The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint

by Brady Udall

  Even with a burnt asshole, Cecil couldn’t help but smile.

  THE CAVALRY STABLES

  AWAKENED BY A chaos of voices in the darkness, I sat up in bed and looked across a room filled with boys scrambling into pants and shoes. I heard something about a dead body and police cars coming up the highway from Whiteriver. Gilbert Cooya, in only his threadbare undershorts, crept into the room and announced that Raymond and Mr. Fitzsimmons were nowhere to be seen, the coast was clear.

  “Somebody’s dead!” Willis Martinez, my bunkmate, hissed at me. He was so excited he had put his pants on backwards. “We’re going to go see!”

  I raced down the hall to Cecil’s room to make sure he wasn’t the dead one. He was in his bunk, alive, watching the last of the stragglers stumble out the door. It had been two weeks since they’d done the butt torch on him, but he still had to tiptoe around like a baby with the worst kind of diaper rash. The skin under his eyes had turned papery gray and his cheeks had begun to stick out like the blades of a hatchet.

  I worried about him, worried that the fire had burned something important inside him, maybe boiled his intestines or scorched his lungs—something that was slowly taking its toll on him—and I pestered him all the time about going to see the nurse, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He drank only water and ate only soup and Jell-O when they were offered because he was afraid of what taking a shit could do to an asshole such as his.

  In seconds the room had been abandoned and was now so empty and quiet it hummed.

  “Want me to stay here?” I asked him.

  “Go,” he said. “Tell me it after.”

  I flew down the stairs in my underwear; I didn’t want to be left behind. It was a warm, muggy spring night and the newly thawed ground was spongy and slick. I had only made it around the corner of the dormitory building when I saw movement, off to my right. I could make out a pack of boys running across the parade grounds, crouching like soldiers under enemy fire, heading south toward the cavalry stables across the road, where suddenly red and blue police lights bloomed out of the darkness, pulsing against the trees and the cement grain silo which stood over everything like a solitary wizard’s tower.

  I sprinted to catch up, taking a shortcut behind the old quarter-master’s building, and by the time I made it across the road I could see dozens and dozens of boys, some of them bare-chested, some of them, like me, in nothing but their Fruit of the Looms, slinking through the bushes and trees like the spirits of the dead. Ahead of us the cavalry stables were flanked by four tribal police cars and an ambulance. The stables, two enormous, elongated barns built to house the horses of the Sixth Cavalry, were surrounded by dense stands of cottonwood and willow trees, and we fanned out in them, each of us finding a nice shadowed spot to hunker down and watch.

  At the north end of one of the stables there were no windows or doors, but we could see flashlight beams swing around, cutting through the gaps in the planks. Principal Whipple and Raymond and Mr. Fitzsimmons and a couple of other teachers stood near one of the old corrals with a deputy who held a flashlight in his mouth and scribbled on a notepad. The other policemen leaned against one of their cars, talking to each other conspiratorially and laughing. They all had buzz cuts and thick brown arms and their badges flashed when they moved. Pretty soon, out came two paramedics in orange shirts on either end of a gurney. On the gurney was a body covered by a blue sheet. As the gurney bounced across the uneven ground, a leg with a black, thick-soled boot slid off to the side and dangled limply, knocking against the aluminum bracings. It was Sterling’s leg. We all knew it immediately.

  “I’ve heard of ’em shooting theirselves in the head or taking a bunch a pills or jumping off into that damn canyon like a bunch a goats,” I heard one of the deputies say. “But this is the first one to string himself up, I know of. Could be wrong, but I think it’s the first.”

  On the other side of the clearing I could see other pairs of eyes like mine peering out from behind tree trunks and clumps of foxweed. One of the boys, just a shadow, was watching from the top rung of the grain silo, which was bleached ivory with moonlight. I pulled my knees up to my chest and locked my arms around my shins to keep from shivering. Off to my left, some smart-aleck blew into his cupped hands, doing a bad impression of a whippoorwill—woo-woo-woooo. The deputy with the flashlight in his mouth looked up for a second before going back to his scribbling.

