by Brady Udall
On the way home, with Raymond listening to Roy Orbison on the radio and Uncle Julius dead drunk and snoozing against the window on the other side of me, I inspected the ball of dirt in the palm of my hand. I had meant to save it, keep it as a record, the only physical memento of my mother I had, but instead I put it all into my mouth, held it there until it dissolved into a gritty paste that began to seep past my lips. I worked at it, choking and gagging, but try as I might I couldn’t swallow it down.
Back at Willie Sherman, instead of following Raymond into the dormitory I walked over to the administration building, where one light burned in a window. A heavy snow was falling and the light outside was a dark particled gray quickly falling into darkness. I tromped up the steps and entered the bright fluorescent buzz of Maria’s office. She was behind her desk, already in her heavy coat and boots, singing to herself, looking at her eyelashes in a compact mirror. Her just-brushed hair hummed with static and the smell of nail polish was everywhere. When she noticed me standing in the doorway, melted snow dripping off the stalactites of my hair, she tilted her head slightly and put out her arms. I threw myself at her.
“Oh, honey,” she said and gathered me in, pulling me up on her lap. She crossed her arms around me and I pressed the side of my face into the smooth brown skin of her neck. I held perfectly still, afraid that if I moved or spoke she might make me go away.
BED-WETTER
A FEW DAYS later I woke up before everybody else and wet the bed on purpose, soaked myself good. Raymond smelled it halfway through his wake-up call.
“Edgar?” he said, yanking back my covers, bewildered. It had been at least six months since my last accident and we all had come to assume that wetting the bed was one bad habit I had left behind.
Raymond threw up his hands. In his funny, clipped accent, he said, “You are ten years of age now? Eleven? Son-thing? What can we do?”
Before he had to ask I stripped off my pajamas, pulled the sheets away from the bed and marched with the entire wet, stinking bundle to the bathroom. Raymond walked behind me, and I knew without looking that he was shaking his head. Boys staggering out of their rooms, their faces and hair still pressed with sleep, paused long enough to snigger and snort as I went by.
When Raymond came back with the pink brick of soap, I said to him, “My mother’s dead.”
Raymond sighed, looked around. He spoke in a low voice. “I know that.”
“Where is she now?”
“Who?” Raymond looked perplexed.
“My mother. Now she stays in the ground forever?”
“No, she ain’t in the ground. It’s…she’s in heaven, you understand?”
“Heaven?”
“It’s a nice place, where dead people go.”
“Like California?”
Raymond paused to holler at two boys who were having a pissing contest in the showers. “Maybe it’s like California. There’s angels there, God’s there, they got music there, I think. Pretty nice place, I guess.”
“And the tooth fairy?”
“What?”
“Heaven’s where the tooth fairy is?”
“Jesus, Edgar,” Raymond said, taking the sodden sheet from my hand and twisting it until there was no water left. “Just don’t wet your damn bed no more.”
On my way back to my room little Walter Reed, a new boy with a birthmark like a red patch of mold on his forehead, leered sideways at me as I passed by and said, “Bed-wetter.”
He didn’t have time to think about running before I was on him. I grabbed him by the hair, jerked him backwards and swung him hard into the concrete-block wall. Laid out on the floor, he held up his arms to keep me off, but I stood over him, naked and wild, and punched at that birthmark like it was a bull’s-eye. Little Walter whined helplessly and boys began sliding out of the shower to see what was going on.
Raymond lifted me up from behind, both arms around me. I was slick with water and soap and I held up my arms, arched my back and slipped out of his grasp like a sardine out of a fist. Little Walter was already picking himself up, smiling sheepishly, trying to regain his composure, when I started in on him again, giving him a shot to the kidney and grabbing for his ear in an effort to tear it off his head. This time Raymond tackled me, pressing me into the floor with the entire weight of his body. I struggled and gasped until I had nothing left in me.
Before Raymond let me up, he whispered to me, his breath hot on my cheek: “Don’t go bad, Edgar, don’t you fucking go bad.”
