The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint

by Brady Udall

  We were standing in front of their car, a white Buick sedan. Barry opened the front passenger door for me and I stopped in my tracks; I was not about to get into that car.

  “Come on, let’s go,” Barry said. “We can’t keep you away too long.”

  I shook my head, turned away, looked down at my own shadow.

  “You see this?” Barry looked at Jeffrey. “You see what they’ve done to him?”

  Barry slammed the door, came over to me. “We’re your friends, Edgar, we are, not these people. I think you’ve forgotten about this at some point. They’ll do anything to keep you in their clutches, they don’t care about you. Only as long as you live by their rules, sure, they’ll be nice to you, give you what you want, but the minute you start to go your own way, they’ll throw you right out on your ear, take my word for it.”

  I looked up at him. He had his face very close to mine and I could smell his metallic breath. His hair gleamed like a freshly washed blackboard.

  Jeffrey said, “These people are buggy, is what they are. Did you see their house? Two front doors. What kind of place is this.”

  “Why are you wearing missionary clothes?” I said.

  “It’s good for business.” Jeffrey clapped his Bible and Book of Mormon together. “Your big goofy friends are the ones who gave us the idea. We can do our thing and the cops watch us go right on by. Everybody trusts a missionary!”

  “Mormons don’t say ‘Praise the Lord,’” I said. “And they don’t say ‘Praise Jesus’ either.”

  Jeffrey sniffed. “Great, now we have an expert.”

  “It’s the only way we could see you,” Barry said. “Do you know it took us this long just to get this address from these people? I don’t know what it is with these Mormons. They won’t take a bribe, I’ve never seen anything like it. They’re demented. I tried everything, but they wouldn’t give me the information. Finally I had to pay somebody to break into the church offices and steal your file. This is the kind of thing I’m talking about.”

  Timothy Boyd, a little kid who lived four houses up, pedaled by on his bike. Jeffrey yelled at him, “Howdy-ho, there little tyke!”

  Timothy rubbernecked and nearly skidded off the road into an irrigation ditch.

  Jeffrey said, “These people are nuts.”

  “Look,” Barry said. “Forget about the car. We can take a little walk along the road here. I just want to talk to you for awhile, find out how you’re doing, it’s been a long time. You don’t have any reason to be afraid of us.”

  I looked down at Barry’s spit-shined shoes, which were liquid and black, like the pupil of an eye.

  “Harmless,” Jeffrey said. “Harmless as baby kittens.”

  “You stay here,” Barry said to Jeffrey. “I’m going to take a walk with Edgar. Don’t talk to anybody. And no smoking.”

  Jeffrey wagged his finger at Barry. “You know the rules, Elder. Companions are supposed to stick together at all times. It’s the first rule of missionary life. Only to shit, shower or shave shall we part company. Thus sayeth the Lord.”

  Barry wiped his mouth. “You can tag along behind. But don’t yell at any more kids and try not to swear.”

  We set off down the hill and I felt better the farther we got away from the house. I looked back to see if anybody was watching us, but the afternoon was still and empty, full of white light that glinted off bottle caps and bits of glass in the road. The crackling buzz of locusts rose and died in an incessant rhythm.

  “I want you to know one thing,” Barry said to me. “There are no hard feelings about you taking up with the Mormons and coming out here. I won’t even hold it against you that you didn’t tell me about it. I understand that school was not an easy place to be in, and I’ll take full responsibility for not getting you out of there sooner. I was going through some difficult times.”

  “What about Art?” I said.

  “Art? What about him?”

  “Is he dead?”

  Barry stopped suddenly, and Jeffrey, who was walking dutifully a few steps behind, ran right into him.

  “Look, Edgar,” Barry said, his teeth clenched. He grabbed my arm, his fingers pressing all the way to the bone. “You need to forget about Art, I’m telling you this for your own good. I don’t know what’s become of him, he’s a lost cause. Has he ever done anything to help you? Who has taken the effort to be here for you, to look out for you? Think about it for a minute.”