  A big Indian in a cowboy hat—the sheriff—emerged from the other end of the stables and told everybody to get this thing wrapped up, there was nothing left to do. The ambulance turned off its emergency lights and eased slowly down the road toward the highway, crunching gravel, and the rest of the police and the others got in their cars and drove away. Within twenty minutes they were all gone and there was no sound but the stirring of leaves and the occasional far-off complaint of a screech owl. Slowly, cautiously, we crept out into the open, converging on the wide stable doors where one of the deputies had stretched a length of yellow police tape.

  Inside, the stable was black as a pit, and though it had not been used in fifty years, it still smelled of horse manure and rotted leather and hay. Narrow blades of moonlight knifed through the cracks and knotholes of the old wooden planks. Clumped together now we were quite a crowd—seventy or eighty boys—and we entered that dark space like pilgrims into a cathedral: shoulder to shoulder and so careful and quiet as to be reverent. The only sounds were our feet shuffling in the thick straw and the collective rasp of our breathing.

  When Harris Neal struck a match we all flinched as if a grenade had gone off. He kicked apart a length of rotten board and lit one of the splinters, which had a thick knot at one end. The pitch in the knot sizzled and popped as the flame hissed brighter, enough to light this end of the stables with a pale orange glow. The rope from which Sterling had hung himself was frayed at the end where somebody had cut it, about seven feet above the ground. Directly underneath it, Sterling’s overturned wheelchair glinted balefully in the low, shifting light.

  DONT PUSH ME it said.

  The rope went all the way up into the darkness of the rafters, tied to one of the rough-cut crossbeams. It swayed the tiniest bit, almost imperceptibly, its shadow snaking over our faces. It had been there as long as anyone could remember. All of us, even Sterling, had swung on it before, grabbed the knot and jumped from one of the supports above the door, holding tight against the pull of gravity, flying for a moment, arcing out toward the opposite wall and back again.

  Until I left Willie Sherman, teachers and staff would occasionally bring up the possibility that Sterling Yakezevitch had been murdered, that there was no way a person in his condition, crippled and bound to a wheelchair, could have managed to wheel himself from one side of the grounds to the other, across the highway, up the gravel road to the cavalry stables and still have the strength and presence to climb up on his armrests and hang himself with such flawlessness. But we knew better: we knew that a kid like Sterling could do pretty much anything except die in the way he saw fit.

  A couple of boys touched shanks of wood to Harris’ torch and within a minute or so we all had a flame of some kind and the place was lit up with the chaos of sputtering shadows. We spread out, kicking through the straw, searching for something else, something to keep us from looking at the rope with the upended wheelchair beneath it, but there was nothing new to see: only the beer bottles and dead, garbage-cluttered fire pits and the broken-down stalls, each marked with a metal plate giving the name of some long-dead horse and the soldier who had been assigned to feed it, groom it and ride it into battle:

  LUCKY/ 871

  Lt. GREENFIELD

  BIG DAVE/ 445

  Pvt. MOE

  RED DEVIL/ 902

  Sgt. BARKER

  It was Ernest Snyder, one of the oldest boys in the school, who stood under the rope for a moment, looking up, before reaching up with a torch made of twisted cardboard and lighting its frayed end. The rope caught uncertainly at first, the blue aura of
flame guttering slowly upward until it reached the rafter and spread itself like a large orange hand grasping the entire beam.

  The rest of us touched our torches to whatever we could—the molding piles of straw, the wooden feed troughs worn glassy smooth by the muzzles of horses, the planks and studs of the old barn itself. Within seconds the entire space was lit up like a stage and the rising huss of the flames was a great drawing in of breath that sucked away the air and made our ears pop. We all stumbled back out into the cool night, coughing and blinking and twisting our necks to see the finger-jets of blue flame already hissing out of the nail holes in the corrugated tin roof.