LIGHTS OUT
PRINCIPAL WHIPPLE’S CRACKDOWN continued well into the spring and didn’t solve anything, didn’t stop the daily fights, the vandalizing, the midnight home-brew parties, the thieving, the sabotaging, the general violence and mischief, all of which I took part in some way or another. He had to figure out new ways of punishing us. One of his new favorites was the middle-of-the-night fire drill, which was not a fire drill at all, but an opportunity for the staff to search our belongings for contraband while we froze our asses off in the cold. For every item of contraband found—even if it was nothing more than a dirty comic book under somebody’s pillow—we would spend an extra fifteen minutes in ranks, all of us, standing perfectly still until our feet went numb and we began to tip and totter like a regiment of Saturday night drunks. Another was smaller portions at meals: the dinner rolls shrank, milk was withheld, dessert went missing, all of which put the food I regularly stole from the storage rooms in higher demand.
For the worst of us, the principal came up with something he called personal detention. Instead of being forced to sit in the detention room with other students after class and during recess, you were locked in one of several empty, windowless supply closets, alone with nothing but a chair and a desk. You could spend anywhere from a few hours to an entire week in personal detention, taking meals there, doing schoolwork, let out only to use the bathroom and to go back to the dorms to sleep.
Eventually, Nelson landed in personal detention when he and Glen were caught trying to get drunk on a two-quart bottle of vanilla I had stolen for them. And not even Nelson could maintain his regular routine of delinquency locked away in the Closet, as it had come to be called.
The night of his first day in the Closet Nelson found me in the bathroom just before Lights Out, sitting on the pot at the end of the row, reading graffiti. There were no doors on the stalls, so Nelson simply appeared in front of me, darkening everything like an eclipse.
“You done in there?” he said.
I clamped my hand tightly over my genitals and glared at him. Even with him locked up all day, I couldn’t seem to get away from him.
Nelson chuckled, as if at some private joke, and said, “Got a little favor I need.” He took a homemade smoke bomb out of his pocket—a ball of tightly wound string soaked in kerosene—and handed it to me. “I don’t like being inside all day,” he said. “Us Indi’ns got to be out in sun, know what I mean?”
I knew exactly what he meant; over these two years Nelson and I had come to a way of understanding each other that didn’t much involve words. My job was simple: I was to light the bomb, put it behind the grate near one of the intake fans and within a few minutes the whole building would be filled with smoke, which would allow Nelson to get outside and conduct whatever criminal business needed to be carried out on that particular day. I was relieved that it was nothing more complicated than that.
Nelson had started to say something else when Sterling Yakezevitch came into the bathroom, the rubber tires of his wheelchair squeaking on the damp floor. Over the past months Sterling’s disease had progressed to the point where even his new arm crutches could not keep him on his feet. He started falling constantly, his useless, rubbery legs bowing and buckling and splaying out underneath him. They sent him away to a hospital, which made me burn with jealousy, and when he came back he was strapped in a wheelchair, his traitorous legs locked in place against two steel plates.
Bound to that chair, he had to maneuver over uneven
ground full of gopher holes and rocks and stickers—there was no such thing as a sidewalk at Willie Sherman. Everywhere he went, people were always sneaking up from behind, trying to push him, help him along, maybe heft him up the steps, but he would always shout helplessly, “Hey! No! Shit! Get the fuck away!” He swatted at us with a broken-off car radio antenna, tried throwing rocks at us, finally settled on taping a hand-painted sign to the back of his wheelchair, spelled out in bold red: DONT PUSH ME.
It was difficult, but we let him alone to fight his way through a patch of soft clay or take ten minutes to undo the buckles and climb out of his chair, scoot up the steps on his butt and pull the chair, clanking and banging against the steel pipe banister, all the way up after him.
Now, he had parked next to my stall and was in the process of transferring himself from chair to toilet. He fell to the floor, yelled “Fuck!” and I could see through the holes in the stall divider that he was pulling himself up onto the toilet, hand over hand, like a man scaling a precipice. He slipped again, whacking against the stall, swearing and groaning and nearly yanking the commode off the floor as he attempted once more to hoist himself upon it.
