by Brady Udall
He drove away and I hunkered down on my battle-scarred trunk to try and get my bearings. I felt frayed at the edges, close to coming clean apart. Over the last four days I had been riding a series of Greyhound buses and in my legs and ass I could still feel the constant jar and rumble of the road. A small blue flame of nausea, fed by motion sickness and the greasy road food I had eaten, guttered fitfully in the pit of my gut.
I had spent my last day in Globe with Art, and early the next morning he went with me to the bus station, bought my tickets, and slipped a roll of cash into my pocket that turned out to be three hundred dollars in fifties and twenties.
“You need more of that, give me the word,” he said. For the first time since I had been with him, his breath smelled vaguely of whiskey. “I’ll find a way to get it to you.”
He had also bought me several new pairs of pants and some plaid shirts with metal snap-buttons. I asked if he wouldn’t mind if I took the clothes he had lent me after my bath. In those baggy, tattered clothes fragrant with soap and the woody tang of cedar and Art’s own particular smells I felt comforted, even protected. They were all I wore over those four long days riding the bus and I had them on even now, stiff with grime despite the few perfunctory washings in rest-stop bathroom sinks.
For an hour Art and I sat together in the bus station, saying very little and having donuts and hot chocolate he bought for us at the snack shop. When the call came over the loudspeakers we stood up together and he reached out and gave my hand a thorough shaking, just as he had on that windy April day nearly half my lifetime ago, and stood by while I climbed the bus steps. And just as he had on that long-ago day, he turned and limped slowly away. He swung his hips to get his bad leg moving, the rubber tips of his canes squeaking on the tile floor, and hobbled down the concourse, not wanting, I suppose, to watch me be carried off once again into some other, faraway life.
The bus pulled out, groaning and shuddering like an animal waking from sleep, and so Edgar was off, loosed again into the world, fearful and alone. In less than an hour we were already passing through Whiteriver, and I crawled across the aisle so that I could see, far off on the other side of the canyon and just above the tops of the trees that lined the parade grounds, the roofs of the dormitories of Willie Sherman, haunted on this very day, no doubt, by a few permanent savages who had been abandoned for the summer. Principal Whipple’s observation tower jutted over the canopy of leaves and beyond that, up on a shallow rise, the white silo and the shadow of black earth where the cavalry stables once stood.
Then it was up through the piney White Mountains and into New Mexico, a land of narrow, zigzagging sandwashes and chaparral and thin buttes rising out of the piles of red rock scree. And on across the desert plain, flat and empty as the palm of a hand, which rolled away on both sides in an endless expanse. Somewhere in Kansas the green started in earnest, fields of wheat and corn and oats in every shade, so shocking in its depth against the black road and the fallow fields and the pale cloudless sky, and then we were in Missouri, where the countryside closed in, the road crowded mercilessly by a mass of vegetation that filled the air with its wet, rotting breath. As long as we were moving I was okay, the small vent overhead blowing a miniature recycled breeze over the top of my head, but when the bus would stop to pick up new passengers or make some repair, the thick air would settle around me in a cloud of hot vapor and I would struggle to breathe, sometimes working myself into a huffing, bugeyed panic, like a fish drowning on the deck of a boat.
I hardly slept at all. I don’t know if it was the humidity keeping me awake, or the wild confusion of thoughts in my head, or the constant stop and start, the exchange of passengers and luggage, but in those four days I did not sleep more than an hour at a stretch. I leaned my forehead into the window and watched the towns and fields and billboards slide past, struck with wonder that the United States of America could be so appallingly huge.
The people who sat next to me either ignored me or wanted to pass the time talking. With the talkers I affected my expression of blank disregard, the one I had so painstakingly developed in my days at Willie Sherman. It was somewhere in Indiana, I believe, that I finally managed to fall into a deep early-morning sleep, when I felt the man sitting next to me rest his hand firmly on my crotch. He was a thick-necked guy who smelled like hair spray. When I looked up at him he flashed me a broad, friendly smile that reminded me instantly of Nelson Norman. I did not shout or make a scene, I merely slipped out Art’s knife from its place in my sock, pulled open the blade and jabbed the tip firmly into the back of his hand. For a second his mouth went wide in a frozen scream, his silver fillings glinting, and then he was dancing down the aisle, shaking his hand as if it were on fire, saying “Owee, ouch, shit!” He spent the rest of his trip up front, near the bus driver, peering back at me from time to time, trying to find in himself the wherewithal to come and retrieve the bag he had abandoned under his seat.