  We crossed the road and walked next to an overflowing irrigation ditch, the water full of leaves and twigs and clumps of dirty foam. Barry asked me about life with the Madsens. He wanted to know how they were treating me, what the school was like, what kind of things they were teaching me in church.

  Behind us, Jeffrey said, “Coma-boy, what do you have in your pants?”

  “Money,” I said.

  “Money!” Jeffrey said. “It looks like you might be getting the hang of things.”

  We stopped for a moment in the shade of a locust tree that hung out over the road from the Sutherlands’ yard. On the far side of the house, Mrs. Sutherland and her son Roger, a thirty-five-year-old mongoloid, were irrigating their garden: perfect rows of chard, carrots, spinach, peppers and young corn. Near the road were two or three arbors of grapes and just beyond them was a bed of flowers artfully planted around a few granite boulders. While they irrigated, Roger and Mrs. Sutherland sang “Abide with Me.” They sang beautifully together, Roger’s voice, high and sweet, alternating between harmony and melody with each verse. Chuckers, their miniature schnauzer, would occasionally join in with a thin, undulating howl.

  “This place is freaked,” Jeffrey said.

  Roger saw us. “Aieeee!” he called, waving with the enthusiasm of the dim-witted.

  Jeffrey waved back. “Aieeee!”

  “Son of a bitch,” Barry growled, grabbing Jeffrey by the arm. We walked the way we had come, moving faster than before, struggling in the heat to get up the long hill. When we got back to the car, Barry’s cheeks were a bright pink and Jeffrey was sucking air as if through a straw.

  “We’ve got to get going,” Barry said. “But I’ve got a couple of things for you first.” He took out a business card and wrote on the back of it. “If you ever need anything, any kind of favor at all, this is the number you can call, don’t you hesitate. I’ll be here for you, Edgar. We don’t want to act in a rash manner, you know, we want to take it slow and easy, not rush things, but everything is going to work out for us this time, I can feel it. I’m dedicated, Edgar, I have the means to do what has to be done.”

  “I know one thing,” I said.

  “Name it,” he said.

  “Could you find the mailman for me, find out where he is?”

  “The mailman?”

  “The one who ran over me. I want to find him. I want to tell him I’m okay.”

  Barry sighed. “That guy disappeared off the face of the earth—what—six years ago? I’ll see what I can do, Edgar. I’ll poke around a little.”

  “Are you going home now?” I said.

  “Not really sure where home is anymore, but yes, we’ve got to get going. One other thing, though. You like baseball?”

  “Yes,” I lied.

  “I think maybe we should go find some lepers to cure,” Jeffrey said, looking around, hitching up his pants. “Maybe cast out a few demons, who knows.”

  Barry opened the car’s trunk, took out a baseball mitt and handed it to me. He was beaming. “This was my first mitt. You might be a little big for it now, but I think it will work for you.”

  “Oh Jesus Christ,” Jeffrey said. He tossed his scriptures into the front seat and got into the car.

  It was an outfielder’s mitt, the leather worn smooth and shiny with age. In the webbing there was a baseball with writing on it. Barry Terrence Pinkley. First Home Run. Little League, 1952.

  I acted as if I liked the mitt, and Barry and I shook hands.

  “I don’t want you to worry,” he said. “You’re not
alone, Edgar. We’ll be around. You can count on it.”

  Barry got into the Buick and started the engine. I looked at the business card Barry had given me.

  Elder Rivers & Elder Wiltbank

  The Church of Jesus Christ of

  Latter-Day Saints

  “Called to Serve”

  Barry turned the car around and sped off down the hill. Dust rose up behind the car in one dense column. Jeffrey put his head out the window and waved back at me. I could barely see him through the billowing grit.

  “Praise Jesus!” he yelled. “Praise the Lord! Aieeeeeee!”

  THE KUM-N-GO

  FOR A LONG TIME I stood at the front gate. I wanted to open that gate, go back inside the house, but I was having trouble doing it. After a while I went over to the irrigation ditch, said a little prayer and dipped my right hand into the cold water. It was the hand that Barry had touched and I was baptizing it, washing away all the impurities. Immediately I felt better.