“Hey, doing alright in there?” Nelson called.
“Go fuck yourself, fat-ass!” Sterling hollered.
Nelson continued smiling at me like nothing had happened. I swear I would have given just about anything to be Sterling Yakezevitch, wheelchair or no.
I held up the smoke bomb. “You want this for tomorrow?”
“Yeah, but I don’t want you to do it. Don’t want you getting caught. Give it to your friend Cecil. He’ll do it, won’t he? I know you two—”
Next door, Sterling growled, “I’m trying to shit, goddamn,” and Nelson continued, without missing a beat, “—are fairy-faggots, going off into the trees to beat each other off, hey? Right?” He laughed and slapped his belly. “You tell him all he has to do is a couple of things for me once in awhile and you two run off fagging each other all you want, fine with me. Tell him tomorrow just after third hour would be okay.”
With that, he was gone, his sandals pop-popping down the hall, and my stall was once again flooded with light. Sterling flushed his toilet, grumbling as he lowered himself to the floor so he could crawl back to his chair, which, in the midst of the struggle, had rolled backwards a few feet. The call “Lights Out!” came echoing down the hall, which meant we had exactly one minute to be out of our clothes and in bed or it was early kitchen detail for the next three days.
I leapt off the toilet, skidding out of my stall, and I could see immediately that Sterling was not going to make it. He was on his belly, shirt and pants soaked from the water on the floor, belt unbuckled, one black shoe off, slipping and scrabbling on the wet tile like a newborn calf. I reached down to help him up—I had seen orderlies hoist people into wheelchairs hundreds of times—but before I could get my hands under his armpits he swung his elbow around, clipping me just under the ear, and I fell backwards against the tin urinal trough.
“You think I care about Lights Out?” he snarled at me, grabbing the armrests on his chair. “What can they do to me?”
Edgar rubbed his head where it had hit the drainpipe. This head injury business was beginning to get old.
The hard little muscles in Sterling’s arms knotted as he pulled himself up. He situated his legs into place on the angled steel plates and looked down on me from the height of his chair.
“Remember,” he said. “You’re Indi’n, not white. White’s not going to get you anywhere, you hear me? Even if you got just a couple a drops a Indi’n blood, that’s all it takes, it’s like a disease. People around here calling you white boy, they don’t know shit. You’re Indi’n. That’s it. So you better get some balls.”
I watched him roll on out of the bathroom and continued to sit under the trough like somebody taking cover in an air raid. The lights went out.
THE BUTT TORCH
THEY GOT CECIL under the gymnasium bleachers. First they hustled him off the playground and into the empty gym, where they kicked him around a little to get things started. Then they held him facedown, three or four sets of hands pressing on his head and back while somebody pulled off his pants.
This is about the time I was brought in, Rotten Teeth towing me along by the hair. The atmosphere in the gym was ancient and gray, like the dim light in a cathedral, and every sound echoed and amplified, rebounding off the distant ceiling and the painted-over windows. Under the bleachers it was even darker, the metal supports crisscrossing above us, the floor underneath our feet thick with leftover syrup of spilled Coke and garbage from basketball games that had happened years ago.
Three days before, I had given the smoke bomb to Cecil, begged him to do what Nelson wanted, but he took out a match from his pocket, lit the short wick on the bomb. “Ka-boom!” he shouted, making me jump. We watched it smolder into nothing, the wind stealing most of the smoke away. When it had burned itself out, Cecil picked up the crumbling cinder, put it in his pocket so he could transfer it to a trash can later.
“You’re gonna get it,” I told him, even though he already knew.
Cecil only shrugged and picked half of a sun-bleached playing card out of a hackberry bush. Right then, I wanted nothing more than to smash that wide, implacable face of his.
It didn’t take long at all for Cecil to get what was coming to him. Nelson was fresh out of personal detention, ready for a little barbarity to get back into the swing of things. Most of the teachers and staff were in their weekly meetings, so it was a perfect time to give Cecil his due.
When I saw that they had his pants down, I knew it would be bad. With your clothes on you can get beat up, cuffed around, kicked in the ribs and not have to feel too ashamed of yourself. But you know that when they get your pants off, you have to prepare.