After all the unrelenting green, passing through the brick and asphalt of cities like Cleveland and Pittsburgh was a relief. I put my head out the window and gawked like a wolf boy at the billowing steelworks and rusting bridges and square towers of glass. The closer to Stony Run, Pennsylvania, I got, the harder it was to shake the sensation that I was disappearing, dissolving into the wet air like cigarette smoke. For almost two straight days nobody looked at me or bothered me and I rode with my head against the window, lost in an exhausted trance, until I changed buses one last time in a town called Dirksville and headed for Stony Run on a ribbon of shattered country blacktop.
And now, feeling as if I had been dropped out of the sky by a passing plane, here I was in front of what I hoped was the house of the man who, by his absentmindedness or negligence or pure bad luck, had started me on this journey eight years ago. More than ever I felt like a phantom, invisible and powerless in the world of the living, a feeling reinforced by the people who passed by: a woman dragging a cart of groceries, two little girls dressed in identical pink outfits and a man walking a miniature black wiener dog at the end of a chain, none of whom gave me a second look, as if a filthy half-breed Apache teenager in old man’s clothes sitting on a battered steamer trunk at the side of the road was a sight they came across on a regular basis hereabouts.
I watched the house for some sign of movement or habitation. Two stories of brick the color of dried blood, beset on all sides by ivy and other creeping plants, it was not the house I had envisioned in my fantasies. The house in my dreams was clean and white and dignified, something with green shutters and new paint at the edge of a golden field of wheat. With its rusted rain gutters and broken porch swing and wooden shingles edged with moss, this house seemed just this side of shabby. I took out the yellow paper, now smudged and fuzzy with overhandling, to make sure I was at the right address.
I stood up and tested my faintly prickling legs. I didn’t know how long I had been sitting on that trunk; riding the bus for so long had rattled my senses and warped my perception of time. The sky was shrouded in a flat gray haze, as it had been for the last couple of days, and I tried to imagine how hot it might be if the sun was out. I took a deep breath, which felt like trying to swallow a damp flannel rag.
I left my trunk where it was, stepped over the buckling sidewalk and stood at the low iron gate, which had been left hanging open. I waited there for awhile, not yet ready to walk up that narrow cement path, climb those steps, and knock on that heavy wooden door.
Above me, all the leaves in the trees began to shake and clatter. A few seconds later it was pouring rain. There was no stirring of air, no distant thunder or flash of lightning, no warning of any kind. One moment it was calm and the next there was a hail of raindrops tearing through the leaves overhead and hitting me on the neck and back as hard as pennies.
In no time I was soaked. I let the warm, battering rain wash the sheen of grime and grease from my hair and skin and clothes. It coursed down the center of my back like a waterfall, poured out of the crack of my butt
and overflowed in my shoes. It felt wonderful, and only when it began to ease up a little did I climb up onto the porch and give the door three solid knocks.
No answer came right away and I knocked again. I thought I could hear a wooden creaking somewhere on the second level and then someone was thunking down the stairs. The door opened to reveal a short, dark woman in a brightly flowered dress, her black hair pulled back from her face and threaded with gray. My throat swelled hot with disappointment.
“Hello?” she said, her face caught in a smile that faded a little as she got a good look at me. Her eyes settled somewhere around my belt and I realized with a start that I had my crotch in a stranglehold.
I dug into my pockets and came up with the dripping yellow paper, the words on it now smeared beyond recognition.
I swallowed. “Does Nicholas Petenko live here?”
The syllables of the name felt odd in my mouth; this was the first time I had spoken them out loud. The woman opened the door a little wider, her eyes narrowing. Her words shaped and flattened by some accent I couldn’t place, she said, “Who are you?”
When I told her she froze, her eyes trained on my face. The rain drummed on the awning over our heads and splashed from the clogged gutters. She braced her arm against the doorjamb.
