”
EDGAR AND CECIL
SO I SHOWED Cecil around the place. I showed him the maintenance hut where I helped Uncle Julius in the summer, the old cavalry stables still filled with ancient horse apples and molding tack, the boiler room where I typed every day, the secret pathways of ducts and crawl spaces I used to creep around in, the cliffs Sterling had shown me and the red markers below. “When it’s time, this is where you jump,” I told him. “Those rocks are red because people bled all over ’em.” He nodded solemnly, seemed to understand completely, no need for further explanation.
Everywhere we went, Cecil would pick up trash—orange juice cartons, cigarette butts, old math assignments—and would stash it in his pockets. He would meticulously pick bits of papers caught in the thorns of prickly pear or ocotillo and would go ten feet out of the way to retrieve a bottle c
ap. I didn’t ask him what he was doing. As long as we were walking around, I thought, why not try to clean things up a little?
Another of Cecil’s more interesting habits was his addiction to Dum Dums. He had the amazing ability to nurse one of those tiny lollipops for three or four hours before sucking it down to the stick. He never once offered a Dum Dum to me, and whenever he opened a new one he would carefully fold up the wax wrapper with an air of solemn ritual, like a Marine retiring the flag. Then he would tuck the wrapper into his pocket for eventual transfer to the nearest trash receptacle.
Cecil and I did not talk much. Cecil’s English was pretty bad, and I was not what you would call a conversationalist. We walked around, mostly in silence, sat together in the cafeteria and ate our food. Who needed talking? I just wanted someone to be with.
It took some effort, but I finally learned that Cecil was not an Amazonian aborigine at all, but a Havasupai, a tribe that lived on a reservation at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. He explained this using an old travel brochure he carried around in the pocket of his shirt. I had never heard of the Grand Canyon before, but Cecil assured me that it was still a good place, even though the hikers and fat-ass donkey riders were filling it with garbage. All the English he had ever learned, he told me, was from park rangers and backpackers who he sold ice-cold well water to for a nickel a cup. This was the first time he had ever been to the United States of America, as he put it, the first time he had ever been to school. Because both parents had died when he was a boy, he had been living with his uncle’s family until a few months ago when the uncle had lost his job with the Forest Service for drinking on the job. So he sent Cecil off to school and allowed him to return only for the summers, when he could earn his keep selling water.