  Somebody let out a shrill war whoop which was answered half a dozen times and we began to move around the stables, bouncing on the balls of our feet, staring into the growing radiance of the blaze, too full of adrenaline and heat to stand still. In no time the entire barn was a single body of fire, the beams and joists glowing within like red-hot bones, the ancient, dried-out pine boards dissolving in the flames like curtains of gauze, spitting embers and cracking apart with the sharp reports of gunfire. The roof came down with an eruption of sparks and then the whole thing collapsed in on itself, sending up a fireball that lit up the trees and the silo and the far-off mesas in a single white flash. I fell back, covering my face, a strange, prickling thrill running through me like a current. I stood up and shouted with everything I had, a soprano keening that tore my lungs raw, joining the other boys as we spun and hollered at the edge of the firelight under a shower of sparks. There were sirens and cars pulling up and the policemen and teachers standing back in the darkness near the road, but we kept it up, circling the blaze, bare-chested and heedless, our eyes full of fire, stomping and howling like the savages we were.

  NIGHT DRIVING

  IT WAS THE summer after the fire that Barry started coming regularly to Willie Sherman, always in a different car, always with a different place to go. He would take me along on his deliveries and pickups: mysterious packages wrapped in black plastic or butcher paper or silver duct tape, sometimes twisted up in a paper bag. I stayed in the car while he completed his transactions; it usually took no longer than a minute or two and then we’d be off, back the way we came. We drove to Superior, Gila, San Ramone. A couple of times we descended into the blinding sea of lights called Phoenix.

  “I now have a few friends in the right places, Edgar,” he told me one night on the way back from a town called Snowflake where he met a couple of small, dark-skinned men in the parking lot of a construction company. “I have worked long and hard and it’s paying off. I can now move around with some impunity.”

  In the summers, nobody missed me while I was out, sometimes until dawn. Once in awhile Barry would bring Jeffrey, and the three of us would take a ride up to Big Lake or Escudilla and we would sit around a fire and listen to Jeffrey play his guitar badly. Barry sometimes brought women with him, a different woman each time, who would fawn over me for five or ten minutes and ignore me for the rest of the night. Despite myself, I began to look forward to Barry’s visits; they killed the crushing boredom of the empty summer, and more importantly, Barry told me things. He was the only adult I had ever met who did not seem to purposefully withhold everything.

  One of those first nights I asked him to tell me again the story of how I died and Barry beat me back to life with his fists. Barry gripped the steering wheel and recited the whole thing, as if it was an epic poem that he had written himself and memorized. On other nights, Barry would tell everything else he knew about me, dramatizing quite artfully: how my father and mother met, my father’s disappearance and my mother’s drinking, the circumstances of my birth, my life before the accident.

  “Bet you didn’t know all that, did you?” he said one July night on the way to Superior. We were in a new beige Duster with dimpled vinyl seats and the whole thing smelled overwhelmingly of plastic. “The very moment you started breathing again, lying on that gurney, I knew there was something special about you. I knew right then we’d always be connected in some way. So when I heard about everything, about your dad gone, your mom running off, your grandma in the hospital, I knew I had to be the one. I talked to your grandma, to all your old neighbors, to the guys who drove the ambulance, to everybody I could find. I turned into some kind of serious detective—I wanted to know everything. That’s why I took a lot of time out of my work schedule to track down your mother. I’ve done all of this for you.”

  Once the stories about me began to peter out, Barry drifted easily into his own life story. He told me about his father, a surly offshore oilman who never called him by his real name, called him Lardass, Knucklehead, Chump; his mother who died when he was a baby; the foster homes he lived in after his father was killed working an oil rig in Venezuela.

  “My last foster family, the Shapiros, decided to adopt me. They wanted me to go into law, become a politician, do away with taxes or some damn thing. The old man was the mayor of Ruttstown, Ohio, and thought he was the King of Siam. I told them I wanted to go to medical school and they went cold. Can you believe that, a family ashamed of a son who wanted to be a doctor, to help and heal people? They thought I owed them something. They said I wasn’t ‘respecting their wishes.’ They didn’t come to my graduation, didn’t send a present. Two months afterwards I got a card from them. It said, ‘Congratulations, Steven and Annie.’ Not ‘We love you, from Mom and Dad.’ Not ‘We’re proud you’re our son’ but ‘Congratulations, Steven and Annie.’ Well, fuck them. You see what I mean? Fuck them.”