“Your name, please,” she said. “Say it again.”
“I’m Edgar Mint. I’m trying to find a man named Nicholas Petenko. He was a mailman in Arizona.” I dangled the limp piece of paper in front of her as evidence of my claims.
She stared past me then, into the torrent of rain that had already made a lake out of the front yard. She seemed to be looking at something that I couldn’t see. A car shished by in the street. I murmured something about my trunk getting wet out there and she looked at me again.
“You are Edgar,” she said, as if to reassure herself, and when I nodded her face unlocked itself from that blank expression and brimmed over with a tide of such strong emotion it seemed to pain her. She faltered a little, falling against the door, her eyebrows creasing together, her mouth curling open to reveal a set of straight, white teeth, her bright eyes, like two little lights, suddenly dribbling tears. She moaned, crossed herself, gripped my wrist in her shaking hand, and knelt at my feet. “God?” she said, “God?” as if she was calling a child in for supper, and then in a language I didn’t understand, began to pray.
A PICTURE
BEWILDERED, A PUDDLE spreading around his feet, Edgar sat on a corduroy love seat in a corner of the large front room, with its tatted and doilied armchairs, its dressers and china cabinets whose every knob sported red and blue tassels, its every wall hung with pictures of saints and icons, its oaken floor worn smooth as brown glass.
The woman brought a large glass of limeade from the kitchen and insisted I drink it before we talked. The limeade was sweet and freshly squeezed and swimming with bits of pulp, and even though I had not been thirsty a second before, I could not help but drink it down in a few gulps.
This seemed to please her. She nodded, unable to take her eyes off me, as if she was afraid I might vanish if she looked away. Her face was dark and plump with little bulldog jowls, and the fine wrinkles that radiated from the corners of her eyes and mouth deepened into grooves when she smiled. She held a string of black prayer beads which she absently wove between her fingers and around her wrist.
I wiped at my forehead with my wet sleeve and listened for a moment, hoping to hear the creak of a floorboard or the thump of a footstep overhead, but we were alone. “I’m trying to find this man,” I said. “Nicholas Petenko.”
“I’m Rosa Petenko, see?” she said. “Nicholas is my husband.”
I sat forward in my chair and nearly fell off it. “Is he here?” I said. “Where is he?”
She tried to smile at me but couldn’t quite manage it. She tapped the beads against her chest. “Lord above took him,” she said, making a little shrug. “One year and five months.”
I went still for a moment, not breathing or thinking, and then my shoulders collapsed and I shrank in on myself like someone who has come to realize, at long last, that he has been the butt of an elaborate practical joke. I eased back into the chair and nodded and swallowed down the bitter taste in my throat. I closed my eyes, wondering how I ever had the gall to believe that things might come out any different than this. I almost laughed out loud.
“Edgar?” Rosa said, but I didn’t open my eyes. I felt her hand on my arm for a moment and then I heard her open one of the drawers of a cabinet behind me. When I looked up she was sitting across from me again, now wearing wire-rimmed reading glasses and holding a picture framed in brass.
“A picture, see?” she said.
I took the picture from her. It showed three people standing next to a bush in the heavy glare of an early afternoon. In the background a billboard said Drink Ovaltine!! A younger Rosa, her hair black and long, squinted into the camera, and next to her was a balding man in a white T-shirt who was looking down at the boy standing between them. A brown barefoot boy with a few freckles scattered over his nose, clutching a half-eaten candy bar.
“You don’t know all this, do you?” she said. “No? You don’t remember. Nobody told it to you.”
For a moment I could not remember who I was or where I was supposed to be. I shook my head and she seemed almost delighted by the confounded look on my face.
I pointed at the man in the picture. “This is Nicholas? Your husband?”
Rosa nodded. “I’ll tell it to you, everything, but first I want you to tell me this miracle.” She tapped the glass above little Edgar’s face with her fingernail. “How you came from there”—and now she patted my knee—“all the way to here.”
I opened my mouth to find that nothing would come out. I couldn’t keep my eyes off the picture; I was trying to determine if little Edgar was smiling or frowning. The sun was hard on his face and he had that candy bar in a death grip. The man was looking down at him, his nose wrinkled as if he had just smelled something funny. From his mouth dangled an unlit cigarette.
