The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint Read online

  “Indi’ns don’t sweat,” he advised me once. “Try to be more like a Indi’n.”

  During those last weeks of school while the students were on recess or free time between the end of classes and dinner, Uncle Julius kept me close by, handing him pliers while he fixed a broken faucet, sorting out nails and screws in the maintenance hut, helping him locate the rats that were forever crawling into the farthest reaches of the heating ducts to die. I can tell you that I didn’t need any encouragement to stay away from the other kids—they frightened me. I had been an only child, shunned by other children my whole life, and had spent the last eight months in a hospital full of adults—to me children of every kind seemed as alien and unpredictable as insects.

  When the spring semester finished and most of the students left to go home for the summer, a few were left behind, a couple of girls, four or five boys, who, like me, had lost their parents through death or abandonment and had nowhere else to go. “Permanents” we were called. Though there were no more classes, there was still something of a regimen that I was left out of. They ate two meals a day in the cafeteria, worked in the morning pulling weeds on the parade grounds or picking up trash along the fences and roadway, were sometimes bused to Show Low or Globe to see a movie. I was told to keep away from them, act as if they didn’t exist. “You ain’t a student here yet,” Uncle Julius told me in his breathy, almost inaudible voice. “Them’s bad kids.”

  So you might imagine how I felt standing outside the infirmary on the first morning of school in my best school clothes (shoes two sizes too big, Toughskin jeans, lime-green sweater which had belonged to one of Art’s dead daughters) with nearly two hundred other kids shouting, squealing, jostling, hooting, living out their last moments of freedom. I gulped air and kept a hand locked tightly on my groin; it was all I could do to keep from wetting my pants.

  There were titters and girls whispering behind their hands and all I could think to do was smile like I did when I sashayed down the halls of St. Divine’s, brightening up everybody’s day. It wasn’t long before we had the interval timed pretty well—a student would pass through the door and there would be a sudden rush of wild activity, pushing and shouting and mock karate-fighting, and then, as if by collective intuition, things would calm down the second before the woman opened the door, gave everyone a meaningful stare, and let another student through.

  When there were only twenty or thirty of us left clustered outside the door, I felt a thump on top of my helmet and turned to find a skinny, bandy-legged kid in a red windbreaker grinning at me with a mouthful of rotten teeth. He had a few long whiskers poking out of his chin and his matted hair looked like something pulled from a bathtub drain.

  “You got something on your head, heh, heh?” he said, and gave me another swat, windmilling his arm and driving the palm of his hand into the top of my helmet, as if I were a tent stake and he was going to hammer me into the ground.

  I staggered backwards, trying not to fall down. From all around came giggles and enthusiastic shouts. Somebody from behind gave me a shot that made everything go liquid for a moment. I turned and tried to smile—I wanted to be liked—but a girl wearing glasses with smoked lenses rushed in and delivered an overhand slap that made my neck compress and little green zags of lightning appear in my vision and then there were four or five boys surrounding me, gleefully whacking me on the top of my head, as if for the simple joy of hearing the sharp slap of flesh striking leather. Next thing I knew I was kneeling in the dirt, my hands on the ground in front of me, drooling a small dark spot in the dust. My eyeballs felt dislodged from their sockets and my head had become so heavy and unwieldy that I could not raise it up to look around.

  Everything went suddenly quiet and the door opened. I heard the woman’s footsteps before I saw her chalky, sandaled feet appear next to me. She helped me to my feet and surveyed the crowd until Rotten Teeth piped up. “I think that kid’s sick or something!” Everybody laughed and someone near the back of the line howled like a wolf.

  The woman helped me into a musty, windowless room where another woman, this one anglo and bony and wearing a white polyester dress and white thick-soled shoes, sat at a desk sorting syringes. A nurse! I thought to myself with a small surge of joy that turned quickly to homesickness. In my woozy state I walked up to her, yearning for something I couldn’t really name, and said, “Nurse.”

  She looked me up and down and narrowed her eyes. “What’s you wearing?”