  Then I dropped the mitt and baseball into the flowing ditch. The mitt quickly absorbed water and disappeared, but the ball bobbed and rolled in the fast current, all the way past the Sutherlands’. It shrank into a tiny white dot moving across the landscape until it was sucked into a culvert and didn’t emerge on the other side.

  I went up to my room and typed nonsense on my Hermes Jubilee for awhile, really gave that typewriter a good pounding. It was not between the hours of four-thirty and seven, but Brain was nowhere to be seen. He was probably at the library, learning. I typed the same page over and over again until it was almost completely black and moist with ink, and I felt myself calming down. I thought the house was empty, but Clay was downstairs in the kitchen, looking at blueprints spread out over the counter. I walked by as quietly as I could, heading for the door that led into the garage, but he saw me. He said, “You all have a good conversation?”

  My pockets were still packed with coins. I nodded, tried to situate my hands over the bulges in my pants as naturally as possible.

  “Something I wanted to talk to you about. Brain told me you were planning on going to visit your friend in Nevada. He said you were going to take a bus. I’ll be happy to take you on my day off. I checked the map and it’s only three hours from here. I talked with Lana about it. We didn’t think it was very safe for you to be going that far alone.”

  “Oh,” Edgar said, gripping the coins in his pockets so his pants were pulled up to expose his socks.

  “We’ll go then, in the next week or so. Don’t be afraid to tell us these things, Edgar, we’re more than happy to help you out. All you have to do is ask.”

  Now I wasn’t sure what to do with all this money: it seemed to be burning into my thighs. I went to the garage, got out my bike, which had a partially flat rear tire, and rode the mile and a half to the KUM-n-GO market. On my way, I passed the Sutherlands’. Roger yelled “Aieee!” at me. I ignored him.

  The whole way there, I thought about Cecil and tried to push Dr. Pinkley out of my mind. Now, not only was I going to visit Cecil, but I had enough money to buy him a bagful of Dum Dums, no, a whole wheelbarrow full of Dum Dums.

  The KUM-n-GO market sat by itself at the far west end of town. It had a gasoline pump outside which no longer worked and an old sign that said Coke 15¢ that made people mad when they went in only to find out that a Coke was actually going to cost them thirty-five cents. The cashier, a fat blond woman who wore lipstick the color of bubble gum, was talking on the phone. I sidled down the candy aisle and stood in front of the Dum Dums. I could buy that entire bin of them if I wanted to. I imagined walking into that prison with a whole armful of suckers as colorful and sweet-smelling as a bouquet of flowers, imagined the look of grateful astonishment on Cecil’s face.

  I reached deep into the Dum Dums and pulled out two handfuls. I looked at the cashier, who still had the phone receiver pressed between her fleshy shoulder and head while she went at her nails with an emery board. Instead of taking the Dum Dums up to the counter and paying for them with my stolen money, I began stuffing the candy into my front pockets, already occupied by thirty-five dollars in coins but still big enough to hold a handful each. Still the cashier didn’t turn around and I crammed more Dum Dums into my back pockets, into my socks. It was all too easy. With one hand I stretched out the front of my T-shirt and with the other scooped as many as I could into the pouch the loose fabric made. I stood in front of the counter, daring the cashier to turn around, but she went right on filing her nails, saying, “Mm-hmm. Huh. Wha—? No way. Who? No way, Linda.”

  Edgar pushed open the door and stepped out into the hot afternoon light, bristling with Dum Dums. He mounted his golden bike and pedaled homeward, a clear and sudden feeling in him that everything was a circle and he was at its center. It was all spinning in toward him: his old self, his old life, spiraling closer and closer, it was all coming back.

  FORGIVENESS

  WE DROVE THROUGH the open desert, the flat plain spreading out on either side of the road until it fell away into the gray, drizzling sky. There was nothing but dirt and split-rail fences crisscrossing like badly made sutures and clumps of sagebrush and mesquite that looked like scattered puffs of black smoke in the distance. Occasionally we would pass an old windmill or run-down picket house or a solitary trailer connected to the world by a single sagging wire.

