by Brady Udall
“Hey-yah!” I heard somebody say as the other kids gathered around, their shoes sucking into the mud. “This is gonna be a good one!”
Nelson lifted me up by the belt, swung me around and slammed me to the ground, sending up a spray of brown water that made the girls squeal. I only had a second or two to recover before he began to pound me into the mud, his great fists landing on my head and back like heavy stones dropped from a great distance. I tried to curl up, to protect myself as best I could, but I felt paralyzed, disconnected from everything, and I began to suck in watery mud until I began to suffocate, unable to lift my head up enough to find air. I panicked and thrashed, the blows driving me deeper into the freezing muck, and then, little by little, I let myself ease into a warm soothing darkness that I wanted never to come back from.
SAVED AGAIN
BUT OF COURSE I came back—I always did. It was nearly two hours later, after Mr. Fitzsimmons dragged me out of the mud and into the infirmary, that I heard what had happened.
While Nelson was busy beating me into hamburger with the student body of Willie Sherman looking on, Cecil had just enough time to sprint over to the pile of tin where he had hidden his bow and arrows. He had planned to kill Nelson at a more appropriate time, without so many witnesses around, but decided, bless him, that he didn’t have much of a choice.
The first arrow missed by five feet. Cecil moved closer and fired again, hitting Nelson in the side, just above the belt. They said he gave Edgar a couple of solid cracks to the back of the head before he noticed it sticking out of him. He looked around, annoyed as if somebody had shot him with a spitwad, and the next one speared through the inner portion of his thigh, hit him from behind with a wet, meaty sound that made some of the onlookers quail and gasp. The arrowhead exited on a downward angle just above his kneecap and blood dribbled off the end of it as if from a spigot.
I tryed to get him in the ass hole, Cecil wrote to me later, from the juvenile prison in Nevada. Too bad.
Nelson turned and saw Cecil standing on the fourth step of the bleachers, calmly nocking his last arrow. He was grinning, they told me, a perfect imitation of Nelson’s grin, and didn’t let up, even as Nelson left poor Edgar lying there, nothing more than a gray pile of clothes, shoes and hair. He lumbered toward Cecil with his skewered leg gone stiff and his flip-flops slinging droplets of mud all the way up his back.
Like the hunter that he was, Cecil waited. And grinned. Grinned like crazy, they told me later. Grinned like a kid about to blow out the candles on his birthday cake.
On came Nelson, gripping the arrow above his hip, working it around, finally wrenching it out, leaving a large piece of broken obsidian deep inside. Cecil waited until Nelson reached the bottom of the bleachers before he even bothered to pull back on the bowstring. Here Nelson hesitated. He was looking up, right along the shaft of an arrow at a boy who was grinning like crazy, the kind of grin he, Nelson, had been comfortable with all his life but could not manage to pull off now. Grimly, he hauled himself up onto the first step and Cecil let the arrow fly.
Hit him dead center, the easiest shot ever made. The six inches of arrow that stuck out of Nelson’s abdomen vibrated, buzzed like a wasp, then quieted. Nelson gripped the arrow near the fletching, to test how solidly it had embedded itself, and then slowly pivoted and sat down, watched as the raspberry stain on his shirt spindled outward in a widening circle.
Cecil put down his bow, stepped past Nelson, walked over to me and lifted my head out of the water, poked his finger into my mouth, made sure I was breathing. He then stood, looked around and trotted across the parade grounds, slipped under the barbed-wire fence at the edge of the road and disappeared into the cedars on the other side.
He never made it to the Grand Canyon. They caught him two days later trying to hitch a ride north of Payson, convicted him in the juvenile courts of aggravated assault and sent him up to the juvenile detention center in Nevada for thirty months. It was Nelson’s fat that saved him from being sent away for much longer than that. It was all that blubber, the doctors said, that kept the final arrow from doing anything worse than lacerating his liver.
Vincent DeLaine, the Native American poet, emerged from the auditorium just in time to see me being carried off to the infirmary like a recently unearthed corpse, and Nelson laid out on the side of the road, two arrows still sticking out of him, attended to by Nurse DuCharme while the ambulance wailed toward us from Whiteriver. Vincent and his assistant practically dove into the Town Car before it fishtailed off, leaving a pile of unbought books that would eventually take up an entire shelf of the school library.