In that thick, dusty darkness, Nelson cast around, searching for something in the accumulated bleacher-garbage: withered popcorn, plastic cups, beer cans, bright orange candy peanuts, dust bunnies that quivered and jumped with any movement of air. Eventually, he came up with an old newspaper and rolled it up until he had a tight, slim funnel.
“Get his ass up in the air,” he said, and the boys pulled Cecil’s knees up under him so he was kneeling almost in a fetal position, his face mashed into the clotted debris of the floor.
Nelson put the narrow end of the funnel into his mouth and lathered it up with spit. Cecil squirmed and grunted but they had him down good. He then delicately pulled Cecil’s butt cheeks apart with a thumb and forefinger and slipped the end of the funnel into Cecil’s anus. A nurse at St. Divine’s could not have accomplished it with a more calm expertise.
With the flourish of a magician, Nelson took a shiny Zippo from his shirt pocket. Its flame threw long, wheeling shadows on the bleacher seats above us. Grinning like a jack-o’-lantern, Nelson handed the Zippo to me and said, “I think we oughta let Edgar do the butt torch.”
Instead of taking the lighter from Nelson, I turned and slugged Rotten Teeth in the groin. I guess this was the point I had come to: I’d had enough. Rotten Teeth yowled and quickly let go of my hair and I went at Nelson, punching with all I had. It was like attacking a water bed; my fists landed against him but barely made a noise. He slapped me across the ear so hard it was like an explosion at the side of my head. Behind my eyes a red star flared and went out. I was only on the ground for a second when Rotten Teeth recovered enough to give me a kick in the mouth, which split the inside of my cheek so that blood poured down my throat.
I did not see the paper light, but a burst of orange lit up everything for a moment and the boys oohed and applauded like the crowd at a magic show. I got up on my knees to see the paper burn down, everyone shouting and clapping, and once it got near Cecil’s butt and started to smolder and die out they all blew on it, their faces pressing in, so that it glowed pink and hot. Cecil did not scream or cry out, but I could see the muscles in his legs jerking like plucked wires, his calves balled up tight.
Smoke billowed up, stinging my eyes, and the smell of burning flesh came over everything.
Once the fire was out, they gave me a few farewell kicks as they filed past and ran out across the gymnasium floor, their footsteps booming and echoing with the sound of distant artillery.
I crawled over to Cecil. He had pulled his pants up and his face had the pale blankness of shock. I squatted next to him and told him that first I would go kill Nelson, I had a big knife hidden away, and then I would find Nurse DuCharme.
“Crisco,” he said, propping himself up on his hip. He took a Dum Dum out of his pocket—root beer flavored—and sucked on it as if it was the one thing that might save him. “No nurse. Crisco.”
I sprinted to the kitchen and barged in like I was on detail, ready to work, and grabbed a ten-pound can sitting next to the stove. I hugged it to my chest and, with Ernest the cook watching me the whole way, walked right out.
I helped Cecil pull down his pants and slather Crisco all over his ass, which was burned black. This seemed to give him a little relief; his legs stopped shaking and he slumped back against the wall.
“You’re not gonna die, right?” I asked him. From my hospital experience, I didn’t think a burnt asshole could be fatal, but I couldn’t be sure of anything.
Cecil kept his eyes closed, breathed through his nose. Outside, the dinner bell rang.
“You don’t want a nurse?” I said. “You can sleep on the cot and they’ll bring you food.”
He blinked and let out a thin, ragged sigh.
“You can sleep all day and nobody says anything about it. You eat your food right in bed. Sometimes they’ll rub you with a sponge.”
Cecil told me to help him up. He took a couple of hesitant steps, trying not to wince. He leaned on my shoulder and we walked like that, out across the parade grounds to the dorms. We stopped for a moment in the middle of the field. We were all by ourselves: everyone was packed into the cafeteria, stuffing their faces with food that there never seemed to be enough of.
“I’m not doing anything for Nelson anymore,” I told Cecil. “He’s a fat-ass.”