  Clay drove with talk radio on and I sat on the far edge of the pickup seat, hunched against the door, trying to work up some courage. In my lap I had my school backpack and in the backpack were two bags, one filled with Dum Dums for Cecil, the other with the wages of sin: thirty-five dollars in stolen coins. I put my hand in the backpack, took it out again. I had been doing this for an hour now, ever since we’d left Richland.

  A few days before, Lana had called the detention center to find out about visiting hours and had made an appointment for us to see Cecil today at five o’clock. We had a special dinner for him, a box full of chicken lasagna, garlic bread and lemon cake. And I had brought my own little secret: Art’s knife, tucked into my sock. I didn’t know what things were like at the detention center, but I figured a knife like mine could be of some use there.

  “You don’t see this kind of weather very often around here,” Clay said. It would spit for awhile, tiny droplets building up on the windshield until Clay had to turn on the wipers, which would take only a few seconds to dry up and begin streaking and stuttering against the glass. “This is real uncommon. Around these parts, either it’s raining or it’s not. This is less like rain and more like indecision.”

  I had the bag of coins in my hand. I held my breath, counted to ten and pulled it out of the backpack. It was actually three brown paper bags, one inside the other inside the other, strong enough to keep from tearing under all that weight. I set it on the seat between us.

  “What you got there?” Clay said.

  I said, “It’s money.”

  “What’s it for?”

  “It’s for you.”

  “Why are you giving it to me?”

  “Because it’s yours. I stole it.”

  Clay seemed not to have heard me. I always had a hard time reading Clay’s expressions because his beard almost completely obscured his mouth; if he was smiling you could only tell by the way the skin around his eyes wrinkled. Clay’s beard was a favorite subject of gossip in the ward. Some said it was against church guidelines, some said it was a bad example to the youth, some said it was just plain unnecessary. I heard one old high priest, Brother Retchler, say, “What a good man like Clay Madsen wants with looking like one a them bumble-minded hippies, well I don’t got the foggiest.”

  Clay pulled the bag open, looked inside. He said, “You stole this money?”

  I told Clay everything. I said I was sorry, that I would never do it again.

  I had learned in church there were five steps to repentance: (1) Feel remorse, (2) Confess, (3) Ask forgiveness, (4) Make amends, (5) Never sin again. Clearly, number 5 was the real bugger. Once you had rep
ented, or so I was told, God would forget about the sin as if it had never happened, it would be erased right out of the record books. There were angels in heaven, apparently, keeping track of everything. I knew I had a lot of sins logged in my record book and it was nice to think that I might get rid of at least one of them. I tried to forget about the fact that there was another bag in my backpack crammed full of stolen merchandise; I would have to take my transgressions one at a time.

  “You did right in telling me,” he said. “But why didn’t you just ask us? You’re part of our family, Edgar, you can ask us for anything and we’ll do our best to help you.”

  Asking: now that was something that had never occurred to Edgar. For his entire life he had lived in a world where asking was a waste of time, a notion to laugh at; you took what you could get.

  “I have one question for you and I want you to answer me as truthfully as you can,” Clay said. “Do you like living with us, being a part of our family?”

  I nodded with such enthusiasm I bit my tongue. “Yes, I like it a lot. Very much. Yes I do. I really like it. A lot.”

  “That’s good, then,” Clay said. Somewhere under that beard he seemed to be grinning. “Because we like having you. All of us, even Brain and Sunny, though they’d never admit to it.”

  Edgar decided right then there was nothing better in this world than confessing your sins, asking forgiveness, unloading the burden of guilt. I leaned against the door, which vibrated pleasantly against the back of my head. In no time at all I was asleep.

  I woke up to the sound of the engine shutting off. We were in the middle of a large parking lot full of cars. The sky was still a wash of gray and the small trees jutting up at intervals among the cars bowed in the wind, their few leaves rattling. The building was modern, made of red brick with a glass front that said State of Nevada Juvenile Detention and Rehabilitation in gold letters. There were no guard towers or razor wire, just a ten-foot-high chain-link fence that surrounded the entire property. All in all, it seemed like a pretty nice place to me.