I came to on a cot in the infirmary, coughing up sludge water, saved once again. I was bruised and battered and crusted with mud, but would be as good as new in a week or so. For Edgar, once more, it wasn’t a good day to die.
A VERY OLD MAN
TWO WEEKS LATER on a blustery March night out by the cattle guard Barry drove up in a green Volkswagen bus. I climbed in, slammed the door, and Barry, who was wearing yellow-tinted glasses and a suede jacket with fringes that moved like falling water, said “Hey, my man. What’s the matter with you?”
I looked out the window at the few lights of Whiteriver gathered in the bowl of the valley below us. What is wrong with me? I thought. Everything. Everything you could name.
In these last weeks a pall had fallen over me: I wandered about aimlessly, barely eating, having to be dragged out of bed in the morning by Raymond or one of the other aides, spending all my free time at the jumping place, looking over the edge of the cliff, imagining what it would be like to leap off into some other place. Sitting on that lip of rock, my feet dangling out into nothing, I considered murdering somebody so I could be sent away to be with Cecil in Nevada, but they had expelled everyone I might have wanted to exterminate: Glen, Rotten Teeth and a few of the other bigger boys I had set up. Principal Whipple had found his beloved contraband stashed under their mattresses and it was more than he could bear—he sent away all six, made sure they were prosecuted by the courts, and promised that as long as he was principal they would never return.
As it turned out, he wasn’t principal for much longer. Hearing that his wife had been doing nasty, unmentionable things with Nelson Norman was really the last straw. Like everybody else at Willie Sherman, he had heard the rumors, had even heard a firsthand account from me about Mr. Thomas and Mrs. Whipple making noises together in the Thomas home. Mr. Thomas—well, he could understand that, he said. Mr. Thomas was a big, strapping man, fairly good-looking. And there had been other rumors, about Joe Harris, the textbook salesman, and something about the math teacher, Mr. Card, who had stayed for only half a year. But Nelson, fat Nelson Norman, the worst of the delinquents, the same Nelson Norman who only a few days before tried to kill the little crossbreed? This was not something he could forget about, no he could not.
Practically the entire student body heard all of this come out one evening during an hour-long knock-down-drag-out from the back patio of the Whipple home. We all opened our windows to be able to hear everything clearly, and the Whipples’ voices carried and echoed down the walls of the canyon, bringing them right to us. They shouted, then whispered fiercely for awhile, their voices rising until they were screaming at each other again, their words coming out sometimes like furious animal barks. Mrs. Whipple raged about living out here on the last outpost of hell with all these Indians, nothing to do but walk around in the mountains, do you expect me not to entertain thoughts? To enjoy spending time with somebody else while he was over there in his office with that little squaw-tramp and her red lipstick?
Everything ended when, in the midst of an incoherent crescendo of shouts, a slap rang out with a concussive report all the louder for the long silence that followed it. Then, crowded at the windows on the north side of the building, we watched Mrs. Whipple toss an overnight bag into the backseat of their Buick and motor away into the night. The next morning Principal Whipple resigned, packed up his things a
nd, without a word to any of the students or teachers, got a ride out of town with the man who drove the bread truck and happened to be one of Mrs. Whipple’s more regular suitors.
All of this because of me.
I began to realize then exactly how powerful I was. I could not be killed. You could beat me into a pulp, burn me with wires, kick my ribs in, run over my head with a jeep, but I wouldn’t die on you. And wherever I went, it didn’t matter where, ruin would follow, sooner or later. Things would be flung apart.
How could I explain any of this to Barry? I didn’t even want to try. I laughed to myself and Barry looked over at me a little nervously. I fiddled with the broken knob on the glove box, said, “I’m all right.”
“You don’t look like you’re all right.” Barry squinted at me. “Is that a bruise on your head?”
I couldn’t believe that he hadn’t yet found out what had happened—he usually had his fingers into everything. He would find out about it sooner or later, I was sure, but in the meantime I was happy not to talk about it.