  “Helmet,” I said.

  She raised her eyebrows. “Well what’s you wearing it for?”

  Was this some kind of trick question? Even though my head still felt like a bowling ball attached to a broomstick and had already taken a pretty good beating, I ended up giving myself a pretty solid slap on the head to indicate the way my helmet was supposed to shield my damaged head from the kind of violence I had just been the target of.

  The big one sighed. “Maybe we should make ’em all wear helmets.”

  She helped me undo the buckles and, once the helmet was off, took an aluminum canister with holes punched in the top and doused my head and the inside of the helmet with a white powder that made my scalp burn and my eyes tear up and my throat constrict with hot, acrid fumes. I coughed and gagged while the nurse, hoping to catch me by surprise, came up behind me and speared a needle into the back of my arm. I hardly flinched—shots were something I knew all about; the pain was even comforting in its way—and then I was once again subjected to the famous doctor’s routine: eyes, ears, heart, throat, lungs, reflexes. Just when I was beginning to feel really at home I was released, hustled out another door and into the pounding sun.

  By lunch, I was starving and faint. I stood at the back of another very long line—now the teachers and staff were mixed in with the students—and tried to be vigilant about anybody sneaking behind me and smacking me on the head. Lucky for me, everybody was as starved as I was and seemed to have lost interest in further violence. I took my tray of food—corn dog, mashed potatoes, crusted chocolate pudding—and sat down at the table next to the row of battered steel barrels which served as garbage cans. In an attempt to establish a routine, to find a place for myself, I would sit at the same spot at the same table for the rest of the school year, alternately wanting only to be left alone and hoping that someone might find it in their heart to take a seat next to me.

  At recess I didn’t know what to do with myself; it was all I could do to keep from tearing off for the hills or leaping down the stairs of the boiler room, three at a time, and hiding under my cot for the rest of the day. The parade ground was a wide expanse of weeds and clump grass with basketball hoops on one end, where a group of older boys played vicious games filled with swearing and the sounds of slapping flesh. On the other side, a bunch of smaller boys played a mad game of keep-away with a dimpled rubber ball, and in the far corner of the field some girls bumped a volleyball back and forth. But overall, recess seemed to be nothing but unmitigated chaos, a lot of running around and talking behind hands and shouting for no reason. I had nothing to do but stand in the middle of it, lost.

  I wasn’t surprised at how quickly Rotten Teeth found me. There were two other boys with him and they sauntered up, smiling like we were all the best of friends. I was glad to see that, like me, they still had the white lice powder trapped in their ears.

  “Hey, are you sick?” Rotten Teeth said. His two buddies guffawed and looked around nervously. One of them, a potbellied little guy with stubby arms and a face like a rat, put his hands down his pants and slipped his finger through his open fly, waving it around.

  It seemed like a pretty good joke to me, but nobody else noticed.

  “What you laughing at?” said Rotten Teeth.

  I pointed. “The kid with his finger.”

  “I think maybe you’re a faggot.”

  “I’m not,” I said, though I had no idea what a faggot might be.

  “I think maybe your mama is a nigger then.”

  “No
.”

  “Then I guess you’re an asshole, right?”

  I shook my head, but I thought I was beginning to get the hang of this conversation. I looked Rotten Teeth right in the eye and said, “Eat shit, Marty.”

  This seemed to have an effect on all of them. They stopped their snickering and stared at me. Rotten Teeth seemed particularly surprised; he stood there, dumbstruck, before a look of pure pleasure and anticipation crept over his face. He stepped forward, and instead of giving me a solid one on the head, as I expected, he put his arm around my neck and led me off toward the back of the boys’ dorms where a row of outhouses stood.

  William Tecumseh Sherman had indoor plumbing, but the sewer system was so outdated and prone to backing up that these two-seaters—left over from the old days—were always kept in use. While his buddies made sure I didn’t run off, Rotten Teeth took his time finding a rusted tin can, punching a hole in it and tying to it a length of blue thread he painstakingly coaxed from the hem of his pants. Then he disappeared into the shithouse and whistled cheerfully for two or three minutes.