  I looked at him, the dull green glow of the instrument panel on his face, and was amazed to see his eyes filled with tears.

  “I know what it’s like. Do you see? I’ve been alone since the day I was born and nothing I do seems to help.” He sniffed and wiped at his mouth, which was loose and wet. “I understand. I know it’s not easy. That’s why I’m here. You need anything, you have any kind of problem, you let me know. You tell me and I’ll take care of it.”

  We wound our way down to the bottom of Salt River Canyon: hairpin curves and sheer drop-offs without guardrails. Below us, somewhere in the darkness, the Salt River was nothing more than a trickle among the rocks.

  I wanted to unload it all on Barry, tell him everything. For the last two months of the sixth grade, before he went home for the summer, Cecil had been talking about killing Nelson. Even though Cecil’s burned asshole saved him from getting punished for the stables fire—he didn’t have to, like all the rest of us, spend two weeks emptying the outhouse pits with nothing but shovels and buckets—it didn’t save him from further persecutions from Nelson and his tribe. No, Cecil’s burned asshole didn’t help either of us. Daily, we were ambushed, beat up, harried, threatened. We couldn’t sit in the library or stand in line for lunch without at the very least taking a rabbit punch to the kidney or a quick, violent pinch at the back of the arm that could make your eyes flood instantly with tears. I stayed in the showers only with Raymond in sight; I peed into the mop bucket in the janitor’s closet to avoid having to go into the bathroom; I stayed awake deep into the morning hours for fear of what might happen if I fell asleep. I would have gone back and done anything Nelson wanted of me if it wasn’t for Cecil. He took it when Nelson’s friends caught us walking out in the cedars, trailing butterflies or hoping to spot Mrs. Whipple again, and pummeled us, slapped us around or let us run while they fired rocks at us and then chased us down again, the way a pack of coyotes would toy with a wounded fawn. Like me, he began to take on a ragged, harried look, but he never complained. The only thing he ever said was this: “I think I’ll kill Nelson.”

  And then there was the news of Grandma Paul’s death. Uncle Julius found me typing in the basement one morning and told me that the hospital had called to say that Grandma had suffered a heart attack. There was going to be a funeral in a couple of days and Uncle Julius asked if I wanted to go. I turned in my chair, gripped with shame, and shook my head. I hated myself both because I didn’t have the gut
s to face another funeral and because the news of Grandma’s death had so little effect on me; I felt nothing but a vague sense of sadness at being abandoned once again, at becoming the lone survivor of a past I had lost all connection to.

  As much as I wanted to tell Barry everything, I kept quiet, the car creaking and groaning as it barreled into the curves and out again. For so long, silence had been the only weapon I had with which to defend myself; saying anything, even just a few words, felt like I was giving something away.

  After Barry had made his transaction that night—a small paper bag passed to a couple of women under the awning of a gas station—we stopped at an all-night truck stop and ate a pile of hotcakes with bacon and eggs. Barry, noticing my sunken face and pale skin, decided I wasn’t being fed well, so after that he brought me bottles of vitamins and fish oil and whenever we took our drives he bought me milk shakes, hamburgers, banana splits, thick ceramic bowls full of truck-stop chili.

  When he dropped me off at the cattle guard that morning the sky was smoldering at the edges and the birds were making a racket in the trees. I was comfortable in my seat and wasn’t at all interested in getting out of the car to go live one more day of Willie Sherman life.

  I had just opened the door when Barry said, “Do you want to come live with me, get away from this place?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Do you think I’m a bad person?”

  I stepped out of the car, shut the door behind me. “I don’t think you’re bad.”

  “Then you’ll think about coming to live with me?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I’m working on it, Edgar, you can believe that. I’m not going to live this life forever. A little nest egg, the right woman, and I can settle down. Stability is what I’m talking about, security. It won’t be long.”