“I been sick,” I said, sniffing a little. “Not feeling too good.”
Barry put on his doctor-face—professionally concerned—and reached over to feel my forehead. “I know there’s been a flu going around. Schools, especially without properly trained medical personnel, spread the flu like nothing else.”
Together we looked out the windshield at the road opening up like a black tunnel in front of us. Barry told me we could go anywhere I wanted tonight—he could run his errands tomorrow—maybe I’d like to go up to Show Low to see a midnight movie, or over to Superior to eat at the all-night diner that served eleven different kinds of pie.
“I want to go see Art,” I said, surprising myself. I looked at Barry, who had his arms on the big steering wheel like a man hugging a barrel. He stared straight ahead as if he hadn’t heard me.
“Is he dead?” I said.
Barry sighed out of his nose. “No, he isn’t dead, but I haven’t checked recently.” The muscles of his face were pulled tight and his cheekbones stuck out like big red knuckles.
“You know where he is?”
“I know.”
“I want to see him.”
“You want to see him? Art, a violent, shit-in-his-pants drunk? You’d rather go see him than eat pie at Sister’s?”
I nodded.
“All right then,” Barry said, biting off his words. “We’ll go see Art. Just like good old times.”
The van’s small engine whined as Barry pushed down hard on the gas. For forty-five minutes he kept his foot locked down on the accelerator, taking it off only when a car ahead of us slowed him down. He did not speak, did not seem to breathe, and his face held itself in that same clenched expression. I was afraid, but tried not to show it, tried not to grab my seat or brace myself against the dashboard when we swung around a curve so fast it felt like we were lifting off the road.
On a long stretch of highway that ribboned through the scrubland plain, jackrabbits began showing up on the road, there seemed to be at least one or two of them every mile, their eyes glowing red with the headlights. Only a few had enough sense to get out of the way and the less alert ones would make a rather distinct wa-wop when the van drove over them. Barry continued to look straight ahead, his hands tightly gripping the wheel. It took thirteen rabbits going wa-wop before I got up the nerve to say anything: “What about these rabbits?”
Barry looked around, startled. He said, “Rabbits?”
We drove on to Globe and there was suddenly so much light it seemed we were swimming in it. Off to our left, I knew, on the other side of a hill, was St. Divine’s, which Barry had told me was no longer a hospital, but a big garage where they parked trucks and stored machinery that dripped oil and smelled like diesel fuel.
I got nervous when Barry turned off the highway and made a series of turns, bottoming out in potholes and sliding over gravel when he touched the brakes. He cranked the wheel and we were in the parking lot of a run-down place called the Polar Bear Motel. On the neon sign in front was a bear in a black top hat with his butt stuck in the door of an igloo.
“Here we are,” Barry said, not looking at me. “Number nine, straight ahead there. I’m guessing he’s still here. I’ve come to check on him a few times, bring him what he needs. I’m not the type to hold grudges.” Barry shook his head. “I hoped you’d forgotten about him by now, seen him for what he is.”
At the end of the row of doors a lone figure, who had been leaning against the wall and smoking a cigarette, started walking our way. Barry poked his head out of the window and waved the man off. “You can stop right there. I don’t got anything tonight. Conducting personal business here. A little privacy would be appreciated.”
The man, who I could now see was wearing a shirt with an enormous red tongue on it, muttered something, stomped on his cigarette and disappeared into his room.
“Well?” Barry looked at me. “He’s right in there. Looks like a light’s on. I’ll wait out here for you. Take as long as you’d like. Leave the door open, just in case. I’ll keep an eye on you.”
I climbed down out of the van and walked up to the scarred door. From where I stood, I could easily see through the large window, its glass crisscrossed with masking tape, into the room. Inside, the only illumination came from the TV, which was mounted on a wall bracket and showed nothing but snowy static, shining over the room like a fat, full moon. At first, everything seemed like a jumble of light and shadow but as my eyes adjusted I could make out a bed, piled with clothes and boxes and tin cans, a low table lined with empty bottles of all sizes and behind that, Art in a wheelchair.