  When finally he came out, beaming triumphantly, holding the can in front of him, only then did I think to run. I made it a good ten feet before they tackled me from behind. The two boys pinned my shoulders while Rotten Teeth stood over me, waving the can around like a decanter of incense.

  “Look at this fish I caught,” he said. “A big one! And this kid here is gonna eat it for us.”

  I determined right then that there was no way I was going to allow him to put that turd into my mouth. I set my teeth so hard that my head began to ache, but Rotten Teeth lingered over me with the patience of a monk, grinning and humming, until he decided time was up and reached over and pinched my nostrils together with two callused fingers. I held out for a good ten seconds until I was forced to open up to take a breath and like it was something he had been practicing for years, he deftly slipped the turd into my mouth so that I sucked it in along with a mouthful of air.

  I kicked and thrashed and spit and gagged and whatever I was able to get out Rotten Teeth smashed and rubbed into my face and eyes with the rusty can, the other boys cackling like a couple of old women. Before they ran off to tell everyone what they’d done, Rotten Teeth theatrically waved his hand in front of his face and said, “Whew! Somebody’s got bad breath!”

  The recess bell clanged three times. Edgar, splayed on the ground, could feel the vibrations made by hundreds of feet stampeding toward the classroom building. Still he lay there, listening to the hoppers clattering in the weeds and staring up into a blank white sky. When he finally got up he didn’t go to class, or to the rest room to wash up, but descended into the boiler room, where he sat down in front of his Hermes Jubilee and typed himself a little reminder: Dont tell anybody eat shit again.

  CONTRABAND

  I HAD SLEPT the entire trip from St. Divine’s to Fort Apache, so I never got to see the changing of landscape, the bone-colored outcroppings and desert scrub of Globe gradually giving way to cedar and juniper and finally to thick stands of ponderosa pine and Douglas fir of the White Mountain Reservation. I went to sleep watching a dust storm fan out across a vast expanse of sandy hills and woke up to the smell of sap, the thin air of the mountains.

  My Uncle Julius was there at the cattle guard to meet me. He signed a paper the driver gave him with a meticulously drawn X and, without a word, picked up my suitcase and headed for the main building, a white-stuccoed edifice with the words WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN SCHOOL stenciled in red letters above the two main doors.

  The school was actually a converted army fort, Fort Apache itself, back from the days when General Crook was chasing Geronimo into retirement. Once the Apaches were under control, there wasn’t much point in having a fort anymore. They kept the fort operational for a few years, just in case the unpredictable savages caused more trouble, but eventually they shut it down and converted it into a school. It seemed reasonable enough: Fort Apache had been instrumental in beating the Indians into submission, why couldn’t it be helpful in educating them?

  So the main building went up, along with a cafeteria and two monstrous three-storied dormitories (for several years the students had been housed in the old cavalry barracks) built of great coffin-sized sandstone blocks and positioned on each end of the old parade ground, flanked on one side by the main building and cafeteria and on the other by a row of elegant stone houses—the old officers’ quarters—which were fronted by a narrow lane shadowed by towering elms. For a small rent the teachers lived in the old officers’ homes. The commanding officer’s quarters, a three-tiered stone house with ornate, painted eaves and French windows and forty-foot-high lookout tower, was reserved for the principal.

  Compared to cramped and ramshackle St. Divine’s the place seemed spacious, enormous, too much to take in at once; along with the dormitories and school buildings and houses, there were the old falling-apart barracks, a stone commissary building, guardhouse, magazine and across the highway the cavalry stables, storehouse and granary.

  I had arrived in the middle of the afternoon—the students were all in class—so the place was quiet except for a faint chop-chop-chop from the kitchen. I stood next to the cattle guard and looked around dumbly until I saw that Uncle Julius had already made it to the front doors and was waiting for me there.