I told Rosa about my bus trip from Arizona. Then I backed up and told her the bare bones of what I knew about the accident and my miraculous survival and my mother’s death, about my stay at St. Divine’s and Willie Sherman and the Madsen home. I had to speak slowly; my mind was a dark and empty cave in which I groped for words. I did not look up from that picture the whole time and when I did, Rosa was crying again.
“Edgar,” she said. She pressed her beads against her lips and sighed. “Let me tell you all the things you don’t know about. I guess we both got some learning to do.”
ROSA AND NICHOLAS
EIGHT YEARS AGO, on a Saturday morning in May, Rosa and Nicholas walked out of the Safeway in downtown Globe to find a dirty Indian boy standing next to their car, eyeballing the package of Moon Pies on the front seat. They asked him where his mother was and he shrugged. The boy’s clothes were stained and threadbare, his hair was full of dust and the hole in the seat of his jeans made it clear he wasn’t wearing any underwear. Rosa took him by the hand back into the store, where they presented him to the manager, who sighed and made a few desultory announcements over the intercom about a lost Indian kid by the name of Edgar Mint.
“I wouldn’t worry too much about it,” the manager said. “These Indians, they let their kids run wild, it’s cultural. His mama’ll turn up sooner or later.”
They waited twenty minutes, and when no one showed to claim the boy they circled the parking lot, then the entire store itself. The only Indian they could see was an old guy sitting on the steps of the bank across the street. They took Edgar over to him and asked if he knew who the boy belonged to.
“Wish I could help you,” he said. “All I got to say about it is somebody oughta clean that kid up.”
So that’s what they did. In ten minutes they had him home, in the bathtub covered in suds, and Rosa in the kitchen cooking up hash cakes and grilled cheese sandwiches. After showing the boy his coll
ection of Marine Corps tattoos, Nicholas emptied out the utensil drawer and he and Edgar splashed each other and performed dive-bomber and submarine maneuvers with an assortment of spatulas, ladles and potato mashers. Once the boy was thoroughly clean, Nicholas lifted him out of the tub and dried him off with exquisite care, rubbing down every inch of him as if waxing and buffing an expensive vintage automobile.
They had no toys for Edgar to play with, no spare clean clothes for him to wear; theirs was not a house of children. They had spent most of the eleven years of their marriage trying to make a family, but it never did take. They had consulted doctors as far away as Seattle and Minneapolis, had even traveled to Denver to receive a special blessing at the hands of Bishop Chekanov, but still their two extra bedrooms remained empty.
Rosa and Nicholas had met in the Philippines, where Nicholas had spent three years fighting the Japanese. Ten years after the war he went back with a group of veterans from the II Corps, for whom Rosa, a grammar school English teacher from Manila, had been hired as an interpreter. They were both single, over thirty, and full of a hopeful loneliness that verged on desperation. On the second night of the tour Nicholas walked Rosa back to her hotel room and they ending up kissing and groping in the elevator. Nicholas left the tour and Rosa called in sick and they spent the rest of the week getting to know each other. Nicholas flew home and before the year was out had saved up enough money to bring Rosa to Pennsylvania and buy her a band of gold so they could get married in the Joy of All Who Sorrow Orthodox Church in Nicholas’ hometown of Stony Run.
Nicholas had come home from the war with a mysterious jungle virus or amoebic bacteria the American doctors could not diagnose: cycles of diarrhea, exhaustion, dizziness, night sweats and fluid in the lungs. Now it seemed only to be getting worse and the doctors came up with a last-ditch suggestion: move to the desert and the dry air. So they packed up their Ford and moved to Globe, where Nicholas got a job with the post office. His symptoms gradually began to vanish and they bought an old stucco house at the mouth of Copper Canyon, but even with Nicholas at full health they could not make a family. Eventually they gave up on the doctors and put their faith in God. Every day they prayed, and often in the evenings they would sit in the backyard in their spring-back chairs talking about their future children as if it was just a matter of time before there were three or four of them scribbling on the walls, clamoring for snacks and keeping them up all hours of the night.