I watched him for a long time and he did not move. He looked shrunken, his hands too big for his arms, his head covered with thinning hair that was now mostly white. Even in the strange flickering light of that room I could see the jaundiced hue of his skin, the calligraphy of burst capillaries written over his nose and cheeks, the milky gray of his eyes.
I put my hand on the doorknob, took it off. I looked back at Barry, who was only a shadow in the driver’s seat of the van. I did not want Art to know that I was with Barry, that I had not, as I had promised, stuck him with the knife he had given me. Art stirred, mumbled something, and raised the bottle to his lips, his hand shaking so badly that the whiskey frothed out of the bottle and splashed down his chest.
“Sh-shit,” I heard him say, in the weak, hollow voice of a very old man. A piece of me cracked loose and fell away.
I rubbed the urinal puck in my pocket until tiny granules of it began to come off. I took it out and turned it over: it had long since begun to fall apart, so I had resorted to wrapping it up with electrical tape. It now looked more like a badly shaped hockey puck than something you would find in a men’s rest room.
I remembered the time at St. Divine’s when Nurse George had caught me with it. I had been sitting under my covers, looking it over, when she pulled back my blankets and tried to snatch it away from me.
“My laws,” she said, “what are you doing with that filthy thing?” She had bright orange hair that seemed to catch fire when she was angry.
I gripped my puck with both hands. If she took it away I didn’t know what I would do.
“Let him alone,” Art said. “That little Chinaman orderly—Liu what’s his name—gave it to him. Clean, from the supply closet. Ain’t no dirtier than anything else in this place. He likes the odor it gives off.”
Nurse George stuck out her chin. “I hardly think it’s the type of thing—”
“You let that boy be,” Art said. “Why don’t you go stick a thermometer up somebody’s wazoo?”
After the nurse had gone, huffing and banging the door shut on her way out, Art asked what in God’s name I was doing with a urinal deodorizer.
“Ghosts,” I told him.
“Ghosts?” he said.
“They bother me sometimes, at nights. This keeps ’em away.”
Art nodded, ran his fingertips over
his plaster arm cast like he was reading braille. “Well, I’m glad for you.” He looked up and tried to manage a smile through a mouth that was capable only of a lopsided grimace. “I could probably use something like that myself.”
Now, looking through the window at him, I felt as if my guts were full of ice, slowly melting. I hesitated only a moment before leaving the puck on the broken cement of his doorstep.
A WALK IN THE DARK
THE FIRST WEEK of April it rained almost without stopping, great vaporous clouds swarming around the mountains, mist and drizzle blown sideways and back up into the sky by sudden gusts. The sun, when it did show itself, cast a pale, greenish light over everything.
Edgar didn’t much notice the rain. He walked across the parade grounds, sloshing through small ponds of unsettled water, through the halls of a Willie Sherman that now seemed strangely deserted. They were all gone: Rotten Teeth, Glen, Nelson, Sterling, Cecil, Principal Whipple and his wife. In the space of a few weeks Willie Sherman had been completely transformed, and I hated it more than ever. Even though I could go about my business unmolested, could take a shower without fear of being ambushed, could eat my lunch without keeping constantly alert for projectiles or attacks from behind, I couldn’t stand it anymore: the guttering fluorescent lights, the creeping mildew smell of my own bunk, the raw loneliness that ate at me like a disease.
One entire Sunday I did nothing but sit in the boiler room and type: cecilcecilcecilcecilcecilcecilcecilcecil cecilcecilcecilcecilcecilcecil cecilcecilcecilcecilcecilcecil cecilcecilcecilcecilcecil cecilcecilcecilcecilcecilcecil cecilcecilcecilcecilcecilcecil cecilcecilcecilcecilcecilcecil cecilcecilcecilcecilcecilcecil cecilcecilcecilcecilcecilcecilcecil cecilcecilcecilcecilcecilcecil cecilcecilcecilcecilcecilcecil cecilcecilcecilcecilcecilcecil cecilcecilcecilcecilcecilcecilcecil cecilcecilcecilcecilcecilcecil cecilcecilcecilcecilcecilcecil cecilcecilcecilcecilcecilcecil cecilcecilcecilcecilcecilcecil until I ran out of ribbon and my hands cramped into claws.