  While I sat in a reception room overseen by a young Indian woman bending paper clips at a desk, Uncle Julius went in to see the principal—Principal Whipple, from the name on the door. Apparently, my arrival was a surprise to Principal Whipple, because even though I could not see him, I could hear him yelling at Uncle Julius. Where’s his certificate of Indian blood? Is this all the paperwork? What about parental consent forms? Does he even have a goddamn Social Security number? The last thing I need right now is another goddamn orphan without any paperwork.

  Orphan, I thought, and felt a jolt of recognition, like spotting some old acquaintance in a crowd. I don’t believe I’d ever heard the word spoken before, but I knew exactly what it meant and that it applied to me. That’s it, that’s who I was, a goddamn orphan. It comforted me to understand my place in the world, to put a name to it.

  The secretary told me I could go in now and I stood in the doorway, unsure of what to do next. Principal Whipple was half hidden behind an avalanche of papers and old coffee cups and Uncle Julius sat just on the other side of the desk, his hat in his lap, as stiff and wooden as the chair he sat in.

  Principal Whipple took one look at me and said, “God help us.”

  The principal had thinning, silvery hair and a dark and bushy rust-colored mustache which was almost enough to draw your attention from the mole on top of his left ear which looked as hairy and alive as a bumblebee. He wore industrial black-framed glasses with magnifying-glass lenses that made his eyes seem to hover a few inches in front of his face. He spoke with an air of insincerity that reminded me of the doctors from St. Divine’s.

  “Sit down,” he said. “How old are you anyway?”

  I looked at Uncle Julius, who looked at Principal Whipple, who tore through a stack of papers like he was trying to dig his way out of the mess around him. He pressed the button on an intercom box on his desk.

  “Maria, where’s this kid’s file?”

  “What?” the intercom squawked.

  “Where is this kid’s file?”

  Now the box only made a loud buzzing noise.

  Principal Whipple stood up and roared, “WILL YOU BRING ME THE KID’S FUCKING FILE!”

  Maria was there immediately with a manila folder. When the principal had the paper he was looking for he said, “This kid’s not nine years old. What’s he doing here? Ten and up, that’s our policy, isn’t it? Can he even speak English, has he ever been to school before?” Purple veins were beginning to stand out on his flat stump of a nose. He turned to me. “Can you speak a word of English?”

  Again, I looked at Uncle Julius, whose hands were shaking badly beneath his hat. “The woman told me
he can read books.”

  Principal Whipple exhaled out of his nose, which produced a thin whistling noise like a badly played flute. He nodded, grabbed some kind of pamphlet and held it out across the desk. “Son, why don’t you step over here and read this for us, just a couple of sentences.”

  I didn’t need to get any closer; I could read it from where I stood. Up in the left-hand corner it said STAFF HANDBOOK and the first paragraph mentioned student discipline and how the teachers and staff were responsible for maintaining a consistent approach in terms of punishment and correction. I was starting to read the second paragraph to myself when Principal Whipple tore the pamphlet away and tossed it over his shoulder, so that it fluttered in the air for a moment, like a shotgunned duck, and landed with a slap on top of a filing cabinet.

  “I wonder if he’s even seen a book before,” Principal Whipple said.

  “He don’t got anyplace else to go,” Uncle Julius whispered into his lap.

  Principal Whipple pushed back from his desk so that he rolled a little ways on the wheels of his chair. He put his hands in the air and said, “That seems to be the standard line, doesn’t it? No place else to go. Nobody else will take ’em. Last stop along the line. Well, send ’em over to us, then! Sure, you bet, we’ll take ’em! Send us whatever you got.”

  The trembling in Uncle Julius’ hands had moved up into his arms and it seemed that he, like me, wanted nothing more than to get out of that office. But there was one more thing. Principal Whipple opened one of the drawers of his desk and pulled out a large canvas sack on which was written, in stenciled block letters: CONTRABAND. I would learn later that Principal Whipple liked to show this bag and its contents to everyone who visited his office for the first time, no matter if it was a new student, a new dorm aide, a parent, a paint salesman, a representative from the BIA.